Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 02:41:58PM -0700:
Maciej Ceglowski does a *beautiful* deconstruction of why I almost never
agree with what Graham has to say.
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Ooooh, I like this site.
http://www.idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm
...is good, too.
-Stewart
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This guy IS good...
http://www.idlewords.com/
"But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for
sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging
experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can
do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle
science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments
alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a
group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere."
"Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle
designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five
to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and
requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an
almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane
must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver
sacrifice to a sky god."
"The tiny commercial launch market was in no shape to supply such a
wealth of satellites, so NASA turned to the one agency that had an
abundance of things requiring shooting into space - the Air Force - and
asked it to abandon its unmanned rocket programs, instead committing all
future satellite launches to the Shuttle."
"Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system - the
side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing
engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection - were the direct
fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force
requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that
had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as
the mechanics of flight."
Bingo...
RBW
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