Thank you Lobo. Rare to hear any encouragement here to speak more about anything.
You are welcome. Even if I don’t quite agree, I always learn a lot from you and others with a lot of background in this. :-)
Yes big solids are on "keep alive" with SLS, but as with any politically "too big to fail", fiat driven product of the arsenal system, they drag along baggage with the benefit of funding. You see, once you turn down the path of such development, things creep in, either as expedients "to make it go" somehow (but not for the right reason), or as "acceptants" (good enough for govt work but not acceptable fora business). Once in, they are difficult and tedious to remove.
The greatness of the EELV program was to weed out many of these, and transition to an almost rational business. (Aside, think that competition from SpaceX is reinvigorating what had become a stolid pace or retreat from same - hope for a committed, stable, balanced, evolving, multiple launch service provider market).
Lobo, I know you've really wanted to see something "useful" come out of the big solids side. Hate to rain on that parade, but the time for that was during STS and it past. And I can't bring it up again here, because the same abject blindness is omnipresent. If you want to understand this area more, study Europe's large solids in detail - they have gone further than America in rational economics for big solids, but are hobbled by political division, funding, and geo return.
Yes SLS can underwrite a "fast start" and parallel funding. But even with that, the incremental part of fixed costs is more than Antares. And, any threat to SLS, or postponement of developments/launches/missions would cause short selling and "death watch" mania that no rational business wants.
I guess I see it a little different. It’s not that I wan to see something useful come out of the bid solids (although, in a way I do), but it’s more due to the merger of OSC and ATK. That now means that big solid boosters are an “in-house” item, not something to need to be outsourced. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so to speak. The more you have in-house, the more control of your costs you have. You can streamline, downsize, optimize, or cost-share as necessarily to get price points you want. You can’t do that when you are buying everything from someone else. SpaceX has shown a very good model in that respect. So that merger has changed Antares’ options now. If not for that, I wouldn’t be even talking about OSC buying solids from ATK. I’d think they’d be better off building the core themselves and then perhaps pursuing AR-1 as a future new engine to replace RD-181 as soon as is feasible for the long term Antares business model. But big solids are now in-house, and with them, you have both the “engine” and the “core”. If OrbATK wants to do anything but just CRS launches, they’ll almost certainly need to move to the Cape. Especially if they want government payloads too. That might be a pipe dream as you say, but they –did- state they want to. I’m taking them at their word and speculating ways to do that. Moving to the Cape then also means access for those 3.7m wide solid motors from Utah which Wallops doesn’t have. So they’ll need to make that investment if they want to do anything but CRS contracts.
Besides the advantage of being in-house, the fact the 3.7m wide composite solid tooling will be underwritten by SLS helps a lot cost wise. They’d still have to develop the monolithic motors out of that 3.7m tooling, but again, given how fast and inexpensively they developed Castor 30XL, I just don’t think that would be a major expense. And they already have their own facilities for testing such new motors.
Finally, they’d need a new high energy upper stage. Such a stage was already being looked at for Pegasus II. OrbATK probably has the expertise and ability to manufacture such a stage themselves if they had an engine. RL-10 would have been used for Pegasus II. BE-3 would be an option too…and probably a better one cost and performance wise. So I don’t really know that the stage itself would be a big deal for a company like OrbATK, but it would depend on getting an engine.
I’m certainly no expert in how all of this work, so I’m not saying this is likely or anything. But from my limited knowledge, it does seem fairly plausible though –if- OrbATK wants to become a player in the commercial and government markets as they’ve said. If they abandon that, then they’ll probably just stockpile RD-181 engines and Ukrainian cores and launch CRS missions until there are no more contracts, and then they’ll retire Antares all together.
As long as the transport and handling costs are mitigated, yes. But they have never been for STS, so won't be for SLS, where govt would rather spend the money elsewhere, because the improvement to a "infrequent flyer" makes no sense to them - see above.
I think it would be a different paradigm than STS. STS boosters required very exotic processes to make the steel casings in such a way that they could survive more than one burn. Going to composite SLS segments means the tooling [theoretically] will be vastly cheaper to operate and maintain. It’s a very different thing to spin composites than forge exotic steel. Then the segments don’t need to be recovered from the ocean, transported back to the Cape, de-stacked, and transported back to Utah. As I understand, along with the high cost of maintaining the steel casing forging tooling (which did nothing besides make new STS casings occasionally) the cost of de-mating the segments and shipping everything back to Utah was all involved in making it so expensive.
SLS will have segments transported form Utah to the Cape and then get mated together. So there will be that. A solid Antares would use monolithic motors which would be stacked (rather than mated like segmented motors). As I understand that’s a much easier thing. Stacking rocket stage essentially, like how Castor 30XL is stacked on the Antares core, or the segments of Minotaur or Athena. Just larger.
So I think it could be a very different structure than STS was, even thought they’d be the same diameter. With a plausible chance of being cost effective.