Alex Fraser wrote: > Do the problems come with the scale of the venture? Looking at NASA > what can you learn about being big. This is what I had in mind. I think > getting big will be a bigger challenge to ERPS than any technological > hurdle.
As David W. mentioned, the bigger challenge is to do this without getting big. Keeping costs down includes minimizing the number of people working on any given vehicle: salaries can add up fast, especially once you get large enough that you have to pay for your own support staff. (For example: we can bring our own food to MTA after purchasing it from the local grocery store, but if we were 100 people, it'd likely be more efficient to pay some catering service.) We already have a bit more people than we need down there (though that's better, especially from a safety standpoint, than having much less than we need), and I don't see why we'd need a far bigger crew to launch, say, PROTO. Scale up PROTO to something that can carry four people, and you add two pilots plus two passengers, but you scale up the machines to service it so you don't need much more ground crew. > As for dirty linen, I think one thing you see when an organization > gets to a certain size is that it must learn to deal with it before > someone else does. Can you imagine 5 reporters at an ERPS meeting? After we launch Spike and boast to some friends who tell their friends who work in various news media? (Either looking for news on a slow day, or from Discovery et al and thus whose main focus would be stuff like the first flying aerospike.) Yes, though I don't think this is quite what you meant. ^_- _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
