At 00:55 12/22/2002, David Weinshenker wrote:
The other factor is that we have an unusually high ratio of fabrication
to design time/cost/etc... building a second unit is likely to be much
more effort than the first one was to design, and almost as much as
building the first one. (This is just the opposite of, say, software -
where the major effort is in design, in figuring out how to do it,
and replication of units is nearly free by comparison.)
I don't know. I think I disagree with this one. Look at KISS - we broke
it rebuilt it in two months (vs the two years to design and build the
first time). CLEARLY, it took much less time to build the second KISS
than to build the first, and then to have the KISS III vehicle designed,
built and flown in 7 months would seem to indicate that we've learned
(for this level of complexity) how to build ballistic rockets.
The POGO design effort is still rather large. We haven't learned how to
build that type of vehicle yet. Same with Spike, which is at an earlier
stage than POGO.
We did, actually, build a POGO before - Gene build the "Mark Zero"
engineering mockup a few years ago. It showed us that a 20" square
base wasn't big enough to allow up room for all the components. We
never built more than that because we didn't have working engines.
All in all - it may be necessary to have funding and resources for
three vehicles, but build them in series - learning from each
edition and applying those lessons (and a dollop of ingenuity) to
the next tail number.
Or, of course, we could do actual detailed designs before we bend
metal - naw ... 8-)
Michael
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Michael Wallis (408) 396-9037 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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