NASA studies new booster (UPI)

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 15:03:58 GMT, in a place far, far away, Scott
Lowther made the phosphor on
my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 03:19:47 GMT, in a place far, far away, Scott
Lowther made the phosphor on
my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

The problem is that the heavy lifter has much higher development
costs,

Undemonstrated

??

Only to someone utterly innocent of launch systems.

Indeed? When has *anyone* *ever* built a low-cost launch vehicle?

I don't know. When has anyone built a hypersonic hovercraft?

Scott Lowther wrote:

Dick Morris wrote:

And how big do you think we need?

Saturn V class seems to be appropriate for minimal Moon missions, and
for major componants of Mars missions.

I saw two Saturn V launches from about 3 miles away, and God knows I'd
love to see another one, but I don't think we're going to be building
anything that big again this side of 2050. But that doesn't mean we
*can't* go back to the Moon or to Mars. The IMLEO of a Moon or Mars
ship will be roughly 80% propellants, so a vehicle with a payload of 1/5
the IMLEO could launch all the hardware in one flight, then launch the
propellants in several tanker flights of the same launch vehicle. No
on-orbit *assembly* would be required, just docking and propellant
transfer operations.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Dick Morris wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:

Dick Morris wrote:

And how big do you think we need?

Saturn V class seems to be appropriate for minimal Moon missions, and
for major componants of Mars missions.

I saw two Saturn V launches from about 3 miles away, and God knows I'd
love to see another one, but I don't think we're going to be building
anything that big again this side of 2050.

I don;t see why not. A shuttle-derived vehicle can easily be in the same
class as the Saturn V.



--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Scott Lowther wrote in message ...
Dick Morris wrote:
I saw two Saturn V launches from about 3 miles away, and God knows I'd
love to see another one, but I don't think we're going to be building
anything that big again this side of 2050.

I don;t see why not. A shuttle-derived vehicle can easily be in the same
class as the Saturn V.

That's the hilarious thing about the Shuttle stack. It's
a Saturn V equivalent heavy lift launcher (it can throw 97%
of the S-V LEO payload into orbit, counting the orbiter
mass but not the SSMEs). And it's flown over a hundred
times. Nobody notices this because of the huge
inefficiency, and general banality, of the Shuttle system
and program. Just imagine what we could have done with
100 Saturn-V launches.

Scott Lowther wrote:


Indeed? When has *anyone* *ever* built a low-cost launch vehicle?


Scout; IIRC they used to go for around 1 million apiece.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:


Indeed? When has *anyone* *ever* built a low-cost launch vehicle?


Scout; IIRC they used to go for around 1 million apiece.

But the paylaod was pathetic, and that was when a million dollars was
*real* money.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Scott Lowther wrote:



Scout; IIRC they used to go for around 1 million apiece.



But the paylaod was pathetic, and that was when a million dollars was
*real* money.


But there might be some lessons to learn from it; it didn't need many
ground support crew or much launching infrastructure due to it's
simplicity (it was solid-fueled) and those factors allowed it to be
launched with economy from fairly simple sites like Italy's San Marco
site and our Wallops Island in a manner more like a sounding rocket than
what is associated with a liquid-fueled satellite launcher.
And with a launch success rate of over 98%, it didn't suck in the
reliability sphere either.
The reason I mentioned it was that it was one space launcher that was
specifically developed for economy- in development, construction, and
operations.

Pat

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 16:07:47 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:

No ....

The Atlas and (Thor) Delta families of boosters have been used to
launch payloads into space for almost as long as we've been launching
payloads into space. That' not sustainable? They've been sustained
for almost 50 years.

.... not for serious exploration activities.

The Altas family launched the Mercury orbital missions, the Agena
target vehicles for Gemini, as well as the Mariner, Surveyor, and
Pioneer unmanned probes. In recent years, the Delta 2 has been the
workhorse for planetary exploration, most recently for the Spirit and
Opportunity missions. The heavy versions of the Delta iV and Atlas 5,
each using three booster cores, could conceivably orbit an
Apollo-class capsusle, so they could be used at least for getting the
CEV/Constellation on orbital missions. That's not space exploration?
Then what have we been doing for almost fifty years?




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On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:27:43 -0400, in a place far, far away, Michael
Gallagher made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 16:07:47 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:

No ....

The Atlas and (Thor) Delta families of boosters have been used to
launch payloads into space for almost as long as we've been launching
payloads into space. That' not sustainable? They've been sustained
for almost 50 years.

Not for any serious exploration initiative.

.... not for serious exploration activities.

The Altas family launched the Mercury orbital missions, the Agena
target vehicles for Gemini, as well as the Mariner, Surveyor, and
Pioneer unmanned probes. In recent years, the Delta 2 has been the
workhorse for planetary exploration, most recently for the Spirit and
Opportunity missions. The heavy versions of the Delta iV and Atlas 5,
each using three booster cores, could conceivably orbit an
Apollo-class capsusle, so they could be used at least for getting the
CEV/Constellation on orbital missions. That's not space exploration?

Not on the scale being proposed (or that many, including me, would
desire).

Pat Flannery wrote


Scout; IIRC they used to go for around 1 million apiece.

x10

The 1991 edition of Isakowitz' "International Reference
Guide to Space Launch Systems" gives the estimated launch
price in 1990 dollars as $10M to $12M for Scout, $15M for
Enhanced Scout. ($10M in 1990 bucks is ~ $14M in 2004 per
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/.)