SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”.
The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned.
My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.
The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.
This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. So yes we may have the best tech/gear in the world but may be spending way too much to only get a slight edge and find this edge is not even sustainable.
I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.
That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.
I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.
Isn't this already known though?
The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.
Accurately
Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...
A phrase I learned at NASA: "With enough thrust anything can fly".
The fact that SLS isn’t designed for reusability, making its per-launch cost something like $4billion, means it’s effectively already outclassed, outcompeted, and obsolete.
Any source?
For twenty years now they have tried to build a launcher based on recycling as many ~parts~jobs from the Shuttle program as possible and thus far have flown exactly zero people and exactly zero kilograms of cargo. The Senate doesn't mind, because the STS is a jobs program, not a spaceflight program. (Although it's not like the market for SRBs in particular has been very hot lately given how few of them have been in fact launched, so I dunno. Probably the govt is paying ATK just to keep the plant running so they'll be able to build/refurbish a pair of boosters every two or three years which is the expected STS launch rate.)
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/08/24/...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Developmen...
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to develop a new rocket called the Space Launch System. It set performance requirements for the rocket (use just two stages to lift 70 tons into low-Earth orbit, use a third stage to lift 130 tons to LEO, carry cargo and astronauts to ISS, carry deep-space crew capsule, support gradual increase in performance by "evolutionary growth" with new stages), and required that, "where practicable", NASA should maintain existing Space-Shuttle and Ares contracts, workforces, infrastructure, and technologies, and that the rocket be scheduled to launch no later than the end of 2016.
The precise requirements were written to force NASA to design a rocket that maintained lucrative Space Shuttle-era contracts.
https://spaceref.com/press-release/hatch-passage-of-nasa-rea...
Also, the requirement to upgrade existing infrastructure ensured that billions of dollars went into Bill Nelson's district in Florida. (He is now the highest-ranking official at NASA.)
The law did not establish long-term funding for the development of the rocket. As with all NASA projects, money is granted one year at a time in Congress's annual budget. In 2011, NASA announced the plan to build this rocket. In accordance with the law's requirements and intention, it re-used almost all core technologies, infrastructure, and major subcontractors of the Space Shuttle. There was actually some fuss about this at the time:
https://spacenews.com/shelby-nasa-hold-competition-sls-boost...
but the strategy of "give Congress what they want" has worked: the Planetary Society shows that Congress has consistently granted NASA more money than asked for to fund SLS.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
In particular, Richard Shelby (senator from Alabama, which is home to many NASA facilities, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2018–2021) was a powerful political supporter of the SLS, ensuring its continued funding, and attacking anybody who even suggested it might not be necessary.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...
We like to pretend that political influence on government institutions is a new "bug" and not something build into the system from day one.
If their engine is between 5-100x more expensive than an equivalent engine from competiting companies. Why is it so impossible to be a little bit more agile and consider the other engines?
You can't just swap engines without a significant redesign of the rocket and ground support equipment to match.
the RS-25 burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; the BE-4 and Raptor burn methane and liquid oxygen, but the Raptor uses supercooled densified propellants while the BE4 takes them at closer to their boiling point. Switching between BE-4 and Raptor would require nearly as much work as a switch from RS-25 to either.
The varying density, temperature, and fuel-to-oxidizer ratios mean the propellant tanks would need to change size, and that may have some tricky structural implications with respect to the side boosters of the SLS. And the ground support equipment (launch pad, tower, etc., ) would of course also need to be adjusted to match.
For a moment there I thought that Low Earth Geostationary Orbit might be a thing.
How quickly we forget that just a few years ago the space industry looked very different from how it does today.
Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.
Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us. For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward, even if it doesn't lead to cancer cures or longer-lasting batteries.
In the same way, sending people into space connects us to all those nameless explorers who sailed into the Pacific in rickety boats, or conquered the Americas (the first time) via the Bering ice bridge.
When I think of the Apollo 8 astronauts seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time, I can almost feel what they felt: awe, perspective, loneliness, and maybe even that primal fear that we all get from being so far from home. I truly cannot wait to watch (and to have my kids watch) astronauts walking on the Moon.
Sure, we can argue about whether we should spend more money on X and less money on Y--that's what democracy is all about. But to say that NASA shouldn't be sending humans into space is, in my mind, missing the forest for the trees.
But is putting humans in a low Earth orbit really gaining knowledge about the universe at this point? Surely we've hit the point of diminishing returns by now.
If you ignore the huge difference in efficacy and results, sure.
That's true only in a very strained and tautological sense of "inspire".
Science has quantifiable results. There are facts that we know and theories we've understood (and discarded!) because of telescopes and probes that we would not know had they not flown. Whether that knowledge has value or not is, I guess, subjective. But it's not only "inspiration" except insofar as you declare that the only reason for wanting to know about martian geology or the early universe or whatever is "because it inspires us". Which is to say: you're making a semantic argument, not a profound one.
Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?
We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight.
The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorers of all kinds. Even if a child doesn't end up being an astronaut, they end up more curious than if we only sent rovers. Because we are human.
It just seems sadly cynical to hear people think "there is no utility to human exploration".
I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.
However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.
Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.
I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera and sensors happen to show you.
Now, whether that scientific information is worth the cost? Hard to say. As much as people like criticizing public programs for "pork barrel" this and "bureaucrat red tape" that and whatever.... publicly funded programs are usually run with penny-pinching oversight and angry politicians wanting to get their day of glory by killing programs.
Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.
What if we made this third party (I'm guessing blue origin/space x) bear the cost until we have a proven result so they put their money where their mouth is...
They promise USD 1M per engine, they have to deliver at USD 1M per engine. Not a cent more.
No, we are figuring out - how do you survive in space? How do you take a shit in space? Toilets would constantly break on ISS and it was a huge problem.
And people can get shit done. They are designing robots for mining lunar regolith, but they are all less efficient than a guy with a shovel. You could send 10 dudes to the moon with a shovel and a 3D printer, and they could produce aluminium parts on the moon.
I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.
If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?
To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.
I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.
One still can see it as a "jobs program" from the individual states' point of view. From the NASA link [1], I found out that the prime contractor is in Huntsville, Alabama, and important subcontractors are in New Orleans, LA, and in Northern Utah. Highly trained engineers would certainly find jobs somewhere, but maybe not in the same states, and that would be a hit to the local economy.
So, I can see how some senators and representatives from those states could put pressure for a make-work program to continue without regards for costs and results. But still, the Congress has lots of other members, and there is a pretty good chance that those other members did not mount a strong opposition because they saw the defense implications of keeping the SLS alive.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/fs/sls.html
Basically, if this is a know-how preservation program, it is horribly mismanaged. And there's no reason why you couldn't have a know-how preservation program that also produced useful results. As with so many things, they're not playing 5D chess, they're just playing poorly.
The sea dragon concept from the 60's is completely impossible today because they literally don't make the kind of cheap steel plate it was designed to use anymore. We can't build saturn V engines anymore (despite extensive blueprints) because those who knew how to do the extremely long, perfect welds involved are all dead and that kind of weld has fallen out of fashion so the skill no longer exists.
You frequently end up re-engineering each bit of "old technology" for the current era's materials and skills, unless you literally maintain an unbroken chain of continual manufacturing all the way along. We stopped building new space shuttles 40+ years ago.
Not all R&D is amortized.
The comparison in space enthusiasm and planning is ... significant.
Wernher von Braun wrote a 281 page engineering text masquerading as a fiction novel to pitch Mars.
Current NASA leadership wrote:
- Stabilize the flight schedule
- Achieve learning curve efficiencies
- Encourage innovation
- Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
Political types love these announcements they’re going to get something for nothing.
It could have though.
Imagine a world where SpaceX burnt out in the late 2000s, and all that talent and energy moved to Boeing/Lockheed et. al.
Point being that they were far from a sure thing in 2008. The traditional contractors were seen as a safe bet by everyone involved. And the speed at which federal government moves means these things are measured in decades.
It's essentially the "Emperor has no clothes" story, but nobody believes the little boy telling the truth, because the "emperor is naked" is such an absurd statement to make. That's just silly, so of course there must be a deeper truth, a greater story, a hidden meaning.
Or just trade each $2 billion [0] SLS launch for a mix of 2000 $1 million [1] Starship launches to orbit, from orbit to destination, and/or returns.
Even if Starship launches have a significant likelihood of costing more than that, just 2 Starship launches per SLS seems like a bargain.
20 would be fantastic.
200 would be surreal.
2000 would be … what on (off) Earth could NASA do with 2000? Put all of NASA, its entire supply chain, and the Senate on Mars! O_o
Then achieve a further cost reduction for trips to Mars surface: just the cost of the electrical current required to operate a Mars habitat airlock.
Talk about time and cost efficiency!!
What is ridiculous is the crazy logic of all this is fairly sound, due to the beyond ridiculous (for today) SLS costs.
I have a funny feeling that the SLS’s days are numbered.
I don’t think these mega empires are good for the world, too much central power and too many management layers between those who rule, and those who do.
A lot of rules to follow that often seems arbitrary.
The budget is written by Congress, and the President doesn't have any direct power in Congress. They often have friends there, especially if they used to be legislators. They have some carrots and sticks, but those are actually weak and indirect tools.
If the President's party controls a house, they can usually invoke party discipline (the general sense that doing something will be good for the party and a whole and therefore good for the individual members), perhaps with some of those carrots-and-sticks for recalcitrant allies. But it's rare for the President's party to control both houses, especially considering the filibuster.
If a President made it their top priority and it were something that the party got behind them on, they could perhaps make an all-out push, calling in favors and making deals. It would come with a lot of ill will, from their own party as well as the opposition, because that's not how Congress likes to work. They see themselves as a deliberative body and don't like outside interference -- especially when it upsets the balance of their own dealmaking.
So the short answer is no, the President doesn't have that kind of power. Even if they wanted to, which they generally don't. Nobody is going to jump up and down to say, "Yay, look how efficient this President is, saving .01% of the overall budget". And while they might score a few political points off of hurting somebody that their allies don't like, it's generally not something Democratic presidents are into.
(I'm afraid there's no non-partisan way to say that the culture war is asymmetric.)
Now the trajectory (no pun intended) of SpaceX was good back then and you might have guessed they would grow rapidly in capabilities and capacity, but it wasn’t a done deal.
I’m no fan of SLS, but it was a very understandable safe bet 10 years ago.
NASA's problem is lack of funding. That is something that can't be fixed in today's world. Because the US just does not have the amount of spare cash lying around like it did in the 1960s.
That lack of NASA funding is why I predict that the US will never again put men on the Moon, no matter what all the pundits try to tell us. There just ain't no spare cash, period.
.
I also found out (afraid I don’t have a source to hand) that re-engineering the A10 (is that right?), the darling of F35 criticisers would cost more to retrofit up to modern requirements.
Yeah that's because every time the price of the programme goes up, they "buy" more planes so that the per plane cost goes down. Any plane can be "cheap" if you agree to pay up front for a million of them to be delivered "eventually, nudge-nudge, wink-wink".
I'm sure some people only look at "omg look at how much it costs to buy one!" and then forget that there's a life after the purchase that costs mind boggling amounts of money that, by simply not buying even a single jet, can actually fund a stupid amount of societal progress, from paying teachers to funding an entire NASA project.
But of course the comment itself wasn't about F35s. It was about "maybe spend less on death toys and more on the parts that make society a good thing like space exploration, the arts, education, health care, etc."
