Five years later, what does it think about SLS?
The country, with NASA’s budget, simply can’t afford to build a large rocket that will fly infrequently and cost as much as $2-$3 billion a year to maintain, Greason said.
“It’s hard for me, I personally haven’t been able to find a scenario in which a government funded and operated launch system, for which the government is the only customer, is a rational approach given the current budgets.
“Is that because I’m against big rockets? Of course not. But maintaining rocket production lines is a very expensive proposition. Trying to open another production line for a rocket that has almost no customers is a difficult thing for me to explain. The one argument I have heard that, if it were true, I would buy, is that there are no other ways to explore. I would buy that, but I don’t think it’s true.”
It’s not true.
Excellent quote.
“Is that because I’m against big rockets? Of course not. But maintaining rocket production lines is a very expensive proposition. Trying to open another production line for a rocket that has almost no customers is a difficult thing for me to explain.”
This.
“The one argument I have heard that, if it were true, I would buy, is that there are no other ways to explore. I would buy that, but I don’t think it’s true.”
And this.
That link in the article to Greason’s speech was really awesome:
http://www.nss.org/resources/library/videos/ISDC11greason.html
I have been in favor of such an approach i.e. space hopping for a long time. All large historical colonization efforts I can remember happened in that way. e.g. the Spanish developed the Canary Islands before going to the New World, the Portuguese developed the Azores before going to the New World, just look at Colombus’s routes and you will figure out that without those early settlements the voyage to the Americas would probably have been impossible with those resources. The Pacific Islanders developed an even more extreme version of this where they not only used the settlements to repair their boats and restock consumables but they actually constructed boats using local materials as well. Local propellant extraction and production can make this vision possible and if the propellants end up being LOX/LH2 or LOX/Hydrocarbon it also becomes possible to synthesize breathable oxygen or water in a pinch without resorting to a lot of expensive closed-cycle recycling systems.