Kryten

Yes, really. Try looking at the statistics for satellites per year versus launches per year.

It's only cheap if it has sufficient flight rate, and it needs more than the entire market to hit aircraft-like flight rates. The classic SSTO problem, or indeed the Pegasus problem, or the Delta IV problem. People keep making the same mistake. Soyuz does have a demonstrated ability to launch once a day from the same pad, as was demonstrated multiple times in the 60s for various rendezvous and docking tests. As there is now an identical pad of the same design, it could very well be launched twice a day.

So how exactly is it supposed to be launching frequently with those kind of payloads? You get that maybe once a month, and many of those are non-competed launches.

The liquid boosters for SLS have not been under consideration for some time. Too expensive to plumb the pad for kerosene.

Where are AR supposed to get the money just to develop F-1B, nevermind the launch site and LV factory? How would something that has to both adsorb those costs and use relatively expensive AR engines compete with Vulcan or falcon heavy?

Nobody has done a dedicated rideshare flight yet , and secondary opportunity are steadily becoming more common. The people trying to make dedicated smallsat launchers are just responding to the larger market and betting that dedicated rideshare doesn't eat their lunch; we'll see how that goes.

They only got a contract to send up replacement sats; the constellation construction is with Soyuz-Fregat, which worked out much cheaper. Even if we assume this ends up happening, there'll only be demand to send up a replacement say every few months, which is not remotely enough to sustain something the size of Skylon. Can you put up a GTO comsat a tiny bit at a time? No. Can you put up an SSO imaging sat a bit at a time? No. Those are the real commercial markets, not food for the ISS. Build it and they will come, that's all you've got? This has happened before, and 'they' didn't appear. We had all sorts of people running around with SSTO concepts in the 90s, which much better funding and backing than skylon, and the orders didn't appear to keep them alive.

Except the fact nobody needs anything launched twice a day, and especially not to low earth orbit. This is the biggest problem with Skylon, and it's one it shares with all the 80s and 90s SSTO proposals it should've dies with; the figures come out great, just as long as you assume there's much more demand than there actually is.

Dedicated rideshare, as is already being done by spaceflight services. With that many payloads, and the number of customers they expect to have, they should be able to swap in customers easy if others get delayed.

That was astrobiotic, they're still trying to do that. TeamIL have bought a slot on a separate rideshare to SSO set up by Spaceflight, and have negotiated with them and SpX to boost towards TLI with remaining propellant after the SSO payloads separate; I'm pretty sure the agreement prevents other people buying moon slots on the same flight. Also the tooling for the actual fuselage probably also no longer exists or has been repurposed.

You don't need to bring in politics, there are more than enough technological and economic reasons for this to be stuffed.

It's been done quite a few times; Titan switched from RP-1/LOX to hypergols with a version of the same engine, energomash have a modified RD-180 that burns methane, KB Khinmash have run their RD-0146 on both methane and hydrogen-but not by anyone in the US, at least recently. Smaller rockets are still competing directly because of SpaceX plans for dedicated launches for small payloads, the first of which is already being set up.

You're acting as if 'space' is mostly crewed efforts; the majority of launches are commercial communications and imaging payloads, and most of the rest are military versions of roughly the same.

It flew four times, just not to the moon.

Well, the idea was the NRL's Vanguard would go first; as Vanguard was based on a sounding rocket rather than a missile, and NRL was semi-civilian and focused on scientific efforts, it was thought this would have a better international response than something launched on a missile by an army missile research group. But they couldn't get Vanguard to work before Sputnik pipped it.

At that point it wasn't clear how the international community would respond to satellite overflights. This could have been seen as illegal violation of soviet airspace, which they obviously didn't want; in the end the issue was allowed because the soviets did it first.

That's changing the subject; obviously the trade-offs are different between missiles and SLV's, particularly civilian ones.

That's like asking why rolexes are so expensive when they're sold in normal-sized shops.

Except SpaceX is trying to get DoD certification. In fact, right now it look like they can get certification for the basic falcon 9 for the very next DoD launch competition, so they're already competing.

They decided to switch to a mostly mobile force for the minuteman, cut down to a single missile design to make that cheaper, and then had the funding cut to make it mobile. The soviets kept iterating on their large liquid missiles until the developer of them ended up in an independent country, and right now they're trying to get Makayev to build a replacement, still liquid.

The only thing that can get that kind of info from orbit without a stupidly huge amount of luck are SBIRS, and they don't do public data releases. In the event of a successful launch we can expect plenty of info from the koreans themselves anyway, they even had rocketcam footage for the last one.

There's no meaningful difference as long as it doesn't leak; and it allows for larger missiles, as you don't have to transport it fully fueled. The Chinese already have DF-31 and -41 for this role, both of which are easier to transport than something the size of LM-11 would be.

They're silo-based and use storable hypergolics.

It's not an ICBM, they already have a solid mobile ICBM that we know this isn't, it would be useless redundancy. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Nobody has ever used or seriously proposed to use chloride trifluoriude in a rocket engine, people just keep bringing it up with the same set of anecdotes for no good reason. The closest we've ever gotten are soviet tests of an ammonia/fluorine upper stage.