It’s inarguably true, in that the Cold War pushed large chemical rockets from the V-2 to the R-7, Atlas and Titan. More was spent on that than on all civilian space, manned and unmanned, in all the years since. In the absence of a Cold War, how long would that have taken?

Since you keep talking about ELVs, you need to look at where those ELVs came from. Atlas, Titan, Delta — they all started as military missiles. Even the Saturns started with work Von Braun was doing for the Army.

> 3. I don’t assume the cost of private spaceflight will remain astronomically expensive. But, to date, projected
> prices are absurd. The economic factors that drive down the prices of digital equipment such as VCR’s will
> not apply to private spaceflight.

Why is it “absurd” to think the laws of economics apply to spaceflight?

You might as well suggest that the laws of physics do not apply to spaceflight.

> In other words, if spaceflight is to compete with existing transport technology, it will need to be
> priced competitively. If it is to be only a joyriding stunt, then it will be priced differently.

“Only a joyriding stunt”? What do you have against joy?

> 5. I didn’t argue that wars haven’t taken place. i argued that human spaceflight has not been
> advanced by those wars as aviation was by the world wars.

By 1912, thousands of people had already flown in airplanes. You can’t ascribe that to the World Wars because it happened before the First World War. Sorry, but the idea that aviation progress only happened during wartime is a myth.

> Our fear of war has advanced missile technology, not human spaceflight. I don’t see any crewed
> military vehicles in orbit or on the Moon.

Which is not due to lack of military investment in space. It was a deliberate policy decision. Like the decision not to have US military forces in Antarctica. It’s not because we couldn’t afford to have them, if we chose to.

> 7. Someone’s degree of boredom has nothing at all to do with the size of the Universe. LEO travel is, and
> always will be, only the first step. Getting to LEO might be fun, but it is spaceflight only in the sense that
> driving around the block is auto travel.

No, LEO is not the first step. It’s the second step, at least.

Do you remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? Just because you’re anxious to immediately head out for the Moon, Mars, or Alpha Centauri doesn’t mean you’ll be the first to get there.

These claims are getting goofy. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts didn’t have wings on their rockets, and they had no trouble getting sex.

> Hopefully, people will begin to understand that wings on spaceships are only useful if that
> vehicle needs to fly in an atmosphere.

Who do you think doesn’t understand that? Certainly no one involved in designing space vehicles.

That’s one of the problems with proposals now. You lie your ass off to get the program, fail to perform because you proposed the impossible (or something you never intended to actually do, more likely), and get rewarded for your failure with additional funding and a schedule slide. Pretty standard stuff these days. Dare to tell the truth and you’ll never win.

Of course, the secret to success is to tell the lies the customer dearly wants to hear. That’s the key. Otherwise they won’t suspend their disbelief. I remember one time being at a meeting where a guy was lying to some Navy officers. I looked around the room to see if anyone was going to call b.s., but every face in the room was filled with rapture. Mouths open, eyes wide, pupils dilated, and I’m sitting there thinking, “are they all a bunch of abject morons?” But the guy was telling them what they wanted to hear, and all they say was, “wow!”

Maybe it is a flaw in my raising, but I could just never do that.

I think the astronaut ego factor is a bit narrow. Wings are sexy. They’ve got a large constituency outside the tiny astronaut community. (USAF, for instance.) A lot of people grew up dreaming of stainless steel spaceships with sweptback wings.

Hopefully, people will begin to understand that wings on spaceships are only useful if that vehicle needs to fly in an atmosphere. If the vehicle is not going to enter atmosphere, or doesn’t need to fly in an atmosphere, you obviously don’t need wings. And then, their usefulness needs to be evaluated against cost and design implications.

Most of the alternative Shuttle designs that I recall were for vehicles much larger than the eventual Shuttle. In particular, one involved a larger winged orbiter carried aloft and launched from the back (or side?) of a 747-sized winged and crewed carrier vehicle.

Of course, one can’t assume that every artist’s sketch that NASA or a contractor toss out repesents an actual design proposal under serious considertion.

I’m not sure what your point is about “mainstream” arguments about wings and astronaut egos. I’m not a particular fan of the Shuttle’s wings because I don’t think there’s been much of a return for their use. In other words, what did those wings let us do that we couldn’t otherwise do, except land the Orbiter on runways? Of course, that wouldn’t be an issue if the Shuttle really had lived up to cost expectations.

But, as far as I’m concerned, the Shuttle is water over the bridge. The only question is when it stops flying. At the latest, that’s 210. If the VSE rollout includes an SDV cargo carrier that can loft ISS components with minimal or no alteration, we might see that last flight much sooner.

Since NASA never envisioned single-orbit flights they never wanted wings on the Shuttle. Early Shuttle drawings looked more like the lifting body vehicles tested in the early 1970s than what we actually got. It was one more compromise that NASA had to make to get the vehicle they wanted. . . .

— Donald

As for fiber optics etc. sales to China I oppose those as well, as I stated above “I don’t believe it to be a wise thing to export ANY high tech capacity” to China.