Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

While NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin wrote in 2007 that the shuttle program had been a colossal mistake and that Apollo-Saturn-Skylab should have continued <http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...>:

>Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars.

>Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.

On that topic, was actually searching the Space Shuttle history earlier, and found this infographic somebody over at SpaceX made when they were pitching the Dragon Module. Actually makes a pretty decent case that without Challenger, and subsequent recoil, the Shuttle program would have actually been pretty awesome.

At the time of crash, they were on course to be running 3-4 Shuttles at 4 flights each every year. [1] The cadence afterward was a pretty massive change.

[1] Shuttle Flights (circa 2010): https://i.imgur.com/f4sRT0T.jpg

> At the time of crash, they were on course to be running 3-4 Shuttles at 4 flights each every year. [1] The cadence afterward was a pretty massive change.

We have some sense of what the near-term cadence goal, pre-Columbia, was for the shuttle from a document Reagan signed in 1984 that forecast 24 missions a year, maybe by 1988. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/03/05/n...> By then it was clear that the shuttle would never come close to the every two-week launch schedule forecast during the 1970s (and expected, back when the first launch was scheduled for 1979). But yes, 24 missions a year using both Canaveral and Vandenberg would have helped a lot with amortizing launch costs.

That said, that's still putting lipstick on a pig. The shuttle program cost $196 billion in 2011 dollars over its entire lifespan. <https://phys.org/news/2011-07-space-shuttle-legacy-soaring-o...> That's $1.45 billion per its 135 missions. By contrast, NASA pays $55 million per seat on SpaceX Crew Dragon as of 2019. <https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...> It's not apples-to-apples because a shuttle carried up to seven people and Crew Dragon missions have so far been no more than four people, and a shuttle mission often launched a satellite, but a SpaceX unmanned launch costs $67 to 97 million depending on rocket used. <https://www.space.com/spacex-raises-prices-launch-starlink-i...> 7 * $55 million + $97 million=$482 million; let's say $500 million. And that's in today's dollars as opposed to the 2011 dollars for the $1.45 billion figure. Further, the SpaceX combination

* is a far safer design (unmanned unless crew is actually needed, manned cabin on top of rocket and not on the side, escape system if needed)

* can provide an astoundingly frequent cadence (just under 100 launches in 2023, goal of 144 for 2024)

* does not yet include Starship, which if successful will further lower costs and increase maximum launchable mass

But the topic is what Apollo-Saturn could have done if continued. The $1.45 billion per launch figure is based on 30 years of the shuttle; in other words, the system has been optimized for efficiency as much as possible. As mentioned, the shuttle flew 135 times during those 30 years, for 4.5 missions per year. Griffin is saying in 2007 that for the cost of maybe five shuttle missions ($6 billion), the United States would have had each and every year for the three decades from the mid-1970s, when Apollo ended:

* Two missions to the moon

* Four missions to Skylab-class space stations

* One new Skylab every five years

And that's not factoring in incremental improvements. Over time the command/service module (the "Apollo" portion) would have gained a glass cockpit, and even wings for controlled landing. <http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/001337.html> There were similar proposals to make part of the Saturn rocket reusable. <https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37052.0> But Griffin's scenario does not need enormous cost reductions from drastic redesigns; only the inevitable ones that come from a steady production line optimized over decades.

In a sense, all of this is missing the most remarkable fact: That this is the head of NASA stating all this in writing in 2007, when the shuttle program had not yet ended!

Griffin was a Musk extension. Little Griffin said was even worth listening to (IMO). Being the head of NASA doesn't actually mean that much, lot of mandates from somewhere (often unfunded). Working at NASA you just watched it get sold. Quite a pig with lipstick, angry grandma would be proud.

> In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.

> Musk offered Griffin the title of Chief Engineer of SpaceX.

Made admin in 2005, gave Musk $3,500,000,000 in 2008 after a bunch of protests. Its all totally rigged up in that realm.

Also, massive injury rates at SpaceX reported by Reuters in 2023 that were very obviously covered up. In 2016, 21/100 workers sustain injuries at the KSC site. 6x industry average. Worker injury reporting vanishes for a half decade afterward.

> Many were serious or disabling: 100 workers suffering cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were “crushed,” and 9 with head injuries, including 1 skull fracture, 4 concussions and 1 traumatic brain injury. The cases also included 5 burns, 5 electrocutions, 8 amputations, 12 unspecified body part injuries, and 7 workers with eye injuries. Also, death and comas.

> [riding on top of an unsecured trailer the employee] fell from the trailer striking his head on the asphalt resulting in his death.

> [in 2022] a Raptor V2 engine broke away during pressure testing [and] a fuel-controller assembly cover careened into the head of Cabada, a SpaceX technician. Nearly two years later, the father of three young children remains in a coma with a hole in his skull

> Another manager, working 20 feet above him, carelessly dropped a nearly 100-pound hoist, barely missing Carson

> In November 2021, two Brownsville technicians were moving square steel tubing weighing 500 pounds, using a crane with a lifting magnet[...] The tubing fell and crushed a worker’s hand because the crane was only designed to hoist 300.

> [because of a missed hand signal] a chain connecting the crane to the beams snapped and struck Rios in the face [causing blindness] ... on-site medical clinic told him he could return to work ... the company argues it was Rios' own negligence

> “SpaceX’s idea of safety is: ‘We’ll let you decide what’s safe for you’"

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-lawmakers-urge-scr...

Challenger was inevitable. The risks were known and there was an estimated loss of two missions.

I remember this being reported in New Scientist in the early 80s.

The Shuttle was - unfortunately - neither well-engineered nor well-managed.

I had a friend who worked on one of the early design iterations of the ISS. When I joked I'd get her a shuttle flight for her birthday she said "You'd never get me up in that thing. I've seen the plans."

Whether Apollo could have continued with no missions lost is an open question.

Griffin is pulling a bit of a fast one though: comparing Apollo to what the Space Shuttle turned out to be, rather what the Shuttle was promised to become. If Congress and the country had known that the choice was between a continued Apollo program and the Shuttle we actually got, it’s all too likely they would have chosen neither. Apollo cost too much to sustain; it’s no defense that the shuttle turned out to cost even more.

There’s a lot of hindsight bias here. We know now that the Shuttle was a bad design that was never going to give us cheap and routine access to space. But I don’t know that it’s fair to expect that to have been clear at the time, before it’d been tried.

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