On Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:08:43 +0000, Russell Wallace
<russell.wallace.nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>John Schilling wrote:
>> There are probably no companies capable of putting a spacecraft in
>> orbit about Saturn in under ten years.
>Why not? Didn't Cassini take something like 7 years in flight? That
>leaves three years to build a small, simple robot spacecraft - not
>develop from scratch, not invent new technology, but build using
>existing technology. Far more ambitious things have been done in less
>than three years.
Yes, but they haven't been done by a group of strangers who met on
Day One and said, "let's do this ambitious thing in three years".
They've been done by organizations that were built, over a period
of rather more than three years, for the purpose of being able to
then do a specific sort of ambitious thing in a short time.
There are no organizations presently extant which are specifcally
good for assembling new types of spacecraft out of existing technology
in three years. And the ones that might be passably close, are not
capable of *launching* interplanetary spacecraft, and are not on the
list of places the big-launcher folks are used to collaborating with.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*John.Schilling@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
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