[AR] Re: Building a small payload to LOE launch company (10-year timeline)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2016 12:44:43 -0400 (EDT)
On Mon, 26 Sep 2016, Andrew Burns wrote:
Seems like there are a lot of horses in this race already but personally
my advice would be to stay conventional. Lots of people out there
touting some kind of perceived technological edge over the competition
but experience will show that barring some great advances in technology
the mature solution is the solution for a reason.
In a field with mature solutions, that's generally true, yes. :-)
However, don't confuse "traditional" with "mature". In rocketry in
particular, too many traditional design choices are just the first thing
that worked halfway well fifty years ago, when people were in a hurry.
Once something worked, it became conventional wisdom, and little was done
to explore possibly-superior alternatives. Such "frozen accidents" are
not, in any realistic sense of the term, mature solutions.
In the early decades of aviation, we had multiple companies aggressively
competing to find ways of improving performance, and an impartial R&D
agency systematically exploring what worked and what didn't and how well.
In the early decades of spaceflight, not so much. :-(
Henry
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