From: Monte Davis 

Adam <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near the
bridge"> wrote:

>What's the diff twixt a space launch vehicle & a ICBM? The payload?

This is news? :-)

One of the articles of faith of the True Space Fan is that the US did
Apollo, creating the necessary technologies along the way, because we Had
The Vision: we Wanted Space so much. The usual corollary is that since
progress slowed after that, something must have gone wrong with the Vision.

The fact is that it was the ICBM and military satellite race, costing 3x
Apollo in 1953-1963, that created nearly all the core technologies: big
rockets that didn't blow up too often, exotic materials needed for same,
high-speed and high-reliability avionics, re-entry methods and materials,
global radar/tracking nets, etc. etc. When you have an ICBM that can go
7000 miles at 15,000 mph, you can take off the warhead, add a top stage
little bigger than a sounding rocket, and get to orbit at 17,500 mph.

Those technologies were adapted for the space race, along with life-support
tech adapted from high-altitude aviation. This should be obvious -- the
simple fact is there wasn't *time* between 1961 (when JFK made the Apollo
commitment) and 1969 for much genuinely new technology to go from lab to
operational status.

I point this out not to deprecate the space program ("it was just
another playground for the eeevil Amerikkkan military-industrial
complex"), but to emphasize how much space "piggybacked" on
another enterprise -- and to suggest two corollaries:

Maybe the naive version exaggerates how much we Wanted Space...

And maybe the biggest reason progress stagnated therefter is that by the
1960s, the core technologies for ICBMs were "good enough." After
that, strategic-arms spending turned to improved basing (including
boomers), launch on shorter notice, accuracy, multiple warheads, etc...
none of which did much for space launch.

People castigate NASA for not moving successfully on from expendable
rockets. IMHO the biggest single reason is that even as Apollo was
happening,  NASA's rich uncle in the Pentagon stopped paying most of the
bills for R&D.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

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