[AR] Re: Quiet times, so OT question

  • From: Alain Fournier <alain245@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2022 19:40:48 -0500

On Dec/20/2022 at 18:38, John Schilling wrote :

One obvious issue for Falcon Heavy utilization is the lack of a destination.  Low Earth Orbit may be halfway to anywhere, but you really need a logistics base at that halfway point, and ISS isn't really a logistics base.  Or a tourist hotel, or much of anything else useful in its current form.

At $2600/kg, it might be worth someone's time to build their own LEO infrastructure from scratch, but if the CSTS is correct, only marginally so.  So it's not too surprising that we don't have budding space industrialists coming out of the woodwork to build their own space stations yet.  Ideally Elon would handle that, but he's too busy playing the social-media game.  And his future plans seem to involve going directly from the Earth's surface to the Martian surface with no fixed orbital infrastructure at all, which seems daft to me.

        John Schilling


Can you elaborate on why you don't like plans for going directly to Mars with no orbital infrastructure?

Personally, I don't really have an opinion on the matter. Orbital infrastructure might be useful but it also might be too expensive for the benefits.


Alain Fournier


Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. arocket
  3. Archive
  4. 12-2022