Subject:
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Re: Some good news for a change, maybe?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 23 Jun 2004 17:48:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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1223 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
> All of the Saturn tooling is no more.
>
> NASA admitted they did that on purpose to "focus efforts on the shuttle".
> Arguably the Saturns would have been really great Big Dumb Boosters if heavy
> lift was something that NASA was really interested in.
Saturn V rockets would have, admittedly, had a lower cost per payload pound, but
who would have been able to take advantage of that capacity besides the
government? Commercial enterprise needs greater cost efficiency, not greater
capacity. Today, a single Saturn V launch would cost about $2.4 billion.
That's about 8 months of Space Shuttle operation with four launches. We'd have
to be able to load up a year's worth of payloads on a single SV and guarantee
that each one would end up where you wanted it, which would be a complete
nightmare if you ended up needing one item in LEO, one in HEO, one landing on
Mars, two more sent out of the solar system in opposite directions, and a sixth
retrieved back to Earth for whatever reason. Oh wait. The Saturn V has no
returnable payload capacity, so scratch that idea. I wonder how many trips it
would have taken to retrieve all of those tomato seeds with Saturn V missions...
Also, when calculating payload costs, everyone always seems to factor for the
total weight of what a Saturn V can lob into orbit vs the total weight of what a
Space Shuttle can fit in its payload bay. What about the weight of the Shuttle
Orbiter itself? If you want to send up a 7-person crew with your Saturn V
payload, you're going to lose a lot of your true "payload" weight to a command
module, a reentry module, and all of the materials necessary to hook them up
with the actual payload. If you want to send them up to perform extended
science experiements, you lose the weight of the science labs and increased
life-support from your remaining payload capacity.
The STS isn't the final best answer to the question, but the Saturn V stopped
being the final best answer when we stopped going to the moon. Private
enterprise is better served by the much more affordable array of ELVs available
today, and universities need something with an even lower price range. What we
need is not a gigantic ELV system, but an RLV system with a design that hasn't
been compromised by military demands that are later abandoned.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Some good news for a change, maybe?
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| (...) All of the Saturn tooling is no more. NASA admitted they did that on purpose to "focus efforts on the shuttle". Arguably the Saturns would have been really great Big Dumb Boosters if heavy lift was something that NASA was really interested in. (20 years ago, 23-Jun-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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