I'm with you. I've come to accept the notion that going to the Moon from
1968-1972 was a real precocious aberration for our species, made possible
by a "perfect storm" of politics, technology, youthful exuberance, etc.
But for as long as I live I will remain ridiculously proud that I lived at
the same time, and in the same nation as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Bill
Anders, Tom Stafford, John Young, Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong, Michael
Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, Al Bean, Jack Swigert,
Fred Haise, Al Shepard, Stu Roosa, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Al Worden, Jim
Irwin, Ken Mattingly, Charlie Duke, Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt, and all
of the Webbs, Gilruths, Fagets, and Von Brauns who made it possible.
It's amazing how many false economies we consistently fall for, whether
it's JSF or the idea of a "reusable" box to carry things to orbit that
weighs three or four times as much as its contents. When you realize how
comparable Shuttle was to Saturn V, both about 1/2 billion $ per launch,
6.8 million pounds thrust vs. 7.5 million, and realize that S-V could put
about 2.5 times as much mass into LEO (and for Shuttle only 1/4 of that
was payload, 3/4 was "reusable" box) and twice as much to the Moon as
Shuttle could to LEO, the false economies are appalling. If you figure 135
shuttle launches times the waste mass of the orbiter itself, which was
almost identical to the mass of Skylab, that's 135 Skylabs we could have
put up, or almost 24 ISSs.
"But the shuttle is reusable!" Assuming that was true (which it wasn't, it
was disassembled and refurbished after each flight), it's still a false
economy. The issue is mass to orbit divided by cost, so Saturn V was not
only still the most powerful operational rocket/spacecraft system ever
built, it was about 5 times as efficient in putting mass into orbit (which
got to stay there, which is the point). With Shuttle you had to put a
Skylab up each time just to carry 1/4 of a Skylab, and then bring a Skylab
back down, and then put it back up the next time. Just leave the damn
thing up there where it belongs. Expendable boosters splashing into the
Atlantic are nothing compared to the waste of putting up and bringing down
a Skylab each shot.
People will fall for anything.
> I never thought after we left the Moon when I was a kid, that that was
> going to be the last time in my lifetime. I hope and Pray that the
> previous
> sentence won't be true.
>
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 10:25 PM, [Traveller_TNE] <
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> That really disappointed me that we couldn't get Shuttle up in time to
>> save Skylab. They used to have pieces of Skylab (from the Australian
>> debris field) in Lucite as paperweights for sale at the National Air &
>> Space museum, really pretty good sized chunks, like the size of your
>> thumbnail for $75.00. I didn't have enough money the one time, and when
>> I
>> had it a couple weeks later they were all gone.
>>
>> Most days I don't really believe we had a space program from 1981 to
>> 2011.
>> That thing was such a dog, almost exclusively parasite weight, and had
>> so
>> many cut corners to be "cheap" that it ended up costing huge ransoms
>> just
>> to keep it hobbling along. That's why NASA hacks had to make up so much
>> nonsense about how many gajillion miles they fell around the Earth, they
>> knew what an embarrassment it was. Its finest hour was when John Young
>> spoke about it from the Moon. The Traveller timeline doesn't provide me
>> a
>> lot of comfort, but I do have hopes for Elon Musk.
>>
>> > Now , now...on the Traveller timeline, the manned portion of the US
>> Space
>> > Program wasn't essentially shutdown in the mid-70s (the space shuttle
>> > actually gets built in time to service Skylab as planned for example)
>> and
>> > the EU didn't get all wrapped up in bailing out semi-socialist
>> government
>> > that made too many spending promises to their people.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Evyn
>
1968-1972 was a real precocious aberration for our species, made possible
by a "perfect storm" of politics, technology, youthful exuberance, etc.
But for as long as I live I will remain ridiculously proud that I lived at
the same time, and in the same nation as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Bill
Anders, Tom Stafford, John Young, Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong, Michael
Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, Al Bean, Jack Swigert,
Fred Haise, Al Shepard, Stu Roosa, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Al Worden, Jim
Irwin, Ken Mattingly, Charlie Duke, Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt, and all
of the Webbs, Gilruths, Fagets, and Von Brauns who made it possible.
It's amazing how many false economies we consistently fall for, whether
it's JSF or the idea of a "reusable" box to carry things to orbit that
weighs three or four times as much as its contents. When you realize how
comparable Shuttle was to Saturn V, both about 1/2 billion $ per launch,
6.8 million pounds thrust vs. 7.5 million, and realize that S-V could put
about 2.5 times as much mass into LEO (and for Shuttle only 1/4 of that
was payload, 3/4 was "reusable" box) and twice as much to the Moon as
Shuttle could to LEO, the false economies are appalling. If you figure 135
shuttle launches times the waste mass of the orbiter itself, which was
almost identical to the mass of Skylab, that's 135 Skylabs we could have
put up, or almost 24 ISSs.
"But the shuttle is reusable!" Assuming that was true (which it wasn't, it
was disassembled and refurbished after each flight), it's still a false
economy. The issue is mass to orbit divided by cost, so Saturn V was not
only still the most powerful operational rocket/spacecraft system ever
built, it was about 5 times as efficient in putting mass into orbit (which
got to stay there, which is the point). With Shuttle you had to put a
Skylab up each time just to carry 1/4 of a Skylab, and then bring a Skylab
back down, and then put it back up the next time. Just leave the damn
thing up there where it belongs. Expendable boosters splashing into the
Atlantic are nothing compared to the waste of putting up and bringing down
a Skylab each shot.
People will fall for anything.
> I never thought after we left the Moon when I was a kid, that that was
> going to be the last time in my lifetime. I hope and Pray that the
> previous
> sentence won't be true.
>
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 10:25 PM, [Traveller_TNE] <
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> That really disappointed me that we couldn't get Shuttle up in time to
>> save Skylab. They used to have pieces of Skylab (from the Australian
>> debris field) in Lucite as paperweights for sale at the National Air &
>> Space museum, really pretty good sized chunks, like the size of your
>> thumbnail for $75.00. I didn't have enough money the one time, and when
>> I
>> had it a couple weeks later they were all gone.
>>
>> Most days I don't really believe we had a space program from 1981 to
>> 2011.
>> That thing was such a dog, almost exclusively parasite weight, and had
>> so
>> many cut corners to be "cheap" that it ended up costing huge ransoms
>> just
>> to keep it hobbling along. That's why NASA hacks had to make up so much
>> nonsense about how many gajillion miles they fell around the Earth, they
>> knew what an embarrassment it was. Its finest hour was when John Young
>> spoke about it from the Moon. The Traveller timeline doesn't provide me
>> a
>> lot of comfort, but I do have hopes for Elon Musk.
>>
>> > Now , now...on the Traveller timeline, the manned portion of the US
>> Space
>> > Program wasn't essentially shutdown in the mid-70s (the space shuttle
>> > actually gets built in time to service Skylab as planned for example)
>> and
>> > the EU didn't get all wrapped up in bailing out semi-socialist
>> government
>> > that made too many spending promises to their people.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Evyn
>