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Old 05-10-2020, 11:03 PM
luke strawwalker's Avatar
luke strawwalker luke strawwalker is offline
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Originally Posted by tbzep
There is always the possibility that the NASA program will get canceled (yet again) before getting to the moon. It will then be left to SpaceX or possibly another private company to pick up the pieces and do the job. Hopefully, they will actually put the most qualified individual's feet on the moon next, instead of bowing to PC BS. If the most qualified is female, that's awesome. If the most qualified is the whitest dude ever to walk the earth, that's awesome too, cause we finally got back to the moon!


Given NASA's glacial pace, cost overruns and delays on SLS, SLS operating costs now estimated at TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER LAUNCH (even the wildest-eyed "radical" was only saying a billion per launch a few years ago and were laughed at as being 'totally unrealistic", and now turn out to be too conservative in cost estimates!) and the fact NASA has "interim everything" plugged into the program just to do the test flights, after over 16 years of development and evolution of the plan to "return to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond", I think that's a given...

Heck even SLS will require the Block 2 mods to actually do lunar missions, "as planned" anyway, with the new disposable spiral filament wound ASRB's and a new ascent upper stage, deep space propulsion stage, and a real (not interim) service module. That's to say nothing of actually developing a lunar lander. Plus we have this Gateway station in the plans now, which isn't a bad thing mission-wise, as it will allow anytime return from the lunar surface as well as landing at any point on the lunar surface, near or farside, including the polar regions, which was a major limitation in the Constellation Program architecture of Ares I and V launching Orion and Altair lunar landers in a hybrid EOR/LOR type mission plan... Altair couldn't launch from the lunar surface at just "any time" due to the requirements of orbital mechanics, in order to rendezvous with Orion in LLO, and return to Earth. Equatorial launches from Earth (KSC) and the required lunar trajectory places you basically into an equatorial lunar orbit, meaning you can't access high-latitude polar landing sites on the Moon very easily without costly plane-change maneuvers... a lunar gateway station eliminates all that, as basically you can do a direct-ascent from the lunar surface to the gateway station without even entering lunar orbit at all if you don't want to, and of course lunar descents as well from the gateway station. Since it will be at a point beyond the Moon's orbit (Lagrange point) it is in a perfect position to act as a communication relay for lunar farside missions from the surface back to Earth via the Gateway station. Nearside missions will have to relay through Earth to communicate directly to the Gateway station, if required, since it will be behind the Moon from the Earth-facing lunar surface. Polar missions, at least if they're at a high enough latitude near the actual lunar north or south poles, should be able to communicate directly with both Earth and the Gateway station.

The problem is, it adds another layer of development and cost, which means years or another decade or so of time to lunar surface return plans... It's great that it enables so many different lunar missions that Constellation didn't, but it's going to take a long time to do. Granted, the Gateway station should be a lot simpler station that the massive/bloated ISS, but "mission creep" tends to inflate the cost/complexity of *ALL* NASA's plans, so you can expect the Gateway station to fall into the same old trap, taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than the rosy estimates NASA has already been putting out about it.

Personally I think it's time for a sort of "reset" at NASA, anyway... NASA should be building spacecraft, landers, and station modules for things like Gateway, and designing missions like Mars Sample Return, and other more ambitious missions, and get out of the rocket design business... SLS is basically the most expensive reusable parts of shuttle carried over into a totally expendable and basically horribly outdated launch vehicle design that will be underutilized and enormously expensive to support and procure and sustain... and basically as-is there's nothing it can do that Falcon Heavy cannot do... The simple addition of a hydrogen powered upper stage to Falcon Heavy would allow Falcon Heavy to FAR outstrip the current iteration of SLS anyway, at a TINY FRACTION of the cost, and with reusability of the core stages thrown in! SLS tosses EVERYTHING into the drink just to get to orbit for pity's sake! Commercial companies have demonstrated their ability to design, build, test, and operate launch vehicles, so WHY is NASA still operating in the outdated mode that *they* have to build the launch vehicle?? It's not like it's 1964 and the heaviest "commercially" produced launch vehicle available is Titan II... (IIRC). (Yeah I know Saturn I/IB was far outclassing it, but that was a NASA-developed project later built by Chrysler and Douglas at Michoud and Seal Beach, respectively). NASA should be developing hardware and letting commercial companies build the launch vehicles... Instead of spending billions and now nearly 2 decades to reuse old shuttle parts in an outdated and super-expensive low flight rate launch vehicle like SLS, which basically has NO payloads developed to fly on it other than the Orion itself, which is basically only capable of performing a quasi-Apollo 8 type mission by itself anyway...

"No plan survives first contact with the enemy intact" and I don't think we've even BEGUN to see the economic fallout of this covid disaster... it's going to be HUGE, and like a lot of these precautionary measures, the cure is in many cases going to be worse than the disease... I'll be VERY surprised if we're not in a full fledged depression a year from now, and if some of the more extreme "stimulus" measures are actually undertaken, we may well be in a hyperinflationary death spiral similar to Venezuela... (you can't just print money willy nilly and toss it into the economy without causing hyperinflation-- it's just a natural side effect or a basic law of reality... it's never worked ANYWHERE it's been tried, from the Weimar Republic of Depression-Era Germany to Brazil to Venezuela, in the latest case...) In short, economic reality may well kill any lunar return plans, or at the very least, cause super-expensive "bad jokes" like SLS to be torpedoed and replaced with more economically sensible solutions...

Later! OL J R
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