From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 14:23:41 MST
On Sunday, February 02, 2003 3:29 PM John K Clark jonkc@att.net wrote:
>> The Saturn Vs seemed to fit that bill, if you ask me.
>
> Could be, or something simpler and smaller, use a
> gas pressure fuel system; turbo pumps are expensive
> complicated and unreliable, fuel tanks are simple
> cheap and reliable.
I agree.
> True, the vehicles would be heavier but the true
> measure of efficiency is not weight versus thrust
> but cost versus payload.
This is my point exactly about all aspects of the Shuttle program.
> The Shuttle was supposed to dramatically
> lower the cost of getting into space but turned
> out to be more expensive than the Saturn and
> unlike the Saturn was limited to low earth orbit,
> not exactly prime space real-estate.
Leave it to a government program to scrap a decent system that works for
one that only promises to do more.
> They say the Shuttle does science but the stuff
> it does seldom makes it to respected peer
> reviewed journals, it's a caricature of science,
> they take ant farms into space, blow bubbles,
> bring science fair projects from high school
> kids, and take geriatric senators on joy rides.
> It's not science but
It's mostly self-promotion and not even good self-promotion.
> nothing really wrong with any of those things
> except it cost about a billion dollars a flight. It
> doesn't even have entertainment value, people
> in tin cans just 200 up have spun around the
> earth for over 40 years and people are board
> with it. NASA could produce ten times as much
> good science with a quarter of its present
> budget if it would just stop manned space flight.
But I feel manned spaceflight does have a place and that's in the
private sector. Space tourism, industry, and settlement can all be done
privately.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See "For a Free Frontier: The Case for Space Colonization" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/SpaceCol.html
See "Space: The Forgotten Frontier" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/SpaceForgot.html
See "A Late Answer to Bob Black" [on space commercialization] at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Black.html
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