18 thoughts on “The Program Of Record”

  2. If that’s the case, there is no reason for SLS or Orion. Orion was pitched as being able to travel beyond LEO, with extra radiation shielding and a heat shield that (allegedly) will handle much higher reentry velocities. SLS was needed to launch the excessively heavy Orion.

    They don’t need a multibillion dollar rocket and capsule to launch 4 people to LEO. They could simply launch them on Crew Dragon for maybe 5% of the cost of SLS and Orion.

    1. Well, SpaceX would need to have Starship do orbital capture from the Moon to Earth or Starship would have land on Earth’s surface from Lunar orbit.

    2. Everyone is ignoring what could be done with all this excess hardware! Remember at the end of Apollo we had the Apollo-Soyuz first international rendezvous and docking. Why with Orion and Starliner we could have the first Lockheed-Boeing peace mission. With of course a SpaceX Dragon available so that at mission end the crews of both can be safely returned to Earth!

  3. I have to say that spending those 5 day journeys to and from lunar orbit in the spacious interior of Starship would at least be a far less cramped experience for the astronauts.

    Come to that, even Blue Moon Mk2 would be a step up in habitable volume.

  4. Imagine having spent 2 decades coming up with SLS, and then looking at the companies (SpaceX and Blue Origin) you laughed at 20 years ago with larger rockets that are fully reusable. Sure, neither have flown people on board, yet before you could possibly fly 5 SLS missions; they’ll have done that many missions on the same booster having carried crew, and at the cost of just 1 (ok, maybe 2) SLS mission.

    1. Current estimates I’ve seen for Orion SLS is about 4 Billion (give or take 10%) per launch and over 23 billion so far. Estimates for Starship are all over the place from 2-10 billion, depending on whether you think Starbase/Cape Canaveral additions count and whether you are pro or anti Starship. Current Starship is NOT man-rated and Lunar would need a fair bit of work. That said, to say Orion is man-rated takes a fair bit of chutzpah. I’d bet good money on the fact that ultimately Starship will have a lower cost to orbit than Falcon 9/ Falcon 9 Heavy, SpaceX needs that to keep expanding Starlink and bring its costs down, When that will be and when/if they man-rate it is a harder question.SpaceX seems to have decided that a Lunar colony is a good intermediate for a Mars colony so I suspect they’ll be pushing hard on that front, but they have a lot of complex issues to solve in the meantime. NASA has gotten horribly hidebound and dependent on feeding various states/delegations to get money and so are incredibly cautious in some ways and insanely risk unaware in others. It shouldn’t be possible yet here we are…

        1. I always thought of it as “capable of carrying payloads other than plutonium”…

  5. I presume this still depends on the lunar Starship being refueled in earth orbit before heading for the Moon. This really feels like we WANT to have an orbital station to transfer to. Take an Orion (or Dragon crew) to the station and park it there. Board the docked and fueled lunar Starship and do your mission. Take the lunar Starship back to the station and transfer to the Orion/Dragon. If we still think we want the isolation time (like the Apollo astronauts did) do that at the station. Then transfer to earth with Orion/Dragon, no need for heavier heat shields.

    If the ISS weren’t such a decrepit hunk of junk, it would be a good starting point. As it is it seems like we really want one of the commercial stations as particularly the older Russian parts of ISS are delicate.

    1. It has to carry the fuel to leave earth orbit, land and return to earth orbit, for all its mass unless you can refuel somewhere else along the way.

      It will allow you to reuse the lander, though.

  6. Let’s be honest about what this is. It’s the greatest engineering exercise to save political face in the history of the space program. We all know how this is going to end; it’s just a question of how long(expensive) or involved the Kabuki theatre will be.

    1. Yup. Dialing back the expectations about what it will do in the future while building the expectation that it will phased out after some important contributions.

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