It is certainly a safe way to go, but for space technology not the most useful. Back to the concord. The original design was from an american firm (Boeing maybe), but market forces in the US pushed the 747 to the frontline of development. Prudent financial thinking, that has paid off in spades, financially, but didn't really lead to any aerospace breakthroughs. The concord, on the other hand, was picked up by GB and France. They never really turned a profit on it, but the aerospace advancements were significant. If the chinese just duplicate what the americans did forty years ago, not much will come of it. If, however, they make some breakthroughs, it might just reinvigorate interest in an american space program. My hope is to see a real mars mission in my lifetime. So that's where I'm coming from.
Mars in my lifetime?? Dream on...
Remember Koncordski?? The Soviet "copy" of Concorde?? It wasn't really a copy (per-se) but similar function breeds similar form. Remember too that the US had an SST program back in the late 60's/early 70's as well, and canceled it (too little returns/need seen, money could be plowed into other projects, like shuttle development (which incidentally if you believed the hype WOULD have plenty of returns and need vs. SST). Europeans went with SST over developing a manned space program. Soviets did SST just to prove they could do it. Soviets never had a need or use for it, so they're rotting abandoned over there somewhere. Europe did Concorde to prove they could compete technologically with the US, but never really turned a profit and the operational problems were vastly underestimated (just as the US did with the shuttle). The Soviets did a shuttle too, if for no other reason than to prove they could. Operationally it was an expensive mess so they left them to rot and went back to the tried-n-true Soyuz and expendable rockets. (US could have learned a valuable lesson here). The Europeans, like the US and its shuttle, simply couldn't let go of the
idea of Concorde (like a reusable shuttle in the US) and thus continued operating them FAR longer than it made sense to do so...
So what's the lesson here??
Newer isn't necessarily
better... After all, the only manned space vehicles currently flying are the Soyuz designed in the early 60's and the Shenzhou (which is basically an enlarged copy of Soyuz).
There's a lot going for "tried and true" versus "bleeding edge" technology... After all SpaceX is having great success with what is basically a modern-day copy of a Saturn IB mish-mashed with an R-7 Soyuz launcher... multi-engine kerosene first stage (like Saturn IB) and kerosene second stage (like R-7, vs. hydrolox upper stage on Saturn I/IB's S-IV and S-IVB stages respectively).
There are some interesting alternative designs out there for "improved" lunar lander concepts, such as the ULA "dual axis lander" proposals, but even NASA is unwilling to embrace them and simply went with their mega-upsized hydrolox version of the basic Apollo LM design for their long-canceled Altair lunar lander under the Constellation program. Other than the conversion to hydrogen/oxygen propellants over storable hypergolic propellants, there wasn't much interesting or innovative about NASA's design for Altair versus the LM either...
As for the Chinese-- whatever works... more power to them! Maybe it'll light a fire under someone's arse on this side of the Pacific...
Later! OL JR
