🚀 go-pugleaf

According to gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman):
>In article <2B40B0AD.5877@tct.com> chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>>According to gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman):
>>>                        Tzu-Pei Chen
>>>"The design of AUSROC II was in many ways too "positive". [...]
>>>Obviously, greater testing of each component may have shown up some
>>>of these problems earlier.  This simply highlights the very limited
>>>resources with which the group currently works.
>>
>>What an obvious straw man, Gary!  You picked an underfunded project
>>[...] to beat up the well-funded DC-1 program.
>
>DC-1 is well funded? Last I heard MacDD hadn't found *any* sugardaddy
>to fund it *at all*.

Um, okay... that's true.

>They've latched onto some SDIO money to fund DC-X, but that's just an
>atmospheric test article, not a SSTO vehicle.

And they have enough money for it so far.  No guarantees of future
funding, of course.  (But then, even if they had promises from the
government, Congress changes its priorities every year anyway.)

>Their strawman paper budgets for an eventual DC-Y prototype and follow
>on DC-1 production vehicle are underfunded by historic standards of new
>spacecraft development programs.

No doubt.  But "historic standards" are the live-by-the-paperwork NASA
mindset of today -- which I think everyone agrees is a more expensive
model than, say, Kelly Johnson's skunk works.  And which organization
would _you_ choose as the core of your new enterprise?

>For shame indeed.

Quite.  I shouldn't have claimed that DC's funding puts it out of
danger of too little testing.  Instead, I'll try asserting that DC-X
and DC-Y are themselves the tests.  After all, DC could be like NASA
and spend all that money on CAD and simulations, and have the first
bent metal become DC-1 (or, more likely, DC-0.5 :-)).
-- 
Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT  <chip@tct.com>, <73717.366@compuserve.com>
  "you make me want to break the laws of time and space / you make me
   want to eat pork / you make me want to staple bagels to my face /
   and remove them with a pitchfork" -- Weird Al Yankovic, "You Make Me"