Only if there are standard issue beige jumpers with flares.
Or a ridiculous text-to-speech system.
aeiou
Matagorda would be the main Starclipper site for equatorial orbits--by far the most common type. Thanks to the first stage's gliding cross-range, a single West Florida recovery site lets it cover a variety of orbits in that family, plus access the Transorbital tug/depot network, which will probably be in the 28 degree range if not even up above 30--Thunderbolts out of Wallops can only dogleg so much without killing their payload.
For the remaining major orbits, you do need a polar site, and I'm thinking there's two options there. One is Vandenberg AFB in California, either following the "traditional" Vandeberg southbound trajectory, then having the first stage use its impressive cross-range to aim for Guadalupe or (further downrange and better-positioned) one of the Revillagigedo islands like Isla Charion or Isla Socorro. They're all Mexican territory, but no one lives there and I'd imagine with the backing of the US government and DoD, a deal could be worked out that'd see the necesary couple-kilometer airstrip built. Alternately, you could fly north, cutting a course north-northwest just off the California coast, aiming for SSO on an initially northbound track. Once the staging event occurs, the orbiter would need to cut a dogleg to reach the final ~97 degree orbit, while the booster could execute a cross-range glide to a landing site in the Pacific northwest.
The other possible polar launch site would be a bit different, and require a much larger change in regulatory environment, but has some attractive benefits: launch north overland from a site at, say, White Sands. The first stage would glide to a landing in Montana or so, while the second stage could continue easily into orbit. The downside, obviously, is the overflight--it'd require a dramatic shift in the conception of launch risk to see the FAA authorize a trajectory that'd pass so close to Albuquerque, Yellowstone, and Calgary, not to mention a hundred smaller towns. On the other hand, Starclipper is an all-liquid vehicle with each stage having glide capacity--in theory, with a fuel dump, you could try and hand-wave clearance. My best guess is that'd take a lot of flight history, though, and it's most likely that you'd see one of the two Vandenberg plans developed with USAF/DoD assistance for polar missions.
Not really, not reduced enough to counter reusability--and a reusable LV with a low-maintenance TPS (particularly a reusable first stage, which faces less extreme thermal environments and can afford to be beefier without effecting payload) can make use of any launch processing/staff reductions an expendable can utilize, and of course eliminates a lot of the production end of the "standing army." There's just not a lot of room for an expendable to achieve the necessary factor-of-four reductions in cost to beat a well-designed reusable.
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Anyway, sorry it took so long to get to that reply--and related to that I have something of an announcement:
My personal life has been going through a bit of a roller coaster lately that's left me less able to write than I'd hoped, and I just checked the buffer and outline last night to discover that this week's post isn't complete. Thus, there won't be an update this week. I apologize for the unexpected interruption, and I hope to have things back on the rails shortly, but with the timeline starting to move into wrapping up, it's more critical than usual to make sure the information and events in posts get checked against one another, and my schedule and WG's have made finding time for writing and reviewing difficult lately, such that the last few posts of the timeline are still incomplete. I'll be talking to Workable Goblin this weekend to figure out a plan for getting things back on track, and I hope we'll be resuming without too much of a hiccup.
Question mark-would a future advance in this timeline be some form of reusable form of the ECUS? Or some system where the Lunar mission profile would involve docking with a transfer vehicle that handled the Earth/Moon mission, with a reusable lander that just needed to be refueled and a landing capsule for getting the crews back to Earth?
Having lived on Revillagigedo Island (the one in Alaska - I lived in Ketchikan,) that name made me think twice and go 'What? Where? Isn't that the wrong direction? Don't people live there?' until I looked it up.
Well, I'm very pleased the authors did not go with Titan for the manned applications, and that the Saturn Multibody ensemble was developed. A part of that is admittedly my animus against hypergolic launchers in general--I don't forget that not only did Titan dominate big unmanned launches OTL in the USA, but that Proton remains (last time I looked at a chart that compared costs, which was a while ago) the most cost-effective launcher overall.
All that said, the technology developed for Apollo, particularly the F-1 engine and its derivatives, remain awesome achievements rarely surpassed in any dimension today (except ISP) and the OTL abandonment of the whole lineage along with the J-2 strikes me as both crazy and sad. So seeing Saturn renovated and upgraded and find a niche as a standard launcher feels just full of win to me; it's mostly a positive thing.
But seeing Titan dethroned is also a bonus IM arrogant O.
All that said, the technology developed for Apollo, particularly the F-1 engine and its derivatives, remain awesome achievements rarely surpassed in any dimension today (except ISP) and the OTL abandonment of the whole lineage along with the J-2 strikes me as both crazy and sad. So seeing Saturn renovated and upgraded and find a niche as a standard launcher feels just full of win to me; it's mostly a positive thing.
But seeing Titan dethroned is also a bonus IM arrogant O.
Explored this one over on nasaspaceflight.com:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35996.0;all
"What if Apollo-Saturn was followed by Apollo-Titan?"
Not as extensive but I was wondering about keeping part of the Apollo program with the in the form of the more affordable Saturn-1 here: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36040.0
And a discussion of "What if Apollo/Saturn had never been cancled?"
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36040.0
Feel free to browse the information.
Randy
Nice to be here. Even nicer to have found my password so I could do more than lurk
Randy
As he said last time, we ran out of buffer last week. Rather than do a sloppy rush job to try to put something up, we agreed to take a mini-break to polish off all of the remaining posts at once and make sure they're all good stuff. We'll let you know when we're ready to start posting again, never fear
As he said last time, we ran out of buffer last week. Rather than do a sloppy rush job to try to put something up, we agreed to take a mini-break to polish off all of the remaining posts at once and make sure they're all good stuff. We'll let you know when we're ready to start posting again, never fear
Ah, I thought you meant a 1 week break. I guess I'll just wait until you can provide a quality product.
Hi guys,
Whilst we wait for the next update, I'm taking the chance to catch up with some of my backlog. So as requested, here are orthogonal views of the Luna-Pe cargo ship and the Artemis lunar rover.
Whilst we wait for the next update, I'm taking the chance to catch up with some of my backlog. So as requested, here are orthogonal views of the Luna-Pe cargo ship and the Artemis lunar rover.
Thanks! It's based upon the attached image of a sculpture, suitably modified to meet NASA modesty requirements
I loved that update.
Nice job nixonshead! For some reason, I misread "spray cans" as "spray cats" when I first read it, and had the image of a cat on the moon...
For the Artemis/Orion lander/hab module, I may have missed it, but was it mentioned as to how it was powered? Sort of interested in that based off where they are landed.
Ummm... There's a British astronaut on board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging
Ferrets, not cats, in the spacesuit.
ooo.... It's a Polar landing site and Ferrets are PoleCats.....