[New] Space Launch System / Orion Discussion Thread

[tater]

43 minutes ago, AckSed said:

As I understand it, that infamous tweet was about refuelling with oxygen at the moon. SpaceX is gaining a decent chunk of change for the moon lander.

The fixed price contract is $2.9B for landing people and returning them, with a test landing uncrewed first.

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

Here's hoping Elon will support NASA's moon plans, regardless of his own thoughts or motives. Not using the moon, let alone letting the Chinese get first dibs on it, is a tactical blunder which will keep coming back to haunt us.

Musk’s often repeated and enthusiastic goal to create a “Moon Base Alpha” belies any narrative that he doesn’t care about getting to the Moon.  If anything he thinks many aren’t thinking big enough wrt the Moon.  Do people even watch his interviews and talks?

(sidenote: autosuggestion wanted me to enter “Moon Base Aloha”.  Given aloha means both hello and goodbye I got a chuckle as it would fit the goal of being a way station)

[darthgently]

This is kind of wild.  Why not touch base with NASA first?  Kind of sends its own message: you won’t fire me! I quit!

 

[tater]

LockMart saying the quiet part out loud:

It's about money to districts, not capability.

[darthgently]

14 minutes ago, tater said:

LockMart saying the quiet part out loud:

It's about money to districts, not capability.

Actual results vs jobs involved really needs to be scrutinized more.  Not just “jobs”

[Terwin]

I will admit that if the government just wants to spend a lot of money on a jobs program, I am not adverse to that program being in the space sector.

It would be nice if they would produce some sort of value with those job dollars however.

[tater]

8 minutes ago, Terwin said:

I will admit that if the government just wants to spend a lot of money on a jobs program, I am not adverse to that program being in the space sector.

It would be nice if they would produce some sort of value with those job dollars however.

Yeah, if the specs for SLS/Orion had been set to allow a lunar mission in 1 launch from the start (~70 tons to TLI as a baseline), I'd have zero issues with it. Not cost effective, but a jack of all trades capability, even at huge cost.

[RCgothic]

I'm still not clear how you manage to take shuttle heritage parts and produce a launcher that's 8x more expensive and can fly 1/6th as often. 

Literally just omitting the wings, cockpit and heatshield from an orbiter would have resulted in more payload to LEO annually than SLS will ever manage by a long, long distance.

It wouldn't have been hard to convert that into more mass to LLO with EOR.

[AckSed]

If the comment I saw below Arstechnica's article on it is correct, you have to scrap the tooling once the shuttle program is over, then rebuild it when the call to reuse is sent down.

If that's not bad enough, stopping a program can cost a bomb as well, and you will never recoup as much as you think.

[Flavio hc16]

9 hours ago, RCgothic said:

I'm still not clear how you manage to take shuttle heritage parts and produce a launcher that's 8x more expensive and can fly 1/6th as often. 

Literally just omitting the wings, cockpit and heatshield from an orbiter would have resulted in more payload to LEO annually than SLS will ever manage by a long, long distance.

It wouldn't have been hard to convert that into more mass to LLO with EOR.

Shuttle C was always the Answer, and it would have been a good architecture:

 

2/3 launches of shuttle C + a crewed launch of just Orion Ares I stile ( but not with the Ares 1) and you had a 170/ 240 tons stack in LEO ready to do whatever you want, and you knew you could launch at least 4-6 per year and 2 launches in close proximity.