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After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test
- JackFr 6y agoI’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.
- fastball 6y agoIt'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 6y agoBlue Origin hasn't actually delivered anything.
- sandworm101 6y agoTransparency 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.
- bob1029 6y agoNothing 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.
- markus_zhang 6y agoYou 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 6y agoIt'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-rocket-launches-through-2035-in-a-show-of-washington-corruption.html 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.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIt 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.
- dmix 6y agoTaking useful rocket scientists, engineers, programmers, etc, plus all of their blue collar support staff from away from productive industry sounds like the worst possible "jobs" program in the world. Calling it a success simply because the money was spent without considering opportunity costs [1] is just bad money management. It's how you end up with these blackhole gov programs in the first place. Extremely wasteful space programs at least typically get justified as also a) 'inspiring' kids into STEM + b) providing national pride. But when all you get in return is decades of doing nothing interesting I doubt many kids will be inspired. And after so many years and getting blown by competitively by private industry turns it into a national embarrassment (even things exploding is more interesting than what they've produced the last few decades with this program). When you factor in the opportunity cost, aka the alternative ares NOT getting "jobs programs", or rather the capital investment, like infrastructure or healthcare or a hundred other possibilities. Things which can employ plenty of blue collar rust-belt workers into jobs that directly support the needs of modern industry who funds these tax paid adventures (ie, transit/railways, electric grid, broadband, etc). Stuff that supports and underpins the new 'knowledge based economy' instead of drawing resources away from it. Not to mention providing a stopgap to a 'lost generation' of former typically-unionized industrial workers who couldn't compete globally after the 1980s when they could have been provided some critical time while their kids adapt and get education/skills needed for the new self-sustaining, productive, and heavily automated/software driven industries that the developed world has transitioned too. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp
- Isinlor 6y agoGreat comparison of SLS vs. Starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY Key points: https://i2.wp.com/everydayastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Super-Heavy-Lift-Launcher-Capabilities.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&ssl=1 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$)
- sandworm101 6y ago>> Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at 0.002B$) 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.
- credit_guy 6y agoInsurance, 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.
- Isinlor 6y agoIt'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.
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- mumblemumble 6y agoI'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-around https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158601-turn-the-ship-a...
- mhh__ 6y agoIt 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 6y agoNow that Shelby is in the minority party in the Senate I think we may see this thing killed.
- frakkingcylons 6y agoAs 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 6y agoYou think the US funding an alternative, government controlled launch system for redundant access to space isn't ultimately for military purposes?
- stretchcat 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoIt's a program to retain the industrial base. For example, Aerojet Rocketdyne would have definitely been bankrupt without SLS.
- frakkingcylons 6y agoThe 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.
- sidlls 6y agoAs 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 6y agofalcon? 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 6y agoI'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 6y agoAnd 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 6y agoYou 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.
- messe 6y agoSLS 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 6y agoIt's not like they actually sent a member of Congress into space in 1985.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-D https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-D
- rm445 6y agoNever heard of that, thanks. Jake Garn is a pretty interesting character. City mayor, Senator, navy pilot with thousands of flying hours. Headed the Senate appropriations committee for NASA and wrangled himself a place on a Shuttle mission. Born in 1932 and still alive despite donating a kidney to his daughter in the 80s. Quite a life.
- ArtWomb 6y agoGreat, 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-launches.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-l...
- michaericalribo 6y agoBummer! 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
- rblatz 6y agoI 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 6y agoThat 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.
- Beached 6y agoSLS 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.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoAdd SLS to the list of embarrassing aerospace projects from America F-35, 737 Max, and Starliner.
- mhh__ 6y agoF-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 6y ago>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.
- yamoriyamori 6y agoThis 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-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201 https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixin...
- pfdietz 6y agoNo pay wall: https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeings-other-big-proble...
- numpad0 6y agoWhy bother with RS-25 if they don’t even know what they don’t know in a failure?
- tailspin2019 6y agoYou 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.
- mcbutterbunz 6y agoI 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 6y ago> 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 6y agoSLS 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.
- pfdietz 6y agoWhile 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.
- Animats 6y agoNASA 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.”
- stretchcat 6y agoIt seems like a textbook case of 'use it or lose it.'
- Animats 6y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
- Balgair 6y agoFrom 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 https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
- dblohm7 6y agoThe thesis of this article is pure hyperbole. “Oh noes, one of the RS-25s failed, the whole program is a failure!”
- Beached 6y agoIt 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.
- pfdietz 6y agoEven if SLS delivered the working design instantly at zero cost it would be a failure. The rockets themselves will be too expensive to make and use.
- Beached 6y agoWithout the existence of Starship, that is difficult to say. I believe the launch cost per rocket (after the first) is roughly $500-600Mil? When you are the most capable rocket BY FAR, and simply the ONLY rocket in existence that can do the missions, it is hard to say if a significantly higher cost then the next best thing is worth it or not. A sls block 1 has about 3x the lift capacity to the moon, and the block 2 about 5x the lift capacity. Short of a moon fly by, the falcon heavy would require multiple launches to perform the same mission of SLS. So the SLS DOES indeed provide lift capability that doesnt already exist. Now if spacex beats Nasa to the moon with starship, all that goes out the window, as startship will be better for sure.
- pfdietz 6y ago
- mchusma 6y agoI 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 6y agoI agree with you and I suspect many at NASA feel the same way. Sadly, it's not up to them.
- jariel 6y agoFailure 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.