The current proposals aren’t anything like this. They won’t be anything that could fly once a day. They aren’t proposing anything like that. The current proposed replacement will be able to launch if everything goes well slightly more frequently than the shuttle did. It won’t be nearly as replaceable (crew launch will be an essentially Apollo-style system). The total lift mass will be higher than the shuttle eventually but not for the early versions.
The main systems that are coming from the shuttle are the shuttle booster rockets, and it would have a similar external fuel tank. There’s no engineering reason for doing this. The primary reason is that certain contractors lobbied Congress so that they could keep their contracts for the parts they get to build. There’s a proposal to eventually give the SLS a new set of booster rockets that use more advanced technology and are built to actually optimize the new SLS requirements, but I’m skeptical that this will happen. And if it does happen, there’s only one guess about what company will make the new booster rockets.
This isn’t about taking a flawed plan, learning from it, and making a new version that doesn’t suffer from the old flaws. This is mainly about keeping the same small number of big aerospace companies happy.
The current proposals aren’t anything like this. They won’t be anything that could fly once a day. They aren’t proposing anything like that. The current proposed replacement will be able to launch if everything goes well slightly more frequently than the shuttle did. It won’t be nearly as replaceable (crew launch will be an essentially Apollo-style system). The total lift mass will be higher than the shuttle eventually but not for the early versions.
The main systems that are coming from the shuttle are the shuttle booster rockets, and it would have a similar external fuel tank. There’s no engineering reason for doing this. The primary reason is that certain contractors lobbied Congress so that they could keep their contracts for the parts they get to build. There’s a proposal to eventually give the SLS a new set of booster rockets that use more advanced technology and are built to actually optimize the new SLS requirements, but I’m skeptical that this will happen. And if it does happen, there’s only one guess about what company will make the new booster rockets.
This isn’t about taking a flawed plan, learning from it, and making a new version that doesn’t suffer from the old flaws. This is mainly about keeping the same small number of big aerospace companies happy.