Posted on 09/06/2020 6:32:31 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Don’t we already have a mega rocket in the Saturn 5?
Not for many years. I doubt even the tooling is still there.
Yes, but the development and engineering is still there.
Not really I think most of the people who worked on it are dead.
Boeing is pathetic.
NASA should turn the project over to SpaceX.
Whatever SLS is supposed to do, SpaceX will just go ahead and do on their own first.
ULA (a combination of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin) is a dinosaur. A bureaucratic, inefficient basketcase. They are old news.
SpaceX is the future and that future is now.
Falcon Heavy can deliver large payloads to earth orbit and at a cost far below ULA with their reusable first-stage boosters and recoverable payload fairings.
While I am not a fan of Musks Tesla, SpaceX is a completely different thing altogether. That company is innovative, efficient, and highly motivated. What they are doing is revolutionary.
Probably.
Much cheaper for NASA to pay for space exploration or whatever in space as a service from SpaceX instead of buying their own hardware from Boeing. Even considering sunk cost.
SLS would have been a good rocket about 20 years (and a few billion dollars) ago.
Now it is obsolete before its first flight and a massive money pit to boot.
*ping*
If we sold areas of the moon, we’d have companies up there mining that sucker in no time at all.
I believe there are treaties in place which basically say you can’t sell the moon. But I think we should tear those up. Get government out of the way and watch entrepreneurs solve all the problems.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin do one thing very well, burn through money.
Elon Musk goal is to mine & process rare metals on the Moon to pay for the Mars trip and exploration.
Thia is my own comment, but I would suspect mining and processing metals on Mars also. I remember reading that the moon rocks that were returned to earth had minute traces of metals not found in the periodic tables. But I’ve never found any article recently or from the Apollo 11 and 17 days to confirm.
Are they planning on an automatic self landing system?
The SLS is supposed to produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust, a little more than the 7.5 million pounds from the Saturn 5.
But the SpaceX Falcon Super Heavy is supposed to produce about 16 million pounds of thrust.
Why are we still fooling with the SLS?
Pitiful and typical. Most gooberment programs have enough slackers and losers to make them fail. It is the people hired and the way they are managed.
It is difficult to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys.
Gooberment workers are not well motivayed. They have no organizational or personal fear of either failure or firing.
Most gooberment contracts are written and managed to give the contractor incentive to rape pillage and abuse. Defense contractors have honed this into an art form. Tough contract officers must be scarce as unicorns.
Even military contracting is a bonafide cluster fluck. Criminal is more like it.
You take the job, you do the job and work yourself to a nubbin or go broke to meet the terms of the deal is not a concept that lives in the gooberment or their contractors. Maybe somewhere?
Even performance bonds don’t insure success.
You Are correct Except that $8,000,000,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of government waste. Launch space X. eclipsed The objectives of the program is should have ended
The fact that the program did not end is worthy of another investigation. Of course each Investigation Just wastes more Tax pear money
Give it to Musk - he’ll do it for a tenth the cost.
That's why SpaceX can do this stuff so much faster and cheaper, because their engineers can do good engineering without being told how to do it by idiot politicians with law degrees in Washington.
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