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Hardly NASA has a long history of getting good value for money. Just look at their funding of SpaceX and how cheap many of their probes have been. The shuttle was something of a rare exception, but it was also infected by the DoD’s requirements.

Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.

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> Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.

Exactly. I find it ignorant when people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money. If NASA played fast and lose (move fast and break things), people would die and shit would explode, and they'd get crucified by congress. Private companies play the risk game because they don't have to meet the same extremely high bar of safety that a government org does. I'm not saying there's some waste, but it is a complex process for a reason. Does it go too far, perhaps: I've fallen into ISO hell before, and it can be mind numbing, but maybe I'm just not smart enough to be the person reading those docs.

> people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money

The Shuttle and SLS jaded people. Of course, NASA didn't cause those. The military and Congress, respectively, did.

One of the issues with NASA is that the centers are a source of alot of political capital for their congressional sponsors. So things get funded on that basis.

The big deal made about it is because government is more transparent. Big companies are often far more wasteful of shareholder dollars, but they generally don’t have boards as insane as congress.

NASA destroyed a shuttle on more than 1% of all shuttle flights, each time killing everyone aboard.

Or to put in another way, NASA only had two shuttle disasters.

Two is such a small number, right?

Funny now numbers can be used.

However I can see the glaringly obvious omission in my post that NASA, in its near 70 years of existence has had numerous casualties and explosions. But that's literally my gist: massive checklists, standards, and regulations are a result of that.

Hard to say if that’s a good track record or not. Shuttle had 2 fatal missions out of 135, Soyuz had 2 fatal missions out of 147 manned missions. Nothing else is particularly close to those number of manned flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soyuz_missions

Meanwhile, 17 people worldwide have died in on attempted space flights, while 169 people have died on in space flight related accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... (Excluding the original V2 program which had even worse numbers.)

Just something to consider.

Delta II is from the same era and had only 1 failure that would have killed people aboard out of 155 launches.

Those weren't "manned flights", but if anything Delta and the later SpaceX rockets show that "human rating" isn't adding any safety worth caring about.

Of course you'd want to certify the life support equipment, but that's not why these rockets have failed.

Delta II only needed to achieve orbit and only 1 of the 4 fatal missions failed to achieve orbit.

Soyuz 11 - was a life support failure (A cabin vent valve construction defect caused it to open at service module separation)

Soyuz 1 - Parachute failed so again not something the Delta II had to deal with.

STS-107 Damage to tiles resulted in failure on reentry, but again no heat shields on the Delta II.

Of the 4 only STS-51-L failed during launch.

I don't know about Russia, but the US human-rates the "launch" part of the system, e.g. the "stage 1" of the rocket. What I was pointing out is that given the available data it seems odd that we're engaged in that at all.

Especially if we consider SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 should probably have gained automatic human rating based on its record, but the bureaucracy persists.

I think saying the SLS only had one launch failure amounts to creative accounting, STS-107 was also a launch failure, just a delayed one.

If the orbiter had been boosted to orbit by magic it wouldn't have broken apart on reentry, it's only because of how the launch system works that it did so (tiles damaged during launch).

So, getting back to a Delta II (or a successor system), in that case the reentry system would have been a capsule protected by a fairing, and mounted on top of the rocket, and therefore debris falling onto the reentry vehicle during launch wouldn't be a failure mode of the system.

The astronauts on STS-107 could have survived if returned to earth via other means thus it was an issue but not inherently a fatal one. There were really 4 separate failures: the initial damage, failure to assess the damage, failure to have a standby vehicle, actual reentry failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx

As to man rating the Falcon 9, SpaceX CRS-7 is a great example of why you man rate things. The Dragon CRS-7 capsule “could have been recovered if the parachutes had deployed, but the software in the capsule did not include any provisions for parachute deployment in this situation.” You really don’t want that kind of oversight when human lives are at stake.

Anyway the Delta II is reasonably close to the Soyuz but again the rocket itself is only part of the story. You need to look at everything from vibration and g loads to how you get people safely onboard. In the end it was simply cheaper to use the Soyuz and it’s proven systems than independently recreate nearly identical capabilities for minimal gain.

>some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money

just for the record, a cash-cow is a business you can just keep milking cash from, not one that you keep feeding cash to. It comes from the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) "growth-share" matrix to describe the lifecycle of startups.

https://www.scienceabc.com/wp-content/uploads/ext-www.scienc...

the basic idea is, a company with a large market share in a growing market will just keep making cash in the future but requires investment now, as opposed to a company with a low market share in a market that's not growing, or the other variations. "Stars" are essentially potential unicorns, worth investing in.

So if I were a contractor, and I was billing ridiculous prices for common items from a government agency that couldn't object due to no bid contracts... basically milking an organization for my own profits... what would you call that government agency?

Take your time.

If you're viewing Nasa as your cash cow, then Nasa "dragging it's feet to get more money" as you said makes it unreliable, not a cash cow.

The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it.

All the other solutions currently are just kind of space buses (for equipment and people).

There are different estimates for the shuttle launch costs -- between $500m - $1.5b. However for LEO there couldn't be anything more useful. The SLS launch costs run between $2b - $4b. It hasn't done anything useful so far...

Right, unless it breaks and Americans have to launch from Kazakhstan :)

There were two spy satellites with the same mirror diameter as Hubble. Launched by normal rockets! Without spending money on shuttle, US could launch new Hubble every 5 years or so!

> Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling the Hubble Space Telescope,

https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...

> The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it.

I'll concede that NASA did an excellent job, all things considered.

The Shuttle itself was terrible(although gorgeous) but that's not NASA's fault. They had to get money from the Air Force so they were subject to Air Force requirements, like the incredible cross range capabilities and the oversized cargo hold.

Then there were other requirements – like having to build solid rocket boosters from far away locations and transport by train, purely to get political support – that caused further problems. NASA didn't even want to use solid rockets in the first place.

The Soviet Buran copied the project (without SRBs) even though it made zero sense to them – but the US obviously had a reason to develop such a vehicle, so they wanted to be ready. Their Energia rocket worked better without an orbiter attached.

What NASA actually wanted to build would have been incredible. Sure, maybe the cargo hold would have been smaller, but if it could have a lower turnaround time and cost less to refurbish after every launch, maybe it would still be operational.

The SLS is also bogged down by politicians. And still uses the accursed SRBs.

The shuttle worked, which was amazing considering everything it could do. But the program was a huge money pit because the shuttle had so much capability that went unused on most missions.

You can quibble about the numbers, but a rough calculation puts the program at US$196 billion in 2011 or ~262B in 2023 dollars for 135 attempted flights. So 2B per flight in todays money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

SLS is aiming for 130t to LEO vs 27.5t to LEO for the Shuttle. 4B a launch would have less than half the shuttle’s cost per kg to LEO, if it’s roughly 2B that’s almost 5 times the cargo for the same budget. Granted the shuttle sent people up on every mission, but spending 60m/person to the ISS lets them stay in orbit for vastly less money / day. Essentially the shuttle launched and returned a large useful space into orbit, but then returned it at the end of every mission, which was extremely expensive.

Both the SLS and shuttle have their advantages but the shuttle was only really useful for LEO as getting that much mass into higher orbits was untenable despite what various movies have suggested.

> Just look at their funding of SpaceX and

. . . compare it to the funding of their actual priority: the series of Constellation: Ares, SLS: Orion. Just look at how despite their best efforts, they accidentally funded something successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...

> NASA has a long history of getting good value for money

like how apollo made do without a luxury fourth gimbal as in gemini

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