Medium.com by Eli Dourado 1/30/2020
How pork-barrel politics and exploding development costs created a rocket that only a military contractor could loveThe moon, I think, misses us. Of the twelve human beings who have ever walked on its surface, eight have now passed away. Not a soul has been there since 1972.
Since the end of the Apollo program, no astronaut has gone beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). Except for a small number of unmanned probes, we have stayed close to home. Thankfully, this may soon change. The White House and NASA want to return to the moon by 2024 through the Artemis program. Elon Musk wants to put a city on Mars with a million people by 2050. The era of human space colonization is beginning.
This ambition presents a technical challenge. If we want to colonize the moon, Mars, and beyond, we need a way to get humans and many tons of cargo to those places. We don’t have a rocket powerful enough to deliver that kind of payload anymore. Saturn V, the rocket that powered the Apollo moon landings, retired from service in 1973. It could transport up to 140 metric tons to LEO, the most of any rocket ever. From LEO, to escape from Earth’s gravity well on its way to the moon, Saturn V needed to burn more fuel, limiting payload to the moon to 48.6 tons of people and cargo.
Trying to colonize the moon 48.6 tons at a time may itself be challenging, but Saturn V isn’t even around anymore. Today’s rockets carry much more modest payloads. They were designed to transport humans to the International Space Station orbiting only 254 miles above the Earth, or to take payloads as big as the 7-ton TerreStar-1, the biggest satellite ever launched, to geostationary orbit (GEO), 22,236 miles above the equator. The latest and greatest Block-5 Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, the most popular commercial launch vehicle in recent years, can take only 22.8 tons to LEO in an expendable configuration (i.e., if SpaceX isn’t trying to recover the booster).
If we are going to colonize space, the world is going to need a bigger rocket.
More:
https://medium.com/cgo-benchmark/the-space-launch-system-is-an-irredeemable-mistake-8778ddc29176
