As a contractor I’ve seen many creative ways folks trashed their programs with these.

It’s sometimes helpful to do them, but it’s important to always remember that they are a summation of tons of subjective opinions, and not some hard scientific fact or gospel truth.

If used wisely they can be useful, but all too often it gets abused.

~Jon

If your going to reject analysis because it can be misused, what do you do – engineer by off the cuff guess? I’ve seen places do it it isn’t pretty.

You could also argue that roads don’t actually go anywhere. Roads are similar to launch pads. And govt didn’t built many roads that only govt employees used. And govt roads were intended to be used by the public. Govt didn’t build cars or the vehicles that actually travelled down the road. So if govt want to build launch pads and allow public to use these launch pad for free or low cost, then you have something similar.

The analogy that fits better is air travel. The government did not try to build a national air line nor did it try to build a national air liner. It did put into place policies that fostered thr growth of commercial air lines, however.

discards in the launcher trades

What’s that? Do you mean, finding out what ATK charges NASA for each SRB?

Mark Whittington notes over in his Curmudgeon’s Corner -

“But I’m not certain that it’s the government’s place to build a commercial space transportation infrastructure.”

Thank goodness we don’t think the same way with regards to commercial ground transportation infrastructure. We’d be a much poorer people without the extensive highway system we’ve developed in this country.

It wasn’t all put in place at once; it was developed, growing organically into the massive ribbons of concrete that carry goods and persons around the nation today.

I’m not saying that NASA should build a ribbon of concrete to the Moon, but I do wish that they would take a moment and think about how we can build an infrastructure that EVERYONE uses. Spending $100Bn to build a transport system that ONLY NASA can use does not strike me as a particularly appropriate disbursement of our nation’s capital.

What if the Eisenhower interstate highway system had been restricted to solely military use? It certainly conjures in my mind a much different system and outcome than we have now.

That’s the beauty of launching stuff 20 mt at a time. You can adapt quickly to changes. The cargoes you’re launching five years from now might not be the ones you expected to launch five years back. Trying to lock down a 300 mt (presumably our rocket scientists are smart enough to use metric) in LEO going to the Moon payload thirteen years out is kind of silly. Besides, if they want 300 mt in LEO you can get that with 5 EELVs/yr in 3 years. (let’s see, assuming $500Mn/launch x 15 launches = $7.5Bn). Well now that doesn’t seem so bad.

I’m not against space elevators, and do think that they are THE permanent solution to space access (besides, Dr. Edwards’ company is here in Dallas), but right here, right now I think we need to go with the flexibility of NASA sharing the same basic launch infrastructure as everyone else.

We can pioneer how to live and work in space, and make that knowledge available to the world. How to put bigger things together, inspect our assets post-launch, stay for long periods outside the Van Allen belts, master the gravity curves, and so on.

Which also brings me to one of my curmudgeonly topics, the political shenanigans many years ago that killed a TGV-type rail infrastructure in Texas, linking the triangle of Dallas-Austin-Houston. If we had that kind of passenger rail infrastructure we could have carried huge numbers of people out of Houston instead of having the parking lot that is I-45. Personally, I’d use it to go down to Austin on the Friday night party train (flashbacks to the Brussels-Amsterdam party train rides) and drag my sorry butt back to Dallas at some point during the weekend.

Instead, I have to brave IH-35 and the gazillion 18-wheelers on it. Oh that we had a TGV in Texas. In 20/20 hindsight, had one been built it probably would have been extended from Houston to Nawlins, though I’ll bet the last part would have been tricky. Still, that would have been a nice asset to have right about now.

With regards to ambivalent’s question about discards in the launcher trades, I kind of doubt it because a lot of the private sector data is going to be classified as commercially sensitve. (One see’s that quite a bit in 10-Ks over on Edgar).

Besides, I had the misfortune of spending my birthday vacation in Houston at the Moon Exploration Architectures Study group or something like that, and the groundwork for what we’re seeing now was being laid even back then. I came away with an ill and sinking feeling in my stomach that the optimizations in the way the NASA guys were looking at the problem in their trades was going to lead them right back to a disposable Son of Saturn.

I didn’t realize that it would take the form of shuttle-derived Frankenstein’s monsters. I should have been clued in from the initial CEV submissions, as on the picture page of getting to orbit included a Shaft CEV as one of the possibilities. I knew the jig was up when the earliest parts of it were leaked, and then I go to the Paris Air Show, find a poster of the Shaft CEV, as well as an ATK CD-ROM laying out the architecture dated August 2004.

And since I know you’re going to ask, no it has no really usefully information on it, just a 10 min. pretty picture movie.

I’ll stand behind my claim that the primary problem with the Stick is the upper stage, though. Mostly, the choice of LH2.

Is there a web page with an analysis of all the designs they considered but dismissed? Surely they considered an air-started RD-180 for the second stage of the Magnum?

That’s $12.12/pound thrust, which is quite a bit less than the $26.47/pound thrust of the Merlins. I was pretty surprised by that result. SpaceX is supposed to be cheap!

Maybe that $40M number is wrong. If it’s not, that suggests that the ATK folks have a pretty good first stage right now. Nevermind that solids are dangerous and not sexy and not really reusable. It would appear that the primary problem with the Stick is the cryogenic upper stage.

So… ATK might do better to gang up with a Kero/LOX upper stage for Stick and Magnum alternatives. A good design might beat SpaceX pricing!