[AR] Re: What happened to the Space Shuttle?
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 15:16:54 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 19 Jul 2019, William Claybaugh wrote:
Whilst NASA is publicly funded, the work of its contractors is proprietary
to those organizations.
More precisely, it is often at least partly proprietary. Depends on what
the individual contracts say; the preliminary NASA-funded design studies
which led to the SSME contractor selection *were* explicitly NASA property
(this fact figured in a later lawsuit by one of the losing bidders), but
more usually, when the company is bringing significant expertise of its
own to the job, the detailed results don't go public. If you want SSMEs
for your Commercial Shuttle, AeroPrattoDyne (or whatever their corporate
name is this year) will be happy to sell you some, just like they sold
them to NASA -- probably at a NASA sort of price -- but you don't get the
info needed to build your own.
An extreme case of this was Ladish, which did the steel forgings for the
shuttle SRB cases. They insisted from the start that they were a purely
commercial company and did only fixed-price contracts and no government
procurement paperwork would ever enter their doors. Nor would any
government inspector -- how they did the forging was proprietary and
nobody else got to see it, ever. If you want to build your own SRBs, they
or their corporate heirs will probably sell you case forgings, and you
don't really have much choice, because nobody else could meet the specs.
(A later attempt to qualify an alternate supplier was unsuccessful.)
In general, it will be lower cost to develop any specific capability
using today's technology, and accordingly seldom economic to rebuild a
decommissioned asset.
True if other things are equal; there is a problem in that very often they
are not. One potential advantage of rebuilding a decommissioned asset is
that the old design is known to work and this can avoid a lot of very
expensive floundering... if you firmly insist that its performance was
good enough and you want a straight copy of it -- perhaps *manufactured*
in better ways -- rather than an "improved" version. (The J-2X is the
poster child for what happens if you don't insist.)
Henry
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