Re:Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
by avmich on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @07:46PM
(#11349350)
I always suspected that to be true regarding Apollo project.
Well...
Today I see how much Soyuz-2 costs vs. how much spacecraft Soyuz costs... and wonder - may be it's still trickier to create Apollo and LEM than Saturn-V, even though in Russian history H1 turned out to be harder to make than the payloads...
Rockets are doing roughly the same thing, since 1957 - get things to orbit. While payloads keep changing - with all those stations, telescopes, probes, monitoring satellites etc. Rockets aren't that much "rocket science" anymore - but the payloads surely are. So may be - just may be - this law can be amended, a little bit.
Well...
Today I see how much Soyuz-2 costs vs. how much spacecraft Soyuz costs... and wonder - may be it's still trickier to create Apollo and LEM than Saturn-V, even though in Russian history H1 turned out to be harder to make than the payloads...
Rockets are doing roughly the same thing, since 1957 - get things to orbit. While payloads keep changing - with all those stations, telescopes, probes, monitoring satellites etc. Rockets aren't that much "rocket science" anymore - but the payloads surely are. So may be - just may be - this law can be amended, a little bit.