The Shuttle just gets worse with thought (was Launch cost thought experiment)

On 19/10/2008, ANTIcarrot wrote:
>> From: Ian Woollard
>> The shuttle could do it, but you would need more
>> infrastructure around it.
>
> At three months repair per flight? Sure you could do it, if you had 13
> orbiters. Or entirely new vehicles.

Yeah, but at about $2.2 billion each, it's not out of the question.
And again, there would be economies of scale, so it would be cheaper
than that.

>> > Congress wanted the shuttle to cost nothing
>> They wanted a jobs program.
>
> If they did they wanted one that costed less than NASA wanted to spend. NASA
> said it woudl cost $10B. Congress told them no.

They wanted the jobs/money spread out even only multiple years, it's true.

>> > USAF wanted the shuttle to do everything
>>
>> They really wanted expendables.
>
> They wanted both. That's why they gave NASA a few billion in exchange for
> the crippling payload capacity and cross range requirement. The selection of
> silica tile as a TPS was driven by these two requirements. Massive payload,
> massive cross range, for negligable R&D is pretty much everything when it
> comes to RLVs.

I still believe they really were more interested in expendables though.

>> > NASA wanted an excuse to keep its work force
>>
>> Yup, although they also wanted to continue to go into space, and they
>> wanted to build a space station and then go onto Mars with the
>> Dumbkopf Plan that involved a space station.
>
> Then they should have had the gumption to turn around to congress and the
> DOD and say, "Sorry, can't be done." They did that with Clinton and the
> space station. Pity they didn't do it twenty years earlier. :(

They were frankly pretty scared, the Saturn V was being shut down, it
wouldn't have taken much to shut the whole NASA manned program thing
down and spend the money on something else entirely. The SS was a foot
in the door.

I personally believe that if the NASA manned program had been
completely shut down, it would have actually turned out for the good,
and manned space would have been further forward than today. The
private sector could have taken up the slack- the presence of NASA in
this arena has more or less precluded things like space tourism
happening for the last 20 years.

> John

--
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.