Post by i***@gmail.comPost by Chad IrbyThe fact that they *didn't use "Peer Group Review" as one of the
practices lends much more credence to the idea that this thing might
actually have worked.
A 2STO can work. In fact the original Shuttle was just that. It had
half the payload of the present Shuttle with NO solid fuel.
...and then Peer Group Review got in, they started adding on
requirements for their own little fiefdoms, and we ended up with, well,
what we got.
A few years later, they went to a much smaller team, got a machine that
did many of the same things for much, much less money, and used it for a
number of missions in secret. Apparently. And now the folks who would
have been running the "peer groups" are telling us it would never have
worked...
Post by i***@gmail.comGo to 2.5km/s in a winged first (LOX/Kerosene) stage and LOX/LH has to
supply 5.5km/s to deliver the magic 8 required for LEO. With a specific
impulse of 4-4.5km/s this would give mass ratios (stage 2) or round
about 4. Yes it could work. New materials such as carbon fiber/ceramic
composites would reduce deadweight. There need be no tiles for example.
I've been wondering about the idea of ablative materials that could be
easily and cheaply applied in place of tiles. An inch or so of some
material that could be scraped off and sprayed on between missions, for
example (note the reentry shields for many of the early US missions,
which were fairly cheap epoxy resins and such).
Then there's the MOOSe system, which was an inflatable, single-man
reentry system. It was a bag for one astronaut, which was filled with
urethane foam from a canister. After the bag filled up, the astronaut
would orient himself correctly with a little gas jet motor, then fire a
chest-mounted reentry rocket. When he got low enough, he'd deploy a
parachute. The heat shield was only a quarter inch or so thick, but the
tests showed the heat wouldn't get through.
There's also the strong possibility of much higher payloads for
suborbital "skip" trajectories (like the Dyna-Soar), which could
minimize the thermal issues for more-standard materials.
Post by i***@gmail.comAll these would be quickly sorted out by PGR.
...or by a small team of really good engineers with a decent budget and
very few Pointy-Haired Bosses "reviewing" the operation. You know, like
the Skunk Works. Who were, apparently, the people who built this thing.
Post by i***@gmail.comPost by Chad IrbyIt also make sure that whatever it is that you're trying to do will
end up being five times as expensive and ten years too late.
An FTL system costs infinitely more. It should cost nothing
(dismissed).
Why do you keep bringing this silliness up, when nobody else does?
Post by i***@gmail.comOh I suppose there is a cost in dismissing it! All PGR
does is test whether your ideas are sound or not.
Not really. Peer Group review, in most of the US aerospace industry,
adds another couple of levels of bureaucracy to an already expensive
process (one level of reviewers, one level of admin to give the
reviewers some power to wield). Note the results of PGR in the early
development of the Shuttle, where it went from a simple "space truck" to
a big, complex gadget with significant crossrange capability (for the
Air Force) and a heavier carrying capacity (for the intel folks),
combined with a severely reduced operational tempo from its original
design.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned before, the most successful group of people
working on planes and spacecraft don't use PGR to any great extent.