Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

The Apollo program ran for 12 years and ended with six successful missions.

Here we are half a century later, with wildly more advanced technology, a bunch of ready-to-fly rockets to choose from, and they need another ten years for a single mission? What “organizational changes” are necessary that cost billions?

View on HN

The Apollo program was also much better funded and they had attracted the intellectual elite of a generation. In our generation, that elite is figuring out how to make people click on ads.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/NASA-Bud...

most of the elite are. Some of the elite are still at NASA, thank you very much.

I didn't mean it that way, sorry. People at NASA are still extraordinarily smart. The number of those smart people is different. NASA right now has approx direct 17k employees and approx 60k contractors. Back in the times of the Apollo program, there were 36k direct employees at NASA with > 350k contractors.

See Figure 1-4 in this PDF: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012v1.pdf#page=15

Also, it seems to me that NASA is involved in far more programs right now than it was back in the times of the Apollo program. Which isn't a bad thing in itself, but of course each program itself has smaller scope.

They are involved in far more programs than they were during the Apollo era. I'd much rather see NASA stay involved in these other areas (e.g. planetary sciences/exploration) than throw everything into a manned mission to the moon to 'make merica great again' a la 1960s style.

I agree with the fact that we are spreading bucks over more planets. I'd love to see a concerted incestment in a consistent strategic direction with a tangible milestone.

But at the same time, there's lots of exciting stuff going on.

NP.

This is partially because we outsource so much work, but yes, we simply do not have the budget to get anyone and everyone we'd want. The A-for-administration is becoming a more important role in shipping tax dollars to R&D and C-for-cots.

A polite critique: Six successful missions which landed, yes. I'd argue 10 successful missions in total. Excluding Apollo 1 and 13, there were four additional missions which were never tasked with landing on The Moon; I would argue that those can be considered successful as well.

[Edit]: Changed "with landing" to "with landing on The Moon"

For reference, here's what each mission did:

Apollo 1: Burned on the launchpad, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

Apollo 4-6: unmanned missions

Apollo 7: Flew in Earth orbit and tested the command module (the lunar module wasn't ready yet).

Apollo 8: Orbited the moon, further testing the command module and scoping out a potential landing spot.

Apollo 9: Flew in Earth orbit, testing rendezvous between the lunar module and command module.

Apollo 10: Dress rehearsal of the moon landing, except they didn't land. Came withing 50k feet of the surface.

Apollo 11: The first moon landing. Only went outside for less than 3 hours. Landed 4 miles away from the target.

Apollo 12: Second moon landing. Two 4 hour walks outside. Landed very close to the target.

Apollo 13: Oxygen tank exploded in command module on the way to the moon. Used the lunar module as a lifeboat, slingshotting around the moon before returning to Earth.

Apollo 14: Apollo 13, but successful. Did two 8 hour walks.

Apollo 15: Upgraded lunar module that could carry the rover and additional supplies, and new suits that they could take off inside the lunar module (previous missions only took off the helmet and gloves). Three 8 hour stints outside, venturing tens of miles away from the lander, including up the side of a mountain. Focus of the mission was entirely on science and collecting samples.

Apollo 16-17: Apollo 15, but at different places and more extreme.

---

I'm almost finished listening to "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin that tells the story of each mission. Highly recommended.

Thank you, for both the reference material and for the "A Man on the Moon" recommendation.

I think I read somewhere that we actually lost the technology to build the Saturn V; the fab tools, the blueprints, and the skilled labor isn’t there anymore. It’s like Damascus steel or Roman concrete or Greek fire. We may have to reinvent it.

To be honest I don’t know enough about this, but my understanding was that both the Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy have the ability to execute a moon mission, plus the Boeing SLS is already in development. Is there a need to start from scratch?

No one had proposed starting from scratch and building new Saturn V's. That would be totally impractical. But none of those new rockets have actually demonstrated the ability to lift enough payload for a manned lunar mission. They might be able to do so eventually but years of development work remain.

Maybe if you're willing to do multiple launches and Earth-orbit rendezvous. Neither the Falcon Heavy nor the Delta IV Heavy matches the payload of the Saturn V: https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/06/technology/future/biggest-r...

Smaller risk in multiple respective baskets?

It would be very difficult to build a new Saturn V just because any product of any complexity is inherently embedded in the economic ecosystem it came from. If the plans specify a #5 Widget and nobody has made a #5 Widget in the past 30 years, then you’re kind of stuck even if the vastly superior #8 Widget is currently available in any hardware store.

What you say is true but it’s not correct to frame is as a step backwards as is often done. The Saturn V would be hard to build today because technology has moved forward a great deal.

This is an important distinction because it means that building a new rocket with the capabilities of the Saturn V is still very much possible. SLS and Super Heavy are two rockets in active development that will exceed the Saturn V. SLS is taking forever but that’s just a matter of not putting resources into it. It’s expensive, but Saturn V was too. Super Heavy is a little more speculative but it looks promising and its capabilities will blow Saturn V’s out of the water if it actually flies, and for far less money.

> that’s just a matter of not putting resources into it.

And Boeing consistently missing deadlines they agreed to. But that's a matter of them being in the business of milking taxpayers not a matter of technology.

EDITED

The Constellation program cost $12B between 2005-2009 [1] and includes Ares V, an earlier version of SLS (but also Orion and Ares I). SLS under the current name (without Orion) has cost $14B 2011-2018 [2]. No idea about 2009-2011. It will cost several billion per year until it is cancelled.

It uses existing (flown in space) shuttle engines, shuttle main tank tooling, 5 segment version of shuttle's 4 segment boosters (also 15 years in development), etc. It requires no new technology and it is not trying to be better than anything. It has all the money it wants. They even took money away from commercial crew to pay SLS, a few years ago, which made commercial crew late which forced them to pay more to the Russians.

The problem with SLS is that it is designed to burn money. It is not designed to fly, to achieve a mission of any kind. It is optimized to cost as much as possible, because its success is defined as "raised average wage in my congressional district for as long as possible" by the people who ordered it done.

1 - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2016/20160801-hor...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_hi...

Where does that $50 billion figure come from? I found a NASA report from last year that says $11.9 billion. That’s an average of somewhat less than $2 billion/year so far. In contrast, the Saturn V took about five years from start to first flight, and development cost something like $6-9 billion/year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if SLS ended up costing more in the end, precisely because spending is lower. A project with less funding that drags on forever costs more than one with better funding that’s finishes quickly.

I edited to remove that number and add links.

Had it been designed by engineers with budget or deadline in mind, we could have debated methodologies. But it was designed by congress with exact hardware to use mandated by them, with no ability by engineers to change it to lower costs.

Also, of course, "cost plus" contracting means that an engineer that suggests an idea to lower costs is thrown out of the room by management.

See Dr. Dan Rasky from NASA, top expert on heat shields, explain from inside: https://youtu.be/g3gzwMJWa5w?t=679

Also, most talks by Dr. Robert Zubrin (author of Case for Mars) explain that the human spaceflight part of NASA is nuts.

There's a lot more complexity in this project and less relative budget. There's also not the same level of pressure aid space race happening.

I don't know much about nations, politics, or space, so forgive me if this is a stupid question: Is it possible that it'd be more time and cost effective to contract SpaceX to do the construction?

Absolutly. The problem is the money is tied up in pet projects that are a waste but can be realocated because the are protected by congress members.

Well, for one, there's no more apollo program to build onto? So, such a pipeline should be restarted?

Ten years is about the timeline to expect commercial launches / lifts to the moon. I suspect to be cost effective, NASA is synchronizing with commercial partners and standardizing mission architectures to ensure a long line of lunar missions. (source: Working on a related problem).

From the NASA Page: "CLPS contracts are indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts with a cumulative maximum contract value of $2.6 billion during the next 10 years."

So there's your new apollo program. 10 years and billions of investment, but with commercial taxis rather than NASA-built.

While I'm on the subject of NASA + Commercial partners. Imagine you had to build your own car to get to work every day, and suddenly a taxi service starts up. Would you use the taxi instead? That's the analogy for SpaceX, Blue origin, etc. Most programs are about science and human exploration, which involve significantly more than rocket and faring technologies. Moving beyond those expensive development projects can only make NASA-led initiatives more cost effective. It's how it has to be nowadays.

Our computers are a thousand times faster but our steel isn't a thousand times stronger and our rocket fuel doesn't have a thousand times the specific impulse. As far as cost and ultimate physical mission limitations go, we're very much still living in the same neighborhood as 1970.

Yup, and we are still violently blowing up a controlled bomb to exit the earths gravity.

Advances in ground computers do not translate to space computers. Most space-qualified processors are still on the order of tens to hundreds of MHz.

I currently work on a space science satellite launched in 2015 for NASA and our flight processor is 40 MHz.

https://www.geek.com/chips/nasas-orion-spacecraft-runs-on-a-...

Current space-rated FPGAs are like 10-15 years out of date compared to what the newest stuff can do. People are starting to take more risk with launching commercial parts in LEO but no one is seriously going to rely on anything but Level 1 parts for expensive, long-term missions.

It has been close to 8 years since the United States launched crew on one of her own launch vehicles. Currently, we have no man rated launch vehicle and have to rely on the Russians to launch people to the ISS.

Spaceflight is altogether more complex than you think.

makes you wonder if it really ...

The kind that requires you to /actually/ land a man on the moon.

Down vote all you want, its true. Otherwise, the only legit excuse is "politics". Least we forget Kennedy was long deady by the time 1969 rolled around - doesn't get much more political than that.

Or much more fake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com