[HN Gopher] After a decade, NASA's big rocket fails its first re...
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After a decade, NASA's big rocket fails its first real test
Author : Liron
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-01-17 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| michaericalribo wrote:
| Bummer! Especially this line:
|
| > All of this casts very serious doubt on NASA's plans to launch
| its Artemis I mission--an uncrewed precursor mission to sending
| humans to the Moon--before the end of this year.
|
| This outcome seems like good safety engineering: prioritize
| safety and control over speed.
|
| Still, it's a disappointing setback. I want to go to space now!
| And this moves the eventual realization of space tourism back
| incrementally further into the future... so much for my kids
| being Belters
| Beached wrote:
| SLS never was going to enable space tourism. You have private
| companies doing that, and doing it better than Boeing.
|
| SLS is worse than existing rockets in every way but one. Lift
| Capacity. Near term expected Space tourism doesnt need super
| heavy lift capacity. cheaper, faster, more reliable rockets
| already exist to get humans into LEO
|
| While Falcon Heavy or Delta may be able to do some of the
| artemis missions, they currently cannot do all of them planned.
| Simply because of lift capacity or payload volume. However it
| will be interesting to see what happens to SLS if SpaceX gets
| starship going before SLS. Since SLS has already been in
| development for almost 10 years, and Boeing is in charge, many
| people think we will see an orbital Starship come to market
| before SLS hits orbit, and essentially rendering the entire SLS
| program a complete waste of time and money.
|
| But dont worry, SLS will in no way slow down you getting to go
| to space, or your kids becoming belters. That timeline is
| independent of SLS, and may even be accelerated because of SLS
| failures.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| I'm intrigued at the idea that this failure "puts the
| squeeze" on private companies to get their projects in order
| faster and more efficiently. Then again I'd rather see Elon
| or Jeff make the trip ahead of me, as a vote of confidence. I
| don't want to get spaced bc of an asshole PM at deep blue! :D
| rblatz wrote:
| I don't think the SLS has been on anyone's realistic roadmap to
| space tourism for over half a decade. Private companies like
| SpaceX and to a lessor extent Blue Origin have blown past NASA
| in that department.
|
| This shows nothing besides how broken the politics around NASA
| are, and how Congress is optimizing for a totally different
| thing than getting people into space cheaply and safely.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| That makes sense. I do think there are network
| effects...NASA's success has some influence on private
| companies' success. But you're right, too, that the public
| sector bureaucracy seems to hobble the possibility of steady
| and sustained progress.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| You have to fail to move forwards. A lack of failure is a sign of
| a lack of trying anything new.
|
| Hasn't SpaceX proved that?
|
| The negative commentary around this seems a little in contrast to
| how we'd talk about a SpaceX "failure" on HN.
|
| I know NASA and SpaceX are very different, but Elon is the king
| of drifting deadlines too. And SpaceX do fail, but they do a good
| job of "owning their failures" and they keep moving forwards.
|
| Should we cut the NASA team a bit of slack?
|
| Let's not forget also that it's NASA who have also drastically
| changed their strategy and have enabled private companies like
| SpaceX to shine through their partnerships.
|
| NASA is big, wasteful, bureaucratic yes, but they are changing,
| slowly... and this "failure" is not the stick I'd choose to beat
| them with.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| My impression is that the big difference between NASA's human
| spaceflight program and SpaceX is that, where NASA has
| failures, SpaceX has stretch goals that weren't met.
|
| This is an unfortunate consequence of any insufficiently
| iterative development process.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| SpaceX made failure part of its strategy. Rocket explodes, no
| big deal, we expected that, the next one is ready.
|
| NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot
| of time and money making sure things work the first time, so
| when they don't, then it is a problem.
|
| This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace.
|
| > Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go
| into series production, making several versions of the STIG
| rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle
| would not be as traumatic. "That was our critical mistake in
| the last few years, because we should have been able to put
| more of these together," he said.
|
| It is not that NASA doesn't have the right to fail, but in
| their case, it is a major setback, and it is a bit
| disappointing considering how much SLS went overboard.
| dmix wrote:
| Wasn't this simply a byproduct of Congress trying to control
| the process? The idea of hard deadlines and low risk.
|
| Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again
| to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure
| political pressure instead of organizational culture.
|
| Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up
| so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at
| all.
| akiselev wrote:
| No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve
| Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both
| terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge
| impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing
| returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example),
| NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance
| or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two
| $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only
| looks at the absolute number of failures instead of
| absolute number of successful missions or their cost so
| NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme
| caution for self survival.
|
| This style of risk management has trickled down across the
| entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty
| much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to
| optimize for least number of total failures at the expense
| of productivity.
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| I don't mind failure and I understand there are going to be
| setbacks. I just wish they would fail faster. I love NASA and
| all they've done but 10 years of SLS without a launch makes me
| doubt this thing will ever get off the ground. With a new
| administration, I feel like we're one setback away from the
| whole thing being cancelled.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > I don't mind failure and I understand there are going to be
| setbacks. I just wish they would fail faster.
|
| I do agree with this. I just took issue with the lede being
| "rocket test fails" as if that's a bad thing.
|
| The underlying points are all valid, speed, cost etc but a
| failed test is not the thing to be focussing the argument on
| in my view.
| maccam94 wrote:
| SLS proponents have been claiming that all of the extra
| time and money spent on process and formal verification
| would lead to a rocket that works without having to do lots
| of trial-and-error like SpaceX. Heck, even the name of the
| test campaign, the "Green Run," kind of reflects this
| hubris and shows that NASA expected the tests to largely be
| a formality.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Doesn't a green run refer to a beginner level course?
| Like a practice ski hill?
| JshWright wrote:
| They are very different kinds of failure though... This was not
| an exploratory "try something new" test. This was an
| integration test to verify that all the "on paper" work was
| correct. The whole point of SLS is that its use of technology
| with extensive "flight heritage" is supposed to avoid having to
| break new ground.
|
| This is like discovering a major issue during the shakedown
| cruise of a new ship. It's better to find the issue now, and
| that's why they test, but the point of this test wasn't to
| learn anything new, it was supposed to just prove that it works
| as expected.
|
| SpaceX is generally very up front about tests that they think
| have a high likelihood of failure, and the tests that do fail
| tend to be doing genuinely "new things" (like belly-flopping a
| booster).
|
| I'm not a SpaceX fanboy here (I think Elon in particular is
| pretty insufferable), but it's not really to fair to compare
| SpaceX's development testing failures with this integration
| test failure.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Let's not forget also that it's NASA who have also
| drastically changed their strategy and have enabled private
| companies like SpaceX to shine through their partnerships.
|
| That's because they're required to by law. There's an entire
| section of the United States Code that's dedicated to this.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| Failure at NASA isn't like failure at SpaceX. This was the
| culmination of 10 years of simulations and pork jobs. For
| SpaceX its the culmination of a couple weeks of wielding on a
| tent using private money instead of direct public funds.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| So I listened to a podcast about this... but SpaceX and
| Boeing/NASA are explicitly taking two different approaches to
| proving their rocket will work. Obviously we know SpaceX is
| proving their rocket through system level tests. But for SLS
| the plan has been to use a long accepted NASA approved method
| of proving their design where individual parts are so
| thoroughly tested and proven to work that they don't need many
| flight tests of the full system. In fact I believe the original
| plan was one flight test without humans and then have the
| second flight be a manned mission! So they really aren't
| supposed to fail like this.
|
| So at the core are two different approaches to proving their
| system, where SpaceX totally expects some failures and SLS is
| supposed to be proven before it even flies. Personally I'm a
| fan of the SpaceX method but I can understand why the old guard
| space developers would choose this slower more cautious method.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Would you mind sharing a link to the podcast? It sounds
| interesting!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I tried to find it a bit but I'll do a more thorough search
| to see if I can figure out where I learned this. I'll let
| you know if I find it.
|
| EDIT: Did a thorough google search and looked through my
| podcast lists but I haven't been able to find it. I did
| find this podcast in my listening history which may or may
| not cover the topic, but unfortunately I don't see a
| transcript I can search through:
|
| https://theorbitalmechanics.com/show-notes/ella-atkins
| foobarian wrote:
| Adding to your comment, this closing made me sad: "So what had
| been viewed as a strength of the program, using heritage
| hardware, instead became a liability. Saturday was only the
| first real hardware test for the rocket. It cannot afford too
| many more liabilities like those on display."
|
| If anything they cannot afford _not_ to have more failures like
| that. In fact on the spectrum of failures this one was near the
| best possible outcome since something was learned without
| destroying the entire assembly. But with this kind of reactive
| thinking they may turtle up and slow down progress until the
| program gets canceled.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > A lack of failure is a sign of a lack of trying anything new.
|
| I may just have blindspots in my history knowledge here, but
| the moon landing was pretty much an unqualified success, no?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?
|
| My comment (in support of NASA) was that an isolated test
| failure shouldn't be looked upon as a failure of their entire
| programme. Instead it's actually a signal of progress being
| made (however slow that progress may be).
|
| There were plenty of isolated testing failures like this
| (some much worse) leading up to the moon landing.
| detaro wrote:
| It did go very well overall, but 3 astronauts died in testing
| (totally avoidable), several of the test-launches of the
| rockets didn't go to plan, and later Apollo missions had
| various incidents.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It was a pyrrhic success. It was so expensive it was a dead
| end.
| tw04 wrote:
| I don't think the negativity is directed at NASA so much as
| Boeing. They've made a business out of grifting, and this is
| just another example of it.
|
| Shelby is more concerned with staying in office than making
| advances in space, and it shows. That's not NASA's fault,
| they're trying to do the right thing IN SPITE of the political
| pressure to waste money in order for a politician to be able to
| claim he's "creating jobs" in his state.
|
| http://innerspace.net/congress-2/richard-shelbys-war-against...
| ryandrake wrote:
| NASA probably _could_ be as nimble as SpaceX if they didn't
| have to rely on Congress, whose goal is not to build a
| successful rocket, but to spread the money funnel across the
| States. Imagine if SpaceX's board suddenly said "the
| company's goal is now not to get to Mars, but to employ as
| many people and contractors as possible in all 50 states!"
| You'd basically get NASA.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's also important to note that while NASA might make
| multi-year plans they have to deal with a yearly budget
| from Congress and Congressional mandates. NASA has a
| relatively small budget but a lot of different tasks,
| manned spaceflight is only one of those.
|
| They have to drop whole missions after years of planning
| and construction because the next year's budget is a
| billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS
| development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets
| pushed to the next fiscal year.
| beerandt wrote:
| So basically... government could be as efficient as the
| private sector if it wasn't government?
| beowulfey wrote:
| It's not the fact that they are government, it's that the
| incentive structure is wrong.
|
| Companies are incentivized to make money. In this case,
| the government is incentivized to provide lucrative
| contracts to contracted corporations.
|
| In the 60s, when a different incentive existed, the
| government (i.e. NASA) was incredibly efficient.
| mjevans wrote:
| It could be a lot more efficient if they stopped trying
| to be subtle and instead spent more time thinking.
|
| Openly admit NASA is a basic infrastructure assurance
| program, much like the Interstate highway system is.
| (Yes, it's Military capable infrastructure, for moving
| troops and stuff around. It turns out that useful
| infrastructure improves overall economic fitness and
| activity as well.)
|
| Then group up all of the infrastructure spending and make
| sure it gives every citizen roughly equal value.
| Sometimes this can be justified in lower shipping costs
| for produced items from farms and backbone redundancy
| across the country. Other times it's connecting land and
| sea ports to the cross country grid. Evaluating a fair
| share of the commons and of resources to maintain the
| commons is a hard problem.
|
| NASA also falls under various civic services the
| government proves because it makes sense for just one
| place to do the work; or at least for a baseline that
| private entities can compete against. The distribution of
| these programs also forms part of the weight to balance
| government improvements programs among areas.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I don't think that's a charitable reading of the GP. More
| like "the government is aiming for something other than
| efficiency, and it gets what it's aiming for".
|
| If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might
| see NASA taking a different path.
| beerandt wrote:
| I agree that it isn't the goal, but that's part of the
| point.
|
| And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for
| government to government, especially for a program that
| ultimately has so much of an impact on military
| capabilities and national security.
|
| But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted
| to."
| ElFitz wrote:
| True, but they are failing very, _very_ , slowly.
|
| The big difference between NASA and SpaceX lies in how fast
| they each move, and _what_ they are failing at.
|
| Failing at launching the first private rocket on a tight
| budget, at landing a rocket for the first time, or at iterating
| on rocket designs at pace rarely, if ever, seen before is
| _expected_. As a matter of fact, it's success that isn't
| expected.
|
| Failing at making _yet another_ (very expensive) rocket built
| by supposedly experienced manufacturers overseen by a huge
| public organisation over more than a decade with huge funding?
| Well, it's a bit disturbing to say the least.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > True, but they are failing very, very, slowly.
|
| I can't argue with that!
| pfdietz wrote:
| SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis
| that ends up not preventing failure anyway.
|
| SpaceX's approach also deals with the real problem, which is
| a program having the wrong goals, rather than making mistakes
| in working toward a given goal. How many of you have built a
| product that ended up working great, but was a failure
| because it was the wrong product?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Waterfall got us to the moon. Agile will get us to Mars...
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 'Daily standups on Mars' that would make an epic show.
| jariel wrote:
| The Gemeni and Apollo projects were very iterative, and
| rife with failures.
|
| They launched a new mission every few months!
|
| Apollo burned downed and killed the crew, the next Apollo
| was up a few months later! The second moon mission was
| launched a few months after the first.
|
| 1960's NASA was a little bit like SpaceX.
|
| That said - we should remember that Space X is iterating
| on already established tech, at somewhat of a smaller
| scale. They started smaller. Let's see how it works with
| their newer, bigger gear that is breaking boundaries.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Lore suggests that that's a misconception, born of the
| Agile myth that the only thing that existed before the
| invention of either XP or Scrum was waterfall.
|
| The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to
| the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit,
| agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting
| back out of LEO again, including to Mars.
|
| For example, see
| https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240112230/Interview-
| Fro...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Congress and the Nixon administration trapped NASA in
| LEO. There was extensive planning inside NASA for
| applications of Saturn-Apollo technologies [0]. Two of
| the ambitious ones were a manned Venus flyby [1] and a
| permanent Lunar base [2]. After the Apollo I fire
| Congress lost its appetite for space and slashed NASA's
| budget [3]. The Nixon administration went all-in on the
| Space Shuttle which ate up all of NASA's manned
| spaceflight budget. Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test
| Project were the only AAP projects to survive and only at
| the cost of Apollo missions 18-20.
|
| The Saturn-Apollo program had a super-heavy lift rocket
| (Saturn V), a man-rated heavy lift rocket (Saturn IB), a
| Lunar trajectory capable command and service module, a
| lunar lander, and a workable wet workshop space station
| (Skylab).
|
| Congress tossed all of that away. The Space Shuttle
| program wasn't a _bad_ idea, a heavy lift vehicle that
| provided a shirt sleeve environment but could support EVA
| is actually an awesome thing for LEO. But Congress
| scrapping Saturn-Apollo trapped NASA in LEO because the
| Shuttle was only capable of LEO. It 's not a platform
| that can support manned Moon missions let alone any more
| distant bodies.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_P
| rogram
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/2013/11/moonbase-apollo-1968/
|
| [3] https://www.wired.com/2012/08/before-the-fire/
| akiselev wrote:
| Not only that, but the nuclear rocketry program for Mars
| was making breakthroughs like the nuclear lightbulb
| hybrid reactor & closed loop rocket engine [1] - that the
| public wouldn't see until declassified papers hit JPL's
| archives in the 2000s. This program was cancelled by
| Nixon, setting us back at least half a century.
|
| [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730003970
| pfdietz wrote:
| Not really a setback, because there was no place for that
| technology. Lack of space reactors wasn't and isn't a
| roadblock. Had that development continued it would have
| been largely wasted, and the knowledge gained would have
| decayed away.
| akiselev wrote:
| It easily functions as a self-breeding terrestrial
| reactor that reaches criticality with 1/500th to 1/1000th
| the fuel of existing nuclear reactors (~20kg). The design
| requires active power that shuts down the reactor on
| failure, making any accident a complete nonevent. It can
| even be kickstarted without huge amounts of enriched fuel
| with the addition of a neutron gun (which they used to
| test the design without nuclear fuel). The core
| infrastructure required to support such a reactor are
| also covered by far less red tape (mostly centrifuges).
|
| It would have changed the face of power generation at a
| critical time for climate change if it was allowed to
| reach fruition. Instead it was locked away in UTC & NASA
| archives.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo
| architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was
| driven by that, not by a "lack of will".
|
| It would have made some sense to incrementally improve
| some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for
| example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.
| darepublic wrote:
| Agility, sure, but don't confuse agility with agile
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Agile <> agile. In tech jargon, this particular word is
| case-sensitive.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I was making a commentary more of what I see the
| difference between NASA vs SpaceX's approach today. I
| wasn't around for Apollo, and given their crazy
| compressed timeframe for getting to the moon back then,
| there _must_ have been some agility there....
|
| I was really agreeing with the previous commenter, which
| I guess is a statement about today, and not how NASA
| operated in the 1960s...
|
| > SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive
| analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.
|
| My mistake for invoking the Agile vs Waterfall debate...
| (and potentially being wrong!)
| [deleted]
| kaba0 wrote:
| SpaceX gets tons of government funding, while NASA's was
| greatly cut over the years..
| pfdietz wrote:
| SpaceX get tons of revenue for selling a product to NASA.
| This isn't subsidy, this is purchasing a service SpaceX
| developed on their own.
|
| Why shouldn't NASA take advantage of technology developed
| by others? NASA has saved a lot of money through this.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Why bother with RS-25 if they don't even know what they don't
| know in a failure?
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Add SLS to the list of embarrassing aerospace projects from
| America F-35, 737 Max, and Starliner.
| mhh__ wrote:
| F-35 is doing just fine at the moment.
|
| It looked bad because it was the first modern aircraft to be
| developed under the watchful gaze of the internet, now it's
| doing much better in simulated combat as it's aged. It's not
| even that expensive anymore - it's not cheap by any means - but
| the new F-16 is basically the same price.
| superkuh wrote:
| >the new F-16 is basically the same price.
|
| Wow. I didn't believe you at first but wikipedia says the
| price of a F-16V is $120 million in 2020 while the latest
| F-35A buy in 2019 had them at ~$80 million a piece.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| The thesis of this article is pure hyperbole. "Oh noes, one of
| the RS-25s failed, the whole program is a failure!"
| Beached wrote:
| It is widely agreed that the whole program is a failure. Almost
| 3 years past due date, and most people believe it will still
| need more than another year. More than double the estimated
| cost Is providing very little benefit over existing rockets,
| and providing no benefits over planned rockets in development
| by others. It is adding no new capabilities, or technologies,
| and is in fact a step backwards in rocket design, not forward
| or to the side. Its sole purpose is to employ people, not push
| the space industry forward of get NASA somewhere. For all those
| reasons, people think SLS is a huge failure of a program,
| except at giving Boeing money, which is does great at.
| JackFr wrote:
| I'm not a rocket scientist and I also don't want to bash NASA,
| but the size of the budget here coupled with the lack of
| transparency about the failure is in stark contrast with what
| we've seen out of both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
|
| Maybe what NASA is trying to do here from an engineering
| perspective is much, much harder. I also feel there may be
| unjustified spin in this article. But to an untrained eye this
| article sure makes it look like an expensive jobs program for
| Alabama,Texas and Florida.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Nothing about SLS makes sense to me economically.
| F9 Launch Cost (without reuse): $65mm FH Launch Cost
| (without reuse): $150mm SLS Launch Cost: >$2,000mm
|
| How does anyone square this arrangement? What saving graces
| does SLS have (from an engineering perspective) compared to the
| SpaceX programs? There are certainly a lot of downsides and I
| would be really disappointed to learn that there are no
| upsides.
| jariel wrote:
| Well could it be the F9 etc. are targeted at a very well
| established commercial class with tons of buyers, economic
| outputs, stable market, opportunity for re-use.
|
| Whereas SLS is more like big fantasy science missions, much
| less frequent and nobody willing to really pay for it but
| government?
|
| As a very, very crude way of looking at it?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It fits with the OP theory of _" an expensive jobs program
| for Alabama, Texas and Florida."_
|
| If you think of that as the actual purpose, this is a
| successful project.
| blackrock wrote:
| Can Falcon Heavy launch payloads with a wider diameter?
|
| I assume they'd have to build an additional adapter to
| handler wider payloads.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| You gotta take care of your brothers and sisters, and you ex-
| colleuages too, and that's a lot of money bro. The real
| upside I think is that people finally figured out there are
| more economical choices other than the big boys alliance.
| imglorp wrote:
| It's all about Congress, the native American criminal class.
| They're already $14 billion in.
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/10/nasa-buying-ten-sls-
| ro...
|
| I'd like to point out the development process appears to be
| waterfall. Instead of many cheap iterations, blowing stuff up
| and continually improving, they want few, complete, expensive
| articles: that means many tests like OP article is going to
| need spin as a "failure" and not a learning cycle.
| izend wrote:
| Notice the use solid rocket fuel in the SLS and the mandate
| from Congress to retain the skills and experience. What else
| uses solid fuel? The US ICBM arsenal.
| mhh__ wrote:
| It _is_ a jobs program. It 's not nicknamed the senate launch
| system for nothing.
|
| If they were doing it now I'm sure they'd be tempted in just
| contracting out and just building the payloads, but when it was
| being laid out they didn't exist.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Now that Shelby is in the minority party in the Senate I
| think we may see this thing killed.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| As jobs programs go in the U.S., I'd rather they waste money
| on an obsolete launch system for space exploration rather
| than weapons. Unfortunately the bar is pretty low in the
| U.S..
| beerandt wrote:
| You think the US funding an alternative, government
| controlled launch system for redundant access to space _isn
| 't_ ultimately for military purposes?
| stretchcat wrote:
| What would the military applications of SLS be? It seems
| like absurd overkill for lifting military satellites. And
| the companies contracted to make SLS (namely Boeing) are
| some of the same companies already contracted to make the
| rockets which _are_ used for military launches.
| SubjectToChange wrote:
| It's a program to retain the industrial base. For
| example, Aerojet Rocketdyne would have definitely been
| bankrupt without SLS.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| The U.S. now already has alternatives in the form of
| SpaceX and ULA. I'm sure that the military wouldn't mind
| having a third option, but I don't think it's the
| ultimate reason for the continued existence of SLS.
| Isinlor wrote:
| Great comparison of SLS vs. Starship:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY
|
| Key points: https://i2.wp.com/everydayastronaut.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2...
|
| Mass to the Moon:
|
| - Saturn 5: 49 metric tonnes
|
| - SLS: 43 metric tonnes
|
| - Starship: 156 metric tonnes
|
| Price per launch:
|
| - Saturn 5: 1.2B dollars
|
| - SLS: 0.875B dollars
|
| - Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at
| 0.002B$)
|
| Price per kg:
|
| - Satrun 5: 25 600 $
|
| - SLS: 20 000 $
|
| - Starhip: 2 000 $ worse case scenario (Elon aims at 40$)
| blackrock wrote:
| This also makes the big assumption that Starship is
| successful. And that Starship's cost estimates are even
| realistic.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at
| 0.002B$)
|
| Lol. No. That is beyond pipe dream territory. There a
| innumerable costs associated with spacelaunch that have
| absolutely nothing to do with reusability. Range closures.
| Payload integration. Regulatory compliance (ie safety).
| Telemetry. That USAF person in the back of the room with
| their finger on the destruct button. That stuff doesn't
| happen for free. Unless SpaceX is given its own range, its
| own giant chunk of the atlantic ocean closed to everything
| but spaceX, massive launches are still going to cost well
| over 0.1B, 100 million.
|
| And... insurance.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _That USAF person in the back of the room with their
| finger on the destruct button._
|
| I'm not going up until that job is eliminated!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Then you aren't going up. Rockets are massive tanks of
| explosives flying through the air at supersonic speeds.
| That person is there to protect the people on the ground.
| Launch escape systems will protect the crew, but given
| the energies involved, the crew is less important than
| the potential for killing hundreds on the ground, or
| potentially thousands onboard a cruise ship.
| maccam94 wrote:
| > massive tanks of explosives flying through the air at
| supersonic speeds
|
| I mean, so were Concorde jets...
| dotancohen wrote:
| Why don't airliners have AFTS, then?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Airliners have been proven to be much safer than rockets.
| By way of example, spaceflight has a 3% fatality rate for
| astronauts [0]. If (pre-COVID) Heathrow airport
| (80,000,000 passengers in 2019) had a similar fatality
| rate, 7000 people would die every day, at that airport
| alone. Airliners are massively, massively safe.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-
| related_ac...
| Jabbles wrote:
| I hope it's actually 2 people like in nuclear missile
| silos. Is there any public information?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/30/spacex-
| falcon...
|
| "CAPE CANAVERAL -- Air Force safety officers sent
| commands to destroy SpaceX's failing Falcon 9 rocket
| after its launch from Cape Canaveral on Sunday morning,
| but long after a malfunction had already caused the
| rocket to break apart, officials confirmed Monday."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety
|
| "Some launch systems use flight termination for range
| safety. In these systems the RSO can remotely command the
| vehicle to self-destruct to prevent the vehicle from
| traveling outside prescribed safety zone. This allows as-
| yet-unconsumed propellants to combust at altitude, rather
| than upon the vehicle reaching the ground.[1]"
|
| "As of 2016, a total of 32 US orbital launch attempts
| have ended in an RSO destruct, the first being Vanguard
| TV-3BU in 1958 and the most recent being Cygnus CRS Orb-3
| in 2014.[...] Some launch vehicles (for example, the
| Titan family) have included an automatic destruct system
| to activate in the event that the solid rocket motors or
| upper stages separate prematurely; this is separate from
| the standard RSO system which is activated by manual
| command."
| JshWright wrote:
| Good news! That job was eliminated a couple years ago for
| SpaceX launches. A computer does it now...
| cowmix wrote:
| Most of the stuff you are citing are ON TOP of the launch
| costs you are talking about.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Insurance, regulatory compliance, the guy with the destruct
| button, all these costs go down as you demonstrate higher
| and higher reliability. If you only launch 10 rockets per
| year, and you get one failure once every two years, there's
| a lot of risk, and not that many points to draw statistical
| inference. If you launch 2000 rockets per year, and only
| one in 500 fails, then it's a completely different picture.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > And... insurance.
|
| To add to everything else already mentioned, when launch
| price goes down, it suddenly becomes feasible to build much
| cheaper satellites: both because you can afford to build
| them heavier, and you can take more risk. That reduces
| insurance costs.
| bserge wrote:
| That's an interesting thought. I wonder what advances
| could be made to satellites if they were allowed to make
| them twice as heavy, for example.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| None. If you want a heavier satellite you simply have to
| pay proportionally more to launch it. Nobody outside of
| government agencies comes anywhere close to the maximum
| load of a single super heavy launch, and even that
| "battleship" approach to satellites is giving way to
| smaller devices. So the mass isn't really the limiting
| factor, rather it is cost. Doubling of launch weights for
| a price, being able to launch at a 50% discount, won't
| result in any spectacular technology. What will happen is
| that big communication satellites will be given large
| fuel tanks, longer service lives, that ironically might
| reduce the number of needed launches of large satellites
| to geostationary orbit. NASA will be able to more cheaply
| explore the solar system. While people wanting to launch
| on the cheap will benefit, they generally won't have the
| funds to push any technological boundaries.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| >That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger
| on the destruct button.
|
| I think (at least at the Eastern Range), they started
| leaving this seat empty for Falcon launches in 2017 once
| the automated flight termination system was qualified. This
| system also reduces staffing requirements at the radars in
| Bermuda and all over the place
| Isinlor wrote:
| It's reality. They do reusable Falcon Heavy flights at 90
| million right now. Good chunk of that cost is second stage
| and fairings that are expendable.
|
| Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
| throwaway45349 wrote:
| They probably said the same things about cargo planes once.
| JshWright wrote:
| > That USAF person in the back of the room with their
| finger on the destruct button.
|
| That person (the Mission Flight Control Officer) doesn't
| exist for SpaceX launches, they use an automated system.
|
| https://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/icg/providersforum/201
| 9...
| maccam94 wrote:
| Falcon 9 launches are often less than $60M. A big chunk of
| that is the disposable second stage. Fairings are also a
| few million dollars. Insurance rates on Falcon 9 launches
| are currently 4%, so ~$2.4M. I'd be shocked if non-
| rocket/fuel costs were more than $15M.
| sidlls wrote:
| As if SpaceX has delivered anything that isn't: a)
| (effectively) government funded and b) built on the back of
| decades of NASA engineering effort. Blue Origin hasn't actually
| done anything.
| Beached wrote:
| falcon? to my knowledge nasa has only partially funded cargo
| and crewed dragon, falcon 1 and 9 were developed through
| private funding and became profitable and stable before nasa
| even got their hands in the pot.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I'm really tired of seeing this stupid argument that SpaceX
| is government funded. The entire aerospace industry is
| government funded because the government has huge amounts of
| money and offers large contracts to many companies. By this
| measure, Palantir and many younger startups are also
| government funded. It's a meaningless statement. Bash SpaceX
| for their work culture and other issues all you want, but
| their business model is just fine.
| sidlls wrote:
| And I'm tired of seeing people worship private entities
| whose entire success story is dependent entirely on
| government work. Not just funding, but work (e.g. past
| research).
|
| A business that lives only with government support is a de
| facto government entity.
|
| Sorry that facts offend you.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You seem to be confusing a program that exists because of
| the government funding the development, and a commercial
| program that exists in part because the government is one
| of the buyers of its product.
|
| Falcon 9 certainly benefited from the government buying
| launches, but the project was done with private
| investment. This is very different from how Atlas, Delta,
| the Shuttle, etc. were developed.
|
| NASA (and DOD) continues to buy launches from SpaceX, but
| that's no more a subsidy than them buying pizza from
| Dominoes.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I'm guessing it has more to do with culture.
|
| A lot of big long-standing organizations develop an internal
| culture of being more focused on not fucking up than on
| achieving success. Paradoxically, this leads to more problems,
| and more of the costs associated with them. People stay in
| their swim lanes, and nobody has each other's backs. The more
| you keep your head down and try not to get involved, the less
| you can be blamed for.
|
| L. David Marquet digs pretty deep into this phenomenon in his
| book _Turn the Ship Around!_
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158601-turn-the-ship-a...
| fastball wrote:
| It's not an expensive jobs program for AL, TX, and FL... it's
| an expensive jobs program for the entire country.
|
| NASA prides itself on sourcing components from / having a
| presence in each of the 50 states.
| readams wrote:
| Blue Origin hasn't actually delivered anything.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Transparency with the public can only happen after transparency
| exists within the organization. They probably don't yet know
| what happened. They might have ideas, some people might be
| confident, but at this point the organization as a whole
| doesn't know much. There is no point in them communicating
| theories or ad hoc explanations. We will all have to wait for
| the internal review of the data.
| pfdietz wrote:
| While I understand the value of technological boondoggle --
| sometimes there IS a pony in there somewhere -- SLS is just way
| too far over the line. Knife this baby and destroy the tooling
| that made it possible, so it never rises from its grave.
| yamoriyamori wrote:
| This article published the day before the SLS test, but I think
| it's important context (engineering vs. financial corporate
| culture) for Boeing's involvement, and just how dang difficult it
| is to get systems integrated (software, hardware, and um giant
| rockets). The article notes just how well Spacex has been doing
| even under greater scrutiny by NASA, while Boeing might have been
| implicitly trusted as a name/brand with a legacy, but had
| delivery/design/testing stumbles anyways.
|
| (WSJ, paywall etc.)
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixin...
| pfdietz wrote:
| No pay wall:
|
| https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeings-other-big-proble...
| messe wrote:
| SLS is often jokingly referred to as the Senate Launch System for
| good reason. Its bloated budget and insistence on reusing space
| shuttle components means that it's more a jobs program, than a
| serious attempt at building a launch vehicle.
| interestica wrote:
| It's not like they actually sent a member of Congress into
| space in 1985....
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-D
| Animats wrote:
| NASA forgot how to make rockets:
|
| _"Both NASA and contractor officials explained that nearly 50
| years have passed since development of the last major space
| flight program--the Space Shuttle--and the learning curve for new
| development has been steep as many experienced engineers have
| retired or moved to other industries."_
| Balgair wrote:
| From Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:
|
| 39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new
| human space program affordable and on schedule:
| 1) No new launch vehicles. 2) No new launch
| vehicles. 3) Whatever you do, don't develop
| any new launch vehicles.
|
| https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
| stretchcat wrote:
| It seems like a textbook case of 'use it or lose it.'
| Animats wrote:
| The Department of Energy maintains a large nuclear weapons
| establishment for "stockpile stewardship", so the US doesn't
| forget how to make nuclear weapons.[1] That already happened
| once with a material for fusion bombs called FOGBANK. The
| original manufacturing plant was shut down in 1989. In 2000,
| there was a demand for more FOGBANK, to refurbish old nuclear
| weapons. But attempts to make more of it failed. Attempts to
| make an alternative material failed. It took until 2008 to
| get production working again.
|
| _" The new production scientists noticed that certain
| problems in production resembled those noted by the original
| team. These problems were traced to a particular impurity in
| the final product that was required to meet quality
| standards. A root cause investigation showed that input
| materials were subject to cleaning processes that had not
| existed during the original production run. This cleaning
| removed a substance that generated the required impurity.
| With the implicit role of this substance finally understood,
| the production scientists can control output quality better
| than during the original run."_
|
| That's one way an institution forgets how to make something.
| There are other ways.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Great, in-depth reporting. My initial understanding was that
| delays were COVID-related.
|
| Feb at least will be a busy month for robotic exploration of
| Mars, with probes from US, UAE and China!
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-l...
| jariel wrote:
| Failure in and of itself is not so bad, it's really how it's
| operationalized. How quickly can they identify, correct and move
| on to the next test? That's the question.
| mchusma wrote:
| I think the SLS program at this point adds negative value to
| getting to space. I wouldn't normally wish for failure, but I
| think even if development were free I would vote to axe it.
|
| The distraction of this program is immense, and when it's done
| you have a non reusable rocket in a reusable age.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I agree with you and I suspect many at NASA feel the same way.
| Sadly, it's not up to them.
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