9 thoughts on “Why It Took So Long To Replace Shuttle”

  1. He’s being a bit generous to Orion.

    I did LOL when he talked about the expensive R&D costs, keeping in mind how much SpaceX spent on developing Falcon 9.

  2. As Jerry Pournelle observed repeatedly over the years, NASA’s human spaceflight program, post-Apollo, was focused more on filling rice bowls than creating a viable long-term approach to getting humans to space.

  3. I have learned a ton from watching his channel. He’s done yeoman’s work on kerbal space program, so much so that the devs have named a valley on Kerbin as Manley’s Rift.

    He is being optimistic about time scales (the past tense mentioned above) . The bit about saving on R&D was in fact the way these ideas were presented to Congress, along with the idea of preserving the Shuttle workforce. It is the latter which really drives the designs and plans of the government space agency.

  4. The nice thing about the progression of Shuttle to Space Station to SLS is the public has been cutting each progressively less slack. The bloom went off the SLS rose almost from the start.

  5. How fascinating that we have today with Falcon Heavy a mostly reusable, inexpensive, launch system with nearly the payload to what Shuttle C was supposed to enable.

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