From: gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman)
Subject: Re: Latest Pegasus news?
Reply-To: gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman)
Organization: Destructive Testing Systems
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 08:06:05 GMT

In article <ewright.726182846@convex.convex.com> ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright) writes:
>In <1993Jan4.174720.11639@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman) writes:
>
>>Yeah, I'm saying a factor of two isn't enough to cover the likely 
>>stretchout in the development timeline as problems appear. I said
>>in the other post that realistic numbers based on other new spacecraft
>>development programs would be a tripling of MacDD's projected base costs 
>>and a tripling of their projected development timeline. That would still 
>>be cheaper than the monsterous delays and costs of Shuttle development.
>
>Oh?  What new spacecraft are you talking about?  Apollo came in on time 
>and under budget.  If the time line had been tripled, we wouldn't have
>landed on the Moon until 1991.  (Assuming the project wasn't cancelled
>in the interim, as it almost certainly would have been.)  

Apollo came in on time, as crash military programs sometimes do, and
near budget, a budget more than double that of Shuttle in constant
dollars, but where is it now? It's rusting in Alabama and Florida
because no missions could afford it after the Cold War stunt was
accomplished. Is Pegasus on schedule and on budget? It's been playing
hanger queen for 18 months after it's last bollixed launch. Is Conestoga?
It's launch cost twice what it earned. Neither of those are tainted 
by your hated NASA. How about E-Prime's LOFT-1? It launched a year 
behind schedule and only made 15,000 feet. Or look at the troubled
Titan series, 34D, III, IV. It's Air Force, but it's a hanger queen
with questionable economics.

>>I think *everyone* agrees that the Shuttle development program was about
>>as badly managed as is possible while still getting a working system in
>>the end. 
>
>But, Gary, the Shuttle is the quintessential example of the engineering
>management philosophy you espouse.  The ridiculous Rogers Commission
>report to the contrary, the Shuttle program was not "success oriented."
>It was a failure-seeking program if there ever was one.

It's you who expouses your whole cloth failure-seeking strawman. I 
expouse careful engineering planning for the inevitable developmental
setbacks in any new venture. That's not failure seeking, that's failure
avoiding by providing alternatives to risky sections of a program. By
providing for the inevitable changes and substitutions that occur in
any development program *in* the budget and *in* the schedule, you
can have high confidence that you *will* come in on budget and on
schedule. The fact that you can't seem to grasp that simple concept
indicates to me that you are unsuited to ever manage a high tech
development program. You'll certainly never do so with my money.

>>I think comparisons to new airliner construction, such as the references 
>>to the progression of the 7xx series, is bogus because SSTO is attempting 
>>something no other craft has ever done, 
>
>Bogus right back at you, dude.
>
>Every aircraft is designed to do something no other aircraft has done
>before.  If an existing aircraft could do the same job, no one would
>bother designing a new one.
>
>>with an engineering team that has no experience with similar reusable 
>>spacecraft to draw on. 
>
>Next to Boeing, McDonnell Douglas's engineering teams probably have 
>more experience designing commercial aerospace products than any
>company in the world.  Practically all of them reuseable.

There's a vast difference between the incremental improvements from
one aircraft to the next in the series and in a clean sheet of paper
design by a team who has never done any similar work. Name 5 vertical
takeoff and landing reusable spacecraft designed by the MacDD team.
Name *one* that came in on spec, on time, and on budget. Don't bother
me with routine extensions of existing airliner designs, it's not
the same thing. Hell, name *one* high performance fighter or bomber
that the MacDD team doing DC have brought in on spec, on time, or
on budget.

>I can almost hear you sucking breath every time you type the phrase
>"reuseable spacecraft."  Strangely enough, you don't have the same
>reaction to the phrase "reuseable aircraft."  Perhaps because you
>don't know enough history to realize how much engineering and development
>the first commercial aircraft required.  Or perhaps you know how silly
>you'd sound if you spoke about aircraft development in the same apocolyptic
>terms.  But mainly, I think, it's just the technological superstition,
>which NASA has helped to instill, about anything connected with "space." 
>After so many years of seeing the way NASA spends money, you believe
>there's just *got* to be a good reason for it; anything connected with
>space must be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to do.  When
>you hear that a vehicle is going to operate in space, without any air
>outside, the superstition takes over, and you believe that the principles 
>of engineering that govern other aerospace systems don't apply. 

More crap. I do know quite a bit about the engineering mega-hours that
went into airliner development to get practical cost effective airliners
that an airline could operate at a profit. And I expect that a reusable
spacecraft is going to need the same kinds of work before it's practical
and can be operated at a profit. Knowledge of NACA airfoils and high
bypass turbofans just doesn't transfer to vertical takeoff and landing
rockets no matter how much you wave your hands about it.

Gary
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