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NASA/DARPA Super Mars Rocket
On 28 Oct, 21:26, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 10/28/2010 2:26 AM, Ian Parker wrote: The cost of Ariane 5 is $120M per launch, but Ariane 5 has an 18,000Kg LEO payload. Neither, as I understand it, is human space flight qualified, although there is the possibility that Ariane Ariane 5 was design to be man-rated, as originally one of its payloads was to be the Hermes mini-shuttle; but the French decided that if they optimized it to carry the Hermes it would be less economical as a commercial launcher, and that was the main purpose it was developed for:http://www.astronautix.com/craft/hermes.htm Energia is 88,000Kg. A real heavyweight. http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/energia.htm http://www.friends-partners.org/part...vs/energia.htm Yeah, but Energia is dead as a doornail despite Russian dreams of somehow restarting the program. For starters, the four strap-on Zenit boosters are made in Ukraine, not Russia, and Russia and Ukraine aren't on very friendly terms...probably a result of Stalin starving between seven and ten million Ukrainian farmers to death while exporting all the wheat they grew to show the triumph of the Soviet collective farm concept. Development cost was something over a billion roubles. Launch cost - vague but probably comparable to Ariane 5. This potted survey shows that if you want the lowest per Kg cost at LEO you buy Russian. It is not as simple as that, there are political questions and the cost may not be a true cost. The real comparison is with Ariane 5. This shows that Falcon, while an innovation is not so radically different from other solutions. The real eye opener is Ariane 5. This I think is because the Europeans, the French in particular had much more consistent objectives than NASA. This analysis rubbishes Capitol Hill but not necessarily NASA that has to live with the objectives set. The French were out to make a buck on commercial space launches; an idea completely alien to NASA. Certainly the quality of the scientific brains that produced this proposal is not in question. Ares I/Orion was supposed to be an easy-to-build system that could be done quickly, and at low cost. Then it began...Orion weighed too much, so the ground landing via airbags or landing rockets and reusable heatshield got replaced by a sea landing and non-reusable ablative heatshield. But that was still too heavy to use a stock four-segment Shuttle SRB for the first stage, so that had to be replaced with a five segment one. Then it was found that the upper stage still wouldn't give sufficient power to get the Orion into orbit unless it fired its service module engine once separating from the second stage, cutting into its propellant supply. Whatever these scientific brains were good at, figuring out the math of what their spacecraft was going to weigh vs. their planned booster's lifting capabilities apparently wasn't one of their gifts. Pat Ares is a pup. there is little doubt about that. Linguistics - Ares was the Greek god of war. Ares and Mars are therefore synonymous. Ares was conceived of as taking humans there. There are a number of problems, weight is only one of them, oscillation is another. This should indeed have been dealt with with good basic engineering. It would in fact have been better to have pulled Saturn 5 out of retirement and fitted it with modern electronics. However the overriding fact is that Humans on "Ares" are completely under resourced. This is the root cause of the problem. Don't do at all what you can't finish. - Ian Parker |
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