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Anyone reading this? (a new chapter added weekly)
The Rocket Company
On the excellent Hobbyspace.com website...
Ok, it *is* fiction, but quite informative, with loads of *real* references about past and future successes and failures of the attempts to build cheap, reusable launchers. Written by guys 'in the knowing,' so sometimes quite thought-provoking... About money mis-spent, mastodont organisations slowing progress, conflicting strategies that get fused in one big dead-on-the-drawing-boards monstruosities...
And a possible solution... (Suspense! Excitement! Cliffhangers!)
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Just one gem from the latest installment:
"...military services often canceled a development program just before it was ready to go into production, because the program was over budget, over schedule, and projecting unit costs way above design goals. So they canceled the tank, the helicopter, the airplane, or the ship and started again from scratch, this time seeking a less capable, but ostensibly lower cost system. After many more years of design and development, the new system was ready for production. Inevitably, that system ended up costing more - with less functionality and lower performance - than the system which had been canceled. In the meantime, enough money had been spent on research and development for the new system to pay for a sizable deployment of the old one!"
Sounds familiar? Next-generation Shuttle follow-up debacle anyone?
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