5 ms·

The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. I see inflation-

by jmyeet 4y ago

The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. I see inflation-adjusted numbers putting the Saturn V launch cost at just over $1 billion but I honestly think the equivalent is way more than that. The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms). Payload costs are now <10% of the Saturn V/STS costs in real terms. That's what we need. If Satrship lives up to expectations, that'll drop even further. In addition to that there are important advancements in scalability (ie how many launch vehicles you can product and that really translates to how many launches you can do per year) and reliability. My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable. Lots of people like to say things like we'd already have put a man on Mars if we didn't cancel Apollo but that was never going to happen.

cnlevy 4y ago
> My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable There was a project to make the Saturn V partially reusable, see http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html
CWuestefeld 4y ago
The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive There's no contradiction here. It's resolved because, relative to its original promise, the STS program was a complete failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But it didn't achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it did do cost vastly more than anticipated. Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble, and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment. We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures. It was always understood that the mirror wouldn't be perfect because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.
- asciimike 4y ago
  > And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission. From https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm, which contains far better analysis of the politics of the STS program than I can provide.
  - billsmithaustin 4y ago
- dmead 4y ago
  hey, i got to learn about deconvolution in undergrad because of this. pre-fix hubble data can be corrected in software fairly reliably and i learned a lot messing around with it.
dev_tty01 4y ago
>But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. Sure, at that moment in time. You are, however, discounting the abilities of clever people to innovate and improve the $/kg performance. I prefer to think we engineers are pretty good at reducing the effective cost of tech over time. However, none of this is about Saturn V vs Shuttle vs some other platform. If NASA remained the sole customer over that period, there would not have been adequate incentives to drive that cost down. In that situation I think improvement would have been slow independent of platform choices. It is the telecommunications age creating scaled incentives that has led to cost efficiencies and companies like SpaceX (and many others) competing to drive those costs down. Lacking the current scale of global incentives, SpaceX and others still wouldn't exist. They certainly couldn't have acquired the necessary funding back in the 70s.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  NASA could have gotten the price down to whatever the lockheed's is now. Or should I say up?
  - loudthing 4y ago
    Up. Politics is a major detriment to NASA's efficiency.
wombatpm 4y ago
I question the assertion that it was too expensive given the costs of programs like the F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Apples and oranges. You are comparing NASA spending to military expenditures (F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program). In 2020 the US GDP was 20.94 trillion USD [1]. In the same year, NASA's budget was $22.6 billion [2], less than 0.11% of GDP, while US military spending was around 766.58 billion USD [3], roughly 3.66% of GDP. Other sources place US military spending 16%-21.9% of GDP from 1996 to 2015 [5]. In other words, NASA's budget was approximately 3% of the military budget (and maybe as little as 0.5%). NASA's budget has been less than 1% of the federal budget since 1975 [4]. [1] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spending-from-2000-to-2012/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Budget_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
april_22 4y ago
I don't think that even the moon landing itself was 'too expensive' for such an achievement. Going to the moon will be remembered for a long time by future generartions as an example of what humanity can achieve. What are $1 billion against that?
TMWNN 4y ago
>The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms). Highly relevant: "Human Space Exploration: The Next 50 Years" by Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, March 2007. He wrote that had the agency continued using Apollo-Saturn instead of developing the Space Shuttle, "we would be on Mars today <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_exploration_the_next_50_years_by/ https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_ex...>
adolph 4y ago
An interesting aspect of the Shuttle mission was the military dual-use. Scott Manley's video "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened" is a great explainer of a specific planned but never executed mission, the requirements of that drove many of the shuttle's design tradeoffs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY
towaway15463 4y ago
You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.
- stetrain 4y ago
  Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper. But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions. Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle. (A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)
    - 4y ago
Teever 4y ago
I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up production. I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  One problem about technology development is scaling too early. The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too. Whole generations of software developers. All those were needed for the information age, not just throwing money to scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.
  - Gravityloss 4y ago
    In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. Probably also intact abort and other technologies. One should look at the operational capacity, not the theoretical capacity. Who cares if you have an airplane that can theoretically do Mach 3 if it's being repaired in the hangar and you need it now? In airplane lingo a plane like that is called a "Hangar Queen" Falcon 9 is a huge step in the operational direction. But more is needed. Can one do two flights in 24 hours? Can one save the second stage too? Just the fairing? Or can one make the second stage cheaper? Or salvage it in orbit?
    - mmmeff 4y ago
      This is why newer space startups like Stoke are aiming to produce totally reusable second stages. The goal is commercial airline-like refuel and relaunch.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. There are other ways to reduce cost, such as cheaper rockets, more efficient fuels, etc. Whatever SpaceX does isn't the only possibility or a necessity.

by jmyeet 4y ago

cnlevy 4y ago

> My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable There was a project to make the Saturn V partially reusable, see http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html

CWuestefeld 4y ago

The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive There's no contradiction here. It's resolved because, relative to its original promise, the STS program was a complete failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But it didn't achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it did do cost vastly more than anticipated. Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble, and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment. We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures. It was always understood that the mirror wouldn't be perfect because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.

asciimike 4y ago
> And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission. From https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm, which contains far better analysis of the politics of the STS program than I can provide.
- billsmithaustin 4y ago
dmead 4y ago
hey, i got to learn about deconvolution in undergrad because of this. pre-fix hubble data can be corrected in software fairly reliably and i learned a lot messing around with it.

dev_tty01 4y ago

>But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. Sure, at that moment in time. You are, however, discounting the abilities of clever people to innovate and improve the $/kg performance. I prefer to think we engineers are pretty good at reducing the effective cost of tech over time. However, none of this is about Saturn V vs Shuttle vs some other platform. If NASA remained the sole customer over that period, there would not have been adequate incentives to drive that cost down. In that situation I think improvement would have been slow independent of platform choices. It is the telecommunications age creating scaled incentives that has led to cost efficiencies and companies like SpaceX (and many others) competing to drive those costs down. Lacking the current scale of global incentives, SpaceX and others still wouldn't exist. They certainly couldn't have acquired the necessary funding back in the 70s.

readthenotes1 4y ago
NASA could have gotten the price down to whatever the lockheed's is now. Or should I say up?
- loudthing 4y ago
  Up. Politics is a major detriment to NASA's efficiency.

wombatpm 4y ago

I question the assertion that it was too expensive given the costs of programs like the F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program.

stevenjgarner 4y ago
Apples and oranges. You are comparing NASA spending to military expenditures (F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program). In 2020 the US GDP was 20.94 trillion USD [1]. In the same year, NASA's budget was $22.6 billion [2], less than 0.11% of GDP, while US military spending was around 766.58 billion USD [3], roughly 3.66% of GDP. Other sources place US military spending 16%-21.9% of GDP from 1996 to 2015 [5]. In other words, NASA's budget was approximately 3% of the military budget (and maybe as little as 0.5%). NASA's budget has been less than 1% of the federal budget since 1975 [4]. [1] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spending-from-2000-to-2012/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Budget_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

april_22 4y ago

I don't think that even the moon landing itself was 'too expensive' for such an achievement. Going to the moon will be remembered for a long time by future generartions as an example of what humanity can achieve. What are $1 billion against that?

TMWNN 4y ago

>The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms). Highly relevant: "Human Space Exploration: The Next 50 Years" by Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, March 2007. He wrote that had the agency continued using Apollo-Saturn instead of developing the Space Shuttle, "we would be on Mars today <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_exploration_the_next_50_years_by/ https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_ex...>

adolph 4y ago

An interesting aspect of the Shuttle mission was the military dual-use. Scott Manley's video "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened" is a great explainer of a specific planned but never executed mission, the requirements of that drove many of the shuttle's design tradeoffs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY

towaway15463 4y ago

You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.

stetrain 4y ago
Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper. But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions. Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle. (A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)
  - 4y ago

Teever 4y ago

I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up production. I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.

Gravityloss 4y ago
One problem about technology development is scaling too early. The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too. Whole generations of software developers. All those were needed for the information age, not just throwing money to scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. Probably also intact abort and other technologies. One should look at the operational capacity, not the theoretical capacity. Who cares if you have an airplane that can theoretically do Mach 3 if it's being repaired in the hangar and you need it now? In airplane lingo a plane like that is called a "Hangar Queen" Falcon 9 is a huge step in the operational direction. But more is needed. Can one do two flights in 24 hours? Can one save the second stage too? Just the fairing? Or can one make the second stage cheaper? Or salvage it in orbit?
  - mmmeff 4y ago
    This is why newer space startups like Stoke are aiming to produce totally reusable second stages. The goal is commercial airline-like refuel and relaunch.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. There are other ways to reduce cost, such as cheaper rockets, more efficient fuels, etc. Whatever SpaceX does isn't the only possibility or a necessity.