That is what they sold the shuttle on. That is what they said the Shuttle could do. Here's another interesting page that goes into this in great detail:

http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld037.htm

In the end, it was Mathematica's findings which again tipped the scales that eventually launched the shuttle.

It is very well established that NASA was using the Mathematica numbers to sell the shuttle to Congress. In the testimony, it was such a joke Thompson laughed about it.

Totally incorrect? We've been over this. The SSMEs required heavy maintenance, the flight rate was substantially lower after Challenger, there were numerous design comprimises, the military did have a major say in the Shuttle design, the shuttle was well over budget, and the shuttle was significantly late.


Couldn't possibly be because others reach different conclusions, could it?

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

NASA never said the shuttle could fly 50 times per year. That was physically impossible. Rather a Mathematica study said IF it flew 50 times per year the cost would be $x. If it flew 40 times the cost would be $y. If it flew 30 times, the cost would be $z, etc.

That very web site shows it was known in 1969 the shuttle would likely not result in major cost savings. THREE INDEPENDENT STUDIES showed that, including those by the GAO and Rand Corporation. It was no secret. It was known by 1971, before the shuttle program ever started. That the shuttle is a costly system today should come as no surprise and is not the result of cost cutting, cost overruns, mismanagement during development or compromise with the military.

That is the opinion of one guy with a web site. It in no way constitutes an official history of what happened.

If the decision makers somehow misunderstood the hypothetical Mathematica numbers when the GAO and Rand studies indicated otherwise, then I guess we deserve the government we get.

Just because a web site by one guy says that means nothing. It's an Op-Ed, an opinion column, that's all.

As the GAO, Rand and other studies showed, the shuttle life cycle cost would not be dramatically lower than expendable boosters. That was known and published in 1971, and was not a secret.

Thompson was laughing both at the obviously artificial nature of the figures and at people who believed they were relevant.

I was addressing the statement that SSMEs are "torn down and rebuilt from scratch after each flight", which is incorrect. They did initially require more maintenance than was desirable, but did not require rebuilding from scratch after each flight. That is why the lower-maintenance block II engines were developed, which are now in use.

I don't deny that, in fact I've already stated it numerous times.

If you mean before the shuttle program ever started, NASA's first design wasn't accepted -- yes. However the same is true for Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, and nearly every other significant development program in history.

If you mean there were design compromises that unavoidably resulted in major shuttle reliability, capability, or cost problems, that not clear at all. If you can name one, I'd like to hear it.

I never said otherwise. The military did have a major say, but it was secondary to NASA's requirements that were the primary factor in determining shuttle features.

Both the previously-posted GAO document and Bob Thompson's testimony show the shuttle was not over budget, but within the earliest projections.

The letter given to president Nixon in 1971 stated the shuttle would likely fly in 1981, which is what happened.

Yes, but according to the paper, 514 flights was the minimum number expected.

From the memo: "at this point, the booster's reuse capabilty is not defined." Obviously, if the booster is reusable, then it is possible for a mission to cost $10 million.

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Seems to me that they never said - to anyone who mattered - that it couldn't, leaving an awful lot of people to think that it could.

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Nearly two flights per day, for $10 million per pop.
We'd already be on Mars if they had pulled that off.

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Sorry, I don't see that. It just mentions 514.

If the booster is NOT reusable, it's impossible since the mission can't cost $10 million if the expendable booster is $50 million.

If the booster IS reusable, it would be vastly larger and more complex than the orbiter. It would be larger than a Titan III, manned, with jet engines for flying back to land. It's impossible to build such a booster for 1/5th the cost of the smaller orbiter it carries, which is what the document said it would cost.

Such inconsistencies are typical when upper level managers or politicians discuss such things. It's hard to tell what they really meant.

I can see that viewpoint. It's conceivable that while NOT committing to 50 flights per year, NASA failed to correct people who concluded that 50 flights per year was a commitment to fly rather than a hypothetical cost evaluation. Games like that are played all the time. But I'm speculating.

To know the truth we'd have to review many more documents from that period. That would have been a good job for the media over the past decades. However they typically just repeat what the last story said, or do an easy interview with someone who had no decision making authority and may even have a biased agenda.

It's hard work and boring work for a reporter to review technical documents, which may be why it wasn't done. This is especially the case if they perceive there's little audience (hence little ratings) for the resultant story.

I'd personally like to see other documents from that period pertaining to this, but not sure how to get them.

The absolute maximum flights per year was capped by the Michoud facility ET manufacturing capacity. In theory it could be ramped up to 24 tanks per year, probably using multiple personnel shifts. With a four orbiter fleet, each one would have to fly six missions per year. Discovery flew four missions in 1985, so maybe that's conceivable for short periods but I doubt it would be sustainable.

However -- flying 24 or 50 flights per year wouldn't save any money it would COST money. It's true the more it flies, the lower the fully burdened per flight costs. That's because the fixed costs of the huge standing army, related facilities, development costs, etc are spread over more flights. However that's not saving any money, just changing one paper number. The operating costs for 50 flights per year would be huge, and somebody would have to pay for it.

Therefore if they HAD flown 50 flights per year, the OVERALL costs would be even higher than today. You'd only achieve a lower paper number -- fully burdened cost per flight.

In the CAIB session, several people laughed when Bob Thompson described the Mathematica conclusion about flight costs going down with high flight numbers. They were NOT laughing because Thompson, et al had pulled a "quick one" on Congress, rather because from their viewpoint these things seemed so obvious it's comical. That's clear from the video.

BTW the videos are available for download. I strongly suggest anybody interested to watch this one, starting at about 28 minutes into it. (warning, 271MB video file, save to local disk): http://caib.nasa.gov/videos/caib042303.wmv

CAIB top level materials: http://caib.nasa.gov/events/public_h...s/default.html

Whether NASA ever officially committed to 50 flights per year is actually a fascinating topic, although unrelated to most of the original points initiating this topic. As illustrated in this thread there's a common perception NASA openly and explicitly committed to 50 flights year, but I've never seen definitive information on that.

BTW if anybody wants definitive information describing how NASA met the shuttle development budget, it's available in these documents (unfortunately not on line):

Mandell, Humboldt C., Jr. "Assessment of Space Shuttle Cost Estimating Methods." Ph.D. Diss., University of Colorado at Denver, 1983

Mandell, Humboldt C., Jr. "Management and Budget Lessons: The Space Shuttle Program." NASA SP-6101 (02), Autumn 1989.

Why return to Lunar missions ?
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=21927
181 Things To Do On The Moon

Ex-astronaut says NASA should be focusing on Mars
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1195890474/4

Uh, isn't that more or less exactly what they're planning to do? As quickly as it's feasible, I mean?

Missions to Mars, both ongoing and (manned) planned, check.

Shutting down Shuttle, check.

Replacement being developed with an eye toward past-LEO manned flights, check.

Private companies doing space research, check.

So what exactly is his beef besides "I want my name in the papers too!"

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Why go to Mars? Oh, no, no, no, no my friend. The question is...
Why not?

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
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Perhaps a new tact on the situation would help our chances for a manned mission to Mars. What if NASA reversed its current stand and acknowledged Hoagland’s claim that there are Martian ruins on Mars. The “face” on Mars is really an ancient monument. Downtown Cydonia really is the remnants of an ancient Martian city. Perhaps that would get everyone fired up enough to generate enough funding for near future manned missions to the red planet. Of course, once we were there, NASA could “discover” that all those were natural formations. But, hey, we’d be there.

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Reality: What a concept!……………………..><Ç(((Ç°>

What frustrates me about the current robotic missions to Mars is that they do nothing to pave the way for a human presence on Mars. Sending a rover to drive a couple of kilometers over the course of a year is quite the achievement for robotics, but a human could do what those rovers have done in an afternoon.

The early Apollo missions were not about extracting scientific data from the Moon. They were about rehearsing the steps necessary to get scientists to the Moon (and Moon stuff back to the scientists). Can we put a lander on the Moon safely? Can we dock in orbit? Etc.

I'm all for finding out if life exists or existed on Mars, but we can do that just as well if we are there. Instead of sending a rover to tootle around, let's send a lander to manufacture water and fuel from the atmosphere. Let's send a ERV to ensure it can launch from Mars back to Earth. We're doing a great job finding out about Mars, but let's kill two birds with one stone.

A human could have observed two Martian years of weather in an afternoon?
Taking 100,000 images, and scores of moessbauer measurements in an afternoon would have been tough too.

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Let's do a sample-return first, as proof of concept. Once people are assured that, yes, we can get a return vehicle to the Martian surface and have it get back to us intact, the foundation will be laid.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Good point, and I retract my hyperbole. However, a rover with a human companion could accomplish far more than a rover alone. For just one example, all the stress and worry about a dust storm shutting the rover permanently down could be resolved by a human with a broom.

On the other hand, adding a human with a broom to the mission would mean adding the stress and worry of keeping him alive for the journey, keeping him alive on the surface for the duration of the mission, keeping him alive for the return, providing a return vehicle, providing Mars-rated landing system for the vehicle, providing the extra fuel to move all his life support and vehicle mass, providing the extra fuel to move the extra fuel, etc... and, of course, it would mean adding the stress and worry of realising that the mission wouldn't happen at all on account of being too expensive, putting human life at too much risk, and being quite possibly beyond the capabilities of current technology.

Gathering more detailed information about the Martian environment doesn't pave the way for a human presence on Mars?

All of which would be unnecessary if Goliath or Big Al were sent instead.

Which would be moot if the purpose was to remain on Mars in order to properly establish the foundations of a permanent presence on Mars.

That, of course, depends entirely upon who is funding the mission.

Going into space always has been, and always will be risky. Walking down the street in New York is risky. I think we need to reassess our priorities.

We currently have all the technologies that would allow us to send men to Mars, and return them if necessary.

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Reality: What a concept!……………………..><Ç(((Ç°>

Most of the information gained by these primitive rovers, while interesting, is not really relevant to finding a location for a permanent colony on Mars.

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Reality: What a concept!……………………..><Ç(((Ç°>

Since a human mission would probably have streaming high definition video during EVAs , then yes, you would get that number of images . Thirty images a second, 8 hour EVAs, two EVAs a week, 70 weeks on the surface, that is ~120 million images.

Mossbauer measurements I'll give you. But why bother with Mossabuer when you would have several much better instruments like XRD, XRF along?

Jon

The ability of an astronaut to do such simple tasks is an added bonus. The reality is a human mission offer two of three orders of magnitude better capabilty than even advanced robotic missions.

An advanced rover like MSL carries perhaps a dozen instruments and will, during its life time

Travel 10's of km.

Characterise 10's of locations

Take 100's of measurements.

Collect 100,000's of images.

Have a few 100 watts to operate.

If it meets up with a sample return mission you might be able to return a few 100 grams of sample.

I am all for such missions. I lookforward to MSL and ExoMars, and hope that there will be MSR within a decade. But eventually the time will come to step things up with people on the surface.

A simple, four person Mars mission will carry perhaps 100 instruments and, in the course of a 600 day mission:

Travel 1000s of km.

Characterise a 1000 locations

Take 10,000s of measurements.

Collect 100s of millions of images.

Have 10s of kilowatts available for experiments and other work.

Return a 100s of kg.

It will do all this with all the advantages of real time decision making by on the spot scientists and human flexibility, dexterity, and adpatibility.

On top of that the crewed mission will be able to carry out things beyond the abaility of either the two missions. Intermediate and deep drilling, excavation of trenches, exploration of caves, complex geophsyics, complex astrobiologial laboratory work. Plus a range of projects related to potential human settlement. ISRU research, engineering trials, biomedical research, plant growth investigations simply not feasible using unmanned missions.

The risk should be the same as current crewed missions. We accept those for Earth orbit, we should certainly accept them for exploring a new planet.

The cost of the two robotic missions would be about $7 billion. The human mission, using a cost per kg midway between the ISS and Apollo, would cost ~$70 billion. It will achieve hundreds to thousands of times as much as what the same expediture would on unmanned missions.

Jon

I'm not in agreement with your cost estimates, nor with your assessment of the risks. I'd also like to point out that I expect our ability to do interesting work with robotic missions is likely to improve dramatically over the next thirty years. Also, all of your claims about available power and mass of sample returns could be done with larger robotic missions for much less cost than a humans with life support mission.

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And likewise, our ability to send humans will also improve.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

That is the plan. Mars in about 30 years.

On the other hand, if you look at the progress made from 1977 to 2007 in computers, and compare it to the progress made in chemical rockets, I think you'll have to agree that the robots will probably improve much more than will our ability to send people.

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Forming opinions as we speak

And yet robots will still not be people. The purpose of exploration is to explore, not sit in front of a TV screen! The most robots can do is pave the way for us.

Robots will likewise be unable to colonize. That, we have to do in person.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Give me the funding for Goliath or Big Al and I’ll build a rover that can:

Travel 1000s of km.

Characterize a 1000 locations

Take 10,000s of measurements.

Collect 100s of millions of images.

Have 10s of kilowatts available for experiments and other work.

Return 100s of kg if it meets a sample return mission.

Perform intermediate and deep drilling and core sampling

Perform complex analyses

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Reality: What a concept!……………………..><Ç(((Ç°>

Well, that is what we are talking about, isn’t it? If we want to send men (and women ) to Mars, we have to find out a lot more about Mars. We have to find suitable locations for a base and for a colony. Robots will do that.

Of course. We can’t let the robots have all the fun.

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Reality: What a concept!……………………..><Ç(((Ç°>

But our current robots are not doing that (looking for bases locations, etc.) They're looking for microbial life and the remains thereof. That was my original point. The issue is not that the current probes aren't useful; it's that they're rolling down a rabbit trail. Digging twenty centimeters into the Martian dust will not make it easier for a human to dig a twenty-foot hole and analyze the sediment levels, now or thirty years from now.