Smells Like Teen Spirit

On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 07:46 AM, Arthur P. Smith wrote:

> CATS cuts
> down some of the costs (but far from all of them - most satellites
> launched now cost considerably more than the launch fee)

But much of that cost is driven by the cost of launch. Basically,
everything has to be a light as possible and there are no repairmen.
Both are a consequence of launch cost and safety. Designing things to
be small and light is expensive. Simple example, you need expensive
rad hard electronics because you can't afford to simply put them inside
of a bunch of lead for shielding. No repairman means everything needs
to be extremely reliable and redundant - meaning expensive. If
transportation to orbit were cheap and reliable, you could have
repairmen.

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

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

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.