— Donald

Here’s the thing, a trade study is no substitute for a good design engineer. Back when aerospace worked, you started someone out designing little things, then if they did a good job you gave them bigger things to design. If they did a good job with that, you put some people under them and gave them still bigger things to design. Today we take some bozo that’s never designed anything ever and say, “our space program sucks, design a new one for us.” You might as well drag someone in from the street, you might get a better result.

I don’t care to see NASA’s trade study results, because I know it’s a joke. They picked one above the worst possible option (one that won’t work at all) and given some of the other garbage they’ve tried to sell us earlier, we should just feel darn lucky they picked one that is the least bit feasible.

IF it is ever made public, one should go over the analyses (and the corresponding assumptions) with a keen eye for detail. The SDV/CEV group is extremely adroit at manipulating numbers. A tittle here and there made all the difference in NASA judging the EELVs to be incompatible with VSE needs.

Well, gee, David, yes I do, and I state it without the slightest blush. If anybody is ever going to do that, somebody has to. You can’t do something you haven’t dreamt about.

I’ll admit to getting carried away, sometimes, but what I’m trying to do is open space the same way other difficult frontiers were on Earth. Nobody is looking at history and, as a consequence, we’re floundering around, when humanity actually has tens of thousands years of detailed practical experience of exactly how to open new and difficult frontiers with inadequate technology. As I just stated above, it was done by people using affordable technology available at the time, not after some vast development project to make it safe, and usually at great personal risk. It was not done by fictional all-powerful robots that would somehow accomplish everything in our stead.

I think that after more than half a century of experience, our space technology is up to the task of getting a start. Unfortunately, I don’t think our “do-or-die” attitude is.

— Donald

An economy does not need to be based on inexpensive transportation, or even reliable transportation or safe transportation — none of those were prevalent during the period when Europe explored the world.

The problem is, we base everything on whether it is mature and efficient and one-hundred percent safe. I don’t need to do cost modeling to know that no frontier has ever been opened by people who thought that way, and it won’t be this time.

The X-prize crowd may be a long way from achieving orbit, but they’re a lot closer than the traditional aerospace industry is of getting to Earth’s moon. It takes brash balls and attitude as much or more than technology, and right now I think we have way to much of the latter and too little of the former.

— Donald

You do daydream about being an astronaut on a do-or-die repair and rescue space mission, don’t you? :0]

alt.space? Nobody here but us Redskins, paleface.

We’re up to $650 million to send the first servicing mission to the $4 billion plus NGST using technology (and, for the most part, hardware) available right now.

is this really such a financially bad idea? It is a very risky idea, but I’ll bet there are astronauts who would be willing to try it.

Oh yah, let’s just outsource all our space hardware needs to the Russians and the Chinese. Its’ so much more cost effective to do that.

We don’t need to manufacture anything, we Americans. We’ll all just sell each other real estate and mutual funds and Web page design and home remodelling services.

Let those nerdy foregners sweat all that boring aerospace junk.

Come on, folks, we’re supposed to be supporting alt.space ideas.

Sorry, I thought we were supposed to support ideas that work, not the ideologically-correct but half-baked tripe of the day. Unfortunately, this blog is littered with the latter. My bad.

So, Soyuz launcher = less than %50 million
Soyuz vehicle = less than $50 million
Improved Soyuz electronics to operate in vaccuum (a la Geminii EVAs) = say, $50 million development
Another Soyuz dedicated to launching a restartable upper stage for outbound trip to NGST orbit = $50 million.
Restartable stage for outbound trip = $50 million
Restartable stage for return trip = $50 million
Soyuz launcher to launch return stage = $50 million.
Let’s go hog wild and at in $100 million in operations and $100 million again in misc. development, radiation shielding, etc.

We’re up to $650 million to send the first servicing mission to the $4 billion plus NGST using technology (and, for the most part, hardware) available right now.

is this really such a financially bad idea? It is a very risky idea, but I’ll bet there are astronauts who would be willing to try it.

Come on, folks, we’re supposed to be supporting alt.space ideas. Let’s have some thinking outside the box.

— Donald

Please tell me what has been open about the design process that led to this ESAS slide show.

When is Dr. Griffin going to make public NASA’s extremely technical, in-depth analyses which caused him to rule out using EELV’s to launch manned spacecraft or ISS structural component payloads?