From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Feb 01 2003 - 17:44:50 MST
Adrian writes
> > BTW, I posted this on Starship Forum
> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Starship_Forum/ ) earlier this week. I
> > thought it might be of interest to some on this list.
>
> The first two - Rolls-Royce plus Oil Change - are what myself and some
> of my acquaintances are already working on, for Earth-to-orbit vehicles.
I am still haunted by the point made by an acquaintance
long ago. He bemoaned the fact that ordinary rocket launches
into space deliberately fire rockets to keep the 2nd stage
or 3rd stage (I forget) from going into orbit themselves.
His point was that ordinary rocket journeys into space should
if possible elevate as much mass as possible into orbit, mass
that can be re-used to build space stations or other vehicles.
What do you think about that?
Lee
> (And, let's face it: this side of Moon or Mars colonization, practically
> every space mission is going to have to use an Earth-to-orbit vehicle,
> which means problems with such vehicles impact *all* human activity in
> space. If you could, for the same cost, double performance of deep
> space or Earth-to-orbit engines, you could do the latter and just launch
> more reaction mass for the same cost for the inefficient deep space
> engines, while reaping other benefits that will eventually pay for
> doubling the deep space engines too.)
>
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