why we like dc x was re shuttle defects bizarre dc x ken your arguments are thoughtful but you are going up against the big boys if you re tackling henry allen sherzer will doubtless chime in on the subject of staggering operational costs too good luck son in article sp beo hsc usc edu khayash hsc usc edu ken hayashida writes shuttle is the only method in the free world of orbiting large life sciences and medical related packages ahem the russians are in the free world now or at least it would be politically correct to contend so i am hopeful that dc x or whatever the follow on is eventually called will perform as you state but right now i must admit that i am more skeptical than ever it will be tough to make dc x succeed and to turn it into an operational orbital vehicle doubtless it will fail to meet some of the promised goals the reason people are so fond of it is that it s the only chance we have now or will have for a long time to come to develop a launch vehicle with radically lower costs there is no shuttle successor in funded development nasp is dwindling away and als nls spacelifter sure as hell aren t gonna knock any zeroes off that per pound cost part of the blame for this must be placed on a shuttle program that consumes many annual billions of the er free world s available space cash as you will no doubt hear from many correspondents in the days to come dc x is an attempt to break out of the vicious cycle by keeping development costs low and flying incremental x plane hardware it s been to my mind incredibly successful already they ve built a complex prototype in under days for under megabucks i would have been extremely skeptical that this could be accomplished in s america never mind flying the thing getting a successor funded or building the dc y i m sure you know well that launch costs are the basic problem for any expansion of astronautics i don t see a realistic prospect for beating down those costs for multi ton payloads anywhere else if the dc flops it ll be business as usual in space the nineties and the double oughts will look just like the seventies and eighties a prospect too depressing to bear pegasus represents another assault on the problem from a different direction it doesn t lower cost per pound but it offers an orbital launch for under ten megabucks it s creating its own market for small payloads i read the magazines and i ve attended the last two iafs there are plenty of engineers with paper ideas for cheaper launch systems some of them as good as or better than ssto there is no sign in today s world that any of these designs will be allowed anywhere near an assembly line you could change my view on dc x if you could prove the following deleting some things i m not going to prove tonight that the shuttle need not go on hiatus to allow development of a man ratable dc x successor strawman is anybody seriously proposing this references please the dc must be developed in the real world funding climate which includes a nasa ferociously committed to continuing shuttle operations as well as the bird in the hand argument your common sense tells you if dc y flies at all it flies alongside the shuttle not instead of it also of course dc y and its operational descendants will be useful for a wide variety of jobs even if they are not man rated most importantly that the dc x will open up leo to more scientific and technical payloads if a dc x successor can fly a kg payload for m or even m rather than the m it now costs more people will be able to afford more payloads for the same money you can fly several satellites instead of one big outfits can fly multi satellite series little outfits will be able to fly spacecraft of their own instead of begging a ride this is just supply and demand you should be able to convince yourself that point will be true assuming dc makes a big difference in costs do you have some reason to think not o zap bill higgins fermi national accelerator laboratory bitnet higgins fnal bitnet internet higgins fnal fnal gov span hepnet higgins
