Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Those guys have already lost the battle

This stuff is hard to do
Gary — (archived)

Buck Galaxy asked:

>Don't you think the money saved from the shuttle could
>accelerate the CEV time frame to sooner than 2010?

It's not a question of money. It's a question of time. 2010 is only five years away. Most of the guys involved with Apollo (who were incredibly bright) have retired or died. The Apollo Command Module (CM) was a flawed design. The CM was used anyway because people at the time were doing it for the first time and on a very tight schedule. There existed a huge infrastructure for testing Apollo's hardware that was a by-product of the ballistic missile program (many biilions of dollars were spent on that hardware). Much of that era's critical test hardware is now useless junk (I walk by some of it everyday when I go to work). And "NO", you can't do it all today with computers. That was a lie they feed the bean counters to get funding for the big super computers. The wrecked test facilities will have to be reactivated. The need to reactivate those facilities has not yet been recognized. The CEV if it is done right will have to be designed from a clean piece of paper. Prototypes will have to be developed for CEV and flight tested before being man rated. This is a process that takes years to do.

We definitely need a deadline to retire the Shuttle. Otherwise the Shuttle will linger for decades gobbling money and killing astronauts. Unfortunately getting CEV up and running by 2010 is probably not possible.

Gary

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