launch

A new ELV flew for the first time last night (Delta IV). Every year or
two a new one flies. The point of the newer ELVs is to lower costs and
raise reliability.

Ron
******

Al Globus
11/20/02 05:14 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Launch

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 12:32 PM, rmenich@... wrote:

> The point of my
> question was not really to get the exact answer, but rather to
> illustrate
> that RLV is not necessarily an unalloyed good: it is not necessarily
> better than ELV in all respects and scenarios. There's a lot of "it
> depends on ..." type of considerations, and what the definition of
> "better" is.
>

A large number of ELVs have been developed in the last 20 years. All
this development did not lower launch cost enough (although it helps).

RLV is another story. There shuttle and that's it. In theory, with a
high launch rate RLVs should be the way to go. Government R&D is an
effective way to address high risk, big payoff issues. Thus, this is a
good thing for NASA to do. Unfortunately, NASA hasn't flown a new RLV
since the shuttle, and there have been lots of failures to orbit
anything (X33, X37, X34, aerospace plane, SLI, etc.). Therefor, perhaps
we should try guarantees for commercial ventures (say, pay for the first
10 flights or so) that develop RLVs. There were three or four of these
a few years ago when everyone thought there would be a lot of LEO com
sat business. I'm not sure if any are still in business.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html