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NASA SLS/Orion/Payloads


_Augustus_

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The ISS is overly expensive, old, and unneeded, especially by 2025.  Remember, Bigelow Aerospace is quietly building a much cheaper station in 2020.  Remember, it costs 150 billion, versus the 10 billion estimate for a moon base.  

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6 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:


Bigelow has been "planning" to launch a station for about a decade now.


They have an actual contract though.  They didn't launch earlier because they were waiting on the Dragon to be built.  

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1 hour ago, DAL59 said:

They didn't launch earlier because they were waiting on the Dragon to be built.  

IIRC their station projects long predate SpaceX. They bought TransHab tech from NASA in 2000.

 

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1 hour ago, DAL59 said:


They have an actual contract though.  They didn't launch earlier because they were waiting on the Dragon to be built.  

Only for BEAM. They were supposed to (internally, no contracts) have two B330s ready for launch last year (didn't happen).

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10 hours ago, DDE said:

IIRC their station projects long predate SpaceX. They bought TransHab tech from NASA in 2000.

You recall correctly.  Bigelow even offered a prize for the first team to demonstrate a reusable manned capsule back in 2004.

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6 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

LOL, like it even matters.

You could launch all of these CubeSats on a Falcon 9 and it'd probably be cheaper than the #*^(@ adapter.

Falcon 9 would need a payload to go to the moon first.

I‘m actually really excited for some of these secondary payloads. NEA Scout for example is a cool little mission.

Edited by Canopus
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7 hours ago, Canopus said:

Falcon 9 would need a payload to go to the moon first.

I‘m actually really excited for some of these secondary payloads. NEA Scout for example is a cool little mission.

True, but a rideshare on a multi-billion dollar ride is still expensive, though I don't know how they assign cost to those, or if they are "free."

EM-1 is like a 40 billion dollar flight.

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1 hour ago, sh1pman said:

Speaking of Energia, is it truly dead, or there are some plans or propositions to make it fly again?

The technological base to produce the RD-0120 motors is largely gone, presumably so is the 7 m diameter manufacturing facility at Progress with its unique electron beam welding robots.

Водородный бак второй ступени

There's occasional chestbeating, but nothing credible.

Some of the newer rocket designs are named Energia, but it's generally a massive mess in the wake of intense competition pre-Crimea. Progress seemed poised to bring back the RD-0120 core stage with methalox strap-ons, while Krunichev produced Energia-5KV with a first stage of four RD-170s strapped together, or a four + one mix.

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Qualification tests are not nothing, they are progress.

SpaceX tests during flights. We don;t get tweets about every Raptor test, etc. BO is even more circumspect. The government has to be more transparent. They move forward, they attempt to hit their milestones.

I'm clearly not an SLS fan, but that doesn't mean that it's a piece of junk. My dislike has more to do with opportunity costs (if the $$ could somehow be diverted, which of course it cannot).

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Is SLS basically being developed at the worst time? It's being developed too early for the commercial rockets of similar size to enter service, but too late to really get much "use" out of it before it commercial launches start taking over.

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