Skipjack wrote:NASA has a horrible track record when it comes to building new launchers since the SaturnV. All of them were overpriced and underperforming.
All of them? You mean STS?
Quite the data set there...
A lot of bad decisions are made due to political pressure.
True. That's why STS ended up so expensive and unsafe - Nixon wasn't willing to fund more than a half-assed effort, but the Air Force wanted a very heavy payload with lots of cross-range on reentry. Still, it turned out pretty well, all things considered.
STS essentially delivers a fully-equipped, crewed space station on orbit along with the payload. And it has 15 tonnes of high-volume downmass capability. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Commercial options are not subject to as much political pressure and therefore can make more reasonable and cost effective decisions.
As I've been trying to make clear, DIRECT
is a reasonable and cost-effective decision. The question is, can NASA make it?
Further, NASA has a horrible track record when it comes to maintaining its knowledge base. As you said it yourself. So much got lost. Private companies do a better job at that, usually, especially since they keep improving their processes and products. Often they will sell or license their older technology to other companies. So again, the knowledge is not (at least not entirely) lost.
This argument is backwards. NASA has had exactly one instance of mass knowledge loss during a large gap. Saturn-to-STS. So in order to avoid this happening again, you propose... firing all the knowledge workers and getting someone else to build a brand-new system from scratch that won't be ready for many years?
Need I remind you that commercial contractors already build and operate all of NASA's stuff?
A program like this won't last long enough for NewSpace, as it stands now, to execute it. That's politics.
The SRBs are probably here to stay. That's also politics. Fortunately, they can enable a system that's quick and cheap to develop, relatively cheap to operate, and very capable.
That too would be a NASA launcher and would be suffering from the same problems as any NASA launcher.
What problems would "any NASA launcher" automatically suffer from?
You seem to have a very negative view of NASA as such. It has its problems, but I think it's better to try and fix them than to junk the whole thing and start over.
There have only ever been two major NASA launch vehicles - Saturn and Shuttle. Both were heavily constrained by political realities.
But the STS stack turns out to make a great launcher without the orbiter attached. What's wrong with using it that way?
Also I am very much against SRBs. They were responsible for 50% of all Shuttle failures and the only failure at launch that the shuttle has had.
No.
Two things.
1) That failure was management deliberately deciding to ignore a technical white paper that said outright that the SRBs couldn't be used if the air temperature was below a certain value.
2) The RSRB (redesigned solid rocket booster) doesn't have the problem any more, and has a very long, very perfect flight record.
Actually, STS historical safety overall is roughly the same as Soyuz, which is the only system that's ever launched enough to make a valid comparison. It's just that the public's tolerance for risk in spaceflight is very very low.
Now consider that Orion, as launched on Jupiter, would have a LAS. That instantly cuts the launch risk by a factor of about 10, putting it way down in the noise as regards mission risk for a lunar sortie.
DeltaV wrote:No OFF switch for SRBs
That's mostly a problem for Ares I. Even there, last I heard a 3-second autodestruct would probably solve it. Jupiter can pack a much heavier, more powerful LAS, which combined with the much lower max-Q makes this not a big issue.
