Is SLS Worth the Cost? | Hacker News Reader

Is SLS Worth the Cost?

space.com

33 pointsabrax314184 comments

Estimated project cost is $13B

Or: about 130,000 $100k single family homes.

In other words, you could build and gift a single family home to nearby every single homeless person in California for this cost of this rocket.

Would I rather waste money on a redundant, congressional committee rocket, or waste money giving people houses?

Without spacex, the rocket is worthwhile. But with spacex, it is a complete waste of time and money.

Arguably NIMBYism is a bigger factor to the lack of housing than the cost of building the houses.

yes, everyone says there ought to be more housing, but not here...

Still bothers me that un-serious folk will post about how much spacex is 'wasting' on space travel, yet say nadda when the gov wastes like 4000x more.

Kudos on running the numbers!

I think the complaint is (usually) a bit more nuanced than that. I, for example, am totally encouraging of SX to take over all earth orbital works, as well as the moon. NASA is wasting its time and our money in those areas. However, I think it’s a waste for anyone, SpaceX or NASA, to send people anyplace outside of the moon. (And even putting people on the moon again is of questionable value.) NASA should stick to what it does best: Remote robots and instruments.

Where are you finding all those $100k single family homes? The median CA house is $760,800 [1]. (I know there's houses cheaper than the median, but if you are buying up 130k houses, likely more than the entire available stock, you will have to go quite high up the price listing.) At that price, you're talking 17,087 houses. There are 161,548 homeless people in CA [2]

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-home...

[2] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/

I’m saying build them. 800 square foot slab on grade 2 bedroom homes with block construction just like we did in the 1940s.

You absolutely could build these for $100k/ea at scale.

Would you want to live in that? Because I wouldn't, nor would I want to live anywhere near a development like that.

I CURRENTLY live in that. Holy shit what an unbelievably insulting comment.

“Would you really live in that?!?!!” Uh, yeah? Because I already do? And love my house? And maybe that’s why I’m suggesting that specific style of house as a solution? Because I currently live in one with the rest of my family.

And before you start thinking “oh poor him”. I can almost guarantee you that I make more money than 99% of the people posting here.

Could you believe the poor sap who might live in a place like this?

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/935-E-56th-St-Austin-TX-7...

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4507-Depew-Ave-Austin-TX-...

I agree with everything you’re saying here. But I would not want to be the poor sap that paid $625k to live in a place like that. Those prices are insane.

Completely agree these prices are nuts. Most of it is location though. Even still: lots of these places were selling for 100-200k 5 years ago.

Those are nice except for the price. It's not the size, it's the sprawling developments with thousands of identical cookie cutter houses that I was talking about. I personally wouldn't want to live in one or near one.

I was thinking this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/levittown-new-york

The people moving into those houses wanted to. You don’t want to.

Do you think living in a suburb is better or worse than living in a ditch or under a bridge?

Lots of Europeans live in places that small and are very happy with them.

I'm talking about building these "at-scale" which results in massive developments of soulless cookie cutter suburbs. There is nothing wrong with the house by itself- quite the contrary. People shouldn't buy more than they need.

See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/levittown-new-york

Is someone giving away land for free? Because in places where people want to live, the land costs more than the house.

Yes: https://www.wideopencountry.com/free-land-in-the-us/amp/

Even mobile homes cost more than that: "the average sale price of a new manufactured home was $111,900 in November 2021" [1] and that's not even California specific.

[1] https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/how-much-...

Average cost per square foot (low end) is $130 in Tennessee[1].

130*800 is: $104k.

[1]: https://innovativebuildingmaterials.com/how-much-does-it-cos...

soo... there are about 70k homeless people in L.A. right now. How do you suggest we airlift them to Tennessee?

Not legally you can't, not in California. Maybe in Somalia.

The comparison is with blowing up hundreds of tons of fuel below and around a capsule filled with people, like half a dozen times. Give them a little flexibility on building codes. NASA rockets explode and catch fire due to weather and normal flight.

including all the fringe costs.. power lines, sewage, roads, schools etc etc?

because the 13B includes all that.

The value of the structure rounds to $0 when compared to the cost of the land it's sitting on.

I don't understand people who paint the house and plant flowers outside before selling. The buyers aren't looking at that. They just want to see the dimensions of the lot and then bid a few hundred grand over asking. Once the paperwork is squared away, one morning an excavator and a dump truck will pull onto the beautiful manicured lawn and by late that afternoon the site will be an empty lot. A few months later the new McMansion on the site will be sold for a significant markup. On the order of 1-2 million dollars more than it sold for earlier in the year.

This is the real estate reality in California because people actually want to live here.

Money has never been the issue. There has always been money that could have been diverted to "fix" the homeless problem, at both the state and federal level. If that's all it was, we'd have solved it by now. Homelessness is far more complicated than just money, and throwing it at the problem won't fix it.

For $100k, you can get 1/8 of a tiny home for a homeless person in LA.

In other words, if you leave it to the government to pay for the work, you will just be astounded by how much it costs.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-co...

$13B isn't that big of a government expenditure, all things considered.

That pork pays for a lot of engineering salaries in places like Alabama. Senators will fight tooth and nail to keep it.

With only SpaceX, there's a risk of the technology becoming expensive or not doing what the government wants. This hedge de-risks that scenario and is worth the cost alone.

Once we have several commercial rocket families to choose from, we can reconsider. In the meantime, we've already paid for SLS and it isn't going away - and that's not a sunk cost fallacy. There are mission specific payloads SLS will be better suited for.

Is wasting money on rocket builders in Alabama more valuable than wasting money on home builders in California?

It is always preferable to support high tech industry which can move whole country forward instead of few bricklayers, which won't move country forward.

When the government gives money to NASA, where does it go? You all make it sound like it goes to about 5 greedy old geezers in a cigar smoke filled room. It mostly goes to tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and laborers.

It goes to engineers and materials scientists? And welders and builders and truck drivers and everything else.

And what about if that money was spent on building homes? Those guys framing the houses aren’t as valuable as the guys running modeling software in an office? Do you think the truck drivers in Alabama are more valuable than truck drivers in California?

Put in the same input of labor, and either get 130,000 single family homes AND the economic benefit of all the work to build them, or get a few big rockets which are about 20 years behind their nearest competitor.

> get a few big rockets which are about 20 years behind their nearest competitor.

What existing competitors are built to bring humans to the Moon?

Portland made house for unhoused and it was astonishingly $400K/person.

I would guess it'd be around that in CA.

Only twice as much in LA

Lots of empty houses already exist in low LCOL areas. Don't even need to build new ones.

It's a rocket built by congressional committee. Therefore it will never be worth the cost, but we'll keep funding it because it's a jobs program and not a lot more than that.

I think someone did a calculation, that they could have just pay every engineer in the program half a million dollars to keep them their job and still have billions left.

How about all of those subcontractors in congressional districts?

Some are upset by the "Senate Launch System" epithet, but it applied a decade ago and still applies today.

There is some value to a jobs program if it provides the basis for a larger rocketry industry. The type of knowledge necessary to build and operate these craft is highly specialized and without applying and passing on that knowledge we will lose it. Also SpaceX will have competitors, and those competitors will need a hiring pool, otherwise the growth of the industry will be constrained.

America makes like $20 trillion in new goods and services every year. We are so past the point of caring about $13 billion.

Want to cut costs? We have 14 nuclear deterrent submarines that cost $20 billion each. Their only job is to end the world. I think we could do that with just five subs.

the most elaborate historic reenactment in history.

we learn nothing from these experiments. they are a show because presidents are tired of being trolled about the moon.

Real Engineering did a video about this[0] and mentioned that SLS was really just a way to create jobs that happens to result in a massive rocket at the end. This makes sense to me and neatly explains the apparently intentionally overblown budget.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0waPJXaZgEg

We are set to learn immense amounts of information directly useful for extended spaceflight, ie mission to Mars

Really? What exactly is that?

whatd we miss in the 60's

New information on long term deep space radiation exposure, new information on long term space travel in general. Lunar research not done before, now possible due to lunar research station. The list goes on and on. You can look up all research projects included in the Artemis missions online

the van allen probes give us higher quality and longer term data about radiation.

we are pretty aware of regolith constitution.

having a moon base (which isnt in artemis 3) is not research

None of the tech "developed" for SLS, Orion or Gateway would be useful for anything Mars related. To clarify - significantly useful, or reasonably priced useful. That's a dead end program.

I personally think that it is a must to go to Moon first before any attempts at Mars, and dead end program can be a reasonable price to pay for the necessary iterative research. But SLS specifically is super bad and super expensive at that task. If the Starship program would fail for any reason but NASA would continue, I think after SLS will finally die, another, totally different system would be required to go to Moon again, to finally iterate on it to go to Mars next.

Basically humans are wasting time with SLS, and would need to repeat a lot of efforts again, to continue human space exploration.

> the most elaborate historic reenactment in history.

Not accurate. It will be new history because we will have the first woman and person of color on the moon. A giant leap for diversity.

Nobody has the will to actually push the limits i.e., by going to Mars, so we'll fritter away billions playing in the local sandbox. The moon is useful for experience building interplanetary colonies. It's fucking worthless for getting the first boots on the ground and then coming home.

I was very disappointed that this wasn't a price/performance breakdown of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG compared to other vehicles in the same segment.

The question is always: Compared to what? Housing? Multi-state jobs program? JWST 2? More bombs? etc.

No.

This seems to be a straightforward example of Betteridge's law.

TL;DR: No

TL;DR: Spacex is literally 4000x cheaper but maybe SLS is worth it because of warm fuzzies.

That cost is based entirely on projections for a rocket that itself has not left orbit yet.

Neither has SLS entered orbit to be fair, and it had a massive development budget and a half decade head start (plus existing engines).

Everyone is taking Starship reuse as an assumption because of SpaceX’s earlier work. It will likely be less easy than people think with such a massive vehicle, but even fully expended mode Starship will loft far more mass at less than an eighth of the cost of a SLS launch.

SLS costs $4B/launch. It is impossible that Starship will be sold for just $1M/launch.

Why not $10m?

You've got to consider vastly different payload capacity as well.

SLS has about 50% more lift capacity to LEO based on a quick google search. But Starship still can lift 100 metric tons to LEO. How much stuff are we launching that needs SLS's lift capability that couldn't be launched across multiple launches and assembled in space?

I'm not sure the hyperbole is helping you.

SpaceX's goal was, as I recall, at least 2 orders of magnitude cheaper per kilogram to orbit. We know they've had trouble with that, they're producing bigger and simpler rocket engines to try to boost that. One article I found suggests they're at around 2% of the cost of a ride on the Shuttle, but the Shuttle was never the cheapest way to orbit. 25x cheaper is still front page news, but it's not the 100x they hoped, and it's certainly not 4000x.

I'm just using the numbers from the article.

Seems like a bit of amateur hour over at space.com

> If that mission is successful, SpaceX will have taken its super heavy-lift vehicle from the drawing board and into space in far less time than it took NASA to do the same with the SLS. SpaceX's goal is to build an entire fleet of Starships and launch multiple vehicles on a daily basis, at an average launch cost of $1 million or thereabouts.

Yeah so the problem with that is that Falcon Heavy launches cost 97 million, which is 42x cheaper, not 4000x times cheaper. This means SpaceX thinks they're going to get another 2 orders of magnitude out of the launch costs? Okay Elon.

Also I think they may be comparing the cost of the launch in fuel and manpower, hopefully for launch and recovery, but ignoring the cost of the rocket, and possibly the cost of cycling the rocket back to the pad.

SLS is ready now.

Starship hasn't yet reached even the Kármán line.

we don't get to go to space with what we'd like to have, we go with what we have. It's costing a LOT yes, but time is of the essence. Arguably we waited too long to do this again.

As a lesson how NOT to spend money, maybe yes. Two best case scenarios for SLS - it will either blow up without crew, or it will be voluntarily put in the museum. In the Museum of American Finance.

In the absence of SpaceX,"worth" was basically defined as "how important tax payers find this vs what it costs." Now we actually have a market framework capable of answering this question. Assuming Starship works, then the answer is obviously "no."

I don't think we should gamble our human space flight program on a single rocket. Having multiple separate development programs sounds like a good idea.

Agreed. While I'd like to see NASA do it right, I'd settle for a couple more companies giving SpaceX real competition.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic do not appear to be those companies.

The problem is that SLS is inherently unsafe for humans. Much more so than any possible alternative, real or paper rockets included. Almost all those money left for actual engineering probably were spent on duct taping this monstrosity to be even a little acceptable for human rated flight.

Source on it being unsafe for human flight?

The most obvious factor can be observed by any amateur at the SLS photo - it looks like two long white thingies strapped to the sides of the rocket :) . Joking aside - Space Shuttle was deemed about as safe as 1 in 60 flights by two different commissions. This SLS uses exact same hardware in general, and can't be much safer than an inherently unsafe Shuttle. That's unfortunate fact of life. I sincerely hope that no crew would be harmed flying this thing.

Not to defend SLS, but it anyway has an escape tower STS lacked.

And since Starship has yet to reach orbit, one could say it's to early say.

Artemis already depends on Starship. So if Starship fails, Artemis fails.

Not accurate - NASA will ask someone else to build the lunar lander under LETS contract. Starship HLS is a complex system which requires half a dozen launches, a simpler lander with lower payload capacity has an higher chance of being realized.

Not when the alternate lander options don’t even have enough performance to land and take off the moon if the astronauts mass is included.

The lower payload requirements mean Starship HLS requires fewer fuel replenishment launches, so an apples to apples comparison makes Starship slightly less risky, especially as the other landers rely on launchers far less developed than Starship.

Those other landers are pure fantasy as of right now and are not remotely financed at all.

If anything so far its a purely political move so NASA can tell congress 'sure we do sort of still pretend to have multiple landers'.

SLS can get about 27 tons to the moon, Falcon Heavy about 20 tons. Sure, redesigning the plans to handle splitting between two launches is time and money, but two falcon heavies is only ~$300M base price. SLS is a waste even without starship.

Yeah but Falcon Heavy is a proven platform. It can lift almost as much as SLS at a tiny fraction of the price. We could've done something like Artemis 1 with at most a few Falcon Heavy launches years ago for pennies on the dollar, right?

It's obviously "no" even without Starship, since Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy result in cheaper architectures.

> So is the cost of the SLS, and the Artemis program as a whole, worth it? Maybe. If Artemis accomplishes all that it has set out to accomplish over the next 10 years or more, that "maybe" could shift to a "probably." Once SpaceX's Starship is launching as often as the company hopes, it's possible we'll see a cancellation of Artemis similar to that of Apollo. But the difference, hopefully, would be the emergence of a bold and flourishing space industry to cement the obsolescence of SLS, letting a new age of human exploration blossom, rather than another 50 years of human spaceflight stagnation, in which people never venture beyond low Earth orbit.

This article is so confused. It keeps referencing Artemis as if it is the catalyst for re-developing an American passion for spaceflight. If anything, it's a giant symbol of government apathy and inefficiency. It's like someone is really intent on giving NASA credit for everything that SpaceX has done in the last decade.

Yes the tail can wag the dog, with enough government insiders anything is possible.

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