| For starters, Orion is still planned to cost from $500 million to $1 billion PER LAUNCH. Given that this is a government project, I'm gonna guess closer to the high bound. Second, the Saturn V/Apollo mission was a diplomatic show of muscle. Those who believe the SLS will be the future of manned space travel fail to appreciate that without the pressure of the Soviet Union, there is absolutely no way the project will outlast the attrition of a 10-year non-wartime Congressional budget session. And all that is moot anyway, as the Saturn V and Apollo systems were built extremely fast, and to do that meant using a myriad of sub contractors [0]. According to Ars[1], the SLS basically had to reverse engineer an F-1 that was pulled from one of the Apollo launches. There were no extant blueprints for a massive LOX/RP engine, and few people alive who had any experience with it. SCUD missile builders with deep government contacts and ensured the STS (Space Shuttle) system would largely rely on the force of solid boosters, with the LOX engines significantly reduced in size and totally different from the Saturn V boosters. More than anything, the Ars article points out how absurdly homebrewed the Saturn V was. Hand drilled nozzle ports? The system was hacked together for one purpose, and then discarded. What Space X is doing, and what SLS will fail to do, is make orbit accessible to people besides a government that controls the world's fiat currency and can basically do what it wants provided it has the political capital (as it did during the Cold War). The Saturn V and Apollo system will stand as one of the greatest achievements of the modern era. But, like the Pyramids of Giza, it did little to spur a sea change of similar technology. There is no great proliferation of massive pyramids after those at Giza were built. And there was no great proliferation of human landings on extra-terrestrial surfaces after Saturn V. Elon Musk's goal in space is more similar to George Fuller, using revolutions in contracting to build big buildings cheaply. After Fuller, huge and tall interior spaces became cheap to build and those buildings proliferated around the globe. 0: http://amyshirateitel.com/2011/04/03/the-lost-art-of-the-sat...
1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-... |