“If you buy one SLS rocket, the price is really high. If you buy two, the price goes down significantly, and if you buy the three it keeps going down,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said-”
It is not one launch every six months that should be the goal, it is six launches in one year, and every year for the next 30 years that should be the NASA position. The 4 billion a year presently being completely wasted on the space station to nowhere would be better spent on building two more SLS core stage production lines. The rivers of tears cried by NewSpace fans if NASA officials were to discuss this option would do my heart good. The 150 metric ton payload target would be no problem if the SLS boosters were replaced with two New Glenn lower stages. This is what is needed to loft a double-hulled “fat workshop.”
In my view the necessary building block for a cislunar infrastructure is a minimum 50 foot diameter fat workshop that has an outer 15 foot envelope filled with lunar water as a cosmic ray shield. A 60 foot diameter stage with a 15 foot outer hull would provide a 30 foot diameter inner hull. By sending these workshops with robot landers to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) a crew compartment pipeline will be created. The landers go down to the ice and convert some of it into propellent and take the rest up to the workshops and repeat. Eventually the cosmic ray shields will be full and by connecting a pair of workshops with a tether system they can be spun to provide a Near-Sea-Level-Radiation-1-Gravity environment (NSLR1G).
These crew compartment pairs can be used first as LLO space stations and then as Lunar Cyclers and GEO platforms. Their most important application will be for spaceships. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and NSLR1G enables multi-year missions to the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants. True atomic spaceships with cosmic ray water shields and tether-generated artificial gravity are the logical replacement for the terrestrial strategic deterrent. These space boomer fleets would allow guest scientists to go on voyages of exploration. Placing the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers months away in deep space would ratchet down over half a century of launch-on-warning risk and provide a means to intercept comet and asteroid impact threats. The Ayn-Rand-in-space crowd does not like the idea of progress in space being directly subsidized by the state but it shows how completely clueless they are. Everything comes from the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJjlaggbK0
The SLS has been demonized by the NewSpace mob from the day the program was announced. The reason for this propaganda campaign is not hard to figure out. Literally libraries of death-to-SLS comments have been posted by a legion of cyberthugs because SLS competes for tax dollars with SpaceX, that poster child for corporate welfare. When anyone interrupts the decade-long non-stop infomercial that public space blog forums have become since NewSpace cyberbullies hijacked them, a dogpile of trolls quickly silences them. This kind of exposure drives the SpaceX fans into a frenzy of wailing and gnashing of teeth. They are the most toxic group on the internet as proven by survey.
In a perfect world the Saturn V would NOT have been killed and, instead, would have evolved into the reusable vehicle the space shuttle was meant to be. Instead of retreating to the dead end of LEO the Moon would have remained the focus of Human Space Flight. Instead of an Outer Space Treaty forbidding nuclear weapons it would have embraced the use of nuclear energy in space outside the Earth’s magnetosphere. Interestingly, Human Space Flight, with human-rating standards and escape tower technology, was the best path to transporting fissile material Beyond Earth Orbit with the least risk. It is not widely publicized that landing back rockets was NOT invented by SpaceX but is actually technology from almost 30 years ago. After only two years of development the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper rocket landed back in 1993.
Hindsight can sometimes be engaged retroactively by resurrecting and repurposing an old concept. The Falcon 9 is essentially an upgraded design of the 1961 Saturn I rocket with Soviet propellent super-cooling added. The Saturn I rocket engine was the H-1, development began in 1958 to upgrade an earlier engine to a thrust of 205,000 pounds, a thrust to weight ration of 102.47 to 1, and a seal level Isp of 255 seconds. The Merlin engine used by the Falcon 9 used technology developed by TRW for NASA in 1964 for the lunar lander. The Merlin has slightly better numbers and must “hover slam” land back, unlike the Delta Clipper. The hobby rocket payload is appropriate for satellites but far below what is necessary for any Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) applications.
In retrospect the mighty Saturn V first stage could have been modified to land back and be reused. The most efficient arrangement for the shuttle would likely have been two large turbopumps driving 4 thrust bells of well over 2 million pounds of thrust each and a smaller central gimbaled engine capable of landing the stage. Likewise the second stage would have landed back but just the engines and some feeder tanks, which would have separated from the stage just short of orbital velocity and then reentered using a heat shield with the stage structure expended. The first stage would have ideally used 4 large thrust bells and one small one while the second stage one large central bell and 4 much smaller ones for landing the engine section. The third stage would have been a single engine wet workshop with a lunar lander (and it’s engine) and may have even recovered it’s single engine using a free return lunar trajectory, heat shield, water barrier, and parachutes. This works out to 12 liquid fuel engines of 6 different types powering 3 stages and a lunar lander.
Sadly, the space shuttle was designed by committee, some say with a secret mission to kidnap Soviet spy satellites driving the requirements. Having served in the military I would say that does not sound like a conspiracy theory and is probably true.
Ice on the Moon 