Hi All

Here's an interesting grumble piece about NASA's new architecture being overly focussed on big payloads and not allowing enough people into space...

HLLVs to Nowhere

...now I really don't agree with this one. His major whinge is about amortising the development costs over the number of flights, while glossing over the real problems that modular space-assembly approaches have. For example he compares a 100-ton booster with a 10-ton booster - but can you imagine building a space vehicle out of 10 modules???

He uses the ISS as an example of our growing experience with space assembly, but most of its problems are from the fact that space assembly is actually a lot harder to do than a one-off launch. And then there's all the propellant loss due to boil-off plus orbital decay plus space degradation etc etc. By the time a 10-unit vehicle was a assembled it'd be mostly space-junk.

Adam