Giant leap for mankind !

Orbital ATK carries less than 8 metric tons to LEO.

http://www.orbitalatk.com/flight-sys...w/default.aspx

http://www.orbitalatk.com/flight-sys...L/default.aspx

http://www.orbitalatk.com/flight-sys...20Approved.pdf

The largest rocket ever seriously studied was Robert Truax's SEA DRAGON

http://www.astronautix.com/s/seadragon.html

which would have carried 450 metric tons (990,000 lbs) into LEO. Three times larger than the Saturn V.

Sea Bee and Sea Horse were built and tested the concept, which were quite successful.

http://www.astronautix.com/s/seabee.html

http://www.astronautix.com/s/seahorse.html

* * *





On Saturday, April 22, 2017 at 12:46:02 PM UTC+12, JF Mezei wrote:
The shuttle had roughly 15 ton capacity.

SLS is to be massive with about 70 tons capacity.

But with little fanfare, Orbital ATK appear to have made orders of
magnitudes improvement with the ability to deliver 7,600 tons of supplies !

From a NASA tweet:
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/855581169596993536
Set your alarms! Tomorrow more than 7,600 tons of supplies arrive at
@Space_Station. Coverage starts at 4:30am ET:
http://go.nasa.gov/2oylzbe


What is significant is that they have maintained this error all week
with their tweets about that launch.


Note: in french, 7,600 means 7 with 6/10 with 3 digits of precision
(coma used to separate units from decimals), but in english the "." is
used, and the "," is used to separate blocks of 3 digits (thousands,
millions etc)

So, if Orbital ATK can already lift thousands of tons to orbit, why is
NASA spending billions to develop a rocket that can only lift 70 tons ? :-)