On Thu, 29 May 2003 23:01:55 -0700, Pierce Nichols <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Fireproof suits, full restraints, acceleration couches, and crash >cages seem to be perfectly reasonable additions to a man-rated cabin system. (snort) You *know* how hard SSTO is - and still you want to put these heavy things in one of them? A separable cabin also seemed to a lot of people to be a perfectly reasonable addition to a Shuttle. NASA looked at it, studied the tradeoffs, and concluded - correctly IMHO - that while it was heroic, it was less effective than other measures costing less, weighing less, and compromising the mission less. Remember: the thing you must not kill - it's even more important to your business than the passengers - is profitability. If your vehicle is perfectly safe but can't fly at a profit, you just wasted a whole potful of money. And you reinforced NASA's opinion that private industry can't do manned space flight. > Your G spec is conservative to the point of absurdity. People have >taken sustained accelerations higher than that in centrifuges and rocket >sleds Not sustained in rocket sleds; and those people were trained for, and prepared for, those g loads. >50 gees or higher peak acceleration is not unreasonable. Please. What's the most you've ever taken whole body? >>Rather than design a vehicle that crashes safely, why not design one >>that doesn't crash? > > Because experience has shown that it is not possible, and making a >vehicle that virtually never crashes (like a jet airliner) requires decades >of experience and billions of dollars. You're not going to be flying the thing for decades. You probably won't fly it for one decade. Figure out how many flights you're going to do in the lifetime of the vehicle, and design in a better than even chance of not crashing during that lifetime. You may assume operational restrictions and good maintenance and training. If pilot error crashes a ship I'm not going to ding the designer too hard. -R -- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
