Zachstar - 24/3/2008 12:02 PMISS will become THE excuse to not go to the moon and mars.Thanks to years of rather annoying other nations. Our next president may want to keep ISS going which drains an enormous amount of funds.. He/she will call it a international gateway to peace or whatever.... The point is it will distract the masses and few will really care that we arent walking on the moon in 2020.As for private space getting there. I have heard ideas about how to get Dragon AROUND the moon. Yet a real program to actually land on there is almost out of the question for private space. No SpaceX is not going to pull the BFR out of it's hat before 2020 btw.And forget mars.
Zachstar - 24/3/2008 12:31 PMWhich will mean little more than SpaceShip3 or Dragon. IE Rich people will pay to go into orbit to dock to a Bigelow station and come home.
Ronsmytheiii - 24/3/2008 12:09 PMNow for the Direct related question. I know that after Challenger the shuttle was barred from commercial flights. Would Jupiter have the same affliction? There may not be much of a market though, but just in case.
Eerie - 24/3/2008 1:18 PMQuoteRonsmytheiii - 24/3/2008 12:09 PMNow for the Direct related question. I know that after Challenger the shuttle was barred from commercial flights. Would Jupiter have the same affliction? There may not be much of a market though, but just in case.Will there be a market for very large satellites in GTO?
kevin-rf - 24/3/2008 1:30 PMThe answer to that is how many Ariane V's have flown to GTO with a single payload.
kraisee - 24/3/2008 3:17 PMThere is currently an agreement between NASA and DoD that NASA will not fly any commercial payloads.Ross.
kraisee - 24/3/2008 3:17 PMThere is currently an agreement between NASA and DoD that NASA will not fly any commercial payloads.But agreements can always be revised if/when circumstances change, and NASA having a capability to lift payloads double or quadruple that of DoD would create a situation where NASA would be in a different market class and would not be competing with the EELV's. In such a situation, if there was *demand* for such capability, DoD and NASA could likely find a new arrangement.I would venture to say that as a NASA operation it would likely be a slow thing. One flight per year maybe. But there is an option to make it a commercial operation as well. Either leasing LC-39's facilities from NASA or building something new. Jupiter-120 as a commercial operation has excellent cost profiles being able to launch twice the payload of satellites as either EELV system currently, yet for quite a bit less than double the cost. There is certainly a potential economic business model there. No idea whether anyone will have a go at that or not though - that's a whole other question.Ross.
Ronsmytheiii - 24/3/2008 6:50 PMActually I was thinking more on the lines of lunar supply with the J-232's starting out with a lunar COTS. However I guess I can see something of a GTO use for J-120, but with Ariane and the EELVs out there, wouldn't be too sure with shat seems to be a saturated market.
kraisee - 25/3/2008 1:02 PMOf course, it would be nice to *have* the asset for the intended purpose and then to *maybe* have some commercial operations push for use of it. That is what it will really take - a company like Bigelow lobbying Washington for commercial use of a 50-100mT NASA launch system - to enable the current rules to be changed, laws to be revised and agreements to be amended.But I'm quite happy if the system does nothing more than get humans beyond LEO within my lifetime.Ross.
Lampyridae - 25/3/2008 11:43 PM SpaceX is already sort of doing this with LC40, although it just amounts to use of the pad; pretty much everything else involved is their problem.
Jim - 24/3/2008 4:48 PMQuotekraisee - 24/3/2008 3:17 PMThere is currently an agreement between NASA and DoD that NASA will not fly any commercial payloads.Ross.It is not a NASA/DOD agreement, it is a US law that forbids NASA from launching commercial payloads. It is the Commercial Space Act
Jim - 26/3/2008 1:55 PMQuoteLampyridae - 25/3/2008 11:43 PM SpaceX is already sort of doing this with LC40, although it just amounts to use of the pad; pretty much everything else involved is their problem.Not really. Spacex is using the real estate and not the systems of LC-40. It is the same thing Boeing did at LC-37 and LM at LC-41