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In article <72332@cup.portal.com> BrianT@cup.portal.com (Brian Stuart Thorn) writes:

>>Correct. But Shuttle is now flying at or very near its maximum rate.

>   No, I disagree here. NASA has never had four working shuttles in
>   service at the same time 

A few years ago I saw some figures on the amount of overtime needed to
process a Shuttle. It was horendous. Adding more Shuttles will just tax
the groundcrew even more. Adding staff to eliminate this bottleneck will
only increase costs.

>   In 1992, all four orbiters flew twice, but Discovery was offline
>   from February to November, Columbia offline from January to May,
>   and Atlantis offline from August to December. Take away those
>   downtime periods and you can add three more flights. 

Your assuming that orbiter availability is the only bottleneck.

I'm sure they could add one or two flights a year. But so what? all that
means is that instead of spending three times what we need we are 'only'
spending 2.75 times what we need to. I don't consider that much of a
victory.

>   This is all
>   moot, since NASA apparently does not want to push its luck prior
>   to SSF assembly, but it does show that the launch rate is lower
>   than it could be.

No because those are factors. The bottom line is that NASA cannot fly
many more missions per year than they are now.


    Allen

-- 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Allen W. Sherzer | "A great man is one who does nothing but leaves        |
|  aws@iti.org     |  nothing undone"                                       |
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