NASA management has sucked for decades. Name a single big project they've done since Skylab that even remotely came in close to the budget or performance projections. I define a big project as one that was supposed to cost around a billion dollars. And yet, as bad as NASA managers are, they're still among the most experienced at this kind of work. Name anyone else could do the job, bad management notwithstanding. Zubrin? Don't make me laugh.
Gemini began development in 1961, long before any serious Apollo hardware was built. The first manned Gemini flight was in March, 1965, about two years before the disasterous Apollo 1 fire. Sure, there was Apollo boilerplate stuff but that's a long way from flight hardware. Gemini was started when NASA realized that going straight from Mercury to Apollo was too big a jump. It allowed them to develop several key technologies and operational techniques, including the ones I listed. It was a good example of the incremental approach to flight test.
Try going straight to Mars with humans and you're going to land flat on your ass, assuming you get that far. Ignore the lessons of 100 years of flight test and you're bound to fail. Those lessons were learned at very high cost, as demonstrated by the names of virtually every building and street on Edwards AFB, including the name of the base itself. They're all named for people killed during flight tests.
Space/Science » in reply to re: Some Thing You're Wrong About
Nope
The whole thread (39 posts)
- "Problems with Mars probes? The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves"
- Money alone isn't the solution
- FBC seems to have been tossed by the wayside.
- Some Things You Overlooked
- re: Some Things You Overlooked
- Key quote
- Money alone isn't the solution