Re:SLS vs. Starship
by bryanlarsen on Friday November 13, 2020 @11:51AM
(#25084186)
Yes, bad assumptions led to a bad result. Some of those bad assumptions made sense 10 years ago. Some of them didn't. I was far too generous to Congress by only talking about the former and not mentioning the latter. Multi-launch for large beyond-Earth missions made much more sense 10 years ago than a big rocket. Heck, multi-launch probably made more sense in the 60's than Apollo, if it wouldn't have been for that 1969 hard deadline.
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Multi-launch was considered for the Apollo program, but was ruled out because it had higher technical risk than just scaling up the rocket and making the payload extra light. If we didn't have the hard 1969 deadline we would likely have gone with the multi-launch option back then.
It's an interesting alternate reality to imagine: we might have had a more interesting moon program that had the ability to naturally scale to larger and larger missions, instead of repeating basically the same thing until the public gets bored and cancels it.
Re:SLS vs. Starship
by Gravityloss on Friday November 13, 2020 @01:09PM
(#25085414)
Yeah, first orbital docking was done 1966 on Gemini 8. The architecture for Apollo was decided much earlier already (it did include the lunar orbit rendezvous and docking which was indeed risky).
We now have 54 years of repeated low earth orbit dockings so maybe the architecture designs could start taking that into account.
Even SpaceX is planning on doing orbital refueling.
Re:SLS vs. Starship
by garaetjjte on Friday November 13, 2020 @02:44PM
(#25086525)
There were plans for more interesting moon missions under Apollo Applications Program, cancelled because of budget cuts. (and what was left was botched as Skylab)