RCgothic

UK radio today reporting that tourist flights to the international space station were to be offered for £28,000. The news was lacking in detail, but that's insane. Even starship with a capacity 100 would struggle to loft a person into LEO for so little.

Plus the fact earth itself moves on its course around the sun due to gravity means than a ship immune to gravity will have trouble tracking with the planet around the sun without applying constant thrust.

If a ship can avoid experiencing gravity it can maintain an orbital altitude without an orbital velocity. In fact, it *needs* to experience gravity in order to orbit, because without gravity any velocity is escape velocity unless you apply constant radial thrust. A gravity manipulating ship doesn't have to orbit unless it wants to. It levitates. So there's no reason its entry to the atmosphere needs to be great other than reducing transit time. If you can sustain re-entry heating, come in hot. If not, walking pace or slower will do. Without gravity all urgency goes away.

That BE-7 engine looks ridiculously simple. Presume the render is missing out a whole host of control gubbins.

Well first off they were usually designed with redundant steam relief valves to stop that happening. Of the fifteen boiler explosions in the UK in the 20th century, only two were failures of the boiler barrel due to incorrectly assembled relief valves (overpressure). Thirteen were due to weakening of the firebox caused by low water level, which is not quite so spectacular. Low water level is caused by either operator error or faulty water level gauges.

0922 BST. Think I'll stick this one on as a short break from work!

Yet another reason SRBs have no business being anywhere near a man rated launcher.

The engine bells shouldn't be too difficult to replace I don't think.

Good call, although CRS-16 wasn't a total loss.

I remember the sea looked pretty rough after the landing. Not surprised nobody could board to make safe if octagrabber wasn't compatible. Still sad though. This the first loss of a block 5?

There's no reason why there couldn't be a reserve for a deorbit burn once payload insertion is complete.

So both second stages are undersized. The core stage is oversized but too anaemic in terms of thrust. And the boosters don't burn long enough. If core and boosters were able to put a sizeable payload in orbit without a second stage the problem wouldn't be half as bad. That would make it mission agnostic, just change what you stick on top of it. If I were designing a SHLV today it would probably look a lot like SA-513 that launched Skylab with flyback side boosters. Two and a half stages to orbit and whatever you like on top.

Stage and a half to not-quite-orbit is such a bizarre architecture.

This is not quite the while story, as you only get robbed of the full 9.81m/s per second if you're burning purely vertical. Once you start burning sideways gravity drag has less and less effect. This is a trigonometric effect. Your thrust makes up the hypotenuse. Gravity drag is vertical. Your desired velocity vector is the difference.

SLS won't be building LOP-G though. It can't co-manifest substantial enough payloads prior to block 2. So we're talking about 3rd party boosters anyway. Falcon can send both the payloads and the crew, separately, within a short enough space of time to be useful. Dragon2 will be able to go to the moon.

Extended deep space operations are pretty pointless if the booster is incapable of taking crew anywhere that requires them. The only difference between extended deep space operations and extended LEO operations is risk to crew.

We do need to launch on the timescales Apollo did because that enables rendezvous mission architectures. Without those we are never going beyond the earth moon system and we are never establishing a significant lunar presence.

We never *will* be ready for the moon or mars or even just significant orbital presence unless and until we have a booster capable of doing the job. Of lifting substantial payloads and performing the required rendezvous mission architectures. Want to forget the competition? Fine. They're forgotten. SLS is *still* not the booster that advances manned spaceflight. Its most advanced form can barely recreate Apollo at 1/4 of the flight cadence.

Yes, payload integration happens after static fire so that if the booster explodes it doesn't take the payload with it, as happened with AMOS 6.

SLS fails on its own terms, nevermind any competitors. It was supposed to take humans to Mars and it never can, not even in its most ambitious block 2 format. It can barely manage the moon. It simply costs too much and can't fly often enough. It fails as a stopgap because it doesn't stop the gap. Better to cancel it now and focus on designing and building a clean slate big dumb booster with a decent launch cadence and have another 10 year gap, than drag this charade on for another 5 years before realising that cancelling it and starting again is what should have happened in the first place.

SLS is a dead end and any money spent on it is a waste. It's a dead program walking. The only thing keeping it going is sunk cost fallacy. There's nothing SLS block 1b or 1b can do that a handful of launches from an alternative extant booster couldn't do for a fraction of the price. Even Block 2 will never have Mars capability, and that is the purpose for which this booster has been touted. If Block 2 ever flies I'll be truly astounded. And the gap in human spaceflight capabilities is not ok. It will have been nine years since the shuttle least flew, and everyone knew that retirement date was coming. "Only 50% longer than the Apollo-Shuttle gap" does not make it ok. 6 years then wasn't ok either, although at least that produced a groundbreaking vehicle. Where shuttle went wrong was keeping it in service for 25 years after it became clear it wasn't going to acheive its required cadence. They should have done something else. The opportunity cost of the last 20 years had been crippling.

Also Orion has full mobility. All Dragon needs to do is hold orientation, which is easy, even connected to a FUS.

There's a difference between a custom fairing to cover Orion and its LES at about 5m diameter at around Falcon's normal fairing size, and flaring out an interstage to cover EUS at 8.4m. The EUS is the same diameter as the SLS core. The Orion service module (built by ESA) is narrower than Orion.

EUS is never going on a FH. FH's maximum fairing size is 5.2m. EUS is 8.4m. ICPS would at least fit within the fairing.

FUS, Plus EUS, Plus ICPS? That sounds even less plausible.