zaitcev.mee.nu

Seen under the cut at Transterrestrial:

I have to say that I love this:

…the EELV approach would also represent a new way of doing business for NASA, which would have the benefit of potentially lowering development and operational costs. This would come at the expense of ending a substantial portion of the internal NASA capability to develop and operate launchers. It would also require that NASA and the Department of Defense jointly develop the new system.

The big unstated assumption here is that NASA actually possesses an internal capability to develop launchers. All of the available evidence for this since the Shuttle development is that it does not — there is nothing to retain. In fact, this was one of the key rationales put forth by Mike Griffin to let Marshall build a new rocket — because they hadn’t done it in decades, didn’t know how to do it, had demonstrated this with several failed attempts in the interim, and needed some on-the-job training.

LoooooooL. Too true.

That said, what's the alternative? If you take the launchers away from MSFC, what is there left for them to do? Let the half of them do Orion and fire the other half?

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 07:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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