Space X and the Stagnation/Decline of Space Travel

Has it really not been tested on animals on the ISS yet? You'd think they had done so by now given how much interest in Mars colonization there is

Yea, everything goes to shit in microgravity. Mars has a bit more than microgravity, but people will still have problems. Babies and children would have terrible problems. People like this are absolute ignorant fucking moron double brainlets with their head up a unicorn's ass.

NASA got the Saturn V design from the military, along with the teams and engines and technology.

They turned it into an utterly pointless footprints & flags mission.
Then their first attempt at a vehicle was the boondoggle known as the shuttle

>Has it really not been tested on animals on the ISS yet?

scott kelly spent a year up there and came back pretty messed up

desu we don't know because we've never grown an animal to maturity in less than 1G, let alone a human.

It could be that they easily adapt, or it could be they are born retarded and unable to move.

Wow, that's almost as impressive as what SpaceX showed us over a year ago with Raptor.

Raptor's both more advanced and closer to going into production than BE-4. BFR will fly before New Glenn, and New Glenn will take years after the first flight before it's even competitive with Falcon Heavy, let alone BFR.

>What went wrong?
Nixon thought space was boring, Vietnam was fun and that oil just appeared out of thin air.

Then Vietnam was no longer fun, Arabs made oil expensive and inflation ate all the money.

That engine is 3x the size of Raptor

>Wow, that's almost as impressive as what SpaceX showed us over a year ago with Raptor.
SpaceX has never built a Raptor.
They don't even know what the final size of the engine will be let alone built it and tested it.

>Raptor's both more advanced
it literally isn't
ffsc is just a less-used cycle
orsc is actually far more difficult to achieve (and Blue Origin is the first American company to do it)

>BFR will fly before New Glenn
hahahahahahahhahaha
*inhales*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>will take years after the first flight before it's even competitive with Falcon Heavy, let alone BFR.
it will beat Falcon Heavy on price immediately by nature of being a single-core design

There's a reason nobody takes you musk nutters seriously. You all ignore the facts and believe anything that comes from his mouth.

What would people do in those "colonies" again?

Now do that in a vacuum.

Grow space potatoes

The claim that viable offspring cant be produced at roughly 1/3 G.

>SpaceX has never built a Raptor.
Why would you set up an assembly line for building an unfinished engine?

>orsc is actually far more difficult to achieve

a: not true
b: so you claim they did something thats both more difficult and yet worse?

communists took over academia and used their positions in academics and popular culture to ruin everything.

>muh blue origin
call me when they deliver a payload to orbit.

Saturn V launcher could have easily been made by simply bying superior Russian engines.

It hasn't been done because there is no need for large rockets.

It's not 60's anymore and dick waving contests are gone.

>declare independence
>space war 1

>It's not 60's anymore and dick waving contests are gone.

Now it's the 2010's and in place of dick waving we have NuVag gaping

You know the BE-4 isn't really that advanced or good of an engine right? It uses staged-combustion that's been used by the Russians since the 60's and has a relatively low chamber pressure; which is why despite it's large size, 7 of them can't even equal half the thrust generated by the 5 F-1 engines of the Saturn 5. The only advanced aspect of the BE-4 is the Methane and Liquid oxygen fuel which it uses just like the Raptor. It's a conservative design that is hard to fuck up (although BO have blown it up during testing twice) which is why ULA have selected it to replace their Russian engines which are also very reliable. The Raptor on the other hand, is an entirely different beast, it's a cutting edge design which will be the most advanced rocket engine in the world when it first enters service (which explains the large USAF interest and funding it has attracted) This is because of it's unique full-flow combustion cycle that makes it incredibly efficient as it burns 100% of its fuel and it's incredibly high chamber pressure that allows the Raptor, which is only slightly bigger than SpaceX's currently used Merlin 1D to output over three times the latter's thrust.

>>Wow, that's almost as impressive as what SpaceX showed us over a year ago with Raptor.
>SpaceX has never built a Raptor.
...and Blue Origin has never built a BE-4, but SpaceX is over a year ahead in the prototyping and ground-testing process.

>ffsc is just a less-used cycle
>orsc is actually far more difficult to achieve (and Blue Origin is the first American company to do it)
But that's wrong, you moron. The FFSC has two pumps, and one side is ORSC, and they have to work together and feed each other (which greatly complicates development, since they're not independent of each other and can't be developed separately). FFSC is more technically difficult and produces higher chamber pressures. Raptor will have higher specific impulse and higher thrust-to-weight than BE-4.

>>will take years after the first flight before it's even competitive with Falcon Heavy, let alone BFR.
>it will beat Falcon Heavy on price immediately by nature of being a single-core design
It will never match Falcon Heavy on price, because less of it is reusable, and the expendable portion is more expensive. New Glenn will use a large, costly BE-4 engine, and an additional BE-3 engine whenever it goes beyond LEO, where Falcon Heavy will only use one cheap Merlin 1Dvac engine.

New Glenn's a much less ambitious design. Lacking any experience with orbital launch, Blue Origin has gone with a high-empty-mass booster design and accepted a major performance loss to add lots of recovery hardware. They have to both land downrange and use a large upper stage. The size of the upper stage required means the empty mass makes it unsuitable for beyond-LEO missions, so they have to add a third stage for those.

Blue Origin is older than SpaceX but has lagged far behind it. They haven't gained the experience, they can't attract the most talented and capable people, they don't have the cash flow that SpaceX has. They're years behind, and not really comparable.

>The only advanced aspect of the BE-4 is the Methane and Liquid oxygen fuel
Not true or fair. Like Raptor, it will use no-wear fluid bearings (for long-life reusability), instead of the conventional ball bearings, and have fast, precise throttleability (for use as a landing engine).

It's not as advanced as Raptor, but if Raptor weren't being developed, BE-4 would be the most advanced engine ever.

You can't really compare how fucked up people on the ISS are when they come back from space. They spend the whole time in 0g. Even at 0.37g there are the downward forces acting on your body whereas at 0g there are none.

All this talk of mars colonisation is fucking retarded anyway. Setting up domes and shit, terraforming and building up a whole planet will require an insane amount of resources and you could instead build thousands of 1g oneill cylinders.

Oh, and I stand by BFR flying before New Glenn.

Remember, Blue Origin has *never* put a vehicle into production before, and never put anything to orbit. They have only ever built a few small suborbital prototypes. They're going to run into so many problems as they try to get their factory running.

For SpaceX, this is not their first rodeo. They're going straight from getting one vehicle up to mature design and production rates, to their next vehicle. And it's not as much of a step up as people think. Rockets are very scalable, there are many advantages to making them bigger. Saturn V flew barely a decade after the first orbital rocket of any size. It's not that hard to make a big rocket.

SpaceX will be going into BFR with experience from Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, and Dragon 2. They'll just be doing what they've done before, bigger and better, like when they jumped from Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 to Falcon 9 in 2010 to Falcon 9 1.1 in 2013. That's a very natural progression for a young company, just following their upward track.

What Blue Origin's aiming for with New Glenn is a huge leap from having done basically nothing so far but experiments.

>building up a whole planet will require an insane amount of resources and you could instead build thousands of 1g oneill cylinders.
The resources are on the planet, and you don't have to do the whole planet at once to live on it. Space stations are just out in space, where there's nothing.

You might say, "Well, there are asteroids." Now you're talking about asteroid colonization. What makes an asteroid better than a planet to colonize?

For a start you don't have to contend with bringing shit up and down a gravity well on an asteroid which is a pretty huge advantage. The resources in asteroids are a lot easier to obtain when you can just grab a 99% whatever composition asteroid you want rather than mining a bajillion tons of dirt to find what you want. There are way more resources in space than on mars and at 1g you don't run any risk of potential low g problems.

>you could instead build thousands of 1g oneill cylinders
we know who is going to pay for colonizing Mars. who is going to pay for oneill cylinders?

>mars has mirogravity conditions.

You guys need to read a book.

>NASA got the Saturn V design from the miliary

This is incorrect. The Saturn series was specifically designed for the Apollo project. Earlier boosters used by NASA were adapted military issiles (Redstone, Atlas and Titan.)

Booster designers and engineers during the Saturn project were largely formerly military designers, since the military had been the previous and only other employer of those who build missiles. Notably the Von Braun team which had previously been employed by the army.

Saturn had no military applications, it was way too powerful for lobbing warheads about, and the USAF dropped its man in space program (which would have needed some sort f big booster to loft stations into orbit) which is why the Saturn series did not continue in any sort of production after the Apollo project ended,

It was not a military rocket, and was of no interest to the military.

Same things they do everywhere else.

Largely get up to the dickens and eat and shit.

>you don't have to contend with bringing shit up and down a gravity well on an asteroid which is a pretty huge advantage
Not so much, when the asteroids are widely separated and moving on different trajectories. The idea that planetary gravity wells are horribly hard to deal with is a relic of the weird post-Apollo lack of progress in rocketry, which is ending now with efficiently reusable rockets. For Mars, you don't even need staged rockets.

>you can just grab a 99% whatever composition asteroid you want
This is pure fantasy. Asteroids are interesting for mining, but nowhere near this ideal. They're rocks and dirtballs, not gold nuggets and springs of drinking water.

>mining a bajillion tons of dirt to find what you want
Don't be confused by analyses of the average or typical soil on Mars. Mining on Mars will be like mining on Earth. If you look around, you'll find good ore bodies.

>There are way more resources in space than on mars
In all of space, sure, especially if you include Mars as an object in space, but Mars is about 100 times more massive than all of the asteroids around the sun put together.

>at 1g you don't run any risk of potential low g problems.
You can build big 1g centrifuges on Mars, if you want them that badly. The difference is, you at least start out with ~0.4g, and you're surrounded by materials.

Let O'Neill pay for them.

>you could instead build thousands of 1g oneill cylinders.
but we cant, do you really actually think that we have the materials to build a fucking O'neill cylinder? Going from the ISS to an O'neill cylinder is a much larger step than you seem to realize

>nuclear powered rockets

This would be the solution to a lot of problem. We have the technical ability to go further and faster but we do not use it because normies are afraid of that.

It's still strange because we have nuclear submarines.

Ok, but should we even consider building O'neil cylinders before we've even mined 1/5 of Mercury

Saturn V used the F-1 engine, which was developed by the military, starting in the mid-50s. Its design was *finalized* by NASA, not developed from scratch.

The military was working on moonshot plans well before NASA was formed, and NASA mostly carried on from that work. The moon was considered likely to become important strategic high ground, so the military was interested in building a base there.

>Saturn V used the F-1 engine, which was developed by the military
Nope.

history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/ch4.htm#104

Hopefully the bad guys keep trying to put malsats up there and the good guys keep destroying them

>history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/ch4.htm#104
>The F-1 engine had roots outside NASA: the big booster came to the space agency in 1958 as part of the Air Force legacy. The F-1 engine, developed by Rocketdyne, dated back to an Air Force program in 1955.
Wow, very disagreeing. Much counterpoint.

>falcon heavy took 10 years from announcement to first flight
>"b-but BFR will fly 4 years after it's announced!"
This is how retarded you sound.

Wow you're fucking retarded.
>It uses staged-combustion that's been used by the Russians since the 60's
Nobody in the US has ever managed to create this "archaic" engine type before until now.
>and has a relatively low chamber pressure
BE-4 is purposefully built with room for improvement across the board (twr, isp, chamber pressure) similar to the original merlin
Its thrust can theoretically be uprated to 3500KM (3.5x that of the "Raptor" prototype)
>7 of them can't even equal half the thrust generated by the 5 F-1 engines of the Saturn 5
falcon heavy has 2/3 the thrust of saturn v but delivers less than half the payload to orbit
>(although BO have blown it up during testing twice)
flat out wrong
>will be the most advanced rocket engine in the world
by what metric
the only thing it will be "best" at is twr
the current winner of twr is merlin and it's hardly an "advanced" engine
>(which explains the large USAF interest and funding it has attracted)
actually, spacex has hundreds of lobbyists and friends in congress (more than ULA ironically)
government funding for raptor is cronyism at its finest
plus, spacex will never win another defense contract after how bad they fucked up Zuma
>his is because of it's unique full-flow combustion cycle that makes it incredibly efficient as it burns 100% of its fuel
lmao that's not how ffsc works you dimwit
> it's incredibly high chamber pressure that allows the Raptor
its chamber pressure has been downgraded more than 50% since last year (it's already 30% lower than RD-180)
>which is only slightly bigger than SpaceX's currently used Merlin 1D to output over three times the latter's thrust.
flat out wrong
The "final version" of raptor (which isn't even designed yet) will only have 1.86 times the thrust of Merlin

>FFSC is more technically difficult
not true
stresses and temperatures on all components is lower than in orsc

high chamber pressure is a design choice and is not determined by cycle type (and spacex has since retraced their ridiculous 300-bar design for one that's even more conservative than RD-180)

>You can build big 1g centrifuges on Mars
No you can't.

It's possible, just obscenely more complex than spinning a drum in space and if any of the components attaching the centrifuge to the ground fail then everyone dies a horrible death.

You can't do it because Mars gravity is too high and you would always experience dynamic forces at the crest and trough of each rotation (varying as much as .6g) due to it.

??? you know we have centrifuges on Earth right ?

You can't live in those centrifuges.

Because we are already at 1g, but if you wanted to build a massive one and live at 1.5g's, there is nothing stopping you

>to first flight

Afaik it didn't fly yet and it already is 6-7 years late right?

The fact that there are still people believing a single word that this south african fraud says is amazes me.

>>It uses staged-combustion that's been used by the Russians since the 60's
>Nobody in the US has ever managed to create this "archaic" engine type before until now.
What are you talking about? The space shuttle main engine is a staged combustion design. As for ORSC in particular, it was not pursued in the US.

>BE-4 is purposefully built with room for improvement across the board
You're grasping at straws, with this claim.

>>will be the most advanced rocket engine in the world
>by what metric
>the only thing it will be "best" at is twr
Don't be such a monkey. Raptor will be a highly reusable design, unlike any rocket engine that has ever existed before it, and it will have higher specific impulse and twr than BE-4, making it generally superior.

>actually, spacex has hundreds of lobbyists and friends in congress (more than ULA ironically)
This is the most absurd claim. ULA is Boeing+LM. That's most of the American aerospace industry.

>stresses and temperatures on all components is lower than in orsc
You're describing how ORSC is shittier and less suitable for a highly-reusable design, not how it's technically more challenging.

>high chamber pressure is a design choice and is not determined by cycle type
Practically achievable chamber pressures depend on cycle type. It's no coincidence that Blue Origin's talking about chamber pressures around half Raptor's.

>spacex has since retraced their ridiculous 300-bar design
Nothing ridiculous about it. They're being conservative for their first iteration, so they can get it flying sooner (Raptor's expected to be flight-ready later this year - the subscale prototype was done like a year and a half ago). They still intend to work up to 300 bar after it's flying.

Jesus Christ, how fucking stupid do you have to be, to assume that the centrifuge has to be on it side like a wheel? Do you have an actual intellectual disability? Do you have to live in a home where they dress you and feed you?

>Don't be such a monkey. Raptor will be a highly reusable design, unlike any rocket engine that has ever existed before it, and it will have higher specific impulse and twr than BE-4, making it generally superior.

>will will will

It's always the future that WILL fix it right?

Let's not talk about how we perform right now we WILL fix it.

Muscovites are the most pathetic beings on this planet.

>how we perform right now
As of right now, SpaceX is the most active orbital launch provider in the world, and Blue Origin hasn't come anywhere close to putting anything in orbit.

SpaceX had several failures that set them back years
It's lunacy to pretend that Blue Origin will stick to their schedule

Lowest reliability not making money being dishonest with failures....

Btw I do not compare thrm to BO

Drive your tesla off of a cliff you 19 year old piece of hipster trash.

>Drive your tesla off of a cliff you 19 year old piece of hipster trash

I, too, get mad at people on the internet because I need people to talk to. How was your day, honey?

>The space shuttle main engine is a staged combustion design.
frsc is far easier, a detail you conveniently left out

>You're grasping at straws
nope
it's literally purposefully built this way
in Blue Origin's own words "a low performance version of a high performance architecture"

>Raptor will be a highly reusable design, unlike any rocket engine that has ever existed before it
uhhh
merlin? be-3? half a dozen prototypes built by pratt & whitney in the 60s?

>and it will have higher specific impulse and twr than BE-4
What is BE-4's ISP? Yes, this is a shit test for you because you're obviously making stuff up at this point.

>This is the most absurd claim. ULA is Boeing+LM. That's most of the American aerospace industry.
ULA lobbying is separate from Boeing and Lockheed, dimwit.

>You're describing how ORSC is shittier and less suitable for a highly-reusable design, not how it's technically more challenging.
moving the goalposts
Blue Origin went with orsc because it's a proven cycle (by the Russians) and they have actual important goals to meet like defense payload launches and not some retarded Mars fantasy

>It's no coincidence that Blue Origin's talking about chamber pressures around half Raptor's.
RD-180 uses an identical cycle to BE-4 and has a higher chamber pressure than Raptor is claimed to be aiming for.

>Nothing ridiculous about it. They're being conservative for their first iteration, so they can get it flying sooner (Raptor's expected to be flight-ready later this year - the subscale prototype was done like a year and a half ago). They still intend to work up to 300 bar after it's flying.
literally everything in this statement is false

the cold war hasn't ended user, now they steal each other's data basically hack each other instead

>ULA lobbying is separate from Boeing and Lockheed, dimwit

>...ce 2006, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has served as the nat...

Ok. So the lobbying is separate from either Boeing or Lockheed. Instead it's just FUNDED and CONTROLLED by Boeing and Lockheed. Totally different. Glad I understand that now.

>Jesus Christ, how fucking stupid do you have to be, to assume that the centrifuge has to be on it side like a wheel? Do you have an actual intellectual disability? Do you have to live in a home where they dress you and feed you?
Are you genuinely retarded?
Did you fail high school physics?

>Btw I do not compare thrm to BO
BO has yet to make any real payload launches, or make the bug fixes that are required after said yet-to-be-completed launches. So you're definitely right; they're not really comparable past the point that they're both companies that want to launch shit into orbit around gravity wells.

Meanwhile, as BO contemplates what stardust tastes like, Spess Teslah is doing coke lines of it off the Defense Industry's ever-expanding rack. SpaceX has had numerous successes, failures, and the launch experience to actually shoot things into space reliably. This is unbelievably expensive, however, to do actual work and not just WANT to do something.

You're like those kids on /k/ who read a report from the Airforce and immediately run to Veeky Forums to tell everyone how shitty the A10 is and how the fleet of them should be scrapped, despite the fact that it is a successful, efficient, and reliable vehicle that does its fucking job.

Their last launch had paying commercial payloads.

Now orient your centrifuge 90* to the left or right. You now have a centrifuge with no g discrepancies.

opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000057934

I'm actually interested in this, any links?

>tfw there may be more companies flying space stuff in the next decade
>tfw I may not actually be born twenty years to early or late

inverse.com/article/39705-blue-origin-reveals-its-first-commercial-payloads-on-board-new-shepard

Put it sideways
Spacex pls pay me

>Salvatore T. “Tory” Bruno is the president and chief executive officer for United Launch Alliance (ULA). In this role, Bruno serves as the principal strategic leader of the organization and oversees all business management and operations.

>Prior to joining ULA, he served as the vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Strategic and Missile Defense Systems.

We can keep trading posts but that's pointless. I think we disagree over the definition of a "joint venture." Boeing and Lockheed run it. That's what being a "subsidiary" means!

That would be like living in a car that's constantly driving in a tight circle

Imagine, now get this, that you live on the WALL
Because, you know, that's where force is pushing you.

With diagonal walls you can make it work, sort of.

>frsc is far easier, a detail you conveniently left out
If it's so much easier, why are are there so few of this type? Since kerosene and UDMH are unsuitable for the FRSC cycle, historical FRSC engines are hydrogen-fuelled engines, which are much harder to develop than hydrocarbon-fuelled engines.

The Soviets developed ORSC engines because they were poor and had to develop versatile tools, not because they were geniuses who could do things Americans couldn't. Americans put hydrogen-fuelled upper stages on top of their rockets, and strapped solid boosters to the bottom. They didn't need to get fancy making the most of all-kerolox or all-hypergolic rockets, because they had the development funding to fill out their toolbox with variety.

You know why ULA uses RD-180? Cheap Russian labor. If the Russians were making gas-generator engines, they'd have talked up a different line of bullshit to pretend the purchase was about something other than offshoring and cutting American workers out of the deal.

>What is BE-4's ISP? Yes, this is a shit test for you because you're obviously making stuff up
For the same propellant combination, sea-level Isp is primarily determined by chamber pressure. If you don't understand this basic stuff, keep your bitch mouth shut while the men are talking.

>RD-180 uses an identical cycle to BE-4 and has a higher chamber pressure than Raptor is claimed to be aiming for.
RD-180 is an expendable engine. It runs for 4 minutes, and then it's garbage. That means they can push it harder.

And 250 bar is not the pressure Raptor is "aiming for", but the pressure they're going to run the initial flight model at. They're still aiming for 300 bar, they just don't need that much performance to make BFR work, and prefer the margin initially, for confidence in the schedule.

then it would be like living in a car going around s-curves constantly

I already live in a car and this thought experiment is making me stop wanting to be an astronaut.

Neat! Thanks, user.

>The next article is about fucking pokemon go
I have a serious issue with this being the NEXT thing I am supposed to read after a historical event in a history-altering field.

>If it's so much easier, why are are there so few of this type? Since kerosene and UDMH are unsuitable for the FRSC cycle, historical FRSC engines are hydrogen-fuelled engines, which are much harder to develop than hydrocarbon-fuelled engines.
>The Soviets developed ORSC engines because they were poor and had to develop versatile tools, not because they were geniuses who could do things Americans couldn't. Americans put hydrogen-fuelled upper stages on top of their rockets, and strapped solid boosters to the bottom. They didn't need to get fancy making the most of all-kerolox or all-hypergolic rockets, because they had the development funding to fill out their toolbox with variety.
>You know why ULA uses RD-180? Cheap Russian labor. If the Russians were making gas-generator engines, they'd have talked up a different line of bullshit to pretend the purchase was about something other than offshoring and cutting American workers out of the deal.
Soviets made orsc engines because they could. They were and still are better at building engines. frsc was never done because the russians didn't need it and the american's barely managed to make it work when they made one

russians don't even put orsc engines on upper stages you stupid faggot

>For the same propellant combination, sea-level Isp is primarily determined by chamber pressure. If you don't understand this basic stuff, keep your bitch mouth shut while the men are talking.
I'll ask again, what is BE-4's isp?

>RD-180 is an expendable engine. It runs for 4 minutes, and then it's garbage. That means they can push it harder.
they test the engine before flying it
there's no reason to believe that raptor will be as reusable as they claim

>And 250 bar is not the pressure Raptor is "aiming for", but the pressure they're going to run the initial flight model at. They're still aiming for 300 bar
source?

>and prefer the margin initially, for confidence in the schedule.
literally what?

That runs into the same problem as creating artificial gravity in spaceships.

The ring/centrifuge has to be really big or the discrepancy between the forces across the length of a person's body cause all sorts of issues.

>>suborbital test
>>history altering
hardly.

Man I'm really enjoying all the rocket engine shilling in this thread

You mean a car going around a circular, banked track constantly.

Rather than a cylinder, It would be a section of inverted cone with a 24 degree slope from upright. The gravitation strength would vary from the bottom to the top (as the gravitational strength would vary from floor to floor in a multi-floor building in a cylindrical habitat), but as is generally the case with centifugal weirdness, this effect could be made arbitrarily small by increasing the diameter of the cone section and limiting the proportional height.

Boeing and Lockheed only make very high level decisions for ULA. It is 95% autonomous - ULA makes its own decisions regarding how to spend its money, what to pursue, how to handle contracts, projects, etc.

>history altering field
>field
>not event

I'm sure you may think sending people into space is a quaint little hobby, but it's a little more important than you think.

>russians don't even put orsc engines on upper stages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0210
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-120
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0124

I'm out of patience with your ignorance and stupidity.

second stages are not upper stages you stupid faggot

You're losing, user. Just deal with it and stop being a triggered sore loser.

There in lies our difference. We won't agree. I think that qualifies ULA for being controlled by it's investors and therefor representative of the mainstream aerospace industry.

It also maintained an effective monopoly on US space launches for about a decade. Again, mainstream as shit IMO.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the companies that will make or lose money if ULA succeeds or fails. Boeing and LM's political pull are therefore applied for ULA's benefit.

I'm not that guy, I'm a different user. I guess it depends on how you define 'controlled'. ULA has a mandate to deliver profits to B/LM, but other than that the parent companies don't interfere with its daily business and operations. Yes, I'd agree that it represents 'mainstream aerospace', but that -in and of itself- isn't necessarily a bad thing. ULA was also created by the government, people forget that. Boeing and Lockheed traditionally don't play well, and we're content to try and compete for launches, until the government stepped in and forced them to partner together to provide assured access to space - thus ULA.

To a certain extent, but it's more of a 'halo' effect - B/LM might lobby for more aerospace funding, or something similar, but they don't and won't lobby for specific ULA policy, ULA handles that on its own. There are multiple reasons, but the primary one is that one of the parents may inadvertently lobby for something that hurts them in the long run.

>they don't and won't lobby for specific ULA policy
So are you a paid shill, or just someone who likes pretending to be informed but has no clue and is constantly making stuff up that you think sounds plausible?

Of course the parent companies put their lobbying assets and connections to use, trying to make ULA profitable for them. You'd have to be an idiot to believe otherwise.

So who's drinking tonight?

Post your

>drink of choice
>what's been bothering you lately
>cocktail ideas

>>I'm sure you may think sending people into space is a quaint little hobby,
and it is if you're only going suborbital.

What B.O. is gearing up for is basically an amusement park ride.