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Old 12-13-2017, 07:46 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BEC
I had occasion to get an informal tour of their Kent, WA facility recently as I was there to meet someone to take some old model rocket stuff off his hands. The fact that - engineer to engineer - we found ourselves talking about maintenance access in the booster goes right to this point. As a retired airliner guy for whom getting to things that need fixing or replacing quickly and easily was an important consideration (on the Next Gen 737s and later variants including the new MAX in particular) this resonated strongly.
The relative lack of that simple--yet important--feature was one of the multiple reasons behind the Space Shuttle's failure to become "the DC-3 of space." One of the initial, in-the-moment cost-cutting features (which resulted in higher costs over time) in Rockwell's orbiter design was the elimination of many of the inspection doors, hatches, and borescope paths that are standard in aircraft. McDonnell Douglas and Martin Marietta had included these easy inspection & maintenance-enabling features in their orbiter designs, and they warned that their elimination in Rockwell's design would make the orbiter more difficult, slow, and expensive to service and maintain. I'm glad to read that this lesson has apparently not been lost on Blue Origin. (I have long thought that if I were to contract for the construction of a "clean-sheet design" reusable launch vehicle, I would prefer to have a *jet* engine manufacture produce its rocket engines [General Electric produced the Vanguard first stage's X405 engine], because easy inspection and maintenance is part of jet engine engineers' design philosophy.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BEC
One of the old model items I came home with was a nearly flightworthy Centuri Quasar which still had a spent C6-5 with a mid 1971 date code on it in the motor mount. That one WILL fly again soon.
What a "two-fer" visit that was, getting to visit a spaceship manufacturer *and* come away with such an historic "souvenir" (actually, two, counting the--I presume--Centuri spent C6-5 of 1971 vintage)!
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