…and probably even get well paid for it, in an influential publication, if I didn’t want to lose my job. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t pay that well…
Proposition (with which I don’t necessarily agree):
NASA’s approach, a return to Apollo (both in terms of the “we need to set a goal and get there,” and the actual hardware concepts) represents the mindset of a cargo cult.
As Rusty Barton noted over at sci.space.policy, in response to this story, “When Boeing started designing the 787, did its engineers go to the Udvar-Hazy Museum and start pulling parts off the Dash-80?”
OK, my question to Dr. Stanley is, if it’s a good idea for Mars, why isn’t it a good idea for the moon?
“If you refilled the EDS in orbit [using commercial LEO fuel depots] it could act as the MTV,” says Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace professor Douglas Stanley, manager of the November 2005 NASA exploration systems architecture study (ESAS).
I think people tend to draw far too many generalizations on the basis of far too few examples in the launch business.
There is a long essay to be written on this subject.
I agree with this as well:
Ironically, most SpaceX personnel come from Boeing, Northrop and other space companies. It is the sometimes Dilbertian environment, not the individual engineers, that holds those organizations back.
I’ve never read anything by “Vox Day” before, but one of my commenters cited him in a previous post. But having read this, it makes it pretty hard to take anything he (or she) has to say seriously:
I tend to support the faked Moon landing theory myself, not because of any particular detail, but simply based on the theory that if the Official Story is that we landed there, then we probably didn’t.
Note, that’s the only reason stated for disbelief–pure contrarianism. Never mind that it would have been much more difficult to fake it than to actually do it, and that all of the supposed “anomalies” or “proofs” that we didn’t go are readily explained by simple references to actual physics and facts.
I should also add that the Fox Network (which is not the same thing as Fox News) should be eternally ashamed of itself for broadcasting that travesty of a crockumentary on the subject a few years ago, and feeding the loons who believe this stuff.
Jon Goff has some interesting thoughts. I agree, for the most part. If Florida wants to continue to play in the game (at least for commercial vehicles), it has to realize that it no longer has the intrinsic geographical advantage that it’s thought it did for years. This is an issue that is going to take a lot of work with AST to sell, though, particularly for orbital flights.
Apparently, the last Shuttle flight had more foam damage than they thought. It was actually about average. They should keep flying, though. Or shut it down. Stop wasting money and time trying to fix the foam problem.