Re: NASA Needs A Bigger Ares V

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:24:59 GMT, in a place far, far away, Brian
Thorn <bthorn64@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:19:26 -0500, "Jeff Findley"
<jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


True, but now they've also gone to a full 10 meter diameter core (same as the Saturn V first and second stages) instead of sticking with a smaller diameter the same as the shuttle's ET. The first stage is also supposed to have five RS-68 engines. There is also talk of adding a sixth RS-68 and stretching the SRB's by another half segment!

They're really grasping now, they must be desperate at this point.

Maybe go back to the higher Isp SSME instead of RS-68?

That would really up the per-flight cost.

Not if you merely removed the SSMEs from the SSTO cores and shipped them back to Earth. That should be easy with all the hardware you can bolt onto your gigantic space ports, with all the extra payload afforded by those big 5 segment SRBs. They install new instruments on the Hubble, removing cryogenic engines from SSTO core stages isn't any big deal.
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