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RD-180 relplacement
On Thursday, May 11, 2017 at 8:42:25 AM UTC-4, Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Scott M. Kozel" wrote: Three separate heavy lift vehicles in development that would be capable of taking men to the Moon or Mars. Actually only one 'program'. And two commercial efforts. I don't really understand that. Last time one vehicle was developed and they built 16 of them and had programs in place to use them within a reasonable period of time, that provided economies of scale and focus to do the program. It was a national scale program and accomplished great things. Last time we had a single government program that spent money like water, made the trip, and then had no follow-on, which is why we can't get beyond LEO anymore. The current approach doesn't make sense; too many vehicle types in development and no real focus toward building enough of them to have an actual program. The 'government program' (how we did Apollo) is the high priced spread. It's true that it makes no sense because it has no real goal (it changes with every President) and is too expensive to fly. The other two efforts are commercial efforts, make more sense, spend a lot less money, and will be far cheaper to fly. If we did it the old way, we would ONLY have SLS, Musk and Bezos would keep their money, and we'd get another 'flags and footprints' mission to somewhere at best. What kind of commercial effort for such a vehicle and program could provide the tens of billions of dollars in private capital to fund it? What would be the business model? The federal government could provide 60-80% of the funding, but that would not be a private sector effort, that would be massive subsidization by the government. Sure Apollo was expensive, but I wonder how the private sector could profitably fund a program like that. |
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