[AR] Re: Future Exploration Policy (was Re: Re: Congrats SpaceX
- From: "John Stoffel" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 11:27:26 -0500
"Henry" == Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Henry> On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, John Stoffel wrote:
Or heck, how big a SAR do you think you could put up on FH? Or
telescope? Or bunches of telescopes? Just think of what you could do
with 10 hubbles in orbit, instead of just one... more command and
control issues... but lots more science time across a range of
subjects. And if one fails, it's not the end of the world.
Henry> Uh, in case it hasn't come to your attention, building Hubble
Henry> cost vastly more than launching it. The same is true of JWST.
Henry> Cheaper launches would have made almost no difference to those
Henry> projects.
Yes, that's certainly true and an oversight in my part.
Henry> The same ecstatic burbling about launching zillions of cheap
Henry> payloads was heard in the early days of the shuttle. It didn't
Henry> happen, *NOT* because the launches didn't turn out to be as
Henry> cheap as expected, but because *launch was not the key
Henry> problem*. It sure helps if you have cheap launch, yes, but
Henry> then you've got to reform the *payload* builders, which is, if
Henry> anything, even more difficult. And it's not something Elon can
Henry> help with.
Just look at what happened to Surrey Satellites, didn't they get
bought out and pretty quickly but quietly shutdown or transitioned
into the big bird market away from their base?
Henry> Just proclaiming that payloads are supposed to become cheaper
Henry> is useless. JWST (nee NGST) was sold as costing one billion
Henry> dollars max, with launch slated for over a decade ago. (And
Henry> even then, people who got a close look at what the project was
Henry> actually doing were saying "no way".) To make the payloads get
Henry> dramatically cheaper, you need to either institute difficult,
Henry> painful structural reform, or swallow your inhibitions about
Henry> "duplication of effort" and start a whole new tribe of low-cost
Henry> payload builders who will gradually replace the old ones.
Henry> Neither route will be cheap, and either will face intense
Henry> political opposition. Don't hold your breath.
I always figured JWST was a hugely ambitious project that was going to
have major problems once I saw it was being put into an L# point,
where it could never be serviced.
But back to my point, would it have been smarter for NASA (not
political mind you, but smarter) to have built five or six hubbles,
even if they were not as good. Economy of scale, redundancy of one
off failures. Bigger chance of design failures sure.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I would think that the satellite
builders, esp those from the Iridium and other constellation groups,
would have a very different take on how some things are done.
And maybe the NZ guys will now have a 6U launcher which will do
interesting things to the market. It's such a darn chicken and the
egg thing.
I remember the SciFi story where someone aimed a device at the moon
and claimed to have found lots and lots of diamonds, which set off a
race to get there no matter what. He was the only one who could run
it, and it turned out to be a scam, but by then people had solved the
problem of getting to the moon. Heh.
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