[Liberal Classic]

Part of what I got out of his essay is the Keep It Simple, Stupid principle. Perhaps a simpler manned launch vehicle and a larger heavy-lift vehicle are what we need. Not that the shuttle isn't a bad idea, but I've heard that having both the space station and the shuttle is like having a recreational vehicle and a cabin out in the woods. Are both really necessary, when one would do the job? Maybe we need a simple car to get into orbit to visit the cabin. Or perhaps we just need the Winnebago?

Certianly a resuable vehicle has (in theory anyhow) a cost advantage. Perhaps the next shuttle should be a lighter manned vehicle with less cargo capacity, and a giant simple lifting body for cargo. Separate the manned part from the cargo part.

Pardon my disorganized post. I'm just woolgathering while working on the weekend.

[supercat]

A reusable spacecraft might be cheaper than one-time use vehicles if the extra weight required for reusability didn't make it so big and heavy. Frankly, I'd rather see an assembly line set up to produce a thousand one-time use vehicles; I'm sure that economies of scale would kick in in a big way with that large a project; further, research into test procedures would be amortized over the whole lot, allowing more thorough testing to be done cheaper than is currently possible.

[jackbill]

Certianly a resuable vehicle has (in theory anyhow) a cost advantage. Perhaps the next shuttle should be a lighter manned vehicle with less cargo capacity, and a giant simple lifting body for cargo. Separate the manned part from the cargo part.

To your last sentence, exactly! The Russians just sent up an unmanned re-supply vehicle, which successfully docked with the International Space Station. I don't know what ultimately happens to the vehicle, but it sure is a lot simpler than the Shuttle.

I am not opposed entirely to manned space missions, but since a human life, especially from among the best and brightest, is sacred, we should be a bit more selective in what we send them up for. As for the ISS, perhaps it would have been more practical to develop a smaller vehicle to transport humans to and from it. The vehicles that were/are initially used to transport parts of the ISS should have been designed to become a part of the ISS. That's what I call efficiency.

I don't want to take my time to do the analysis since others are being paid to do just that. But I strongly suspect that the probablity of bringing a human being back from space is inversely proportional to the size of the vehicle. The Shuttle is just too damned big to be safe.

As for the last mission of Columbia, I believe that the "experiments" that were carried out were not worth the dollars, much less the lives of the seven astronauts. Yes, you may say that we have to transport people back and forth between earth and the ISS, now that we have the ISS, but how in the hell do you justify a half billion dollars to study spiders?

And before you start flaming, let me say that just before retiring from an aerospace company I was involved in a contract with the Naval Research Lab to conduct a "space experiment" on the Shuttle. It involved superconductivity. There was absolutely no way that the device would act differently in space than it did in our laboratory, but NRL spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot it up into space - and they confirmed my analysis. And the astronauts received acclaim. But I feel that they were risking their lives for nothing, unless they were simply satisfied with just being in space.