Is it sustainable?
Can it be used to nuke Mecca?
If they don’t sink the continental shelf doing it!
Has NASA’s muslim outreach office announced a launch date for the Mars mission as yet? Didn’t think so.
The mighty Saturn V rocket that took the United States to the Moon had a lift capacity of 260,000 lb (120,000 kg) to low-Earth orbit. That’s 130 tons, or 116 “tonnes.”
US Won’t Lead New Manned Moon Landings, NASA Chief Says
http://www.space.com/20557-nasa-moon-missions-bolden.html
NASA chief Charles Bolden says the space agency won’t be sending astronauts to land on the moon any time soon, according to press reports.
The U.S. space agency won’t lead the way back to the moon in the foreseeable future in order to maintain its focus on manned missions to an asteroid, and eventually Mars, Bolden said during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board last Thursday (April 4), according to a SpacePolitics.com report by Jeff Foust.
“NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission,” Foust quoted Bolden as saying. “NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things.”
Instead, he said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars. “We intend to do that, and we think it can be done,” Bolden said.
Question...what are those three towers that surround the launch pad, and are the same height? I don't recall seeing anything like that for Saturn or the shuttle.
Their was a story in one of the Florida papers this morning, the gist of it was the SLS (and NASA as a whole) faired really well under the buget passed by the House yesterday, NASA had request 1.7 Billion for construction of the SLS system in 2014, the Budget gave them 2.2 Billion....
My niece is working on this program now.
I wonder about its carbon footprint?
As Archimedes once said, give me a rocket big enough and a website to watch the artist’s conception videos..... or something like that.
Designed to maintain the flow of cost-plus, no-bid contracts to all the companies that built the shuttle, and ensure that the return flow of campaign contributions will not be interrupted.
Pfui.
The only reason this rocket is being built at all is the incredible inertia of the enormous FedGov sow: once a program is started, politics makes it extremely hard to stop it. The power of incumbency, multiplied by media manipulation, gerrymandering, vote buying, and dirty tricks (traffic jams on election days) make it virtually impossible to stop any given politician, much less any Federal program.
There may be a rocket, but there will be no Mars mission.
The word that should be rolling off tongues at NASA is a philosophy of “cumulative” space exploration. That is, every time a mission within the solar system takes place, it should build on, literally, missions that have happened before, and its mission should be used to build on those that happen after.
When a space station is built, one of its primary tasks is to construct an “interplanetary shuttle engine”, a big, robotic engine and fuel tank to take other spaceships from Earth to Moon and Mars and beyond, and back, itself remaining in space. This would permit the spaceships to carry a lot more of their own fuel and supplies.
When considering Lunar and Martian missions, the first missions should be nuclear powered robotic tunneling systems. By mining tunnels as habitats, you avoid a huge number of problems, as well as create a cumulative Lunar or Martian base, so missions there can be a lot longer and carry more and different supplies.
The mining can be done before humans arrive and after they leave, and while they are there, the mining robots nuclear power can be used to provide copious amounts of energy to the base.
NASA reveals its latest boondoggle. There’s no need for a huge launcher.