Re: Revamping the Shuttle Program

From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Mon Feb 03 2003 - 13:49:12 MST

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    >>Me:
    >>It's not science but nothing really wrong with any of those things
    >>except it cost about a billion dollars a flight.

    "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>

    > The costs I've seen for shuttle missions are ~$400-500M/flight.

    I stand corrected, but of course that last flight will end up costing a
    great deal more than one billion dollars.

    > Here is an interesting set of data that shows the Shuttle in not
    > such a bad light (in terms of cost/man-hour in space):
    > http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/spacemarkets/sld005.htm

    I wish it had talked a little about what people are supposed to do once they
    get into "space". Isaac Asimov laughed when somebody said the shuttle was
    exploring "space", he said you could drive there in just 3 hours in the
    family car if it could go straight up. You can tell the "research" they do
    there is worthless by the sort of people they send there; can you imagine
    the people at a multi billion dollar particle accelerators like CERN or
    Fermilab performing experiments devised by high school or even grade
    school kids? It would be inconceivable, real science is done there and
    every experimental physicists in the world would kill to get a crack at
    one of those machines, they have no time to fool around with
    science fair projects ant farms and retired senators.

       John K Clark jonkc@att.net



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