Science General Discussion

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Started by Legend, Sep 02, 2014, 07:17 PM

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Legend

ULA could dominate the launch market if they re-design the vulcan first stage to land like the Falcon 9.

The ACES second stage on vulcan is designed as a space tug with in orbit refilling. ULA already plans to launch heavy payloads to LEO and use a second vulcan to launch and refill the first ACES, almost exactly like the spacex BFR.

Unlike BFR though, ACES has a low dry mass and can send much heavier payloads to direct GEO. Outside of cost, Vulcan with ACES is a stronger launch system outside LEO.

But costs could be greatly improved if the vulcan first stage was fully reusable. The current plan is to only reuse the engines, but I hope that changes.

A vulcan could launch ACES+payload to space and then land. ACES could do its thing and then come back to a LEO parking orbit. After a few launches, a group of these could be picked up by a BFR and returned to Earth.

Would be super cool and work well. Even if vulcan doesn't land, picking up older ACES by BFR would be smart. It's crazy to think that cislunar 1000 and such might be happening in 10 years.