Except it won’t. Particularly as the ISS represents the past policy planning for an era long over.

Going in circles, no wherem fast, for half a century is a waste of resources. Noly Musketeers like Costal Ron crave the fig leaft of ‘learning how to live in microgravity’– which is a plea to finance trash cans like Dragoon. There’s five decades of on orbo data from living in microgravity .

The Obama ewra has been a waste of time in the space era. BEO is the future. HRC knows it. Next stop, Luna, folks. Meanwhile the Mars gawkers can be paraded before Congress and explain what we’ve gotten for the $2.6 billion Curiosity mission- whose two year mission is up in August. Lots of pretty red pictures. Quaint.

“Are the SLS solids likely to be essentially the same segments as the probable Orbital Science solids? The same diameter and mix?”

No.

“Or would the ATK section of OSATK be producing two different products?”

Yes.

“It would seem to make the most business sense to just produce one type of segment if that’s feasible.”

The technical requirements are not the same.

However the labor force required would share commonalities, and maybe even some common facilities.

However the prospects for a long term need for SLS solids is not very high, since a liquid fueled booster (assuming the SLS survives that long) is more likely to win in a competition.

It would seem to make the most business sense to just produce one type of segment if that’s feasible. But if they do that how are they going to price the new segments? If they charge the same price as for the SLS segments is that going to automatically put the new Antares (or whatever name) vehicle non-competitive price-wise?

On the other hand, if they price the new segments more reasonably how is that going to look if essentially the same segments for SLS are priced quite differently?

Anyone have thoughts on this?

I think that is a pretty solid analysis and it more or less matches mine.

Government policy is the baseline definition of inertia, and usually this inertia is immune from basic notions of change…but vunerable to almost every event in the government…this is an excellent example of where, kind of from an unexpected source basic US policy which was very immune to change is now coming under some “mass” disruption.

What the Russian move into the Ukraine has done is given various actors who want a course change a geniune and hard to dispute chisel to see if the wedge can be opened and it seems to be doing it.

in the end what OSC and ATK have to do is to try and figure out how to compete with SpaceX and this will be the fall back to soften the blow when SLS goes down.

They will need to stab SLS to death by virtue of looking for customers on a more then a 2 year launch cycle…and will have to do it in large measure because it will be silly to have a solid first stage that is orders of magnitude cheaper then the boosters for SLS.

Where both Lockmart and Boeing are in a hurt is that the need for their launch vehicles will falter if a lower cost alternate actually emerges (ie SpaceX can meet its goals or OSC/ATK develops a lower cost vehicle.)

As Stephen would say it is interesting times. RGO

Leaving 2 stations co-orbiting in each others debris, in useless 55 degree orbits? You aren’t thinking clearly.

Orbital is an ISS partisan and ATK’s political weight, which used to be exclusively SLS-centric, is now going to be redeployed.

Orbital is suddenly America’s solid rocket motor company, owning a multi-billion SLS contract. ATK boosters aren’t going anywhere.

At the bargaining table we should be magnanimous and let the Russians stay on ISS for the entire five-plus additional years they’ve got coming under current arrangements, but also work out a rebuild schedule such that the Russians can detach their contributed property to form the rump of a future Mir 2.0 and allow us to step-by-step replace Russian functionality and extend the new ISS 2.0/Freedom or whatever else we choose to call it, so that two separate, independent stations are extant by 2020. It would be nice to have the U.S. delegation be simply the lead entity of a larger delegation representing also the EU, Canada and Japan, but we should go it alone if we must.

As they have long been obviously delusional, it is perhaps unsurprising that the various SLS fan-boys who post here now seem to see mortal peril for ISS in recent Russian moves. In truth, it’s SLS and its joined-at-the-hip-and-in-Alabams blood brother ULA that both face prompt extinction. Once it’s apparent that Russia really means to embargo RD-180’s, Atlas V is dead and 60% or more of ULA’s future business along with it. The ULA-USAF block buy will be broken and SpaceX will grab all or most of the low-end launches as they are competed, one at a time. Toward the end of the launch slate represented by the current block buy, SpaceX might even get some competition for a few payloads from Orbital’s Antares – probably a re-engineered Antares 2.0 by that time. SpaceX will barely notice even if they lose a few of these as they will be well into eating the Delta IV Heavy’s lunch with Falcon Heavy by that time.

Since the recent merger, Orbital is now in charge of ATK’s space assets. As I noted above, they want to follow the trail blazed by SpaceX and get Antares certified to launch DoD/USAF/NRO payloads. ATK, previously an unalloyed part of the Shelby mob owing to its SLS connection, will now have active reason to oppose the other major objective of said mob, preservation of ULA’s military/intel launch monopoly.

With respect to SLS, a decision to base future large solids business on building several Antares 2.0 booster stages per year – instead of maybe an average of one five-segment SRB a year for SLS – would gut SLS like a trout. Orbital is an ISS partisan and ATK’s political weight, which used to be exclusively SLS-centric, is now going to be redeployed. The best the SLS faction can hope for in future is that Orbital doesn’t simply stab SLS to death out of hand by nixing the SRB’s. The price of such forbearance is likely to be a strict hands-off policy with respect to the ISS budget and acquiescence to Orbital’s orderly entry, behind SpaceX, into the DoD/USAF/NRO launch services market.

Truth to tell, Orbital is a lot more crucial to the future of both ULA and SLS than even SpaceX right now, odd as that may seem. Both are doomed, of course, but when the bodies eventually go down, the CSI’s are going to find at least as many Orbital fingerprints on the corpses as SpaceX ones.

“If Constellation’s lunar hardware would have INITIALLY had the crews stay on the surface for fourteen days instead, guess what: THAT WOULD STILL BE PROGRESS!”

To do what? Pick up more gray rocks? To “learn” the history of the Moon?

Here is part of a press release from NASA today about the SpaceX Dragon return to Earth from the ISS:

““The space station is our springboard to deep space and the science samples returned to Earth are critical to improving our knowledge of how space affects humans who live and work there for long durations,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations. “Now that Dragon has returned, scientists can complete their analyses, so we can see how results may impact future human space exploration or provide direct benefits to people on Earth.”

The T-Cell Activation in Aging experiment, which also launched to space aboard Dragon, seeks the cause of a depression in the human immune system while in microgravity. The research could help researchers develop better protective measures to prevent disease in astronauts.”

So I see the choice we have as rather stark:

A. Continue the ISS mission so we can find out how humans will be able to not only survive in space, but potentially live.

B. Learn more about the geology of the Moon.

That’s the choice you want to make, right? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but if those are the choices then I choose “A”.

Maybe wait until the first manned test flight of Dragon in order to make it clear that we ourselves do not need to bluff back but can back it up.

We already have any needed hab space in development with Bigelow. The other hardware can show up in short order if needed, I think.