perfidy

The cover story of the recent issue of the Economist completely agrees with my scheme for reworking NASA - that it should focus on exploration and research, and that private industry should take over Earth to orbit transportation. Money quote:

"Indeed, if private enterprise can create astronauts with only millions of dollars, what might it achieve with a fraction of NASA's wasted billions? The Space Station is a mere 240 miles above the Earth. That is about four times further than any of today's private suborbital craft are trying to reach. But, if NASA were a customer, and not a competitor, in the business of building spacecraft, companies might have the incentive to extend their craft all the way into orbit.

...Meanwhile, the existence of the shuttle doubtless inhibits the development of a private space industry and the new private companies face regulatory restrictions that do not apply to the shuttle. Remove some of those barriers, scuttle the shuttle, and a private industry may bloom... And NASA could explore the real frontier."

You heard it here first. In related news, Slashdot has a roundup of links discussing the business case for reusable launch vehicles. There are a lot of interesting tidbits there, but I have been thinking that there may be some value in going back, at least for a little while, to usable rocket launchers.

While rockets are expensive, the shuttle is ridiculous. It is reusable in only the most restricted sense. If we really needed to get stuff into space, disposable launchers - maunfactured in quantity - could be substantially cheaper than operating the shuttle. The shuttle requires immense sums of money to launch, and more to be reconditioned for the next flight. Depending on disposables would eliminate at least one whole category of shuttle expenses.

The two current disposables in our inventory - the Atlas and the Delta, were both at one time man-rated. They could be again. And if we were making lots of them, they would cost less. We could put a two man glider like the Dyna-Soar (yes, aerospace engineers can have a sense of humor) we designed in the sixties on top of it. I'd be curious to know what their ground crew needs are. And we can always use the disposable shuttle pieces as a cargo lifter, as I have mentioned before.

With a little money and design work, the demise of the shuttle would not put us out of the space game, and could in fact increase our capabilities. Disposable launchers do not have the long turn around times of the shuttle - just order a new one and launch it. Cheap two man orbiters would not be the technological nightmare that the shuttle is, and not a single point of failure. The shuttle-based cargo lifter would have more cargo capacity than anything since the Saturn.

AND NONE OF IT REQUIRES A SINGLE DAMNED NEW PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY. All it takes is a little money, and a couple free weekends for the engineers at Boeing and Lockheed.