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Old October 1st 17, 03:07 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default NASA is teaming up with Russia to put a new space station near the moon. Here's why.

In article ,
says...
There is as much "realism" to it as there was to Falcon 9 launching
manned Dragons to ISS 5 to 10 years ago. Today, that looks imminent.

There is a lot of risk here, but the "holy grail" of cheap access to
space has always been a fully reusable launch vehicle. BFR, even if
unmanned, would be hugely useful.


It's almost too big. Replacing Falcon 9 with BFR (which Musk says is
the plan) is an insane increase in capability and the cost to launch
BFR can't be more than Falcon 9 per launch (around $63 million
expendable or something like $40 million with booster recovery).


This is where it gets tricky (since economics isn't my strong suit).
Note that just this year SpaceX has launched a former Falcon 1 payload
on Falcon 9, possibly at a loss. But, in the big scheme of things, that
was surely cheaper than keeping the Falcon 1 production lines open,
which would have delayed development of Falcon 9 possibly resulting in
the death of the company.

But I agree, you likely would not want to launch a single Falcon 9 class
payload on BFR since it seems like a real waste of capability. But, if
you really can fly a BFR 100 or more times without refurbishment, it
might just make sense. This would be the sort of "airline like
operations" that cheap access to space supporters have been dreaming
half a century.

More realistically, with BFR, you'd surely want to launch more than one
Falcon 9 class payload at a time. Assuming the existence of an in space
refuelable "tug", BFR would only have to deliver the payloads to LEO and
refuel the tug(s) which would then deliver the payloads to their final
orbits (e.g. geostationary transfer orbit or similar).

The "tug" might just end up being an ACES upper stage powered by a
LOX/methane variant of the RL-10. That way you could refill it from
leftover BFR propellants. If ULA didn't produce such a thing, then
SpaceX no doubt could. It would just be a "micro" BFR upper stage
powered by a single Raptor engine that never leaves orbit.

Jeff
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