"Scott Kozel" wrote in message
...

On Saturday, August 3, 2019 at 12:43:23 PM UTC-4, Jeff Findley wrote:
says...

If Moon manned landing missions were resumed, what would be a
realistic schedule?

Apollo flew about 3 times per year, and had massive amounts of funding.

Given future funding, maybe one per year going forward? One every
two years? That would be a lot slower than Apollo, but still having
five missions per decade will do a lot of science over time, that
would be 10 missions over the next 20 years.

Plus doing things not done by Apollo, such as the mission the south
polar area, missions to the far side of the Moon, missions to
mountainous areas, etc.

If Congress continues to fund SLS/Orion ($2+ billion a year just for
SLS), then the flight rate will be at most twice per year. At first, it
will be only once a year, once crew is flying, IMHO.

Boeing is having a hard time building the SLS core stage. And while
they claim they've discovered ways to make that go faster, I'll take
that claim with a grain of salt until they prove they can ramp up the
flight rate to something "reasonable", which is 2x a year for SLS.

In reality, 2x a year is a pathetic flight rate and worse than Apollo
did 50+ years ago.

We have had zero a year for the last 50 years.

Wouldn't 20 per decade be an enormous improvement over that?

That assumes there's more than 2-3 flights... total.

I just don't see SLS being sustainable at its price, especially with Falcon
Heavy flying and BFR possibly coming along sooner than SLS.


Plus the sustainability to continue that for 2 or 3 decades or more?
At that cost, it's not sustainable.

And keep in mind right now the first few SLS flights will be flying
re-vamped SSMEs. Once those run out, we need new ones.


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