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Sorry, I should have been clear that I was talking specifically about the era from roughly the mid-1970s until the mid-2000s. Prior to that, US rocket scientist
by nkoren 10y ago
Sorry, I should have been clear that I was talking specifically about the era from roughly the mid-1970s until the mid-2000s. Prior to that, US rocket scientists were wildly innovative and also rather good at trade studies. Subsequent to that there was Elon Musk. In the interim, several decades of rot while stuck in a local maxima.
- snowwrestler 10y agoI wonder how much of that was a set of theoretical blinders (as you say), vs. how much of it was just the practical result of the huge demands of the Space Shuttle program. The STS famously had all sorts of contradictory goals (some came from outside NASA) that resulted in sub-optimal design tradeoffs--which in turn required the highest-performance engines NASA could get their hands on. From the outside, looking back, it seems like the Space Shuttle was so (unexpectedly) demanding that it basically took over NASA for 25 years. Maybe there just weren't enough resources to pursue other launch vehicle ideas, even if people there recognized the need.