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> spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very pr

> spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.

oldgradstudent 4y ago
> Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position. It could, and it was. http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  Huh. Touche.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    And it was known as early as the 1960s that expendable launch vehicles could be reduced in cost by as much as a factor of 10 by adopting a minimum cost rather than maximum performance design methodology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf Easterbrook again was pointing this out, in the August 17, 1987 Newsweek.
pfdietz 4y ago
The question was being asked early. It came into public focus even before the Challenger loss, as the shuttle program struggled to come remotely close to promised flight rates (which of course it never did). The cover story of the November 1985 issue of Discover magazine had this cover blurb: "The shuttle is a superb technological achievement, and it's flown by brave, immensely competent men and women... But what's it good for?" https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oFwAAOSwgDZjI0Av/s-l500.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oFwAAOSwgDZjI0Av/s-l500.jpg The article was pointing out that going with cheaper expendable launchers would have been a much, MUCH better idea. And so it proved. (This article is one of the reasons I wrote "largely" in the comment above.) At any point after this article came out, cheerleading was irresponsible. Journalists might be forgiven for not predicting how uneconomic the Shuttle would be to operate, at least before this became painfully obvious a few years in. Even the critics on Capitol Hill like Mondale and Proxmire missed that; they focused more on development cost. But the Shuttle would have been a failure even if the development cost was zero.

> spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.

oldgradstudent 4y ago

> Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position. It could, and it was. http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...

_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Huh. Touche.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  And it was known as early as the 1960s that expendable launch vehicles could be reduced in cost by as much as a factor of 10 by adopting a minimum cost rather than maximum performance design methodology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf Easterbrook again was pointing this out, in the August 17, 1987 Newsweek.

pfdietz 4y ago

The question was being asked early. It came into public focus even before the Challenger loss, as the shuttle program struggled to come remotely close to promised flight rates (which of course it never did). The cover story of the November 1985 issue of Discover magazine had this cover blurb: "The shuttle is a superb technological achievement, and it's flown by brave, immensely competent men and women... But what's it good for?" https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oFwAAOSwgDZjI0Av/s-l500.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oFwAAOSwgDZjI0Av/s-l500.jpg The article was pointing out that going with cheaper expendable launchers would have been a much, MUCH better idea. And so it proved. (This article is one of the reasons I wrote "largely" in the comment above.) At any point after this article came out, cheerleading was irresponsible. Journalists might be forgiven for not predicting how uneconomic the Shuttle would be to operate, at least before this became painfully obvious a few years in. Even the critics on Capitol Hill like Mondale and Proxmire missed that; they focused more on development cost. But the Shuttle would have been a failure even if the development cost was zero.