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" Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher. "
Henry Spencer
Problems
Build
Good
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" Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time. "
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Perfect
" Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap. "
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Moon
Cheap
" The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion. "
Henry Spencer
Just
Illusion
End
" Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense. "
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Solid
Necessary
Nonsense
" Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane. "
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Flying
Much
Like
" Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along. "
Henry Spencer
Wonder
Burn
Space
" SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing. "
Henry Spencer
Bad Luck
First
Three
" Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches. "
Henry Spencer
Big
Cost
Costs
" Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent. "
Henry Spencer
Probability
Past
Failure
" Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer. "
Henry Spencer
Cheaper
Than
Milk
" An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. "
Henry Spencer
Optimism
Too Much
Small
" Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020. "
Henry Spencer
Work
Goals
Support
" Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection. "
Henry Spencer
Always
Going
Painful
" If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better. "
Henry Spencer
Start
Change The World
World
" In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly. "
Henry Spencer
Sleep
Mission
Small
" The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications. "
Henry Spencer
Earth
Apollo
Voice
" Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible. "
Henry Spencer
Money
Impossible
Off
" The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered. "
Henry Spencer
Moon
World
Questions
" Speaking of photography, while the Apollo 8 crew shot hundreds of photos, there was one that got everybody's attention: a blue-and-white Earth rising over a gray moonscape. "
Henry Spencer
Earth
Gray
Attention
" My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research. "
Henry Spencer
Money
Easy
Look
" Rocket engines generally are simpler than jet engines, not more complicated. "
Henry Spencer
Complicated
Than
Rocket
" Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try. "
Henry Spencer
Progress
Failure
Way
" Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts. "
Henry Spencer
Enough
Women
NASA
" The communications delays between Earth and Mars can be half an hour or more, so the people on the ground can't participate minute by minute in Mars surface activities. "
Henry Spencer
More
People
Earth
" The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work. "
Henry Spencer
Apollo
Work
Weight
" On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system. "
Henry Spencer
Flight
Real
System
" NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length. "
Henry Spencer
People
Down
Finding
" As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first. "
Henry Spencer
Nobody
Plans
First
" Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket. "
Henry Spencer
Test
Chance
Escape
" The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch. "
Henry Spencer
Up
Rocket
Space