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No, but the mass and volume constraints are. See how much effort went into making JWST fold up and how hard they had to try to get the mirrors to be light enoug
by sebzim4500 3y ago
No, but the mass and volume constraints are. See how much effort went into making JWST fold up and how hard they had to try to get the mirrors to be light enough.
- pfdietz 3y agoThat's where in-space assembly comes in. It's kind of sad that the one real thing the Space Station demonstrated, assembly of large space structures, has been abandoned in the name of feeding the pork pipeline with SLS.
- nordsieck 3y agoWhy do you say it's been abandoned? SLS will be delivering segments of Gateway after the first 2 are delivered by Falcon Heavy.
- pfdietz 3y agoISS involved assembling segments that could be lifted on the Shuttle. Continuing that would involve lifting segments that could be lifted on F9 or FH. There would be no need for something as large as SLS.
- sbierwagen 3y agoSLS is expending surplus RS-25 shuttle engines. Once they're gone they'll be paying Aerojet Rocketdyne a hundred million each for new ones. The first stage uses four. Eventually someone with a brain is going to notice, SLS will be canceled, and decades of federal jail time will ensue for the criminals who perpetuated this fraud upon the American people.
- tsimionescu 3y agoGiven that SLS works and Starship has failed pretty spectacularly so far (engines failing off the gate and in flight, launch site damage, failed to detonate on demand), I think it's about time to stop saying SLS is just pork.
- cubefox 3y agoSLS may be further ahead in development (though the version that launched is far from the final one), but it is much worse than Starship in nearly every other aspect. This is consensus in the space community, it has been discussed to death. Edit: The most significant thing Starship is bad at is launching and landing humans. Human launch systems like Falcon 9/Dragon or SLS/Orion have both a launch abort system and a highly reliable "blunt capsule" method of landing humans back on Earth. For Starship, both launching and landing humans is much more dangerous, as it doesn't have a launch abort system and it uses a complex maneuver ("belly flop") in order to land. Starship will need to do a lot of unmanned satellite launches to prove a safety level acceptable for humans. Or people transfer to and from Starship in space, as in Artemis 3, and start/land with a different rocket.
- pfdietz 3y agoSLS basically has a single purpose: funneling money to particular contractors. There is no objective in space that couldn't be done more cheaply with F9 and FH, given propellant transfer and some in-space assembly.
- GolfPopper 3y ago>Given that SLS works A cost of $27,000,000,000 per launch, and a launch rate of 1 per 132 months is a generous definition of "works". And that's where SLS is right now.
- cubefox 3y agoI think it is "just" 4 billion per launch, though of course this doesn't include the development costs. Regardless, the costs are staggering compared to Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, or Starship.
- dylan604 3y agoHow did China lift their space station?
- basementcat 3y agoModules were launched on Long March 5B rockets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoSpace assembly for a telescope is way harder than the ISS. Telescope mirrors need to be aligned to within a few nanometers of each other, compared to the ISS which just needs airtight seals (so ~1mm + O-ring tolerance).
- pfdietz 3y agoThe alignment would be actively controlled. That's how they make large terrestrial telescopes work.