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.
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'.
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.
I'm sure neither was easy to estimate.
There's just less of a democratic process behind distributing the taxpayer's money.
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.
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.
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.
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.