🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov19.073340.27278@netcom.com> hage@netcom.com (Carl Hage) writes:
>: This BTW is a source of trouble for SSTO.
>
>A source of trouble? HL20 won't win any arguments claiming to be better
>because it's more expensive...

Remember that money = jobs; being a lot cheaper is *not* an unmixed political
blessing.

The big problem HL20 presents for SSTO is that a lot of NASA people see
HL20 as work for them and SSTO as work for somebody else... and NASA is
the established source of expertise on spaceflight, so any space project
that NASA dislikes has an uphill battle ahead of it.  (This isn't a new
problem, by the way.)  All the more so because SSTO challenges NASA's
credibility, not just its turf, by being (if it works) a vastly-superior
system built at low cost with off-the-shelf technology.  This is bad news
if you've spent your career defending very expensive projects as "the only
way it can be done".

>Claims of $1M or even $10M launch costs seem too low to be believable.
>... Does your info kit offer clear and complete
>information that will convince a skeptic?

Nothing short of a flight demonstration will convince really skeptical
observers.  A successful on-budget DC-X, especially with a demonstration
of rapid reflight with minimal refurbishing, will help a lot.

>It seems like it is a matter of a few simple calculations to show that
>it is theoretically possible/impossible given some basic assumptions
>about current rocket technology like, weight, engine efficiency, fuel
>weight, etc. Presumably you have shown that it is possible.

It's been (theoretically) possible at least since the 60s, perhaps earlier.
(Ed Heinemann, Douglas's military-aircraft miracle-worker, sketched an
expendable SSTO launcher in the late 40s...  Pity he never got the chance
to build it.)
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MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry