Dwayne Day has some interesting early history of the space program and Bob Truax over at The Space Review.
And Jeff Foust writes about Flexible Path, Plymouth Rock and HEFT.
3 thoughts on “Rocket Man”
Comments are closed.
Dwayne Day has some interesting early history of the space program and Bob Truax over at The Space Review.
And Jeff Foust writes about Flexible Path, Plymouth Rock and HEFT.
Comments are closed.
Reading ‘Charting a Flexible Path’ just makes me angry. Hundreds of billions and 15 years of waiting and we still won’t have the infrastructure for general missions. $1.85b will park a ship ten times more capable than Orion in orbit in just a few years with almost no design expense. Bigelow and SpaceX have already built and orbited 90%+ of our ship.
We don’t need any lift capability more than we have. What we do need is to be practicing the transfer of kerosene and LOX in zero G. That’s it.
It would be nice if we could take what we have now and do exploration while simultaneously working on a super heavy lift.
Great discussion on last Thursday’s Space Show about the costs of Fuel Depots in LEO or EM1 to support lunar missions vs super heavy lift.
From my non-technical perspective, both were good, none of them were perfect, and neither of them was cheap.
Wodun, ya know when Dave asked my question about how a 75mt booster affects what they were talking about.. and they ignored the question.. and then he tried to push them to talk about the value of propellant depots to no-heavy-lift deep-space missions.. and they ignored him again? You should have seen the questions as they went over chat, and it wasn’t just me.
Yes, propellant depots can make heavy lift more capable, and that’s great, but the *real* value is in the use of propellant depots and *existing* boosters to deep-space exploration.. and they refused to talk about it.
Otherwise it was great.