NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Splashes Down in Pacific After Test Flight | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Splashes Down in Pacific After Test Flight

nytimes.com

223 pointsdnetesn141 comments

The [non-]money quote:

"The next test flight is not expected until 2018 because of limited NASA budgets, and Orion will not carry astronauts until 2021 at the earliest."

So while I don't want to downplay the technical achievement, it is politics, not technology, that remains the limiting factor at NASA. :-(

It's also technology. "But the project suffered a series of technical issues last year that pushed the service module preliminary design review back by about 10 months." http://aviationweek.com/blog/nasa-slips-orion-em1-flight-201...

It's someone doing good PR that gets it boiled down to "limited NASA budgets."

I can't help but think part of the technology problem is also caused by budget constraints. Less budget means less actual testing and experimentation and more theoretical planning, work and design. I imagine more real world experience with tests and experiments for those involved would help these problems get solved sooner, possibly before they even come about.

It is not clear that more budget would make things go faster. 9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example. It really depends on how well the project could utilize the extra funding (they probably could do with more, but at some point progress/dollar would have to fall).

It is just like software, actually.

Well in this case it would have. The sub contractors went through multiple stop-work start-work iterations and there is always a loss of efficiency with that as the engineers get shuffled. The ones on the program when it starts frequently aren't the same people as when it was stopped.

Good point: consistency in funding is pretty important, and to manage projects for the long term...also in industry. It would be tough not to know what your budget would be for 5 years on a 5 year project.

"9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example."

Very true. However, 9 women and 1 man are more likely to give you a baby in 9 months that 1 women and 1 man.

Don't mean to be pedantic, but I think it's "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month", but they can make 9 babies in 9 months. Bandwidth vs. latency.

I'm sure NASA could speed up the overall project if they had more resources by doing lots of things in parallel. NASA went from having unmanned ICBMs to putting a man on the moon in under a decade when they were given enormous funding.

The Apollo project is historical precedent that shows that precisely this type of project can go much faster, given the required budget and focus.

The second part here is also important, of course. Just pouring more money onto a problem isn't necessarily going to help if e.g. there is more focus on political turf wars than there is on the actual technical challenge.

That's also politics, they have been bouncing service module work between NASA and ESA.

People at my company also always list budget and headcount restraints as the reason they couldn't have been more successful. It's almost like it's universal politics at play or something.

Or it's like pretty much no one ever thinks there's enough money or people for whatever project they're driving. Maybe that's what you mean by "politics" but pretty much no organization ever--there are probably a few cases that come close to exceptions like the Manhattan Project, but not many--can get as much funding or staffing as they would like.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Manhattan Project was considered to be understaffed and underfunded as well. I don't know a lot about it, but my understanding is that at the time, leaders really had no idea if it was going to work or if it was worth all the effort.

I imagine you're right :-) I was just throwing out the name of a 1 in a million project that may have potentially had all the resources it wanted given to it. But I'm sure even that project saw phone calls arguing for more support staff or whatever.

They threw a lot of people and funding at the Manhattan project, it was a national priority at the time and not a really a good example of a project that was starved at all for resources (it was probably like: we need X; ok, you get X).

The next test flight is not expected until 2018

ಠ_ರೃ

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Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money.

Orion is a multi-billion dollar project. SLS (which will eventually be the launcher for Orion, should they ever plan a full design for a mission that uses it) is also a multi-billion dollar project. Orion has a budget of about $1 billion per year, SLS nearly $2 billion. So we're spending a crapton of money on these projects. But because of they way they are being managed and run they are hugely expensive compared to the work involved.

Sadly, NASA manned spaceflight is mostly a jobs program now, and has been for a long time. The unmanned spaceflight part of NASA is still capable of executing on ambitious projects, the manned part more or less just sort of stumbles in the general direction of a goal with the hope that a lot of money will fall out of congress along the way (which it usually does).

The Iraq war cost $1 billion per DAY.

Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA.

I recall when NASA needed to fix the Hubble telescope and the Air Force had TWO extra space telescopes in storage!

Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA.

Imagine if all the money in a Monopoly box were real.

The Air Force had two optical assemblies in storage, that's actually one of the cheapest parts of the entire system, though a very important part. Even if we could launch those "space telescopes" for free they'd be useless, they aren't complete units.

And sure, it'd be nice if we spent more money on space, but that doesn't excuse the huge problems at NASA et al. There is a gap of perhaps an order of magnitude in capabilities between what we are doing and what would be possible if we gave space exploration a higher priority in terms of expenditures. But there is a gap of perhaps 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in capabilities between what NASA is doing and what would be possible if NASA manned spaceflight were run better and smarter.

As an example, the Shuttle program spent around $5 billion a year consistently for nearly 30 years. In that time the major achievement of all that work was to put up the ISS. The ISS is nice now that the expense to put it up is just a sunk cost, but it was in no way worth how much it cost, nor was anything the Shuttle did worth the cost of the program. Ultimately every Shuttle launch ended up costing about as much as a Saturn V launch (and that's a Saturn V launch back at the start of the program, more likely later launches would have become cheaper due to various economies of scale and process improvements). So we had 30 years of operating a hugely expensive low Earth orbit spacecraft instead of 30 years and over 100 launches of a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads beyond Earth orbit. We could have had hundreds of people living and working in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars by now, but instead we got the Shuttle and ISS. Some of the fault there comes is due to congress, but there's no excusing the people at NASA from making and committing to these decisions.

The shuttle was a high fixed cost program, but the variable costs aka what you saved by scrapping a launch was fairly low. With 2x the budget they could have done something like 6x times as many launches and each launch could have sent 20-30 people to space. But there is simply little point in sending people to LEO which is the real issue.

NASA started out as a public works project, one of its explicit goals was uplifting (my word) the South, and after Apollo it became almost entirely a public works project.

So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.

There was an IAMA on reddit a while back which was with JPL engineers. One of the engineers was asked what would happen if NASA had the funding of the pentagon. He said space colonies would be there and possibly an interstellar probe.

> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money.

I've had several highly intelligent & competent friends opt to not work at NASA because the salary was 66% of competing offers where they would still be doing cools things. With some more money, NASA could have competitive salaries to attract more talent.

NASA has a tremendous pool of talent, that's not the problem. The problem is the bureaucracy and the organization. Just compare the unmanned vs manned parts of NASA. On the unmanned side there is a huge diversity of projects, mission architectures, and destinations, and a lot of recent accomplishments across the Solar System. They take the effort to separate out technological development projects, they use incremental development processes, they build on what they've accomplished previously, they deal with budget constraints in sensible ways, etc. They still have huge problems from time to time and are still hugely bureaucracy heavy, but they get things done. On the manned side things are completely different. The average project is some huge multi-billion dollar venture of questionable value, with a reasonable chance the project will be cancelled partway through (X-33/VentureStar, Constellation, etc.)

In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).

> NASA has a tremendous pool of talent

Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.

>> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money.

Exactly. NASA wasn't doing anything along these lines until they got their budget cut and some competition. I'm guessing mostly the budget cut because they were too busy spending lots of money in someones district to do anything different. Finally someone said "just stop that '70s stuff" and now we're getting somewhere. BTW I know the SLS makes a lot of reuse of shuttle launch hardware, but it is still a change.

No astronauts for 7 years, at least? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, we all understand that resources are limited

I could relate with the excitement! Indian space agency ISRO is launching its own crew module prototype[1] aboard a next gen launch vehicle[2] in an experimental mission. Crew module will perform a controlled re-entry and splashdown in Indian ocean. ISRO is aiming to be ready with all subsystems and infrastructure required for human spaceflight by 2020 (Government hasn't yet approved the human spaceflight program).

[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/To-put-man-in-space...

[2] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sci-tech...

How does this compare to what SpaceX is doing? Does it make sense for NASA to be doing this in parallel with Dragon?

SpaceX is building a shuttle to get people to orbit and back -- Orion is meant to get people to Mars. I think the scale is different.

Aren't SpaceX also working on the Mars mission long term? How are they addressing the interplanetary flight?

Maybe in the very longterm. SpaceX is at the moment in orbit where NASA was in the 60s. Going to the moon is a much greater distance than most people imagine. Not even speaking of Mars.

True. NASA is now where NASA would have been in the 70s or 80s if the initial momentum of going to the moon was maintained.

All of the planets in our solar system, including the gas giants, fit between the earth and the moon with a little bit of room to spare.

http://i.imgur.com/CLqdeKf.jpg

People severely underestimate the distance to the moon!

For some more perspective. The layman should know that actually getting into Low Earth Orbit is BY FAR the most fuel-consuming burn of any rocket mission. Even on a mission to Mars, the most predominantly fuel-consuming burn will be to LEO.

Getting to the moon from LEO takes less than half the delta-v that it takes to get to LEO, and WAY less fuel (because by this time you've dropped so much weight getting to LEO)

So the real problem will always be the stupidly inefficient method by which we conduct space flight. We send all of our supplies out of an enormous gravity well with a thick atmosphere.

Imagine what we could build if we already had everything in space for us already.

The only way we'll be able to become truly space-fairing is if we either become an astroid-mining civilization, or if we build something that lets us virtually ignore Earth's gravity well, like a space elevator.

I ask you this question because you seem to know what you're talking about, whereas I simply don't.

Watching the launch today, I couldn't help wonder why they don't use standard jets to get the vehicle to a height where a rocket could take over.

The highest a jet has flown is about 37km and LEO is considered to start at about 160km. That 37km though in my mind would be the toughest and most fuel costly to ascend.

Would it not save both weight and money to use jets and fixed wings up through the low altitudes before turning to rockets for the higher altitude ascent?

That's pretty much the approach of Virgin Galactic. Reasons why it works for them, but not for NASA would have to be explained by someone more qualified. I do know that VG barely gets into LEO, whereas NASA's requirements are much higher. In any case, I presume the scientists at NASA (and SpaceX & co) have considered just about every alternative, and the current approach still remains the most efficient for their needs.

Not even LEO; so far, all of Virgin's flights have been strictly suborbital.

Orbital Sciences is doing something similar, IIRC.

They are the two big approaches to cheap space being done now. 1) Be cost-effective at making rockets, 2) launch from jets. My money is on #1, which SpaceX is doing, but #2 has some things going for it that could prove me wrong. #2 is also strictly limited in just how big you can make a payload, while for #1 you can get up to around 200 ton payloads before things start working against you.

I think there are strength/scaling issues with winged aircraft that, given the fuel requirements for any sizable payload to orbit even from the speed/altitude a jet can achieve, makes this extremely challenging, but its something people keep working on.

I'm sure this has been studied to death, but my guess is that the extra risk during flight/separation, and the extra weight of designing the rocket to handle the different forces encountered when attached to the mothership are not compelling enough to make it worth the extra few % in delta-V. (SpaceShipOne went to Mach 3, not 25, so the boost was greater by percentage)

The issue is that people confuse getting into space with getting into LEO. Virgin Galactic are not even close to getting into LEO – their plan is to fly a ballistic trajectory which takes them just above 100km before falling back to Earth.

Since they don't need to achieve anywhere near the required velocity to enter LEO, they can use a much smaller solid-fuel rocket engine and launch from a jet.

It's not the height, it's the speed. (Though, Virgin is trying something like this for their rocket).

LEO isn't that far away, but it goes by _really_ quickly. And getting going that fast requires a lot of propellant mass, and that's judged by the tyranny of the rocket equation.

"The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up. It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast."

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

I don't entirely buy this. You don't get to go any slower if you are going to Mars, which is not orbiting the Earth in any way. Or if I just want to escape Earth orbit and go drift in space, why do I need to be moving fast relative to the Earth? Why can't I be moving slowly but steadily away?

> Or if I just want to escape Earth orbit and go drift in space, why do I need to be moving fast relative to the Earth?

Because gravity. If you aren't going fast relative to Earth, you aren't going to escape Earth orbit [0]. Heck, if you aren't going fast relative to Earth, you aren't even going to be in Earth orbit [1], you are going to be falling back to the surface.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed

Everyone's responses are spot-on. But I can understand that it still may not be intuitive to you.

The difficulty is that we see pictures and videos of our satellites and shuttles in orbit, and they look peaceful and serene. What's missing from those images and videos is a visceral feel that they are going over 17,000 mph. If they went less, they would leave orbit, and hit the Earth.

Objects in orbit are not "outside" of Earth's gravity; they are not just up there, just floating in space. The reason they don't "fall to Earth" is that they are falling to Earth. Constantly. It's just that their horizontal speed relative to the Earth is so large that they are - literally - falling around the Earth.

The premise of your question is wrong. If you are in Earth orbit, you are moving fast. It's actually being in orbit that allows you to move slowly away, because you can take as long as you want to apply the force. If you're not in orbit you have to quickly apply enough force to escape Earth's influence in one go or you will fall back to Earth.

I can highly recommend having a play with Kerbal Space Program to get an intuitive grasp of orbital mechanics.

Basically, if you don't go fast enough, you're going to come back down to earth. Once you get to a speed that's fast enough that you aren't going to come back to earth, you'll find you are now in orbit around the sun, in a path remarkably similar to the one the earth is on. To get to Mars you need to get up into a higher orbit around the sun, so you need to go even faster.

This is all true, and is all well and good for unmanned space exploration (yes, getting to LEO is halfway to anywhere), but for manned spaceflight time is also expensive - every day spent in flight adds mass for life support and supplies, and also increases the human risk of a failure.

For yet more perspective - an astronaut on the ISS in LEO is at most a couple of hours from the ground-based facilities in an emergency, probably more accessible than researchers at the South Pole. Sending people to Mars (on the order of magnitude of a year round trip, with very limited opportunities for early return) would require them to carry with them not only more expensive redundant systems, but also more advanced medical equipment and repair systems than anyone has had to carry into space before (which requires yet more mass, and hence a bigger and better launcher).

Of course, Orion itself doesn't deal with any of these issues - it's meant to be used for ascent and Earth return only, and to be attached to the larger systems that deal with the challenges of a Mars journey. Which indicates pretty well how little of the engineering work has been done towards NASA's Mars mission.

> So the real problem will always be the stupidly inefficient method by which we conduct space flight. We send all of our supplies out of an enormous gravity well with a thick atmosphere.

True, but it doesn't actually cost very much to do so. The cost of fuel for getting into orbit is only 0.3% of the total cost for the rocket [1], so if we could rapidly re-use them, we could potentially launch them every day of the year for not a lot of money.

[1]http://www.space.com/21386-spacex-reusable-rockets-cost.html

384,000 KM doesn't sound that much in space scale. Don't our rockets travel at something like 30,000+ KM/h in space?

Orbital velocity at LEO is ~28,000 km/hr, but as you get further away from the Earth, your velocity decreases. Orbital velocity at the distance of the moon is only ~3,700 km/hr. (Obviously this all depends on your reference frame...)

when talking about space travel, speeds and distances aren't relevant the same way they are planetside. in space travel, it's all about who's gravity well you're stuck in, and how much delta V itll take to transfer to a different gravity well.

if we're talking about probes, the delta V aspect becomes a lot more fun when you consider the web of gravity slingshots that can be pulled off to up your dV

Not really. Planetary Robotics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University is building a lunar rover named Andy and they have already purchased a launch slot from SpaceX to send their rover to the moon. The projected launch date is October 2015. This team are also competiting for Google Lunar X Prize.

How much of NASA's $20 billion budget is spent on spent flight? It's budget is quite small. Apple made $100 billion in fiscal 2014. Now can you imagine what a SpaceX with that kind of revenue could do? A self-sustaining business model is the better way to develop space technologies.

> A self-sustaining business model is the better way to develop space technologies.

It's a good way to improve space technologies. SpaceX builds on a lot of the research and development NASA did with taxpayer dollars, just as Apple benefited from government subsidy and investment in things like early computers and the Internet.

I strongly disagree.

While for profit sounds great, and does work amazingly well at a large number of US, EU, and multi-national corporations. It also doesn't.

Complex scientific programs can have developmental studies measured in decades. Which even very healthy multi-nations can't stomach. Selling a 50+ year ROI R&D program is really hard, and will likely get you laughed out of the boardroom.

But this is ultimately something that happens in academia. Due to largely public funding. Because as an charitable entity profit doesn't necessarily interfere with development and/or research of new ideas. Your goal is literally to piss away money experimenting on things.

While business and innovation to go hand in hand very happily. Business by definition don't transcend profitability. It is their goal. So while they do join hands for the short term, this is a short fling, not a life long love affair.

:.:.:

Also SpaceX does seem impressive. But everything they've currently done was done in the 1960's, without modern computing, or even integrated circuits. I like SpaceX but they are literally riding NASA's coat tails.

A structural analysis of a rocket engine can be done in a CAD simulation. Instead of by 5 guys with slide rules, and an IBM batch processing computer barely performing 100 KFLOPS.

>But everything they've currently done was done in the 1960's, without modern computing, or even integrated circuits. I like SpaceX but they are literally riding NASA's coat tails.

has been for now. Significant differences though start to appear -

1. their rockets are modular from the start (even Russia has trouble to get similar system - Angara - off the ground)

2. GrassHoper - self-explanatory

3. "Raptor" full flow staged combustion engine - once they get that one, they will become way ahead of any previous development.

>Has been for now.

So you confirm my argument.

> their rockets are modular from the start (even Russia has trouble to get similar system

I'm glad a US company can do in 2014, what a cash strapped USSR couldn't in 1970/1980. Luckily there have been few technological innovations in the past 30 years to allow this to be a fair comparison.

Once again, we are hedging our bets on what may happen. Not what has. Until it happens its vaporware.

>I'm glad a US company can do in 2014, what a cash strapped USSR couldn't in 1970/1980.

actually it is cash rich Russia which is trying to do it today with much less success than SpaceX.

>So you confirm my argument.

my point here is that while the both functions have the same value, the SpaceX's has much higher first derivative at present and that, for all practical purposes, guarantees that it will be well ahead tomorrow

That Russia's oligarchs are rich doesn't really make Russia rich.

Russia as its government (not its people) has been very oil rich during the last decade. It is another question where it has directed the money though. It didn't have any issues to spend $50B for Olympic Games for example (of course most of this money were stolen by those oligarchs, like childhood friends of Putin).

The issues with Russian space isn't money. It is widespread corruption which is able to drain any amount of money and lack of educated professionals. The "old guard" is retiring and new people are too young/inexperienced. People who should have come into the industry during the 199x are pretty much missing. Add to that especial Russian government and near-government corporate ineptitude, lack of modern technological base across the country, especially in electronics/communication...

You should read how US (DoD) buys rocket engines from Russia - US buys them from Florida 5-guys shop (all guys are very well connected Russian guys, some of them are even officially sanctioned by US :) for say $10/engine while the Florida shop buys them from the Russian state corporation at $1/engine while the cost of the engine is something like $2/engine, so the Russian state is something like losing the money here :)

> actually it is cash rich Russia which is trying to do it today with much less success than SpaceX.

Russia has put people in orbit on a yearly basis since the 60's. SpaceX is successful at coming up with promising designs, but it's quite a bit early to call them more successful than Russia.

> SpaceX is at the moment in orbit

Not for long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory

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

Thanks. SapceX never made it a secret that their whole goal is flying to other planets. So the claim above about different scale sounded quite off.

I think it's worth noting that the working name for the rocket to launch this thing is the BFR. It stands for Big Rocket, and I'll let you figure out what the F stands for.

Actually SpaceX is also building a system to get people to Mars and back. It is focused on the current money making opportunities however.

I've not heard whether or not SpaceX has done the on-pad abort test they were planning for last month.

There hasn't been any official word, as far as I know, but the rumor has been that the pad abort originally intended for November might happen in January sometime.

This is not really true either. Orion can in no way shape or form get anyone to Mars. Maybe a modified Orion will be used as part of a plan to take humans to Mars but it is not capable of that on its own.

"Orion, which could one day take astronauts to Mars..." [1]

"NASA just tested Orion — a spacecraft that might someday carry people to Mars" [2]

"NASA and its commercial partners are designing Orion to take astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the 2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s" [3]

"Orion will facilitate human exploration of the Moon, asteroids, and Mars." [4]

"This time, the rocket was unnamed, but the craft is designed eventually to carry humans to Mars" [5]

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/05/368652770/a-s...

[2] http://www.vox.com/2014/12/3/7322909/orion-test-flight

[3] http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/splashdown-orion-spaces...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/05/nasa-launches...

You are repeating news sources that are repeating press releases.

The Orion has less than 214 square feet of room. This isn't enough for 4 people to live in for 6 months.

NASA says it's for Mars because it gets people excited. But Congress has not instructed them to do a mission to Mars, and Congress is in charge, for better or for worse. There is no mission to Mars.

I would expect a Mars mission to be coupled to a living space during transit. Bigelow's inflatable modules might be a good fit, and they're testing one soon on the ISS.

Orion was originally designed for extended lunar missions. There were studies that envisioned it as a component of asteroid missions. Probably there are studies applying it to Mars, but I'm not aware of those.

http://www.universetoday.com/88434/human-mission-to-an-aster...

The majority of news sources are commonly just echo chambers. They all repeat the same incorrect improperly sourced information regularly.

Yep, the Mars line is sales. NASA has been aiming for the moon as a more realistic possibility with this thing, which is why they rebuilt Apollo with modern rockets.

SpaceX is also working on a vehicle to transport humans and cargo (at incredible scale) to Mars routinely using reusable vehicles.

And to be 100% clear, Orion is not capable of making the journey to Mars. Orion is envisioned as potentially being a key component of a larger system that could be used for Mars exploration, but by itself it is perhaps only maybe 10-20% or so of what would be needed for such a trip.

Any practical Mars mission is going to require a staging area in LEO or a Lagrange point to assemble a larger interplanetary craft. Dragon will be up to that task.

Probably not, but NASA paid for the development of Dragon as part of the Commercial Resupply Services program.

The two spacecraft are meant to do two completely different things. Orion was designed for deep space exploration, Dragon is not.

Sort of. According to Wikipedia the plans are for the Dragon to be modified into the "Red Dragon" for future mars missions.

"Red Dragon is a modified SpaceX Dragon capsule for low-cost Mars lander missions using Falcon Heavy rockets. Plans call for a sample return rover to be delivered to the Martian surface while also testing techniques to enter the Martian atmosphere with equipment a human crew could eventually use."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_(spacecraft)

Note, for all you "SpaceX and NASA are competitors" people, that the Red Dragon design study was something that NASA paid for.[1] SpaceX and NASA are are on the same side in reality. Only in magical internet flamewarland, carried out by people who don't do any of this for a living, are they in opposition.

[1]: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2012001...

It would make more sense to contrast SpaceX with ULA or any of the other rocketry startups. Whatever long-term plans SpaceX have aren't very relevant to the current supplier-contractor partnership that SpaceX and NASA share.

You point is correct, but SpaceX is competing directly with the SLS which according to Wikipedia is designed by NASA. I am under the impression that the ULA will produce the SLS, but after a quick search I can only find reference to ULA producing the upper stage (http://www.ulalaunch.com/united-launch-alliance-hosts-nasa.a...). NASA as a whole is not competing with SpaceX, but some parts of it are, unless "designed by" really just means "funded by".

This is not correct. Dragon was in production before the NASA contract was signed. SpaceX was paid to develop a commercial crew variant called Dragon V2.

Spacex was from its start conceived by Musk to develop low cost systems that will be used to colonize Mars. He has said this from the start.

Nasa contracts were never necessary for SpaceX to succeed as they have contracts world wide to lift payloads to space for many nations. These contracts help to accelerate the company timeline for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars.

>Does it make sense for NASA to be doing this in parallel with Dragon?

it is called competition - a best known way to get 2 of something at the total cost of 2X when otherwise it would be only 1 inferior version of that something at the cost of 10X

Sky & Telescope editor Kelly Beatty drew a pretty strong distinction between the two in an interview on the public radio show Here & Now a couple days back (http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/12/03/nasa-orion-mars):

INTERVIEWER JEREMY HOBSON: Do you think it's possible that the private sector beats NASA in getting to Mars?

BEATTY: Not with people.

BEATTY is wrong of course. SpaceX entire premise is the mission to Mars. By the time Orion ferries its first astronaut to space, SpaceX will be the low cost operator to the ISS.

Orion uses a parachute to land, Red Dragon will use Super Draco based thrusters to land.

Nasa throws away the tanks used to get Orion to Space, SpaceX will land the tanks and reuse them to lower overall mission cost.

Nasa spent 60 billion dollars to get this far, won't be ready to test its new SLS system for 3-5 years, won't fly a human for 10+ years. SpaceX will fly astronauts to space by 2017.

SpaceX spent 3 billion getting this far and resupplies the ISS. Multiple times.

Beatty is short sighted and underestimates Elon Musk.

I hope you're right about the future, but I wouldn't be so confident in what hasn't yet happened.

Alternatively, SpaceX hasn't launched people into space; NASA has. SpaceX hasn't launched a space station; NASA (and others) have. NASA has larger budgets, but they solve that problem by having larger budgets.

NASA doesn't have any hardware to put people into space, either. The Orion is them trying to get back into that business, which is just what SpaceX is trying to get into.

I'm bullish on SpaceX when it comes to launch systems and vehicles, but to the best of my knowledge they haven't demonstrated any expertise in Life Support Systems.

The hardest part about getting to Mars isn't flinging a metal tube off the Earth. That part we know how to do.

The hard part is keeping people alive for 6 months there, 6 months back, and providing all the equipment necessary to do meaningful science on the surface.

This isn't to say that an adequate launch system isn't essential to the mission, but I would be very surprised if SpaceX developed life support systems independently and more efficiently than NASA. More likely, I can imagine a news headline in which a SpaceX rocket sends a NASA capsule and living module to an off-world mission.

Why wouldn't SpaceX be capable of doing life support systems? What's so magically complicated about those compared to the rockets themselves? You have to be aware of the shifting goal posts scenario here. At every stop people said SpaceX wasn't going to be able to do what they were going to do, because there was some kind of magic fairy dust that only government space organizations have. And each time that they achieve a milestone, people just keep shifting the goalposts. They've already done things NASA was never able to do, like build a reusable rocket and land it vertically. Clearly they are more capable than NASA in some ways. Personally, I think SpaceX will be able to do everything they say they will do, up to and including putting people on Mars. They've come this far, why wouldn't they go all the way?

That's about entirely backwards. Flinging a metal tube off of Earth is much harder than keeping a few apes alive in a can. The tolerances and requirements in rocketry are much more severe, the dimensions unfortunately super-human scale, and the ability to test the system limited by the scale, expense, and speed of the final product, not to mention the usually-100% chance of destroying your machine in the process. (Even reusable systems, which are rare, are expensive to run simply due to scale.)

The actual spacecraft part is easy in comparison. It's of reasonable dimension, you can test and fiddle with it on the ground, and plenty of common practice is available due to submarines and high-altitude aircraft as well as decades of continuous operation in space.

The history of manned space systems will present plenty of examples of the booster being the pacing element. But we don't have to look much further than the very system we're talking about here. Orion is ready and flying a projected 4 years (and probably longer in reality) before its booster. And that's not because they got a head start.

That's not to say that rockets and manned space craft are similar problem domains; they're not. Any expertise SpaceX will need in that area will have to be developed separately. But the techniques are well known (thanks largely to NASA, who make no secret of it) and are just plain not that hard. They're already flying a pressurized and temperature-controlled Dragon (which spends time as part of the ISS), and are in development of a crewed one.

It is true that SpaceX has yet to operate any space stations, which NASA has, and which are the closest analogues we have to an interplanetary spacecraft. But again, ISS systems are a known quantity, and SpaceX could easily replicate them. Or, if they don't want to bother, could contract with Bigelow, who is currently flying two (unmanned) pressurized space stations, with designs for manned versions ready to go and awaiting a way to get there. SpaceX and Bigelow have already announced plans to partner for orbital station operations.

A Dragon and a Bigelow station would provide a nice ride to Mars. Getting to the surface and back would be a bit of a problem, but a SpaceX/Bigelow team could possibly land on Phobos and return in the next 5 years. And on a darn low budget, too. If you want to walk on Mars without too much tech development, Dragon 2 should be able to land just as it does on Earth. Dunno how you'd get back up, though. Maybe you could land a Falcon-ish booster loaded with a storable oxidizer (like peroxide) on little enough juice that it could get back into orbit. Haven't looked into the numbers there; F9-1 is certainly single stage to orbit on Mars, but down-and-up on the same fuel load seems unlikely. It'd certainly work with ISRU propellants, but that's a nice can of worms.

In my opinion, Orion is pretty much worthless, although that's a strong opinion. Realistically it is at the very least a hugely flawed program.

Orion has no mission yet, it's really just a component of a larger system, but that larger system hasn't been designed or funded.

Worse, Orion has several design flaws that limit its usefulness. For example, it's designed with an old-fashioned tractor abort system, a huge solid fueled rocket that will be attached to the capsule during launches. However, in most realistic scenarios the crew for a mission that would use Orion would not actually be launched from Earth on Orion, rendering that feature nearly useless. Except that it's a feature that takes away literal tons of useful hardware from the spacecraft since it is a heavy (7.5 tonnes) component that steals payload mass from the rest of the vehicle.

That sort of issue is endemic to the entire Orion project, and even worse for SLS. It's a hugely expensive hypothetically useful system designed around hypothetical constraints for missions that haven't even been designed, let alone funded, yet. Realistically it'll probably end up not being useful for whatever mission architectures we end up with for future manned interplanetary missions, and more flexible designs or newer systems are, I suspect, far more likely to be useful and practical when that time comes.

Orion is particularly interesting since it's sort of the cornerstone of a potential manned Mars mission. But when you compare it against competing designs such as SpaceX's "MCT" architecture there is about 1-2 orders of magnitude greater cost, significantly greater complexity, and yet less capability. At this point there is a very high likelihood that no human crew will ever end up in an Orion spacecraft, and the more likely outcome is that the project will be abandoned prior to anything interesting happening with it.

[ ] has no mission yet, it's really just a component of a larger system, but that larger system hasn't been designed or funded

Fill in the blank and you've described a good fraction of NASA's technology over the past 20 years.

SpaceX as of right now only has medium class rockets which is aimed at space station resupply. The Space Launch System that Boeing uses to carry the Orion is a heavy lift class. The difference is in carrying capacity. Think star destroyer and super star destroyer.

I am both amazed and disappointed at the cost to do one launch of this machine. How much of that cost is going to occur each launch?

This test cost $370 million.

An SLS launch is projected to cost $500 million.

A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-lan...

Wow, almost $2.5B at today's cost. There is no way that they would allow that much today.

Shuttle launches cost $1-2B, and carried significantly less to orbit.

There's some accounting fun in that, though. The marginal cost of a Shuttle launch was considerably lower. $1-2 billion is what you get by dividing the budget by the number of launches. Much of the cost went into maintaining the fleet and would have had to be paid whether or not they launched. That's substantially different than with an expendable launcher.

Lmfao isn't that extremely ironic? The purpose of the shuttle was to have a semi-reusable rocket to save a little money. Instead we end up blowing billions just maintaining and refurbishing the fleet. The shuttle very obviously wasn't the way to go.

I think SpaceX's grasshopper setup is more promising. It doesn't need to withstand the same pressures that the shuttle had to because of the altitude at which it returns to Earth, so there's not so much to refurbish. That, and it also comes down like a pencil rather than like a rock.

The Shuttle's cheapness was predicated on a high launch rate. When the high launch rate wasn't achievable, it became pretty expensive. That's only to be expected, of course. A 747 is an economical way to fling a bunch of people and cargo across the Pacific if you do it once a day, but it's terribly expensive if you only fly it a couple of times a year. The Shuttle was decent enough conceptually, but it pushed the envelope in too many places and that hurt reusability a lot.

I agree that SpaceX's setup is more promising. The fact that they're slightly modifying an existing expendable rocket that's already cost-competitive means that any reuse is just a bonus. They can throw away a bunch of boosters as they work on the problem, which wasn't an option with the shuttle at $2 billion apiece just to construct them.

The cost of a Shuttle launch was $450M and carried 24,400 kg & 7 people to LEO. The only thing that can compete with that short of the Saturn V is the Delta IV-Heavy, which is $340M per launch and can carry 28,790 kg to LEO.

Where does that $450M figure come from? I'm looking at Wikipedia where I presume you took that from, and it says the total cost adjusted for inflation was $196 billion, with 135 launches, that (with straight division) averages out to 1.5 billion adjusted for inflation over the life of the shuttle.

Yeah, during Apollo, the NASA budget was 2.5-4.5% of the total federal budget, vs. 0.5% today.

During Apollo the federal budget was also many times smaller. In real dollars NASA's budget is only about 20% smaller than its average in the 60's. The difference with respect to human space travel is risk aversion and lack of focus and political will.

The US needs another cold war to get it motivated. Maybe if China steps it up...

The US is currently, and for the foreseeable future, solely reliant upon Russia to get astronauts to & from LEO & the ISS. Frankly, I'm surprised Putin hasn't rattled that saber yet.

Edit: I'm rooting for Sabre & Skylon, myself. Perhaps not for big payloads but for 'naut travel, anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_%28rocket_engine%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29

> and for the foreseeable future

That depends on whether or not 2017 is foreseeable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development). Since 2012 the US has had a craft that is capable of taking people to and from the ISS, NASA just wants to do an excessive amount of testing and incremental improvements before we trust it (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/05/...).

Well, technology is supposed to drop in cost over the years, while also getting better.

How much would you like it to cost?

That's why reusability is so important.

Just the Delta IV Heavy cost $375 million. Rockets are expensive.

I did a Google search for a breakdown of the costs related to launching rocket. Found this => http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/launch.htm.

They are, but they're not quite this expensive.

This isn't just a rocket, it's a rocket with paperwork certifying USAF involvement and EELV contracting and various oversight instruments, and manufactured by ULA, the consortium we allowed to become a monopoly, which will offer jobs to everyone involved in this process after they retire from government service.

Private telecom satellites, which are in fact an open market, go for any of the Russian, Chinese, or European launchers, and recently for SpaceX, because ULA's products are too expensive unless you're the US Government.

ULA in this view is effectively a branch of the US space program, which is allowed to guarantee its shareholders a profit, and is protected from allegations of waste because we have NASA to use as a punching bag, they're just a 'private sector contractor'.

The SLS is designed for a 500m cost per launch. This was a test flight using the very expensive Delta IV rocket, not the SLS rocket, currently in development.

For reference, the Saturn V cost (fixed for 2014 inflation) is 3b per launch. The Space Shuttle cost 1.5b per flight. So this system is fairly cheap historically, especially considering how much lifting power the Block II configuration will provide.

Interesting that we went from 3b to 1.5b from the Saturn V to the STS, half, but this time are going from 1.5b to 500m, a third.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

For those interested, the new Gerard R. Ford class aircraft carrier costs 14b in R&D and 9b in construction and costs 2.5b a year to run (including other ships in carrier group). If I'm doing my math right, something like the SLS, and its lifetime of missions (excluding Mars), is comparable to having another carrier in the US military. Currently we have ten carriers and two under construction.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/carriers/cv-list.asp

That are the projections, right? How much security is there, that the real costs will be quite that number?

The Space Shuttle once also should be much more affordable than it really was ....

Also to compare the Saturn V with one Space Shuttle lift is really not fair at all ... since the Saturn V could carry much more weight, as much I know as the Shuttle in one lift (more than 100tons for the Saturn V vs. 24 tons for the Space Shuttle into a low orbit).

It's a bit sad (in terms of lost opportunities to put mass in orbit) to recall that the Shuttle, empty, weighed about 86 tons. This weight went to orbit every time whether the mission needed people or not. So the launch to LEO capability of the Shuttle was actually about 110 tons, on par with the Saturn V.

Yes, you are making the classic "we spend X for the defense project and that would buy Y."

You aren't adding anything to the conversation because it never changes anything. Can we try some non-classic thinking? Maybe we can add something new to the discussion .

I don't think I am. I'm just trying to put that cost into some perspective. Its comparable to a aircraft carrier in some ways. I'm not necessarily advocating for cutting the military spending. If people are comfortable with taxation for one of those carriers then they should, arguably, be comfortable for taxation for the SLS.

I think people have distorted ideas of what space travel really costs. Describing it as a 13th carrier puts thing into perspective.

An aircraft carrier is a mobile city with a nuclear reactor, and hundreds of warplanes that serves a purpose for decades. I think it's a big stretch to make any kind of comparison. It really only confuses the issue.

A Falcon 9, which from my understanding has similar capabilities as the Delta IV, costs 60 million per launch. SpaceX is targeting 5-7 million per launch, but that depends on them getting the full reusabily they want. We'll have to wait and see if they actually achieve that price point.

Delta IV Heavy (which EFT-1 flew on) is currently the world's most powerful rocket, capable of putting 30 tons into LEO, about twice the payload of the Falcon 9. The Falcon Heavy which is supposed to make its first flight sometime next year is supposed to carry about twice the payload of a Delta IV Heavy[1]. However, NASA could not choose it for a few very good reasons: A) it isn't ready to fly yet and B) NASA really really needed this mission to go perfectly, and so being on the first flight of a brand new, less tested rocket created too high a risk of program cancellation.

NASA was very concerned that if there were problems with this launch it would lead to program termination in the current budget environment. Especially given the fiasco of the Constellation program, and the fiasco of every program save two (ISS and STS) dating back to Apollo Applications and the Space Task Group, I can understand NASA's concern.

[1]: Note that when Musk originally announced this rocket as the Falcon 9 Heavy back in 2011, it was supposed to first fly in 2013, and all their website sas now is "Expected in 2015". Rocketry and space is HARD. Even for SpaceX.

Thanks for the response, did a bit more research and realized my mistake of not comparing the heavy versions of both rockets. I did find this article (http://www.nss.org/articles/falconheavy.html) that talks about the Falcon Heavy and it's projected cost of 100 million per launch, almost 1/4 of the price, and can carry more then double the payload. However it's a bit old (2011) and I'm not sure if that projected price point might have changed, with the delays and all.

You need a Falcon Heavy for today's launch, but the problem here is that there is no such thing as a Falcon Heavy. It doesn't exist yet, or ever.

Not to mention there's risk in NASA putting its Orion dreams on something thats currently unproven. If the publish saw Orion blow up today then that could prove disastrous for the SLS program.

'While the capsule did not carry any people, some artifacts were on board, including a sample of lunar soil, part of a dinosaur fossil and a recording of the Mars movement from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.”'

Wait, what? Does anyone know why? Is this a tradition of some kind?

Some of it, at least, is likely to test the effect of passing through the Van Allen belts a couple times.

I really enjoy all the comments to these types of articles. Obviously, a whole lot of us are armchair rocket scientists. It's nice that there are clearly a few actual factual rocket scientists here as well.

Here's to lots more to discuss in the coming years...

A related article makes a point about the very low morale from astronauts for going to an asteroid using Orion and SLS, which is the major first use for Orion: http://gizmodo.com/orions-a-triumph-lets-not-waste-it-166656...

I suspect public opinion about such a quest is just as low for this milestone.

For those who saw the launch but are looking for a video of the splashdown:

Longer NASA coverage (5:23) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdmZAvwznOU

More concise coverage by the AP (0:54) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCF4dkGqV78

"...there's your new spacecraft, America." (1m15s: [1])

That's ignoring Dragon and Dragon v2, among others. This isn't the 60's or the 80's, when there was only one game in town, and sports-commentator-like narration propaganda for spaceflight was understandable. Cut the BS narration please, NASA/ULA (who does the narrator work for?), you're embarrassing yourselves.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdmZAvwznOU#t=1m12s

This isn't the 60s. What an embarrassing display of technology.

We could have the Space Shuttle 2.0 but we get this rehashed waste of money instead.

So disappointing.

Was very cool to watch the descent and splashdown.

Agreed. Watching the descent and the parachutes opening was mesmerizing.

Watching the little capsule barrel in toward the water before the parachutes opened - all I could think of was HOLY CRAP POP THOSE CHUTES!

11 parachutes split into 3 separate stages, very cool to watch descend.

For me it was the free fall. Without any parachute.

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