Posted on 02/08/2011 4:50:10 PM PST by Nachum
The marching orders from Congress and the White House to NASA were pretty straightforward. Go out and build a new big rocket to replace the retiring space shuttle fleet. Unlike the shuttle, the new rocket has to be powerful enough to get out of low Earth orbit and carry humans to an asteroid and eventually Mars, perhaps even the moon. There must also be a test flight by 2016. But at this point, NASA officials are warning of a potentially devastating setback to future space exploration. Its first new rocket in 40 years may not happen because the agency doesn't
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Not true.
/johnny
Where did you hear that?
No. To build a new Saturn V from blueprints would quickly become a real cluster f*ck. Imagine, if you will, trying to duplicate the '60s-era computers, materials, and whatnot. It would take more time, effort, and money, to try to retool and rebuild that obsolete old dinosaur than it would to start fresh.
The problem is not having to design a big Saturn-class rocket; for all its hugeness the Saturn V is a fairly simple design, especially as compared to more modern rockets. But it still costs a butt-load of money to do it, and it's made more difficult by the fact that the mission requirements are not firmly defined.
I would like to hope not. It would be nice if the tooling an dies for it survived but knowing our sainted leaders, I wouldn’t count on it. Wasn’t the tooling and dies for the Blackbird ordered destroyed too years back or am I thinking of something else?
I'm pretty sure they don't exist anymore ... why would they? It'd be like asking Ford to keep around the tooling and dies for their 1964 product line.
There are still companies that make rocket engines, and companies that make entire rockets. It's not an issue of capability: given proper funding and requirements, and a well-run program, a Saturn-class rocket could be turned out in a reasonable amount of time. But funding is a problem, requirements are not firm, and NASA management is a mess....
Sad. It was almost 40 years ago when I was working at NASA and one of the researchers there gloomily exclaimed that NASA had just passed a milestone: they now had one administrator for each researcher.
Your point is VERY well taken. Instead of a group of engineers and scientists with a mission, it's a group of largely bureaucrats with a mission to save their bureaucracy.
I was referring to development cost, not production cost.
I mean, the design is already completed. The development cost has already been paid. It is cheaper than creating an entirely new system.
Even a review and partial redesign with new materials and methods would be less costly to do than an entirely new design.
“
NASA says its pockets not deep enough for new rocket
“
Maybe a decade ago I ranted to my brother that I thought a lot of NASA
work was just a waste of $$$.
Especially because the apparent lack of benefits/innovations from
the on-winded Space Shuttle project.
My brother shut me up by saying:
“Better to spend the dollars on NASA than social engineering crap”.
And having a social engineer in The Oval Office, he was dead on correct.
Even a review and partial redesign with new materials and methods would be less costly to do than an entirely new design.
Even if that were true (it's not), as I said, there was nothing inexpensive about Saturn. You could hand it to NASA for Christmas, with all the facilities, and they still couldn't afford to operate it, any more than they could then. Its cost was why we quit going to the moon. And Constellation would have been worse.
We have to get NASA out of the launch business completely, and not just for planetary probes, so it can focus on actual exploration.
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