Space depots v. Big rockets


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The battle is joined between those supporting space refueling depots and those in favor of big rockets like the Space Launch System which cost so much flying them once a year is all the NASA budget can handle.

Depots are the newer engineers solution as much of the infrastructure either exists or will exist within 3-5 years.

Big rockets are the choice of old-school engineers who worked on Saturn V and politicians looking for large slices of pork for their districts.

The first shot is the leaking of the summary of an internal report making the case for Depots. Next will be to jinn support for the entire reports release.

Report summary....

SpaceRef story....

On 26 September 2011, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) issued a press release regarding fuel depots. This included a letter to former Administrator Mike Griffin who had dismissed the notion of fuel depots and commercial launch vehicles as being a viable alternative to the Space Launch System(SLS) during Congressional testimony.

Rohrabacher noted "When NASA proposed on-orbit fuel depots in this Administration's original plan for human space exploration, they said this game-changing technology could make the difference between exploring space and falling short. Then the depots dropped out of the conversation, and NASA has yet to provide any supporting documents explaining the change," says Rohrabacher."

Well, despite what NASA may or may not have been telling Rep. Rohrabacher about its internal evaluations regarding the merits of alternate architectures that did not use the SLS (and those that incorporated fuel depots), the agency had actually been rather busy studying those very topics.

And guess what: the conclusions that NASA arrived at during these studies are in direct contrast to what the agency had been telling Congress, the media, and anyone else who would listen.

This presentation "Propellant Depot Requirements Study - Status Report - HAT Technical Interchange Meeting - July 21, 2011" is a distilled version of a study buried deep inside of NASA. The study compared and contrasted an SLS/SEP architecture with one based on propellant depots for human lunar and asteroid missions. Not only was the fuel depot mission architecture shown to be less expensive, fitting within expected budgets, it also gets humans beyond low Earth orbit a decade before the SLS architecture could.

Moreover, supposed constraints on the availability of commercial launch alternatives often mentioned by SLS proponents, was debunked. In addition, clear integration and performance advantages to the use of commercial launchers Vs SLS was repeatedly touted as being desirable: "breaking costs into smaller, less-monolithic amounts allows great flexibility in meeting smaller and changing budget profiles."

In a time when space sector jobs are an issue this alternative architecture to the use of the SLS would create real jobs and get humans beyond low Earth orbit years sooner than what the Senate demands be done via the pork filled route.

Right now there is a slow-motion purge underway within OCT and across the agency to move anyone who thinks beyond the SLS mindset in ways that could do things in a much less costly fashion with much greater flexibility.

And if some of these words below look familiar, well they should - see "Using Commercial Launchers and Fuel Depots Instead of HLVs" (March 2011) and "The HLV Cost Information NASA Decided Not To Give To Congress" (January 2011). Studies have been bouncing around NASA for some time that cite alternatives to large government-developed Ares-V/SLS-class boosters such as the use of fuel depots and commercial launch vehicles.

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why can't we have both Doc? why? i will never stop asking that. if i have to choose, then i guess i go with the more efficient systems, yes...but ultimately our future in space and the benefit of space exploration, i.e resources and employment for the people of Earth, lies in big, expensive and manpower-hungry projects. i know you don't like that future Doc, but it's a good one, i'm sure of it.

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Look at ship development.

Man used ships that were just big enough to do the voyages of discovery and early settlement to make it affordable. Only later when the settlements were stable and the economic case made did larger ships get built, culminating in clippers, ocean liners, and large warships to defend those established interests.

We are in the same same funding as Russia, but instead of opting for one or the other for sustainability some want both. This will have profound effects from almost assuring SLS will eat big parts of the budget before its eventual cancellation to JWST having to gut the Space Science budget to survive.

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