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NASA will pay $146M for each SLS rocket engine
- tectonic 6y agoTim Dodd just released an excellent (and long) video comparing the costs of SLS with Falcon Heavy and (eventually, maybe) Starship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY&feature=youtu.be SLS will cost upwards of a billion per launch. Compare that to $90 million for a reusable Falcon Heavy launch or ~$150 million for a disposable one.
- bostik 6y agoKind of off-topic, but trying to watch that video brought this to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243
- autonoshitbox 6y agoTim can repeat himself often, but he's not bad at what he does. His content is admittedly designed for children.
- navaati 6y agoThat’s a bit harsh, at the beginning of his videos he does a kind of outline of the content. But the content is there ! Kind of understand why you say that when, at one point, he mentions a future video.
- nickik 6y agoAnd SLS Orion Launch: 4x RS-25: 520M 2x SRB: 200M ICPS: 150M (EUS will be more) Core Stage: (not sure) 30M+ given how long they work on it Orion Capsule: 900M That is all without ground infrastructure or people working at NASA. Given that it will probably not launch more then once a year. 100s of M extra. In comparison, a SpaceX Raptor internal cost is 1-2M, Merlin less then 1M. The sale price of the BO BE-4 is 8M.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI feel like we'd all be better off if the federal government just cut an equivalent no-strings-attached check to Alabama in perpetuity, cancelled the SLS, and freed up all the rocket scientists to build something useful. They could probably even do it in Alabama! SpaceX could open a local branch and mop up the talent. The current "waste money on the SLS for political reasons" just feels like the worst of all possible worlds.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoI feel we are better closing down instagram/<useless app>, and using freed up computer scientists to build something usefull.
- testrun 6y agoI don't think you understand the difference between public and private money
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoI don't think you understand that entire industry sectors would not exist without Nasa. There would be no GPS, no Google-maps, and you wouldn't know when a hurricane is coming.
- ShorsHammer 6y agoCompared to $1m for a reusable Raptor that has more power at sea level. There really should be painful monetary and career consequences for the people who makes these insane decisions. The reality is it doesn't matter a bit and they'll retire with a wall full of accolades.
- robomartin 6y agoSpace isn’t easy. Going to the moon is significantly harder than LEO. I don’t think one can claim functional and performance equivalence between SLS to FH. https://youtu.be/Y81vx__JngY https://youtu.be/Y81vx__JngY Now, if the argument is: Why go to the moon? Well, that’s a different conversation.
- semi-extrinsic 6y agoThis should be the top comment, and that video interview from NASA should be mandatory to watch before commenting in this thread.
- dotancohen 6y agoI had little hope for Bridenstine when he got the position, but I must say that I've been impressed time and again. That video was absolutely terrific.
- chroma 6y agoJim Bridenstine sounds like a competent guy, but the fact is that NASA as an organization is no longer competent. They can't build rockets anymore. SLS has been a complete failure. The program was announced in 2011. The plan was to make an expendable vehicle based on existing RS-25 engines, existing SRBs, and the existing Space Shuttle external tank. This idea of reusing all of these systems was based on the previous Constellation project. Over the past decade NASA has spent $15 billion on SLS and they have yet to launch. Falcon Heavy went from a concept in 2011 to launching Elon Musk's car into interplanetary space in 2018. The development cost for Falcon Heavy was around $500 million. That is 30x cheaper and almost twice as fast. Orion has also been in development for over a decade and has cost $16 billion. Current estimates put the total development cost at $23 billion. If you add up the development costs of Constellation, SLS, and Orion, I am sure it would be close to $50 billion. That's for an expendable launch system that costs $1 billion per launch. For the price of a single SLS launch, you could develop Falcon Heavy and launch 5 of them. Obviously Falcon Heavy doesn't have all the capabilities of SLS, but SLS is vaporware. And by the time SLS is working it will have to compete with Starship. It seems totally insane to continue this program considering that in the best case, we will have a launch system that is 10x more expensive than its competitor.
- voz_ 6y agoI don't understand - what is the motivation here? The article is a little short, and it gives good insight into just how expensive this is (compared to other similarly classed potential space purchases). However, what I am failing to grasp is... why? Why spend so much when these other options are available? Surely not ignorance. Is it malice? corruption? Someone's ego?
- m3nu 6y agoLast sentence: Politics. > Men and women in all 50 states are hard at work..
- __m 6y agoYou just assume that there are other options that meet their requirements, which might not be the case
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoThe requirements were made so that the SLS would be the only thing that would be rated to launch it
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoIs there another moon-capable rocket i dibt know about? And please dont say starship - its highly experimental, has never flows, and spacex has never flown people.
- Joeri 6y agoThis is a jobs program which happens to produce rockets. The rockets are not the key objective, the jobs are.
- golergka 6y agoPlaying devil's advocate here: wouldn't "preserve institutional knowledge about building rockets" also be it's goal?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- etrabroline 6y ago> The core stage is structurally similar to the Space Shuttle external tank,[24][25] and initial flights will use modified RS-25D engines left over from the Space Shuttle program.[26] Later flights will switch to a cheaper version of the engine not intended for reuse.[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System So they reused as much of the space shuttle as possible, down to using left over engines. Developing a new engine from scratch using a new fuel (methane) like SpaceX did would have been a very risky proposition. Like NASA, Blue Origin and ULA both did much more conventional things and have launch costs multiple times those of SpaceX. The relative cost of NASA's more conservative design decisions is more a testament to Space X's remarkable success with the Raptor engine than NASA being somehow incompetent.
- 7952 6y agoIt is difficult to assess risk without an indepth technical knowledge of the engine. Particularly when the engine could have a profound influence on how the rest of the rocket is designed.
- valuearb 6y agoEach Merlin Engine costs $1M. A Raptor is expected to cost less than $1M each. Blue Origins BE-4 is priced at $8M each. So how did conservative NASA get cheaper RS-25 engines for only $147M each?
- etrabroline 6y agoThose numbers are not measuring the same thing. Those are the marginal cost per engine. What did it cost Space X to develop the design, and what did it cost them to build the production facilities? The price NASA is paying is for delivery, not the cost to produces one more after billions have been sunk. Also, how many do they plan to produce? NASA probably only needs a few dozen RS-25s for the life of SLS, so probably not worth the billions Space X spent developing a new engine.
- valuearb 6y ago
- Proven 6y agoThe Fed's are running trillion dollar budget deficits - they can fund more than NASA's buddies can launch. And the debt will never be repaid, so they should just decide that costs are irrelevant. $146, $46, $346 million... How does it matter and why should we care?
- pfdietz 6y agoThe purpose of the space program isn't to explore space, it's to consume federal funds, accruing influence and kickback contributions to the politicians who arrange it. It's important you understand this primary purpose if you want to understand what happens at NASA. If you are a space program supporter who is okay with the situation as long as NASA is getting money, then you are the reason they can get away with this. Thanks a lot.
- djaque 6y agoThe way I understand it is that during the space shuttle years, companies made ties and lots of money off of federal contracts. The whole SLS program has since been doninated by those companies using political pressure to get those contracts back on new missions.
- valuearb 6y agoThe SLS design was required by congress to maximize use of Shuttle hardware and contractors.
- PostOnce 6y agoit's also a high quality job creation program that employs 17K at NASA and who knows how many at contractors it's also a military capability it's also saved who knows how many lives with weather satellites and ambulance GPS and satphone rescues it's also a meteor warning program it's also a global warming monitoring program it also begets companies like spacex and capabilities like GPS for all and inspires people to pursue science sure there's fat, but we're employing highly skilled domestic tech and science people with that fat, would it be better if we left all those tax dollars to be spent on iphones and Starbucks? or the prison industrial complex? NASA and NOAA and the NIH and any pure science agency is super defensible
- the_pwner224 6y agoWe can spend all the taxpayer money on creating 17k highly skilled jobs that actually do something. NASA does some useful stuff, but we could be doing much more useful stuff with the same money, while still having 17k+ jobs and good military technology and weather satellites etc.
- tomohawk 6y agoRichard Feynman was pulled in to investigate the space shuttle challenger disaster. He refused to sign the report unless his findings were included. They were eventually included as an appendix, which is well worth reading. There is a section on the main engines (you can search down to the SSME section) https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...
- hn_acc_1 6y agoThanks for sharing, this is a great read. The bit about top-down vs. bottom-up design (Liquid Fuel Engine (SSME) section) is surprising to me. It appears for the Shuttle program, all the years of knowledge on how to successfully complete engineering projects with large CAPEX + large risk was just ignored.
- avian 6y ago> Thus, it is not unreasonable to guess there may be at least one surprise in the next 250,000 seconds, a probability of 1/500 per engine per mission. It's interesting to read this in the context of the STS-93 incident [1] where a broken SSME injector came close to causing a mission abort. Was this Feynman's "one more surprise"? He was writing this report 70 missions before it happened in 1999. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93
- _ph_ 6y agoOf course, the answer to why it is done, is the money flowing into many states involved in the production. Jobs are something every politician likes to create. And it is part of an economy, that the state spends some amount of the tax dollars to support a wide range and healthy economy. But for that, the jobs need to do something useful. Just overpaying for rocket engine is the quite opposite. The same amount of money could be spent to create jobs which have a longtime value and as a consequence create more jobs. Even if it was just used to accellerate the whole project by not wasting effort on something which can be bought at a fraction. Like in having the funds to make a real moon station, instead of creating a rocket, which goes to the moon once or twice and then gets cancelled because at those costs, you cannot afford a moon station.