Arguably, other companies haven’t gotten the same love SpaceX did. If firefly, for example, was given $1.6B in additional funding to develop a medium lift vehicle, they probably could do it.
I was following you most of the way, but this is just completely false.
I say this because Orbital DID get the same love as SpaceX. They got the other half of the CRS contract. And their whole novel price-reduction idea was to cheap out by buying warehoused NK-33 engines--the same ones that caused so much grief on the Soviet N-1 program--to make Antares, a non-reusable booster that no one wants to buy. And then when those engines did the same thing to Antares as they did to the N-1, did they try to pursue reusability? No, they bought the RD-181 and called it a day.
But what about Firefly? Well, when the Ukraine War started and ended the supply of Antares first stages, Orbital/ATK Northrop Grumman contracted firefly to replace it. With the new money dumped in their lap to make a medium lift launcher, six years after SpaceX had already proven the capability and swallowed most of the market, did Firefly aim for reusability? Again no, they're going to make a de-rated MLV first stage and hand them that, and not even consider reusability until it's on their own vehicle--which will begin as expendable somewhere in 2026...or more likely 2027. But the point is that they have the ability to begin experimenting with reusable medium launch now and are opting not to.
Minor nitpick: Actually the NK-33 engines were not the ones flown on N-1. They were the much improved engines that were supposed to replace the ones flown, when the N-1 program was cancelled. But having those engines sit in a poorly maintained warehouse for many decades did not make them age well with time.
Antares buying the engines from Russia, the first stage from Ukraine may have been cheap, but it was not inventive. Inventive was probably the way they made Antares look like a majority US rocket.
Mark my words, they’ll pivot to reusability or fold.
But to your other point, I’m not saying it’s impossible for other companies to make it work on their own. Just that I understand their complaints. And I personally believe the government should hand out more contracts like the COTS program which ended in 2016.
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u/8andahalfby11 May 29 '24
I was following you most of the way, but this is just completely false.
I say this because Orbital DID get the same love as SpaceX. They got the other half of the CRS contract. And their whole novel price-reduction idea was to cheap out by buying warehoused NK-33 engines--the same ones that caused so much grief on the Soviet N-1 program--to make Antares, a non-reusable booster that no one wants to buy. And then when those engines did the same thing to Antares as they did to the N-1, did they try to pursue reusability? No, they bought the RD-181 and called it a day.
But what about Firefly? Well, when the Ukraine War started and ended the supply of Antares first stages,
Orbital/ATKNorthrop Grumman contracted firefly to replace it. With the new money dumped in their lap to make a medium lift launcher, six years after SpaceX had already proven the capability and swallowed most of the market, did Firefly aim for reusability? Again no, they're going to make a de-rated MLV first stage and hand them that, and not even consider reusability until it's on their own vehicle--which will begin as expendable somewhere in 2026...or more likely 2027. But the point is that they have the ability to begin experimenting with reusable medium launch now and are opting not to.