At 03:56 PM 2/16/2003 -0500, you wrote:
On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, John Carmack wrote:The assumption is that it isn't the man-hours themselves that are important, it is the time that the vehicle isn't flying. Sure, not needing labor at all is best, but being able to get the vehicle back in the air rapidly, even if it means larger labor in parallel with the flight, would be a significant improvement. Especially for something like a suborbital point-to-point service, where the total flight time is very short, moving what labor is necessary out of the critical path is good practice.
> I don't see why that is a problem for getting the vehicle back in the air
> with four man-hours of effort -- you would just need more heat shields than
> vehicles, and a pipelined refurb process...
I'm not sure it is fair to sweep the man-hours under the carpet :-) like
that -- you still have to pay for them. (Suppose you could somehow do the
refurb in 15min while still on the vehicle, but it required 100 guys; is
that really any different from needing 5 hours work by 5 guys in another
building?) Not counting such off-line activities as part of routine
turnaround strikes me as reasonable only if they are relatively rare,
not something that's needed on every flight.
I'm just laying this out on principle -- For a vehicle that is going to operate that rapidly, I would almost certainly opt for some kind of active cooling.
John Carmack
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