RCgothic

Could do. A methane tank leak probably won't end well. If it's hit on approach and the tanks depress then the engines will go engine-rich and the landing won't be pretty either. If it's on the ground, then it won't be taking off again without pressurised tanks. And the tanks depressurising through a hole could itself cause catastrophic failure. And if hit by an explosive munition it's basically game over.

They absolutely have to scrap gateway. It's simply not achievable alongside a surface presence, and it's always been entirely purposeless. I also agree they have to scrap the separately designed Basecamp. Just permanently emplace a LSS as a hab. Doing the above would free up so many more crewed surface missions it's ridiculous. -_-

Yup. That this was going to happen was obvious.

Rockets are extremely damage intolerant. You do not want to send something like Starship anywhere remotely unsecured. 3.5mm stainless steel tank walls are at risk from .22 rounds, never mind actual military calibre munitions.

So in practice it'd need to jettison in at least two sections and have a *two or more* catching operations.

It's just not optimised for anything. If you optimise for a specific mission, at least you can perform that mission unaided. If you optimise for LEO, you can always add a departure stage if necessary. If you optimise for cost, missions are cheap. If you optimise for cadence, it's likely both cheap and opens up a lot of construction/rendezvous architectures. SLS sins in every category. The only thing it's optimised for is politics, and even that will not hold if it's visibly inferior to the competition, which it is.

Edit: Sorry, traverse the globe at 4° per minute. The rate of change to an observer on the surface would be much greater. At 400km altitude that would be a ratio of 6771km to 400km, roughly 17:1. So roughly 68°per minute, or just over 1.1deg/second.

To a rough magnitude objects in LEO traverse the sky at about 4° per minute (360 deg per 90 mins).

A classified US govt payload is listed on Wikipedia as co-manifested. So definitely something meaty.

True actually. Falcon 19 Heavy would probably not be taller, the engines can only lift so much. So if it's not stretched, it would perform a similar flight profile to Falcon 9. Direct scaling of thrust to payload would give a payload for Falcon19!Heavy of 133t expendable. Probably a bit better due to beneficial square/cube law. Recovery modes would also be easier due to better aspect ratio and more body lift. Directly competitive to SLS to LEO. Cheaper, due to leveraging the cost-effective Merlin engines. Plus more flexible due to scalable recovery options. With high energy 2nd and 3rd stages it'd be very superior. 57 main engines would be charting new territory though.

A little bit of Raptor info:

Super Falcon (Falcon 19!) would actually make for a great SRB replacement. Just a little larger diameter (4.5m), basically the same thrust, lighter overall, much better ISP, and recoverable.

SLS requires all of its performance for its primary mission though. There isn't any spare capacity to waste on recovery experiments, even if recovery of any portion of it were feasible (which is not likely).

Test tank is at the launch site:

There isn't any practical way to make SLS reusable, and if you did it would be so different it wouldn't be SLS anymore. The boosters are barely worth refurbishing even if they were recovered and the best that can be done with the RS25s is a kind of ULA's SMART reuse where the engines alone are recovered.

So send an empty crew capsule with a Rosie the rocketeer mannequin. Actually exposing crew to unnecessary radiation in a pointless and difficult-to-abort-to orbit is the stupidest type of mission. The chances of irradiating a crew would be halved by putting them on the surface where they can actually do useful work. And a changeover station is not required when the lander can accommodate an entire crew and both lander and capsule can just mate to each other directly.

I think it'll probably take them longer than the end of August to work up a full 33 engine static fire and wet dress rehearsal.

The Gateway station is the single most pointless part of the Artemis architecture.

A skim read of the report doesn't reveal anything unreasonable in terms of mitigation measures IMO. SpaceX will be pretty happy with this I think.

Increase in ESM diameter? It could be flush with Orion or even bi/co-conic like Gemini.

Mitigated FONSI:

hyyyyyyype!

Scrapping Orion, I think they could have made a decent architecture with a launcher capable of 19t to TLI: 19t to TLI gets you an Apollo-style LM capable of braking itself into LLO for rendezvous. 19t to TLI gets you a CM *twice* the mass of Apollo, plus a CSM easily capable of LOI, TEI, and lunar rendezvous manoeuvres. 19t to TLI gets you ~4.7t of emplaced downmass in an Apollo-style descent stage for mission extension modules. 19t to TLI is within Falcon Heavy's capabilities. Or the launch vehicle can get away with just 52t all-up to LEO if the departure stage is a Centaur V with 27t of residuals. A much smaller, cheaper, launch vehicle that can launch more often is going to be far more useful overall than SLS.

Ouch. Follow-up to Artemis III likely delayed to 2028. If I were NASA I'd be ordering more ICPS to make use of ML-1.