okan170

Interesting, latest renders from Lockheed and some from NASA now show Orion for A3 and beyond using an extended docking collar. source:

Actually ARM was never an SLS mission except in some initial concepts. ARM was/is to be launched on either Delta IV Heavy, Altas V 551 or Falcon Heavy. The SLS human mission component was un-funded by congress, originally was to be EM-2 but moved to about EM-5 when EM-2 became funded as a test mission. One of the main criticisms of the SLS for a bit was that it wasn't even necessary for the ARM mission at that point except as a launcher for Orion and that congress hadn't even mandated that SLS launch by funding a mission beyond EM-2.

Probably it'll end up bringing crew two and fro from the Moon-orbiting NEXT-Step habitat(s) that are currently being developed. Fortunately funding has been proposed again this year to continue those efforts. ESA remains interested in providing more service modules (waiting on NASA to be directed to do more flights) in exchange for potential astronaut seats, so at the very least you could end up with a small station around the Moon occasionally visited by Orion and resupplied by Commercial Cargo providers (per NASA's comments).

This is incorrect. Funds have been made available to ensure commercial crew comes online in 2017, even with the provision to use Soyuz money to make it happen on time if needed.

Its worth noting that human-rating Ariane 6 has been ruled out already. https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/675007686166097921

One of the great advantages of having your debt in your own country's currency is that you can never technically fail to repay the debt. You can always print enough dollars and despite the horrible massive inflation it would cause, the debt would be repaid at great economic hardship (while also crippling China with a now very low-value sum of currency). Debt between the US and other countries enumerated in US currency operates nothing like household or personal debt and it is misleading to imply that it does.

Fortunately, the NASA budget part of this bill is not one of the contested items. If it were vetoed and sent back, the NASA budget would likely be transferred intact to the next version since nobody is fighting over it (except maybe the tangentially-related RD-180 ban).

Clarification, the idea is that the foam will drastically reduce the amount of uncontrollable ice buildup on the interstage of both the ICPS and EUS stages. This part of the stage is not related to the tank pressurization and is ventilated to prevent general overpressure like all interstages. The area in question is near the top of the LOX tank dome on the core stage but is not part of the tank itself or its thermal protection. If thermal analysis showed ice remained at manageable levels without the foam, it would have just been painted white. Source on this is an SLS program manager.

Ares V was to be a full 10m core with the 6 RS-68Bs on it by the time it ended. SLS is in many ways a throwback to very early Ares V designs with the standard shuttle tank-diameter core and 4 RS-25s (originally 5' date=' but it was unnecessary). There is also a difference in their flight plans, Ares V would stage much lower than SLS does, letting the J2X upper stage push all the way to orbit and circularize. SLS stages almost at orbital velocity (the core can put something into LEO all by itself) letting much more efficient upper stages take over for in-space work. Yeah, SLS is now very far beyond where Ares 1 was when it was cancelled.

This is incorrect. I have been told directly by people involved that they will be painted white for protection against heat, like the filament-wound boosters would have been had they flown on STS. The raw material of the casing is composite giving it its black color.

Apologies, fair enough. Felt a bit of a need to bring it up after it made folks chew me out for merely saying earlier that it was to be orange. Post removed.

They're also painted for thermal reasons. If Orbital-ATK's advanced boosters (Dark Knights) are chosen they would still be painted white.

Just a heads-up, and idk if its important or not, but the actual docking mechanism has the "spades" closed now instead of hollow like they were on earlier designs (and renders)

Love the JEM style surface texture! I think the ISS CAM module was supposed to use the same MMOD protection as JEM so it'd have probably looked like that too.

Actually SES-9 is currently set for a landing attempt. After choosing the "1.2" (Full-thrust), SES-9 also inquired about the possibility that, should the stage be returned, they could lease it for future SES missions. Now that bit was before the CRS-7 incident, so if it ends up being the first recovered stage, I don't know if its going to be possible to figure out a "lease" on what is essentially a testbed. http://spacenews.com/spacex-early-adopter-ses-ready-to-reuse-falcon-9-%C2%AD-for-the-right-price/

The central question we need to ask about this hypothetical is "when is it not Ares 1 anymore?" Is Ares 1 being considered anything with the ATK SRB (4 or 5 segment) and a liquid upper stage? If you're starting from scratch with the 4 segment, there are a few possibilities but none of them were really applicable to the Constellation era due the the requirement that Ares 1 use STS hardware. A nice little history of the design of "The Stick": http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/ares1.html

The whole reason-to-live for Ares 1 was to re-use as much Shuttle hardware as possible. By the end of the program, almost the entire thing was brand-new; 4-segment to 5-segment was a bigger hurdle than they thought, and J2S needed to be redesigned to be J2X to make up for shortcomings in the first stage. I don't think any boosters can be mounted to the segmented SRB without a drastic redesign to redistribute the loads; the STS/Ares SRB was designed to be structurally held in very specific ways for the shuttle (and probably Ares V.) As for augmenting the upper stage, you could have gone a lot further to try and save it but the end point was it was a terrible design and it wasn't worth the time and money to make it workable. And since, by this point, none of the hardware was even direct-from-STS, there was little to no reason to keep pouring money into it. Technically, Ares 1 could work. Maybe throw an additional $15 billion or so into it and it'd fly. In the end, it just wasn't worth it to keep trying to fix it for more money than a new design would take.

SES-9 would be the first Falcon 9 "1.2" which uses densified propellants and a stretched 2nd stage to allow for recovery on flights like this. So get ready for some more frequent landing attempts! (hopefully actual landings)

There have been a number of modifications to the engine since they were last flown. New hardware for the controller (from the J2X program) and some other elements. Also, SLS feeds the fuel to the engines faster and at higher pressures (partially due to the height of the core tank) than the RS-25 experienced during it's Space Shuttle years. Additional modifications include removing some of the elements that facilitated reuse and testing the new insulation on the engines designed to protect them in the 4-clustered configuration with 2 burning SRBs on either side.

It should be remembered that the spending bills have not yet become law, so theres a TON more fighting to go over this issue. And things get weirder if congress throws another tantrum and we have to use a continuing resolution to cover next year. I believe NASA has a little legal recourse where they can ask for special dispensation, but I'm not sure how that would work out if it had to be tried. For what its' worth, NASA has been very adamant recently that they would, in an underfunding situation, be extending the timeline for commercial crew to 2018 or 2019 rather than doing a down-select per the article in the OP.

The big thing with this is, while the tank would have flown and worked on X-33, it would not have worked for Venturestar which had to be SSTO. Part of the whole reason X-33 existed was as a testbed for the Venturestar SSTO technologies, and one of these was the composite tank. X-33 could've achieved it's modest hypersonic goals with the aluminum tank, but Venturestar could not make orbit with it. X-33 had little to no application outside of being a tech demonstrator Venturestar/X-33 were joined at the hip somewhat unusually and it bit them hard in the end. Traditionally, one would design the final vehicle after the sub scale demonstrator… but X-33 was designed to specifically enable Venturestar (which had certain specifications), and when the performance started to creep out of feasibility, losing one meant losing the other. It doesn't help that Venturestar was the SSTO design that had the most unknowns about it compared to a selection of options from other manufacturers. Around the same time X-33 ran into issues with it's tank, Venturestar was running up against increasing weight in the aerospikes (far heavier and less efficient than had been anticipated) and a need for a significantly beefier TPS to deal with the heat loads of reentry and much larger wings in order to remain in control during atmospheric entry. It had ballooned into a huge behemoth with very large wings, much heavier tile coverage and heavy engines, when the tank issues started coming up. This is a good example of what Venturestar had become by the time it was cancelled. By the end of it all, Venturestar was no longer capable of achieving it's SSTO goal and was cancelled along with X-33. The tanks could certainly be done better today, but there are also a large number of problems to solve with the design.

Yup, all the exhaust is just water vapor so those clouds are basically just low rainclouds.

Just remember that the tank will be orange.

In the space of only two days, this has become a new favorite mod! Thanks!

Any inkling if this works in 1.0?