Everybody knows this but the problem with Cheap Access To Space is convincing someone to pay the huge development costs for something that has no proven market. Back in the early 1970s, Max Faget produced Shuttle designs that would have been fully reusable and probably brought LEO access down to the magic $1000/kg. However those designs were dead-on-arrival because the federal government wasn't prepared to pay the huge development costs. The current Space Shuttle was funded because they redesigned it to support military missions, i.e. the Shuttle cargo bay was sized for the KH-10 satellite along with the Shuttle's cross range cabability specified for polar orbits with once-around launch and landing at Vandenburg AFB. If NASA had not partnered with the USAF, the Space Shuttle would never have gotten off the drawing board. A manned Mars program could provide the necessary incentive for a CATS program. Write the launch service contract based upon a lump sum. Structure the economics so there would be more profit in developing a CATS system rather than using ELVs.
Gary
Space/Science » in reply to Faulty Memory On My Part
CATS is a chicken-and-egg problem
The whole thread (44 posts)
- Is This NASA's Problem?
- Plans, plans and more plans
- NASA's problem is simply that Mars is not Earth-like
- There is no disagreement
- No
- re: No
- re: No
- re: No
- sounds like you can't tell the difference between socialism and communism
- difference between socialism and communism
- Go back to elementary school
- difference between socialism and communism
- sounds like you can't tell the difference between socialism and communism
- re: No