But very neat. I wonder how much of this is encouraged by ULA's desire to lower their costs by going for commonality between elements of Delta and Atlas. I guess once your pad (or pads) can accommodate both of them it's not that big a leap to the idea of making it totally flexible to handle major known (or *plausible*) architectures.
Any idea how far this idea has got?
Not related. It was just USA trying to drum up business.
Saturn had crew access on its MLP, so your argument falls apart.
We aren't talking Saturns and no one is going to use LC-39 with vehicle specific MLP's, so your argument falls apart.
not on the crawlers, on rail it might make a difference
Here is an interesting February 4 and 5 2013 presentation by George Sowers on ULA and commercial crew:
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DEPS/ASEB/DEPS_069080#Committee_Meetings
I like all of that ACES info. Would like to see ULA commonize on it, and maybe NASA consider the ACES derived DTAL lander.
Would have really liked to have seen Bolden come out selling the idea of EELV and evolved EELV as the replacement for the cancelled CxP in February of 2010. And maybe we wouldn't have had the SLS-like LV mandated later that year?
And, instead of po-poing going back to the moon, been out there selling DTAL with it's common components as much more sustainable hardware than all of this 1-off stuff like Ares V, Ares 1, and Altair.