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Old November 20th 17, 12:20 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

In article . com,
says...

On 2017-11-19 09:45, Jeff Findley wrote:

Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs.



It is obvious that this was the case for Ares/SLS. Desire to replace the
business lost with Shuttle retirement.

But since NASA didn't "feed" ATK in the 60s and 70s, abandonning Apollo
wouldn't mean lost business for ATK.

Would be interesting to look through the decision correspondance to see
how ATK won the business and how hard a pitch it had to make or whether
the pitch was made by the military or politicians.

If the decision was largely reliant on "influence" to help ATK, I have
to wonder if the "too expensive to develop" liquit fly-back boosters was
just an excuse to justify the SRB decision.


Actually it would have been quite expensive to develop liquid fueled
flyback boosters since there really wasn't any suitable LOX/kerosene
engine at the time. That and winged vehicles aren't exactly trivial to
develop. Reusing shuttle avionics might have helped a bit, but you'd
still need to tweak the programming quite a bit since "things that are
different just aren't the same".

Also note that Aerojet Rocketdyne is not only pitching AR-1 for Vulcan,
but they're also saying it would work for advanced boosters for SLS.
AR-1 is to be their high thrust oxygen rich staged combustion
LOX/kerosene engine. Cite:

http://www.rocket.com/ar1-booster-engine

AR-1 is the engine they should have been developing for decades.
Starting when Russia started selling their RD-180 for use on Atlas first
stages.

Jeff
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