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Old October 1st 17, 02:53 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Default NASA is teaming up with Russia to put a new space station near the moon. Here's why.

In article ,
says...
More like they're trying to find a use for SLS/Orion that doesn't
require them to go back to Congress and ask for tens of billions more in
funding for each year. Since Asteroid Retrieval Mission was shot down
(because it was stupid to bring the asteroid to high earth orbit where
Orion could reach it), NASA has been looking for something, anything, to
replace it with.

In my opinion, the Deep Space Gateway, as currently envisioned (likely a
high lunar orbit or something similar), is "weak sauce" without a lunar
lander.


Not only that, but if Musk actually gets BFR flying in the next five
years it's rather pointless. With an orbital refueling, BFR could land
dozens of people on the Moon and bring them all home. For $128
million BFR would put more people on the Moon in one shot than the
entire Apollo program (and by a lot). Bring home a ton of samples
(literally).


Agreed. This could be the vehicle that finally gets NASA manned
spaceflight beyond LEO in a truly meaningful way. With its crazy
capacity and delta-V capability, it could land all the science
experiments on the moon that NASA could dream up (at least in the next
5-10 years). The BFR upper stage is very close to the hypothetical in
orbit refuelable SSTO discussed in the sci.space about three decades
ago.

Note that Musk figures that in the next few years SpaceX will capture
half of the entire satellite launch business. In the face of that and
BFR, NASA's 'lunar orbiting space station' makes even less sense (and
it made very little in the first place - what's it for, exactly?).


Possibly. But Blue Origin isn't sitting still either, so SpaceX could
have some competition. Real competition is a good thing.

There will no doubt be a portion of launches by governments that will
choose to use their own vehicles, at least for some time. It would be a
bit embarrassing, for example, for Ariane 6 to only fly a few times due
to high costs and complete lack of customers.

I loved the illustration Musk showed of a BFR spaceship docked to ISS.
Given that the BFR spacecraft can carry 100 people in cabins with
supplies for 3-6 months, what the hell would you need ISS for once
it's flying?


Routine, inexpensive, access to LEO via BFR might turn out to be a
viable replacement for much of the activities done on ISS today. Why
rotate a crew on ISS every six months when you can just launch another
BFR with crew and experiments?

But, IMHO, you still need long term (years rather than months) in space
laboratories, habitats, power generation, and etc. to perform longer
term experiments. So ISS may still have a purpose for some time to
come. But, time will tell.

Truly cheap access to space (CATS) is something the sci.space newsgroup
has been discussing since I started reading it back in 1988 or so. It's
taken decades to get where we are now (proving once and for all that the
all expendable old space "emperor has no clothes"). It may take another
10 or more years for the vision of a truly inexpensive BFR to become
reality. But I truly hope that SpaceX's time-line for BFR is fairly
realistic and that it is as successful as they hope.

Worst case, we've still got Blue Origin slowly plodding along. Bezos
seems quite content to keep funding it at its current pace. That's the
advantage of being a multi-billionaire. You don't have to rely
completely on outside funding for truly long term investments in new
tech.

It's kind of sad really. US corporations are sitting on so much cash
these days that could be funding truly long term tech development.
Apple, for example, has an obscene amount of cash, but all they seem to
be producing is incremental updates to the iPhone that truly don't
impress me. I'll be sticking with my 64GB iPhone 6 hand-me-down (was my
oldest daughter's) until it dies completely.

Jeff
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