Eric Berger has the latest. Killing EUS would also eliminate the need for ML-2. It could be that we’ll have to continue wasting money on the SLS core and Orion for a while, but it would free up some funds to actually get back to the Moon soon.
11 thoughts on “A Compromise On SLS?”
Comments are closed.
Hardly ideal, but something that can be lived with – provided that lunatic nonsense about flying people on the first flight of the new stack goes away along with the EUS. An unmanned test between Artemis 3 and the next manned Artemis mission isn’t going to have any influence on whether or not we can Beat the Chinese[tm] – that’s all on Artemis 3.
If we’re also still going to be stuck with Gateway, perhaps the unmanned test of the notional new stack can carry a piece of it – though it will have to be a piece that can dock with PPE-HALO autonomously.
If SLS-Orion can only be killed on the installment plan that is still superior to leaving it to shamble on indefinitely.
I have yet to see how Gateway is usable, as it’s in a two-week halo orbit that is virtually useless for a surface abort.
Why don’t we send it to L4/L5 instead? Give us an outpost there to survey the local environment. See how must space debris in the form of dust/rocks has been swept into one of those orbits with minimal station keeping required. Give us perhaps a usable “gateway” to cis-lunar space. If we build two we can have one at each. Must be serviceable via a Starship at a minimum however.
Can’t see much point in sending a dinky, barely habitable “space station” – never mind two – all the way to those Lagrange points. Even one Gateway in NRHO is an unjustifiable sink for resources far better used for lunar human surface activities and infrastructure.
And what science there is to be usefully done at L4 and L5 could be accomplished much less expensively with unmanned probes. I think, for example, that Blue Origin’s Blue Ring – which Blue is already touting for long-term deep space use as a datacom relay near Mars when equipped with a large parabolic antenna – could be outfitted with that same antenna and a very multifarious suite of instrumentation for long-term programs of observation and science gathering at L4 and L5.
Given that Blue is looking for applications for Blue Ring, this would justify building two more and go toward reducing the cost of individual units. I think the big antenna version of BlueRing could well be an excellent bus for all sorts of long-term deep space fly-by and orbiter missions. And the more of these that get built, the cheaper each will be.
I only suggest it because as I understand it “metal bending” for Gateway has already begun. I don’t argue that a probe could do just as well if not better. Only figure that if the money is already spent maybe we could get something for it.
Your vision is 20/20. Gateway is useless in any practical sense – other than accommodating the delta-V limitations of the SLS-Orion stack. Like SLS and Orion, its origins were political and it only continues as a pork magnet for not only our own legacy contractors, but those of Europe and Japan as well. I certainly don’t favor building it and my comment about it was strictly with respect to its likely continued existence due to politics.
Personally, I’ve always felt that it should be parked at EML-1, if for no other reason than to serve as a placeholder for future operations there. After all, space is first-come, first-served. EML-1 is the crossroads of cislunar space, providing innumerable benefits for future space efforts:
-instruments at EML-1 and EML-3 provide a high ground view of all of cislunar space,
-great spot for staging future GEO salvage efforts.
-24/7 access to everywhere on the Moon
-accessible to all inclinations of LEO for about the same delta-v
-cheapest launch point to deep space from cislunar space
The list can go on and on. A placeholder at EML-1 is probably the best use for Gateway, at the moment.
[and yeah, don’t get me started on NRHO. What a kludge of a compromise, trying to stay far away from the Moon for as long as possible, with the SLS intercept looking like the old Surveyor trajectories from back when our rockets were still a bit…underpowered]
Could another country contract with SpaceX to do a crewed lunar surface mission including Dragon launch to a fully refueled HLS lander in LEO. The effect would be to establish that a viable alternative exists to Artemis 3 with SLS.
There are also 3,000 people worldwide who have $1 billion or more to pay for said mission.
An all-reusable-Starship-based lunar mission will cost a small fraction of $1 billion and could carry dozens of people. The ticket price won’t be something an Ordinary Joe can afford, but it won’t require being on the Forbes 400 list either.
No. That would be a one-way mission. HLS can’t get back to Earth orbit from the Moon and lacks the TPS for a direct entry.
And forget any scenario involving Dragons at all. There are only five, each requires lengthy refurb between missions, SpaceX does not intend to build more, and the five we have will all be at end-of-life about the time the Falcons are retired in the early 2030s.
The replacement for SLS-Orion will be a Starship version that can take large crews from Earth’s surface to LEO for refilling and thence to a much closer lunar orbit than NRHO to rendezvous with an HLS Starship. There will also be a cargo-only version that can robotically transfer payload pallets to a cargo-only version of the HLS Starship – call it a CLS Starship. All of these can be in service by the early 2030s.