What makes you think it's a one-off mission?
To the contrary, it seems it ought to be part of an extensive collection of spaceflight activities that aren't limited to individual "celebrity" missions that have all of Earth's monitoring and support resources tied down with them, the way an Apollo shot involved 100% of NASA capacity. If Ares IV were an Apollo style mission, then she ought to have her own reentry capsule. If Ares IV were being flown today, with the option of involving the ISS in the flight, she probably would still bypass that option and go for her own reentry. But in the Trek 2030s, with supposedly routine interplanetary travel and indeed apparent weekly fights to Mars, there ought to exist a well-working surface-to-orbit system that would make the individual reentry means of interplanetary craft redundant and undesirable.
If Ares-IV doesn't burn up on the return to Earth then you can simply park it in orbit, refuel it and then fly it again on another mission.
Indeed, Ares IV is probably Ares II reflown. Might have been Aphrodite VI before that, and scheduled for Poseidon III in the near future. It would help, then, to have enough configurational flexibility that a Mars lander could be swapped for a Venus lander or a Neptune balloon. But would a Venus lander be bolted on during a mission to Mars?
The reentry capsule would be the 21st century equivalent of NX-01's shuttlepod, entering the atmosphere and making a pinpoint thruster-controlled landing, then returning to orbit on a disposable SSTO.
Quite possibly. But there'd be little need for one, when a space coach service runs daily from Earth to LEO anyway.
Unless Ares IV was intended to be free-roaming to such an extent that she might make an unexpected detour to, say, Venus or Vesta, and would need independence of certain transportation and support infrastructures for that reason. The one-week-to-Mars propulsion system probably ought to give that sort of freedom.
...NASA has concluded that the system is not worth the amount of effort used to maintain it.
NASA knew that before STS-1 was launched, though. They still did pretty good lemonade.
Further to note: there's no canonical evidence that the DY-100 class actually is launched from the ground other than a desk model in a Voyager time travel episode. For all we know the ship is built was built launched from a Soviet moonbase, or even assembled in orbit with nuclear-powered boosters attached specifically for a Solar system escape trajectory.
True. But I'd accept the model as fully canonical evidence; most of our canonical evidence on Trek spacecraft is based on models, after all.
OTOH, the model configuration could be showing those orbitally assembled nuclear-powered boosters rather than surface-to-orbit ones. Them having a classic rockety shape and aerodynamically sharp forward ends might be for weird tech reason X...
On a related note, neither the model nor the various "live" shots tell us whether those big boxes (always just 5 shown but with sockets for 16) are for cargo or for fuel, but in the surface launch interpretation of the tabletop model, they seem to ride to space aerodynamically unprotected. They probably can afford to, if future STO propulsion is anywhere as advanced as ST:FC indicates; a rocket might reach space at walking pace, rather than doing eleven gee and leaving the atmosphere gasping for the final drops of fuel.
Timo Saloniemi
