How do we go from this.

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To this.

Can't they just re-use the same parts that had an already tested 100% rate of succes instead of wasting time and money creating an entirely new LAunch system? A portable laptop could possibly replace all the computers in the original Satrun V so upgrading the electronics shouldn't be such a big deal. Are the engines too expensive to manufacture/maintain? I can't really see why this shouldn't be an option.

The new SLS even has a smaller payload than a 50yo old design. It's fucking laughable.

>>8738092
The saturn 5 only exists as a spreadsheet rocket. We don't have the facilities to make it again. It would be more expensive to try to copy the saturn than to just start over. But the main issue is budget, and NASA's prime directive getting changed by the short sighted executive branch every 4 years.

>>8738101
the main issue is NASA being a shitfest of bureaucracy & competing interests, with congress coming allow to cripple them because they want the money spent in their own districts

More budget doesn't solve the fact they are doing shit all wrong/wastefully

>>8738101
Well atleast they now have a prime directive that focuses on deep space exploration again for 8 years instead of the budget consuming, no-show low earth orbit exploration.

NASA needs to realise that low earth stuff might have been a kinda cool concept with the shuttle and all, but people don't get as rallied up by soyus launches as opposed to say lunar orbiters/landings. They need to work on their PR the same way they did back in the 50s with W. Disney(Blessed his ahead of its time soul) And Wernher Von B.

>>8738115
This. NASA needs to focus solely on what really matters and what the public really wants. Interplanetary exploration. Nobody gives a shit if an astronaut plays guitar in the space station above earth but everyone will turn on their TVs for an astonaut playing guitar on the moon even if they can't it.

>>8738123
exploration is fucking useless
thats how you spend hundreds of billions for zero results

Need to build reusable everything vehicles first, then start bases on the moon

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to this?

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>>8738141
You mean to this

>>8738214
>>8738141
Nice space dildos.

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>>8738233
want more?

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>>8738139
Because reusable everything and space stations make people go WOW right? If pic related happened and a moon station was made then yes, reusable everything would bring public attention a more monies, not low earth orbit snore fests.

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>>8738234
M-maybe.

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>>8738239
>with saturn shuttle we could have maintained the heavy lift of saturn v in addition to having the shuttle
it's just not fair

>>8738239
>space shuttle to the moon

I knew that episode of Jackie Chan Adventures was realistic!

>>8738239
>>8738253
>>8738315

If I recall correctly, the Saturn Shuttle configurations had fatal flaws that prohibited them from being viable, but for the life of me I can't remember the specifics. It looked cool, but something about the design didn't make it worthwhile.

>>8738318
Maybe the stress of the shuttle's weight and drag on the top of the SaturnV would have cause catastrofic failure? Although at first glance one would believe this could be solved by placing it at the bottom of the rocket instead of the center top.

>>8738323
It's probably something of that nature. If you're stuck placing the orbiter at the base, you instantly justify 90% of the Shuttle's design criteria.

>>8738329
But the Russian shuttle didn't even have boosters

Or am I missing something by that 90% figure?

>>8738329
Well theres no making a successful vehicle if you are always stuck with a 80 ton orbiter that needs hundreds of millions of dollars of refurbishment after every launch

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>>8738350
They were on RP-1 though
not solids

Everything about Russia's shuttle was a better design than NASA, still kinda pointless though

>Going to space so elitists, politicians and billionaires can high-five each other

Seriously, what the hell is the point of all this when we have bigger problems down here on Earth? Sure, we need satellites, cellphones and everything and those are incredibly useful but going to the Moon, Mars and beyond is such a fucking waste of money. I get that you grew up with star wars and science fiction movies and these are cool things to do. It costs tens of BILLIONS of dollars for this fantasy.

Are people really this delusional?

>>8738357
it ditched all of its engines

>>8738351
If the Orbiter is the goal, the Shuttle architecture is basically one of the only ways to do it.

>>8738357
The Russian shuttle threw away the engines after every launch, which was less technically complex but not really "better" in light of the irrelevance of the mission profile of the orbiters themselves.

>>8738367
>>8738375
The buran only flew once.. and ofc the boosters were thrown away.

>>8738387
It did almost launch a bitchin' looking orbital space laser once. Almost.

>>8738139
>the moon base meme
maybe after mars

>>8738364
It only costs so much because the globalists and higher ups make it so. Do you really believe the F35 or the SLS reallty cost what they say they do?

>>8738364
wtf i hate inspiring generations of scientists now

black ppl all oppressed n sheeeit but whitey's on da moon!!!!

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>new space race with multiple teams feverishly working to make reusable heavy-lift rockets and dreaming of space tourism, planetary colonization,and even asteroid mining

Fucking spectacular.

>>8738364
this is my favorite pasta

>>8738234
Do they just pick random numbers because it looks cool? Where's Falcon 6 or 7 or Saturn IV?

>>8738101
What happened to the design documents? Did they really not keep them?

>>8738387
The main engines too. On the Russian shuttle the main engines were attached to the external tank and were expended along with the tank. I know that they planned to eventually make the side boosters flyback and be reusable but I'm unsure if they ever had any such plans for the main engines.


>>8738528
Falcon 9 is named Falcon 9 because it has 9 Engines. Saturn 5 was named because it was the 5th design in the Series. Atlas V, Delta IV and Araine 5 are named because they're the 4th or 5th generation of their launch vehicle family.

>>8738139
>exploration is fucking useless
get back to the Fifteenth Century, faggot

>>8738364
>we need satellites, cellphones and everything
Guess where those originated, Sherlock.

>>8738092

The industrial logistics that can make Saturn V's no longer exists.
We're stuck here forever.

>>8738101.
Pretty much this. It is just ridiculous how much such a rocket and it's components cost while the technology used is 50 years old. Look at what SpaceX did. They use technology commonly available and are therefore able to reduce the prices a lot.
NASA would be able to do the same and build a complete new rocket that's far cheaper. But that's not how public funded companies work.

>>8738732
It's actually a little more complicated than that. Of course SLS will cost much more than a falcon/kg to orbit, because it will launch something like once every year at best. Better pricing in privates comes mainly not from reuse (yet) but industrial methods: a factory making a lot of merlin engines will make them overall cheaper than making whole factories for a couple RS25 and SRBs. Same reason Ariane 6 is projected to be in the same price range as spacex without reusability. So making a big awesome nasa rocket will always be expensive unless you commercialize its launches. So far they haven't needed to because they have an ok amount of funds, whereas ESA for example needed ariane to be commercial because they could never afford to build rockets just for science and institutional

itt: idiots who think the only thing that matters is having an idiotic payload capacity.

the saturn V was an impressive rocket, sure, but with launch costs starting at 1.16 billion in todays dollars, it's completely worthless when most customers just want a car-sized box in space.
and for those who do want a heavy payload up there, falcon heavy and new glenn will soon have them covered for a lot less green.
go to the wiki pages of SV, Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9, and the Shuttle, work out the cost per ton into GTO and LEO, then come back to me with a valid argument

>>8738542

The documents aren't the point. We don't have the factories and tooling used to build the Saturn V anymore, also so much of the manufacturing process was manual labor that it would be difficult or impossible to replicate that process.

Now if we wanted to build a Saturn V 2.0 or something to that effect we could, but that would essentially be just developing new technology meant to replicate the old. The end result would look like a Saturn V and have similar performance, but the internals would be very different.

>>8738787
Rebuilding the Saturn V is the most stupid idea ever. The goal should be to build a new rocket with todays technology.
This would even be much cheaper.

>>8738781

Shuttle had a worse dollars-to-payload fraction than Saturn V, because it combined a very high expended hardware and operations cost with a shitty useful payload fraction. It also couldn't directly place any payloads onto geostationary transfer orbit.

Saturn V had a better cost per kg payload, but each launch was very expensive because of how large the rocket was and how much the hardware cost. Every part of the Saturn V required lots of manual labor to produce, and lots of time, thus it was expensive.

Falcon 9 costs $61.2 million to launch up to 22.8 tons into LEO, which works out to about $2,864 dollars per kilogram. Falcon Heavy will cost $90 million to launch up to 54.4 tons to LEO, which works out to a lower cost per kilogram of $1,654, nearly half that of the Falcon 9. This cost reduction is due in part to the high manufacturing volumes associated with each rocket, combined with the fact that the components of the rocket are designed to be easy to manufacture and are almost all produced under one roof as opposed to in separate facilities spread across the country. The entire Falcon family of rockets only uses one turbopump design, for example, and the use of spin forming rather than tubes makes the nozzles far cheaper to produce.

For a super-heavy lift vehicle, these same design principals of ease of manufacture, hardware commonality, and all-in-one factory production would lead to a significant drop in cost per unit.

>>8738803

I agree that it makes no sense to try to replicate the Saturn V. My point was that even if we wanted to start building new Saturn V rockets, we simply can't.

Who cares anyway nowadays? Blue Origin and SpaceX will build rockets far better than the Saturn V within 5 years AND start their own Mars missions.
NASA should be closed down. It has become nothing but a waste of tax payers money in the past 20 years. Too much political interests, too much buerocracy and not enough vision and can-do attitude.

>>8738833
>Falcon Heavy will cost $90 million to maunch up to 54.4 tons to LEO

That's actually wrong. Those numbers surprised me too at first, but turns out it's two different numbers. 54.4 tons to LEO, or 22 to GTO, is the heavy expendable configuration, for wich the price tag is still uncertain. However the $90 million version is the reusable one, wich loses a lot of performance due to boostback and gets down to 8 tons to GTO. It's the same with f9 actually, it can theoretically send over 8 tons to gto, but is set back to 5.3 to be able to land the booster

>>8738079
>>8738084
They don't have the funding to tool back up for Saturn production, so they are trying to get by with space shuttle parts. It's literally as simple as that. The funniest part is that there were actually a whole bunch of STS-based partially-reusable heavy lift vehicle designs floating around back in the 70s, but they killed all of them.

>>8738859
NASA should become more of an operator of facilities in orbit and on ground. Take some of the risk off the private enterprises that undoubtedly are streets ahead the rest.

I don't think they've outlived their role, all the while they take part in interesting shit like rosetta/philae, observatories and telescopes and the space station. But I do agree they're not the most agile organisation for groundbreaking research and development.

>>8738141
>>8738214
They would have killed for such 3d animation back in the 60s, no doubt. Too bad they only had a working heavy lift rocket.

>>8738859
>NASA should be closed down

Implying spacex are developing all their technology alone and they can build their own life support, scientific payload and probes.

>>8738859
>who is paying for spaceX

>>8738887
>rosetta/philae
that's ESA though

>>8738892
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding
a bunch of people. You're probably talking about how "hurr durr nasa is paying for spacex" but that's through contracts, meaning nasa is spending its money in a more rational way than building the same craft themselves (which they can't, in an as-economically viable way).

>>8738900
I stand corrected, and also suck cocks.

>>8738079
>>the moon base meme
>maybe after mars

Having a base on the moon makes Mars insanely easier.
A base on the moon could create fuel and other supplies, which in turn lower the number of launches from earth.

>>8738915
Prerequisites fusion reactors, son. Can't make current chemical rocket fuels from moonrock, and the infrastructure to send and build harvesters on Moon would probably cost as much as some of the ITS launches. Not to mention the prestige and public excitement around landing on a different planet for the first time will help the space effort immensely.

It will be the most televised and watched event in human history. Imagine how many feeds of video, text and audio you will have available and consider how much money will be generated from that.

I agree with you from an orbital scientific standpoint, but not from an economic or technological standpoint. A lunar base would lower the dV needed and thus the cost. But until reusable space tech is perfected, there's still too much risk and cost in trying multi-stage refueling from an untested source of untested fuel.

>>8738925
>Prerequisites fusion reactors, son
No it doesn't. Fission is entirely sufficient, certainly long enough to kickstart the production of solar power satellites.

>>8738935
Citation needed.

>>8738888

>implying making a several minute computer animation distracts or delays from the development of the vehicles that those videos are showcasing

>>8738915

Having a Moon colony (not a base, which wouldn't be able to supply anything) would make going to Mars slightly easier in terms of required mass launched from Earth, however since we don't currently have a Moon base, building one would require such a massive investment of time and money that simply building big rockets and going directly to Mars is far, far cheaper.

Saying colonizing the Moon would make Mars easier is exactly the same as saying colonizing Mars would make the Moon easier. It is simply a way of getting your destination explored and developed first, by framing it as a prerequisite to colonizing the other destination. There is no reason we can't do Mars first, or the Moon first, or both simultaneously, despite what anyone tells you.

At least we can all agree that 'visiting a near Earth asteroid on the path towards X' is a NASA meme, and would be a waste of time and resources that is a total side step away from colonizing space. Until we have a strong presence in space and building O'Niel cylinders becomes feasible there's no reason to send people to asteroids, and even then there's little justification for it.

>>8738925
>Imagine how many feeds of video, text and audio you will have available and consider how much money will be generated from that

please kill this meme, money generated by views on the Mars landing would not be funneled into whatever organization pulls it off, and even if it were there's no way it would offset the costs. Also, considering how fast public interest died during the Apollo era once they actually landed, the 'revenue stream' if you want to call it that would go from inadequate to essentially non-existent.

the fact is that the vast majority of people don't give a shit about space travel and will continue to not give a shit in the future.

>>8738884
>However the $90 million version is the reusable one

Citation needed, I've never seen anything from SpaceX saying that the Falcon Heavy price tag displayed on their website is for the reusable configuration.

Also, a Falcon 9 launch always costs the same (unless you factor in the cost of Dragon when they're sending stuff to the ISS for NASA, since NASA also pays for the vehicle), regardless of whether or not the booster is going to be recovered or expended during the flight.

I'm pretty sure the $90 million figure for Heavy is the price assuming all cores are expended, meaning the price would always remain $90 million if all three cores are expended, if only the center core is expended, or if all three cores are recovered. This would mean that SpaceX would still break even on a Heavy launch even if all the cores failed to land successfully, and it means that if all three cores are recovered they simply make a lot more profit on that launch than they would otherwise. It's just a safe business tactic really, rockets are not as reliable a airliners yet, so if you can ensure you won't operate at a loss while still undercutting the competition in price, then why not?

>>8738969
The biggest obstacle to Mars first right now is that we simply don't know how to do it. We simply don't have the necessary skills to slow down and soft land with precision the huge mass needed for a Mars mission which is 30 days at the least.

>>8738885

Those proposed vehicles, like the Shuttle C and the DIRECT/Jupiter lineup were not chosen of course but they didn't die there. They eventually were modified and chosen for the Constellation program, then later modified further and became the SLS after Constellation was cancelled.

SLS is essentially the culmination of decades of people who know launch vehicles trying to make a sensible rocket using Shuttle hardware as a selling point, vs political unwillingness to change and continuous setbacks and restarts in terms of administration goals.

>>8738985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Pricing_and_development_funding
>$90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016 (with no published price for heavier GTO or any LEO payload)

here is your citation. They are deliberatly ambigous on the website, but if you click on princing, written very small under the $90m tag is "up to 8.0mT to GTO".
http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
Next to "Performance" is a little, discrete *. Scroll down, and * actually means "Performance represents max capability on fully expendable vehicle"
Do your research.

>>8738994

>We simply don't have the necessary skills to slow down and soft land with precision

I would argue that we actually do have the technology. However, people generally don't include it as a viable option because it necessitates a very large launch vehicle because it requires a lot of mass. If we ignore trying to minimize mass, just to take a look at all options, then the one that immediately sticks out as the best is simple retro-propulsion. You start in orbit, you dip into the atmosphere to bleed off speed, and then when the timing is right you fire your engines to slow from supersonic velocity down to a few dozen meters per second to steer yourself downwards the last kilometer or so, then touch down at <1 m/s velocity on target.

SpaceX's Red Dragon is going to make use of the lifting effect of a capsule achieved by placing the center of mass to one side of the axis of symmetry, in order to dive deep into the thicker part of the atmosphere of Mars before turning and leveling out in order to get as strong a braking effect as possible, then once the capsule is sub-sonic and at the right altitude it will fire its engines and slow down in a hover-slam to land on the surface. This method would be able to land the capsule plus around one ton of payload, making it the heaviest object we've ever landed on Mars.

Another option that would eliminate the 'suicide burn' and thus make the landing safer for humans would be to start the burn much higher up and descend more slowly. Obviously this requires a pretty large fuel mass per unit payload delivered to the surface. We can make refinements, like making the entry vehicle a lifting body to more efficiently use the atmosphere to slow down and getting a high surface area to volume by performing entry with over-sized, mostly empty tanks, which would imply your landing stage is also your Earth departure stage, and at this point we're building the ITS spaceship.

This is future stuff, but it isn't sci-fi stuff.

>>8739037
>This is future stuff, but it isn't sci-fi stuff
this is precisely what I meant. Right now not only have we not tried supersonic retropropulsion, and the amounts of extra fuel per kg to mars surface makes a mars mission very expensive until we develop better ideas (the lifting body you mentionned?) or make these worthwile. On the other hand moon landings, we can do no prob (and we descelerate from a much lower velocity).

>>8739011
>Do your research.

Stop being hostile and fuck off.

Since the Falcon 9 numbers also show that disparity, wouldn't that mean that every expendable Falcon 9 launch so far has actually cost more than the $62 million they advertise? I'm pretty sure the disparity comes from the fact that the payload attach fitting can currently only handle up to about 10 tons, which would imply that for heavier payloads there would be an added cost for a custom PAF that would be able to handle the weight.

This would mean that, for example, and interplanetary probe launched with Heavy that only weighed 5 tons would still have a launch cost of $90 million, despite expending all cores. However a payload with a mass of 15 tons going on to GTO or LEO would cost $90 million + $X million, where X is equal to the cost of developing and manufacturing a stronger, custom PAF for the launch, regardless of how many cores can be recovered during the launch. This is similar to how a Dragon flight to the ISS costs $62 million for the Falcon 9 + $X million where X is equal to the cost of the Dragon capsule, despite the fact that the first stage can easily be recovered during a Dragon launch to the ISS.

This makes perfect business sense to me. Of course the added cost of the PAF skews the $/kg payload numbers, but even only considering the ~10 ton limit with the current PAF, it still works out to about $6200 per kilogram for the Falcon 9. It's important to note that, aside from maybe the Saturn V/Apollo stack, no launch vehicle is ever loaded to its max payload limit. The maximum payload limit comes from a basic calculation of a rocket's deltaV when loaded with mass until that deltaV becomes equal to the minimum amount required to reach whatever example orbit you choose. In real life it would be pretty much impossible to actually max out the payload of a rocket for a given orbit and actually make that orbit. Thus, the actual $/kg payload number varies significantly across payloads.

>>8739058
>the amounts of extra fuel per kg to mars surface makes a mars mission very expensive

Consider reusable launch vehicles and the added mass can be accounted for without increasing the price to what a smaller mission would cost given an expendable launch vehicle.

SSRP has been done, although the vehicle doing it (the Falcon 9 first stage performing a reentry burn in a Mar-equivalent regime) was not taking advantage of the shock front that can be created if the engine is small enough; the stage was simply slowing down with rocket power. Personally I think SSRP may be useful for medium and heavy Mars probes, using a small amount of propellant and a tiny engine pointing into the shock front during reentry to expand the shock front and increase drag, but for larger missions it makes sense to just use a bigger rocket and use it to slow down directly.

Lifting body reentry vehicles have been done, for example ESA's IXV technology demonstrator vehicle. The principal advantage of a lifting body vehicle is that it can be scaled up far more than a capsule, because of the superior relationship between surface area and mass of the lifting body. This relationship can be further improved by decreasing the mass density of the vehicle by making it bigger and having its propulsion system do double duty, using most of the propellant to leave Earth and therefore perform entry at Mars with mostly empty tanks and a very good lift to weight ratio. The remaining fuel would be then used to land on the surface.

Landing on the Moon is much simpler, yes, but by necessity requires more mass than even the direct propulsion landing option on Mars. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, your landing craft needs at least 1730 m/s of deltaV in order to land from a 100km circular orbit. Comparatively, despite having a higher orbital velocity, a craft landing on Mars can make use of the air to slow down and only needs to have a few hundred meters per second of deltaV minimum in order to land.

>>8739061
Although I hadn't considered the PAF issue, to my belief Ariane5 ECA does fly at max payload with the sylda. If it were the SOLE issue in raising the capability x2.8 for almost the same price tag they would have made it their main goal as it would ensure market domination, and would probably have figured it out by now. However, I have a hard time believing that this vehicle could launch 22 tons to GTO whilst landing 3 boosters (and getting down to $1600/kg to LEO?!). Either their projected price includes profit from reusability thus lowered payload, or their reusability is pointless and the rocket is insanely profitable when expendable.

>>8738994

Nothing that can't be solved with a bit more delta-v. Time to dig out them N-Thermal Rockets. Call them eco-friendly since they don't waste useful oxygen by burning in it in SPACE and people will love it.
That should give the martian payload a bit more breathing space.

>>8739075
I actually forgot a detail, lifting body mars entry is probably not possible, because of earth rocket size constraints. You would need to either make it really small to fit in a heavy lifter's fairing, or make a shuttle style launch, which sounds quite impractical for Mars. I guess you could assemble stuff in orbit, but it does add a lot of mission complexity

>>8739092
make materials strong enough to survive the heat in a nuclear rocket engine, and not only will we have super efficient rockets but also a gateway to ssto tech

>>8738139
Worst post in 4chan history

>>8739061
An expendable Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX about $40-45 million, incrementally. This doesn't include their development or fixed costs, so they've been operating on quite a slim markup, depending on reusability to eventually make it profitable. With a billionaire behind it and sweetheart contracts from NASA, it's sustainable as an expendable, but it'll never be a business success.

That's why they limit payloads at the advertised price to those consistent with reuse.

For Falcon Heavy as an expendable, the margin is even slimmer. They've basically added the incremental manufacturing cost of the side-boosters, or even a little less, to the cost of the F9 launch. They're really depending on at least reusing the side boosters.

Payloads more than those advertised as consistent with the advertised price have to be specially negotiated (i.e. tens of millions of dollars more).

>>8738101
>But the main issue is budget, and NASA's prime directive getting changed by the short sighted executive branch every 4 years.

fucking this. you guys have no clue how wasteful your government is and what the culture inside these organizations is like.

there are good people, but there are also whole groups of guys that are just looking for some easy cheesy boondoggle project to milk a paycheck out of.

its called white mans welfare for a reason and it needs to stop. the mission scope of NASA needs to be narrowed and refined so faggots can't allocate funds for their retarded time wasting (((research)))

>>8738885
>They don't have the funding to tool back up for Saturn production, so they are trying to get by with space shuttle parts. It's literally as simple as that.
No it isn't. It would have been cheaper, faster, and produced better results to tool back up for Saturn V production (they even did most of the work of redesigning the F1 and J1 engines for modern production, and incorporating them into the SLS design has been in and out of the plan), but then some of the shuttle contractors would be left out, and production facilities would likely be moved around, out of some electoral districts.

SLS is political as fuck. It's all about pork.

>>8739089
>Either their projected price includes profit from reusability thus lowered payload, or their reusability is pointless and the rocket is insanely profitable when expendable.

SpaceX has historically been focusing on lowering the cost of expendable rockets more than building reusable rockets, which is why Falcon 9 started out as a cheap expendable rocket and is now becoming a cheap partially reusable launch vehicle. Going forwards they appear to be shifting towards producing highly reusable rockets (ITS) instead of making them as cheap as possible. This makes sense, because if they tried doing it the other way around, their vehicle would have been very expensive to fly until the started nailing down reusability, which is not a good business model for a startup company.

Having a cheap rocket does not mean that making it reusable is meaningless, in fact it simply means they can make much more profit per launch while still having a lower price than the competition. For example, maybe a Falcon Heavy can be launched fro $90 million in a fully expendable mode and still make profit, BUT the margin would be slim. The advantage there would be that since your price remains low, more people will buy your launch service, which keeps your production volume high and your overall cost lower. However, recovering the side boosters or all boosters while keeping the price at $90 million means that suddenly you're making much more profit for the same launch cost, helping your business by making more money without deterring customers by changing the launch price to keep that high profit margin even on fully expendable launches, which would necessitate a higher price.

In short, I think SpaceX is planning on taking a hit on profits for expendable Heavy flights in order to ensure more orders for Heavy launches which can recover boosters and thus return much higher profits.

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>>8738233
>I see the future.
>You see dildos.

>>8739095

We've already built and tested NTRs, in the 50's. They run at a cooler temperature than conventional chemical rockets but since their exhaust is so light their Isp outstrips even the best possible chemical rockets by about 2x. The tradeoff is comparatively low thrust, but in space absolute thrust matters far less than Isp.

SSTO is a meme, you can get better performance and a much more cost effective launch system by using a reusable lower stage and a reusable upper stage to launch payloads, plus you don't need extreme advances in materials and propulsion technology.

>>8739134
>retarded time wasting (((research)))

True, NASA directives are haywire, but if you give in to factions "research is bullshit, only exploration matters" then it's formally the same as "exploration is useless money wasting, only earth observation matters"

>>8739094

You don't need to make it fit in a fairing, it's already aerodynamic anyway and doesn't have wings to mess with the center of lift/drag, so you can just put it on top of the stack with an interstage fairing between the launch vehicle and the Mars EDL vehicle. Again, combining the EDL vehicle with the Mars transfer stage makes the EDL vehicle better at performing reentry, because it has a lower overall density and can slow down more easily in the upper atmosphere of Mars.

Obviously this would require a dedicated system but for landing heavy things on Mars a dedicated system makes a lot of sense. The launch vehicle would consist of a (preferably reusable) lower stage, a (preferably reusable) second stage, and the Mars EDL vehicle itself, which would use its own propellant to burn onto a Mars intercept, then use the atmosphere at Mars to slow down, making a final landing burn using the last bit of fuel left in the tanks. The payload bay would contain whatever you wanted to land on Mars, be it a habitat module or roving vehicle that astronauts could drive around, bulk solar panels, or whatever.

>>8739141
i don't think research in general is bullshit. the fact that the mission statement of NASA is so wide that virtually anything can get underneath its funding umbrella is whats idiotic.

i've worked for various federal organizations and the ones that were the best stewards of taxpayer dollars had a very specific wheelhouse that they stayed in.

>>8739134

You're right.

>muh 90 day report

That fiasco has colored any manned mission to anywhere as impossibly expensive, and it's a result of old space programs desperately trying to justify their existence.

>>8739153

>but it is VERY important we study what zero G does to cancer because that could definitely lead us to a cure :^)

A lot of NASA enabled ""research"" is pretty bullshit honestly.

>>8739138
Thanks for the more in-depth margin part I hadn't though about.
However what i meant is that unless an expendable 90m Falcon Heavy launch is made at a loss, the announced payload capacity would make insanely cheap, and nobody could compete. That is why I find it unlikely for it to be possible, and that the 90m price factors in reusability, which makes sense: after all the beast has three f9 cores so you could expect it to cost at least twice as much.
Otherwise making a profit is easy:
Suppose a 90m, 22.2 tons to GTO, fully expendable FH launch makes no profit, and just balances expenses. Now make that launch price to 150m. You are still OVER 1.5x cheaper than current f9 per kg to gto (63m/5.5t = 11500$ per kg for f9 VS 150m/22.2t = 6750$ per kg to gto for fh), and just made 60m pure profit on a single launch.
If that was the actual math they would do it. It's not, and that's why the 90m launch factors in projected reusability, giving spacex a vehicle in a similar price range as f9, but also allowing them to target mars and the moon in an expendable launch if they want to.

>>8739171
>>8739138
>>8739061
>>8739011
>>8738985
>>8738884
>>8738833
I want to step in on this quite granular cost discussion and point out that the situation with the first SLS launches will be "We can send up a 70 ton payload for $2 billion"

Which is fucking embarrassing isn't it?

>>8739171
>Suppose a 90m, 22.2 tons to GTO, fully expendable FH launch makes no profit, and just balances expenses. Now make that launch price to 150m. You are still OVER 1.5x cheaper than current f9 per kg to gto (63m/5.5t = 11500$ per kg for f9 VS 150m/22.2t = 6750$ per kg to gto for fh), and just made 60m pure profit on a single launch.
>If that was the actual math they would do it.
It's probably about what they would charge for a launch that pushed the limits of what Falcon Heavy can do as an expendable.

And yet, the $90m price tag is probably still providing a small profit. So why limit the payload and keep the price so low? Because the recovery attempt is *also* a profit, just a non-monetary kind. These would be very expensive experiments without a customer to pay for the launch.

Remember how early they set that price. They weren't counting on reuse working. They were counting on being able to make a recovery attempt, to assist in developing reusability. Besides that, they still don't *know* how much money reuse can save. They certainly didn't know years ago. They hope they can eventually sell a reusable launch for around $10 million, but that's if everything works perfectly, they can't know when that'll be possible while they're still developing the tech.

Another important thing to consider is the market. Most customers only want to launch about 5-7 tonnes to GTO, so the excess capacity isn't a selling point. And SpaceX isn't all that established, they still have reliability and schedule issues. They needed a big price advantage to win lots of contracts.

>>8739193
It's more like $1 billion, but yeah it's pretty sad. The full heavy cargo version of SLS will be able to send 50 tons to Mars though, so that's cool.
Honestly I can't think of any other argument than "it's a big and cool rocket so I want to see it fly" (which is true btw), or maybe "the SR25 is a really good engine so don't let it die"

>>8739193
>the situation with the first SLS launches will be "We can send up a 70 ton payload for $2 billion"
It's really more like "we can send up a 70 ton payload for $10 billion".

You have to factor in those development expenses. They only get 4 or 5 launches before they run out of scavenged shuttle engines and have to go back to the drawing board to redesign it to work with new engines, and they've already committed to using two just for test launches (unmanned and manned).

Someone did the math on it honestly early on: the program would cost $40 billion for four flights, completed around 2025. And after that, there's no reason to believe the option of developing it for further use will have any value. So $10 billion per launch.

If they insisted, like the shuttle, on ignoring economics and not doing anything interesting in space for several decades, *then* they might get it down to $2 billion per launch.

>>8739202
>Remember how early they set that price

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Pricing_and_development_funding
>with announced prices for the various versions of Falcon Heavy priced at $80–125 million in 2011,[28] $83–128M in 2012,[29] $77–135M in 2013,[50] $85M for up to 6,400 kilograms (14,100 lb) to GTO in 2014, and $90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016

So... how early?

>>8739216
>It's more like $1 billion
When people are claiming things like "it will cost $1 billion" or "it will cost $500 mlilion" they're not really talking about cost. They're talking about the amount they can save by not doing a launch. The SLS program can launch maybe once or twice per year, but it'll go on costing billions of dollars per year whether or not it's launching, just to keep the option open.

SLS is a low-launch-rate rocket with large fixed costs and large development costs. If you're going to amortize those development costs honestly, you've got to account for the time value of money and charge interest on the investment for as long as you're launching rockets. By the time it starts launching once a year, $1 billion/year won't even pay the interest on the development funds, let alone pay anything toward the fixed costs and the incremental costs of actually building and launching a rocket.

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>spacex can take over as our primary launch service provid-

>>8739202
>Most customers only want to launch about 5-7 tonnes to GTO, so the excess capacity isn't a selling point

I don't agree, as not only does Ariane fly 2 regular 5 tons satellites, but FH isn't projected to fly much more than twice a year, and F9 would remain a workhorse for single satellite launches. This would make finding multiple clients on a single FH launch less difficult than it is for europe, and they would just need to make a payload adapter.

>>8739234
To be fair, every launch company went through that at some point. Hell, the most reliable rocket on the market started off trying to make 90° adjustments to its trajectory, providing one of the most majestic failures ever.

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>>8739234
>you can't trust private companies to do NASA's important wor-

>>8739244
>failures happen therefore we should close down everyone except spacex that way we are always grounded 6 months out of the year

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>>8739231
>amortize those development costs
Why would SLS do that?
It was never meant to launch at a profit.

>>8739229
>>$85M for up to 6,400 kilograms (14,100 lb) to GTO in 2014
>>$90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016
These are basically the same price, and the low end has been in the same approximate range since 2011.

They definitely didn't have confidence in reuse working on their first Falcon Heavy launch back in 2011, and were taking into account the high probability that they'd lose all launched stages.

By 2016, they were talking about discounts for launching on a previously-flown stage.

They're not going to lose money if they do a Falcon Heavy launch for $90 million and don't get any of the stages back.

>>8739257
at this point they are less likely to lose FH boosters on landing than they are to have a total launch failure

>>8739257
Fair enough.
Sorry if I sound autistic, but I still don't understand what you are making of the previous "60m profit" calculation. If a 90m expendable Falcon Heavy launch is not made at a loss, i believe the reasoning stands, which in my opinion makes it unlikely. An 8 ton limit would simply make no sense

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>>8739139
>that pic

>>8738139

>screams Nixon as he tells Agnew to ram the Space Shuttle down Congress' throat

>>8739252

>launch at a profit

Don't look now, but Elon isnt generating a profit off his launches either

>>8739298
The Space Shuttle would've been great if it was actually reusable. Shame it isn't.

>>8739252
>>amortize those development costs
>Why would SLS do that?
As a matter of honest accounting.

You can't spend $10 million buying one million cases of Coke for your "free Coke at work" program at your hundred-person company, and then next year say that it costs the company $900/year ($0.03/can for 30,000 cans) because that's what it costs to deliver it from storage to the worker. You have to factor in that up-front expense, so when the last can is gone, your cost per can covered all of your expenses.

If SLS costs $30 billion in development funds, that's like the million cases of Coke. If the program launches once per year forever, then the development funds alone have to be factored in as $600 million to $3 billion (2-10% interest rates for government borrowing) forever due to the time value of money (when you're analysing whether it should have been done in the first place -- for later decision-making, sunk costs must be ignored). If the program only lasts three launches, then obviously no launch could have cost less than $10 billion.

Whether the vehicle development is worth doing depends a lot on how many launches you do with the vehicle.

That's one reason US government investment in Falcon 9/Heavy makes so much more sense than investing in SLS. Falcon 9 is a high-flight-rate vehicle. They've already launched 30 times, before SLS has flown once. They want to launch 30 times per year. Even if gov't funding (with interest and sweetheart contracts) amounts to $2 billion to date, that's already down to $67 million per launch, and it'll keep dropping as they launch more and faster. It'll amortize down to something that doesn't make the whole venture look embarassing. If they put another $1 billion into getting SpaceX to put a large, Raptor-powered upper stage on Falcon Heavy, that'll basically give them SLS performance at a much, much lower price. If they put $10 billion into ITS, it may be amortized over tens of thousands of launches.

>>8739323
it was reusable just not cost-effectively

>>8739333

It was fully reusable given the design challenges at the time

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>>8739333
It was a Ship of Theseus.

The holy grail of spaceflight is a spaceship that can fly into space, come back, gas up and fly into space again, maybe with an expert giving it a quick look over after every couple of flights like a 747.

>>8739328
They don't have to worry about development costs because they have already been paid. All they have to worry about is paying for launches and upkeep of the infrastructure.

>>8739344
>It was a Ship of Theseus.
No it wasn't.

>>8739277
>If a 90m expendable Falcon Heavy launch is not made at a loss, i believe the reasoning stands, which in my opinion makes it unlikely. An 8 ton limit would simply make no sense
SpaceX wants to make a large profit on each launch, not just scrape by. The 8 ton limit is consistent with recovery of all three stages in condition for reuse. It's also generously sized for comsats.

With Falcon Heavy, they can probably make 4 fully-expendable launches per year (expending 12 booster cores), without being able to do any Falcon 9 launches. At $90m per launch, they're not losing money, so they can survive and keep trying to make it reusable. At $150m per launch and no margin for recovery attempts, they're making $240m per year, if they can sell every one of those launches (again, they're not that established, and may have trouble booking all four flights every year without drastically lower prices), but they can't do any development work toward reusability or launch their own payloads so they're stuck there at a quarter billion dollars per year and no Mars program.

However, once they succeed with reusability, they can probably sell 12 launches each of Falcon 9 and Heavy per year, including 3 or 4 specially-negotiated expendable ones at $100-$150 million (depending on Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy) each, since reusability doesn't reduce the number of expendable launches they can do unless the customer demands pristine new stages. So now they're making $30 million each on 10 Falcon 9 launches, and $60 million each on 10 Falcon Heavy launches, and $240 million on special-ordered expendable launches for NASA and the Air Force, and they have over $1 billion per year. And they'll be able to work on their own stuff like the LEO-sat internet constellation to make more money. And now they can build their Mars rocket.

The reusable program is going to be much more lucrative due to the high volume of launch. They're just trying to survive until they get there.

>>8739375
Yes it was

>supersonic aeroplane carrying rocket to high altitude
>rocket separates and fires its engines

Why is no one doing this? Seems pretty straightforward and although there will be upper limit to payload due to the plane's capacity it'll still be cheaper than throwing away bunch of booster stages with expensive hard to manufacture stages and stuff.

>>8739387
The vast majority of its components were never removed, let alone completely replaced.

Columbia had its second flight in shorter order than spacex is.

>>8739387

Do you know what a "Ship of Theseus" is?

>>8739375
>>8739387
Don't fight, you're both dickheads.

They never replaced everything on any shuttle. They did replace enough expensive stuff on each shuttle to equal more than the total original cost after each few flights.

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>>8739389
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_launch_to_orbit

>>8739396

>they never replaced anything on the shuttle

>except a few tiles

>and some circuit boards

>and upgraded those ancient computers too

But nah....they never did anything to it

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>>8739403
Actual quote, which could have been included in the reply just by selecting the text before clicking on the post number:
>They never replaced everything on any shuttle.

Stupid monkey fake greentext quote, which some retard actually typed out to demonstrate their total lack of reading comprehension:
>they never replaced anything on the shuttle

>>8739171
>However what i meant is that unless an expendable 90m Falcon Heavy launch is made at a loss, the announced payload capacity would make insanely cheap, and nobody could compete.

That isn't exactly a problem. SpaceX has radically improved on the cost of manufacturing launch vehicles by pretty much every metric, which is why a Falcon 9 can be launched for $62 million and still generate enough profit to support everything SpaceX is doing in terms of manufacturing, R&D, infrastructure, etc. Just the method of producing most of the parts of the rocket in one building rather than spread across multiple states probably saves millions, and the smart tactics employed in the design (engine hardware commonality, road transport ability, etc) also drive the cost lower. In mid 2015 they were building 4 engines per week, an unheard of speed in rocket manufacturing. This mass production of components drives the individual cost of each engine down significantly, as well as the mass production of tank structures and cores themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if a Falcon 9 currently costs $30 million or less to build. That includes the entire first stage plus the second stage and fairings.

If the Falcon 9 first stage only costs something like $25 million, then even in a fully expendable mode the Falcon Heavy would be able to launch for $90 million and have a thin but not negligible profit margin of $10 million. However, recovering all three cores and adding a $10 million refurbishment cost would give a huge profit margin of $75 million, all thing being the same. Since there are very few payloads that would require full expenditure (even big GTO payloads can recover the boosters), SpaceX would almost never have to launch Heavy with that small a margin, for the benefit of (assuming a good track record) near total domination of the heavy payload launch market, in the best case scenario.

>>8739193

It's absolutely an embarrassment, but it will be a good example to the world of what bureaucracy and corruption can do VS what good design principals and active innovation can do.

Ironically, SLS and all other shuttle-derived launch vehicles were meant to save money by using existing hardware, yet have resulted in the most expensive launch vehicle ever.

>>8739436
>SLS and all other shuttle-derived launch vehicles were meant to save money by using existing hardware
this is a lie

>>8739436

Remember the golden rule for government sponsored projects:

"Why build it cheaply when you can build it for four times the cost?"

>>8739394
>Columbia had its second flight in shorter order than spacex is.
SpaceX built ten new rockets and launched ten customer payloads since recovering its first booster. Since they started recovering boosters, they have been doing testing and analysis on how to do the reuse reliably and economically.

The shuttle program was fully focused on returning Columbia to the launchpad. It took them nearly three years to launch ten times. Its reuse never had the potential to be economical thanks to the high-cost drop tank, nor was it a suitable platform for researching more cost-effective reusability due to their commitment to reusing their initial batch of vehicles without major alteration or redesign and construction of new units based on experience.

The shuttle's going to be a footnote in history about this weird pseudoreusable big government pork program.

>>8739455
You're just proving my point

NASA and Blue Origin make spacex look like chumps, as far as reusability is concerned.

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>>8739462
>New Shepard

>>8739471
If New Shepard is nothing compared to Falcon 9, Falcon 9 is nothing compared to the shuttle.

>>8739462
NASA failed utterly at cost-effective reusability... and continued repeating their mistake for decades, before giving up and saying it couldn't be done. SpaceX is on the verge of doing what NASA couldn't with over a hundred billion dollars and decades.

Blue Origin still hasn't put anything in orbit. What they've done isn't comparable. They're hoping to demonstrate reuse of a booster from an orbital launch in a few years (remember, they originally claimed they'd be doing passenger suborbital launches by 2010, and they still aren't doing them now, so expect long delays), whereas SpaceX has a solid plan to do their first reuse within a month or two.

>>8739474
>>8739476
New Shepard is a glorified bottle rocket, it's not a "real" launch system in any sense.

That said, it would be *great* if they could scale it up to New Glenn by 2020, but at this moment in time that's more of a paper rocket than the ITS, let alone the Falcon series.

>>8739476
>NASA failed utterly at cost-effective reusability
...and spacex has already succeeded without reusing anything?

>Blue Origin still hasn't put anything in orbit
spacex hasn't reused shit, let alone reused it 4 times

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>>8739479
>that's more of a paper rocket than the ITS
tell me another fairy tale grandpa

>>8739216

The RS-25 is an engine with good stats but otherwise is not good for either a reusable system nor an expendable system.

It has good stats because its design pushes rocket technology to the limit, which results in very harsh internal environments in the engine, which results in excess wear and tear. Thus, the engine needed to be torn down and rebuilt after every flight; On the later missions engineers claimed they could be flown without any tear down, but this was never done, so who knows if that claim is actually credible or not.

The RS-25 is also poorly suited for an expendable rocket, on account that it is so goddamn expensive. A single RS-25 for example cost about $40 million dollars back when they were building them for the shuttle program, but now that the assembly line has been shut down and needed to be restarted, that cost has increased to the point that a single engine will cost about $60 million, or the equivalent of an entire Falcon 9 launch. The RS-25 is also difficult to assemble and takes a very long time to build in the first place, which is why the SLS will not be able to fly more than once per year; engine production cannot keep up with a faster launch cadence. For reference, SpaceX was been able to build 4 Merlin 1D engines per *week* in 2015, and that rate has probably increased since.

>>8739249

but he was saying the opposite of this, anon

launch failures early on in a rocket's career are to be expected, learned from, and used as data points to avoid failures in the future.

Ariane 5 started off with a track record similar to the Falcon 9, and in 2018 they're going to use it to launch an $8.7 billion telescope.

>>8739260

I think he was talking about flying a fully expendable profile, for an interplanetary probe trajectory for example.

>>8739312

Not today, baitu-kun

>>8739519
they will likely never fly expendable FH

the numbers on their site (for FH) are sandbagged

>>8739516
You cannot reasonably predict that failure rates will improve.

Arianespace launched rockets for decades before Ariane V

>>8739403
>everything = anything

What is it like to see the world through your eyes, anon? Anon...what do you see?

>>8738116
>for 8 years

>implying he won't be impeached in the next 6 months

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>tfw weak little meatbags still dream of conquering the deadly environment of space
>look at how big their fantasy rockets, are!
>look at them and laugh!

*syncopated electronic laughter intensifies*

>>8739285
AAahhh hahahaha 'das funny senpai.

Since this is /sci/ I'll contribute
>>8738079
Combustion propulsion is the limiting factor in man's exploration, my team is working on something better, but we should all consider alternative possibilities.

>>8739552
I've taken longer walks to the bathroom for a dump than that overgrown nuclear dune buggy manages in a week.

>>8739389
>Why is no one doing this?

Because that method isn't actually very straightforward and it doesn't really do much in terms of making it easier to get to space.

To get to orbit from the surface of the Earth you need about 9000 m/s of deltaV, to get to orbit from a high altitude of 30km moving at 400 km/h you need about 8500 m/s of deltaV.

Also, the maximum payload is very small, because the rocket that launches it into orbit needs to be small enough to be carried under the plane that flies it to altitude.

Finally, reusable boosters a la Falcon 9 completely blow the air-launch method out of the water. A reusable booster can place an expendable upper stage and payload onto a suborbital trajectory moving several kilometers per second at an altitude of over 100 km. A reusable booster can be scaled up essentially as far as a regular rocket can be scaled up, which is well beyond anything we've ever actually built. A reusable booster affords enough margin that the upper stage can also be made reusable if the whole launch vehicle is big enough, further driving down costs. A reusable booster is like an air launch rocket, except better in every single way.

>>8739554
VASIMR is a meme

>>8739389
because it isn't about altitude. its about velocity.

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>>8739561

Your bathroom is 4.7 billion miles away?

>>8739574
It didn't drive there.

>>8739574
fake composite image

>>8739443

You mean it WAS a lie, it was essentially a fib meant to ensure shuttle hardware would continue to live after the shuttle program itself was shut down, and thus keep government money pouring into the same districts it'd already been going towards. The lie was that it would save money, but the supposed reason was that to develop the new engines and structures required for new vehicles would be even MORE expensive, and thus reusing shuttle bits was the cheaper option.

That's the way it was sold anyway, and that's the spin NASA puts on it.

>>8739449
kek

I thought it was 'why buy one when you can buy two at twice the cost?'

>>8739455
>The shuttle's going to be a footnote in history about this weird pseudoreusable big government pork program.

Isn't it already remembered as this though? Apart from the ignorant, the delusional, and the shills?

>>8739580
it would be more expensive if nasa was doing it

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>>8739588
humans have been in space nearly continuously for 30 years thanks to the shuttle

>>8739588
Plus how the air force wanted a system for launching sats into wacky orbits...

The Buran was really confusing for a lot of,the engineers, since they were told to make a shuttle clone, as if the Americans were doing it they should to. But none of them could find a benefit it had over traditional capsule designs. They were right.

It was pure congressional tomfuckery that kept the shuttle alive after the Air Force realzoed they didn't need it

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>>8739578

Of course.

And one of the greatest achievements in human history to date...converting two specks in ridiculously oversized telescopes into actual, familiar space environments.

And the robot responsible is still on its way to another destination, still further out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_MU69

Pic related. Another speck that suddenly came alive.

>>8739474

In what regard?

Falcon 9 can launch as much as Shuttle could, for a fraction of the cost, is already economical, and in a few weeks will reuse a Falcon 9 first stage for the first time.

New Shepard on the other hand is 7 years late on being able to provide suborbital hops for millionaire tourists, and its only claim to fame is being the first to do something that the F9R dev vehicle and the DC-X could have done but didn't do because it wasn't considered important enough.

>>8739598
>The Buran was really confusing for a lot of,the engineers, since they were told to make a shuttle clone, as if the Americans were doing it they should to. But none of them could find a benefit it had over traditional capsule designs. They were right.
people always say this with no sources
it's bullshit

USSR was afraid of the shuttle because they thought we were building it so it could kidnap spy satellites

>>8739602
Pluto and Charon never look like that together.
Someone shooped them together because it looked cool.
Stop posting that image.

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>>8739597
Why are these wings pointed the wrong way? Wouldn't this cause inordinate drag?

>>8739610
>kidnap sats
Now that's bullshit. the Russians could track the shuttle easily, and both sides knew it would be impossible to capture a sat without everyone knowing.

>>8739609
The assertion was that NS is not comparable to f9 because its top speed is 1.5km/s rather than 2.0km/s. However, the shuttle top speed was 7.8km/s compared to 2.0 for f9.

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>>8739483
>hasn't even been fired yet

kek, even the subscale Raptor engine is further along than the BE-4, the hardest part of any engine is figuring out the engine cycle, once you do that scaling it is trivial by comparison. Also, SpaceX was doing pic related back in September, do you really think they have had zero progress in the months since?

>>8739623
That's why you have a nab vehicle which shifts the orbit of the target satellite to intersect with your shuttle. By deploying strategic chaff it can just look like the target satellite has gone dead.

>>8739623
>without everyone knowing
making up things I never said to suit your argument

>>8739583

That's also another way of saying it

>>8739627
>subscale Raptor engine
How is this an accomplishment? It will never be used.

>the hardest part of any engine is figuring out the engine cycle
Ok, now SpaceX needs to completely redo cycle work for the full sized engine.
BO will test their production engine within weeks.

>SpaceX was doing pic related back in September, do you really think they have had zero progress in the months since?
yes, I do
the only reason they did that test was so that elon could show it at his meme presentation

>>8739643
>How is this an accomplishment? It will never be used.

>What are stages?

>>8739476
>NASA failed utterly at cost-effective reusability... and continued repeating their mistake for decades, before giving up and saying it couldn't be done.

They fell for the space-plane meme, simple as that.

>muh skylon

Probably just going to turn out as another R&D money pit, too many leaps in materials technology and a little bit of handwavium makes jack a doubtful boy. It's unfortunate for the space-plane group that the technology is probably never going to work on Earth. That being said, maybe in the future space-planes will make sense on Titan, if we ever get there.

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>>8739609
>Falcon 9 can launch as much as Shuttle could

>>8739646
why would anyone develop a sub-scale engine?

this shit just can't be "scaled up"

>>8739526
Falcon Heavy would need to fly fully expendable in order to launch a Red Dragon to Mars, or so I'm remembering.

That may have been a Grey Dragon to (outer solar system destination goes here).

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>>8739480
>>Blue Origin still hasn't put anything in orbit
>spacex hasn't reused shit, let alone reused it 4 times
Always this tired old bullshit. Are you the usual NEET incel who just hangs around to spam the same idiotic points into every thread where SpaceX comes up?

>>NASA failed utterly at cost-effective reusability
>...and spacex has already succeeded without reusing anything?
Yes. SpaceX has already demonstrated that their version of reusability is going to work and save money, succeeding where NASA failed. You didn't need to wait for the shuttle's first, let alone second, flight to see that it wasn't going to succeed in the program goal of reducing launch costs through reusability, and you don't need to wait for Falcon 9's first reflight to see that it will succeed.

1) Their reusable vehicle doesn't cost more than expendable vehicles. This is a major point, since it means even limited reusability will mean a real cost saving.
2) They're now fairly reliably recovering their vehicles after launches, and have made rapid progress in increasing this reliability.
3) The landing method uses the same engines needed for launch, demonstrating that the stage is still in good working order when it lands.
4) They've extensively tested the recovered stages on the ground, including firing the engines for the length of a full launch.
5) Due to the low cost of their vehicles, they can continue making changes to make the reusability more efficient.
6) They've returned a recovered stage to flight-ready status according to their own standards, and have generally shown competent judgement in such matters.

There's no reason at this point to believe their first reflight will be unsuccessful, that there won't be many to follow, or that there will be hidden costs that prevent any money from being saved by booster reuse.

As for the shuttle before its first flight...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/835107/posts

>>8739140

We would see NTR powered spacecraft if it weren't for flower sniffing hippies and their horn rimmed glasses wearing beat nick parents objecting to detonating nuclear weapons in the atmosphere

>>8739659
>SpaceX has already demonstrated that their version of reusability is going to work and save money
No they haven't.
The only group who has shown that reusability is viable so far is Blue Origin. They recently announced that refurbishment of New Glenn for each flight will cost as little as $10,000.

>>8739665
New Shepard*

>>8739656
>Grey Dragon
>>>/r/eddit

>>8739554

Chemical propulsion is good for getting humans to Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Asteroid belt. By utilizing reusable boosters, on-orbit refueling, and in-situ propellant production, chemical rockets can provide more than enough capability to send large payloads on relatively fast trajectories over these comparatively short distances. Chemical fuels are of course the cheapest option and also provide the highest impulse, making them the best for launch vehicles pretty much everywhere. Chemical propulsion also makes a lot of sense for hopping between the moons of the gas giants, as the short distances mean transits are always faster than interplanetary, and the icy composition of the moons makes fuel easily available as long as enough energy is being generated.

Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn are within the range of solid core NTRs. An NTR core can probably only last several trips before needing to be replaced, but a reactor pumping a liquid fuel through a solid heat exchanger/reactor chamber would be able to continuously purify its fuel and could carry a large amount in a holding tank, thus allowing the engine life to be extended for a much longer time, the system only needing to be topped up with hydrogen propellant. Along with propulsive power the nuclear fuel could also be used to generate electrical power, good for when you're travelling very far from the Sun.

Uranus, Neptune, and KBOs would require long trip times in any case unless we manage to develop fancy fusion drives or some other high technology that can afford enough thrust with a lot of efficiency. Orion-drive style is possible but nukes are expensive and hard to make, so in-situ fuel production is more or less out the window until a colony is already very well established.

>>8739654
>why would anyone develop a sub-scale engine?
The 1/3rd scale model was sized to fit on the available test stand while they built a bigger one. It validates the computer simulations they're using for the full-scale model.

>this shit just can't be "scaled up"
But it can, tho. A 3x scale-up is pretty simple. Anything that has to go to triple the volume has the dimensions go up 1.44 times, anything that needs triple the cross-sectional area goes up 1.73 times. It's not going to look a lot bigger than the subscale prototype.

Those are modest factors, and reasonably close to each other, so the shapes of things won't change much. Between fluid dynamics simulations and 3d printing, it's never been easier to develop a new rocket engine.

>>8739650
The Space Shuttle never carried a payload larger than the 22.8 tonnes to LEO that SpaceX claims Falcon 9 can do (the shuttle's payload dropped off very quickly with any deviation from its easiest-to-reach orbit, due to its high mass, plus a limit-pushing payload risked loss of vehicle if there was some performance shortfall). Falcon 9 certainly outperforms the Space Shuttle to any higher orbit, since the shuttle had to carry rather clunky, inefficient solid-fuel upper stages for that. It has done larger launches to GTO on reusable flights than the shuttle was capable of.

File: 1475006761955.jpg (411KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

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Why would SpaceX show this?

Wouldn't they be getting cooked alive by radiation in this scenario?

>>8739718
>The 1/3rd scale model was sized to fit on the available test stand while they built a bigger one.
They built that stand to accommodate all raptor testing, so, no, you're lying though your teeth.

>>8739597
>without the shuttle the ISS would be impossible to build

Explain how the Russians built Mir without any Shuttle equivalent.

Really, to replace what the Shuttle allowed us to do in terms of module design, all you'd need is a small orbital tug to maneuver the modules into grabbing range of the station, then detach and boost itself away.

The Shuttle's amazing station building capability was that it was an orbital RCS tug and had a robotic arm, which could easily (and is currently) be situated on the station itself instead of the Shuttle. The ISS has been a pork project and thus was destined to be expensive, but much of the over $100 billion dollar price tag can be attributed to the cost of launching Shuttle.

Oh also, many of the modules that make up the ISS were too big or heavy to launch on Shuttle, and even a few that weren't were just launched by conventional rockets anyway.

>>8738925
>Can't make current chemical rocket fuels from moonrock

Yes you can, just need to find water & carbon

>>8739597
There's no part of ISS that couldn't have been launched on Proton.

>>8739720

>Space X vehicles are shielded from electromagnetic radiation thanks to unobtainium minded from Pandora

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>>8739728
>solar panels can auto-dock

>>8739732

You don't need carbon to make rocket fuel.

>>8739614

They aren't wings, they're radiators. They have to be aligned perpendicular to the solar panels in order to not have any sunlight fall on them, because their purpose is to radiate waste heat into space, which they can't do if they're in full sunlight.

The ISS orbits above most of the atmosphere and only experiences a tiny tiny amount of drag.

>>8739734
Or, you know, water. A manned mission to the outer planets is going to need a large fresh water supply so the smart engineer uses this for shielding.

>>8739740

>Water

Well fortunately Europa has plenty of that.

>>8739739
Thanks. I had read that the ISS is actually technically inside the atmosphere, I didn't realise it was so little.

>>8739745
They're going to need to carry a lot too. To use a terrestrial analogy, it doesn't matter that a gas station down the road has enough gas to fill your car several hundred times over if you don't have enough to reach it.

>>8739626

No one made that assertion.

Also, the Falcon 9 stack =/= the Falcon 9 first stage. The F9 first stage reaches 2km/s while carrying the second stage, on its own the first stage would actually almost be an SSTO. Thus the Falcon 9 first stage alone, in terms of top speed, is almost as fast as the Shuttle was, and it doesn't have any solid boosters or external tanks to drop.

>>8739746
they have to frequently re-boost it to keep it in orbit

>>8739750
>new shepad is "it's fucking nothing" [compared to falcon 9]
>No one made that assertion.

>>8739748

Well I'm sure that by the time we develop spacecraft that can pluck European ice cubes from the surface, we would have solved sending massive spacecraft long distances within relavistic time frames

>>8739725
They built around the limitations of the pre-existing test stands at Stennis and McGregor, then they got to work on bigger test stands. Don't be a dick.

>>8739758
the raptor test stand is a new test stand built by spacex in the last 3 years

>>8739746
>I had read that the ISS is actually technically inside the atmosphere
True, and yet the ISS is never less than 300 km above sea level, or triple the altitude the supposed "space rocket" New Shepard reaches on its useless straight-up, straight-down path.

>>8739751
Why don't they just fly it higher? Also, could an air breathing engine with a very high compression ratio work?

>>8739769
>300 km above sea level, or triple the altitude the supposed "space rocket" New Shepard reaches on its useless straight-up, straight-down path.
put another way, twice the altitude of the useless falcon 9 first stage

>>8739725

gimme the source, johnny

>>8739770

Flying it higher requires fuel. Fuel adds to the mass. Plus you have to ensure the fuel is periodically replenished. Which means you need to send spacecraft up to replenish it more often. And that costs money. Money that isn't in the budget.

>>8739775
I never realised there was a level of fanboyism between private space boosters that approached Apple vs Microsoft.

>>8739737
>ignoring that I said a simple tug with an RCS system could assemble all the modules of the ISS in orbit, thus rendering the Shuttle 'capabilities' moot

>>8739777
Thanks again.

>>8739782
>simple tug with an RCS system

Someone's been playing too much KSP.

>>8739776
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39182.0

>>8739753
>'It's fucking nothing' alludes to top speed achieved during flight and not any other factor such as actual usefulness apart from being an amusement ride

are you a real person

>>8739782
>ISS wasn't assembled with countless EVAs and roboic arm uses (all impossible w/o shuttle initially)

>>8739665
>>8739668
wew, for a second I thought bezos discovered black magic

>>8739783

My pleasure anon

>>8739791
New Shepard is the first fully reusable launch system in the world, and will be the first vehicle to put real tourists in space.

Falcon 9 just does stuff that other people have done for decades.

>>8739793
Reminder again: ISS was just a bigger Mir (built with no shuttle involvement). Proton was good enough for all of it. The shuttle was entirely unnecessary and made the whole thing vastly more expensive, NASA just shoehorned it in to pretend the shuttle was useful.

>>8739775

>implying I will respond to this

>>8739797

You must enjoy being miserable in life

>>8739805
your arguments: 0

>>8739787
Simpler than the Space Shuttle, and able to be flown along with the module using a regular old rocket instead of a manned space plane with a massive price tag.

>>8739797
>will be the first vehicle to put real tourists in space
There have already been space tourists. They flew on Soyuz.

Falcon Heavy's scheduled to send space tourists on a moon flyby next year, never mind your bullshit about "in space" (which is actually far too low for any satellite to orbit).

>>8739799
see >>8739737

>>8739797
>New Shepard is the first fully reusable launch system in the world, and will be the first vehicle to put real tourists in space.

>Falcon 9 just does stuff that other people have done for decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glEvogjdEVY

I had no idea that people had been doing this for decades. I, for one, feel enlightened by this excellent realization of Blue Origin's unparalleled achievements in reusable orbital space flight.

>>8739806

your snappy responses: 0

>>8739793
>modules can't be designed to be assembled without human interaction
>what is Mir

ISS construction requiring humans was an exercise in justifying manned space flight without a destination.

>>8739813
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o

>>8739810
Are you implying that Mir didn't have solar panels? That the Soviets never did spacewalks?

NASA organized ISS construction in such a way to include make-work for the shuttle. Every use of the shuttle could have been easily avoided, with a lot of money saved by doing so.

>>8739817
>DCX
>Orbital Flight
Pick one.

>>8739797
I don't care if you're a troll or totally deluded, this is fucking funny

10/10 anon made me blow air out of my nose slightly

>>8739820
>f9s1
>orbital flight
pick one

>>8739819
>Are you implying that Mir didn't have solar panels?
Are you implying that Mir-type solar panels are sufficient for ISS?

File: ISS construction.gif (2MB, 400x225px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8739816
ISS was vastly more difficult than Mir to construct, you retard.

>>8739822
Falcon 9 is more than just Stage 1.
Neither Falcon 9 Stage 1 or DCX are orbital launch systems, but Falcon 9 S1 is part of an operational orbital launch system. F9 S1 also crosses the Karman Line (330,000 feet), while DC-X's altitude record was 10,300 feet.

>>8739829
>Falcon 9 is more than just Stage 1.
does the rest of f9 that isn't stage one land vertically like dc-x or new shepard?

>>8739832
Nope. As far as Blue Origin has revealed, neither does Stage 2 or Stage 3 of New Glenn.

>>8739817

But anon, DC-X never went to space. :^)

>>8739824
Are you implying that it is somehow impossible to make a self docking module that has ISS style big solar panels?

>>8739824
>Are you implying that Mir-type solar panels are sufficient for ISS?
Um... yes? Of course?

>>8739828
ISS was made artificially more difficult than Mir, sure, because NASA insisted on using the shuttle. Nothing practical was gained from it.

The whole point of a modular space station is that it's easy to assemble. You just dock the pieces together, and maybe hook some wires and hoses up.

>>8739832
>does the rest of f9 that isn't stage one land vertically like dc-x or new shepard?

Does the capsule New Shepard is supposed to carry do that? Or does it land using parachutes and a set of pyrotechnics?

>>8739828
>ISS was vastly more difficult than Mir to construct

Because it was mad that way on purpose to justify using the Shuttle, which was my point

>you retard

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>thread devolves into musk faggots trying to shit on everyone else
Literally every thread.

>>8739844
>Because it was mad that way on purpose to justify using the Shuttle, which was my point
literally a conspiracy theory

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>>8739845
>>thread devolves into wright bros faggots trying to shit on all of the kites and guys gluing feathers to their arms and flapping them

>>8739845
>thread devolves into fandom and hatedom taking pot-shots at each other with varying calibers of factual ammunition
FTFY

>>8739845

>implying B(tf)O niggers aren't shitting just as hard, with less justification

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>>8739847
>>8739855
>when your post is so instantly validated

>>8739846
Are you implying that pork programs and the like don't exist? Ya dingus.

>>8739858
you're welcome senpai :^)

everyone chill

kg->leo will get cheaper
more stuff will be launched
more progress will be made
these are inevitable.


fanboyism isn't necessary

>>8739863
This is the internet. When we're here, fanboyism is all we have.

>>8739863
but it's more funner

and also none of our opinions matter so why not get extremely buttblasted about it literally every time

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This is now a space images thread.

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>>8739878

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>>8739878
Okay.

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>>8739884

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>>8739888

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>>8739889

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>>8739891

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>>8739897

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>>8739901

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>>8739907

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>>8739912

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>>8739915

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>>8739919

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>>8739921

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>>8739924

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>>8739928

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>>8739931

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>>8739928

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>>8739942
mars is comfy as fuck

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>>8739943

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>>8739943
>tfw I can't post most of my pictures because they're too big

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>>8739946

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>>8739949

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>>8739951

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>>8739953

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>>8739958
>tfw you run out of named pictures

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>>8739961

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>>8739965

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>>8739967

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>>8739969

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>>8739973

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>>8739974

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>>8739976

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>>8740033

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>>8740035

>>8739654
If its 3d printed I believe that yea, it CAN just be scaled up
With some work

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>>8739988

>>8739654
Only one other engine has ever been built with the operating cycle SpaceX is utilizing with Raptor. They did sub-scale development because the equipment needed to test the cycle, short of building the entire engine before validating any of its parts, could only be 1/3rd scale.

>>8739709
>Orion-drive style is possible but nukes are expensive and hard to make
Nukes are actually very cheap, takes a fixed cost of a breeder reactor which produces several tons a year.
5 kg or less of plutonium needed for each bomb.
In terms of energy output it could easily be cheaper than conventional fuels.

But anyways, methane fuel is totally adequate for sending payloads to Jupiter, Saturn or Nepture.
Could also include nuclear electric propulsion to speed up travel time.

>>8738214
... to this?
*muhdick.jpeg*

>>8738542
90% of the design was in Von Braun's head, he didn't feel the need to lay it out for brainlets as he was on a schedule. The Apollo was an extremely hierarchical project, no wonder it succeeded so wondrously.

For one, because the F-1s haven't flown for decades and have a lot of unknowns. The RS-25s are extremely costly for the amount of power they produce and aren't optimized for sea-level usage but NASA have a supply of them and knows their good and bad-sides. It's also worth noting as others have that the RS-25s are throttle-able and have a larger gimbal-range than the F-1s. To a significant degree, the SLS is a shuttle derivative and thus attempts to use shuttle or otherwise existing parts (for example, one of the upper-stages will be a modified european spacecraft).

With regards to the Saturn V-heritage, there have been plans to use F-1Bs in Pyrios (kinda like a Saturn IB-2 stage, which was to be the first stage of Saturn C-3 and would've used two F-1s) liquid-fuel boosters and/or J-2Xes in the Earth Departure Stage, though atleast the EDS was cancelled (I'm not sure about the Pyrios). Two benefits of Pyrios when compared to shuttle-derived boosters is that in the event of failure, they can be shutdown, enabling safer separation between the capsule and the booster and that they do not have the O-ring issue.

>>8738542
They have the designs and blueprints for the Saturn V. The tooling doesn't exist, the work force trained to build it doesn't exist, the alloys are not legal to use, and the rocket itself is a bespoke design with one mission in mind: The Moon. They could build a Saturn V, but if Congress didn't dictate the suppliers, it would be almost trivial to do better in the super heavy lift regime.

>>8740838

The concept was in his head, but the final blue prints for the Saturn rockets were kept.

I would like to have been a fly on the wall listening to Von Braun and Arthur Rudolph coming up with the idea of a large rocket design during the later half of World War 2

>>8738364
>Implying a global civilization can only do one thing at a time.

>>8738350
Russian shuttle had boosters, but of course never used them because it never went into space.

>>8742098
I correct myself, they did launch it once. My memory was that they had only done atmospheric glide tests, like "Enterprise," but my memory was in error.