"gaetanomarano" wrote in message
oups.com...

Jeff Findley ha scritto:

You also ignore that the crawlers and MLP's can't handle the weight of
what
you propose (this is from memory).

A: thanks to the four SRB thrust, my AresX is smaller than AresV and
has the same width

From past discussions, I believe I remember that the crawlers can't handle
the weight of four SRB's. Note that the SRB segments are solid fuel and
come fueled from the factory. These things are freaking heavy!
Astronautix.com says they're 1,299,990 lb each fully fueled. By comparison,
the first stage of the Saturn V was 298,104 lb empty. The shuttle's ET is
65,980 lb empty. So adding two of these means adding about 2.6 million
pounds to the stack since you're not going to save much by "slimming down"
the center stage.

From what I understand, that's why the launch tower was taken off the MLP
when they converted them from the Saturn V to shuttle configuration. The
SRB's are *heavy* when compared to an empty liquid fueled stage of the same
performance.

I suppose you could scrap the existing MLP's entirely and build newer,
lighter ones to offset the mass of the two extra SRB's, but I think that's
still a lot to ask for since the MLP is about 9 million pounds. I'm not
sure what would have to change, if anything, in the flame trench. New flame
deflectors?

Any way you slice it, this means lots of changes on the ground to support
this supposedly "simple" change to the launch vehicle.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)