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Comment by permalac | Hacker News Reader

What debacle? Is it dead?

Money spent vs results over time. Results excluding Boeing & subcontractor revenue. SLS was originally sold as cost effective reuse of existing SSMEs combined with relatively simple tankage to get a cheap large booster. Against those metrics it’s a debacle, unclear if it ever will fly, especially more than once.

While I agree about SLS, and I'm also hopeful about SpaceX's Starship stack, I'd really like to see a successful test. They're working on it, but just imagine how much closer they could have been with even a fraction of this SLS boondoggle contributed.

If NASA is supposed to be a multi-state grant to the sciences, I'd much rather they focus the funding where it will deliver results that benefit the public commons. The jobs program for obsolete and finicky space tech is a dis-service to the public and even the workers who's skills are in questionably useful specialties.

Compared to Starliner and its move from Atlas V to Vulcan [0], SLS is a paragon of incremental success. Additionally, to be fair to SLS, many of the problems associated with the program have to do with the mobile launch platform, which was built for the previous Constellation program and required considerable refit for SLS. [1]

0. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/nasa-will-pay-boeing...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Ground_Systems#Lau...

> Against those metrics it’s a debacle, unclear if it ever will fly, especially more than once.

Not to mention a national security nightmare. Imagine a world without the COTS program, where we would most likely still be waiting for whatever version of Starliner that we finally got. We would right now be reliant on Russia to return our astronauts to earth from the ISS. Can you even imagine what we’d have to give up for their safety?

This alternate reality could yield a good movie script. Think of American astronauts trying to hijack a Russian Soyuz docking at the station to get back to earth.

The SLS was pretty much designed by Congress. Design choices were made primarily to keep jobs in plants which were previously used for Space Shuttle parts.

With its impending first launch, a lot of discussion is popping up again about it arguably being way too slow to develop, overly expensive, and not fit for the intended mission profile.

Criticism that SLS is unfit for the intended mission profile is misguided. SLS never had an intended mission profile. The mandate was always to build a rocket in these places and with these contractors and at fabulous expense, and any notion of what would be done when/if that boondoggle I mean rocket ever flew was the mere coda of an afterthought.

Yeah the engineers were really fucked in their options and it shows in their evaluation.

They were supposed to build a 130 to LEO rocket that should launch the first time in 2016 (min 70t) and use existing contractors. That is kind of insane.

So NASA basically allow their internal teams to come up with Block upgrades based systems and that's where the whole SLS Block 1a, 1b, 1c comes from.

The problem with this was (and is) that they had no reason to rush to a quick block 1 as there were really no missions for it.

Had they been given until 2020 developing a single core modern Saturn V would have been a much better design (this is clearly evident in their internal design evaluation documents). The had already put a lot of work into J-2x and modern F-1 version was attainable. My alternative would have been to use a whole bunch of SpaceX Merlin 1D instead but they never considered that. This version would also have been much closer to the 130 tons in the first version.

And it could have been evolved to be reusable unlike the current SLS.

What people from the outside don't really see is the NASA internal competition. Johnson Space Center clearly wanted the Shuttle derived version, Kennedy Space Center really wanted to Saturn V style rocket. Some at NASA HQ wanted to give it as a contract to SpaceX/ULA.

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