Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: NASA: A Can-Do Agency Becomes A Can't Do Bureaucracy
Message-ID: <1990Jul25.155957.27656@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <8824@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <=^1$NW#@rpi.edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 90 15:59:57 GMT

In article <=^1$NW#@rpi.edu> mvk@pawl.rpi.edu (Michael V. Kent) writes:
>>The space station, with construction costs up from $8 million to $37 billion
>
>$8M for a space station, is he kidding?  $37G may be correct...

I think he meant $8G, which at one point was what NASA was solemnly promising
as the total cost of the space station.  Times change...

>Right now, the American companies are launching all the satellites they can
>handle.  McDonnell Douglas is launching about ten per year, and Martin Marietta,
>Orbital Sciences Corp., and General Dynamics should reach that mark shortly.

Um, really?  McDD is doing well because of Navstar, but that's not going
to last, and they've attracted very little commercial business.  Current
speculation is that MM is going to dump the commercial market altogether,
since their sales in it have been nearly zero.  (They do have a fair bit
of government business.)  GD is actually doing fairly well these days,
but I think 10/year is an exaggeration even for them.  And I'm sure OSC/H
(Pegasus is Hercules too, not just OSC) would jump for joy at the prospect
of 10 launches per year, but they're nowhere near that now.  There is
near-unanimous agreement that once the post-Challenger backlog clears,
the US commercial launch industry is facing a major capacity glut and
will hit hard times.

>... there will be more ELV failures, airplane crashes, and automobile
>accidents as well.  The estimated failure rate for the Shuttle is 1 in 78.
>For Apollo it was 1 in 10.  That puts the Shuttle at 8 times as safe as Apollo.

Um, on what do you base this number?  Apart from the fact that we don't have
a statistically-meaningful sample for either one, the definitive version of
the Apollo spacecraft had one in-space failure, period, and the Saturn V
never had a failure at all.  (If you're going to count the engine trouble
on Apollo 6, remember that the same thing happened on at least one shuttle
mission.)  In any case, we have only the vaguest notion of the failure rates
of systems with such small samples.  If I recall the numbers correctly --
they have gotten a little better since, but not a lot -- we have only
something like 50% confidence that shuttle failure rate is under 1 in 25.

Even if you count ground tests, the shuttle has already killed twice as
many astronauts as Apollo did.  (This is an equally meaningless number,
of course.)

>The Shuttle has not made "prosaic cargo-delivery missions" since the Challenger
>accident.  It does carry up items which will not fit on an ELV due to size or
>weight constraints.  The Shuttle is the only heavy-lift booster the US will
>have for the next five years...

Oh really?  Titan IV can carry more to a higher orbit.  A significant
fraction of the near-future shuttle missions are, to put it bluntly,
prosaic cargo-delivery missions.  NASA has paid lip service to the "no
more routine cargo missions" rule, but there have been a remarkable
number of exceptions, sometimes on the flimsiest grounds.

>>How can the Soviets stage some 90 space launches per year...
>
>Part of the answer is that the Soviets need 90 launches per year to maintiain
>their capability...

No, that is not part of the answer at all.  That tells why they need such a
capability; it says nothing about *how they achieve that capability*,
which was the question being asked.  The US very definitely could use more
timely and cheaper launches, even if it doesn't need 90 a year.  As you
said elsewhere, look at the shuttle manifest.  The backlog is half a decade
or more, and some missions have quietly died because of the delays.  (Ever
wonder why Astro 1 is just being called Astro now?  It's because Astro 2
and 3 are defunct.  Remember when LDEF was going to be going up and down
at regular intervals?)

>>... it should be possible to design new throwaway
>>boosters that would have at least as much power as those in use - yet be far
>>cheaper.
>
>It's called Pegasus, and it's brand spanking new...

I'm sure OSC/H would be flattered to hear that Pegasus has "as much power"
as, say, Titan IV, but it's not true.
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
