[Paradox]

Its good to see that things move forward, even when the Shuttles future is up in the air.

[chimera]

Cool, but still a midget compared to the Saturn V. We lost a lot of heavy-lift capability when we cut our own throats closing down that program.

[Cincinatus]

"Collins said the most likely market for the heavy-lift Delta 4 outside the Air Force is NASA's new space exploration initiative, which is targeting manned missions to the moon by 2020 and eventually missions to Mars. "As NASA looks toward their exploration initiatives, here's a heavy-lift vehicle that will be flight proven," Collins said

The problem is that the Delta-IV, as cool as it is, only carries 13 metric tonnes to LEO (compare with 15 mT for the Shuttle). For even a simple human lunar mission, we'll need something on the order of 100-150 mT in LEO and we would need up to 500-1000 mT for a human Mars mission. That's a lot of Delta-IV's!

In contrast, the Saturn V could place 120 mT in LEO with one launch. We need to develop a real heavy lift vehicle; a Shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle could put 50-70 mT in LEO using existing hardware and launch infrastructure.

[Dallas59]

[Barney59]

How about a coat of paint and a few patches on the 3 S5's in Huntsville, Cape C and Houston?

A little LOx anyone?

I hear they were Moon ready when they pulled the plug on Apollo 18...

[hosepipe]

WOnder if Clinton SOLD... The chinese all of NASA's expertise too, like he did our military secrets, or NASA's TAXPAYER FUNDED abilities are just FREE STUFF from a RICH country to all the non RICH countrys in "some kind of" world re-distribute the wealth program.. by Washington D.C. Democrats and RINOs..

[Centurion2000]

The heavy-lift vehicle, with three core stages in a side-by-side configuration, is designed to loft up to 13,000 kilograms to geosynchronous-transfer orbit, twice the capacity of its single-core cousin.

Sounds like three of these could put up a nice battlestation in geosync orbit.

[Centurion2000]

We need the SEA DRAGON.

[Lazamataz]

Boeing's Delta IV Heavy Gets Ready for its Close-Up

Thanks for flying Delta!

[RightWhale]

The mission also marks the debut of Boeing's 5-meter fairing

Hard to keep up with movies. Will wait for the DVD.