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Atlas V to be man-rated
On Jul 20, 5:51*am, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article 9e6eb710-6c25-4645-8324- , says... The problem is that Space X apparently doesn't want to fly Dragon atop anyone else's boosters, and Orion MPCV is way too massive to carried into orbit by a single common core booster, hence the launch tenatively scheduled for 2013 on a Delta IV is going to be a Heavy. This modification of Atlas V strikes me as a smart hedging of bets towards ensuring manned access to LEO in the advent that Falcon 9 has a Bad Day. Obviously SpaceX would like to see Dragon fly on Falcon. *Falcon keeps the fate of Dragon within the same company. *On top of that, it's far cheaper than Atlas. * Yes, and the down side to that is what is going to happen when Falcon 9 has a Bad Day? Does Musk have a secret back up plan to fly a Dragon on an Atlas V or other launcher? That's what bothers me. He's gone too "in-house" in order to cut costs. What about Boeing's commercial capsule? *Assuming it flies, it's got to go up on something. *For Boeing, having Atlas as an option is a good thing. *Falcon may be cheaper, but why would Boeing want to trust their capsule to be launched *only* by the competition's launcher? * As you well know, Boeing and other COTS groups, like SpaceDev, are designing their vehicles to go on a wide variety of launchers, not just one in particular. That might be a big more expensive in the short term, but it could pay off big time in the long term by not stranding their spacecraft in the advent of a Bad Day. Competition is a good thing, but when the same companies are working on both launchers and capsules, the situation does become a bit complicated. I don't see that as a big problem. We can take a lesson from aviation history here. For example, look at how for many years Hughes Aircraft produced numerous designs and aircraft and Howards Hughes at the same time owned and operated Trans World Airlines (TWA), which also made use of Hughes Aircraft designs. -Mike |
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