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Shuttle-Derived Vehicle: Shuttle-Derived Disaster
Engineering hardware costing millions has already been built for Shuttle C development programs. |
Honolulu - Apr 16, 2004
The space community finally seems to be coming to terms with the fact that the President's new space initiative requires the development of some kind of heavy-lift booster, one much more capable than the existing Delta 4H and Atlas 5H vehicles. But the question remains: what kind of booster?
A popular answer is: a Shuttle-Derived Vehicle (SDV), similar to the Shuttle-C and Shuttle-Z proposals of years gone by. This notion has a lot of superficial attractions -- especially to those people who earn their living by serving in the great army of Shuttle support personnel. But if you study it a little, it becomes clear that this idea has severe drawbacks.
First, note that many SDV promoters are under-estimating the current cost of Shuttle launches by a factor of ~2. NASA has traditionally used a phony cost accounting system in which the salaries of civil service personnel and facilities support are not allocated to specific projects.
Sean O'Keefe has finally forced the universal adoption of full-cost accounting throughout NASA (about a decade after Dan Goldin ordered it). The Plan Bush budget chart now shows a wedge of about $5B/yr allocated to Shuttle.
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