Leak ruins NASA moon rocket launch bid; next try weeks away
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[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
At this point I’m fairly convinced hydrogen cars were a coordinated plan by oil companies to delay EVs. It probably would have worked if Tesla hadn’t come out of nowhere.
So you think, well fine, we can just generate it on site via electrolysis — alas, hydrogen actively destroys metal containers via embrittlement. Not so much in hydrogen gas, but any process where you’re running chemical or electrolytic reactions;
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42154-020-00096-z
This is the thing... there is no "one size fits all" but the nay sayers look at hydrogen and say "nah too hard for anything". They're wrong. Hydrogen will be huge in the NEAR future... it just wont be a silver bullet.
Is what fans of hydrogen have been arguing for 30 years.
The world finally has motivation to get out of that rut. Dominant powers will make hydrogen work for them because thats how a corrupt capitalist society works.
Well, H2 is an "also ran" at this point: it has lower energy efficiency (losing the majority of input energy in the cycle from electrolysis -> compression -> fuel cell -> electric), it requires more expensive and practically non-existent infrastructure, it's theoretical range advantages are negated by the need to have a small COPV bomb on board, forcing the longest range Hidrogen cars have less range than the equivalent electric, they are more expensive and complex, requiring expensive, platinum based catalysts, pushing the prices of H2 models into a multiple over the equivalent BEV. There is nothing that H2 can do that BEV can't do better, with the exception of fast refueling, which is becoming less and less of an issue.
For cars the race with BEV is irredeemably lost, and even for trucks the hydrogen industry needs to perform some technological miracle to stay in the game.
HN rate limits my replies you can read my sibling comment if you’d like more information.
granted, most of it is made via non-renewable dirty methods... but there is VAST sums of money pouring into Green Hydrogen. Its going to become dominant in very few years. 5-8 is my guess.
You can buy one of only a few models of car, and those are only sold in absurdly small numbers.
For trucks there are more trials going on but real mass production of hydrogen trucks isn't really a thing for a few more years (and many expect those will be further delayed).
There are many reasons for this. Just something as simple as count how many different sub-systems are required between a BEV and a FCEV. In addition that basic disadvantage, the end to end energy in efficiency is worse, so its more expensive. In addition to that, the infrastructure required is about 10-100x more expensive.
Tesla as one start up rolled out a global (or lets say in the developed world) EV charging infrastructure. The same amount of money invested in hydrogen infrastructure like not even have resulted in enough locations to charge the whole West coast. And because you can't charge at home, you need many more such locations.
So really end to end it makes no sense pretty much from any direction you look at it and has been absolutely destroyed in the market. Some people still have hope for trucks, but there too the trends are pretty clear.
Electric still comes out ahead despite this handicap.
Right. This is the main issue for us for going electric. We barely use the car, but when we use it, it is often for longer distances (visiting my in-laws, who live in another country, holidays). Having to 'refuel' longer and more often is very inconvenient.
I know there are some extreme people who basically push and pie in a bottle if they have to, but most people don't travel that way.
Modern EV can refuel large part of the battery in like 15min.
There is still an advantage, but it gets smaller with every generation of vehicle.
I've traveled between the bay area and Los Angeles (a six hour drive) many times with a large variety or different drivers. The longest break was a 20-30 minute stop the Greyhound bus makes at a Burger King in the middle of nowhere. But the bus also, doesn't take the shortest route for some reason.
In a private car, the more passengers the greater the chance that someone will ask for a bio break. But if it's just me driving, or I'm the only passenger, the trip is typically a non-stop push. Often without stopping for even 5 minutes at an overpriced gas station in the middle.
Using a current gen EV introduces nearly an hour delay each way when you factor in range limitations and excessive charging times compared to gas.
I expect this will be a solved issue by 2030
If the oil companies chose to expand out their infra on the highway system with hydrogen, it may make more sense with long haul, big truck routes.
Battery power scales more proportionally to weight than hydrogen.
> Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.
Elon Musk responded to this article with the following tweet [1], which to my understanding is a pretty reasonable take:
> Accurate assessment. Raptor design started out using H2, but switched to CH4. Latter is best combo of high efficiency & ease of operation imo. Delta-v difference between H2 & CH4 is small for most missions, because CH4 tank is much smaller & no insulation is needed.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-...
One final gift is you can quit burning hydrocarbons to get to space, if you can figure out how to do this sustainably.
Nitrogen in many forms (including ammonia) is bad news for natural ecosystems.
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/09/nitrogen-the-environmental...
The products of ammonia hydrolysis (or any other chemical reaction that releases energy) are N2 (same as atmospheric nitrogen) and water.
Yes, if we leak ammonia, that is very very bad. Ammonia is also an immediate, serious, and acute irritant. Any significant ammonia leak is dangerous to human health.
There are problems with every idea. I was not suggesting that we should just burn ammonia. Even if I was, there is no way I was outlining a whole solution in a short internet comment.
See https://climateer.substack.com/i/60052576/you-thought-the-ma... for a slightly longer explanation.
Just based on the fact that it's the most abundant element in our 'space' (earth, atmosphere, reasonably accessible), I do really hope that you're wrong with this.
I'd feel a lot better about the fate of humanity if we somehow found a way to use Hydrogen as our primary fuel (if we can't otherwise do so with solar/wind/tidal).
100 years from now it may be all hydrogen fuel cells, but that doesn't help anything today.
If the private launch services didn't exist how they are, SLS would be heralded as the latest generation of rocket.
The timing is terrible for all sorts of reasons.
If you asked me to bet at even odds on who would be able to do two, or five, or ten launches to orbit first, my bet would be on Starship.
If you design a mission specifically for SLS then yeah, SLS difference matters, but if you simply want to make a good architecture, you much rather go with the smaller cheaper rocket.
In terms of Orion, can Dragon do everything it can do. No not by itself Orion plus the Orion service module can do some thing Dragon can't. But Dragon can do most things and with a few simple add-ons like extend tank in the trunk.
So in reality if NASA had the freedom to plan, a few years ago they could have switched a Falcon Heavy/Dragon architecture and achieved the same thing. SpaceX would likely even have been willing to do things like cross feed and potentially even a Raptor based upper stage. All of these would have been ready far earlier then when Orion will actually launch with humans.
So just saying, SpaceX doesn't support something is a really narrow view. It doesn't support it but SpaceX certainty would have the capability to do the Artemis 1/2 missions if NASA had asked them too.
And all of that while completely ignoring Starship, just with the capabilities they had in 2019. Between then and now SpaceX could have already done this mission quite easily. And likely they could have done it 5 more times before Artemis 2 launches.
The question to me is, does SLS have a grand scheme? The entire program is specified and budgeted for about five missions, with extensions uncertain. Each launch is a tremendous (and tremendously expensive) affair, and this launch is the first time that all of the SLS systems are coming together.
Commercial launch services (not just SpaceX) get to amortize these sorts of failures over dozens to hundreds of eventual launches, but SLS is not designed to "fail fast" as a learning experience.
Yes, the price tag is an abomination and the engineering strategies outdated and frankly kind of embarrassing. But hindsight is 20/20.
Then SLS is the exact opposite. Building around existing commercial crew and commerical rockets would be that.
SLS/Orion is the actual both 'single point of failure'.
So really SLS/Orion is the opposite of what you suggest.
> keep the US' aerospace building capabilities fresh and available
And by that you mean removing money from the actual productive aerospace industry and instead keeping age old infrastructure in place and rebuilding production lines for old outdated technology.
Had this money actually been invested in the advanced aerospace industry, the US would have more and better aerospace capability.
So again, SLS/Orion is literally the opposite of what you suggest.
> provide some of the usual pork barrel giveaways to the usual folks
That's its real and only goal.
But again, there would have been other ways to do this.
> US put all their bets on SpaceX that could now not deliver for some reason.
That was never the alternative. That's just a strawman.
> But hindsight is 20/20.
Its not hindsight. Its actually mostly known at the time. If you look at the internal NASA studies, they all indicated that many other paths including using commercial rocket and building a Saturn style rocket would have been far, far better.
See: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.
These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
Just look at this graph, it says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3...
Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything.
Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s.
Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on.
So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...
SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
Given how much technology has advanced and how much more technology and knowlage is available, it should be much cheaper to do the same.
For example, https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-dela...
Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things.
Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'.
The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on.
To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO.
So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft.
NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO.
How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it.
NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.
FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled.
It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...
Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32702211 ("NASA – Artemis I – Liquid Hydrogen Leak Detected Once Again", 94 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32702761 ("Artemis I Launch Attempt Scrubbed", 108 comments)
It stands to reason that the the next step (a semi-permanent moon base, progress towards being able to launch more stuff into deeper space) will provide similar benefits.
What they are against is giving untold billions to old Shuttle contractors to fly a overpriced single use rocket.
We will not get advanced technology from a moon program unless the moon program FINANCES ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. This moon program is the opposite, it tries to keep old technology alive.
If you want a moon program that finances advanced technology, what you should do is build large reusable rockets that deliver small modular nuclear reactors to the moon. And also some drone/robots that build habitats autonomously. That would actually be providing technology benefits on earth.
However, my understanding is that the current rollback is needed to address the hydrogen leak; they are not (quite) yet at the end of the rated battery lifetime.
The first is as you say, there's a timeline constraint based on the launch abort battery. It's previously been stated that NASA could attempt to get a waiver for the timeline.
But second reason is that the number of remedial and inspection actions you can perform on the launch pad is obviously more limited than in the VAB. Given that NASA did try for an immediate relaunch, it's likely that they've already tried and exhausted their highest value launchpad inspection and remedial actions.
- "At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon."
- "If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary to service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-...
Is this a matter of NASA failing to attract and retain the best engineers because of non-competitive TC? In this case, where are the 10x rocket engineers who would have prevented these problems?
Is this a matter of lost institutional knowledge, where it's been so long these kinds of rockets were launched that the people who knew everything about them died or retired?
Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
They made the problem harder to solve by choosing architecture that makes congresscritters happy at the expense of making the rocket way more expensive than it needs to be.
Read: prevents program cancellation
Many politicians don't care about science.
No politicians ignore high paying jobs in their districts.
People throw stones at NASA for optimizing within its system of funding, but it was a fairly brilliant move in the 50s and 60s, and is still a brilliant move today.
Both NASA and SpaceX et al. can be optimal in their own funding landscapes.
Do you have a source for this "architecture"? Not calling you out, I'm genuinely curious.
EDIT: I found an article about the contractors and how it all got put together, interesting read for those outside of the defense contractors world https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/28/artemis-i-and-the-...
Essentially the Senate in 2011 wrote a bill that mandated NASA to build a rocket by 2016 AND that uses existing contractors. So there was literally no way other then just using exiting Shuttle components to even attempt to do that.
This reddit thread has a lot of resources about the actual design of what SLS ended up being and how the design process clearly suggest to NOT DO what they eventually did: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
Eric Berger form Ars Technica has lots of articles on the topic, see: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/former-nasa-official...
NASA was forced by congress to put together a large rocket with all existing technology and infrastructure, something they have not done since the 1970s. The last rocket they tried Ares 1 was maybe one of the worst rocket designs ever made and cost an absurd amount of money given its possibilities.
NASA is also hard locked into locations, the NASA Johnson Space Center is politically important and wanted the development. Are the best engineer in that location or in LA where SpaceX put its main engineering efforts.
> Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
Its a hard to solve problem either way. Made harder by the history and constraints at NASA.
The more relevant question is, should you solve this problem? As Elon Musk often says, are you asking the right question?
That is why for profit rocket company have largely moved away from hydrogen and away from solid rockets.
No different than our approach to infrastructure, education, Healthcare, broadband....plenty of money, no results
Or we can turn this into yet another bitchfest about government inefficiency.
SLS as a platform was forced on the scientists by the politicians.
Also from a science perspective: the funding of this boondoggle has sucked the air out of the room, lots of other projects weren’t funded to make this thing happen. Seems like all SLS discussion is inherently political.
While there big problems with the SLS program such a small delay on the pad is not one of them.
So while politicians love to talk about cutting "waste", they never actually do. It's something that exists in aggregate but somehow no actual program ever gets cut.
Each program does exist for a reason. Cutting the budget is about making hard choices between reasons. And nobody ever loses reelection for failing to make hard choices.
The US has the luxury of being able to borrow cheaply, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to do so. But that means that the politicians campaigning most loudly about "waste" get to say a lot without ever grappling with genuine issues.
However, the reality is NASA has tried to fuel this rocket before. They had rolled out the rocket in a Wet Dress rehearsal. They tried multiple times and failed each time.
Then they rolled it back in and said, in a few weeks we are gone launch. And everybody that was following this was like 'Seriously? You failed to fuel this rocket every single time you tried, and now you want to launch?'.
So when they tried again 2 times fuel the rocket and both times it failed to be fueled nobody at all was surprised. We are now at 10+ attempts and not a single time has the rocket ever been actually fully fueled.
So really this was more of a Wet Dress rehearsal then a launch attempt.
Many people now demand of NASA, do a real Wet Dress rehearsal and actually prove that you can actually fuel this thing before you actually try to launch it.
It would have been fine if they acknowledged some fueling problems and said they wanted to continue troubleshooting on the launch platform so they could test everything there while it was assembled. That way they could work on problems found there while disassembling the rocket to fix the hydrogen fuel leaks back in the assembly room