archipeppe said:
luke strawwalker said:
That's what makes the entire program so incredibly frustrating right now as to seem almost a joke... all the money is going to SLS development, virtually nothing being spent on what its supposed to carry... and without payloads, no missions can be done. Carrying expenses to maintain SLS capabilities after its completed are going to eat up a lot of money that could have gone to develop and pay for payloads later on, further delaying the program when we could have been doing missions...
In this sense history is repeating all over again, it seems that SLS at the end will behave like its predecessor Shuttle.
It will eat a lot of money to fly leaving very few for its possible payloads. In this sense SLS seems even worst than Shuttle, since STS could (at least) carry crew to LEO or ISS while SLS without Orion is useless for human flight applications....
It's worse than that... SLS and Orion are being developed for "deep space missions" (now that lunar missions are off the table, which presumably will mean an asteroid mission (despite NASA and the scientists apparent lack of enthusiasm for such a mission) and perhaps lagrange point missions or lunar orbit or something of that sort) and without payloads, SLS and Orion are basically useless... Shuttle at least made no pretense of planning for anything more than "cheap transportation to Low Earth Orbit" (which of course it never was and never could be). Shuttle at least would work for the intended mission, even if it cost many times what was originally planned.
SLS and Orion, on the other hand, are completely useless without a host of supporting hardware, none of which is funded at this point. While technically SLS and Orion COULD provide transportation to LEO and to ISS, it's FAR too expensive to use for such a role... and without the habs, cryogenic space propulsion stages, etc. necessary to perform these "deep space" missions, SLS and Orion are just very expensive cancellation bait IMHO...
It's almost like SLS and Orion continue, without a viable plan to use them, simply because NASA and Congress have no idea what to do instead... it's a placeholder to maintain the status quo. The problem is even if SLS and Orion continue to completion, it's going to be a VERY expensive system to maintain the capability for, so it's going to eat up a LOT of funding while the remaining budget is reallocated to developing payloads and in-space propulsion stages for SLS and Orion, during which time basically little/nothing is actually being flown, simply because without the habs and stages and equipment, SLS/Orion simply cannot do anything particularly useful. Shuttle's overhead costs were enormous, and that was with, compared to the anemic projections for SLS flight rates, a very robust flight rate for shuttle (excepting the stand-downs post Challenger and Columbia...) SLS's "one flight every year or two" is going to make it on a per-mission basis the most expensive launch vehicle ever conceived, and the overhead costs to even maintain the capability are going to be staggering...
I guess we'll see what we'll see... but I'm in no way optimistic about the likelihood of a vigorous deep-space program-- and Mars seems to me very much a pipe-dream... Congress is choking on the vehicle development costs alone, and developing the hardware and infrastructure, and paying for the actual missions is going to be very much more expensive... IOW, if we can't afford lunar missions, what makes ANYBODY *seriously* believe we'll ever afford MARS missions that will cost many times more??
Time will tell... Later! OL JR
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