Wallops launchpad repairs to take a year
According to spaceport officials, it will take a year to repair the damage sustained by the launchpad at Wallops Island from the Antares launch failure last month.
The damage didn’t look that serious in the initial assessments. I wonder if this long repair schedule isn’t a negotiating ploy for funding.
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According to spaceport officials, it will take a year to repair the damage sustained by the launchpad at Wallops Island from the Antares launch failure last month.
The damage didn’t look that serious in the initial assessments. I wonder if this long repair schedule isn’t a negotiating ploy for funding.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Can anyone imagine Elon Musk allowing these repairs to take an entire solar year? He’d have the job done in a few weeks and be launching within a month!
Elon Musk is in a completely different business. He is actually developing rocket engines, not just buying old Soviet stuff which has been sitting in storage since the 1960’s. Antares is not the future.
I’m really impressed by the extreme retardness of the space industry! The singularly popular idea is to dig up whatever Ioseph Stalin and his communists did half a century ago and repeat that. Elon Musk is a genius with his unique concept of trying to apply some modern technology in the rocket industry. Completely unheard of since Wernher von Braun. Angara was developed in 1992. SLS is a 1980’s project all over again. Soyuz hasn’t changed since Sputnik 1. And the Chinese are flying Stalin’s old rocket and spaceship. I don’t know of any industry which is so underdeveloped and backwards as is the rocket launcher industry. SpaceX seems to be the first in the business to even have an RnD budget in a quarter of a century.
Just look at this Salyut piece of junk which a fraudster pretends to want to use for space tourism:
http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/business/manx-registered-space-exploration-firm-to-fight-civil-suit-in-us-1-6958688
Oh, the cost+ contractor’s club have research budgets, too. It’s just that about 80-90% of those budgets are funded as research contracted through a government agency. This is not *just* greedy exploitation of perpetual government R&D by companies run by their former CFOs. It is also something *taught* to them by a Congress that wants to ensure that spending enhances the power of the right people.
Thus, when Northrop developed the F-20 Tigershark in only 7 years, using their own money, they learned it never had a chance of getting large contracts. This happened in spite of it being far cheaper than its government financed competitors to build and operate. Similar things happened about once each decade from 1946-1986, when the F-20 died. After that, they seem to have learned what their place was as remoras to Congressional sharks.
The word for this situation is “monopsony”. Few get taught it any more, even in economics. The DoD and NASA record shows that monopsony has just as many agency costs to society as a whole as does monopoly.
Similar things happened with good bids for NASA programs that did not fit the ideas of one or more NASA Centers, and their patrons in Congress. One of the bids for the Apollo program had a small re-entry module, a service module, and a cruise module for living in, to be disposed of before re-entry. That did not fit Langley’s idea that all the living space should be in the re-entry module, and was rejected. Today, Apollo capsules are historical relics, while Soyuz spacecraft, with their small re-entry modules, their cruise modules, and their service modules are still operational, and productive, at miniscule cost, compared to the Shuttle, much less Orion.
Possibly the last example of a US Aerospace Contractor spending their own money, on their own initiative, to develop a piece of equipment, and getting their money back in government contracts, was when Dutch Kindleberger put down the money to build a rocket engine test center outside LA, in 1947. It was operational by 1949. Von Braun was of the opinion that this moved US rocket development ahead by about 5 years, compared to getting the government to fund such a center for testing large rocket engines effectively. He said it saved the US from being utterly behind in rocketry.