Comments on: Heavy lift and space science

By: Jeff Wright

Jeff Wright — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:52:37 +0000

Carolyn Porco knows what she is talking about–people.

Ares V will be a boon for science. The enemies of HLLV are just as wrongheaded as the dunces who thought R-7 was too big.

By: Fed up and disgusted

Fed up and disgusted — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:33:08 +0000

Why bother at all with outer space? You have the “morally pure” scientists who argue for unmanned missions throughout the solar system for purposes to discover what? That water once flowed on Mars? So what? Who cares? You then have the politicians who, depending onthe political winds support space activities when speaking to one crowd and then will say “We need to pour more money down the rat holes of the ghettos instead of reaching for the stars.” Let’s be real folks, America doesn’t have the guts anymore to do anything truly visionary. We’ve become soft and timid. We’re a nation of computer geeks sitting on our large butts waiting for our government support checks. I cannot bleive people actually think we have the guts to launch a new Moon mission. It will be just a matter of time before the Democrats cancel the Vision for Space Exploration under the auspices of “fiscal responsibility”, so don’t worry about builidng the Ares V becasue it will never be built. We are seeing the last Amercian human missions into outer space right now with the space shuttle. Face it, we will never go back to the Moon let alone Mars or the stars. We will continue to deteriote into a socialistic, weak worn out country where the poor clamor for thier goverment checks and there is no national pride. In 2008 we will elect a woman president becasue she will present the image of a “nurturing” leader. Woman are not exploreres, Men are. This female president will gut NASA and the military and be lauded by the media for her strong position. And she will usher in the demise of America as a leader for scientific innovation.

By: Adrasteia

Adrasteia — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:44:22 +0000

Oh, so about the same size as Atlas V Phase 2 then?

By: Donald F. Robertson

Donald F. Robertson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:02:13 +0000

Item 1) is one of the few instances where I fully agree with Edward.

— Donald

By: Edward Wright

Edward Wright — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:56:26 +0000

> If I want to really explore the Jovian system, or beyond, I could really use either a bigger spacecraft, so that I
> can stuff more sensors on it along with its fuel supply and perhaps an ion engine, or a few spacecraft but with
> different sensor suites and each having their own exploration mission. Any of these spacecraft could be built
> today, but not launched.

Just because you want it doesn’t mean Congress will fund it, Jim.

Let’s assume Congress would appropriate $5 billion for such a Death Star class mission. There are two ways to do it:

1) You could support the development of low-cost commercial launch systems and on-orbit assembly. In that case, you could probably do it for a lot less than $5 billion and follow-on missions would be much cheaper, so you wouldn’t have to wipe out the entire NASA planetary sciences program for a decade every time you launch one. Or,

2) You could saddle the taxpayers with the huge, expensive Apollo on Steroids, developed by Mike Griffin when he was with the Planetary Society. This means drastic cutbacks in the number of NASA astronauts that get to fly in coming decades, which doesn’t bother the Planetary Society. It also means “cuts” (actually, modest increases) in the planetary society budget, which the Planetary Society has screamed a great deal about.

I realize that planetary scientists generally want human spaceflight to go away, except for a few Apollo-style flag-and-footprint missions, but does it really make sense to cut your own throats?

By: Donald F. Robertson

Donald F. Robertson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:54:38 +0000

Thanks for the correction.

— Donald

By: anonymous

anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:28:25 +0000

“Iâ€™m sorry, I meant before the current ramp-up in human spaceflight. That is, the situation that space scientists are pining for. . . .’

The lowest human space flight has been since the start of the Shuttle era is a little more than half of the total NASA budget. It’s never been close to one-third, and is now almost two-thirds, thanks to the reductions Griffin made to science and aeronautics to keep Constellation on schedule and to avoid any rampdown in the Shuttle workforce during his tenure.

By: Donald F. Robertson

Donald F. Robertson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:11:34 +0000

Anonymous: including both â€œExploration Systemsâ€ (Constellation and ISS research) and â€œSpace Operationsâ€ (STS and ISS operations) comes to $10.7 billion in the White Houseâ€™s 2008 budget request

I’m sorry, I meant before the current ramp-up in human spaceflight. That is, the situation that space scientists are pining for. . . .

— Donald

By: Stephen Metschan

Stephen Metschan — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:47:14 +0000

I think the AresV with its inherently low launch rate is too big. The ELVâ€™s on the other hand are two small. The Jupiter-1 being a â€œDirectâ€ derivate of STS is just about right with a 10m Fairing Diameter and +70mT to LEO. Itâ€™s also interesting to run the STS numbers minus the expense of the shuttle while adding it dead weight to the payload. Cutting the $/LEO kg to half of what the best ELV can do is good start for VSE altogether. I think thatâ€™s why the ELV guys want it dead. In addition, using the current STS infrastructure and workforce 15 years earlier saving billions in development cost over the AresV is good as well.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/814/1

By: Doug Gard

Doug Gard — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 11:45:24 +0000

Heavy lifters should not be justified by cost reduction. They are justified by the ability to lift large sized single payloads. Be it less costly or not. The skylab comparison to the international space station mentioned above is a good example of where heavy lifters excel. I doubt that robotic space exploration is a good example. To me heavy lift will be required to build a robust future deep space infrastructure. It has less to do with economics or flight rates its more of a size issue. Manned deep space exploration will require large structures and propulsion units, and heavy lift provides the capability.