Scaled Composites was bought by Northrop Grumman in 2007. Doubtful it will compete with it's parent company in any meaningful way. ________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org on behalf of Shoppa, Tim Sent: Mon 5/17/2010 10:15 AM To: Gary Subject: Re: [OT] Space Shuttle and ISS (was Re: Amiga 1000 helps) Al writes: I actually hope he doesn't do "a Space Shuttle replacement". The Space Shuttle is a classic example of scope creep. It had to do everything. In the end it did do most all of everything, and it did it each of them pretty well, but it was much more complicated than needed for any one task, and schedules and budgets were blown out of the water. But excepting schedules and budgets... it did surprisingly well. What Burt Rutan could do, is a family of replacements, each of which does one of the shuttle's tasks well. Some stages/assemblies/technologies would probably end up being shared and that's great. Tim.