New Mars Forums

It doesn't suprise me very much that Kistler would dump orbital as their prime sub-contractor. The Alt.Space start ups aren't going to have much hope of actually producing vehicles given their reletivley meager budgets if they delegate major sub-systems to the primes with their low production rate high cost structures. This is the conclusion SpaceX came to and is why they are so vertically integrated. What Alt.Space needs now is Alt.SubContractors that can do things like make friction stir welded LiAl tanks for a fraction of the cost of Michoud.

Well that's true, but they will still on an order of magnitude cheaper then their Plutonium/Uranium burning counterparts, Lithium6-Deuteride is a fraction of the cost of weapons grade Uranium.

You are assuming that it will be cheaper and/or faster to develop a new, air startable, large cryogenic engine then it is to simply put the five segement RSRB into production. There is an RD cost associated with the fuel change for the CLV, but there have been two 5 segement RSRBs ground fired.

There simply is not a large enough air startable engine in production right now that would allow for the origional CLV configurations, and I can guarantee you that it will cheaper to produce a flight ready 5 segement SRB then it would be to produce an expendable/air startable SSME.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that to get the life capacity we need out of the Ares V we need the five segement SRB. Please don't counter that argument with by saying we just need a 3 or 4 SRB version of the Ares V, the diminishing returns you get with solids, not to mention unit cost and pad infrastructure pretty much dictates that's not really an option or a good solution.

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The big culprit in the long development time we are looking at with the Ares I and V is the fact that we still have the great white elephant of the space shuttle and space station on NASA's back. The faster we get ride of those two leeches the faster we will be on our way to the Moon and Mars.

I think that will be the most valuable thing that the Mars Society can do with the analog research stations is long duration 'missions' working up to a full length mission length.

Well we can be ready for colinizing Mars once we can indgenously produce Mountain Dew and vodka in the Hellas Basin 

...with any luck the first heard of martian cattel will produced the first martian beef tenderloins right around that time too, haha

There is no way the economics of developing a reusable nuclear-electric Ion tug would work out for even Mars cargo supply, better to just apply the economies of scale to expendable nuclear thermal or chemical upperstages.

Eventually reuseable infrastructure will be needed but we havn't gotten their technologically or time-line wise.

That's very spiffy, but about 20 years too late, the USAF developed and likely briefly deployed a weapon system in white world papers referred to as the Hypersonic Glide Vehicle. The idea was basically you hang several solid rockets with lifting body encased warheads off the side of a B-52, which heads to 40,000 feet, the solid rockets light off and send the Warheads on their way which then separate at half way to their target and glide at over mach 9 the rest of the way. The idea being that they could go through early warning radars undetected and maneuver their way around ABM defenses.

When the program was run in the mid to late 1980s it was SAR which is why you likely haven’t heard of it, now details are slowly starting to leak out.

My hope is that NASA chooses to go with uprated the launch vehicle rather then gutting payload. It would be a reletivley easy fix to expand the CaLVs tank and SRBs are cheap enough that going from two to four wouldn't be a cost breaker. If they start  gutting the LSAM then VSE just become Apollo redux with no major capacity to put payloads on the surface.

Also, as GCNR stated, really the only thing that Mars is getting out of the current ESAS  hardware is the HLV, so we might as well get as big a one as possible from the get go to make the Mars program look that much cheaper when it rolls around.

Does anyone know if the cost overrun on the Ares I is due to the switch to five segement or is it just big aerospace bloating? If the latter is the case I say ditch ATK and dump that money into COTS. 3 billion would pay for the T space CXV and the Space X Dragon.

Oh, I'm very aware that Space Ship One and two are basically toys. Also the hybrid rockets they are using are so low preforming I don't think they will ever be of any significant value. What I do see Burt doing of value is producing a large dedicated carrier aircraft. If they are overbuilding the White Knight II to the extent that is rumored it could carry a good old fashioned low tech rocket and capsule up and drop it via delayed lanyard release ala AirLaunch. I don't think that any AltSpace company would be able to muster the resources to produce a real TSTO. Yet anyways, or I hope at least.

Pad Processing Error doomed the Faclon 1 rather then a design flaw. according to that article.

It's funny I figured if they were going to loose a vehicle from anything it would be burn through on the engine bell, I know they were having some problems with their pintel combustor system.

I'm encouraged by this bit of news and the fact that they are pressing forward, especially with the Dragon...I think SpaceX is the AltSpace Canery in the mine shaft, if they survive others will follow, if they don't, well that's that. [/url]

And my AltSpace hopes and dreams die today....

Might be really easy if you want to go real big and adopt a 10m diameter tank, since I suspect that much of the Saturn handling hardware is likley still in place.