szabonj@ibmpa.UUCP (Nick Szabo) (12/16/89)
In article <37951@ames.arc.nasa.gov> yee@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) writes: > >This is NASA Headline News for Tuesday, December 12.... > >Navstar will circularize the orbit on Wednesday. It's the eighth >Delta launch this year. Unmanned strikes again! Delta launches cost probably one-fifth to one-tenth of a Shuttle launch, depending on whose accounting you want to believe. Now of course these launchers are old technology, older even than Shuttle. The difference is that Delta is scaled properly; Shuttle is a monstrosity. > >A NASA high-altitude balloon will carry four astronomical >instruments aloft from Ross Island in the Antarctica later this >month. The New York Times says one of the instruments is a >large new-type cosmic ray telescope. The experiment will exploit >Antarctica's unique physical qualities for research. The balloon >will take the instrument package up to 100,000 feet altitude and >then drift westward along the 78th parallel completing a trip >around the Earth in about two weeks. What??? Unmanned probes in Antartica??? Henry, we gotta putta stop to this! Soon they're gonna be _everywhere_! :-) >NASA's space activities in Florida provided that state's economy >with a $1.24 billion boost in fiscal year 1989. Over 18,000 >workers were employed during the year at the NASA field center. >Of that number 2400 were civil service. That's probably an order of magnitude less than drug smuggling. ;-) Seriously, it all comes out of the pockets of other states. **** These opinions are not related to Big Blue's ******** -- --------------------------- Nick Szabo szabonj@ibmpa.tcspa.ibm.com uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/19/89)
In article <3332@ibmpa.UUCP> szabonj@ibmpa.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes: >Unmanned strikes again! Delta launches cost probably one-fifth to >one-tenth of a Shuttle launch, depending on whose accounting you want >to believe. I believe the NRC's accounting, which says that all current US launchers cost about the same per pound at the same launch volume. The enormous cost advantage of unmanned launchers is a myth. Well, one caveat: Delta probably *is* somewhat cheaper now because those are (I think) commercial launches rather than government-run ones; that development is more recent than the NRC findings. -- 1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972: human | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu