Timeline for Why does the government still fund SLS while SpaceX is cheaper and has the same capabilities if not better?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
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| Jul 21, 2020 at 9:39 | comment | added | Barry Jenakuns | @Graham and jamesqf this discussion isn't directly relevant to improving my answer; please have it here chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/110836/… | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 8:48 | comment | added | Graham | @jamesqf And then however many vehicles they're sending to Mars, they will build precisely that many vehicles. If these things cost dollars to make, of course you'd get backups. When they cost billions of millions of dollars to make (and a mission to Mars will cost that) then you don't get a backup. You can't spend a billion dollars for the just-in-case of losing a launcher. And honestly launchers don't die very often. | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 3:31 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Graham: Sure, but had the system been designed with a smaller launcher, the pieces easily could have been backups. E.g. Apollo N's lunar module launch fails, you just launch the one from N+1. Looking ahead, in-orbit assembly will be a necessity for any survivable Mars mission, as you'd need at least two vehicles (for redundancy) roughly the size of the ISS. | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 0:49 | comment | added | SafeFastExpressive | The Orion is another massively expensive project of questionable utility. Building an entire launch system around it is a mistake in itself. | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 8:13 | comment | added | Graham | @jamesqf Every piece of equipment was built for a specific launch though. There were no backups. | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 4:16 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Graham: No space project? How about Apollo, which built a number of nearly identical command modules, service modules, and lunar landers. Note that even though everything for a mission was launched on one rocket, there was quite a bit of in-space reconfiguration being done: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition,_docking,_and_extraction | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 0:23 | comment | added | Graham | @jamesqf What backup? No space project has ever built more than the one item going to orbit (or beyond). Non-flyable test systems are built, sure, but that's it. If that single item is destroyed, building another will take precisely as long as it took to build the first one. Even for satellites which may be designed as a constellation of multiple satellites, they only build exactly the number planned for orbit. You can expect funding to take just as long to come through too. | |
| Jul 19, 2020 at 9:29 | comment | added | user20636 | but there is the "military" fairing @Dragongeek | |
| Jul 19, 2020 at 3:58 | comment | added | jamesqf | @leftaroundabout: OTOH, when you launch the whole thing at once, one failure means you lose everything. With multiple launches, if one fails, you just launch the backup. | |
| Jul 19, 2020 at 0:20 | comment | added | leftaroundabout | @jamesqf well, the more modules the more that can go wrong in orbit. And I guess building a station of the same utility as the ISS from fewer, Skylab-like modules launched on a Saturn V derivative would in hindsight have been cheaper. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 16:46 | comment | added | jamesqf | Of course the question that immediately comes to mind is "Why would you want to launch Orion?" or other large, one piece spacecraft, instead of modular ones that are assembled in orbit? Imagine trying to launch the ISS in one piece :-) | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 12:38 | history | edited | Barry Jenakuns | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Dual manifest Gateway payloads.
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| Jul 18, 2020 at 11:44 | comment | added | Dragongeek | +1 Falcon heavy's payload fairing volume is also rather small--its the same size as the standard F9 which excludes volumetrically large payloads | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 11:26 | history | answered | Barry Jenakuns | CC BY-SA 4.0 |