Re: Congratulations to Lockheed-Martin on winning the Orion program


On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 16:21:09 +0100, GSV Three Minds in a Can
<GSV@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Bitstring <memo.20060902153623.3124D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, from the
wonderful person John Dallman <jgd@xxxxxxxxx> said
In article <44fb1433.118663781@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, fairwater@xxxxxxxxx
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Yes. We are going to replace it with a *new and different*
deathtrap/moneypit which will be the ball and chain for the next 30
thirty years.

Don't worry. It's going to get cancelled.

So what became of the HOTOL/Fly to orbit contenders, that we are back
with the big dumb boosters (plus the deadly solid fuel strap-ons, from
looking at the NASA cartoons)??

Which "HOTOL/Fly to orbit contenders"?

I can only think of a few proposals for HOTOL space launch vehicles,
and none of them were "contending" with anything except their own
cancellation.


The Boeing RASV proposal, attracted serious USAF interest, but there
wasn't a spare $1.4 billion in the upcoming budget, and by the next
budgetary cycle Boeing's management was no longer pushing the proposal
and the RASV project team had moved on to other things. There was no
competition between HOTOL projects, just one idea that Boeing worked
up into a proposal.

The NASA X-30 "National Aerospace Plane", was noncompetitive on account
of NASA at the time did not recognize anyone as worthy to compete with
NASA's unsurpassed excellence. So they ran the program in-house, and
demonstrated that what they were really excellent at was tacking on to
any project within reach every shiny new technology within reach, no
matter how dubious or expensive, until either the bank or the vehicle
was fundamentally broken.

British Aerospace's "HOTOL" was subject to the same pressures as the
X-30, but thanks to the singular influence of Alan Bond remained somewhat
practical to the end. That end being, Britain having a failure of will
and/or confidence regarding its ability to pursue major aerospace R&D
programs independantly, and France seeing HOTOL as too British to be
allowed into ESA.


If you're thinking of the X-33 competition from the late 1990s, none of
those vehicles were HOTOL, or orbital. The NASA managers who ran the
competition were clearly from the X-30 school, and Lockheed-Martin wowed
them with a most impressive bag of shiny new technologies. Which quite
literally broke the vehicle - the prototype's spiffy multilobed composite
fuel tanks came apart at the seams - but not until it had extracted close
to a billion dollars from NASA and ensured that the other competitors got
nothing, so from LockMart's point of view it has to be accounted a great
success.


Right now, the HOTOL people are mostly working on less ambitious and less
conspicuous suborbital projects, which keeps them out of trouble while
they work up to orbital capability.

Oh, and "Big Dumb Booster", does not mean what you think it means. There
are no BDBs in service, and NASA doesn't plan on building any. Elon Musk
does, but that's another story. What NASA, and the other usual suspects,
deal with, are small, medium, and big *smart* boosters. Possibly foolish,
but representing way too much engineering cleverness to qualify as "dumb".


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