jadebenn

There is absolutely no reason to launch JWST on SLS, and this is coming from one of the biggest SLS fanboys on this forum. In fact, there'd be a lot of risk inherent in launching on SLS (because the spacecraft was not designed around it) for no practical benefit - it's not like it'd be able to take advantage of the greater payload. I'm sure if the designers of JWST had known that there'd be an SHLV just about ready by the time their payload was wrapping-up that they would've considered it, but when JWST started super-heavy lift was both not-at-all assured and very far-off into the future. It's the future designs, like LUVOIR, that will be taking advantage of the SLS and using its capabilities to enable science. It's way too late to try and change the JWST.

I'm certain there will be more, though I have my doubts we'll see any stronger bids. SpaceX is seemingly going to bid Starship for this, which will be interesting to watch. Aerojet Rocketdyne and some other smaller companies, are likely to bid as well, but I have severe doubts they'll be able to propose something that'll top the big three. Ironically, I think the National Coalition sort of "gave" the second bid to Boeing. If Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin had competed independently as was the original plan, I think it would've been much more unlikely for Boeing to win. I'd wait for the financial details of the proposals to be released before making these statements. Let's see what Boeing has in mind before completely condemning it.

Current plan is to have two winners, ala COTS and CCrew, which is why I think Boeing's got a pretty good shot. If it was just one, I'd bet on Blue Origin and the National Coalition's very strong combined bid.

Not AJ-10s. The Boeing lander will be methalox according to their partnership with Intuitive Machines.

Only because it wouldn't be ready in-time. They're definitely providing one, just not by 2024.

They have. They were the first country to sign-on. Japan was the second. We're still waiting on the ESA and Roscosmos, but both are almost guaranteed to participate.

I think Bridenstine's quote to Congress about the SLS flight rate "depending on how much Boeing is willing to invest" applies here.

I wouldn't put too much stock in the pictured design actually being the bid. That image is pretty old.

This is relevant to the Artemis thread as well; Boeing's lander bid will be SLS-launched: I don't want to say I called it... but I totally called it.

This announcement seems to have completely slipped under the rug: Sounds like I was right about Boeing's lander bid!

You're hitting on something interesting here: If not for Constellation, any SLS-like design would've been a bit closer to STS. No 5-segment SRBs from Ares 1 means no stretched core, which means a slightly smaller rocket. Sometimes I wonder if that would've been a better path. It kinda feels like Block 1B is in the awkward position where it's not powerful enough to do a Saturn V-style single-launch lunar sortie, but it's too powerful to just waste the extra payload capacity. I guess the stretched core will really pay off once NASA upgrades the SRBs after flight 8 (I really need to do a write-up on why the BOLE program is a really good idea sometime), but that's gonna be quite a while from now.

A hydrolox transfer stage? That's a bold move.

Wait, what? No, no, no. You misunderstand. I guarantee you there's an out in whatever contract will be drawn up. But the political will to use it won't be there unless something has gone terribly wrong. No President or Congressmen wants to pay money to stop something being built - and believe me, it's not corruption to have cancellation fees for a contract like this.

It's basically impossible to seperate out the unit costs of the first six RS-25Es due to how the production restart contract is structured. The goal for everything past that first batch is a 30% cost reduction over the SSMEs. All the reports I've seen state that they're on-track for that. It's only provisional until there's ink on paper later this year, before any elections or administration changes.

Aerojet's actually already on contract for those.

It was a test launch in the same way that Starhopper is - more of an aerodynamic analysis with something vaguely shaped like the flight hardware than a test of the actual rocket. Ares I-X (which I'm presuming is what you're referring to) carried a dummy Orion on-top of a dummy upper-stage, with a dummy fifth segment on-top of a real four-segment Shuttle SRB. There was basically zero part commonality with the real deal. That's not to say that useful data wasn't found from the test, but it wasn't really a launch of the rocket.

Constellation never even got past PDR. The lander is in the same boat as CxP. Everything else is muuuch further on. You're a lucky one. Then again, if you mainly stick to these forums, I wouldn't be too surprised. The quality of discussion here is pretty good. Off-site... it's not. You don't hear it as often nowadays, but you used to be able to hear it pretty often on the SpaceX subreddits. Even now you still can, occasionally.

NASA is stating its intention to block-buy 10 SLS cores and 8 EUS stages from Boeing: NASA Commits to Future Artemis Missions With More SLS Rocket Stages Will this finally kill the "SLS will only fly once" meme?

He didn't say the pressure, only that it was pressurized. I will say that I don't think it's a coincidence that the engineer demonstrating the spacesuit had to take interview questions from inside it. The pressure must've been high enough that she couldn't just step out afterwards.

WAITWAITWAIT. @tater, I was watching the video. Bridenstine said the suit was pressurized.

Should be. The dynamics that make a soft suit stiff when pressurized don't apply to areas with discrete joints. On a side note, one of the interesting features of the xEMU suits is the capability for variable pressurization. Instead of an astronaut slowly decompressing in the airlock before entering the suit, the xEMU is capable of being pressurized to the spacecraft's ambient pressure, allowing astronauts to jump in and work as the suit slowly lowers the pressure to a more flexible level over time. This should allow astronauts to be much more productive prior to EVAs.

Yeah, I get that. The suit in the video's got to be little more than a hollowed out casing - would be way too heavy to wear in Earth gravity otherwise - but the way the joints on the arms and lower torso move as she walks looks like it'll be very good news for flexibility in actual lunar conditions. The design looks a lot cleaner when it's less... uh, loud. And, yeah, the xEMU is a hybrid suit design. More mass than the Apollo designs, but that was deemed to be an acceptable trade-off for the increased flexibility.

Oh I love how dorky that suit mock-up looks in red, white, and blue. The flexibility looks very good though. I'm wondering whether that's how flexible the suits will actually be. I guess that mainly depends on how much commonality that mock-up has with the real deal.

It's not surprising. The 3-stage lander will already be strapped for mass, and FH is the most-capable non-SLS launcher that will be available in the relevant timeframe.

Right. When I say two-launch, I mean just for the lander. Descent goes up on SLS. Ascent goes up on a commercial vehicle. Crew goes up on another SLS. The IP 03 proposal is exactly what I was referring to. Since the ascent module is meant to be reusable after the first incarnation, that would mean you'd only need one additional SLS launch for each lunar sortie, at least until the ascent module needs to be replaced. The limiting factor (or at least the one NASA anticipates) is life support. The HLS solicitation con-ops state that the lander must be able to support a crew of 4 with pre-deployed surface assets. Without those, it only supports 2. I've had this argument with you before, so for brevity I'll just summarize it. The bidders have incentive to bring down lander development costs through simplifying the design. SLS allows a simpler design without giving-up capability. The question for the bidders, then, is whether they can save enough in development to justify launching on SLS. That is the million-dollar question that will decide what route they take.