[ExI] NASA: go Go GO back to the moon

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Adrian Tymes


spike wrote:

>>... Seems like after the shuttle program ended there would be a market for
this.

>...We certainly think there is...most VCs won't invest until you have
signed customers, and most customers won't sign until after we've put
something in orbit...

Ja.  Early vision was that government effort in rocketry would train a bunch
of people and kickstart an industry.  It didn't really work out that way, as
getting stuff to orbit remains remarkably difficult and expensive, even with
all the cool new control stuff that has been developed.


>...Do you still have any contacts at LM?
_______________________________________________


None of any use unfortunately.  A lot of us in my area retired at about the
same time.  I don't know much about what the next generation is doing there
now.  The classical controls guys are all gone now.  I get notices often
about the originals dropping dead (I got a really depressing one Wednesday.)
These were the guys who invented a lot of the stuff we later classical
controls guys studied and the now generation doesn't study at all, for they
do all digital controls on Matlab.  Some of them know what a Bode plot looks
like, and can to some extent identify poles and zeros on a root locus
diagram, maybe interpret a Nichols chart worth five cents.  

The heavy lifting is done by the computer, not just brute force calculation,
but rather a lot of what we once thought of as engineering.  I suppose it is
analogous to all those closed-form optimization tricks we learned in school,
now done by making a model with a spreadsheet and writing a script to just
try a jillion different combinations.  That must have caused similar
consternation among the classical orbit mechanics guys who knew all the
equations, when guys like me came along and discovered the classic
discipline could be done on a cheap computer by Monte Carlo and other
mathematically uncouth strategies.

spike