“Today’s teen is tomorrows aerospace worker.” Not in this economy, fella. “You need to get out and mix with the human race a little more…” indeed, you do, and see what career paths teens with potential are looking at- and it isn’t aerospace, fella.

“I could care less about Apollo docs…” We know. It shows.

“Why would you souce local teens on HSF or history of any kind.”

Today’s teen is tomorrows aerospace worker. And since you want to mandate every worker be aware of Apollo history, then I guess that teen will not get the job.

And it’s not the schools fault for not impressing the importance of Apollo history, it just goes to show the lack of relevance that Apollo has in today’s world. Someone went somewhere new and survived – happens all the time.

“Suggest you source KSC docs”

I could care less about Apollo docs, as they don’t have any bearing on today’s reality, and are completely unrelated to anything I do for work. Space is not my vocation, but my personal interest. That’s why the fortunes of NASA contractors don’t matter to me, only the end result of all the spending (i.e. are we doing things in space).

Your being an amateur Apollo historian is quaint, but reinforces the perception that you are disconnected from today’s realities. Case in point, your belief that if something wasn’t done 30-50 years ago that it will never happen. Uh huh. Sure.

You need to get out and mix with the human race a little more…

To the extent that Newspace can create vehicles for which the launch timeline is short, as SpaceX is promising to do, it will make for quite a revolution in launch ops. We’ll see.

BTW, trying to draw an analogy between launch ops procedures of an Apollo/Saturn V to the tinkering by SpaceX is a vast and false comparison. Maybe an Atlas, and they required about 3,000 people circa 1962 to get one off the pad… five decades ago.

“It’s well documented and easy for you to source.”

If it were so easy you would provide something, anything, that even remotely supports your claims. But as usual, you are just empty rhetoric.

“Sort ofl ike the significance of Apollo 8.”

I asked a local teen what he thought of the significance of Apollo 8. He asked if they were a musical group like Maroon 5. Case closed.

It’s well documented and easy for you to source. Sort ofl ike the significance of Apollo 8. Oh, BTW… tick-tock, tick-tock.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this announcement on Monday:

NASA Media Telecon To Announce Technology Demonstration Missions

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/aug/HQ_M11-171_Tech_Demonstrations.html

Maybe it has to do with the OCT $10M – $150M mission proposals in the following areas (general, not strictly HSF exploration-specific, space technology):

* high-bandwidth deep space communication, navigation and timing;
* orbital debris mitigation or removal systems;
* advanced in-space propulsion systems; and
* autonomous rendezvous, docking, close proximity operations and formation flying.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/crosscutting_capability/tech_demos/tdm_solicitations.html

These will involve cost-sharing of at least 25% by the winners. As a result, if we assume similar numbers of jobs per dollar, regardless of whether the project is a space technology demo, ISS module, SLS, MPCV, robotic science mission, or whatever, these will produce at least 25% more space jobs per NASA dollar than projects like SLS that don’t require cost-sharing.

After the mission, you can assume that both NASA and the partner organization have plans to use the technology later since they’re both willing to pay for it, whereas with a project like SLS it is only NASA that would be using the development results. Thus again this kind of cost-sharing technology demonstration mission can be expected to result in more jobs per NASA dollar in the long run than the SLS type of spending.

A similar argument can be made for other cost-sharing efforts like COTS and CCDEV likely resulting in more jobs per NASA dollar, for similar reasons. Therefore, if creating jobs is what we’re interested in, this sort of approach has a lot of advantages.

The SLS approach only creates lots of jobs because of the massive amount of spending for that 1 project. Multiple smaller cost-sharing efforts with a combined NASA budget similar to the SLS budget will create many more jobs than SLS.

That’s exactly right. It took a long time to prep Saturn V for launch. And that … that, is one big reason why we’re not building or launching Apollo/Saturn anymore. Time = expense. BIG expense. Excellent lesson there. We now know what they didn’t know, I guess.

To the extent that Newspace can create vehicles for which the launch timeline is short, as SpaceX is promising to do, it will make for quite a revolution in launch ops. We’ll see.

BTW, $(1969)69M to launch a Saturn V? That makes $(2011)430M! Pricey launch, no?