Posted on 04/10/2010 9:12:05 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
For more than three years, NASA chief Michael Griffin has maintained that the safest, most reliable and affordable way to return astronauts to the moon is on the Ares I, a rocket he helped design from parts of the space shuttle. Alternatives, he insisted, such as modified military rockets, were simply not capable of carrying humans to the moon and beyond.
But interviews, as well as documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, indicate that military rockets can lift astronauts safely into space -- and to the moon -- for billions less and possibly sooner than NASA's current designs.
While it's not clear how the next administration wants to proceed with NASA's lunar ambitions, one aerospace-industry official confirmed that NASA recently asked Kennedy Space Center to start examining the impacts of scrapping NASA's own Ares I rocket design and switching to modified versions of the military's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets as the agency's next-generation human spaceships
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.orlandosentinel.com ...
That i did not know
Not quite. The R-7 development started in 1953, when the Soviets didn't even have a 1Mt weapon. At the time it was thought the smallest megaton range staged thermonuclkear bomb would be 3-6 tonnes. ergo one BFICBM needed.
The 100Mt Tsar Bomba was a later 1961 device, primarily a Kruschev propaganda display. But if it had been actually deployed, the intended range would have been much shorter - 3-5 of them airdropped (in its 50Mt sans Uranium tamper form) ahead of the advancing Warpac forces in Europe in the event of unpleasantness breaking out. The biggest bomb ever built: a tactical weapon. True story.
The program may have started in 1953 but they did not launch the first rocket until 1965
It was eventually utilized as a space launch vehicle. It was the brainchild of Vladimir Chelomei’s design bureau as a foil to Sergei Korolev’s N1 booster.With the termination of the Saturn V program, Proton became the largest expendable launch system in service until the Energia rocket first flew in 1987 and the U.S. Titan IV in 1989.
Titans are gone....last one launched several years ago.
I have already been informed and already knew.
The safety issues are the concern. Required reliability for man rated launch is much more than for non-human payloads. That reliability come in the form of expensive redundancy, more reliable and expensive parts, and much more testing and evaluation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.