The launch industry is seeing the light (and in China as well). The biggest expendable we should expend is SLS.
8 thoughts on “Expending The Expendables”
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The launch industry is seeing the light (and in China as well). The biggest expendable we should expend is SLS.
Comments are closed.
The biggest expendable we should expend is SLS.
Heh.
“He noted Avio is developing technologies — such as a rocket engine using liquid oxygen and methane propellants — that could support future reusable vehicles. “I think that cadence needs to be rightsized to the size of the market that you can actually reach,” he said, “otherwise, you’re going to do pretty much nothing with it.””
You don’t do anything with it when it is at the bottom of the sea either and there are cheaper ways to make artificial reefs.
What he is talking about is unrealized capacity and thinking it is a waste but he will never get the opportunity to use it if it isn’t there.
I believe the term that would help him comes from traffic engineering: “induced demand”.
Serious question, not a rhetorical one: now that re-usable rocket stages are a reality, is there still any realistic use case for expendables, other than for nations that don’t have anything else and in weapon systems which are intended to only ever take a one-way journey to the target?
Missions for which no reusable can cope – such as the recent Europa Clipper launch.
Of course, Starship, orbital refueling, and the like will deal with this too, soon.
An interesting case of underestimating demand for a service occurred in Auckland NZ when the Harbour Bridge was built. The politicians wanted a bridge that would handle the “expected demand”. Fortunately, the engineers designed a bridge that was expandable (not expendable). After opening, the bridge was found to be incapable of handling the actual new demand, so its capacity was doubled using so-called “clip-on” sections. Quite clever, really.
The Space Shuttle showed that at low launch frequency, reusability just isn’t worth that much. I don’t see a low frequency launcher working in the long term, but it could be a way to get a competitor started – like SpaceX tried with Falcon 1.
China has been pursuing reusables though its government and “private” branches for years. And it’s no news that they’d be doing the same with their heavy lifter, LM 9. They spoke of it, and I wrote of it more than a year ago. Or was it two years. Oh well.