Shuttle costs

Mike has really got this one right. Many people on this mailing list
seem to assume that, because they don't understand why spaceflight is
expensive, the high cost must be a nefarious plot by evil conspirators
in NASA to thwart their dreams. Alternately, NASA is considered
incompetant despite achieving dozens of difficult goals no one else has
ever accoplished. For example, landing on the Moon, partially reusable
launch, 1% launcher failure rate, rovers on Mars, soft landing on an
asteroid, etc., etc., etc.

The truth is much more prosaic. Spaceflight is difficult, orders of
magnitude more difficult than aircraft because, among other things, the
velocities are more than an order of magnitude greater and energy scales
with the *square* of the velocity. High energies make huge demands on
systems and materials requiring extensive engineering, test, and
refurbishment. This requires lots of people, and people in the US are
expensive.

NASA contains a large number of people and these people are, to first
order, about the same as any other large group of people. They are no
more evil than you are. They are no less compentent than you are.
Furthermore, NASA is very open (for example, see the huge web sites).
Such openess would have difficulty sustaining the evil plots
hypothesized.

Finally, note that there are a number of space launcher efforts in this
world that are not controlled by NASA (Russia, Ukraine, China, Europe,
India, and Japan). Most of these have only reduced launch costs
marginally, which is expected. Where they have reduced cost
substantially (mostly Russia) it can be attributed to low cost personel,
writing off development costs, and some very good rocket design.
Interestingly, many US efforts to develop new launchers depend on
Russian engines.

From: Ian Woollard [mailto:ian.woollard@...]

Even the space shuttle would cost many times less if it
could launch every week.

So what I get from this is that when NASA said the Shuttle would be much
cheaper, and would fly 50 times a year, rather than calling it two
separate lies, we might more charitably call it two interrelated errors.

Regards,

Mike Combs

--
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an
accident. Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.