

Ha!


Watch me. It flies. It lands. It gets rebuilt.



That's not what they told us back in the '70's.


1. It isn't a logical follow-on. A logical follow-on would have
been either a Russian "snowfox" type thingey (for the lifting bodies)
or something like MMI's Space Van (or Boeing's TSTO, or the airbreathing
TSTO the military is allegedly _using_ now that probably cost less
to develop than the shuttle does to fly for a year).


Keep that attitude, and it'll be a couple centuries before we get real
access to space, unless another country without all that baggage comes
along and kicks our ass in the space race.


Or NASA HQ. That doesn't give the rest of the program plausible deniability
if we deceide that it wasn't worth the money we've spent, which is by now
probably a lot more than Apollo.


Yes, but it gets sold on the basis of the political statements.
You're saying basically that it met the engineering specs (which is
questionable, IMHO) so it's a success, never mind that you couldn't
get the funding the shuttle eats with those engineering specs in
a thousand years.


You can get hypersonic flight data with an X-15 or a follow-on X-15
type vehicle for much less.

And economics and engineering are interchangable; engineering in the
absense of economics is basically just physics, and in terms of physics,
the shuttle looks like a failure next to the X-15.



HS>Sorry, support that I can arrange for launchers all goes to launchers
HS>that I have some hope of riding some day.  At the moment, that's
HS>DC-X's hoped-for successors.


The shuttle program has a bad record. I _once_ had hopes for the
shuttle program. By now I know those hopes were false. 

All I have for DC-X and similar and dissimilar experimental vehicles
are hopes. But at least I know they aren't false hopes yet.

I did support the shuttle, way back when. It didn't do nearly what
it was supposed to. It's time to move on to something that might do
the job of orbital delivery better. Or at all.





We don't want to learn how to operate on orbit. It launches, it
shoves out the payload, it lands. It doesn't waste payload hauling
up and down EDO pallets and the like.

The only thing to be learned from shuttle is how *not* to build a
launcher.

Finally: that bit about the "proven" shuttle. Are you hoping you can
tell a lie enough times and get someone to believe it?


How much science and technology could have been done is the money spent
on shuttle had been spent differently?

...

Learn about economics and the current budget realities in the United States,
please.

