

Well-Aimed and Powerful - ArikBe
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/07/well-aimed-and-powerful/

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avmich
> The heroic era spanned only eleven years (1961–72) compared to the shuttle’s
> thirty, with a much longer list of firsts, and this fact contains an
> important lesson about the history of American spaceflight as well. We did a
> lot in a very short span of time, and then we did a lot less for a lot
> longer. Soon, of course, we’ll be doing nothing at all.

Really? Nothing at all? And list of projects developing new hardware both for
manned flights and for launching payloads isn't long enough?

> This is the paradox of growing up in the shuttle era: the vehicle is more
> complex and advanced, its reusability makes it much more cost-effective, and
> its versatility makes possible missions the Saturn V never could have
> accomplished, such as repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope and construction
> of the International Space Station.

Really? Saturn-V couldn't carry a mission to repair Hubble Space Telescope
similar to Soyuz mission to repair Salyut-7? International Space Station
couldn't be build using Atlas and Delta, Proton and Ariane alone - especially
after Mir was built by Protons? You're kidding, right?

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avmich
My favorite counterargument to moon conspiracists is the following: it was
technically possible to fly to the Moon, and way easier to fly than to
convince everybody without actually flying; so - why not to fly? Technical
details of the Apollo project show, that it's not rocket science :) by today's
standards at least, not so much. Meaningful application of known approaches,
moderately conservative (say, F-1 parameters, except thrust, were well within
known models proven already experimentally), with a lot of work... but not
really magic, no more than you'd expect from a project of that size.

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skybrian
"This is the paradox of growing up in the shuttle era: the vehicle is more
complex and advanced, its reusability makes it much more cost-effective [...]"

Um, what? Can anyone substantiate the claim that the shuttle was cost-
effective?

