/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11969630
Well fuck...

>>7506068
As a design, it's actually pretty damn good.

The only real problem with the SLS is that it isn't using parts in common with other US made rockets to keep costs down. It really should have used something that could have some commonality with something else. However, that's a real problem when at the time, and even currently, the only American made rocket engine worth a fuck is the Merlin that would have any commonality. The Atlas uses a Russian engine, and the Delta's engine sucks major ass.

Check out the DIRECT proposal. If we had gone with DIRECT as soon as the shuttle was doomed, we'd have been back to space and those companies wouldn't have been able to argue the profits around like they did under Constellation.

SLS adopted a lot of these ideas from DIRECT but it was too late to prevent Boeing and others from being greedy fucks.

http://www.directlauncher.org/

It is cheaper and quite efficient to adopt the shuttle tech - the SSME is the only engine we have of that size because nothing else was allowed to challenge the shuttle politically, and thus Aerojet Rocketdyne didn't bother to produce anything else. The SSME isn't even that bad, it's actually fairly good and since we have a lot of experience with it, it's still the best choice for a heavy lifting rocket. Again, the only problem with SLS is that it was turned into a pork project.

>Why? With the shuttle, they were at least able to recover and reuse the engines.

Refurbishing the entire thing is why it all cost so much. Refurbishing an entire shuttle and maintaining the shuttle fleet was fucking super duper expensive.

>>7506084
>True, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the capacity for their advertised figures before, it just means they didn't have the surplus capacity above their advertised figures which they intended for landing and reuse.

Yeah that's probably more accurate than how I explained it