Hmmm ... military cargo is the one application that makes Earth point-to-point look reasonable in comparison. The key may be to develop a low cost re-entry pod that can be dropped out of the cargo bay. That pod can later be recovered for reuse as time and resources permit. When this first came up a couple years ago I suggested they carry up an end-of-line Cargo Dragon and release that from the payload bay to see if they could hard land that at some point to demo it to the SF.
Probably using Dragon is on the right lines. It has PICA-X ablative tiles which are a lot less valuable than more up to date TUFROC used on Starship. Perhaps an encapsulated palette with PICA-X for reentry would be best, costs little and enemy gains nothing of any valuable if left on the battlefield.
Hmmm ... military cargo is the one application that makes Earth point-to-point look reasonable in comparison. The key may be to develop a low cost re-entry pod that can be dropped out of the cargo bay. That pod can later be recovered for reuse as time and resources permit. When this first came up a couple years ago I suggested they carry up an end-of-line Cargo Dragon and release that from the payload bay to see if they could hard land that at some point to demo it to the SF.
Probably using Dragon is on the right lines. It has PICA-X ablative tiles which are a lot less valuable than more up to date TUFROC used on Starship. Perhaps an encapsulated palette with PICA-X for reentry would be best, costs little and enemy gains nothing of any valuable if left on the battlefield.
Yes, Dragon would be a nice demo, then maybe some scale-up if that worked well. But it would be a $B dev sort of thing, but SF has $, at the moment.