[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

I tossed around a variety of ideas as to where this thread ought to go, and finally decided it should go here.

I'm sure we've all seen the von Braun concepts that were lionized by Disney et. al. back in the 1950s. The Saturn Shuttle, the doughnut-shaped LEO station, the large expedition craft assembled in LEO and dispatched to the Moon and, later, Mars.

In real life, it has taken one of history's most capable cargo-carriers-to-orbit many, many years and tens of flights to *partially* build an assemblage of tubes and flaps that we call a space station. And many of the elements of this station were dispatched not by this real-life shuttle, but by expendable rockets. The whole thing has cost more than a hundred billion dollars thus far.

How much more expensive would von Braun's Saturn Shuttle and his enormous spinning station have been than ISS? Than Apollo? It seems to me we would have had to transport orders of magnitude more material to LEO than we've ever managed for a single project, and assemble it all without *any* prior experience at working in microgravity.

So, while the Disney and Colliers work produced a lot of pretty pictures, isn't it fair to say that such dreams were just that -- dreams? Projects that would have been prohibitively expensive for *any* nation-state to attempt?

Or am I missing something?

-the other Doug

[mcaplinger]

How much more expensive would von Braun's Saturn Shuttle and his enormous spinning station have been than ISS?

I don't know if such information was ever presented for the station, but certainly there are cost estimates in THE MARS PROJECT ( http://www.amazon.com/Mars-Project-Wernher...n/dp/0252062272 ) in which he said the project "would cost no more than a minor military expedition extending over a limited theatre of war." You might say his estimates were overly optimistic, but he presented his reasoning so I would advise you to read the book and form your own opinion.