Russia to approve new Moon rocket

Bluuuue Rajah wrote:
BradGuth wrote in
:
Why reinvent the wheel?

To save both time and money. IIRC, the Ares I is just a shuttle SRM
stacked on top of an Atlas, both of which are off the shelf components.
To reconstruct the Saturn V would actually require effort, but they had
the Ares I designed about two months after Bush announced the new plan.

So it looks like solid rockets are now fully trusted at NASA. During the
Moon missions, NASA management (i.e. Wernher von Braun) distrusted solid
rockets for good reason, and so solid rockets were off-limits. That's
why Saturn V was so big, it was liquid rocket that needed to leave Earth
orbit. You need a lot of liquid to do that.

As it turned out solid rockets were the reason for the first of the two
Space Shuttle disasters, Challenger. So NASA's initial objections to
solid rockets was verified. I suppose those redesigned O-rings have now
made these solid rockets "rock solid" for NASA.

Yousuf Khan