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SLS is the last major gasp of a military industrial complex that has completely taken over congress. The fact that we're paying $146M for each engine on the SLS

SLS is the last major gasp of a military industrial complex that has completely taken over congress. The fact that we're paying $146M for each engine on the SLS (takes 4 to launch) and SpaceX is promising an entire launch for Starship at <100M is obscene. (Oh, and SLS ends up at the bottom of the ocean...Starship you can just refuel). While I don't agree with all thing Musk, he's revolutionized the global spacelaunch industry by reducing costs 10x. Now, totally dominant in an industry, he's making that rocket obsolete in favor of a better one (Spaceship).

skykooler 6y ago
Of course, a large part of the cost of those engines is that they're designed to be reusable (a difficult task with hydrogen/oxygen engines due to thermal shocks and hydrogen embrittlement). This made sense when they were being built for the Space Shuttle. It no longer makes sense now that they are using the same engines for an expendable first stage.
- agsacct 6y ago
  Which makes the plans to throw them away with each launch even more silly. They are cobbling together jobs programs from space shuttle components with no real strategy except "worked before" and "we can charge a lot of money for this".
- kanox 6y ago
  The $146 million figure is specifically for new engines that are no longer designed to be reusable.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Reusability doesn't make engines costly. All liquid rocket engines are reusable. They have to be, so they can be tested before being put on the vehicle, and so during development you can keep reusing test articles. The Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are reusable (and on the first stage, they are reused). They are reported to cost SpaceX just $400K per engine to manufacture.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    >All liquid rocket engines are reusable. As always there are exceptions - rs-68 has an ablative nozzle that is rated for a single flight, so you need to test without that I guess. Other engines could be similarly rated for jinutes of runtime by default for maximum performance. SpaceX aldo repeatedly ststed Merlin and Raptor were designed for cheap and fregvent reuse.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Yes, Merlin was designed to be cheap. That's why it's cheap. Being reusable was not an impediment to it being cheap. Being reusable is not an excuse for being expensive. A cheap rocket engine needs a cheap development process, which means you want your test articles to last a long time. Far from being an obstacle to cheapness, reusability is a requirement for an affordable engine development program. Let's go way back to Usenet and listen to Henry Spencer on this subject. https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/rl10.html https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/rl10.html "To reiterate my original point: almost any regeneratively-cooled liquid rocket engine is reusable, even if it was built for expendable vehicles. The design requirement for the F-1 was 20 starts and 2250s of firing; as part of the test program, six of them accumulated over 5000s each."
  - skykooler 6y ago
    The Merlin engines don't run hydrogen, though. Because of hydrogen's propensity to embrittle metals it comes into contact with over time, it's much harder to design a hydrogen engine for long runtimes (vs. say, a one-minute static fire plus a eight-minute flight).
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Any hydrocarbon engine will have hydrogen in the thrust chamber, and in the gas generator. They all run a bit fuel rich to maximize Isp, and that will mean the hot partially burned gas has some molecular hydrogen in it. What makes hydrogen engines more expensive is the low density of LH2, which greatly increases the pumping power needed to bring the propellant up to pressure for injection into the thrust chamber.
CraftThatBlock 6y ago
Starship launch price should only be a couple millions (see the article). <100M is _technically_ right, but very far off. Since Starship will be fully reusable, it's upfront building investment (the ~100M price-tag you are referring to), spread over the lifetime of the vehicle, plus staff/maintenance/fuel for launches. Falcon 9 was already a +10x reduction (~~1.5B per launch -> ~70M, likely cheaper for reused boosters), and Starship will be another +10x cheaper than F9. This means Starship will be >100x cheaper than competitors (excluding small-sat rockets like the Electron)
- fabian2k 6y ago
  Where is that 10x reduction and the ~1.5B per launch from for the Falcon 9 comparison? I mean Falcon 9 certainly was cheaper than the competition even without reuse, but I'm quite sure the difference wasn't as large as you're stating there. The Falcon 9 did disrupt the industry for sure, but you don't need a 10x price reduction for that.
  - CraftThatBlock 6y ago
    You're right, I was using incorrect numbers. An Atlas V's sticker price is 110M~160M, so about 2-3x cheaper
vikramkr 6y ago
If you think it's the last major gasp, you're gonna find yourself awful disappointed. One does not simply kill a jobs program. There'll be SLS, and then some other 2 trillion dollar airplane, then some satellite system, and again and again forever. Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. There will always be more
- mtgx 6y ago
  > Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. Sounds like dirty communism to me. Surely market freedom politicians wouldn't support such programs, would they?
- NortySpock 6y ago
  If we can redirect from SLS to building Moonbase Alpha (with SpaceX presumably doing most of the shipping), I'll consider that a success.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    Find a way to do it keeping the same contractors and adding a couple in some states with senators and representatives who are simultaneously members of the majority party and vulnerable, then maybe you've got a bill, though it might still get filibustered. NASA is a political work of art
- binarycodedhex 6y ago
  The MIC will find a way to make a flying car/moon rocket that fires Hellfires and a gatling railgun. Let's call it a multi-program total cost of $40 terabucks that could've given every American a nice home (household assets are $130T but this counts both impoverished and wealthy persons) and UBI; but no: self-serving, subsidized wealth transfer to the Cheney's and the Erik Prince's comes first.
- rch 6y ago
  There's also a strategic capabilities argument that never goes away. I'm anticipating a significant investment in synthetic biology facilities in the next few years. Ideally these would be 99% automated, remotely operated via secure dedicated networks, and maintained by small on-site skeleton crews. They'd be geographically distributed, with a majority in 'red states', but not because of any jobs they might create.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
"last major gasp [...] that has completely taken" Uh, does anyone else see a contradiction there?
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Yes, that's a botched idiom. If the MIC has consumed Congress, it would be Congress doing the last gasping, not the MIC. The MIC is alive and well.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
The plans for Starship are haisy, not scrutinised and it has not been delivered. So far design has changed massively, it was scaled down a lot, and it's stil a vehicle looking for a purpose. I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point withing the next 10 years. All the best luck to spaceX, but you can't base the entire national space programm on something that flaky. SLS solidly gets you to the moon, and you van make real plans on it. If it turns out to be redundant, that's ok
- hwc 6y ago
  > I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point within the next 10 years. But what if it is only half as expensive per ton to low-Earth orbit as Falcon-9/Heavy? And if it can only deliver 100 tons at a time, not 150? That's still going to dominate the launch market for some time. If they eventually prove it to be safe for human passengers and can demonstrate in-orbit refueling? It then replaces SLS, and is still a fraction of the cost.
- orangecat 6y ago
  SLS solidly gets you to the moon Speaking of things that have not been delivered...
- kanox 6y ago
  > vehicle looking for a purpose While I agree that Starship is very much an early-stage project it has a clear commercial utilization: Starlink. Assuming demand for Starlink is strong and SpaceX will be able to scale it up like crazy since Starship will give them far more LEO capability than anyone else.
  - AlanSE 6y ago
    Starlink doesn't need Starship. It works right now and the current SpaceX vehicles are sufficient for what it does. Maybe you could talk about Starship as a means to increase the total receiving area, number of satellites, and thus total bandwidth, users, etc. Maybe it could reduce the necessary size of the terrestrial receiver. But... this is both speculative and marginal. If Starlink needs more hardware, they can ramp up Falcon 9 rocket use, which is already partially reusable, and will continue to increase reuse. Starship could drive down launch costs, but it can't reduce the cost of the satellites themselves. You'll hit a floor where it could reduce costs, but not remotely enough to justify it. Starship is on a completely different playing field. It strives for a VERY large payload with a VERY large fraction of reuse. This makes no sense unless actual people are riding on it at some point. The demand for orbital transport is not enough otherwise. It only makes business sense by assuming some future activities will happen which will bring in a massive amount of funding. This is beyond conventional business risk, this is a leap of faith.
fasteddie31003 6y ago
I love how triggering Elon can be to people that you have to preface your statement with "While I don't agree with all thing Musk".

skykooler 6y ago

Of course, a large part of the cost of those engines is that they're designed to be reusable (a difficult task with hydrogen/oxygen engines due to thermal shocks and hydrogen embrittlement). This made sense when they were being built for the Space Shuttle. It no longer makes sense now that they are using the same engines for an expendable first stage.

agsacct 6y ago
Which makes the plans to throw them away with each launch even more silly. They are cobbling together jobs programs from space shuttle components with no real strategy except "worked before" and "we can charge a lot of money for this".
kanox 6y ago
The $146 million figure is specifically for new engines that are no longer designed to be reusable.
pfdietz 6y ago
Reusability doesn't make engines costly. All liquid rocket engines are reusable. They have to be, so they can be tested before being put on the vehicle, and so during development you can keep reusing test articles. The Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are reusable (and on the first stage, they are reused). They are reported to cost SpaceX just $400K per engine to manufacture.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  >All liquid rocket engines are reusable. As always there are exceptions - rs-68 has an ablative nozzle that is rated for a single flight, so you need to test without that I guess. Other engines could be similarly rated for jinutes of runtime by default for maximum performance. SpaceX aldo repeatedly ststed Merlin and Raptor were designed for cheap and fregvent reuse.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Yes, Merlin was designed to be cheap. That's why it's cheap. Being reusable was not an impediment to it being cheap. Being reusable is not an excuse for being expensive. A cheap rocket engine needs a cheap development process, which means you want your test articles to last a long time. Far from being an obstacle to cheapness, reusability is a requirement for an affordable engine development program. Let's go way back to Usenet and listen to Henry Spencer on this subject. https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/rl10.html https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/rl10.html "To reiterate my original point: almost any regeneratively-cooled liquid rocket engine is reusable, even if it was built for expendable vehicles. The design requirement for the F-1 was 20 starts and 2250s of firing; as part of the test program, six of them accumulated over 5000s each."
- skykooler 6y ago
  The Merlin engines don't run hydrogen, though. Because of hydrogen's propensity to embrittle metals it comes into contact with over time, it's much harder to design a hydrogen engine for long runtimes (vs. say, a one-minute static fire plus a eight-minute flight).
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Any hydrocarbon engine will have hydrogen in the thrust chamber, and in the gas generator. They all run a bit fuel rich to maximize Isp, and that will mean the hot partially burned gas has some molecular hydrogen in it. What makes hydrogen engines more expensive is the low density of LH2, which greatly increases the pumping power needed to bring the propellant up to pressure for injection into the thrust chamber.

CraftThatBlock 6y ago

Starship launch price should only be a couple millions (see the article). <100M is _technically_ right, but very far off. Since Starship will be fully reusable, it's upfront building investment (the ~100M price-tag you are referring to), spread over the lifetime of the vehicle, plus staff/maintenance/fuel for launches. Falcon 9 was already a +10x reduction (~~1.5B per launch -> ~70M, likely cheaper for reused boosters), and Starship will be another +10x cheaper than F9. This means Starship will be >100x cheaper than competitors (excluding small-sat rockets like the Electron)

fabian2k 6y ago
Where is that 10x reduction and the ~1.5B per launch from for the Falcon 9 comparison? I mean Falcon 9 certainly was cheaper than the competition even without reuse, but I'm quite sure the difference wasn't as large as you're stating there. The Falcon 9 did disrupt the industry for sure, but you don't need a 10x price reduction for that.
- CraftThatBlock 6y ago
  You're right, I was using incorrect numbers. An Atlas V's sticker price is 110M~160M, so about 2-3x cheaper

vikramkr 6y ago

If you think it's the last major gasp, you're gonna find yourself awful disappointed. One does not simply kill a jobs program. There'll be SLS, and then some other 2 trillion dollar airplane, then some satellite system, and again and again forever. Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. There will always be more

mtgx 6y ago
> Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. Sounds like dirty communism to me. Surely market freedom politicians wouldn't support such programs, would they?
NortySpock 6y ago
If we can redirect from SLS to building Moonbase Alpha (with SpaceX presumably doing most of the shipping), I'll consider that a success.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Find a way to do it keeping the same contractors and adding a couple in some states with senators and representatives who are simultaneously members of the majority party and vulnerable, then maybe you've got a bill, though it might still get filibustered. NASA is a political work of art
binarycodedhex 6y ago
The MIC will find a way to make a flying car/moon rocket that fires Hellfires and a gatling railgun. Let's call it a multi-program total cost of $40 terabucks that could've given every American a nice home (household assets are $130T but this counts both impoverished and wealthy persons) and UBI; but no: self-serving, subsidized wealth transfer to the Cheney's and the Erik Prince's comes first.
rch 6y ago
There's also a strategic capabilities argument that never goes away. I'm anticipating a significant investment in synthetic biology facilities in the next few years. Ideally these would be 99% automated, remotely operated via secure dedicated networks, and maintained by small on-site skeleton crews. They'd be geographically distributed, with a majority in 'red states', but not because of any jobs they might create.

SiempreViernes 6y ago

"last major gasp [...] that has completely taken" Uh, does anyone else see a contradiction there?

bigbubba 6y ago
Yes, that's a botched idiom. If the MIC has consumed Congress, it would be Congress doing the last gasping, not the MIC. The MIC is alive and well.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

The plans for Starship are haisy, not scrutinised and it has not been delivered. So far design has changed massively, it was scaled down a lot, and it's stil a vehicle looking for a purpose. I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point withing the next 10 years. All the best luck to spaceX, but you can't base the entire national space programm on something that flaky. SLS solidly gets you to the moon, and you van make real plans on it. If it turns out to be redundant, that's ok

hwc 6y ago
> I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point within the next 10 years. But what if it is only half as expensive per ton to low-Earth orbit as Falcon-9/Heavy? And if it can only deliver 100 tons at a time, not 150? That's still going to dominate the launch market for some time. If they eventually prove it to be safe for human passengers and can demonstrate in-orbit refueling? It then replaces SLS, and is still a fraction of the cost.
orangecat 6y ago
SLS solidly gets you to the moon Speaking of things that have not been delivered...
kanox 6y ago
> vehicle looking for a purpose While I agree that Starship is very much an early-stage project it has a clear commercial utilization: Starlink. Assuming demand for Starlink is strong and SpaceX will be able to scale it up like crazy since Starship will give them far more LEO capability than anyone else.
- AlanSE 6y ago
  Starlink doesn't need Starship. It works right now and the current SpaceX vehicles are sufficient for what it does. Maybe you could talk about Starship as a means to increase the total receiving area, number of satellites, and thus total bandwidth, users, etc. Maybe it could reduce the necessary size of the terrestrial receiver. But... this is both speculative and marginal. If Starlink needs more hardware, they can ramp up Falcon 9 rocket use, which is already partially reusable, and will continue to increase reuse. Starship could drive down launch costs, but it can't reduce the cost of the satellites themselves. You'll hit a floor where it could reduce costs, but not remotely enough to justify it. Starship is on a completely different playing field. It strives for a VERY large payload with a VERY large fraction of reuse. This makes no sense unless actual people are riding on it at some point. The demand for orbital transport is not enough otherwise. It only makes business sense by assuming some future activities will happen which will bring in a massive amount of funding. This is beyond conventional business risk, this is a leap of faith.

fasteddie31003 6y ago

I love how triggering Elon can be to people that you have to preface your statement with "While I don't agree with all thing Musk".