News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test. Parent comment

Re:After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test by pfdietz on Sunday January 17, 2021 @04:09PM (#25814985)
It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was driven by that, not by a "lack of will".

It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test by astroflask on Monday January 18, 2021 @01:14PM (#25824699)
In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack.

The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test by pfdietz on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @06:32AM (#25832406)
The engineers knew from the beginning that the Shuttle made no sense. The mission numbers used to justify it were always absurd and assumed a flight rate that they knew wasn't going to be achieved.
[ Parent | on HN ]