Author Topic: Starting Over  (Read 973 times)

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Offline rickl

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Starting Over
« on: March 06, 2011, 09:27:55 AM »
I found this righteous rant about the last 50 years of space history via Transterrestrial Musings.

Starting Over

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If this mission goes off without disasters Endeavour will do STS-134 in April; if they can find enough loose change behind the couch cushions Atlantis will do STS-135 sometime this summer. That’s it. No more Shuttle.

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When 1960 rolled around the United States’s aeronautical industry was varied and vibrant; jet passenger planes were fully on-line, there were experiments with ducted-fan and Coanda-effect fliers, and the several manufacturers seemingly came out with something new every week. Space, too, was getting a lot of attention: the Air Force was experimenting with lifting bodies and beginning Dyna-Soar, X-15 missions were regular, and there were dozens if not hundreds of other projects going on.

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But we had to get to the Moon, and we had to do it right away, and all of that, all of it, got sacrificed to meet that goal. Mercury/Apollo was a huge challenge, barely doable with the technology of the time; NASA lured (or shanghaied) as many of the top people as possible for the crash program, and the contracts they let for the parts that weren’t within their capability brought most of the other aerospace manufacturers into the program — or destroyed them if they didn’t go along. A truly gigantic fraction of the total aerospace expertise in the United States got diverted to the official space program, and a sizeable chunk of Canada’s as well, all buoyed up on a flood of Federal funding. The other projects got miniaturized, slowed down, or ended totally. The only way to get to space was with a NASA meatball emblazoned somewhere.

Read the whole thing.
« Last Edit: March 06, 2011, 10:33:19 AM by rickl »
We are so far past and beyond the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that the Colonists and Founders experienced and which necessitated the Revolutionary War that they aren’t even visible in the rear-view mirror.
~ Ann Barnhardt

charlesoakwood

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Re: Starting Over
« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2011, 11:13:15 AM »

1950's private industry interested in outer space, that's a new one.
Boeing's 707, it's first big jet airliner, was still new.
 
The X-series is the only other program approaching outer space and has been argued would have made a superior transition but that was also government.