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

> From: Ian Woollard
> 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.

I'm not sure economies of scale applies to the way NASA does business
though. It's almost impressive how they can completely and effortlessly
flout economic rules like that.

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

Possibly. However they also got real excited about the opertunity to launch,
rondavouz with, and then steal russian satellites, all in one orbit, before
the russians realised what was going on.

> 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.

It was still an act of idiocy. The S-IVB and S-II both had mass ratios in
excess of 10. The RL-10 and J-2 were both in production. The J-2S and
J-2T-250 were in the final stages of ground trials. The sane thing woudl
have been to take advantage of this to run a few x-vehicle programmes with
the flight articles you had available. Instead they got obsessed with those
silly wing things.

> 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.

Don't forget private space flight was illegial in America until the 1980s.
We're also talking about the same government that tried to ban certain
versions of the internet browser Netscape Navigator for 'national security'
reasons. And a government that considers the common Birthing Mechanism (big
square doors on the ISS) to be classified military technology; unfit for
transfer to its British allies.

Personally I wouldn't have shut NASA down so much as passed a law forbidding
inhouse design and overly detailed specification. I think the shuttle
programme might have turned out different if NASA had offered up their $5B
congressional shuttle budget as an X-prize.