For example Scaled Composites did not spend $20M or whatever to win the X Prize in 2004, they were developing a commercial venture that happened to be close to the X Prize requirements.
You are correct - Scaled Composites didn't spend a dime. Burt Rutan was quite clear he wasn't going to enter the contest until a) the prize was fully funded, and b) he found a backer. When both happened, he tossed his hat in the ring.
The commercial venture came about after this - and from a third party.
The thing I always wondered about these kinds of contests, like the x prize, is doesn't it cost more to build your craft than you win?
But if you win you are the leader for any big money contracts that follow.
Not in this case - because the contestants are going to be universities and small private teams, which in no way have the ability to develop, design, and manufacture a real lunar lander. (Nor even to manage such an effort.)
This prize really is something of a boondoggle for the taxpayers - because it won't really provide anything useful. The general algorithms for something like this are pretty well known, and the specific algorithms are strongly tied to the exact configuration and performance of the actual craft (and have to include corrections for things like fuel slosh and any bending moments and body resonace that won't show up at this scale). I.E. it isn't going to scale from these models to a real lander well, if at all. (Unlike the contest for a full-scale glove.) This contest, unlike the DARPA Grand Challenge, isn't headed off into unknown technology.
But technology prizes, in the wake of the X-Prize and the Grand Challenge, are currently fashionable - so NASA is running one whether it makes sense or not.
The fact that America simply could not launch something today, this week, this month, this year, or quite possibly within the next three years which would get them to the moon means that -- at this precise moment -- you are behind China and Japan in terms of actually possessing the technology.
Then, by your own definition, we aren't behind. Because we do have that capability - and more. Or have you not noticed that not one but _two_ US commercial operations offer launchers off the shelf with the capability of launching a moon probe? (And a third coming on stream any day now.)
But, they've got one that's actually working, and either in orbit or in transit to orbit around the moon. You have 50 year old designs that haven't been revisited since, and that nobody has any working experience with the manufacture of.
I guess you haven't noticed the half a dozen planetary probe missions currently flying, and more under construction. Or the multiple probes in LEO, with more of them under construction too... Putting together a moon probe is just a matter of getting someone to sign the checks.
I own a physics textbook, but that doesn't mean I have any technology -- it means I have the theory.
My old smoker finally rusted through this summer, and I don't have any pork shoulders in my refrigerator anyhow. But I still have the technology - because I can buy a new smoker pretty much any day I want to, and my butcher can deliver a shoulder trimmed to my requirements with about two days notice.
Unfortunately, over the last few decades, so much American industrial fabrication has been moved out to cheaper locales, there's little left. The companies and systems which used to support the space program are now focusing on other things, or gone completely.
Nonsense. Two of the biggest are still in the space business (never having left), and not only are a goodly number of the small fry still about (and still in space) - but a whole crop of new small fry have sprung up.
Sure, Boeing can probably still do neat things, but you have neither the political will nor the money to make it happen right now. And, it would take time to ramp up and achieve this.
Boeing is rolling launchers off the assembly line and building satellites even as we type. Hughes is still in the satellites business, and Lockheed is still in both. No need to ramp up - just need somebody to write and sign the checks.
What you did 50 years ago isn't indicative of what you could pull off today; which, I fear, would be way less than you did back then. That, unfortunately, is why it seems that the US is slipping in this field.
That, unfortunately, is a belief utterly and completely at odds with the facts.
Wouldn't the images not be as clear because of the Earths' atmosphere? It would still probably be better quality images then a ground based telescope.
120kfeet is above a good deal of the sensible atmosphere - but the idea of sending up that high wasn't to avoid atmospheric distortion, but to avoid atmospheric filtering - I.E. to see the Sun in wavelengths that don't make it to the ground.
So, sorry Bruce, but you're not qualified to make that statement with any authority, and frankly, your position as an expert on security should make you more wary of voicing lay opinions about subjects in which you have no expertise.
Don't forget that his paycheck depends on him voicing unfounded opinions and creating fears where none existed before. Without generating fear, he can't get consulting gigs. Without generating controversy, his value as a pundit and speaker goes down.
But Schneier's point is not that it is impossible for humans to think rationally about IT security, but that it does not 'come naturally' to the average person.
OTOH - Schneier has a vested interest in supporting that belief. Without generating fear, he can't get consulting gigs. Without generating controversy, his value as a pundit and speaker goes down.
I was discussing this with an engineer friend. Let's say we wanted to get back into the race? Simple enough, you just dust off the plans for the Saturn V, setup the tooling, and...
Oh, shit... Not only don't we have the tooling, but we don't even have enough kids trained in running a drafting pencil to design the tooling. WE WOULD HAVE TO OUTSOURCE THE DESIGN AND FABRICATION TO --- Yup. Asia.
Neither you, nor your engineering friend know what you are talking about.
Other posters have mentioned Constellation - but what about SpaceX? Or the old standbys - Boeing or Lockheed? There isn't anything magical about the Saturn V that these companies couldn't do today with sufficient cash and a bit of lead time.
Analysts say it is a key step towards China's aim of putting a man on the Moon by 2020
Except that such an 'aim' is a creation mostly of the analysts themselves, China has made no goals or national policy statements. This so called 'moon race' is a creation of pundits looking to justify their paychecks.
But the thing to remember is that if you consistently have to rely on redundancy to prevent an accident - you no longer have redundancy. The management failure in the Challenger accident is a good example of this. The primary O-ring consistently was damaged, but since the redundant O-ring was not... They continued flying rather than treating the failure as serious. At that point it took the failure of only one ring to cause an accident - since the first was essentially permanently failed.
Hence the concentration (in this study) on near misses, because they indicate the first level of redundancy may be breaking down.
Growing up we had a saying referring to how close something came to almost happening, but didn't... "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."
So NASA was correct in ignoring the O-ring failures prior to the loss of Challenger? After all, they only almost burned through. And the foam damage prior to the loss of Columbia never actually caused serious damage.
Isn't the safety of an activity determined by the number of actual accidents, and not by the number of near-accidents?
Yes... and no. Among other things, a rising number of near accidents indicates increasing stress on the system, or a breakimng down of the underlying infrastructure. A rising number of near accidents may be a precursor to an actual accident - or a symptom of the increasing chances of an actual accident.
Fo example, you start to do a lane change, and suddenly, before you actually enter the other lane, you notice another car there, and abort the lane change. The point of driving experience and skill is it also helps you to cope with the near-accidents that your driving skills failed to prevent.
Not noticing another car until after initiating the manuever is a symptom that your driving skills aren't quite what you think they are - because you are supposed to check and ensure the lane is clear before starting to change lanes. Your accumulated experience may prevent an accident from happening, but that doesn't change the fact that it should never have happened in the first place.
The Polyus was launched before the Buran and was, more or less, a collection of repurposed parts and technology. It could have flown on top, but I guess they didn't have the spare parts and the equipment for that.
No, it wasn't flown on top because Energia wasn't built to carry loads on top - it's not the early designs that matter, it's the hardware that's built.
The Energia design also calls for re-usable boosters and main engines (eliminating the need for SSME-like engines on the orbiter itself). I am not sure how they would do that and, in fact, I don't think they were either - they never did it.
There seems to be a lot of things you don't know about Energia. Try taking a look at the boosters on the side - see the squarish bulges just below the nose? Those would have been parachute containers for the boosters, the Soviets know damm well how thet were going to do it, but they never did because they went broke. (There never was any intent to re-use the main boosters in the Energia itself - though they would have been in the proposed Energia II.)
Side-mounted passive loads are rare for a reason - it's harder to design a vehicle for that kind of use.
Actually across the history of rocketry they have been fairly common - if you are familiar with the history of rocketry. (Which you patently are not.)
Oh-for-Three. Care to try again?
The Shuttle goes up side-mounted not because it's a clever design, but because it has its own engines that are needed for the lift.
Duh. I supposed that Captain Obvious will tell me the sun rises in the East next?
First, how many times has the empire state building been rebuilt? Yep, never has.
Yep, you are not only wrong - but clueless. The guts of the Empire State Building have been replaced several times - not to mention the work needed to bring various bits up to modern safety codes and to provide services and amenities expected in a high prestige office building today.
That said, again using the K'nex analogy, there's no reason you couldn't replace parts of it in sequence until you'd replaced the entire thing with little or no reduction in performance,
Everything is easy on paper if you simply your analogies to the point of absurdity. The real world is rather messier.
Sure, there's not much connection today between reality and my ideas(which have been proposed by many others). Oh well. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be done.
There's not much connection ever. You are utterly and completely clueless on the topic - and I don't mean that in a perjorative manner, I mean it literally. The engineering, the economics, the mathematics, the whole shooting match. You can parrot a few buzzwords and string them together, but you don't understand what they mean.
It also means you triple the launch risk[1], since you are now launching three vehicles rather than one. You also double the re-entry risk[2], since you are now landing two space craft rather than one.
Statistically it's a wash though, as you're also less likely to loose the whole crew.
The chances of losing a whole mission/crew are irrelevant when you've significantly increased the chances of a partial loss. (And significantly increased the chance of killing some of the crew, from 2% to 4%.)
The shuttle is currently sitting at ~2% chance of complete loss per mission. Soyuz capsules are doing better than that.
The Soyuz is currently sitting at about 2% chance of a complete loss per mission - how, precisely, is that better than the Shuttle? Especially considering the history of the Soyuz. Hell, it had a serious failure yesterday - the second in just ten missions!
you'll need to either modify the Soyuz or buy an additional launch (and module) for each and every non-station mission you use it for. (And niether will be cheap - either will wipe out your 'savings' and more.
Actually, in another post I suggested designing and deploying a space-only servicer, launched from a space station. The ISS isn't in a very good orbit for it, but it can be done.
It doesn't matter which orbit you put your station into - 90-99% of satellites are going to be inaccessible from it without a large (and heavy and complex) OTV and tens of tons (if not hundreds of tons) of fuel. Period.
But there is no single vehicle capable of duplicating the capabilities of the Shuttle - at any price. And, as demonstrated above, you'll be hard pressed to do it cheaper with any existing vehicles.
Very true. What I'm arguing is that a fleet of dedicated vehicles can duplicate what the shuttle can do - ultimately cheaper and faster.
And that's a problem - you are merely arguing, I'm introducing facts - facts which you persistently ignore.
I cannot claim that Shuttle is without problems - but your analysis of replacing the Shuttle with Soyuz fails when you actually compare capabilities directly rather than simplistically and naively compating raw costs.
And you seem to keep ignoring that I'm not proposing replacing the shuttle with just Soyuz - I'm including dedicated cargo lifters in there and extensive use of a space station.
And I pointed out the problems with your fleet of cargo lifters and the use of a space station. Your proposal fails because you keep compating costs and ignoring capabilities.
You can't compare apples to oranges on price alone.
It's not such a comparison though. How many satellites other than Hubble has the shuttle serviced? Most of it's missions today are servicing the ISS.
There have been (IIRC) 4-6 satellite recovery/repair missions (other than Hubble). That doesn't count the 4-6 missions of experiments that have flown multiple times. Even when it comes to servicing ISS, your proposed system founders - because of the cost of the increased capability to support assembly spacewalks that using a Soyuz/cargo lifter system will require. Not to mention the increased cost, weight, and complexity that delivered cargo will require - since the cargo vehicle and/or the payload itself will have to supply the support and delivery functions currently provided by the Shuttle. (And which are reuseable to boot.)
The shuttle can carry X people, Y pounds into orbit for Z amount of time.
I think the premise the gp was proposing is that a sattelite shouldn't be a vehicle. It should only be launched once, which counts as flying the same way putting a container on a cargo ship counts as sailing.
You still need a vehicle to boost the sattelite into orbit - which is what I was talking about.
but I imagine if a space station was made with airlocks between each module and had a lattice superstructure, you could take pieces out of any location with relatively little effort and not have the entire structure fall apart. Think K'nex, not Lego.
So what happens when the lattice superstructure needs to be replaced? The cables, ducting, etc... that it will have to carry to support the ability to remove pieces in the middle will themselves wear out over time.
I really don't believe someone can claim to be an engineer - and then write the following with a straight face. Either you are nothing but a fanboi, or you are ignorant of Soyuz's actual record, or you aren't actually a real engineer.
The Soyuz system is remarkable in that it's been reliable. They're not perfect. Yes, they had fatal accidents, however, the last one occured in 1971. They learned from those failures and implemented design changes in the later modules. Yes, it's also true that Soyuz has only flown around 100 manned flights; but, even when it fails, as the NAV system did today, the people return alive. That's a reputation that's hard to argue with.
It doesn't matter when the last failure was - it still counts in the statistics. You can't have it both ways - if you want to claim the positive parts of the long flight record, you have to take the negatives as well. Otherwise what you are left with is the current mark of the Soyuz, with less than ten flights and significant troubles on several of them (Including having the navigation system fail twice) - and handwaving away significant troubles is exactly what people take NASA managers to task for in the Challenger and Columbia accidents.
Yes, it's true that people return alive. But an engineer actually concerned with safety and reliability would look at the flight record of Soyuz - and shudder. Out of ninety odd flights they have had: two non fatal complete loss of mission launch accidents, (IIRC) five complete loss of mission on orbit incidents, two fatal reentry and landing accidents, two significant (though non fatal) accidents during reentry[1], and (IIRC) *twenty* significant incidents during reentry and landing. Worse yet, those accidents and incidents are fairly evenly spread across the entire life of the program to date. That's not the track record of a program that learns from accidents and incidents.
Slashdot is a poor enviroment for a full discussion, I invite you to drop by the usenet group sci.space.shuttle for that[2]. Or just google it for "soyuz safety" and "soyuz reliability". (I particularly commend the posts of Jorge Frank to you - who is a NASA engineer, and not particularly a Shuttle or Soyuz fan.)
[1] Both of them extremely close calls, the crews are alive today by luck.
[2] Which, despite its name, is not a shuttle fanboy group. By-and-large the majority of the regulars are shuttle detractors, but unlike the vast majority of Slashdot - they are informed detractors.
Great, it's a reusable space station. The point that I'd make is that it shouldn't be. For the cost of what we do with it, we could have an even larger permanent space station, just use smaller capsules(and large cargo rockets) to get there.
That seems true - until you actually cost out the flights. The small (people carrying) rockets are expensive because they flight often. The large (cargo/station module carrying) rockets are very, very, very expensive because they fly so rarely. The Shuttle, by combining both roles, is a very expensive middle path.
Using existing vehicles, other than the Shuttle, to build an ISS equivalent - you save about 10%-15% on paper. In reality it comes up a wash, or even somewhat more expensive, when you consider all the extra weight and costs that the modules/parts will now need because they must support and navigate themselves rather than relying on the Shuttle to do it for them. (And that extra weight causes problems down the road - as it means extra fuel is needed for reboost, though reboosts are needed slightly less often due to the increased density of the station.)
Design a space station that only has to survive being lifted once, and doesn't have to come down intact.
Which means a vehicle which flys very rarely indeed - which means a vehicle that is incredibly expensive, a vehicle that makes Shuttle look like a Yugo. Worse yet, a vehicle that flys rarely is less reliable because the skills of the assembly and launch crews atrophy between launches, and fewer launches mean fewer chances to debug the vehicle.
The trick to making spaceflight cheap is to make a versatile and reuseable design with minimal man-hours of maintenance between flights - and then fly the living hell out of it to amortize your fixed costs across as many flights as possible. (In other words, exactly the same methods used by every other form of transportation.)
Heck, make it modular - remove pieces as they wear out and let them drop back if you want to.
That's a great idea. Until you have to replace a module in the middle - then it becomes very difficult, very expensive, and very risky.
For satellite repair design a space tug that can go out with some astronauts and the robotic arm to conduct repairs on satellites. It should be almost an order of magnitude lighter than the shuttle, so it shouldn't take much fuel. For longer repairs, consider hauling the satellite back to the station.
That works real well - so long as the satellite is in pretty much the same orbit as the station. For the 99% of satellites that won't be, it doesn't work at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct - Scaled Composites didn't spend a dime. Burt Rutan was quite clear he wasn't going to enter the contest until a) the prize was fully funded, and b) he found a backer. When both happened, he tossed his hat in the ring.
The commercial venture came about after this - and from a third party.
Not in this case - because the contestants are going to be universities and small private teams, which in no way have the ability to develop, design, and manufacture a real lunar lander. (Nor even to manage such an effort.)
This prize really is something of a boondoggle for the taxpayers - because it won't really provide anything useful. The general algorithms for something like this are pretty well known, and the specific algorithms are strongly tied to the exact configuration and performance of the actual craft (and have to include corrections for things like fuel slosh and any bending moments and body resonace that won't show up at this scale). I.E. it isn't going to scale from these models to a real lander well, if at all. (Unlike the contest for a full-scale glove.) This contest, unlike the DARPA Grand Challenge, isn't headed off into unknown technology.
But technology prizes, in the wake of the X-Prize and the Grand Challenge, are currently fashionable - so NASA is running one whether it makes sense or not.
Then, by your own definition, we aren't behind. Because we do have that capability - and more. Or have you not noticed that not one but _two_ US commercial operations offer launchers off the shelf with the capability of launching a moon probe? (And a third coming on stream any day now.)
I guess you haven't noticed the half a dozen planetary probe missions currently flying, and more under construction. Or the multiple probes in LEO, with more of them under construction too... Putting together a moon probe is just a matter of getting someone to sign the checks.
My old smoker finally rusted through this summer, and I don't have any pork shoulders in my refrigerator anyhow. But I still have the technology - because I can buy a new smoker pretty much any day I want to, and my butcher can deliver a shoulder trimmed to my requirements with about two days notice.
Nonsense. Two of the biggest are still in the space business (never having left), and not only are a goodly number of the small fry still about (and still in space) - but a whole crop of new small fry have sprung up.
Boeing is rolling launchers off the assembly line and building satellites even as we type. Hughes is still in the satellites business, and Lockheed is still in both. No need to ramp up - just need somebody to write and sign the checks.
That, unfortunately, is a belief utterly and completely at odds with the facts.
That's a common myth. It's also wrong, as we *do* have the plans for the Saturn.
120kfeet is above a good deal of the sensible atmosphere - but the idea of sending up that high wasn't to avoid atmospheric distortion, but to avoid atmospheric filtering - I.E. to see the Sun in wavelengths that don't make it to the ground.
And some of us are apparently not terribly well-evolved to tell the difference between an ad-hominem attack and facts.
Don't forget that his paycheck depends on him voicing unfounded opinions and creating fears where none existed before. Without generating fear, he can't get consulting gigs. Without generating controversy, his value as a pundit and speaker goes down.
OTOH - Schneier has a vested interest in supporting that belief. Without generating fear, he can't get consulting gigs. Without generating controversy, his value as a pundit and speaker goes down.
Neither you, nor your engineering friend know what you are talking about.
Other posters have mentioned Constellation - but what about SpaceX? Or the old standbys - Boeing or Lockheed? There isn't anything magical about the Saturn V that these companies couldn't do today with sufficient cash and a bit of lead time.
But someone of (whatever your age is) is too fucking stupid to read TFA and realize that the law in question isn't about verifying the age of viewers.
Except that such an 'aim' is a creation mostly of the analysts themselves, China has made no goals or national policy statements. This so called 'moon race' is a creation of pundits looking to justify their paychecks.
It's easy to be a 'sucess' and 'thrive' - just redefine the meanings of the words to suit your situation.
Try reading his comment about where the Buran rode on Energia and then comparing his comment to the picture.
Idiot.
Agreed - redundancy is the key to safety.
But the thing to remember is that if you consistently have to rely on redundancy to prevent an accident - you no longer have redundancy. The management failure in the Challenger accident is a good example of this. The primary O-ring consistently was damaged, but since the redundant O-ring was not... They continued flying rather than treating the failure as serious. At that point it took the failure of only one ring to cause an accident - since the first was essentially permanently failed.
Hence the concentration (in this study) on near misses, because they indicate the first level of redundancy may be breaking down.
So NASA was correct in ignoring the O-ring failures prior to the loss of Challenger? After all, they only almost burned through. And the foam damage prior to the loss of Columbia never actually caused serious damage.
Yes... and no. Among other things, a rising number of near accidents indicates increasing stress on the system, or a breakimng down of the underlying infrastructure. A rising number of near accidents may be a precursor to an actual accident - or a symptom of the increasing chances of an actual accident.
Not noticing another car until after initiating the manuever is a symptom that your driving skills aren't quite what you think they are - because you are supposed to check and ensure the lane is clear before starting to change lanes. Your accumulated experience may prevent an accident from happening, but that doesn't change the fact that it should never have happened in the first place.
No, it wasn't flown on top because Energia wasn't built to carry loads on top - it's not the early designs that matter, it's the hardware that's built.
There seems to be a lot of things you don't know about Energia. Try taking a look at the boosters on the side - see the squarish bulges just below the nose? Those would have been parachute containers for the boosters, the Soviets know damm well how thet were going to do it, but they never did because they went broke. (There never was any intent to re-use the main boosters in the Energia itself - though they would have been in the proposed Energia II.)
Actually across the history of rocketry they have been fairly common - if you are familiar with the history of rocketry. (Which you patently are not.)
Oh-for-Three. Care to try again?
Duh. I supposed that Captain Obvious will tell me the sun rises in the East next?
Yep, you are not only wrong - but clueless. The guts of the Empire State Building have been replaced several times - not to mention the work needed to bring various bits up to modern safety codes and to provide services and amenities expected in a high prestige office building today.
Everything is easy on paper if you simply your analogies to the point of absurdity. The real world is rather messier.
There's not much connection ever. You are utterly and completely clueless on the topic - and I don't mean that in a perjorative manner, I mean it literally. The engineering, the economics, the mathematics, the whole shooting match. You can parrot a few buzzwords and string them together, but you don't understand what they mean.
I'm not talking about your plan - I'm talking about reality. The gulf between them is so vast as to defy description.
The chances of losing a whole mission/crew are irrelevant when you've significantly increased the chances of a partial loss. (And significantly increased the chance of killing some of the crew, from 2% to 4%.)
The Soyuz is currently sitting at about 2% chance of a complete loss per mission - how, precisely, is that better than the Shuttle? Especially considering the history of the Soyuz. Hell, it had a serious failure yesterday - the second in just ten missions!
It doesn't matter which orbit you put your station into - 90-99% of satellites are going to be inaccessible from it without a large (and heavy and complex) OTV and tens of tons (if not hundreds of tons) of fuel. Period.
And that's a problem - you are merely arguing, I'm introducing facts - facts which you persistently ignore.
And I pointed out the problems with your fleet of cargo lifters and the use of a space station. Your proposal fails because you keep compating costs and ignoring capabilities.
There have been (IIRC) 4-6 satellite recovery/repair missions (other than Hubble). That doesn't count the 4-6 missions of experiments that have flown multiple times. Even when it comes to servicing ISS, your proposed system founders - because of the cost of the increased capability to support assembly spacewalks that using a Soyuz/cargo lifter system will require. Not to mention the increased cost, weight, and complexity that delivered cargo will require - since the cargo vehicle and/or the payload itself will have to supply the support and delivery functions currently provided by the Shuttle. (And which are reuseable to boot.)
You still need a vehicle to boost the sattelite into orbit - which is what I was talking about.
So what happens when the lattice superstructure needs to be replaced? The cables, ducting, etc... that it will have to carry to support the ability to remove pieces in the middle will themselves wear out over time.
In other words, you don't want to use a real Titan IV - you want to use some fantasy Titan IV. I guess anything is possible in fiction.
It doesn't matter when the last failure was - it still counts in the statistics. You can't have it both ways - if you want to claim the positive parts of the long flight record, you have to take the negatives as well. Otherwise what you are left with is the current mark of the Soyuz, with less than ten flights and significant troubles on several of them (Including having the navigation system fail twice) - and handwaving away significant troubles is exactly what people take NASA managers to task for in the Challenger and Columbia accidents.
Yes, it's true that people return alive. But an engineer actually concerned with safety and reliability would look at the flight record of Soyuz - and shudder. Out of ninety odd flights they have had: two non fatal complete loss of mission launch accidents, (IIRC) five complete loss of mission on orbit incidents, two fatal reentry and landing accidents, two significant (though non fatal) accidents during reentry[1], and (IIRC) *twenty* significant incidents during reentry and landing. Worse yet, those accidents and incidents are fairly evenly spread across the entire life of the program to date. That's not the track record of a program that learns from accidents and incidents.
Slashdot is a poor enviroment for a full discussion, I invite you to drop by the usenet group sci.space.shuttle for that[2]. Or just google it for "soyuz safety" and "soyuz reliability". (I particularly commend the posts of Jorge Frank to you - who is a NASA engineer, and not particularly a Shuttle or Soyuz fan.)
[1] Both of them extremely close calls, the crews are alive today by luck.
[2] Which, despite its name, is not a shuttle fanboy group. By-and-large the majority of the regulars are shuttle detractors, but unlike the vast majority of Slashdot - they are informed detractors.
That seems true - until you actually cost out the flights. The small (people carrying) rockets are expensive because they flight often. The large (cargo/station module carrying) rockets are very, very, very expensive because they fly so rarely. The Shuttle, by combining both roles, is a very expensive middle path.
Using existing vehicles, other than the Shuttle, to build an ISS equivalent - you save about 10%-15% on paper. In reality it comes up a wash, or even somewhat more expensive, when you consider all the extra weight and costs that the modules/parts will now need because they must support and navigate themselves rather than relying on the Shuttle to do it for them. (And that extra weight causes problems down the road - as it means extra fuel is needed for reboost, though reboosts are needed slightly less often due to the increased density of the station.)
Which means a vehicle which flys very rarely indeed - which means a vehicle that is incredibly expensive, a vehicle that makes Shuttle look like a Yugo. Worse yet, a vehicle that flys rarely is less reliable because the skills of the assembly and launch crews atrophy between launches, and fewer launches mean fewer chances to debug the vehicle.
The trick to making spaceflight cheap is to make a versatile and reuseable design with minimal man-hours of maintenance between flights - and then fly the living hell out of it to amortize your fixed costs across as many flights as possible. (In other words, exactly the same methods used by every other form of transportation.)
That's a great idea. Until you have to replace a module in the middle - then it becomes very difficult, very expensive, and very risky.
That works real well - so long as the satellite is in pretty much the same orbit as the station. For the 99% of satellites that won't be, it doesn't work at all.