🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Dec18.181605.7966@utzoo.uucp> kcarroll@utzoo.uucp (Kieran A. Carroll) writes:

>Also, as Henry has pointed out earlier, the cost of Apollo itself
>(i.e. developing the CM, SM and LEM, as well as the training facilities,
>and support facilities required for supporting men in space) was quite
>a bit less than the cost of (Apollo+Saturn). If a large number of >unmanned<
>missions had been sent to the moon, they would have required a launch vehicle
>too; maybe not as big as Saturn, but probably many more launches would have
>been required in order to accomplish what Apollo did in six missions.

And as I have pointed out, this reasoning is quite wrong.  Automated
missions use the same launchers everybody else (comsats, defense,
etc.) uses.  Manned missions require their own oversized, specialized
launchers that are useless for commercial activities.  The entire 
development cost of Saturn certainly should be included in the 
Apollo (including Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz) mission costs.   Only
a trivial fraction of the development costs of Titan et. al. need to
be amortized over the automated planetary missions, since the same
boosters have been used for hundreds of commercial and defense launches.

This also means that automated missions have a much greater potential
for spinoffs than manned missions, since the technology is correctly
scaled and can be directly applied to commercial activities in space.

>Do you attribute the cost of the launcher development to each program that
>used the launch vehicle? 

Get a basic accounting textbook.  Look up "amortization."

>Sure, Apollo/Saturn was an expensive program. Too bad Congress decided to
>throw away all the infrastructure the program had developed

Congress, DoD, the scientific community, and the commercial sector, all 
rejected Saturn as oversized, overpriced, and useless for any productive
activity in those communities.  They were right.  

>it had been payed for; otherwise, follow-on manned missions could have
>been cheap enough to satisfy even Van Allen.

The recurring costs of Saturn missions would have been huge; probably
greater than for Shuttle missions since Saturn was not at all reusable.
There would have been no commercial customers, and only very limited 
DoD use.  We would have a dozen Saturns sitting around rusting instead of
a couple. 


************ These opinions are not related to Big Blue's ********

---------------------------
Nick Szabo
szabonj@ibmpa.tcspa.ibm.com
uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj