Thanks for the space chat, folks, Message #10 Posted by Norm on 12 Sept 2003, 5:47 a.m., in response to message #9 by bill platt (les Estats Unis d'Amerique)
Thanks for the space chat, folks, I enjoyed all of your reply posts. "XCOR" was interesting, as was the consensus that NASA has too much bureaucracy to proceed with things beyond the Space Shuttle.
The Shuttle was, obviously, quite an achievement when it first flew. But NASA has not done any impressive "buck rogers" stunts in the last decade or two. They just run the school bus back & forth, back & forth (until it blows up)
they need to try some new stuff.
For those of us with engineering mindset (all of us?) the focus needs to be upon cost per kilogram of material shipped into space. That specification will vary with the different vehicles that get proposed and built. It needs to be made as low as possible. My vote is for an electric rail-gun launch from Hawaii. The vehicle should already be going 400 miles an hour and be at 15,000 feet by the time
the rocket motors are ignited.
I don't yet see any unifying consensus between all the different factions. It appears President Kennedy did the nation a favor by demanding a very specific goal of our country, at the earlier time. Painful to say if you are a republican, but its true that it was the democrat Kennedy that got everybody to focus upon the specific goal, that gave us the legendary "Apollo" years, an absolutely unbeatable time that no number of Humvee's, big-screens and stock-fraud millionaires in McMansions shall ever replace.
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