Great Design: Money versus Savvy

I love to see great design. I love small and efficient design and I just hate waste in any form. One engineering concept that shows the striking difference between good design and bad design is in traditional manned space travel versus the new Virgin-backed concept. In the Saturn V rockets we had enormous rockets on a launch pad with a design based on dumping big chunks of metal in space, and expending huge quantities of fuel. These were necessary because of the problems of launch and re-entry. The launch idea was based on the launch of the unmanned V2 rockets in WW2, mainly because the designer of both was Werner von Braun. But manned spaceflight doesn't actually need a launchpad - it has people to guide it. Take away the launch pad and piggy back the rocket on a standard aircraft and much less fuel is needed and no parts need to be thrown away. The re-entry idea was even better! The amount of money NASA wasted on a badly designed reusable shuttle should be enough to disband NASA. Worse still, they actually blamed the shuttle disasters on a lack of funding. Eh? In fact the shuttle and the rockets before it were designed by an enormous complex of people with phd's but no imagination. The main problems with the shuttle are the enormous launch boosters and the heat of the re-entry on the fixed wing design. But we already knew that a dropped capsule worked just fine without all these hugely expensive thermal tiles so why not have a movable wing design and just drop back through the atmosphere and then glide again when we've dropped. Totally brilliant in its simplicity, and the result of just one inspired designer with a background in flight. What are the lessons learned here?
1. Unlimited money leads to an expensive design. Limiting money forces better design.
2. One person with savvy is worth more than several thousand Phd scientists.
3. You probably need experience of flight if you are going to design flying machines.

On a related note. You may have noticed that Western weapons technology is generally outperformed by Russian technology. In fact the West is usually playing catch-up in capability terms (Mig aircraft, T-34 tanks in WW2, Sunburn misssiles etc, etc.). Of course the Western stuff costs billions and the Russian stuff costs peanuts. Western companies are much better at marketing than technology it seems. A glaring example being the patriot missile, whose projected 99% success rate was discovered to be in reality about O%. There are many, many other examples of this type of unjustified hype! However, now that the cold war is over and the Russians are clearly our friends, perhaps someone should suggest that the West could save a fortune by buying it's weapons from Russia. Just a thought, in case someone was wondering how to fund all these retiring baby boomers.

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