[AR] Re: Mars Ascent Vehicle studies
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2018 19:23:35 -0500 (EST)
On Sun, 4 Mar 2018, William Claybaugh wrote:
Take five minutes and you should figure out that reuse on the moon
doesn't make sense for the same reason it doesn't make sense for LEO:
flight rates are too low to justify the additional development cost.
If your vision of activity on the Moon is repeating Apollo -- a few short
visits followed by program cancellation -- that's undoubtedly true. And
of course, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you build your
hardware around that impoverished vision, that's all it will be good for.
On the other hand, if your vision is "sustained human presence on the
Moon", you might decide that this requires planning your hardware to
support higher flight rates before too very long, even if it therefore is
suboptimal for a brief initial period of limited activity. This would
require a rather different approach to the problem.
I note that the latter is what NASA was explicitly directed to do by the
NASA Authorization Act of 2005 (US law 190-155, 30 Dec 2005) -- the quoted
phrase is verbatim. If you seek an example of letting institutional
assumptions override rational planning, consider the transformation of
that phrase into a program whose highest goal was to repeat Apollo.
Reuse on the Moon, like reuse for LEO, is justifiable only if your goals
reach well beyond the first dozen flights.
Henry
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