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Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?
Jeff Findley wrote:
In article , says... Were liquid flyback boosters for the Shuttle ever realistic? YES http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf Recovery costs would be dramatically reduced, along with propellant costs. LOX is $0.10 per kg and Kerosene is $0.40 per kg, whilst Polybutadiene and Ammonium Perchlorate costs well over $2 per kg. Recovery from the sea, versus landing at an airport, makes the SRBs way more costly than LRBs, the SRB has far lower performance than the LRB with the LRB being nearly twice as efficient, the cost of refuelling and handling the SRB is 10s times more costly than LRB, the ability to throttle the LRB makes things far safer for the LRB than the SRB, structure weight is far lower for the LRB than the SRB, increasing payload to orbit, haha - this is just the short list. You are completely ignoring development costs. Magic Mookie Math and 'Asshole' Accounting (where he pulls numbers out of his ass) frequently ignore lots of things. NASA never received development funding for liquid fly-back boosters. And with NASA's cost models (especially back then), it would have cost many billions of dollars to develop. The politicians were never willing to fund that kind of development, especially with the huge political support that ATK has always enjoyed. ArianeSpace studied the idea of replacing the SRBs on Ariane 5 with liquid flyback boosters. They concluded the development would take 10 years and be hideously expensive (and EU cost models tend to be much worse than NASA's). Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs. Politically, it was hard to disentangle the shuttle program from the support of that supply chain. This was not something expressed loudly in the press, but I am arguing the pressure was there, behind closed doors. This was pretty much common knowledge at the time when they were doing the original development work. SLS was originally scheduled to get liquid boosters to replace the SRBs around 2024. That development slid to the latter part of the 2020's and it now looks like the 'internal plan' is to use a new ATK SRB called 'Dark Knight' rather than liquid boosters based on the J-1B motor. -- "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 |
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