"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

The thing is, you and I are both old enough to remember when NASA said that about the STS, and well...

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

SpaceX is a business and they are very motivated to keep costs down. They will always try to find a cheaper, better way to accomplish their goal because it ultimately increases their bottom line. Government has no incentive to do the same, as the STS program showed.

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

It's arguably worse than that. NASA made it's essential manned spaceflight mission the task of taking 40 y.o. PhDs into orbit to do "science" often as glorified lab techs. While this is great for the PhDs, it's not very compelling for everyone else. And when millionaires tried to get in on it, NASA was fairly clear that they were not allowed, so they had to go to the Russians. Now, if NASA had clearly been working towards wider (if initially expensive) access the resulting history of the shuttle might have been different (even with the other issues).

-VR
Of course, when John Glenn came calling, they yielded. They knew who issued their paycheques.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

The shuttle was 1) a highly compromised design, 2) too leading edge and complex for the time and 3) a jobs program with wings. Elon and SpaceX appear to be trying very hard to avoid making all of these expensive mistakes. It also helps that they have no backstop from the public purse if things go wrong, along with some competition that would love to take their place if they should fail hugely.

-VR
And that's not mentioning all the insane problems NASA and it's manned spaceflight sections have had with risk management.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

To instead be replaced by a company who, in the local industry circles is seen as hiring young engineers straight out of school, using them hard, basically using them up, then discarding them.

Do you work there? I'm genuinely curious as to how much of that is true and how much is the result of political maneuvering by the old-line aerospace corporations who can see themselves getting reduced rations in the future. They cost a lot of money to run and most weren't as smart as Boeing, who made sure they had a non-governmental revenue stream.

-VR
If it's not Boeing, I'm not going...
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

FWIW, a guy at our LEGO club worked at NASA down at Kennedy during the Apollo program. (well, not sure if -at- Kennedy, but definitely for Apollo). I'll have to dig out the photos I took of his scrapbook at the time.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

https://lan.lego.com/lugs

Official list of LEGO recognized Lego User Groups (LUGs)

--- Philip
(Find one near you today!)

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

Nope. My Maternal Unit works in quality assurance at Aerospace. And she's worried about still having a job once the WGS program wraps.

The STS we got was not the vehicle that NASA wanted to make. Congress slashed NASA's space launch budget by half so instead of a single stage to orbit reusable spaceplane we got a brick of a glider strapped to a massive FAE bomb. And then Congress did the same thing to the VentureStar project so instead of a single stage to orbit reusable spaceplane we got... an extension to the cut-funded STS programme.

Worse than that, the shuttle ended up having all three parts of the intended program crammed into it along with some military intelligence requirements, (half of which were never used).

The plan was three things:

At least one space station.
A heavy-lift booster to build space stations and other projects.
A small shuttle for people and supplies.

As cutbacks came, the shuttle had to be made bigger to do a cut-rate version of the heavy-lift work as well and also the ability to do extended missions because there was no space station to go to. Then the cutbacks reached the point that NASA couldn't even do that and they had to get the Air Force on board.

The Air Force insisted on two things:

The ability to launch their Keyhole satellites, (making the shuttle even bigger).

The ability to do a fractional polar orbit and return to the launch site. The plan was to launch, do a satellite launch or retrieval, (the latter not necessarily of an American satellite), then land without ever going where the Soviets could easily watch. No such flights were ever flown, making the crippling design compromises to get the cross-range capability needed were all done for nothing.

actually thats a bit backwards, the original plans called for the sts to be a heavy-lift vehicle on its own and all changes _reduced_ the overall size because the larger system was, at the time infinitely more expensive or so was the word coming from the people actually building it, my family included.

--G.

funny this should be brought up, this is a topic iv spent 35yrs on. i had family working on the shuttle program during its middle and final development stage, i got to study original blueprints for the sts and got to keep the revised plans and detailed 'manual' they gave to politicians to explain the system concept, i also had 1 of the official NASA models of it with the removable panels that showed the internals of key systems and got to play around with a torch and some of the 1st run tiles(great fun for a scientifically bent youth ... also styrofoam is stronger/more durable than those tiles were) and i got to hear the consistent bitching about which new direction the design was headed for. the original plans split into the 'orbiter' and the 'fly-back booster' but then the airforce took controlling interest, ostensibly due to budget reasons(completely untrue), and the program became the single worst system NASA produced with its own engineers wondering _before first flight_ how long before it killed its crew. if the original plans had been followed it would have had a smaller payload capacity for its size, traded for an active tps but its turn around time would have been days not months. of course the original plans called for it to be about 20% larger than the final version with most of the increase going towards cargo space so its payload would have closely matched with what its final incarnation was capable of.

having had the chance to go over in fine detail the exact plans that would become the shuttle i wondered what the frell they were thinking when they dropped the white coating layer from the external tank because that was actually part of the integrated tank system. it was that heavy layering of paint that kept the insulation from shedding and with it gone the odds of a catastrophic failure became 100% up from the more usual 65-75% that was expected for every launch.

the importance of the falcon landing isnt as much 'great technical strides', (which it does kinda of represent ... the delta clipper demonstrated these landing systems and techniques years prior but a single failure doomed the program) as the completion of a process that should have been done decades ago. that said it is still a garbage system for transporting people. these things blow up far too regularly for human use. skylon or virgin galactic have the right idea for human orbital delivery, skylon being the only horizontal launch/landing ssto vehicle and ss2 its closest competitor. of the 2 only skylon offers a truly 'safe' launch and return solution as it utilizes a active tps, a jet/rocket hybrid(the engineering behind which still amazes me) a glass cockpit(mixed feelings on this honestly) and a completely separate 'payload/passenger' compartment, which i count as a good thing, a would-be 'terrorist' cant very easily hijack a hypersonic vehicle if he/she/it can't get to the pilots.

so yeah, there is a lot of good from the falcon landing demonstration, and the blue origin 'new shepard' vehicle but it is perhaps a few decades late and not really a significant improvement over the boosters used up till now. it still means sitting atop a bomb being deliberately set off to throw things off planet and that, in my honest opinion, is never a good idea.

NTRs are great, just not for liftoff:

Solid-core NTRs don't have the thrust to weight.
Liquid-core NTRs are borderline and can't be started outside of freefall. They also have significantly radioactive exhaust.
Open cycle gas-core NTRs have the T-W, (although they still aren't great) but are a serious nope when it comes to running one in a biosphere. Liquids may leak radioactives, but NTR-gas spews them.
Closed cycle gas-core NTRs might not be possible and might not have the T-W if they are.

Even the ones that might work mean building large ships, NTRs are heavy.

Slogging your way out of a gravity well into freefall is the realm of high thrust so that you can get past the gravity losses. High T-W is where chemical rockets shine, replacing them really requires some form of external thrust.

There is one nuclear drive that does work for liftoff, but it's probably better that the program got cancelled: Curtis LeMay having a spaceship filled with nuclear bombs belongs very much in the realm of 'what if?'

And this was why the name of the new NASA crew vehicle was so alarming for people familiar with the history.

It's pretty funny, in retrospect, how many proposals there were for non-military uses of nuclear explosives, the premise being, "Hey, regular explosives have loads of peaceful uses, how hard can it be?" Also ominous the way many of those proposals rapidly turned sinister (note the last paragraph before "see also").

I would assume that one of the points of divergence in the Fallout universe is that things like Project Chariot were actually done there.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That isn't sinister, that's obscene. And all the more so for how completely unsurprising it is.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

It could have been worse, they could have named it Pluto.