Okay I’m a little confused then, since I thought your position was the sidemount shuttle only made sense if it was used a crew launch vehicle as well as a cargo vehicle, to reduce costs by maximizing flight rate.”

Sorry if I’m not being clear. I had no position on whether Shuttle sidemount made sense with or without crew launches in the manifest. My only points were:

1) If Shuttle sidemount is used for crew launches, its LAS will likely be flawed under some number of contingencies due to the geometry of the vehicle but it may also be good

2) Although likely much less costly to develop than Ares, Shuttle sidemount may not offer much in the way of savings over the current Shuttle budget.

3) If Shuttle sidemount is used for both ISS crew and cargo, that may eat up a lot of the annual flight rate, potentially not leaving much to support exploration missions.

“As far as the sidemount costs compared to the existing STS, you are making a mistake to use figures from the old Shuttle C concept to judge it.”

A fair critique, but I don’t know of cost figures for any closer concept.

“The new concept is expendable whereas the Shuttle C was going to recover the SSME/OMS and reuse them via a small pod, in a sense an unmanned mini-orbiter.”

No doubt. but again, like I said in my earlier post, the costs of restarting and maintaining SSME production for Shuttle sidemount may be a rough wash with reusing the existing SSME inventory.

“And though the talk now is making a cheaper non-reusable version of the SSME for the Block II, I don’t know why the even cheaper expedient of using a pair of RS-68 wouldn’t work instead, when using an EDS. I would guess that option would only sacrifice 10% of the payload.”

Agreed. You pay a premium for the SSME’s extra performance, and the agency may be better off with the lower cost/lower performance RS-68 for a Shuttle-derived solution (whether inline, sidemount, etc.). Assuming no goofy requirements to “human-rate” RS-68, switching RS-68 for SSME has the added benefit of combining NASA and USAF needs, increasing demand for RS-68, and driving costs even lower.

FWIW…

Okay I’m a little confused then, since I thought your position was the sidemount shuttle only made sense if it was used a crew launch vehicle as well as a cargo vehicle, to reduce costs by maximizing flight rate.

As far as the sidemount costs compared to the existing STS, you are making a mistake to use figures from the old Shuttle C concept to judge it. The Shuttle C concept was very different compared to what is being proposed today. The new concept is expendable whereas the Shuttle C was going to recover the SSME/OMS and reuse them via a small pod, in a sense an unmanned mini-orbiter.

Recovering, and reprocessing that Shuttle C engine pod would have been almost as big a headache as doing so for the STS manned Orbiter, so it’s not surprising the flight costs look similar. That standing army to keep the Orbiter in flying condition is also why the total STS yearly cost is relatively insensitive to the STS yearly flight rate. The STS sucks down 5-6 billion a year whether it flies six times a year or zero times a year.

The Block I sidemount would use leftover SSME for flights. And though the talk now is making a cheaper non-reusable version of the SSME for the Block II, I don’t know why the even cheaper expedient of using a pair of RS-68 wouldn’t work instead, when using an EDS. I would guess that option would only sacrifice 10% of the payload.

“Honestly, my gut tells me that a smaller capsule on a single-stick EELV or Falcon 9 when it’s up and running is the safest way to go for crew transport, but that’s just my gut. It doesn’t mean that I’m right. Only hard-nosed analysis delivers confirmation”: Most likely the truth spoken here. 3 crew a la Apollo with minimum service onboard.

As to the sidemount analysis this is precisely what I am saying. There is NO analysis. And CEV has a tumbling abort scenario that I seriously doubt this stack can pass. You can read some of my exchange if you’re interested here http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/sidemount_hlv_n.html

I think that it’s entirely possible that the Ares 1/Orion LAS introduces more hazards into the system than it mitigates, and actually makes the crew less safe, but they have to have it for political reasons. Last time I looked at it, there were dozens of ways for it to give you a bad day, and more than half of them on an otherwise nominal mission…

Well, since the SSMEs will have to go back into production, the costs of refurbishing the SSMEs after Shuttle flights versus restarting production for sidemount flights is probably a rough wash.

And although the orbiter costs will be gone, there will be new costs associated with the sidemount stacks. For example, some of the publicly available configurations include an ATV, and last I knew, those were priced at $800 million a pop.

According to the Astronautix website (which is sometimes wrong), a 1989 Rockwell/Martin Marietta study found that the per flight cost of Shuttle-C (probably the closest analogy to sidemount) was going to be $424 million, which isn’t much lower than the ~$500 million average cost of a Shuttle flight. In fact, they found that Shuttle-C was going to be more expensive than Titan, already a very expensive launch vehicle. See:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm#Shuttle%20C

So, although it will be a lot cheaper than Ares to develop and fly much earlier (especially for heavy lift), I don’t necessarily expect Shuttle sidemount to produce savings operationally, and in fact, it’s costs may not be sustainable within the budget if NASA is also going to pursue significant exploration developments. (But we’ll see where Augustine and Co. come out.)

“I’m not worried about the flight rate of the Sidemount HLV being too low.”

My concern is the flight rate need might be too high (not too low) for the Shuttle infrastructure to handle, at to support ISS crew and cargo and ambitious exploration.

FWIW…

Neither does the Waco Tribune article. It only states where SpaceX hopes that funding goes.

Again, read for comprehension.

“So it IS new information…”

There was no new information in your prior post.

“…rather then”

It’s “than”, not “then”.

“hashing over the details of a 30 year old rocket design.”

The design in question was publicly released just a few weeks ago at the first Augustine review committee meeting.

“The Waco article and tells what Rep. Edwards is doing to get more for Elon.”

This sentence is incomplete and unintelligible.

“You may have you sandpit.”

The second “you” should be “your”.

“It and the high school debate classes you teach are probably all you have.”

If only this exchange had been at the level of a high school debate class. I spent most of it correcting grade-school English errors.

Oy vey…