Re: Vision of the three Rs: Regular, Reliable and Reusable

In article <1173215510.853853.310470@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Hyper" <hyperboreea@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Heavy lift spares you a lot of headaches. If you think about it, a
higher price may be worth it if your station/vehicle is assembled in a
couple of flights instead of 20-30 (to say nothing about EVAs.

Why? What do you have against a large number of flights? Or EVAs for
that matter?

Both launches and EVAs are expensive and dangerous in large part because
we do them so rarely. Anything that would get us doing them on a weekly
(or better still, daily) basis would almost certainly be a good thing,
as far as I can tell.

Plus, you can't fly large diameter components on existing launchers.

True, if you define "large" as "bigger than can fly on existing
launchers." But then, that will always be true.

But I'm being a bit pedantic here; surely there are occasionally
components that don't break down easily, and fit into that narrow range
where existing launchers are too small and a sufficiently large launcher
would not be ridiculous. But I doubt it comes up all that often.
Entire skyscrapers are built out of components that fit on trucks; why
can't we do the same in space?

Best,
- Joe
.