After more than decade in ‘aerospace’ the only thing I found what the term ‘classified’ meant is to hide the real cost from the taxpayer.
In 1995 I had a tour of the Lockheed factory where the F-22 was being
built. I joked to the engineer that ‘milling it out of gold bricks could
not have been more expensive’. His response was immediate: “No, that
would be much cheaper.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/george-giles/lost-in-space-2/

By George Giles

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been a non-stop hype machine since its earliest days. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 American leaders panicked. If the Commies could launch a beeper the size of a basketball into orbit then thermonuclear weapons the size of a greyhound bus to the U.S. mainland could not be far behind. It seemed that American rockets of the day exploded upon launch or shortly thereafter. A “missile gap” was created overnight wherein the Soviets were vastly ahead of the United States and our annihilation would soon follow. NASA was created to address this issue and suck money from taxpayers exhausted by two decades of war and unwilling to give more money to the War Department, the Defense Department’s honest name. Sixty years later encouraged by President Trump and the silly notion of national prestige there is serious talk on all the obedient media outlets, and the massive funding needed, so we can return to the moon, go to Mars and I guess run around festering in space with silly notions of evening news mentality of democracy. The lie that created NASA continues to this day and it is looking to get a lot more expensive for absolutely no benefit of mankind.

I spent several years working for a NASA prime contractor on the Space Transportation System (Space Shuttle) including a year at Cape Canaveral – Kennedy Space Center. Years earlier I had worked as a contractor on the Trident D-5 missile. I spent the better part of a decade as a Lead Engineer and Program Manager in the aerospace/defense sector so I have some level of experience in these things. As was my habit I went to the library studied as much as I could on space technology as soon as I got the job. I found it fascinating as it was the reification of my childhood dream of being an ‘astronaut’. So in a sense I am a rocket scientist, NASA spent millions on my ideas, but all I learned was sad, evil and depressing.

The ‘Camelot’ Administration of JFK could not announce a vast new multi-billion dollar program to build a fleet of rockets designed specifically to put a thermonuclear weapon the size of a small automobile in downtown Moscow (we were always ahead in miniaturizing these weapons of mass destruction, now one fits in a suitcase and is more powerful than the one that levelled Hiroshima) with the cross hairs of the target certainly being Red Square and the Kremlin itself. Instead NASA would put a man on the moon by 1969 when it was announced in 1961. The massive Saturn V could put 300,000 pounds of payload into a Low Earth Orbit which is more than necessary to put payload anywhere on the Earth. The world watched breathlessly as NASA astronauts walked on the moon. The miracle was that they all got back alive because there were so many single points of failure on the Lunar Lander that the just pushed buttons and held their breath. I won’t waste space listing them all but you can probably imagine: ‘start the engine, go engine, click, silence, go engine click silence. Houston we have a BIG problem’.

Along the way NASA designed and built the Redstone, Atlas and Delta rockets all very capable of delivering nuclear warheads. The transfer of the necessary technologies of propulsion, guidance, payload and re-entry to the military were not advertised, deemed national secrets and highly classified. After more than decade in ‘aerospace’ the only thing I found what the term ‘classified’ meant is to hide the real cost from the taxpayer. In 1995 I had a tour of the Lockheed factory where the F-22 was being built. I joked to the engineer that ‘milling it out of gold bricks could not have been more expensive’. His response was immediate: “No, that would be much cheaper.”

The Space Shuttle program was a disaster as it failed to reach any of the initial stated goals during its operational lifetime, so over the years NASA just changed the goals and then just stopped talking about them altogether. Two of the shuttles disintegrated spectacularly killing all the astronauts on-board.  I knew a Space Shuttle Main Engine Reliability Engineer who assured me that the whole thing was safe failure would be in the parts per million. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman who found why the first shuttle exploded said his calculation was about 1 in a 100 would fail catastrophically. The real number was very close 2 in 255. I go with Feynman.

The original design of the ‘Space Station’, that I read design documents for was incredibly complicated and it called for almost 20,000 hours of ‘space walking’ for assembly at a time when the total accumulated to date by NASA was 200 hours. Space suits cost more than $1 million apiece and they leak but slow enough so the work can get done before they get back in the nice cozy Space RV. Astronauts working on satellites in the weightless vacuum of space found even the simplest manual tasks to be daunting. Newton’s third law action produces reaction in the opposite direction so turning a wrench on a bolt turned the astronaut! This will not work, so like typical bureaucrats they stopped talking about it, and came up with an old design, then pawned it off as new. Skylab was an empty upper stage of a multi-stage liquid fueled rocket. It made for a ‘space fort’. The current International Space Station is just a bunch of these tubes stuck together. This does not look at all like they giant rotating wheels producing artificial gravity that we have all seen in science fiction movies of the last 70 years. If we spent the entire gross domestic product of the entire world for a decade we could not build one of those. Physics says no, again I have to quote Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman ‘nature cannot be fooled’, even if a gullible Congress can. Read the rest of this entry »