2. Plain and simple, there is no way to get a 100 ton station to the launch site except by waterway. And there are no 100 ton station production facilities anywhere in the country, much less by any waterways.BLEO doesn't have 100 ton dry payloads, most of its mass is propellant.Shuttle, Titan IV, EELV's, ISS, etc all used existing infrastructure
2. Plain and simple, there is no way to get a 100 ton station to the launch site except by waterway. And there are no 100 ton station production facilities anywhere in the country, much less by any waterways.BLEO doesn't have 100 ton dry payloads, most of its mass is propellant.Shuttle, Titan IV, EELV's, ISS, etc all used existing infrastructure.
For those who question the need to compete the advanced boosters, but are interested in considering massive payloads, it might be useful to look at the limitation imposed by the transportation infrastructure between the VAB and the pad. The mass of the propellant that powers liquid boosters wouldn't be carried by the crawler-transporter; presumably at least some of that mass budget would then available for the payload.
With no assembly at the launch site, Shuttle payload bay (C-5C transportable).Using foreign aircraft (Dreamlifter is not available for hire), Beluga or An-124 might get you something larger, but a new container would be required and then there is getting that new container from the factory to the airport. Then there is the matter of test facilities, thermovac chambers, acoustic cells, vibe tables, etc.
No, a Mars Hab wouldn't have a dry weight of anywhere near 100 tons. We don't even have the EDL technology (even when scaled up to larger fairing sizes) to safely land something much greater than a few tons, let alone 100 tons!!! It'd plow into the Martian soil. No, a Mars Hab will have to be much less massive than that.
- Lower R&D cost. The life support systems, Common Berthing Mechinism design, the gyroscopes, the solar arrays, trusses, etc. have already been designed (for ISS), so much of that could be reused.
- 70 plus ton modules can carry pretty much a mostly completed station. This means less launches, less modules to build, less redundancy.
There will be no money for NASA space stations
Quote from: hop on 11/21/2011 05:38 pmThere will be no money for NASA space stationsIt's nice to know that "Back to the Future" was not just a scifi film and that people can actually jump into the future, read the paper and then come back to us and tell us what the future actually holds for us.
There will be no money for NASA space stations, or much of anything else if we actually to the point of using SLS for exploration. (edit: based on historical funding levels...)
Skylab was to launch on two IBs but ended up on the INT-21 when there was a spare Saturn V.
Quote from: Patchouli on 11/23/2011 03:54 amSkylab was to launch on two IBs but ended up on the INT-21 when there was a spare Saturn V.Actually, it was more that the Saturn V allowed Skylab to be heavier and fully fitted out from the beginning, and therefore more capable. Turning the wet S-IVB into a workshop was also a little more difficult than originally anticipated. See Skylab: A Chronology, particularly the entry for 21 May 1969.
.Skylab was to launch on two IBs but ended up on the INT-21 when there was a spare Saturn V.
Seems kinda hokey. The heaviest US modules of the ISS only weigh about 14 tons. They weren't designed with the intent of maxing out the payload capability of the launcher.
Now Satoshi is back on Earth (miss him already) JAXA has that big module with nobody up there doing research. The stuff he was doing related to cancer did sound important.