[FPSPACE] NASA's plans for CEV and heavy lift launcher

[DSFPortree at aol.com]

Chris:

I think that space travel is difficult and dangerous and that we're going to 
have failures no matter who is building the rockets and spacecraft - whether 
they are the old guard of deeply entrenched aerospace companies or the 
johnny-come-latelies whose performance remains (for the most part) theoretical. 

My money would tend to be on the first group, since they have a track record. 
In the ~40-year history of spaceflight, we haven't seen too many major 
failures. Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, STS-51L, STS-107, plus near-misses like 
Gemini VIII, Apollo 13, "the April 5 anomaly," the Progress collision with Spektr, 
and others. Not as many as one might expect, given the enormous difficulty of 
the task. Compare it to early seafaring and polar exploration - we're doing 
well! (Not one astronaut has died of scurvy or been eaten by cannibals so far.) 
That we suffered only two catastrophic failures in 113 Shuttle flights to me 
means that the folks doing the job now are doing something right.

If we can save money and time by using judiciously chosen elements of our 
existing spaceflight infrastructure, then that makes sense to me. Choosing 
judiciously is the trick.

We did the "throw out everything and start over" thing after Apollo. Now 
we're bringing back Apollo and calling it CEV. It appeals to my sense of irony to 
mine the program that replaced Apollo to revive it.

David

David S. F. Portree
Science writer & historian
dsfportree at aol.com
Flagstaff Arizona USA

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"Historian (n.): An unsuccessful novelist." - H. L. Mencken