Launches of NASA cargo to the International Space Station, including one planned early Sunday, don’t guarantee SpaceX is ready to launch military satellites, the head of Air Force Space Command said Tuesday in Cape Canaveral.
If a rocket failed, the loss of a national security satellite potentially worth more than $1.5 billion would be a bigger setback than losing food, clothing and other station supplies, Gen. William Shelton told the National Space Club Florida Committee.
“So there’s a big difference,” he said.
This is one reason that talk about “human rating” an Atlas (or Delta) is silly. If it’s reliable enough for a $1.5B satellite, it’s reliable enough to carry crew. All it ever needed was failure onset detection. And when SpaceX starts flying crew, the general’s argument will be much less strong.
Unless I missed it, there was one important aspect not discussed in trading kerosene versus methane. The latter would be much easier to manufacture on Phobos/Deimos or the Martian surface.
Someone needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that “as soon as possible” could be within a year, if they accelerate the docking system, and they could fly someone in ten days, if someone decided it was important.
The headline of this good National Journal article on yesterday’s Senate Appropriations hearing is very misleading. One would think from it that’s it’s about the commercial crew competition between Dragon and CST, when in fact it’s about the competition between SpaceX and ULA for milsat launches. I assume that the copy editor screwed up, not the author. Anyway, note the typical socialist argument against competition that Dick Shelby uses.
The biggest implication is that the models are worse than useless as a guide to policy on climate. And places like California are taking a wrecking ball to their economy for nothing.