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Old October 1st 17, 11:39 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Default NASA is teaming up with Russia to put a new space station near the moon. Here's why.

JF Mezei wrote:

On 2017-09-30 17:38, Jeff Findley wrote:

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.


If BFR works out, what happens to the rest of the industry?


It adapts or dies.


At what point do all the others (Boeing etc) scramble to develop
reusable rockets? How many years to develop a reusable system?


They already are. See the long term plan for ULA Vulcan. They're not
thinking big enough, though. Their first goal is to halve the price
of a basic Atlas (to around $84 million per launch). This is still a
third more expensive than Falcon 9, which has similar payload, and
down around the cost of Falcon Heavy, which is much more capable.
They're not building for reusability but are talking about adding it
later by having Vulcan jettison its first stage engines and recovering
them in the air with a helicopter.


Or would the big guys just increase lobby efforts so they continue to
get the government/military business even if they can't compete on price?


That too. They're still talking about using a bunch of solid rocket
strap ons to increase payload.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw