From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 14:37:32 MST
I wasn't going to plug this - it smacks too much of exploitation of
tragedy for my tastes - but it needs to be said. This kind of senseless
waste of a space program has to be corrected, and there is a way we can
do it. That way is not to spend all the energy we have dreaming up
alternatives, such that we then have no energy to actually build the
things. We have to actually build and fly the alternatives...and this
is not as impossible as it seems.
John K Clark wrote:
> "Technotranscendence" <neptune@mars.superlink.net>
>>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.
And the test data some of us have been gathering proves that out.
If you'd like to help stop something like this from happening again,
talk to us (or any of the other groups doing what we're doing, like
XCOR) and see if there is a way that you can help. Money is typically
in shorter supply than engineering talent. (For instance, if you know a
company that could use XCOR's services, or that might be willing to make
a donation to ERPS, convincing them to inquire to the appropriate
organization might help more than personally trying to redesign the
rockets. Not that ERPS will object to people studying and improving
their designs, either - so long as you work with what they have, and not
suggest to completely scrap their development in favor of some other
scheme.)
How would we help? Once space access is cheap, the common sense answer
would not be to try to land a broken bird with people on board, but to
send up another bird to get everyone off first, or even to repair the
bird in orbit. The financial cost of the shuttle program has,
yesterday, caused a more human cost, and it will continue to do so so
long as the present methods of space access remain the only viable ones
- and the powers that be have shown that they will not, despite the
rhetoric, seriously develop alternatives on their own.
Even this disaster will not convince them otherwise; if you don't
believe that, just look at NASA's history on this issue. They'll study.
They'll agonize. They'll hem and haw. And then what's left of the
shuttle fleet will be pressed back into service, with perhaps some
grumblings about replacements but no actual replacements. It would
take the (possibly actual, possibly just effective) elimination of the
entire shuttle fleet, making manned space access impossible for NASA
except by going through foreign agencies, before NASA will budge on this
issue without external pressure - and then mostly because they will have
to put the budget that used to be for the shuttle to some use.
I sincerely wish I was wrong about that. But I see no evidence to the
contrary. Which means it is up to us to act - but those who would act,
must act effectively if their actions are to mean anything.
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