15 thoughts on “Shuttlyndra And The Smoking Rocket”

    3. The Chinese have tested weapons to destroy orbital targets, and I would imagine that the US has the same capability. Seems that once lunar mining operations commence then the value of the depots become much more strategic

      2. The Chinese have tested weapons to destroy orbital targets, and I would imagine that the US has the same capability.

        As do Russia, France, the UK, and India. Iran is working on it.

        Any nation that has ICBMs or SLBMs has the capability to destroy orbital targets.

        Somehow, that fact is lost on the arms controllers who resist any US attempt to develop a non-nuclear ASAT capability. Ironically, they oppose the development of weapons that would produce *less* collateral damage.

    4. How would the depots be secured from theft or destruction?

      How does the US secure any orbital asset from theft or destruction?

      The State Department would say “international treaties” (and probably actually believes that).

      The real answer, at present, is “the difficulty of getting there.”

      That will change at some point in the future. When that happens, any nation that wants to protect its space assets will require some sort of military or police force.

      In my opinion, ignoring the military dimension was one of the biggest mistakes in the Bush Vision for Space Exploration. Possibly even more disastrous than ignoring commercial space.

    5. You can’t secure anything from theft and destruction. Anyone that thinks you can needs to be beaten with the reality cluebat until properly adjusted.

      Any loss needs mitigation. First you have more than one depot serving the same area with replacements ready. Second you do not spare the rod and spoil the child… even if that child happens to be a nation with nukes. Being a punk or being punked is a choice.

  2. Secured from theft or destruction by the thousands of lowlife criminals that hang out in low earth orbit? Sounds impsossible to me…

    2. There’s an old religious song titled “Give me that old time religion” that contains the lyric “it was good enough for Grandpa and it’s good enough for me.”

      It seems that’s the thinking of some people when it comes to the need for a heavy lift rocket. “It was good enough for Apollo and it’s good enough for me.”

      If anything useful has come from the ISS experience, it’s the knowledge of how to design modular spacecraft and assemble the pieces in orbit. It makes no sense at all to spend tens of billions of dollars building the SLS when there not only isn’t an identified payload but no money left over to build any possible payload for it. If they do build it from Shuttle legacy components, it’ll require a large standing army of infrastructure (people and facilities) that will continue to consume large parts of the NASA budget whether the SLS flies or not. To the politicians, that’s a feature, not a bug. They likely don’t care if the SLS ever flies a useful mission so long as it keeps the money flowing to their districts.

      Instead of building a honking big rocket and then wondering what we can do with it if we find any additional funding, it makes more sense to design mission architectures for different destinations and then determine what’s the most massive/largest indivisible component. Once you’ve done that, you know what your lift requirements are and can then evolve/develop boosters with that capacity. Instead of spending an estimated $40 billion to develop the SLS, allocate perhaps $10 billion to purchasing lift capacity and the rest to developing the payloads that will be launched. Simply proceeding with the SLS and hoping that money will magically appear for payloads is patently stupid.

      The first post on this thread makes me happy I never belonged to the Cult of Saint Zubrin.

  4. For some reason I can’t post there so…

    The per-pound cost of space launch decreases as launch vehicle capacity increases, so by shunning heavy lift for orbital refueling, the depot approach will increase the cost of interplanetary ventures.

    Someone should let Dr. Zubrin know that NASA has hidden internal documents that contradict this.

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