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Comment by agsacct | Hacker News Reader

SLS is the last major gasp of a military industrial complex that has completely taken over congress. The fact that we're paying $146M for each engine on the SLS (takes 4 to launch) and SpaceX is promising an entire launch for Starship at <100M is obscene. (Oh, and SLS ends up at the bottom of the ocean...Starship you can just refuel).

While I don't agree with all thing Musk, he's revolutionized the global spacelaunch industry by reducing costs 10x. Now, totally dominant in an industry, he's making that rocket obsolete in favor of a better one (Spaceship).

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If you think it's the last major gasp, you're gonna find yourself awful disappointed. One does not simply kill a jobs program. There'll be SLS, and then some other 2 trillion dollar airplane, then some satellite system, and again and again forever. Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. There will always be more

If we can redirect from SLS to building Moonbase Alpha (with SpaceX presumably doing most of the shipping), I'll consider that a success.

Find a way to do it keeping the same contractors and adding a couple in some states with senators and representatives who are simultaneously members of the majority party and vulnerable, then maybe you've got a bill, though it might still get filibustered. NASA is a political work of art

There's also a strategic capabilities argument that never goes away.

I'm anticipating a significant investment in synthetic biology facilities in the next few years. Ideally these would be 99% automated, remotely operated via secure dedicated networks, and maintained by small on-site skeleton crews. They'd be geographically distributed, with a majority in 'red states', but not because of any jobs they might create.

I'm not understanding what you're suggesting. What is a "synthetic biology facility" (research center? Manufacturing plant?), who is paying for them, why are there no jobs, why are they in red states, and since when did synbio become a low labor field? If its private sector investing in synbio manufacturing, they'll do that wherever the tax credits are. If it's the government, they aren't going to be doing any manufacturing, and research needs people.

I have no clue what GP is proposing, but "strategic capability" projects tend to be in red states because those are the low-population states where you can spread things out enough to be somewhat resistant to nuclear attacks. Being far from the coast is preferable for similar reasons (more time to intercept missile attacks).

Some of the low population states have had certain facilities allocated specifically because the facilities would be high priority target for ICBMs, thus making them "nuclear bomb sponges".

Yes, if you put your facility in the middle of San Francisco you give the enemy two targets for one bomb. Better make them work for it (and have a slightly higher chance that either your facility or part of San Francisco survives)

The problem with synthetic bio is that it's going to be pretty hard to drag synbio people away from boston, and I don't think the NIH is leaving bethesda any time soon.

I guess my comment is pretty scattered rereading it now - I guess that's because as you mentioned we don't know what exactly was being proposed - synthetic bio is wide enough it could refer to a million different wildly divergent things.

Sorry my comments are so vague. I'm thinking along the lines of the existing CIADM centers, but with different capabilities.

https://www.medicalcountermeasures.gov/barda/core-services/c...

Rumsfeld put a lot of people out of work with his cancel stamp.

The MIC will find a way to make a flying car/moon rocket that fires Hellfires and a gatling railgun. Let's call it a multi-program total cost of $40 terabucks that could've given every American a nice home (household assets are $130T but this counts both impoverished and wealthy persons) and UBI; but no: self-serving, subsidized wealth transfer to the Cheney's and the Erik Prince's comes first.

The plans for Starship are haisy, not scrutinised and it has not been delivered. So far design has changed massively, it was scaled down a lot, and it's stil a vehicle looking for a purpose.

I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point withing the next 10 years.

All the best luck to spaceX, but you can't base the entire national space programm on something that flaky.

SLS solidly gets you to the moon, and you van make real plans on it. If it turns out to be redundant, that's ok

I remember when people said that about Falcon Heavy and people were defending SLS by saying 'Falcon Heavy is not real, SLS is real and exists'. 2017 was a simpler time.

You don't need SLS for a moon program, Starship or not. Its a major waste of money and only needed because the whole architecture was designed to need it. It makes neither economic, nor infrastructural sense considering the rest of the infrastructure and American space industry.

Starship will very likely fly, even at 100x over its target price, its a bargain. Putting in 30+ billion into a project, even if we assume complete 100% success from now on, will not succeed in the mission 'going to the moon and staying'. At a same-time invest basically 0 in a system that could literally revolutionize human space travel, is beyond nonsensical.

I would bet a fair amount of money on Starship transporting humans before SLS. SLS Core stage just spent almost a year preparing for a single static fire test, and has already fallen behind again.

SLS solidly gets you to the moon

Speaking of things that have not been delivered...

> I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point within the next 10 years.

But what if it is only half as expensive per ton to low-Earth orbit as Falcon-9/Heavy? And if it can only deliver 100 tons at a time, not 150?

That's still going to dominate the launch market for some time.

If they eventually prove it to be safe for human passengers and can demonstrate in-orbit refueling? It then replaces SLS, and is still a fraction of the cost.

> vehicle looking for a purpose

While I agree that Starship is very much an early-stage project it has a clear commercial utilization: Starlink.

Assuming demand for Starlink is strong and SpaceX will be able to scale it up like crazy since Starship will give them far more LEO capability than anyone else.

Starlink doesn't need Starship. It works right now and the current SpaceX vehicles are sufficient for what it does. Maybe you could talk about Starship as a means to increase the total receiving area, number of satellites, and thus total bandwidth, users, etc. Maybe it could reduce the necessary size of the terrestrial receiver.

But... this is both speculative and marginal. If Starlink needs more hardware, they can ramp up Falcon 9 rocket use, which is already partially reusable, and will continue to increase reuse. Starship could drive down launch costs, but it can't reduce the cost of the satellites themselves. You'll hit a floor where it could reduce costs, but not remotely enough to justify it.

Starship is on a completely different playing field. It strives for a VERY large payload with a VERY large fraction of reuse. This makes no sense unless actual people are riding on it at some point. The demand for orbital transport is not enough otherwise. It only makes business sense by assuming some future activities will happen which will bring in a massive amount of funding. This is beyond conventional business risk, this is a leap of faith.

> Starship could drive down launch costs, but it can't reduce the cost of the satellites themselves. You'll hit a floor where it could reduce costs, but not remotely enough to justify it.

You're assuming that satellites are so expensive that the difference between Falcon 9 and Starship is not relevant but we don't know this. Satellite hardware is usually very expensive but SpaceX is building them internally as a series product so they might be able to drive the marginal cost/unit much lower.

It's safe to assume constellation bandwidth (and potential revenue) scales linearly with total payload mass, meaning it is proportional to ($satellite_cost_per_keg + $launch_cost_per_kg). Unless satellite cost is much higher than launch cost there are benefits from switching to a cheaper launcher.

Since Falcon 9 design is mostly frozen and still requires throwing away an upper stage for every launch it has a price floor of its own. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if launch is already more expensive than satellites.

Elon has already said that Falcon 9 is the largest and most expensive part of Starlink, for Starlink to be fully successful it needs Starship.

Falcon 9 is limited by Falcon 9 second stage product.

> This makes no sense unless actual people are riding on it at some point.

It actually makes a lot of sense, if that performance gets you a cheaper vehicle.

> This is beyond conventional business risk, this is a leap of faith.

Starlink, the NASA Moon program, commercial sat buissness, SpaceX Mars Plans, SpaceX Space tourism and so on. A cheaper vehicle always has more usage.

I will concede all those points except for the last one.

> Starlink, the NASA Moon program, commercial sat buissness, SpaceX Mars Plans, SpaceX Space tourism and so on. A cheaper vehicle always has more usage.

Go back to basic college Econ. There is a supply curve and a demand curve. Reusable rockets allows providing the same commodity (orbital transportation) at a lower price.

The problem that everyone seems to subtly know but doesn't like to say aloud is that the demand curve is highly inelastic.

It is completely possible that cheaper rockets result in more usage, but less total revenue. This happens with lots of things. Think about food production, weather is bad, rice harvest is very low during a year in a nation that mostly eats rice. We have historical examples that total value of the crop goes up, despite less being available. That's highly inelastic demand for you. If supply of orbital launch goes up, then total revenue can easy decrease.

In this case, the only way for total revenue to increase a great deal is for genuine innovation to happen. Yes, space tourism, Mars plans, etc. would fit the bill. However, all of these are bets, and I don't think they're particularly good ones. The best bet would be for US government itself to realize what is happening and double-down on the military and scientific windfall they can get from it. I don't feel like this will happen on its own, and the general public isn't engaged enough. I worry that SpaceX's success could usher in its own demise, and we lose out on the opportunity of a generation.

With Falcon 9 you always throw away the second stage, even if you reuse the rest - that adds up. Also even though 60 says per launch and the many hundred in orbit are a monumental achievement already, it pales in comparison with their plans. Also the stats have finite lifespan, so with many thousand in orbit even a weekly 60 sat launch migh not be enough to replenish & add more sats over time.

When did that happen? Originally, and I thought still today, it was quite literally the reverse - it was Starlink that was created to fund Starship, and Starship has a well-defined purpose: getting to Mars.

Starship launch price should only be a couple millions (see the article).

<100M is _technically_ right, but very far off. Since Starship will be fully reusable, it's upfront building investment (the ~100M price-tag you are referring to), spread over the lifetime of the vehicle, plus staff/maintenance/fuel for launches.

Falcon 9 was already a +10x reduction (~~1.5B per launch -> ~70M, likely cheaper for reused boosters), and Starship will be another +10x cheaper than F9. This means Starship will be >100x cheaper than competitors (excluding small-sat rockets like the Electron)

Where is that 10x reduction and the ~1.5B per launch from for the Falcon 9 comparison? I mean Falcon 9 certainly was cheaper than the competition even without reuse, but I'm quite sure the difference wasn't as large as you're stating there.

The Falcon 9 did disrupt the industry for sure, but you don't need a 10x price reduction for that.

You're right, I was using incorrect numbers. An Atlas V's sticker price is 110M~160M, so about 2-3x cheaper

Of course, a large part of the cost of those engines is that they're designed to be reusable (a difficult task with hydrogen/oxygen engines due to thermal shocks and hydrogen embrittlement). This made sense when they were being built for the Space Shuttle. It no longer makes sense now that they are using the same engines for an expendable first stage.

Which makes the plans to throw them away with each launch even more silly. They are cobbling together jobs programs from space shuttle components with no real strategy except "worked before" and "we can charge a lot of money for this".

The $146 million figure is specifically for new engines that are no longer designed to be reusable.

Reusability doesn't make engines costly. All liquid rocket engines are reusable. They have to be, so they can be tested before being put on the vehicle, and so during development you can keep reusing test articles.

The Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are reusable (and on the first stage, they are reused). They are reported to cost SpaceX just $400K per engine to manufacture.

>All liquid rocket engines are reusable. As always there are exceptions - rs-68 has an ablative nozzle that is rated for a single flight, so you need to test without that I guess.

Other engines could be similarly rated for jinutes of runtime by default for maximum performance. SpaceX aldo repeatedly ststed Merlin and Raptor were designed for cheap and fregvent reuse.

The Merlin engines don't run hydrogen, though. Because of hydrogen's propensity to embrittle metals it comes into contact with over time, it's much harder to design a hydrogen engine for long runtimes (vs. say, a one-minute static fire plus a eight-minute flight).

Any hydrocarbon engine will have hydrogen in the thrust chamber, and in the gas generator. They all run a bit fuel rich to maximize Isp, and that will mean the hot partially burned gas has some molecular hydrogen in it.

What makes hydrogen engines more expensive is the low density of LH2, which greatly increases the pumping power needed to bring the propellant up to pressure for injection into the thrust chamber.

Reusability is not binary, saying 'all liquid rocket engines are reusable' is pointless. It's like saying surely a Formula 1 car is equivalent to a Tacoma in terms of 'reusability', because both can be restarted. Spoiler: they're not.

"last major gasp [...] that has completely taken" Uh, does anyone else see a contradiction there?

Yes, that's a botched idiom. If the MIC has consumed Congress, it would be Congress doing the last gasping, not the MIC. The MIC is alive and well.

I love how triggering Elon can be to people that you have to preface your statement with "While I don't agree with all thing Musk".

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