I notice you addressing everything but the last two posts I made in response to you.

Gas stations are “nice to have”? In what form of transportation are fuel stops only nice to have?

Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grummen and a host of other aerospace firms have said they are not show stoppers and all have said they are doable. I tend to agree with them.

Remember it was NASA that said EELV’s were impossible to rate for humans and the black zones made them impossible to use for crew. It was NASA that said we needed the Constellation program as the only way forward.

You have a group in congress that knows if we go the route of commercial fuel we don’t need a heavy lift launch vehicle. If we don’t need a HLV then we do not need that army at NASA. That means jobs in their districts and less campaign support because we would be moving away from cost plus-fixed fee aquistion and towards fix price.

Correct!

The longer we put off developing them, the longer it will be until we have one

We already have them. Market forces will take care of the cryogenic variants once there is sufficient traffic beyond LEO, but we need to unleash those market forces first.

There’s no “in case they don’t work”, because they have worked for more than thirty years. It’s a known known as Donald Rumsfeld might say. The main uncertainty is how much time and money it will take to develop and deploy cryogenic depots that are capable of storing LOX/LH2 for about a month in LEO and about a year at L1/L2. There’s a tiny probability LH2 in LEO will turn out to be problematic. But even that wouldn’t be a problem because you could launch LH2 straight to L1/L2 just before you depart, because of the high O/F ration. And that’s even if you insist on using LOX/LH2 everywhere, which is itself unnecessary.

You are simply telling lies. Do you want to be known as a liar?

“He’s not the Messaiah when it comes to HSF, and he needs to realize that-and so do his fans.”

Only Musk detractors see him as their messiah. People that support commercial space see him as a businessman that is actually DOING something about lowering the cost to access space.

You mean like he did for automibles with TESLA? Oh yeah, there’s a good business model– not.. unless your plan it to get government subsidies rather than seek financing in the private sector.

SLS lacks a sane timeframe/budget to get the job done. Congress is not providing enough funding to get a shuttle derived launcher and any launcher that needs 10,000 plus people to launch it isn’t going to leave any budget left over for payloads (heck even having enough to finish Orion seems to be a problem…I mean you could do something with it and no SLS, but Congress does not seem to be too happy with spending more to finish it in the short term). Sorry but technology has advanced a lot since oh 1981. How would you like it “the law” specified that you must use systems developed in the 1970ies for a small pickup truck in your new car? Do you think it wise?

IMHO I would not be surprised if ccrew gets drop, Space X flies a crew by about 2015(Musk wants to fly people NASA or no NASA), and people start asking hard questions about Orion(i.e. As it has zero chance of being manned in this time frame). And yes he is in a position where he could do just that.

“While CxP had not fully developed its manifiest, they did have sorties in mind for the first few landings (assuming their funding profile at the start was what they got and not two administrations’ butchery via OMB), followed by a permanent outpost at Shackleton Crater. (remember Shauna Dale, Lori Garver’s predecessor, making the announcement on NASA TV?)”

Yeah sometime around the 2030ies with not much spaceflight in that period taking place. The Altair lander was deferred in the attempt to get CXP going. Sorry but you cannot fit a more than Apollo mission, using 1970ies rocket parts into a 21st NASA budget. Not going to fit and congress is not likely to increase the budget to make it fit.

SLS isn’t a back up plan to depots. It is just an overpriced rocketed designed to keep certain constituents happy by NOT CHANGING THE STATUS QUO. But if you truly want exploration, you need cheap access to space (SLS isn’t cheap). You need to widen the political consentient beyond the current space states (SLS does not do that) but a prop depot might.

Anyway the cost to prove depots is less than the cost needed to build SLS and depots make a huge difference as to what kind of rocket do you need to complement it and even CXP was facing a boil off problem (they needed to launch Ares 1 within 7 days of launching the Ares V assuming the loiter skirt worked….or else there would be no moon mission). Can you imagine the expense that being able to launch two rockets different rockets in a short period of time would have cost? If you had a depot then you would have more than 7 days to launch the mission.

This is an insane statement, to anyone who understands the technology and economics of space transportation. It is HLVs that are “nice to have.” Propellant storage and transfer on orbit are absolutely mandatory to a spacefaring civilization. The longer we put off developing them, the longer it will be until we have one, and money pissed away on a government jobs program simply continues to delay that day.

While CxP had not fully developed its manifiest, they did have sorties in mind for the first few landings (assuming their funding profile at the start was what they got and not two administrations’ butchery via OMB), followed by a permanent outpost at Shackleton Crater. (remember Shauna Dale, Lori Garver’s predecessor, making the announcement on NASA TV?)

Vadislaw: Depots are a “nice to have” part of the infrastructure, but need not be mandatory. Right now, apart from small-scale demonstrations with Progress/ISS and some fuel transfer experiments in GEO (AF sponsored) ,we don’t know if it’ll work or not. Why do you think NASA issued the RFP for a technology demonstrator to flight test and see if it works or not? Betting the whole exploration strategy on a technology that may not succeed is not a good idea. Even Dr. Braun, NASA’s chief technologist, is on record as saying that some of what they will be working on may work in the lab, but not in orbit. What’s your Plan B in case depots don’t work? (either the boil-off problem can’t be solved, propellant storage and stability, or fuel transfer are the three likely stumbling blocks) Will they work? Probably. But as Chris Kraft says, “Have a backup plan.”

And USAF research, Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion research and their own research…

I’m not saying NASA would design the next RLV, but that they fund the basic research that lets the businesses decide which approaches are worth pursuing.

They tried that with NASP, X-33, SLI etc to no avail. As long as the R&D isn’t prescriptive it won’t be as bad as SLS / Constellation / Shuttle, but it will likely be a waste of money and more importantly a waste of time when life is so short and the art so long and when we’ve wasted so much time already. We could have had it all by now.

When it comes to expendable launch vehicles the knowledge resides mostly in industry. I don’t see any reason why it would be different for reusable ones. That is one of the main reasons why I would like to see RLV development (as well as other important infrastructure like depots) funded through demand pull and not through a scheme like COTS or CCDev. The latter lends itself well to relatively mature types of systems but not in my opinion to R&D of systems designed to be more economical and radically so.