It's great to see things all coming together but this part made me chuckle:
> officials declined to say whether this first SLS launch will occur by year's end as had been planned or will bump into 2022
SLS was meant to fly in 2018. It's clear there's something very wrong with the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed combination. These companies have perfected the art of milking the taxpayer and impeding advances like orbital refuelling and depots as much as possible for the sake of higher profitability.
There's been over ten years of prominent people and ex-NASA administrators calling for it to be scrapped, these people have proven right time and time again, because now it's a $20bn white elephant with little future and everyone just going through the motions until it is shuttered.
NASA just signed a new contract for the already developed single use RS-25 engines on SLS, they are paying $150m per engine. This is about the same cost as a fully resuable Starship by SpaceX.
This is a Jobs program, not a Space program. It's working as intended! Most politicians don't care about Space, but Jobs programs are great for re-election and basically unkillable.
Think of it this way: the Jobs spend was going to happen anyway. But instead of high-speed trains to nowhere (hello California!) we get rovers on Mars. Wasteful, but not a total waste.
This doesn't sound right: according to Wikipedia, the cost of the Perseverance rover is $2.7e9 total over 10 years, whereas the cost of SLS is $2.5e9/year (figure for 2020). I agree that it's a jobs program, but the rovers on Mars could be too small to be relevant to the calculation. Maybe it should be "instead of high-speed trains to nowhere it's rockets to nowhere". You don't get rovers on Mars because of the spending on SLS, you get them despite the wasteful spending.
>These companies have perfected the art of milking the taxpayer
Glad some one said something about this. It seems like public and private sector has some how magically merged in US. Shall we remind what happens when you privatize some thing public like prison.
Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey with funding by Peter Thiel, is trying to take that startup approach to defense contracting. They raised an additional $200M in venture capital last year. They build drones among other things.
SpaceX doesn't have the domain knowledge of a defense prime to be able to really compete with them, at least certainly not today.
Drones, missiles, fighter planes are chock full of proprietary software developed by the primes and hardware developed either by themselves or often Tier 2 or Tier 3 suppliers. Replicating that isn't done overnight and would be an immensely challenging uphill battle against entrenched corporations with decades of experience and very close ties with Washington, which makes competing with NASA look like a walk in the park.
SpaceX would need to hire former lobbyists, managers and engineers from primes and their suppliers and play a really long game to try to get there. Doesn't seem feasible in less than 10 years and even that is an outrageously optimistic timeline.
SpaceX absolutely competes against NASA in SLS case - SLS is so absurd even deep pockets of USA taxpayer can't prevent SLS losing in comparison to SpaceX solutions. Of course, NASA can use more regulatory heavy handing - they had approximately that unfortunate experience with Beal Aerospace - but we'll see if NASA will get to it in the current situation. So far the forecast isn't that dark.
Old organizations grow slow, new organizations can cut corners and the survivorship bias makes it seem like what they do is obvious and anyone not doing it should have known better.
There are problems with these old organizations that had much of their foundations built on an initial project with unlimited funding to get to the moon as fast as possible. Those problems aren't easy to fix. Some of those problems are because funding is dependent on continually changing legislation and on top of doing things, the government-space-industrial-complex has to manage the government relationship.
> Old organizations grow slow, new organizations can cut corners and the survivorship bias makes it seem like what they do is obvious and anyone not doing it should have known better.
Startups cutting corners certainly has some truth (e.g. the drama around SpaceX's last-minute flight approval for its Starship tests comes to mind). However, that doesn't mean the incumbents' processes are free from such problems.
For example, Boeing's new crew capsule encountered problems during testing. Investigating those problems exposed more problems which hadn't been spotted, and this worried NASA enough to launch an independent investigation into Boeing's development processes.
Even this SLS test could be argued as 'cutting corners': it's a repeat of an earlier test, which aborted early due to the hydraulic gimbal/steering system going outside an acceptable safety margin. The difference between that aborted test and this successful test is that they changed the acceptable safety margin.
I disagree. SLS has nothing to do with the Apollo program. It's built mainly from Shuttle parts, so everything they need is somewhat there already. If you compare that to SpaceX's starship which needed to develop a completely new engine from scratch, it's laughable how slow the progress is. But as somebody said it's a jobs program. And just because you need to manage a relationship with the government doesn't mean your engineers can't do a good job and there are clearly several issues (see e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/13714885009027...)
We don't lack for heavy lift -- we have Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy and will soon also have New Glenn and Vulcan.
We lack for super heavy lift, but we've been lacking for that since Saturn V was retired. Some people sometimes count Shuttle as super-heavy, but they cheat by including the Shuttle mass as part of the lift mass.
SLS as is isn't super-heavy either, it requires the planned but un-funded Exploration Upper Stage for that, which is likely never going to get funded.
Isn't a large part of it about keeping people employed in jobs that develop and maintain the skills required to create rockets etc? It's both a job creation program and a national security program to ensure there is a constant source of expertise in the area?
Creating engineering jobs at NASA would be one thing, but creating jobs at a private contractor is vastly more expensive. That overhead is all about lining well connected people’s pockets.
It’s almost silly how much effort is put into making things as inefficient as possible. The federal government is intentionally given a bad reputation here, but it’s shocking how much more efficient they are internally vs outsourcing stuff.
I had the same feeling. A lot of the things that NASA develops internally are mindblowing (e.g. the Mars rovers or the Casini probe, both developed by JPL), but everything subcontracted to Boeing or Lookeed endup uber delayed and hyper expensive.
If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive.
The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, and the main explanation of that was 'to develop a new landing mechanism'. Ok, I guess.
And now Perseverance is again 2.5 billion despite large parts of the rover, landing system and so on, were already 95% developed.
Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.
Space Nerds bitch less about these programs since they at least are successful compared to the human part of NASA but if you really look at the achievement per $ its not that fantastic.
It's also worth noting that technically JPL contracts to NASA... It's actually part of Caltech under contract to NASA rather than a direct NASA organization.
John Carmack, of Armadillo Aerospace fame (and Quake too), once mentioned how they helped some NASA specialists in a project where their flying platform Pixel was involved. John said, that collaboration was the first opportunity for at least some NASA PhDs to actually work with flying hardware - years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.
This would make (some) sense if otherwise these skills were going away, but they very much are not.
If NASA budget were used effectively you would create tons of jobs at the private contractors.
SpaceX and to a lesser extent BO, RelativitySpace, Electron and so on are all working on innovative engine and rockets. At SpaceX they are doing things far more advanced then anything on SLS along pretty much every metric.
This is specifically about employing people in Alabama and Utah.
Creating jobs by employing people to create an overpriced and inferior product at the expense of the taxpayer doesn't work in a capitalistic economy. It's just throwing away talent and stifles any competition that doesn't have MASSIVE financial backing, which is why it's taken so long to have any kind of commercial competition.
If you mean "isn't a large part of it about shoveling pork barrel money to selected constituencies", then absolutely. For actual skills, SpaceX, Blue Origin etc seem to be keeping rocket scientists employed just fine.
With pork barrel it's the government, through their elected officials, and, therefore, the people themselves, who plan these strategic job creation and maintenance programs.
SpaceX and Boeing don't answer directly to the people.
It's sad that these reusable engines (the test fired ones have flown lots of times and are super-reliable and battle tested) are going to be discarded on an expendable launcher.
There are only a handful of RS-25s left in existence, they're all going to be used, when some of them should be in a museum. NASA is ordering more, but Rocketdyne/Aerojet are claiming new ones will cost, I kid you not, $100 million per engine, more than the cost of Falcon Heavy launch -- for ONE engine.
How can this possibly be competitive with BE-4 that ULA is using, or the Raptor that's going to be used on Starship?
Rocketdyne is clearly defrauding the government here with massively inflated costs.
I think saying they're 'super-reliable and battle tested' is a bit strong. The SLS program has been plagued by engine problems in the last year. They've already replaced at least one fuel (preburner?) valve, and had issues with the ox (preburner?) valve during the green run.
Rocket engines are hard, they're eternally finicky. I think there are very few engines in the world (SpaceX Merlin might come close) that reasonably get more reliable after more use; RS-25...I would not put high on the list.
No Merlin has yet achieved that, and we don't know how much refurbishment they need relative to the RS-25 either. But no RS-25 has ever failed during flight, whereas Merlins have failed multiple times, and Raptors at this point seem to fail quite often.
Now, I'm a SpaceX fanboy so I'm rooting for Raptor and Starship/Super Heavy, but I think it's unfair to say that the RS-25 hasn't proven itself.
>By about T-3 seconds, all engines were up and operating at 100% of rated power level. Exactly when it happened is not clear, but on the right engine, the gold plated pin from LOX post 32 in row 13 came shooting out. [...] Now two scary things could have happened. First, the LOX post, which was pinned for a reason, could have failed allowing LOX to pour into the engine cavity where the hot hydrogen was introduced. [...] Failure of the LOX post was considered a CRIT 1 failure [...] How close we were to disaster has never been determined. [...] Second, the nozzle extension could have failed. [...] Someone had calculated that if 5 adjacent cooling tubes split or were otherwise ruptured, there would not be enough local area cooling and a burn through would occur, causing a cascading failure of the nozzle and ... a CRIT 1 failure. [...] The bullet shaped LOX post pin hit the side of the right engine nozzle extension about two thirds of the way to the end with great force. Just by sheer luck, three nozzle tubes were breached.
You've brought up the key piece here, the scope of refurbishment. If engines become a Ship of Theseus problem, then it compromises the idea that age proves a particular engine serial number reliability. I think there's a difference between the design overall being reliable (which I agree RS25 has shown), and lifetime improving a unit's reliability.
For comparison on refurb, a Falcon9 first stage with 9 engines is refurbished for $250k[1], while refurbishing 16 RS25 engines (and building a new engine controller) cost $572M[2]. Shuttle and its components weren't reused, they were rebuilt, and this (probably unfair) cost comparison shows it.
> and Raptors at this point seem to fail quite often
I know this isn't actually a dig at Raptors, but I would expect that Raptors are flying at a point in the development cycle where most engines were still only used on test stands.
It does seem like a serious drawback to making improvements rapidly that the post-firing engine is unavailable for examination, of course... :)
According to wikipedia [1], the marginal cost of a SpaceX Raptor engine was $1m in 2019 and is targed to eventually be only $250k. Could anyone with more information explain why there is such a large cost discrepancy between the SpaceX and NASA engines?
I believe it’s because spaceX is vertically integrated into all things rockets. They are literally buying raw materials and outputting working rockets. I don’t think NASA and their many suppliers and their many suppliers can get the same level of cost efficiency
RAC1 is the current SLS (basically) and RAC 2 was basically modern Saturn V.
I remember in 2016 people saying 'we can't cancel it, its almost ready' but the only thing that makes sense, if you do any sort of analysis, even the most optimistic (that will 100% not happen) its a terrible project that is gone hold NASA back for years.
NASA is certainly a victim of misaligned incentives and Darwinian selection. Its budgeting process rewards political savvy (e.g. jobs programs and pork), rather than effective delivery of its stated goals.
It's tempting to align their incentives more towards outcomes, but we saw how that rewarded risk taking in the Shuttle program (and self-deception about those risks, e.g. Challenger's o-rings).
The current two-level model seems like the worst of both worlds, with NASA being budgeted politically, then funneling that money to monopolistic private contractors which are 'too big to fail' (ULA, etc.).
The disruption of those contractors by SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Relativity, etc. (and perhaps Blue Origin, if they actually deliver anything) was sorely needed. For NASA, this gives a credible alternative to the pork, without politicians appearing to be 'anti-NASA/science'.
It's been done with police departments, when the old one gets out of hand. Minneapolis is doing this after a litany of problems culminating in George Floyd's murder.
I'm sure in practice you would tweak it on each iteration. My worry is more about the incentives around the end of the cycle, knowing that your job and entire organization is about to be scrapped.
"Let’s be very honest, We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real."(2014)[0]
> After a thorough review of the rocket program, the agency committed to a maiden flight by November 2018, but officials kept open the possibility of having the SLS ready to fly sooner — perhaps as early as late 2017 on the scheduled NASA touted since the launch vehicle’s inception.
“SLS will go away," he said. "It could go away during a Biden administration or a next Trump administration… because at some point commercial entities are going to catch up. They are really going to build a heavy lift launch vehicle sort of like SLS that they will be able to fly for a much cheaper price than NASA can do SLS. That’s just the way it works.”
That's less of a "FH can't be human-rated" and more of a "there's not point in human-rating FH right now".
FH is heavily derived from the human-rated F9, but what capsule would fly on FH? Crew Dragon flies fine on F9, and NASA isn't looking to fly Orion on FH. If the latter part changed I'm sure SpaceX would undertake the human rating.
Falcon Heavy took longer than expected, but still managed to launch years ago. The only reason they're not bothering to get it human-rated is that they've switched all focus to Starship.
This has actually caused some interesting dynamics:
- To get F9 human-rated, SpaceX had to perform many successful launches using the same configuration.
- Keeping the same configuration essentially froze any further development of F9.
- Development focus switched to a green-field successor, the BFR/Starship.
- Announcement of BFR/Starship caused an Osborne Effect for Falcon Heavy: anyone considering it (even SpaceX themselves!) would be better off waiting to see if Starship works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- This stifled Falcon Heavy's market (which was already questionable/nascent), resulting in very few launches
- Having very few launches makes it hard to human-rate Falcon Heavy (in any case, SpaceX have bet the house on Starship)
To me having a particularly heavy rocket to be man-rated is like stepping into Shuttle problems again. That is, trying to make a system both very safe and having a large mass payloads.
Why to have a larger than necessary rocket, which has additional problems with just getting stuff to orbit - FH is more complex than F9 - to carry humans, who requires extra care?
Much better, from the point of safety, is to have a moderate-sized launcher human rated and specializing in bringing humans safely to orbit. After that it's much safer to use whatever means of travel are brought to space by any other launchers, those with focus on economy and less on safety.
A counterargument is usually a variation of "it's very expensive", but that's just, roughly, because human life is valued cheap enough to allow for suboptimal choices.
The new SpaceX Starship super heavy rocket will be the biggest rocket ever built and will carry humans. It probably won't get "man-rated" by NASA before the first humans start going up in it, but I don't know about the legal details of that possibility. SpaceX has a much high risk tolerance than NASA.
Lots of talk about the expense and delays of SLS, but some people consider the SLS to be horribly unsafe to fly humans on, which is an even better reason to cancel it.
Also, the first test did not reveal any kind of flaw in design or construction of the stage. It aborted early because of hydraulic pressure fluctuations that were within spec -- but exceeded extremely conservative limits in place for that test to protect the stage. The main thing that differed in the second test was a software tweak to relax those limits.
I personally think continuing the program is throwing good money after bad, given the availability of alternatives and the limited missions left for SLS (I'm not sure they're planning to use it for anything other than Orion at this point) -- but test failures are expected in rocketry (SpaceX has plenty in public), and it makes no sense at all to beat NASA up for this one.
The difference is that as bad as the F-35 is, cancelling it would have huge repercussions. On the other hand, the SLS could be cancelled tomorrow and nobody outside of NASA and the contractors would even notice.
Comparatively the F-35 is a lot better anyway. Its nowhere near as bad as people like to scream about it, it was just built for a world that doesn't really exist anymore and didn't meet the ambitious targets set for it originally. New F-16s are just as expensive (flyaway, presumably cheaper to maintain, but an F-16 is going to be a sitting duck against a stealth fighter with a modern sensor package as time goes on)
> officials declined to say whether this first SLS launch will occur by year's end as had been planned or will bump into 2022
SLS was meant to fly in 2018. It's clear there's something very wrong with the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed combination. These companies have perfected the art of milking the taxpayer and impeding advances like orbital refuelling and depots as much as possible for the sake of higher profitability.
There's been over ten years of prominent people and ex-NASA administrators calling for it to be scrapped, these people have proven right time and time again, because now it's a $20bn white elephant with little future and everyone just going through the motions until it is shuttered.
NASA just signed a new contract for the already developed single use RS-25 engines on SLS, they are paying $150m per engine. This is about the same cost as a fully resuable Starship by SpaceX.