RE: RE: starship-design: Interstellar mission within fifty years

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Kelly, Zenon et. al.,

> You are partly right, but, first, it is a good strategy
> to use as much of already proved technology rather than make
> all the things anew. Second, obviosly some technology
> progress has been made, for example the Saturn V rocket,
> which is to this day one of the largest (if not still the largest)
> as concerns carrying capacity. It would be more than sufficient
> as the Zubrin's Mars Direct booster - unfortunately its assembly
> lines were dismantled long ago and as far as I know,
> none is preserved (even rusted).
>
>
> > >With current attitudes, it is not going, but crawling,
> > >and not always ahead.
> > >Say, Pathfinder was a nice toy, but no number of Pathfinders
> > >will build the necessary space infrastructure.
> >
> > Big agree.

Several years ago I read an article somewhere about how someone in the space
program had realized that we were reinventing the wheel. It seems that a lot
of the small things were getting reinvented again and again because there
was no database of designs that had been proven to work reliably. For
instance, if you needed a turbo pump, you designed a turbo pump instead of
getting one off of the shelf. Has anyone heard what became of his idea to
start such a technology database?

Lee