18 April 2012

To Weep Or Laugh?

Now that the last Shuttle has departed Kennedy Space Center for a museum...

Good fucking riddens!

Know when we should have started looking for a replacement for the flying brick-yard?  1980.

Challenger should have been hint one for a total redesign, and likely wouldn't have happened if we'd followed my schedule for replacement.  Shuttle II would have been flying in 1986.

Six years from concept to flight?

Yes.

How?

Remove how the government does things from it.

State what the vehicle will do.  Accept bids.  Test prototypes.  Buy the winner.

That first step is where we fuck it up completely.  That's known as specifying.  To get something out the door in a timely manner you have to lock the specs and leave them locked.

Did you know Ronald Reagan was president when the F-22, F-35 and V-22 were started?  We're still waiting on F-35 to enter service.

In the same time frame Boeing has introduced three new airliners.  How many planes has Airbus introduced since then?  A few.  Both companies sold more than the originally projected numbers too.  The aforementioned fighters are going to be well under projected numbers.

Do you honestly believe that an airliner is more complex than a spacecraft?  Didn't we go from paper to landing on the moon in less than ten years?

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