On Sun, 02 Feb 2003 13:36:58 -0800, Adrian Tymes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>That's with aerobraking to remove most of orbital velocity, right? Right. You need a really high mass fraction to get light enough that aerobraking takes you subsonic. But you needed a really high mass fraction to get to orbit in the first place. :-) >Until we send another to go fetch the crew and/or repair the SSTO. >Which, I believe, might have been possible here had NASA thought of it. Possible, if they had started work right after launch. Columbia launched on 1/16/03, and the EDO retrofit only gives them enough consumables for up to 30 days. Columbia had a full crew aboard, but... Atlantis was rolled over for ET/SRB mating on 1/29/03, on schedule for a 3/1/03 launch. They might have been able to shave two weeks off a six week schedule, had they known they needed to do it. > >>I have never liked ablative methods. Yet they seem to be the best. > > > > I have a simple philosophy: Do What Works. Ablatives work. > >Until they ablate away or fall off. They're *supposed* to ablate away and fall off. You strip off the remnant and put on a new coat. Or use prefab panels. >BTW, question about the shuttle tiles. I was talking to my dad about >this earlier today, and he mentioned that the white tiles used for the >shuttle's upper body would make great housing material except for the >cost: excellent insulators, totally fire and termite proof, strength to >weight ratios far more than adequate for a typical house, et cetera and >so forth. The only problem would be cost - which, of course, is often a >killer for this kind of thing. But he was wondering if, perhaps, >getting some contractors hooked on using these for housing materials >would drive the point down, such that making them for the occasional >spaceship would be a cheap custom job rather than the elaborate >undertaking it presently seems to be. (Then again, that might not be >inherent to the material, just to its current main user.) They're very brittle. Setting one down too hard can damage it. They're totally unsuited for structural building material. Sorry. -R _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
