Is it just me who can't muster any enthusiasm over it because the rocket is so wasteful? Not very Tintin to trash the entire booster and everything for every launch.
In contrast, SLS is predicated on taking actual engines (and boosters) from the Space Shuttle program—ones which were once at the very forefront of reusable spacecraft technology—and trashing them. Sure: reusing the Shuttle and its boosters turned out to be much (much) less economically advantageous than hoped, and it is great that NASA eventually retired it. But the remaining Shuttle hardware is a monument to the engineering talent and production effort that produced the most sophisticated spacecraft ever flown, and to take the surviving engines, each of which has flown on multiple shuttle flights and _intentionally_ send them to a watery grave in the Pacific (Atlantic, for the booster segments) is a total travesty, and a shameful destruction of historic artefacts.
Indeed, the whole program is a boondoggle. SLS is based on the Shuttle hardware not for compelling engineering reasons so much as because it keeps the contractors that built the shuttle in business, and that keeps money flowing into the campaign funds of the politicians in Washington. Its exploration goals are laudable, but the approach taken has been fundamentally an exercise in job creation and military R&D subsidy before all else.
If your instincts come from how SpaceX have done it, then I can imagine it feels extremely wasteful. But SpaceX needs to try and turn a profit, so they have a different set of incentives to NASA.
How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things?
Imagine if NASA was solely located in Alabama where von Braun set up shop. I think it would have been defunded in short order and there would be no NASA and, by extension, no SpaceX (since they are so reliant on govt contracts)
Put JPL in California, mission control in Texas, launches in Florida, and a bunch of manufacturing at Boeing and you've got a much, much wider Congressional support base.
Look at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ - they've even managed to spread suppliers around to Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii. Every single state has at least some jobs that depend on SLS.
The political risk is the more salient point to me, and jobs is just a way to mitigate it. (You could also, for example, mitigate it with less productive means like lobbying)
(Suppliers is a different story. A lot of time NASA is handcuffed by which suppliers actually want work with them. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and many suppliers just don’t find it worth the hassle)
1) The requirements aren't levied by congress. They are created by NASA civil servants who are usually the technical experts in a particular field. These aren't people who have much of any interface with lobbyists.
2) A lot of the instances where it's not worth it to suppliers isn't because they are being boxed out by some industry giant clamoring for some giant contract. It's usually closer to "it's not worth our effort to overhaul our manufacturing process to meet requirements so we can sell NASA a $70 teflon seal." The giant corps have little desire here either. But being a big manufacturer is sometimes correlated with having a more mature manufacturing process that meets specific standards.
There’s already enough corruption in govt, we don’t have to make believe it’s in places that’s it’s not.
Is there any infrastructure there for the mission? My cynical side wonders if someone flew to Honolulu, went to a hardware store to pick up some JB Weld, and flew it back to Florida just so they could check off Hawaii on the list of states.
It also doesn’t mean they want spaceflight material. It can just be something needed to support the project, like shelving to hold extra parts. But if the charge code is traceable to the program, it makes the list.
* this is also why SpaceX can do things cheaper. They don’t have the same quality requirements so they can streamline their processes. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not: https://parabolicarc.com/2016/06/28/nasa-investigation-space...
Zero of which are currently capable of putting a human around the Moon.
Prove yourself and the contracts get bigger.
NASA budget is like 30% SLS/Orion for decades+.
> Prove yourself and the contracts get bigger.
If you hard allocate a huge part of the budget you can only give out so many other contracts for the best bids.
Astra, Rocket Lab, etc. have to demonstrate capability to move up the ladder.
So, 'currently' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, not to mention in general the idea of SLS being ready to send people to the Moon now is a bit of a stretch too since Artemis II will be ready to launch in 2024 if we're lucky, which is also when (if we're lucky), Lunar Starship should be starting its testing.
I recall some NPR story recently about war games the US runs about a hypothetical war with China -- it was said that the US loses most of the time in these simulations. Why? A lack of industrial capability.
To get to the Moon a Starship will require two launches. A manned vehicle and a fuel tanker. They have to dock in Earth orbit, refuel, then the manned vehicle transfers to a Lunar injection orbit. It's very likely a Starship will need a tanker waiting on the Moon to refuel a lander for the return trip and landing back on Earth.
Starship hasn't even flown let alone demonstrated in-orbit refueling. SpaceX hasn't even demonstrated that in the small scale with Dragon capsules. It's a hard problem with a lot of unknowns.
SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.
In order to do that the launch stages don't save any fuel for landing. It's "more expensive" to use expendable stages but all of their energy is used for their payload and none is saved for landing (and landing safety margin). Overall SLS is mass optimized rather than cost optimized.
The NASA way involves a lot fewer moving parts and <unproven technology goes here>.
The difference is that Starship is getting $3B from NASA vs the $40B that SLS got. NASA could get a single launch moon mission using Starship, but they'd have to pay SpaceX more than $3B to get it.
> SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.
SLS doesn't carry the lander nor the fuel for the lander. So yes, it does need something else to get the lander's fuel to the destination.
Look at where the major NASA centers are compared to politically important states. That reduces political risk but also increases inefficiency.
SpaceX and NASA have different, but symbiotic, goals.
SLS could absolutely be cheaper, but reuse isnt really part of that equation.
SLS is going to have difficulty maintaining a 1 launch per year even without payload readiness, so of course it's expensive and therefore disposable. But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly.
With SLS this becomes stark in the sense that if SLS was reusable, it could fly more often and would have lower per launch costs, which would make the other lunar lander proposals more viable and would make it more realistic to fly science payloads on it. If SLS were reusable, establishing a long term lunar presence with it wouldn't be a joke that everyone pretends to take seriously because it wouldn't be a matter of choosing between sending over a crew or launching components for a base for a given year.
This is true, but the issue is that there just isnt the need for it really. Very, very few missions actually require a SHLV. There just arent enough payloads atm, and that probably wouldnt change a ton even if the rocket was cheaper
The profit motive is a powerful and universal incentive.
People are careless when spending Other Peoples' Money.
For example, someone doing volunteer work usually isn't trying to maximize their profit. They may be trying to maximize something else, but that fact means the profit motive isn't a universal first principle.
Many charities seem to exist only to enrich the people who run them.
We all intuitively recognize this. Why do people watch football or spend time with family on Sundays instead of working another job? Because they recognize there’s marginal utility and are more motivated by the increase in quality of life than the increase in money. So much so that we look at people who try to maximize profit at all costs as having sociopathy.
I said “maximizing utility” which is the opposite of self-sacrifice. I’m just saying “utility” is measured across more dimensions than profit.
E.g., do you pick your spouse/friends or make a decision to have children based on their ability to maximize your wealth?
I was responding to the claim about NASA.
> do you pick your spouse/friends or make a decision to have children based on their ability to maximize your wealth?
People marry for money all the time. If you're a man, and have no money and no prospects for money, what do you think your odds are of finding true love reciprocated?
As for children, the birth rate declines as the economics of having children changed from an asset to a liability. This happens in country after country. People most definitely historically have had children for their ability to produce for the family.
I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart, and especially in their professions and their behavior while working.
>I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart
We probably fundamentally disagree here. Again, I’m not saying people aren’t motivated by money. I’m saying they aren’t only motivated by money. The people I’ve met that think human interactions can be distilled to such a simple principle tend to struggle in their personal relationships in my experience.
The fact that you’re willing to type away on HN instead of trying to make more money tells me you know it’s a balancing act. Besides, I think people are more motivated by status (being the hierarchical primates that we are) and money is just a clumsy proxy for status. For example, status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one.
That they are careful with other peoples' money.
> I’m saying they aren’t only motivated by money.
I never said only. I said it is a powerful motivator that motivates nearly all of us.
> status
is another path to getting money.
> status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one
What they'll do is marry the rich one and cheat on her with the beauties. Besides, having an elegant beauty on your arm gives a big boost to one's career. Just look at JFK and Jackie. There's no doubt Jackie was a big help. And there's no doubt JFK selected her with that help in mind.
You can believe what you like. But I (and many I know) have become a lot happier through recognizing how human nature actually is rather than believing in the fantasy. The unhappy people I know are the ones who still believe in the fantasy, and are constantly disappointed.
is another path to getting money.
You have this inverted. Money is a path to status. Status is what really matters. For example, do you think a former less powerful than, say, a billionaire? Billionaire's use their money to get power, prestige, and status, but it doesn't always go as far as other means.
>I never said only.
You said universal. I'm saying it's common, but not universal. The problem with absolute statements is that it only takes one instance to disprove them.
Is Bezos marrying the richest woman he can find? I doubt it. Are you actively selling your organs for money? If not, maximizing money isn’t universal. It common, but still commonly constrained by other competing priorities. Some of which we hold more dear than money. To ignore that seems like it’s own oversimplified fantasy.
I don’t think it does. Maybe if you phrased it as “maximizing utility” but you constrained it to “maximizing money” as a universal truth. That’s demonstrably false.
Another man pushed him aside, and answered "oh, he's a Communist Party member in good standing, he's going to give it all to the Party!"
The lottery winner shot back "Oh no, I'm not a Communist anymore!"
My dad always had a belly laugh when he recounted that story.
My dad wasn't laughing at him. He was laughing at the Communists with their inability to recognize their false god.
I'm certainly not making a case for Communism. Again, it's telling that that is the lens you view these discussion through.
This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits.
What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using.
This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices.
But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition.
The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy".
Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.
I did, and that's why I couldn't care less. SLS is abandonware. Starship makes it completely irrelevant
> Additionally, pinning the entirety of the American space program on a single private company seems like a recipe for disaster.
That's exactly what happened here. America pinned the entire project on Boeing Space. With disastrous results.
Carrying fuel, parachutes, etc. to booster separation that you don't use to boost the rocket, or worse, carrying fuel, heat shields, aerodynamic surfaces, etc. to LEO for re-entry in addition to your payload, are wasteful. Non-critical mass to lunar orbit is even more extravagant.
When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together, or your tanks made by composite experts hand-laying carbon fiber in cleanrooms, yeah, it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn (or, I suppose, the other way around - first the burn, then the crash).
If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
Note that the rocket engines used by SLS (RS-25, and to a lesser extent the solid rocket boosters) were explicitly designed for reuse, as part of the Space Shuttle program; all the way back in the 1970s.
The four RS-25 engines that Artemis 1 dumped in the ocean had previously flown on Space Shuttles. IIRC they first flew in 1999 (although Shuttles only used 3 engines).
> If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
Also note that the marginal cost of an SLS launch is 4.5 billion dollars. That doesn't include all the one-off costs, like R&D; certification; restarting production lines; etc. Famously, it cost over a billion dollars to restart the RS-25 production line (so they can replace those engines being dumped in the ocean); despite claiming that the use of existing tech would save money!
In fact, refurbishing & upgrading those existing Shuttle engines cost more than producing brand-new RS-25s. Again, it was claimed that reusing the existing Shuttle engines would save money...
Despite the cost of these assembly lines, SLS rockets aren't "flying off" them. The (few) scheduled Artemis launches are separated by years.
Citation desperately needed.
There's no infrastructure in space to do anything. Even if you built a rocket in orbit that doesn't do you any good if the payload in sitting on a pad on the ground.
We know what the point is with James Webb Space Telescope, we know that the point is with each successive Mars rovers. But the moon seems just so pointless. We’ve been there, there is nothing there. We’ve also seen how capable robots are in space, and we continue to be excited to see each generation of robots outperform the previous, bringing in new and exciting discoveries and confirmations. For the moon, there is nothing to be excited about.
One good reason is that the moon is a relatively close jumping off point for other operations and missions to other destinations. It has a great combination of ample space and very low gravity, so it’s (relatively, compared to earth) easy to get off of. So a fantastic choice for future bases, mining operations, labs, materials storage, and possibly manufacturing. It also has problems of course, which is well known.
You don’t have to accept this for it to remain a good reason to people in the know about the opportunities of developing beyond earth and the dangers of not doing so.
Even without returns, it is simple matter of security. With another country like China taking absolute control over space US would be quickly incapable to take care of its interest here on Earth. Just imagine China deciding to incapacitate all US satellites and US having no way to respond to it.
So it is same old weapons race, it is just trying to score some extra side quests a bit outside of the main quest. Haven't you ever tried to do side quests to get some extra exp to help you with main quest line?
projected by who and how many % of his guesses turned out to be right ?
It's not inconceivable that having platinum become plentiful might also be such a boon.
Impossible to tell, but a ton more than what aluminium industry pulls in.
An entire universe, void of all life, that doesn't get to experience itself deeply saddens me. Though that might just be the fitness-function within me talking.
We might be better off spending the next couple hundred years focusing on making sure we don't destroy our own home before trying to move on to the next (or at least more comprehensive threat detection). There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
That's precisely the reason why we will be better off by investing into space exploration now.
Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed. At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony... and it's quite possible we'll be sidetracked significantly if the climate causes widespread migration and famine as expected.
If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
I support space exploration and development, but putting more resources outward when we have so many inward problems feels like a fool's errand.
We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
Given the current low-level of funding we should be focusing on defense (climate reliance, threat detection) rather than colonization. I'd be over the moon if space industries were better funded to do both... but more often than not total funding as a percentage of GDP has been decreasing, not increasing.
We think alike - but IMHO that's going to happen only if we begin now. That's why we shouldn't hold off.
> If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
It's not like there's a single "we" that can keep attention at one thing at a time only. There are a lot of great engineers excited about space stuff, who don't care about ecology/whatever else at all. It makes sense to use their skills and enthusiasm while other engineers excited about that work on solving our Earth-bound problems.
Another point is - whatever helps us survive on Mars and the Moon will help us greatly to reduce harm done to Earth.
> Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed.
> We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
For sure, but there are also dangers other than climate change - war, asteroid impact, pandemics, rogue AI takeover... It's not that either Earth gets destroyed and the Martian colony will die anyways or nothing has happened and we don't need the backup.
Perhaps there will be another pandemic and the people on Earth will die off but the Martians survive. Perhaps asteroid impact will make Earth uninhabitable for 10-50 years but no more. Etc
There's no need to take it to infinite extremes. There are always plenty of values in the slider between short-medium-long term to choose from to find meaning in life… whatever floats someone's boat.