BEWARE THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
(Updated Postcript Below)
Every once in a while you're blown away at the quality of content, analysis and thought in a blog post. My moment was after reading on this piece titled "A Shuttle to Nowhere" on Idle Words by Macieg Ceglowski (via Kottke).
It's one of the best things I've read this year on any blog.
Totally recommended if you have the slightest interest in matters space related, and recommended even if you don't. An cautionary look at how decision making evolves in a government environment with many masters.
It's really an out of the box look at the history of the shuttle program, with many elements tied together that otherwise would have been missed.
It's a bit longish, but well worth it. And don't miss the footnotes!
If after reading all of it, you stil want more, don't miss his link-rich sources page of Delicious tags here.
On a separate note, it starts to show you the value of tags, the subject of yesterday's post. After seeing the above page, you start to appreciate what the fuss over tags is all about and why we need to make them as easy as surfing the web.
P.S.
If after reading all of the above, you're hankering for more Maciej, take a look at this hilarious post on his first visit to Esther Dyson's PC Forum. His description of the Dyson clan alone is worth the price of admission.
Bookmark his site...he's one of the favorites on my blogroll.
UPDATE (P.S.)
POSTSCRIPT 1
This piece from BoingBoing offers a counter-argument to why private efforts like Burt Rutan et al have a long way and many dollars to go before being able to do what NASA does (note, not only with the Shuttle)...
It's full of terrific links, so I'm posting it here from BoingBoing in its entirety for reader convenience (by the way WWBRD stands for "what would Burt Rutan do?":
"WWBRD: one reader's answer
In light of challenges facing NASA's Space Shuttle program, BoingBoing recently asked the question, "what would Burt Rutan do?" Many wrote in with possible answers, but the golden jackhammer prize goes to reader Brady Hauth, who says:
Pungent greetings, indefatigable Xeni, Midas of vivacity!
The specific energy required to reach the altitude SpaceShipOne (SS1) reached is this, corresponding to this speed. Orbits are only stable above around 180 km. A 200 km orbit requires a speed of 7.78 km/s, so getting into a 200 km high orbit requires a specific energy of this, corresponding to this speed. That's 7.54159384 times faster! The formula for the speed of a rocket tells us that to go that much faster requires 693.390852 times as much rocket.
The exact cost of SS1 isn't public, but was probably between $20 and $50 million - I'll say $30 million here. Scaling this up to a low earth orbit capable rocket, we get $20.8 billion. I'm estimating the payload of SpaceShipOne at 400 kg from the rules. The shuttle launches 24,400 kg - 61 times as much. Scaling costs up to something that size, we get $1.2688 trillion The costs of the shuttle program over its entire life? About $145 billion.
Add in the costs of protecting the craft from re-entry from actual orbit, and things start to look expensive.
Now, one can get higher specific impulses than Rutan did, which reduces that number above the e. It makes for more expensive engines, but it doesn't have to cost nearly as much as it costs NASA. (Maybe they're paying people to make presentations like this one from the military?) One can argue that Rutan could make a design that could make orbit cheaply. However, his building SS1 is not good evidence of that. That is a completely different requirement requiring entirely different engineering. A much harder and much more expensive requirement.
Previously on Boing Boing: WWBRD?"
POSTSCRIPT 2:
As Anil Dash puts it after reading Macieg's article:
Even if there's never another mishap with the shuttle, it's doomed, as this article makes abundantly clear.
The debate continues...
Comments