After years of setbacks, NASA’s SLS moon rocket is ready to fly
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But if it does, I hope it leads the US government to change course on this nonsense.
We need to switch to purely fixed-cost contracts, that do not pay in full without full success, for all space launch related endeavors.
If the SLS indeed manages to put people back on the moon in the next 2-3 years, that could inspire a permanent moon presence, and that would be huge for development of future technology.
Well, Artemis 2 is scheduled for May 2024. It is to take crew on a lunar flyby, i.e. not even entering lunar orbit, which in my view makes it a lot less inspiring than Apollo 8.
Artemis 3 is to put people on the moon, but is currently "no earlier than 2025" with many missing pieces in the critical path. The spacesuits themselves are no earlier than April 2025, and while they loosened the Gateway requirement, it still needs a spacecraft to get from Orion to the moon and back. NASA selected Starship. If SpaceX can put Starship on the moon, what are the odds that Artemis 3 will be its first crewed trip?
I don't think Artemis 3 has any chance of being the catalyst you describe.
I don’t think the two scenarios are really comparable.
But certainly you're right about the risk of damage on landing.
The initial design has special high up landing engines btw, this solves the debris issue.
And in terms of the stability, Starship has enough mass-fraction to add whatever kind of legs on that thing they want. NASA didn't even list that as a minor issue in the report.
I mean, their engines are still melting which means they fundamentally don't have the lift capability they claim. I'm sure they could get them to work if they just ran them cooler, but cooler engines means less thrust and that changes everything about a rocket's capability.
And that's what makes it exactly like the self-driving car problem in my mind -- they're stuck at an impasse that might not really have a viable solution all while Musk is saying they'll be delivering any day now. You just can't trust a thing he says about when and how much they'll deliver.
If people land on the moon. Starship will be the impressive inspirational thing, not SLS.
And Starship is what you need to have a permanent moon base. Its a simple fact that there is not enough budget for a moon base, as long as NASA is forced into SLS. Do the math and you will see.
There is a reason literally everything other then Orion is already taken away from SLS. Both science missions and all other moon missions and landers are no longer going to use SLS.
SLS is literally just there to put Orion into moon orbit. That's it. And that could be achieved other ways as well.
SLS is just a crouch that NASA is forced to use. And on the pictures on television, when Astronauts get out on to the moon, it will be a large SpaceX rocket.
The SLS will (most likely) put people on the moon as part of a later Artemis mission.
The "completely unrelated rocket" will not be certified to launch Humans in time. The modified Starship that is used as a lander will undergo some certification, but ferrying Humans from lunar surface to lunar orbit is a lot less difficult and risky than blasting off of Earth.
Yeah, Starship hasn’t stopped blowing up. What it has flown successfully is a small atmospheric hop, with a pretty pared down version. The first stage hasn’t even successfully static fired yet. And yet, everyone is falling over themselves to say various versions of “SLS is obsolete because starship”. SpaceX has a great track record in developing Falcon 9, its reusability, and Dragon. But Starship is order of magnitude more complicated, optimistically it will not fly for several years.
I remember in 2017 when people said Falcon Heavy is not real, SLS is and all this bullshit.
SLS has no logical justification, even if either Falcon Heavy nor Starship existed. It just doesn't make sense if you actually think threw the problem.
NASA knew this, and didn't want (outside of Johnson) but were forced to do it.
> But Starship is order of magnitude more complicated, optimistically it will not fly for several years.
That quite the claim.
I would bet you 10k$ that Starship will reach orbit 5 times before SLS reaches Orbit twice? Interested?
The only thing SLS currently adds to the moon mission is that it allows the switchover between capsule and Starship to happen in lunar orbit instead of LEO. This is not very valuable.
SLS+Orion is ready to fly now, or at least almost.
One small exception is that transfer of people in Artemis III will be from Orion to Starship instead of from Crew Dragon to Starship.
After Artemis IV the plan is to transfer people from Orion to Lunar Gateway to Starship.
Not 100% sure but I think metal has not yet been bend on Lunar Gateway.
Citation needed.
NASA specifically called out in their report that SpaceX had done a huge amount of work on refueling already and they were impressed with the amount of detail.
NASA has also handed out contracts to study fluid dynamics of cryo and SpaceX got a contract to study that.
This is not some mystical thing. Refuling in orbit has been done for 50 years. Yes, its now cryo fluids but pumping cryo around in orbit is already required for upper stages, so its not really even that new or different.
And btw, refueling Starship is a required part of Artemis if you want to transition crew in earth or lunar orbit.
This didn’t age well.
And as for later versions of SLS after that… I highly doubt they will ever fly, because the insanity of the cost and they non-reusability will become too glaringly obvious to everyone.
Landing on the moon is only of value if it leads to things additional that are of value. But this indirect benefit requires that landing on the moon be cheap enough and easy enough that the additional activities are practical. I don't think anything needing SLS qualifies.
The confusion of symbol with substance has bedeviled the space program since its inception. It's a kind of cargo cult thinking. To do worthwhile things on the moon requires being able to get to the moon in a practical and economical way. I'm not sure even Starship qualifies, to be honest, but it may.
Seems implausible to me. If SLS fails this year, you can forget about the second launch, meant to be a crewed launch, in 2024. And by that time I think Starship will be flying. The absurdity of keeping SLS going will become too great even for Congress to tolerate.
SLS isn't more absurd than putting Humans on the Moon in the first place. It's an insane task in the best circumstances.
With China on the geo-strategic horizon, and maybe even with Russia really getting back into the game, I'm pretty sure that NASA or any other Western-based (and US-led) space agency will get funding for an indefinite period of time. Case in point, just show a short video like this [1] to any decision-taker in DC and I can assure you that that funding will get instantly approved:
> The Nudol missile, which Russia will use to shoot down enemy satellites in case of war.
> Flight speed from 2000 to 5000 meters per second. In this video, you can judge the speed yourself.
[1] https://twitter.com/TobiAyodele/status/1563635402967322624
Back at the beginning of the Obama administration NASA had a blue-ribbon committee to investigate what should be done about the over-budget exploration program that was supposed to replace the Shuttle. The conclusion was that NASA should scrap the Shuttle-derived launcher it was working on and develop a "flexible path" program of exploration where rides are bought on commercial vehicles, used to explore whatever the frontier is that is reachable with off-the-shelf commercial technology. This would be paid for by cancelling the rocket and Orion capsule that was being worked on. The legacy aerospace companies that were making bank obviously didn't want the gravy train to end, so they got their bought and paid for congressional reps to literally write in the NASA authorization law a mandate for NASA to design and use their own rocket (the SLS) and the Orion capsule. Congressional staffers even wrote in the exact specifications of this rocket without consulting NASA about whether the specs made any sense at all (they didn't--they were designed to ensure sole source contracts to existing contractors, but with enough changes that lucrative development work would be needed). As such we went from a rocket that was supposed to launch 2-4 times per year, to one which costs 10 times as much and launches once per every 2 years. And one that is even incapable of getting its spacecraft payload to the Moon.
Furthermore, because use of this rocket is mandated by law the entire exploration program around it had to be adjusted to accommodate its inefficiencies. Since the rocket can't get to the moon, a whole space station (Gateway) is built in a totally useless deep space orbit to serve as a destination and staging area for lunar missions. But because of orbital dynamics this prevents many portions of the moon from being accessible to lunar missions, and limits options for direct abort, making lunar missions significantly more dangerous. Also all the effort that could go into making a permanently occupied based on the moon is instead being spent on this useless tollbooth in the middle of nowhere.
My favorite anecdote about the absolute waste of this program is regarding the SLS main engines. The SLS uses 4 modified space shuttle main engines on its first stage. The SLS rocket that is currently prepping for launch in Florida actually has 2 engines on it that were pulled off Shuttle Atlantis before it was put in a museum. These are historic engines that flew many missions in space and arguably ought to be in a museum themselves, or at least cut apart in cross section as teaching tools in engineering colleges. Instead these fully reusable engines, which initially cost about $40M each, were refurbished at a price of $150M(!) each to make them expendable(!!), and are going to be unceremoniously chucked into the ocean a few hundred miles off the coast as part of the SLS launch. That is not a typo: they spent $150M to make a $40M already reusable engine single-use. Actually they spent $600M, over half a billion dollars, to throw away 4 of these engines. Madness.
So the argument goes: this insanity is doing nothing but wasting national treasure and distracting NASA from any meaningful exploration. The SLS is a cancer which has mestasticized to infect the entire human spaceflight program. It needs to be cancelled ASAP, and all the architectures built off it rethought from the ground up if we are to have a national spaceflight program that is in any way meaningful.
(The counter-argument is that cancelling the SLS + Orion programs won't free up money for other exploration projects. This is congressional pork. If you cancel the program, NASA budget will be reduced in the process. Arguably for the taxpayer and the nation this is a good thing, but not for NASA. From the perspective of NASA the SLS + Orion is a free gift of a corrupt congress, and beggars can't be choosers.)
Using the shuttle systems reduces the engineering risks. This means that SLS may be more expensive than something scratch-designed, but there is also a lot less insecurity in the schedule (though there was enough ...).
I don't think there was a way for NASA to start the Artemis program sooner than with SLS. I don't think it's a good idea to entirely depend on SpaceX for heavy lift rockets or human rated space flight.
I also don't understand your point about Orion not being able to go to the moon. Of course it "could" get as close to the moon as it wants. But it is basically a command and reentry module, not a lander. There are more potential missions for the Orion than for a combined lander and reentry module. So you'd have some kind of rendezvous in any case which also saves fuel.
It's human-rated only because NASA says it is. It has literally never flown. The NASA rules for human-rating its own internal-designed craft are way looser than the rules for human-rating commercial craft. SpaceX and Boeing had to jump through way more hoops to get their platforms human-rated by NASA.
Artemis could just as easily be done by launching Orion + service module, and upper stage to LEO on separate Falcon Heavy launches, then launching crew on Dragon or Starliner. No starship required. It would be 3 launches, but with autonomous LEO rendezvous there would be no risk to the crew, for about 1/10th the cost (or alternatively, 5 missions a year instead of 1 every 2 years).
This, btw, was NASA's plan before congress mandated the use of SLS!
> Using the shuttle systems reduces the engineering risks.
The extensive changes made for SLS and the fact that ~none of the original engineers were involved invalidates all that heritage. Or at least it would if NASA held the SLS program to the same standards as commercial industry.
> This means that SLS may be more expensive than something scratch-designed, but there is also a lot less insecurity in the schedule (though there was enough ...).
SLS has had more budget and timeline overruns than anything else out there. Even SpaceX's famously optimistic "Elon time" is not as bad as SLS's delays.
> I don't think there was a way for NASA to start the Artemis program sooner than with SLS.
Again, this was the plan before congress got in the way. I remember it vividly as I worked at NASA at the time.
> I don't think it's a good idea to entirely depend on SpaceX for heavy lift rockets or human rated space flight.
ULA would be happy to develop a super-heavy Vulcan. Or Rocket Lab. Or Relativity. etc. Do the same as COTS: fully fund two providers, and if one drops out then fund a 3rd.
> I also don't understand your point about Orion not being able to go to the moon.
Orion has insufficient fuel to enter circular LLO (like Apollo) and still get home. It's too heavy and under-powered compared with the Apollo Command and Service Modules.
Can you share a couple of examples of this? Curious...
Which is actually a rather on-point observation: NASA human-rating certification is a lot of do-as-I-say,not-as-I-do hypocrisy. The commercial crew contractors had to actually demonstrate safety. NASA, on the other hand, asked Boeing, the prime contractor, to estimate odds of failure for various subsystems of SLS. Boeing wrote many reports explaining in detail why the odds of failure were within acceptable limits. NASA read these documents and said "okay, I believe you." And that is why the SLS is human-rated.
This Quora answer does a decently good job of explaining the absurdity of the situation:
https://www.quora.com/Why-will-SLS-be-man-rated-after-a-sing...
But also, let me introduce you to the magical concept of a 'waiver'. NASA has very strict rules for what are allowable risks in human spaceflight. If anything exceeds acceptable risk tolerances, the countdown stops or the mission aborts. UNLESS, you can get a 'waiver.' A waiver is a piece of paper that says NASA is free to ignore the identified problem! Cold Florida mornings leads to ice build up on the Shuttle overnight? Waiver! No need to wait until external temperatures are back within design limits. Foam insulation strike on the leading edge of the wing? Waiver! No need to image the impact point with ground-based radar. NASA, quite famously, gives out wavers like candy for its own launch systems. When I was at NASA (admittedly not on the human spaceflight side), whenever we encountered a problem the first question was always "alright, can we get a waiver?" The answer was usually yes for things in-house. But a commercial spaceflight provider? Good luck convincing NASA to give you a waiver for anything that isn't well and truly, quite obviously a procedural hiccup only.
> Again, this was the plan before congress got in the way. I remember it vividly as I worked at NASA at the time.
How many people at NASA left because of this sequence of events?
But of those more on the aerospace side, with less transferable skill sets, leaving the industry isn't a clear-cut option. Many of them did move to SpaceX though. At the time that I left, I remember there being concern about the best and brightest SLS engineers getting lured away to work on Falcon 9. There was certainly a lot of churn in the late Constellation & early SLS days.
You can use commercial rockets to go to LEO and stage of from there. I don't know why this is hard to understand. NASA knew this in 2011.
> I don't think it's a good idea to entirely depend on SpaceX for heavy lift rockets or human rated space flight.
They wouldn't have to. You have Crew Dragon and Starliner, both have potentially multiple rockets they could go on.
> I also don't understand your point about Orion not being able to go to the moon.
The point is that the Orion Service Module developed by ESA is seriously under-powered and NASA has to design around those constraints (and btw its an additional cost of SLS/Orion as this is paid for by NASA not ESA).
Orion can't go into LLO and back.
There's just less of a democratic process behind distributing the taxpayer's money.
Also you could say NASA is supporting SpaceX and others in doing something similar, which is better than having one single program in-house.
SLS is the safest bet for a soonish return to the moon. Anything else is just speculation.
If the problem is getting to the moon cheaply and frequently then the SLS is most definitely not.
Therefore we need SLS out of the way to fund real sustainable solutions for space exploration.
Also, if you look closer at the SLS program, there will be replacements which will make the launches cheaper eventually. Not reusable though.
2 Falcon Heavies for 140M each, would give you literally 1.5 billion in extra budget to change your in space assets and for operations.
Are you seriously gone argue that docking a capsule and a service module in LEO costs 1.5 billion?
This is juts a kniejerk response. If you actually seriously sit down and you do the analysis, no sane person would ever use SLS.
Seriously, go try it with realistic numbers and see what architecture you end up with. Nobody that is not forced would include SLS in any architecture.
We know the cost of SLS/Orion from public numbers and Government Budget Service.
We know the commercial prices for SpaceX launches.
Of course I have not done a full analysis of the cost of mating a service module and capsule in LEO. That would be far to much effort for a person that is not paid to do it.
But given that the difference is 3.5 billion, I don't think anybody could argue that this wouldn't be within that margin.
I would only hint at comparable programs cost. 3.5 billion is more then the complete Crew Dragon program, and we are talking about a dumb service module that consists of mostly things that already exists.
And that 3.5 billion $ is just the first launch, over the next 10 launches it would go up to about 15 billion $. Suggesting that it would cost more then 2 billion $ per launch to push a capsule from LEO to moon orbit is a bit absurd anyway you look at it. There would essentially be no new technology needed.
Some people have made series Artemis alternatives plans over the years, such as moon direct for example. But those of course change far more then my 'minimal' example.
But I of course have not paid millions of $ to do a complete study on an alternative architecture. That's what NASA should do, but they don't because they are not allowed to. And they aren't allow to because everybody knows it would be beyond embracing.
The only initial attempt to do a minimal study on just an alternative for Artemis 1 almost got the NASA Administrator fired.
This has been explained over and over again since 2011 when congress forced NASA into SLS.
Launching a moon mission on standard commercial rockets is absolutely possible. Many different architectures have been proposed to do that. Its really not a question at all.
Its not about 'matching capabilities' because Artemis is currently designed such that it requires SLS. So of course if you design to program to the rocket you were forced to use, then of course its the only option.
When the NASA Administrator in 2019 proposed to shift to Falcon Heavy he was almost fired and was given a mouth guard on the topic. NASA was not allowed to invest single $ into any program that could threaten the existence of SLS/Orion.
NASA is barley even allowed to make studies that suggest an alternative.
Just in very simple terms a few possible architecture:
1. This is if you are forced to keep Orion. You need to change Orion so Orion and a slightly larger Service Module can dock in orbit, rather then launch together. Each one can launch on a Falcon Heavy. This alone would give you 3.5 billion to invest into the service module and other related cost. And over the 2020 would save about 15 billion $ or more.
2. You can throw away both SLS and Orion if you add extension tank into the cargo trunk of Dragon then it could do basically the same as Orion/SM does now. That would literally save 5 billion a year and would easily be enough to make a real service module.
3. The Artemis architecture already requires a moon lander. Instead of SLS/Orion you can launch people into LEO with Crew Dragon or Starliner, there they would transition into the moon lander. And the journey to moon and back would be in the lander.
There are many other way. Almost every other way is cheaper then SLS/Orion. Try to do the math yourself.
But of course the problem is, NASA is simply not allow to advocate or design such missions architectures. Any architecture that cuts out SLS or Orion is stillborn because of politics.
But it's sitting on the pad today and nothing else is.
So SLS really doesn't exist practically. That is the problem with incredibly low launch rates.
> But it's sitting on the pad today and nothing else is.
Falcon Heavy has been ready to use for 3 years and you could easily design a moon mission around Falcon Heavy. Hell you could even use Atlas or Falcon 9.
You cannot just wave your hand and say SpaceX. As much as I think it's the better option to use falcon heavy, it's not ready this week.
Nobody says this first SLS shouldn't launch. Not that it would matter much if it didn't, but still.
The discussion is about forward looking space policy for the next 10 years, for the whole Artemis program.
SLS will fly LITERALLY 1 and then not again for 2-4 years. In that time a strategy change can and should be made.
If it fails, there’s a good chance those billions will redirected into in actually sustainable launch system.
It does suck to want something to fail, but you have to think about the bigger picture here and the greater good. No one is going to die.
I see no reason why a failure of this rocket would change the way they do business. The political motivation is for local high prestige jobs, not for any outcomes outside of that.
NASA does well to fight for the science they do, but the funding model is not aligned with that goal.
A lot of this is directly attributable to the success of the Commercial Crew program.
In a controlled experiment, we ran the ossified incumbent with a storied 100 years of experience against a challenger. The challenger delivered in May '20 and the incumbent, paid way more, will be about 3 years late to get people to ISS: OFT-1 is currently NET Feb'23.
This says more about Boeing's business structure than anything else. Its mission is different.
And "total mission success" isn't the only goal of these programs. Progress in manufacturing and engineering is a considerable factor.
Governments, like big banks, are better at taking on risk than most businesses or individual persons. That's how health care works in most civilized countries, disaster relief and other things. And expensive space programs had to be started by governments because they were too risky with too little benefit, and in some respects this is still the case.
> And "total mission success" isn't the only goal of these programs. Progress in manufacturing and engineering is a considerable factor.
This is such a copout and nonsense. The idea that SLS does anything for 'progress in manufacturing and engineering' is a bad senator talking point with essentially no relevant for the real world.
In fact, giving money to innovative space companies would achieve those things far better.
> Governments, like big banks, are better at taking on risk
The whole point of SLS was that it was low risk legacy technology. SLS is the EXACT LITERAL opposite of what you suggest, its low-risk incredibly conservative with minimal technological advancement.
Up until recently, there was no profit motive to create private rockets, so the government was the only source of work on rockets. The government doesn't need that many rockets, so it's not shocking that there are a small number of contractors.
And no, you can't just force them to shoulder risk. They're private companies that aren't contractually obligated to accept other contracts. If we wanted someone we could force risk onto, we would need a public entity that designs and manufactures the rockets.
Or rather, I guess we could legislatively force them to accept the risk, but I would expect private capital to flee, so it would become a de facto public organization.
Just look at the journey COTS, form Orbital -> Orbital ATK -> NG.
> Up until recently, there was no profit motive to create private rockets
Had the government not artificially pushed Shuttle, there would actually have been a quite large commercial market.
A US launch vehicle could very much have competed against Ariane 3 and Soyuz.
> And no, you can't just force them to shoulder risk.
Rocket launches in the 90s were not some crazy future risk. Doing a COTS style program for rockets was 100% viable.
> If we wanted someone we could force risk onto, we would need a public entity that designs and manufactures the rockets.
No you only need a public entity willing to buy a a lot of launches.
Let's try with an example.
Until now: government pays $100 to build a rocket to go to the Moon, say $50 now and $50 at launch. Rocket explodes? No problem, you still get your $50.
Your proposal: government pays $100 to build a rocket to go to the Moon. $50 now, $50 if it lands. Ops. No one shows up. Err... Let's try $60 now, $40 if it lands? Nope... Still nobody around to get this contract...
Why? Because a company would charge you (simplifying a bit) $150, of which $100 now, and $50 if the rocket lands.
Congratulations. You have contributed to ballooning the Space budget. Taxpayers are thankful.
The bidder say "I can do it for $100". Fantastic! Then they go 'over budget' (as planned) and spend $1000, and the government pays it anyway because the contract says they must. Plus $20 profit.
Meanwhile the Commercial Resupply Services missions have been a poster-child for cost-savings.
The taxpayers truly thank you for 'saving them money'.
I'm sure neither was easy to estimate.
2 billion dollars! Each, single flight.
You could build, launch and operate 3 Kepler Telescopes for that. Kepler is the telescope that was used to discovered ~3 thousand planets.
You could build, send and operate another Curiosity/Perseverance rover to Mars for 2 billion.
Sure spaceX claims to be working on some of this, but they could cease to exist tomorrow, and governments (ie MILITARIES) need control of their platforms and more than one option.
Space travel is only peaceful until it isn’t.
Your logic is akin to ‘why are we building aircraft carriers when we could could build 20 Destroyers for the same cost’
Because we project our power with aircraft carriers, not destroyers
The biggest issue is that SLS is not even available. NASA flagship Europa Clipper mission had to be moved out of SLS to Falcon Heavy due to lack of availability of SLS.
Also interplanetary travel is not only in scope of nation states, but also private companies. Perseverance rover has been launched on ULA Atlas V rocket.
But more importantly SLS+Orion can not deliver people to the surface of the Moon. That's the job that NASA has given to Starship and SpaceX.
Also, huge chunks of Lunar Gateway (let's skip the fact that Lunar Gateway is useless in itself) will be delivered by SpaceX with Falcon Heavy. Also, resupply of Lunar Gateway will be done by SpaceX with Dragon XL.
Without SpaceX Artemis program will be failure whether you have SLS or not.
But you could get rid of SLS and Orion. You could use Falcon 9 with Crew Dragon or Boeing Starliner to load people to Starship in Earth orbit. Then you could send Starship to the Moon. It goes there currently anyway.
The kicker is that Starship will have the same internal volume as ISS, many times bigger than Lunar Gateway + Orion.
NASA is not incompetent or corrupt and neither are its contractors. The people who work all their lives at those institutions don't do so because they love the idea of never going to space. You might consider that the process is subject to other pressures than corruption. The reason why things are so expensive and take so long is because of how our society demands that government act. The response to failure of any kind is pull the plug, and skin those responsible alive in the press, and treat it not as a setback or a problem to be solved, but yet another play in a partisan-ideological football game.
The people saying that they hope it fails so their preferred vision can be implemented do not understand that if this fails, then that's just more years away from the goal. There isn't some tiny group of people you can point to and say "its their fault." The enemy here is actually broader society reads about, talks about, and votes about its government.
Can we agree to call that external corruption?
...but I think there was a word for reorganizing your entire business model to bend toward the whims of external corruption.
Basically just take a definition of "external" then scope it to corruption specifically.
And the extremely huge organizations that take the funds are not exactly misusing things themselves but they are facilitating the politicians.
It's been legal for congress members to inside trade, even. That doesn't make it acceptable. It's not just making decisions I "disagree with" that matter here.
But there are a damn lot of special interests influencing the process.
> The reason why things are so expensive and take so long is because of how our society demands that government act. The response to failure of any kind is pull the plug, and skin those responsible alive in the press, and treat it not as a setback or a problem to be solved, but yet another play in a partisan-ideological football game.
Can you give an example for this that would explain the immense costs compared to e.g. SpaceX bootstrapping itself for a fraction?
They may not be corruption, but there sure as hell are a lot of special interests. NASA's budget is set by Congress, after all.
1) SpaceX doesn't have a complete super heavy lift rocket because they're still iterating the design, they started later than SLS (roughly 2013 vs. 2011), they have to build their own infrastructure and deal with the FAA (NASA/contractors largely don't), and they're designing from an entirely different and likely much better long-term requirement of reusability. Cost is only a side factor if you've been tracking Starship development.
2) This SLS can't actually land on the moon. It's a to-orbit and orbital transfer platform only.
3) Given 1 and 2, it isn't at all clear that "public funds leap frog over business" or that in this case SLS somehow "paves the way for private industry". SLS is untested, horribly expensive to launch, has basically no new technology, and isn't even "done" (this is just Block 1).
While I'm happy to have a second super heavy lift rock available, I and many other people strongly question if this was really the best use of the funds as opposed to using those same funds to incentivize SpaceX and its competitors to build more modern rockets free from special interests. Doing the latter seems like it would be the more efficient way to pave a path for private industry.
There is no law of nature that to do a moon program you need a super-heavy or whatever.
Not sure what you mean, NASA can literally just buy stuff from the open market at market prices. NASA only costs more if they do special things. So part of not having large cost is not building some NASA only special thing like SLS/Orion.
> And spacex doesn’t have a fully scoped moon base platform.
Neither das NASA.
> It doesn’t even have a full heavy lift yet.
NASA doesn't have that either. They might have one test flight now, and then nothing for many years.
Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy over the next couple years could lift literally 100x more then NASA could ever do.
And many people have pointed out that distributed launch was an option. Even back in 2011 many people at NASA saw that given Falcon 9 and Atlas 5 launching commercial only was an option. But congress didn't allow that.
The fact is, Artemis is already a multi-launch architecture. That could be slightly extended in many ways and make SLS totally unnecessary. This has been shown again and again 100 times since 2011 and even before that. But somehow people still don't get that. Its pretty basic, but I guess we just have to defend whatever architecture some senators from Alabama wanted.
> Why? Because the costs are too great.
Again, Falcon Heavy is literally a super heavy lift class commercial vehicle. And Starship will commercial and far bigger then SLS. New Glenn and Vulcan are also in development.
The idea that NASA needs to spend 20 billion for some slightly bigger rocket that can launch once every few years is absurd.
> Hence, the public funds the leap frog over business and paves the way for private industry.
I'm sorry, but frankly this is a total misunderstanding of how NASA works. The opposite is true, SLS/Orion are starving the rest of the space industry because they are so absurdly expensive.
NASA in 2011 wanted to consider commercial rocket providers for 'SLS' but Senate didn't allow it. Had they done, that money would be 100x better invested now.
> That’s the benefit of the public funded model. It advances us faster than is natural.
You can't just put public money on a pile light in on fire and then say 'look public is funding a this amazing thing'.
The SLS/Orion programs are the perversion of the model you are advocating. Instead of public money funding amazing advisement in space, it goes to support legacy contractors developing products that are totally noncompetitive and backwards.
20 billion and not a single new engine developed, not a single next generation avionics system deployed, no significant advances in structural engineering. This is literally the opposite of innovation and progress.
SLS has some technical design issues. Large segmented solid rockets for the Space Shuttle were originally politically motivated. Ares V and subsequently SLS inherited them. They make operations really hard. They are very heavy and dangerous.
Liquid rockets can be moved around empty and fueled on the pad. A lot easier and safer.
No matter how great an engineer you are, if you have to use large segmented solid rockets, you're probably not going to have small launch infrastructure, small crew or frequent launches. Another way to move humanity towards spacefaring would be instead to work on a rocket that's fundamentally designed to be more operations friendly.
That’s not a mark in the nice engineers who work there, but let’s not kid ourselves.
> The Saturn V also took many years to develop
The Saturn V basically bootstrapped the whole US space industry. The Saturn V had 2 engines, F-1 and J-2 that had to be developed and put into production. It invented technologies and had incredibly complex computer systems for the time.
You are comparing a project from a fledgling industry to a highly mature aerospace industry.
And Saturn V is significantly larger and more powerful then even the eventually SLS 1c. This SLS is not even close to what Saturn V was able to do.
> NASA is not incompetent or corrupt NASA is not some perfect organization on a hill shined on by god. NASA makes mistakes, NASA estimates things badly. NASA has group think and is influenced by its history.
I wouldn't say NASA is incompetent, but that doesn't mean they are competent in some aspects either.
In addition to that they are hamstrung by the politics of the situation and are not actually free to act on many things.
> and neither are its contractors.
Here I have to disagree with you. The contractors spend a huge amount of money on influencing NASA choices thew politics, and that is pretty close to what I call corruption.
And there is also real corruption, if you have followed NASA then you would know that a director of human space flight was just fired because he shoveled information to Boeing. There is a believe with some in the space industry, that unless you give lots of money to Beoing, NG and LM your project is still born. This is a real issue and its series, both in civilian and military space.
The contractors have no intensive to actually finish the rocket on time, despite horrible performances they keep getting bonuses and the and they keep a whole army of engineers employed that gives them political power. And they lose non of their profits.
> The reason why things are so expensive and take so long is because of how our society demands that government act.
That is quite a nebulus concept. Society doesn't demand anything in itself, society doesn't act or think.
> The response to failure of any kind is pull the plug, and skin those responsible alive in the press, and treat it not as a setback or a problem to be solved,
Funny COTS and CommercialCrew had plenty of failure but everybody evolved on the government side didn't get put infront of a firing squad and won prices instead.
> but yet another play in a partisan-ideological football game.
That wrongly assumes that these issues are about democrats vs republicans. But this is not the case. Its political football, but not actually partiasan. Its a total misunderstanding of the politics of space and NASA to think this is about party.
> The people saying that they hope it fails so their preferred vision can be implemented do not understand that if this fails, then that's just more years away from the goal.
I have never said I hope it fails. But this is simply not true depending on what the goal is. If your goal is 'single mission to moon' then maybe it would be more years away.
But if your goal is, having a sustainable successful moon program and space program, then it would actually be closer if SLS fails.
The reality is that SLS is a hold-over from old NASA. A purely political creation that was never in NASA interest and simply exists for political reasons. SLS/Orion were literally the price the Obama administration had to pay for CommercialCrew to exist.
> There isn't some tiny group of people you can point to and say "its their fault."
There kind of is, a group of senators from Florida, Alabama, Utah that made sure when they wrote Space law in 2011 that forced NASA into this course of actions.
> The enemy here is actually broader society reads about, talks about, and votes about its government.
That overestimates the influence of the general public and underestimates the power of large contractors and employers in major stats.
The ‘a 50 year old rocket that was the first of its kind was expensive too!’ excuse doesn't make sense when anybody with the most modest bit of understanding about how rockets work can look up the industry and come up with a plan about a factor-10 more cost efficient that's significantly safer both from a human and a technical risk perspective, and could have been done on much shorter timelines.
Corruption is one thing I don't feel qualified to comment on but having worked for both NASA and for a few contractors... yes they're absolutely incompetent.
They have expertise in small pockets but the overall organization is surrounded by giant cushions of bloat. NASA could drop ~50% of their staff and nothing would materially change. ULA could drop ~20% of their staff and nothing would materially change.
One of the biggest issues with SLS (besides cost) is the launch rate. It will limit the NASA for a long time.
One of their single-use engines costs more than any SpaceX rocket… which are all reusable.
If history is any guide and they haven't missed any big blockers though, then they'll get there - but I think a 10 year horizon is probably a reasonable expectation.
Starship is a SpaceX rocket reasonably late in the development cycle, and is planned to land on the moon in an uncrewed demonstration flight no earlier than 2024, and with people during NASA's Artemis 3 mission no earlier than 2025. According to the plan this will be the first mission to land people on the moon since Apollo.
SLS at this point is not planning on launching a vehicle that lands on the moon, instead just a very very expensive taxi to a starship in lunar orbit which could have easily carried the astronauts there itself...
Pretty sure it's untried. Theoretically easy, just like launching starship is theoretically easy.
Of course it's more challenging.
And it does matter if there's more fuel, you have to have valves and pipes that won't freeze after lengthy contact with cryogenic fuel. And you need larger pressure vessels, which scale in volume differently from surface area. It's not at all the same whether you move one ton or a hundred.
Regardless of the dates, Artemis using starship as a lander seems practically guaranteed at this point, so SLS really is relegated to the role of unnecessary taxi...
Several Moon missions were launched on commercial rockets. Even tiny RocketLab launched one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPSTONE
I'm not saying there's room for improvement, but I think people neg Artemis way too hard for what it is. And people give Starship too much credit for what it is (so far). (And I DO like the idea of Starship and hope it succeeds). If it succeeds things will be awesome!
I’m hopeful it will meat here falcons success, but until then compare what’s actually possible today.
And if the SLS/Orion architecture wasn't so underperforming, Starship could waste less energy making up for it.
Now what is true that the further out you go, a hydrogen RL-10 based upper stage will win out better then a Falcon 9 based kerlox upper stage.
So while the payload to LEO between rockets can be pretty close, the payload to a moon orbit can be quite different.
But yeah, they’re on completely different levels.
When SLS finishes development, it will also hold the record for all 3.
The way SpaceX does programatic accounting, and the way NASA does programatic accounting are I suspect, wildly different.
NASA itself estimates costs of about 800m+ each (depending how you account for program overhead). Also, if SLS is used to launch stuff to LEO, its a cosmic waste of money. None of the Falcon rockets can really meet the program goals of SLS.
First of all, that 800m number is mostly a very optimistic estimate that might come true sometime around 2030 or later.
And even then its only true if you completely ignore amortization of development cost, something SpaceX can't really do.
Some of the items that are getting ordered now are for rockets in the late 2020s and if you look at those unit prices its not close to 800m yet.
1b will also need a new upper stage, the price of that is as of yet pure speculation and anybody that has watched the SLS program knows that will happen before its done. And the unit price will also not be there.
SLS will almost certainty be canceled before they reach anywhere close to 800m a launch.
> None of the Falcon rockets can really meet the program goals of SLS.
That is simply not true, or rather, its only true as so far as the whole Artemis program was designed to use SLS. When the NASA administrator suggest that Falcon Heavies could be used some in congress threatened him and seriously suggested he should resign. He shut up quite fast after that.
Many at NASA in the early 2010s didn't want SLS, simple because such a rocket is not required. And even today with a few changes and tweaks it wouldn't be required. But of course if you spend 45 billion into a specific solution it will be better then the solution you spend 0$ on.
But even so, its still not to late, even now canceling SLS and redesigning Artemis would be worth it. Artemis assumes that Starship will exist anyway, and human transport to LEO is fixed already. Starship is the lander already. So really, only thing you need is somehow to get humans from LEO to the moon. And guess what, Starship already has to fly that anyway.
Thats, speculation, one covered in the source article, that notes, because of the spread of the project - virtually every state makes something for it, its proven itself more or less immune to budget cuts because of this.
Beyond that, there is a dearth of heavy lift rockets out there, the idea of a single source from SpaceX is.. one, contrary to normal federal procurement rules, and two, not a sane idea - if for no there reason than it doesnt match the mission profile for a lunar mission.
I'll note, that even a Block I SLS launches 30t more into LEO than Falcon Heavy does, the numbers go up even higher for later blocks, presumably this advantage is even high for lunar missions.
Its speculation but informed speculation.
> more or less immune to budget cuts because of this
That is true so far but not a law of nature. There are many in congress who don't like it. It touches every state, but some state far more then others. And an alternative solution would also spend money.
SpaceX is in California, Texas, Florida and Washington. And other commercial providers like BlueOrigin are in Alabama and Florida.
Originally it was a Alabama and Florida Senator who pushed SLS. A Florida senator didn't want commercial space, he wanted SLS launching from Florida. However since then every Florida senator will understand that SpaceX aud Commercial launch is 1000x more important for Florida then a SLS launch every year.
So a state like Florida was incredibly pro SLS, now this is no longer true. Alabama and Utah will continue to be pro SLS. However Texas and California (slightly relevant stats) will certainty not be.
There are forces in congress that don't like the waste and Alabama/Utah dominance and when Starship fly's regularly before Artemis 2 even launches you will see some series attacks on SLS castle. And if SLS has any series issues it will be easy to topple. Even just delaying funding for the new upper stage can kill it.
Its a very long time from now until late 2020s. Consider the difference in the industry over the last 7 years. 7 years ago there were still influential voices who thought reusable rockets would never be real, now reusable rockets are so boring that even hard core space nerds don't watch all the launches anymore.
SLS already looks like a flying antique in a few years it will just be comical.
> one, contrary to normal federal procurement rules
Federal procurement rules don't really apply to large NASA missions. As SLS is single sourced right now.
> two, not a sane idea
So then by your own logic SLS is not a sane idea. I guess we agree.
> I'll note, that even a Block I SLS launches 30t more into LEO than Falcon Heavy does, the numbers go up even higher for later blocks, presumably this advantage is even high for lunar missions.
We are not talking about Apollo. This is not a single all-in-one launch architecture. Artemis already relies on multiple launches for all its missions. Anything but single launch payload comparison will come out much better using commercial rocket.
Falcon 9 heavy can launch literally 5-20 times as often while you can launch 20 of them for the price of single SLS launch. 20 Falcon Heavy rockets costing 140M a pop (likely would be less) cost would literally be cheaper then Artemis 1 launch cost alone.
You can also do the numbers for New Glenn, Vulcan, Terran R, Neutron and all the other commercial rockets. Going to a multi launch architecture designed for launch vehicles of current size is sensible, far more so then single source multi-billion SLS.
You could literally pay for 10 years of all launches required with the price of just the Artemis 1/Artemis 2. Its financial idiocy beyond rime or reason and nobody who seriously looks at the numbers can defend it.
There are so many other architecture that could make sense. Even dumb things like launching the Service Module and Orion separately would work and if you did, Falcon Heavy would be totally doable and far, far cheaper then the current architecture. But of course current Orion isn't designed to do that, no-no, we couldn't do sensible architectures like that.
If you actually gave space mission architects freedom from the the political milestones, not a single one of them would ever come up with the current Artemis program.
All of this is before we even consider the existence of Starship. SLS/Orion are terrible ideas BEFORE you even consider Starship. If you consider Starship (and Artemis already has a hard dependency on it) SLS/Orion go from terrible ideas to borderline insanity.
This is not accurate even according to the NASA administrators in the past. Falcon Heavy should be able to meet the vast majority of the goals if not all; many of which were arbitrarily defined to only fit SLS anyway.
Its literally just paper work, Falcon Heavy is already DESIGNED AND BUILT TO MEET human rating standards. They just didn't to the paper work.
NASA's crewed rating is one step farther, but not a huge step farther.
Next problem would be Crew Dragon itself. It's probably not able to return from the moon, the speed and thus the temperature is higher so you need a capsule designed for this. Which Orion is and Dragon isn't.
Human rating certification is more about paperwork, not technology demonstration.
Neither does the SLS/Orion stack. What are you even comparing here?
A lander is required anyway.
> Also Falcon Heavy only carries 26t into LEO
I assume you don't mean LEO.
> Next problem would be Crew Dragon itself. It's probably not able to return from the moon, the speed and thus the temperature is higher so you need a capsule designed for this. Which Orion is and Dragon isn't.
Actually, the Crew Dragon Heat Shield is designed for moon reentry. There might be a few updates for avionics but nothing to big.
SLS/Orion/Orion SM and Falcon Heavy/Dragon stack are both underpowered. There are solution to this is you were willing to invest the smallest amount of money.
Dragon could be extend by adding a extra fuel tank into the trunk. That would be a reasonably cheap solution. Alternatively a separately launched Service Module. That would likely cost a few 100M, but that is jump change compared to SLS/Orion.
Or even better, don't launch the capsule to moon orbit at all, switch to the moon lander in LEO. Then you can simply use commercial crew to get the astronauts up and down and the lander to go to the moon and back.
All of these idea would save 10s of billions.
No, you don't scale up the 26t by the factor of 4 in a heartbeat.
Yes, you need to take the capsule to lunar orbit because the lander wouldn't survive reentry and you don't want to take the transfer stage down to the lunar surface and back again.
SLS is ready to fly. There are no alternatives which can do the same thing which are ready to fly. This is a fact.
Its not like Orion has actually flown, Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy are more proven then SLS/Orion and would be easier to certify.
You don't have much aerospace and certification experience, do you?
Nobody denies its hard and would take singificant work.
But the fact is, all the individual subsystems are certified. The Falcon 9, a closely derived rocket is fully certified. The Dragon is fully crew certified for LEO. And both Falcon Heavy and Dragon are engineered from the ground up to be able to be certified if required.
If this was an argument about if it cost 5 million of 50 million then we could have a discussion.
BUT ITS LITERALLY ABOUT 10+ billion $. So unless you can make an argument that it somehow cost more to human certify Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon for moon then the complete Falcon 9 and Dragon program cost in the first place then you don't have an argument. Only smart-ass comments.
So please tell me, what do I not understand. Why would it cost 10 billion to do the things I suggest. In reality, we know that it wouldn't even cost 1 billion $.
Europa Clipper is not, and that's a pretty big tell.
That is literally why the Artemis program is designed as it is, the program is designed about the rocket and capsule, rather then the other way around.
Many at NASA wanted a different architecture after Shuttle, but congress had no interest in that.
EC cost estimates are currently about 4-5 billion for the whole program while a single SLS launch is ~2 billion.
The whole SLS/Orion program runs at few billion each year and it's already spent more than 10x the entire cost of Europa Clipper.
Go look at some of the studied NASA internally did, their result was the same, other approaches would have been better and cheaper in the long run.
The Shuttle derived architecture won because of politics.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
Basically a Saturn V like clone was considered.
And those studies referenced also didn't consider many other viable options. Commercial providers were planed to be able to bid as well and SpaceX and ULA would have considered making bids.
Something NASA also didn't consider is using the Merlin engine, an engine that actually existed and was already going into mass production at that time. That would have been an alternative to F-1 and would have been ready sooner.
You also might be interested in this presentation from 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweLWCBHpUE%3Ft%3D0
What funny about that presentation is how much time he spends talking about cost and how cost control is the most important thing and if they can control cost NASA shouldn't even make its own rocket. And of course SLS did the exact opposite of controlling cost.
And even if you assume they fail, the bids were expected to be in the 2-5 billion $ range.
Not in the 20 billion+ $ range. And those bids would have been for a 130 ton rocket, not a 90 ton rocket like SLS is.
> I'd also question cost estimates based on nothing actually built or seriously planned through.
You can question it, but those kinds of estimates are what NASA bases it choices on. And NASA picked what their own estimations suggested was the worst thing.
The RS-25E (non-reusable SSME) is incredibly complex, and you are not gone mass produce them anytime soon. Even starting a very limited production line cost billions.
So sure with infinite budget many things are possible, but they are simply not going the happen. The rocket is simply not designed for high launch rates.
Falcon 9 and Atlas 5 are two examples. NASA's safety advisory board has said very positive things about the safety aspects of using a frequently-launched rocket.
8 years ago we had a long discussion after the Virgin Galactic crash.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279
Virgin Galactic still isn’t live but at the time people thought they would be by now.
Anyway, since then I’ve seen Steven Weinberg’s explain my point much better than I ever could.
Can’t find the entire article but here’s the first part. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/04/08/the-wrong-stuff/
Unmanned is much cheaper, and we can iterate much faster.
In fact, in the current situation we have exactly this issue. SLS/Orion is so absurdly expensive that there literally is no money for dual sourcing of moon landers. NASA was forced to select on Starship as the moon lander BECAUSE there isn't enough money.
If you actually read what smart pro-SpaceX analysts and journalist write, you will see that you can dual source literally every part of the architecture.
We already have (or soon will) have 2 ways to go from earth to LEO. If you build on top of that, and you are not forced to spend money on SLS/Orion you have easily enough money for 2 way to get form LEO to the moon.
Starhip is one of those ways, but other ways of doing the same thing could be designed if there was money for it in the budget, but that money isn't there because NASA was forced by uninformed politicians to use this architecture. Why so many people defend an architecture that is the direct result of clueless politicians I will never understand.
There is a reason every other modern NASA program is dual sourced, COTS, CommercialCrew, CLIPS, Lunar resupply, suits, but somehow Artemis isn't. Why might that be ...
Still, my point was primarily that there is a general heavy slant towards SpaceX on this site which, whatever successes, should be tempered.
But even fans of SpaceX agree that dual sourcing is important, it just so happens that the secondary bids are mostly not as good or inspiring. So they are talked about less.
Of the two rockets that resulted from the original COTS program, Falcon 9 and Antares, I think its pretty clear why when talking about those there is a heavy slant towards Falcon 9.
Had NASA not given SpaceX a chance for HR (as Bolten and others in the Obama administration wanted) the US would be reliant on Russia for ISS and that would be a literal disaster right now.
Success in the space industry is slanted towards SpaceX, and that why its the same on this sight.
Neutron is less capable then Falcon 9 and likely lower launch rate as well. Its really not comparable to Starship at al.
I love RocketLab but they are not really playing in the same league as of yet and will not for a many years to come.
First of all Virgin Galactic is a trash company that mostly been use to scam investors, they have shown nothing but incompetence using them as a reference point is just a terrible idea.
But there are many other issues with the concept of just not doing human space flight at all.
If you want to do real systematic science and exploration have humans is actually cheaper. Human on mars supported by serious equipment and local labs is simply more powerful. The best results you get when you have real human scientists directly on location.
And the cheap price for science missions is also partially a myth, despite being a second flight of the same architecture Perseverance cost over 2+ billion. We can't spend 2 billion every time we want to get a few rocket samples and then spend many more billions to pick them up. The complete cost of designing a lunar lander for NASA (that is capable of delivering 100x that weight of Perseverance) cost 2.9 billion.
If you want to do really serious science on a large scale on mars, you will have a human station with lab facilities resupply by reusable rockets and space craft, going on expeditions themselves or sending out robots that can bring back samples and be repaired.
In addition, the human component is quite simply politically incredibly relevant. Human rocket launches draw far larger audience, astronauts are the best ambassadors for space. In addition, the technology developed for human in space of has application for humans on earth as well so much of the technology to provide, air, radiation protection and so on is relevant.
Thats a reasonable description of how a lot of space launch companies turn out.
So I think while your statement is partly true, partly that inherent in space, and partly VG is worst of breed.
It is, yes. But why does that mean it isn't worth doing?
It's not controversial to say that manned space exploration is more expensive and complex than unmanned, but it also offers capabilities that unmanned currently can't match. Where I expect you will run into trouble is in trying to argue that those capabilities aren't worth the cost based on a view of the industry 20 years ago, and/or by extrapolating on deeply flawed analogues like Virgin Galactic while ignoring obvious, far more relevant counterexamples like Crew Dragon.
Official estimates are that if SLS flies 10x, its cost per flight will be $4.1 billion. These things have a way of ballooning, but let's say that is reasonable.
SpaceX does not say how much Starship is costing them to develop, but external estimates seem to be under $8 billion. So for the cost of 2 SLS flights, SpaceX is developing a rocket with a cost to LEO orbit of under $10 million, and that they are aiming to get down to $2 million. SpaceX is planning to build in quantity, and launch at an insane cadence. Once enough have been launched, they will have ironed out the bugs and have a safety record good enough to take people.
After that, human spaceflight will be cheap.
In fact SLS is entirely unnecessary for going to the Moon. The current plan is for SpaceX to launch Starship, fuel it in orbit from other Starships, send it to the Moon, and then have it be a ferry for astronauts who got to the Moon on Starship. Why not just send people on Starship the whole way?
Yeah, yeah. I know the answer. Politics. SLS is largely funded by porkbarrel politics. Its purpose is to get congresscritters re-elected and only incidentally get to the Moon. But in a sane world, we wouldn't build it.
But we are. We are even laying plans to send humans to Mars on SLS in 20 years or so.
Anyone want an even money bet that Elon lands people on Mars before NASA does?
Some of that sounds like unreasonable optimism.
Given the track record of SpaceX, it's safe to assume that Starship will eventually fly and that the lower stage will eventually be reusable. Getting the Starship itself to survive reentry and landing in good enough condition to fly again without major refurbishment is another story. Something like that has never been achieved before. It's plausible that SpaceX will make it happen, but it's also plausible that it won't work. Then Starship will be simply an expendable upper stage that's too big and too expensive for the purpose.
Didn't the space shuttle used to do that?
A non reusable Starship still beats SLS. So the discussion is kind of mute.
Do you have any idea how many firsts they've put up? The craziest was reusable boosters.
For this one the problems to solve are fairly well-known. There is no particular reason to believe that it will be harder than what they already do.
I'm not even saying that as some sort of retarded Starship fanboi, we absolutely lack a heavy lift + man-rated launch vehicle and we need a replacement/successor to Apollo and the Space Shuttle ASAP. I don't care if it comes from NASA, SpaceX, Boeing, or Bill Gate's dog's cousin twice removed.
But the SLS is not that replacement nor successor. It brings no technological advancements to the table, it quite literally throws away reusable rocket engines (Space Shuttle Main Engines) in perfect working condition, it costs far too much fucking money per launch, and most importantly it's a rocket to nowhere because NASA's goals change with the coming of every Congressional and Presidential party switch.
The only purposes the SLS serve are to keep prior infrastructure related to the Space Shuttle in operation, and by consequence and most importantly feed votes to Congressmen. As regards human space exploration, the SLS is an abhorrent waste of time, resources, and money that can't end soon enough.
We went to the Moon already, and we know it's basically a desolate ball of regolith with nothing of interest that would surpass the costs of getting more men there in the first place. Countries that haven't landed their own men on the Moon yet have a political dick contest incentive, but the US isn't one of them, and regardless they still don't have any economic incentive anyway.
I stated earlier that the SLS is a rocket to nowhere, but I will also go a step further and posit that human space exploration itself is an endeavour to nowhere for the forseeable future. We have yet to find anything out there in the black that surpasses the sheer costs of transporting live humans across space.
This isn't the Age of Exploration, where the West was lured to map out the world in the hopes of landing a lucrative trade passage with the East and maybe finding some dirt to Manifest Destiny. This is the Age of Human Space Exploration, and we still haven't found any reason to engage in it beyond idolized dreams and dick size contests that we graduated from over 50 years ago.
At this point we have no common ground.
There's not really any scenario where a post-apocalypse Earth is more inhospitable than the moon.
If your only option for backup servers was lowering them into an active volcano, then you'd need to ignore it and buff up your primary datacenter.
Would you be more open to exploring the Moon and Mars if it was 100x cheaper? Yes/no
Exploring the unknown is a good thing, but that takes substantial time and resources. Sending live humans out into space is very, very, very, very expensive and challenges the absolute limits of our logistics. There must be a net positive return on all that investment for human space exploration to make any sense.
Think of this scenario. We give up on space exploration. 20 years from now China or some other county did not give up, they created economic ways to reach, build and sustain outposts on the Moon and Mars.
They are now able to perform R&D in low gravity and environments with low EM interference. Possibly advancements in manufacturing, biotechnology, weapons, chemistry and physics. Those advancements give their industries an economic advantage on Earth.
Maybe, maybe not, that’s the gamble we take when we stop pushing things forward in one sector and allow others to catch up and surpass us. We may not see the net return for 100 years but if it’s out there you probably want to get it first.
I'm saying the SLS is a tremendous waste of time and money we could be spending on proper R&D instead. I'm saying we haven't gotten human space launch and habitation costs to be economical and practical enough (and/or found something immensely worthwhile out in the black) yet to be fantasizing about Moon bases.
We can wish SLS were designed better, but it being gone tomorrow or blowing up will not help SpaceX or BO or ESA get to the moon or Mars quicker. The "hoping it fails" just comes off as... I don't know how to even describe it, juvenile? Edgy, bitter? This is the most shameful, depressing comment thread I've seen on HN in ten years.
I grew up near JSC. I remember watching Columbia break apart. I remember watching the last shuttle land (Atlantis?). I was at the Falcon Heavy launch. I wish SLS were better. But I want space travel and space exploration to be moving again. Without SLS, there is no moon landing. I'd love for SpaceX and BO to put out lunar landings as well, good for them! But cancelling or having SLS fail will not make that happen.
To wish for failure smacks of a juvenile brand of anti-government-waste ideology without a hint of reality or understanding of the logistics of planning a government rocket program.
o "better" alternative would have gotten there cheaper faster, at least not with much certainty.
SLS, in various incarnations, has been in the works longer than those companies exist and certainly longer than SpaceX actually living up to it's promises. Now that they do with Falcon, and Falcon Heavy and (maybe) are about to with Starship, it seems outdated of course. However, changing the program again (to eg. make SLS reusable) would only make things worse. It's also not a given that Starship will work. I totally expect and hope so, but it's not a given.
Further, it's not that the money has been burnt, it has mostly been spent in the US, right? Just redistributed :-) . Could also have pissed it away in the army. Of course some other good have been done with it too, to be fair.
Alas, not my taxpayer money for the largest bit: as a ESA member state citizen, I only paid a fraction of the ESA supplied module.
Cancelling SLS will also not make Artemis program any more late than it is.
Starship must be fully successful to get people to the Moon surface.
If Starship is fully successful, then you have Starship+Crew Dragon. And you don't need SLS+Orion.
One could make the argument that SLS being an option keeps SpaceX and others pushing to be the superior functional candidate. Without SLS as an option, SpaceX has a monopoly on the capability. just thinking out loud.
Related questions for anyone who knows:
* Can Orion fit on Falcon Heavy/Starship?
* Can Crew Dragon support more-than-LEO missions?
* Can Falcon Heavy support crewed more-than-LEO missions?
Then Starship can get you to Lunar and Mars surface.
SLS is not pushing SpaceX on anything anymore, because Falcon Heavy took almost everything besides Orion from SLS.
That's Falcon Heavy mind you, not Starship.
SLS was important for assembling Lunar Gateway. Lunar Gateway itself is useless and was invented for justifying SLS existence. But if we skip that, then funny fact. Lots of pieces of Lunar Gataway will fly on Falcon Heavy! Resupply to Lunar Gateway will also fly with SpaceX on Dragon XL and Falcon Heavy.
There was also NASA flagship Europa Clipper mission.
But due to lack of available SLS vehicles, NASA shifted it away from SLS and it will fly on Falcon Heavy.
You just can't make it up.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-falcon-heavy-to-launch-fi...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/29/world/nasa-artemis-1-launch-s...
Payload to LEO: from 95 tons (Block 1) to 130 tons (Block 2) for SLS; 140 tons for Saturn V.
Payload to TLI: from 27 tons (Block 1) to 43 (Block 2 Crew) tons for SLS; 43.5 tons for Saturn V.
(Block 2 Cargo does just edge out Saturn V for payload to TLI at 46 tons, but that's cargo only, no crew.)
It smacks, but it's the right decision.
One of the things that got me interested in space was seeing a Saturn V launch on the cover of my favorite science magazine.
I really hope this will be a success.
NASA is his best customer.
But I certainty would cry about it failing and I would suggest that success or not, the program should be canceled after this launch.
The real risk is it works and leaders are tempted to throw more money at it until it has a chance to kill Americans, like the Shuttle it is replacing.
Really? Maybe you missed the recurrent theme on HN, that of disruption of bloated and inefficient legacy companies that should be dead already but government subsidies keep them afloat. And they innovate precisely as if they have zero skin in the game.
I'll be watching tomorrow morning hoping for a spectacular explosion that takes out ground facilities along with the rocket. Perhaps then the ensuing government finger-pointing will expose this mess for what it really is -- a poorly conceived, incredibly expensive jobs program masquerading as a "moon rocket".
People have made the inevitable comparisons to SpaceX's Superheavy/Starship, and there have naturally been responses pointing out that Starship is far from proven. That's absolutely right, but think about this: If SpaceX never reuses a single nut, bolt, or hunk of stainless steel, SH/Starship is by far the better launch system. Fully expendable, it would cost somewhere in the range of 10-25% of an SLS launch, while delivering something like twice the payload to orbit.
I'm super-excited about the growing enthusiasm for going back to the moon, landing on Mars, building larger and more capable orbital installations, and who knows what else. SLS enables none of that. It is both too expensive, and too rare, to be a part of any effective program. By merely existing, SLS sucks money out of other programs that could show real results.
I promise you this: If we go back to the moon with SLS, it will make Apollo look like the better program. That, in spite of 50+ years of technological advancement. I'd rather sit here on earth than let our spacefaring dreams die that way. The other day I turned 50, which means I'm too young to remember any of the moon landings. If we rely on SLS now, it's unlikely that I'll live to see the next attempts.
Do you think SpaceX literally dies if SLS succeeds? What kind of logic are you using to think that a successful SLS moon mission sets humanity back?
I would assume you know that government space programs take a fuckton of money to operate on, and that they take years if not a decade or more to execute. SpaceX wasn't anywhere near proven 10 or 15 years ago. Cutting SLS doesn't mean SpaceX and BO suddenly get $30b in funding.
By such logic, we should have wished the other shuttles had blown up in the 90s too.
And the whole reuseability of SpaceX's rockets would be impossible without modern computers, software and fabrication technology. No, NASA or anyone else couldn't have done that twenty years ago. Maybe ten years ago, with a ton of dough more, but not that long.
Also I don’t know what kind of supercomputers you think are running on falcon, but we’ve been landing robotic probes on many planets for decades.
All it would have taken would be NASA funding the R&D and making it part of the requirements. Unfortunately cost effectiveness was never high on their list.
I don't know what you think Falcon is running on, but they are definitely using more advanced and faster computers than those used for landing probes on planets. Even those raptor engines are quite complex in terms of regulation. Also, SpaceX certainly used lots of computing power for simulation of all sorts. Neither the computing power nor the algorithms have been around for decades, necessarily.
Point is reuseability isn't easy. Nor necessarily cheaper. SpaceX can't do it on the scale of SLS, by the way. They had more trouble than anticipated with Falcon heavy at "only" 26t to LEO. SLS can do almost four times as much. Starship may be able to do it. But it is far from ready for prime time.
The Shuttle did prioritize reuse to some extent, but the design was frozen and never iterated on. Buran automated the landing and had plans for landable side boosters. DCX also demonstrated propulsive landings.
The thing is these were all side project. NASA really never prioritized economical systems as demonstrated by living with the Shuttles exorbitant costs and building SLS. Even though by driving down costs they could of performed orders of magnitude more science.
Obviously politics is to blame, not feasibility.
Buran automated landing is a different thing and more in line with aerospace autopilots. DCX was thirty years ago, used cutting edge technology at the time and didn't come back from anywhere near orbit. Reuseability has largely been rejected as too difficult, costly and risky. SpaceX has had a tough time showing it can work, most of the other companies have not yet succeeded.
Yes. If Shuttle failed faster NASA would be less motivated to make intentionally terrible decisions.
The greatest irony of these defenses is perhaps that if Starship fails, then SLS actually can't get to the moon short of backups that haven't even been decided yet never mind built, whereas if SLS fails you can still just run the rest of the components as-is and switch out SLS/Orion for two pretty much stock Crew Dragon flights.
How does the potential failure of Starship impact the success or failure of SLS?
I have no idea how you or anybody else can say with a straight face that they're a space fan. What a laughable idea.
It is one thing to think it may fail on some technical merit, or to wish it had been done differently, but to actively wish for a rocket to blow up is unpatriotic and irrational.
I may hope that SpaceX can get Super Heavy to a lunar landing by 2024 as well but I'm not going to wish that human space travel gets set back.
The mere existence of SLS as a program would have run the US space launch capability into the ground if it weren't for SpaceX serving as the seed for 'New Space' launch companies. Without SLS we could've had refuelable second stages to provide a genuinely sustainable lunar presence (Boeing outright tried to get the guy who proposed such at ULA fired because it would make SLS mostly pointless) without having to rely on sheer luck of having a motivated private party.
So if anything, it's unpatriotic to wish for the success of SLS since it fundamentally represents everything that's wrong with the US and allowing it to continue is the same as allowing politicians to continue screwing over the average person.
That said, while I'm hoping for it to fail, I don't expect an explosion tomorrow to be able to make it fail, if anything it'll just give Congress an excuse to transfer more money to Boeing. I'd rather it fly properly and then be cancelled after a 3rd or 4th flight when it becomes way too clear that SLS is useless (Ideally SpaceX will have done the DearMoon and Polaris Dawn flights by then). SLS will fail but not because it'll fail to fly, but rather because it will fail to be worth flying.
I'd also love for a reckoning where every politician responsible for pushing the program is punished but there's zero chance that'll happen.
How many times did SpaceX blow up before getting a rocket into orbit?
I'd give SLS an 85% chance of reaching roughly the correct initial orbit, and only a small chance of leaving a smoking crater.
Yes, they really do. They want the second flight of this rocket ever to be crewed. That's obviously not going to happen if the first launch goes wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Launch_System_la...
They aren't doing the SpaceX thing of iterating fast and blowing up a few rockets early on.
The companies who have put this together are very experienced at making launches successful.
The self congratulations do seem premature, but they are very good at blowing time and money budgets on disposable solutions that optimize for the maximum payroll per flight… absolute world class experts at what they do.
Last thing you want to do is lose the vehicle because you decided some issue wasn't worth running down.
In any event, the weather was lurking in the background and might well have caused a scrub regardless.
What does SLS add to the already existing panoply of launchers, other than revenues for those companies which stood to lose out on the retirement of the Space Shuttle? Why is this thing set to dump SSMEs which were designed for reuse into the ocean after a single launch? Did they at least fix the problems with those o-rings which caused the loss of an orbiter before using derivatives of those SRBs on this launcher?
Note how there was no attempt at using them for Apollo and no new rocket company uses them.
The only reason so many countries relay on them because it sharing costs with ICBMs.
NASA own internal investigation suggested the same thing, but politics is more important.
Imagine you need a bunch of people trained to do X, and machines capable of Y, in order to build your missiles, but you don't need many missiles right now, but if a war against a major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly. Either you keep making missiles you don't need, or you somehow train people and maintain machines without actually using them, either way you're spending just to maintain readiness for no immediate value. Or you find a close enough use where you can get some value by producing something similar enough that you can convert to military use rapidly.
That wouldn't be so much political pork as actually practical. But I know little to nothing in this area, so just speculation.
In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.
In general, I think by now the technology has diverged quite a bit as the requirements for launching potentially humans and ICBMs is quite different. I don't know how closely the technologies are still linked between the solids used on rockets like Vulcan and ICBMs.
In France this is certainty the case for example.
> major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly.
Lets hope we don't need to rapidly ramp up production of ICBMs since they are mostly just used to carry nukes.
If you think its politically necessary to fund that infrastructure just do so with your military budget. Tying down other space activities, specially civilian, is a bad idea.
The huge Space Shuttle SRBs were never an ICBM part themselves. The military angle enters the picture when you realize the SRB fuel is the same fuel used in ICBMs, made by the same company (originally Thiokol, then ATK, which merged with Orbital Sciences to form Orbital ATK, which was then purchased by Northrop Grumman.)
Continuing rockets like Saturn 1B and doing a Saturn 1C would have been vastly smarter then all the Atlas/Thor rockets since then.
Solids were a result of military launchers wanting to continue to relay on technology for ICBMs and those ICBM producers having political influence.
Solids are a sad unnecessary diversion. They massively increase operation complexity from manufacturing to launch.
Solids are very dangerous and complex to handle. The end to end infrastructure cost absolutely does not make them viable.
Are you seriously suggesting something about operational simplicity when you are dealing with a material that is highly explosive and can easy kill a whole launch crew if badly handled?
In addition, solids require very expensive launch infrastructure to modify the boosters to fly specific routes. Check out the highly complex infrastrucutre the Europeans deploy in Kourou.
There is a reason, non of the new commercial companies even remotely want to touch solids, they are avoid like the plague.
The solid based Pegasus rocket is vastly more expensive then the air-launched liquid fueled Virgin Orbit rocket.
Japan with their solids never were a series competitor in the international launch market and their launch rates were always very low.
And solids are also never practically reusable as the expensive part is the whole fuel manufacture and infrastructure.
Solids are just a bad idea and make no sense when fully consider. Only nation state driven launchers would use them.
> Japan doesn't have ballistic missiles.
The Japanese SRBs are built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Do you know what else they manufacture? Missiles of course. Not ICBMs, but they do manufacture missiles, particularly the powerful SM-3 Block II.
The claim is that PP's economy of words meant that the presentations to each level of management got more and more dismissive of the danger, the higher up the chain they went. Euphemisms got more and more bland, until the top people thought "screw it, we're launching."
Note that I'm not endorsing that theory, since I haven't seen the slide decks that got used. It's disputed here: https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-th...
I find that dismissal to be completely missing the point. Tufte wasn't arguing physics, he was arguing that PP euphemisms caused top execs to minimize the danger.
I can imagine him blaming a presentation style, but PowerPoint?
The Challenger exploded in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
PowerPoint didn't exist until 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint
Tufte decrying PowerPoint in relation to a shuttle disaster was about about the Columbia, not the Challenger.
However having o-rings that are this fragile was a large part of the problem with shuttle. It was fragile, to get it to be able to launch at all an increasing amount of issues had to be ignored. To many failure points, leading to far to many close calls.
What is actually surprising is that only 2 shuttles failed.
Wow, they invented that phrase? I had no idea.
This isn't true actually. From the very start the o-rings were not functioning as designed even in warm weather. They realized even before the first shuttle launch that the o-rings weren't compressed properly and were being partially extruded through the SRB joints when fired, and allowed some gas to escape out the joint around the o-ring, causing partial o-ring erosion. NASA decided not to worry about it and continue with the design. Turns out this problem was even worse during cold weather...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
The fact you're referencing "did they fix the defect from Challenger in 1986" tells me what I need to know.
It can lift almost 100 effing tons into LEO... and is human rated.
It's the only rocket currently capable of putting Humans near the moon. And now its about to prove itself or not...
Leaky pork barrels don't fly it seems, the launch was scrubbed due to (among others) an engine bleed problem [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637493