Nibb31

Reusing the core will be hard, whatever they do.

Only if A and B are vast tarmac landing pads and are the actual places where you want to those 66 tons delivered.

More people worked on the Airbus A350 project or the Boeing 787 than on SLS. Certainly many more people worked on the F-35 than on SLS. The larger the organization, the more complex the project gets. Throwing more workers at a problem doesn't get it done faster. It usually just adds complexity and management overhead. If you ask people if they would like a cure for cancer, peace in the Middle-East, improve education, and to reduce pollution, they will always answer yes to those questions too. So now ask them which one needs to be fixed first, and that is where it gets complicated... China doesn't have the same safety, quality and environmental standards. They also have a pretty authoritarian government. In most countries, you couldn't even get the building permit for a super-skyscraper in 90 days. See cryogen's post above. NASA has plans. It's their job to produce studies and reference mission architectures. They do it all the time. They simply don't have the support from Congress, because everyone has their own priorities (like finding a cure for cancer, peace in the Middle-East, improve education, and to reduce pollution... and lots of other stuff).

More people worked on the Airbus A350 project or the Boeing 787 than on SLS. Certainly many more people worked on the F-35 than on SLS. The larger the organization, the more complex the project gets. Throwing more workers at a problem doesn't get it done faster. It usually just adds complexity and management overhead. If you ask people if they would like a cure for cancer, peace in the Middle-East, improve education, and to reduce pollution, they will always answer yes to those questions too. So now ask them which one needs to be fixed first, and that is where it gets complicated... China doesn't have the same safety, quality and environmental standards. They also have a pretty authoritarian government. In most countries, you couldn't even get the building permit for a super-skyscraper in 90 days. See cryogen's post above. NASA has plans. It's their job to produce studies and reference mission architectures. They do it all the time. They simply don't have the support from Congress, because everyone has their own priorities (like finding a cure for cancer, peace in the Middle-East, improve education, and to reduce pollution... and lots of other stuff).

It's nothing to do with bureaucracy. How long does the private sector take to design and build a fighter jet, an airliner, a bridge, a power plant, or just a stupid highway? Just about any large engineering project takes at least a decade these days. It took only a small team to design the V-2 or the nuclear bomb. Nowadays, it takes 2000 people to design a new car. This is because the systems are much more complex. The interfaces between those systems are more complicated. The requirements are more strict. The interactions between contractors and much larger teams take time. Quality and environmental standards generate more paperwork. Folks like Von Braun (or Tesla, or Bell, or Da Vinci) were multidisciplinary experts. However, as the state-of-the-art advances, it is no longer possible for a single person to be an expert in chemical propulsion, aerodynamics, guidance software, electronics, acoustics, documentation, and project management all at the same time. Much more people are involved in large projects because they are all specialized in a specific area. Each area has its own constraints and each team has to coordinate with the other teams who have their own set of constraints. In the 60's an engineer could pull out the slide rule and correct drawings on a piece of paper to fix something and send the drawing down to the machine shop. Nowadays you would set up a review board meeting to discuss the change with all the parties that are impacted, get the change to a CAD designer, conduct meetings, rewrite software, redesign interfaces, rewrite documentation, conduct more meetings, setup tests and simulations, negociate with suppliers and qualify manufactured parts. Large organizations are divided into smaller divisions that need specific communication channels. A lot more people are involved, IT support, logistics people, software developers, purchasers, quality people, and of course multiple levels of managers to coordinate the whole project. This has nothing to do with government bureaucracy. It has to do with the size of modern organizations, whether public or private, and the complexity - - - Updated - - - It's pretty much the opposite. Go out on the street and ask people to set a list of priorities. I can assure you that space exploration won't even be on the list. NASA has published multiple Mars DRMs over the years, but nobody cares. I'm pretty certain they won't. Actually, NASA administrators have been doing that for years without much effect. Do you have any idea how many organizations, agencies, and administrations go to Congress every year with very solid agendas asking for a "a reasonable amount of money"?

Just like every US spacecraft in the past, CST-100 and Dragon are funded by NASA and built by private sector contractors. The only difference is in the way the contracts are structured, but Commercial Crew is fundamentally a government program for launching NASA astronauts into space.

Explains a lot, doesn't it...

I doubt you could actually shut down NASA. After all, NASA does much more than manned spaceflight. There is all the unmanned exploration, the aeronautical research, and the international cooperation, that is all necessary. But you can cancel programs and if NASA was reduced to those missions and just complete the ISS program, I don't think the public opinion would care much. However, there is a lot to think about before you do cancel a major program. You need to think about the consequences and to provide an alternative for the people who worked on those programs. When you put 10000 aerospace engineers out of work, you risk losing the technological edge and your technical capability as a nation. NASA pays contractors, contractors pay workers, workers pay taxes, buy stuff, and keep the economy afloat. Government spending is never wasted. Having unemployed engineers sitting around seeking jobs elsewhere is bad for everyone.

I haven't seen anything indicating that Trump is pro-space or that Clinton is anti-space. Space policy is so way down on the agendas of both sides (and of the public opinion) that it doesn't even register. If anything, I would think that democrats would be pro-government spending (which would be good for NASA, right?), and republicans would be against it, but then logic rarely applies in politics. And unfortunately, we aren't allowed to discuss those topics here, so I'll stop at that. Constellation was a flawed concept on many levels, and although there was a "Vision for Space Exploration", it was actually just cheap talk with no funding to back it up. Because of that, and because of some fundamental design decisions that were more based on pleasing some corporations rather than technical requirements, the whole thing was doomed from the start. It was basically set up as poison for the next administration who had no other option than to cancel it. The same is true for SLS, which most people understand is unsustainable at the current funding levels and with no proper goal. The next administration will have to choose between one of the following options: - Cancel SLS and concentrate on yet another vehicle development program. This would continue the trend of handing out money to the usual contractors regardless of whether it accomplishes anything (which is NASA's main purpose nowadays). However, it would basically gut the manned spaceflight program for another decade. - Focus on Mars. At realistic budget levels, this would end up being a 20 year program to develop the vehicles. In the meantime, the SLS will sit around in a hangar costing billions to maintain and waiting for a payload. Realistically though, a lot of money will be spent on contractors (which will make Congress happy), and the whole thing will be cancelled with the next change of administration. - Focus on returning to the Moon. IMO, this is the only achievable goal at current funding levels and the only way to leverage SLS and Orion. The only new hardware development that's needed is a lander. That will probably take 10 years to develop, but by that time the ISS will be ending and funds can then be diverted to a semi-permanent lunar outpost. Congress won't like this, because it means less money being poured into their constituencies, but NASA would actually achieve something. Let's face it, Orion was designed to go to Moon, and that's pretty much all it can do. It will never be an interplanetary vehicle and there really isn't much else "Beyond Low-Earth Orbit" that it can actually be used for. It's useless for Mars and visiting Lagrange points or picking up pieces of asteroids gets old after you've done it once.

Just launching humans to the ISS on a routine crew rotation costs a lot more than "a few millions". You'd need a vehicle capable of supporting an EVA, which rules out Dragon, CST-100 or Soyuz, unless you heavily modify these vehicles for the new mission. Only Orion is planned to have that capability, and it won't cost "a few millions" to launch. Unless the satellite was fitted with an IDSS docking ring, you would also need a device capable of grappling the satellite. This means an arm on the spacecraft side and a grappling fixture on the satellite. There are no spacecraft that are currently planned to have an arm, and SMAP obviously wasn't equipped with a grappling fixture or handrails, so you would have to design and build a specific mission module to grapple the vehicle allow the astronauts to hold onto it, and then figure out a way to launch that mission module. Then of course, you would also need to spend several months planning the entire mission, training astronauts and the support team for the EVA, developing procedures and designing specific tools and fixtures that can be used in space. Once you include all that, a manned mission costs much more than building a new satellite using the same design. - - - Updated - - - You won't be soldering a new component in space. You would just swap the board it was on, but unless the satellite was designed from scratch with access hatches and large parts that can be replaced wearing thick gloves and an EVA suit, that's impossible. Typically, electronics are buried inside satellites under several layers of shielding and insulation. There might be cutting edges that could damage an EVA suit, it might have coolant loops that cannot be disconnected without ground equipment, it might have thrusters that could be misfired while the astronaut is working on it. I repeat, for a satellite to be serviced in space, it must have been designed for that purpose from scratch.

It could only be serviced if it had been designed to be serviced, with a grapple point, hand railings, removable covers, and replaceable parts. You would only include those features if you anticipated that those parts will need replacing. If you anticipate the failure of that component, then you design it to remove that particular failure mode. The whole problem of something like this happening means that is failure mode was unanticipated, which means that even if you had designed the satellite to be serviceable, this particular failure mode might not be repairable anyway.

Those aren't really comparable. More difficult, I don't know. More risky, definitely.

Crossfeed is complex to work with. You don't really want to be leaking propellant when there are 9 open flames nearby. The switchover event has to run smoothly without starving or blowing up your turbopump and the separation can be tricky. It also makes core stages and booster stages fundamentally different, which increases cost.

There were two hatches. The extra structure for the ejection seat system and additional instrumentation for the test flights made Columbia the heaviest of the Shuttles. - - - Updated - - - There were two hatches. The extra structure for the ejection seat system and additional instrumentation for the test flights made Columbia the heaviest of the Shuttles.

The size of the sort of asteroid that would could effectively redirect makes it no threat at all.

How close is "not enough time to react"? How close do you think a sci-fi warship would allow an asteroid to get if they know that the enemy uses this tactic? Wouldn't you just blow up every asteroid that gets close enough to be a threat ? And any asteroid that changes its orbit would be pretty suspicious.

I don't see why you would want to expose a manned vehicle to space warfare. It would be putting lives at risk for no reason and a manned spacecraft would also be a too expensive asset to risk in a conflict. Space warfare would be limited to disabling enemy satellites with your own satellites. No warships needed.

"The Vertical Weld Center, Gore Weld Tool and Circumferential Dome Weld Tool that are there now could make two SLS core stage structures a year at most" http://spacenews.com/36012tooling-processes-coming-together-for-affordable-space-launch-system/ "NASA officials are claiming that launches will cost about $500 to $700 million each. That sounds fairly reasonable given the massive payload SLS would be able to place into orbit. And you might think, well, in a good year NASA might be able to launch two of them? Wrong. The $500 to $700 million figure might be the marginal cost of the launch, not including all the additional fixed costs of the infrastructure and program (the $3 billion per year figure). Just like the shuttle program cost about $3 billion per year whether NASA launched once or five times." http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/04/12/sad-cost-sls-deep-space-operations/ "Once SLS has completed its political role with EM-1 and EM-2, a mix of cargo and crewed missions are expected, launching at least once a year. SLS is currently projected to have the capability of launching once every six months." http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/02/sls-launch-rate-repetitive-cadence-gerstenmaier/ And then there are the actual launches that are manifested: EM-1 in 2017, and EM-2 in 2021 (at best). There are no other flights manifested for 2022, 2023, or 2024, which makes any predictions of "one flight per year" bogus. Nobody is seriously expecting SLS to ever fly more than twice a year.

Production facilities and logistics chains are sized for 1 SLS launch per year, with a possibility of extending to 2. But the real bottleneck is payloads. Heavy payloads typically cost more than smaller ones. NASA can't afford a 100-ton mission every year. We will be lucky if we get an SLS every 2 years.

Not hating. Just correcting your misunderstandings. So Soyuz 1 crashed because of a parachute failure, so are you going to claim that parachutes are inherently unsafe too ? The Challenger accident was due to NASA launching outside of the certified launch parameters. The temperature was below the specified operating limits of the SRB o-rings, and the o-rings failed. When you exceed limits, you are bound to have failures, whether you are using solid or liquid engines or any other complex system. In the history of spaceflight, there have been more liquid engine failures than solid motor failures. Statistically, they are safer than liquid engines.

The R-7 really didn't have anything in common with the V-2. And before Sputnik, there was no such thing as a Space Race.

SRBs aren't stupid. Are you saying that the people who design and build practical launch vehicles are idiots ? SRBs have certain specific qualities which is why they are used to meet certain requirements. Ares 1 was a dead-end design, not because it used an SRB, but because the fundamental architecture was flawed.

Actually it does. You simply can't restart production of a 30 year old design, based on paper drawings, outdated manufacturing techniques, materials that no longer exist, tooling that has been scrapped, facilities that have crumbled, and suppliers that have disappeared. You would need to redesign each part with modern CAD/CAM tools, recertify them with modern standards, and rebuild the tooling, test fixtures, and supply chain, requalify suppliers, build new buildings and launch pads, etc... You would be better off starting from scratch. Claiming that Russia has Energia and Buran is as silly as claiming that NASA still has Apollo. The V2 didn't start the Space Race, and neither did Von Braun. It was a product of the Cold War. The Space Race started with Sputnik.

1) Energia is dead and buried 30 years ago. Bringing it back is as impossible as bringing back the Saturn V. You would have to start from scratch. 2) The private sector only exists because the government is paying the bills. Even if they manage to somehow monetize space activity, they can't survive without the multi-billion dollar NASA and DoD contracts.

The name is "CST-100 StarLiner". You know, like a "787 DreamLiner" or "F-22 Raptor", "F-35 Lightning II", "C-17 GlobeMaster III", "UH-60 BlackHawk", etc... Those monikers don't serve much purpose anyway. They are really only used in marketing material and in the media. You'll never see a pilot refer to an F-16 as a Fighting Falcon or an air-traffic controller use the name DreamLiner for a 787.