The ever-irritating Jeff Bell came out with another snarky space essay, but no one else seems to have noticed. Or cared. One of the two.
I’ll leave it to Rand to ridicule Bell’s “everybody knows” arguments against reusability — assuming he has nothing better to do with his time. But I will myself deign to point out a particular error:
The very last VentureStar concept took the drastic step of eliminating the internal payload bay and carrying ISS supply modules externally. [emphasis added]
Nope. Sorry. That happened at least four configurations prior to the cancellation of the program. Nor was an external payload carrier a “drastic step”, but rather the end result of a gradual design evolution.
Jerry Pournelle made some comments about Bell’s article. See “Chaos Manor”, the article/commentary “On Getting To Space”, from the Friday, September 9, 2005 entries.