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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 08 2017, @09:07PM   Printer-friendly

Trump space adviser: Blue Origin and SpaceX rockets aren't really commercial: Scott Pace likens heavy-lift rockets to aircraft carriers.

In recent months, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, has worked assiduously behind the scenes to develop a formal space policy for the Trump administration. In a rare interview, published Monday in Scientific American, Pace elaborated on some of the policy decisions he has been helping to make.

In the interview, Pace explained why the Trump administration has chosen to focus on the Moon first for human exploration while relegating Mars to becoming a "horizon goal," effectively putting human missions to the Red Planet decades into the future. Mars was too ambitious, Pace said, and such a goal would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners. Specific plans for how NASA will return to the Moon should become more concrete within the next year, he added.

In response to a question about privately developed, heavy-lift boosters, the executive secretary also reiterated his skepticism that such "commercial" rockets developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX could compete with the government's Space Launch System rocket, which is likely to make its maiden flight in 2020. "Heavy-lift rockets are strategic national assets, like aircraft carriers," Pace said. "There are some people who have talked about buying heavy-lift as a service as opposed to owning and operating, in which case the government would, of course, have to continue to own the intellectual properties so it wasn't hostage to any one contractor. One could imagine this but, in general, building a heavy-lift rocket is no more 'commercial' than building an aircraft carrier with private contractors would be."

I thought flying non-reusable pork rockets was about the money, not strategy. SpaceX is set to launch Falcon Heavy for the first time no earlier than December 29. It will have over 90% of the low Earth orbit capacity as the initial version of the SLS (63.8 metric tons vs. 70).

Previously: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
First SLS Mission Will be Unmanned
Commercial Space Companies Want More Money From NASA
U.S. Air Force Will Eventually Launch Using SpaceX's Reused Rockets


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday November 08 2017, @10:06PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 08 2017, @10:06PM (#594261) Journal

    One of the problems with SLS is not so much a technical problem. It is simply TOO EXPENSIVE to fly. If NASA can only afford one flight per year -- or less -- then you don't get to do very many missions. And the ones you do are very expensive.

    SLS is a pile of crap. And that is not intended as a slight to who I am sure are many fine people working on the technology of SLS. It is congress that has ruined SLS.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NewNic on Wednesday November 08 2017, @10:58PM

    by NewNic (6420) on Wednesday November 08 2017, @10:58PM (#594292) Journal

    I am quite sure that SLS is very effective at its primary mission.

    The problem is that its primary mission is distributing pork to the states of various politicians.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 09 2017, @10:49PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday November 09 2017, @10:49PM (#594898)

    Agreed, just because you work on a pork project does not make you a bad person, it's economic reality: pork is all that's on the menu for lots of NASA contractors.

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