Jeff Findley wrote on Tue, 27 Mar 2018
06:05:58 -0400:

In article ,
says...

wrote on Mon, 26 Mar 2018 17:24:56 -0700 (PDT):

NASA chief explains why agency won?t buy a bunch of Falcon Heavy rockets:

"By some estimates, NASA could afford 17 to 27 Falcon Heavy launches a year for
what it is paying annually to develop the SLS rocket, which won't fly before
2020. Even President Trump has mused about the high costs of NASA's rocket.

On Monday, during a committee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council, former Space
Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale raised this issue. Following a presentation
by Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, Hale asked whether
the space agency wouldn't be better off going with the cheaper commercial
rocket.

"Now that the Falcon Heavy has flown and been demonstrated, the advertised cost
for that is quite low," Hale said. "So there are a lot of folks who ask why
don't we just buy four or five or six of those and do what we need to do without
building this big, heavy rocket and assemble things like we did with the space
station?""

See:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...heavy-rockets/


And have they asked SpaceX what it would cost to develop the Falcon
Super Heavy, which would have at least the capability of SLS Block 1B?


Falcon Heavy cost $500 million to develop. Even if Super Heavy cost
double that, it would still less than a single year of SLS development
funding. SLS Block 1B won't fly realistically for another 6 years. So,
I'd WAG that Super Heavy would cost about 1/10th of what it will cost
SLS Block IB just to get to first flight.


Falcon Super Heavy would cost much less than that. They hit all the
big speed bumps with side boosters doing Falcon Heavy.


Same goes for launch costs. Even if we assume Super Heavy costs double
compared to Falcon Heavy, that's about $300 million per launch in fully
expendable mode, so partially reusable mode would be a bit less than
that.


My guestimate is that Falcon Super Heavy in reusable form would cost
around $120 million (Falcon Heavy is only about $30 million more than
Falcon 9) and less than $250 million in expendable form.

SLS Block 1B is what NASA will be flying when BFR is ready.

Hopefully. SpaceX would no doubt like to focus all of its development
efforts on BFR instead of Falcon Super Heavy. Unfortunately, we may
have to wait until BFR is flying before SLS is finally killed. BFR will
obsolete SLS completely.


I don't think that will be enough to kill it at this point.


--
"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