“Rand, when Shuttle was approved back in ’72, there was no mention of a Sapce Telescope, a space station, Spacelab, etc. Just build shuttle.”

That may be true in 1972, but by the mid-70’s things were being planned for the Shuttle.

In 1978 the Hubble Telescope was approved and the target date for Shuttle launch was 1983.

On the last Shuttle test flight (#4 in June 1982) they launched a DoD satellite, and commercial comsats later that year, so payloads had been in process for some time.

There is no such backlog of payloads that I’m aware of that is being considered for funding for the SLS. Certainly none are funded right now to meet a launch date of 2017 or whenever Congress wants the SLS flying.

It’s stuff like that that leads many of us to believe that the SLS is being pushed as a jobs program, not for any particular payload need.

And still the SLS is the cart before the horse, because other than vague claims, no one has specifically identified payloads and programs that have been reviewed for modular assembly instead of single pieces (existing launchers vs SLS), so Congress has short-circuited the design process, not helped it.

I see that you’re completely ignoring my point, and that you have no desire to get back to the moon. You just want to build a big rocket.

Last year Shuttle-derived TPS was still being considered for Dream Chaser I think. I don’t know if they’ve made a decision yet.

“I am proposing a sort of “social networking” website for the departing personnel in an attempt to collect some of this information and preserve their insights and ideas.”

This is a good idea. The challenge will be in what service(s) you use.

For instance, LinkedIn Answers would be a good choice for the professional level people, since the active professionals are likely already on LinkedIn.

For the non-professionals, a quick search found this list on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn_Answers

For such a small population of people, it’s better to use existing services, but you may have to use more than one to capture a large enough segment of the relevant population.

Hope that helps.

“The question isn’t “how do you glue on a tile”, its “how do we find ways to provide heat shielding that will reduce the cost of maintenance?”

I understand your point, and you provided good detail to support it.

I guess my view is that we couldn’t afford to keep the Shuttle going, and there was no need for it anyways. That being the case, keeping people around to retain 30+ year old technology knowledge by funding more Shuttle flights seems like overkill. Just create a “Dept. of Knowledge Retention” and hire them.

But you’re also assuming that we’ll need HRSI tiles or Nomex blankets sometime soon, and I just don’t see when or where we will. Certainly not in the next decade, since the new vehicles that we’re building don’t use them, or the companies have already hired who they need.

I’ve been around the aerospace and defense industries long enough to have experience quite a few boom and bust cycles, and for the Shuttle people it’s a bust, but for other segments of the aerospace industry it’s a boom. I think the market will sort it out, like it always does, but it won’t feel fair to some.

“if we can find the money to fight two wars at the same time…, then we can find the money to do what NASA can do with that kind of budget”

We couldn’t “afford” to fight two wars at the same time, we borrowed money during that time to fill in the shortfall in the entire budget. Our political leaders chose to go further in debt to accomplish their goals overseas.

But you’re assuming (like others) that it’s a binary choice, in that we either fight 2.5 wars or we go to the Moon in a big way. That’s not reality.

As it’s always been, going back to the Moon is a money issue and not a technical one. There is a reason that every President and Congress after Apollo and up until Bush 43 didn’t want to go back – because there is not enough reason to go back. Even Bush 43 didn’t use any of his political capital to keep the Constellation funding levels up, so it was not a priority for him either.

Oh sure it’s interesting going to the Moon, and some day we may be able to keep people living there full-time like we do in the Antarctic. But it’s not a national priority.

Regarding the SLS, if Congress really wanted it ready by 2016 for missions of any type, then we’d already be far behind in building the payloads. Keep in mind that the SLS requires far larger SLS-sized payloads to justify it’s need, and those payloads can’t be manufactured with the current 5m wide ISS tooling, so new factories, transportation systems (8m payloads can’t go by air or through tunnels), tooling, test equipment and everything else need to be designed and built before the payloads can be made ready for the SLS. And we don’t know what the mission even is.

Based on my manufacturing background, my conservative guess on how long it will take from designating a destination and goal, to having a SLS-sized mission payload ready to launch is at least 10 years. Congress wants the SLS in 4 years, so what’s it supposed to do for 5+ years?

As others have pointed out, you can either build the largest rocket in the world, or you can use that money to build exploration payloads that fit on existing rockets. Choose one.