From: "John Beamish" 

A Proton can put up 6 tonnes in a single launch to geostationary orbit; an
Atlas is in the same neighbourhood; I'm guessing that the Ariane isn't far
off.

You know more about this than I do but I can't easily imagine a program
designed to build a launch vehicle that would put up materially more than
that in a single go.  There might be one or two occasions when you would
want to ... but a program to build, test and deploy such a launch vehicle
seems unlikely.

That means we're going send up several packages that can get connected.


On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:48:25 -0500, Adam field.near the bridge">
 wrote:

> John Beamish wrote:
>> Yeah ... shuttle.  Not Saturn V.  And what happens when the shuttle is
>> retired in a few years ... how will the big packages go into orbit?
>> Certainly not by a modern day Saturn V (that kind of lift was needed
>> only for NASA)
>> but by mid-range lifters that can send up several packages that get
>> connected after doing a rendezvous in orbit.
>>
>
> The russians & Europeans would probably disagree.
>

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