Re:4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred re...
by SJC_Hacker on Sunday July 27, 2025 @12:37PM
(#44702517)
How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20?
I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
Re:4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred re...
by ACCount36 on Sunday July 27, 2025 @04:11PM
(#44704289)
How many tons of payload would that Starship land? How many could Saturn V?
If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon.
Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.
Re:4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred re...
by pklausler on Monday July 28, 2025 @02:45PM
(#44713936)
What was the one failure of the Saturn V that you mention? If you're thinking of Apollo 13, that took place after the Apollo stack had ditched all of the Saturn V stages.
Re:4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred re...
by SJC_Hacker on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @09:48AM
(#44723368)
Apollo 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6
Had that happened on a crewed mission, they could have returned astronauts safely. Which is probably why they went ahead with Apollo 8
Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't.
When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you.
There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).