Air Force study say Government should get serious about reusable rockets | Hacker News Reader

Air Force study say Government should get serious about reusable rockets

arstechnica.com

31 pointsChuckMcM17 comments

Remember the last time the Airforce butted heads with NASA? They almost lost their entire space program. To better justify the Shuttle during its development, NASA demanded that all air force payloads ride on it. The air force pushed back because they needed polar launch and wider landing capabilities. NASA knew the Shuttle design would fail to meet its performance and cost promises, so it agreed to modify the Shuttle design (making it worse in most ways) for the Air Force in return for locking down Shuttle political support.

The airforce was forced to wind down its space program until, the Challenger explosion. Then they were forced to scramble to restart it.

Now the Airforce is advocating for a technology that is directly counter to the interests of NASA, its funders in the Senate, and the SLS, which is the main reason for that funding. NASA and its congress critters aren't going to like this, they still want to pour massive amounts of pork into their districts with the SLS and any government employee publicly pointing out its missions could be done far cheaper is going to get whacked.

Excuse me, NASA ran the COTS program for commercial resupply contract to the ISS, and they also ran another program for commercial space vehicle.

After all, NASA help made what SpaceX is today.

Of course, there's probably a faction within the NASA and aerospace contractor community that don't like SpaceX, but it is inaccurate to say that it run contrary to the interest of NASA as a whole.

Right, wouldn't NASA be SpaceX's largest customer? They gave them $1.6 billion for those resupply missions (right when SpaceX needed it to stay alive) and a further $3 billion for that crewed vehicle development you mention.

Commercial Crew was $2.6 billion to SpaceX and includes 6 flights, I believe. Yes, NASA is SpaceX's biggest customer, but SpaceX also gets a lot of revenue from launching commercial communications satellites to GEO -- a business that US launchers have not been price competitive at for a long time.

Anything that threatens the SLS is NASA's mortal enemy, even if it offers a far cheaper route to Mars.

> Now the Airforce is advocating for a technology that is directly counter to the interests of NASA

Why do you believe that reusable rockets are against the interests of NASA?

They've are spending $20B to design an obsolete disposable heavy launch system that maximizes political pork.

You've failed to answer the question. You only stated that a project costs money, and proceeded to assert that the technology is "obsolete" and then pulled from the conspiracy theorist's playbook with the pork reference.

Do you really think NASA would be fine with canceling the SLS so they can restart a new reusable launch system, or contract with BO/SpaceX for one?

Any launch system that's in current development that isn't reusable is obsolete. The likely cost savings are so substantial they make disposables entirely uncompetitive. ULA knows this, Arianespace knows it, and NASA knows it but practices denial because their political support is predicated on a project spending lots of money in a huge number of vongressional districts.

> Now the Airforce is advocating for a technology that is directly counter to the interests of NASA

I'm out of the loop on most of this, but is there a reason they can't give NASA the funding to cover both interest groups?

It probably makes more sense for the Air Force to stay away from subsidizing particular systems and just buy whatever is cheapest for a particular level of demonstrated reliability. If reusable rockets pan out economically (which looks like a pretty safe bet, at this point), that's what launch providers will build.

The problem, over the last 50 years or so, is Congress wants to dictate which companies get contracts (and subcontracts) so the right districts get jobs. If that doesn't stop the subsidization of this or that technology isn't going to make much difference.

If NASA had done that for commercial resupply or commercial crew, they would have spent more for less. Because they instead competed pre-buying launches, essentially, 2 new less-expensive launch vehicles were created.

It would be smart for the Air Force to compete pre-buying heavy launches. It would remove a lot of the uncertainty in today's market.

>If NASA had done that for commercial resupply or commercial crew, they would have spent more for less.

I don't see why you think this is true.

The numbers speak for themselves: these block buys paid for development of F9 and Antares plus their flights. ULA lost round 1 of the cargo contest and won 1/3 of the second cargo contest.

How is this not covered by the statement "...just buy whatever is cheapest for a particular level of demonstrated reliability."

It makes a huge difference whether you buy 1 flight at a time, or a bunch. Which is the point I was making.

From a historical perspective, it is important to remember that the military has always wanted low cost access to space. Back in Reagan's 'star wars' program one of the key technologies was 'single stage to orbit' or SSTO. Also re-usable craft. Then the Space Shuttle came along which was supposed to be a 'space truck' mostly re-usable and flying up and down into space so often and regularly that you could decide to build a satellite and get it into orbit a month later.

If SpaceX can work out a plan to get the second stage of the Falcon 9 back on the ground in an undamaged state, it really sets the stage for relatively "low cost" missions.

In some ways it is a stronger capability than having weapons in orbit, as you don't expose what you can do until one day suddenly you install them up there because you need or want them.

It will be interesting to see how this stuff works its way into the whole space launch fabric of things.

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