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NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoSpaceX of ten years ago made SLS look ridiculous.
- danpalmer 3y agoI think this is a little unfair. SpaceX of 10 years ago didn’t have the same launch capacity and was not human rated, or even close to human rating. Now the trajectory (no pun intended) of SpaceX was good back then and you might have guessed they would grow rapidly in capabilities and capacity, but it wasn’t a done deal. I’m no fan of SLS, but it was a very understandable safe bet 10 years ago.
- justrealist 3y ago> and was not human rated The SLS has not launched a human.
- danpalmer 3y agoNo, but that was the plan all along, and it's built out of multiple components that have launched humans. I don't think the plan for F9 was to launch humans for a long time, or at least it didn't appear to be a focus for SpaceX until Commercial Crew came along.
- MaxRegret 3y agoFalcon 9 was designed from the beginning with safety factors consistent with human-rating, rather than the lower safety factors required for cargo (1.4 vs 1.2 if I recall correctly). And with the very first cargo Dragon flight in 2010, SpaceX talked about how the windows and life support system pointed towards their ambition of flying humans on the spacecraft. Now, as always happens, actually completing the human-rating of Dragon required more work than expected, and Dragon 2 is quite different from Dragon. But, as far as I know, Falcon 9 did not require nearly as many upgrades to be human-rated.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoSLS isn't really comparable to the F9s that were launching a decade ago. Either in terms of payload capability or reliability/safety. on the other hand a decade from now its totally possible that Starship is going to make SLS look like the antiquated boondoggle it is.
- belval 3y ago> NASA recently said that it is working with the primary contractor of the SLS rocket's main engines, Aerojet, to reduce the cost of each engine by 30 percent, down to $70.5 million by the end of this decade. [...] And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine. If their engine is between 5-100x more expensive than an equivalent engine from competiting companies. Why is it so impossible to be a little bit more agile and consider the other engines?
- madaxe_again 3y agoBecause they aren’t made by the parties who lobbied for SLS.
- dotancohen 3y agoThe other engines burn methane, these RS-25s burn hydrogen.
- danpalmer 3y agoThis is a good point, but to extend it a bit, changing the fuel means changing the chemistry of the whole system, changing tradeoffs and thresholds, changing capabilities, all sorts. Rockets very much need to be designed around a particular fuel, it defines so much of the rest of the rocket either directly or indirectly.
- madaxe_again 3y agoThe affordability isn’t relevant - in fact, the lack of affordability is pretty much the point. SLS is a jobs program, pork barrel spending to keep the MIC contractors and the voters who are dependent upon them sweet. The more it costs, the better it plays in whatever Poughkeepsies or Peorias they make the gold-plated doohickeys in.
- dralley 3y agoSo cancel it and tell said MIC companies to build something we actually need, like missiles.
- irrational 3y agoOr a federal free insulin plant. How much would it cost to manufacture and give free insulin to everyone that needs it compared to the cost for SLS?
- martin8412 3y agoInsulin costs around $30 when bought from the privately owned manufacturers. No point in having the government manufacture it.
- lazide 3y agoSounds like communism! /s
- westmeal 3y agoI know you're joking but people actually believe this and will advocate for privatization of shit like this it's just so tiresome
- r00fus 3y agoI mean, it's not like Hollywood hasn't spent nearly a century carrying water for the moneyed elites. The premise of so many movies hinges on the solution being some superhero or Ayn Rand-ian mold-breaker that can only happen with privatized super-tech. We complain about China brainwashing its citizens when the US is the OG offender.
- techdragon 3y agoImportant context… SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”. The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned. My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago> SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for Any source?
- acegopher 3y agohttps://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
- archgoon 3y agoNote, NASA has a copy of the original 2010 funding legislation here: https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf Which can also be found here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-bill/3729 https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-bill/372... The key part is: > (2) MODIFICATION OF CURRENT CONTRACTS.—In order to limit NASA’s termination liability costs and support critical capabilities, the Administrator shall, to the extent practicable, extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts necessary to meet the requirements in paragraph (1), including contracts for ground testing of solid rocket motors, if necessary, to ensure their availability for development of the Space Launch System. Which explains why NASA isn't necessarily getting engines from Blue Origin or other cheaper new comers for example. The senate law dictates that they should continue using existing contracts. Now, could a NASA administrator argue that they should drop Aerojet (as cited in the ars technica article)? Potentially, but Aerojet could possibly sue, claiming that NASA is in violation of the law. -- From the Shadows
- wmf 3y agoTime for a "backup plan" Commercial Lunar Crew program.
- Karellen 3y agoDo you mean the Human Landing System program? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System
- wmf 3y agoNo, because HLS still uses SLS. Imagine if NASA used commercial fixed-price contracts to get astronauts onto HLS in addition to the existing HLS contracts.
- dotnet00 3y agoThere are various theories about architectures that use a Dragon or Starliner to transfer astronauts to the respective HLS vehicle in low Earth orbit before then departing for the Moon. There doesn't appear to be too much of a reason that shouldn't be possible, particularly since both HLS vehicles are meant to be able to perform orbital refueling, but the idea has oddly remained absent from official public documents. My personal theory is that like with orbital fuel depots, the idea is being kept out of official public communications until the HLS vehicles are operational (and thus uncancellable), at which point the political will can be more easily gained to cancel SLS without risking another waste-of-life threatening to kill the entire human spaceflight program if it didn't directly buy him votes.
- ls612 3y agoIf starship (and thus HLS) flies and can fly humans eventually there’s nothing really stopping it from being the whole mission using more refuelings in LEO.
- wmf 3y agoI don't think they'll cancel SLS just like they didn't cancel Starliner. They'll just buy enough alternate flights that they don't have to actually launch SLS.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoNot sure how this is "unaffordable"? Just buy one fewer F35's, done, you just funded the whole thing.
- vxNsr 3y agoWhen people talk about the cost of f35s they’re often including the amortized cost of the whole project. Most that money has already been spent.
- dragonwriter 3y agoYeah, buying one fewer F-35 barely moves the needle on total cost, it just bumps up the per-unit costs of the project because its almost all fixed, not variable, costs.
- bigfudge 3y agoI’m sure this is true, but “buying one less f35” to me sounds like shorthand for “don’t spend such a stupid amount on the next boondoggle military project”. I assumed it was a given that money had already been spent.
- foobarian 3y ago> buying one fewer Well maybe buying a lot more F-35s would save us money then! :-)
- lmm 3y agoThat's exactly what they've done. When you read about how the costs have come down or been kept stable, that's an accounting fiction where they increase the number they're "buying" so that the unit cost comes down.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoAnd most people who counter with that argument seem to forget that a jet has a life after delivery, where maintenance, replacement parts, and the cost of practice ordinance are substantial. You don't just save the cost of "the thing" by not buying it. You save "the entire lifetime cost of that thing".
- ramesh31 3y agoYou have to view the cost of SLS like insurance. Premiums are also a huge waste of money until you need to make a claim. In this case, we didn't; SpaceX came through with flying colors. But that was far from a sure thing 15 years ago, and the risk of being left without access to space was real.
- wmf 3y agoSLS doesn't provide any meaningful access to space.
- ramesh31 3y ago>SLS doesn't provide any meaningful access to space. It could have though. Imagine a world where SpaceX burnt out in the late 2000s, and all that talent and energy moved to Boeing/Lockheed et. al. Point being that they were far from a sure thing in 2008. The traditional contractors were seen as a safe bet by everyone involved. And the speed at which federal government moves means these things are measured in decades.
- dotnet00 3y agoI disagree, there was no world where SLS would be flying often enough to meaningfully substitute for a failed SpaceX. Such a world would still have ULA with its Vulcan, which would be the more likely candidate for taking on the work instead, possibly even making it difficult for Boing to can ACES.
- mannerheim 3y agoThat's an excuse that might have worked before the Falcon Heavy started flying. Not a reason to have kept funneling money into an obsolete design afterwards, and not a reason to keep doing so now.
- bnralt 3y agoWhile true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics. Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.
- svachalek 3y agoHuman spaceflight is more or less the marketing budget or loss leader for all the scientific work they do. It gets the public and Congress behind funding the important stuff.
- sitkack 3y agoIf that is true, I am not sure it is effective as it was in the past. From my viewpoint, the public doesn’t care much and space flight has been normalized.
- WWLink 3y agoI think you would have to be an incompetent principle investigator if you sent people to space and couldn't figure out a way to maximize scientific knowledge from it. We've been doing that for decades with the ISS and the moon trips and so on. I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera and sensors happen to show you. Now, whether that scientific information is worth the cost? Hard to say. As much as people like criticizing public programs for "pork barrel" this and "bureaucrat red tape" that and whatever.... publicly funded programs are usually run with penny-pinching oversight and angry politicians wanting to get their day of glory by killing programs. Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.
- mcny 3y ago
- araes 3y ago@1970-01-01 well timed other submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422115 The comparison in space enthusiasm and planning is ... significant. Wernher von Braun wrote a 281 page engineering text masquerading as a fiction novel to pitch Mars. Current NASA leadership wrote: - Stabilize the flight schedule - Achieve learning curve efficiencies - Encourage innovation - Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
- adrr 3y agoI don't understand how NASA is paying $100M for a space shuttle engine designed 40 years ago. R&D has already be amortized so its just manufacturing the thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
- jakobson14 3y agoYou have to factor in "oh shit, everybody who knew how to do that kind of weld retired" or "oh shit, they don't make that kind of valve anymore" as well. The older shit is, the harder it is to find expertise and spare parts. The sea dragon concept from the 60's is completely impossible today because they literally don't make the kind of cheap steel plate it was designed to use anymore. We can't build saturn V engines anymore (despite extensive blueprints) because those who knew how to do the extremely long, perfect welds involved are all dead and that kind of weld has fallen out of fashion so the skill no longer exists. You frequently end up re-engineering each bit of "old technology" for the current era's materials and skills, unless you literally maintain an unbroken chain of continual manufacturing all the way along. We stopped building new space shuttles 40+ years ago.
- cratermoon 3y agoSLS will use the remaining used Block II RS-25D engines, then (if SLS is still flying) switch to a newer RS-25E, designed to be cheaper and expendable. Not all R&D is amortized.
- Racing0461 3y agoWho cares? I would much rather my taxes go to this than be completely wasted on cr*p i don't care about.
- morninglight 3y agoSLS is powered by that inexhaustible fuel..... Pork. .
- adolph 3y agoIt's all part of the experiment to falsify Einstein's conjecture that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/compound-interest/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/compound-interest/
- moomin 3y agoI love it when someone says they’re going to cut costs by “Encouraging Innovation”. Almost as much as “Reducing Fraud”. Political types love these announcements they’re going to get something for nothing.
- simonblack 3y agoNASA's problem with the SLS is not really its high cost. A 'high cost' is strictly relative. NASA's problem is lack of funding. That is something that can't be fixed in today's world. Because the US just does not have the amount of spare cash lying around like it did in the 1960s. That lack of NASA funding is why I predict that the US will never again put men on the Moon, no matter what all the pundits try to tell us. There just ain't no spare cash, period.
- Nevermark 3y agoI have an incredible idea, give the SLS vertical landing and relaunch capability. Or just trade each $2 billion [0] SLS launch for a mix of 2000 $1 million [1] Starship launches to orbit, from orbit to destination, and/or returns. Even if Starship launches have a significant likelihood of costing more than that, just 2 Starship launches per SLS seems like a bargain. 20 would be fantastic. 200 would be surreal. 2000 would be … what on (off) Earth could NASA do with 2000? Put all of NASA, its entire supply chain, and the Senate on Mars! O_o Then achieve a further cost reduction for trips to Mars surface: just the cost of the electrical current required to operate a Mars habitat airlock. Talk about time and cost efficiency!! What is ridiculous is the crazy logic of all this is fairly sound, due to the beyond ridiculous (for today) SLS costs. I have a funny feeling that the SLS’s days are numbered. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
- animitronix 3y agoYup, this is what happens when you subsidize states like Alabama with government contracts...
- nebula8804 3y agoWould a Democratic president have any way to put the screws to this program and the people in Alabama seeing as they don't ever vote Democratic anyway?
- tjalfi 3y agoThere's substantial bipartisan support for SLS and it has suppliers in all 50 states[0]. [0] https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
- jfengel 3y agoNot really. The budget is written by Congress, and the President doesn't have any direct power in Congress. They often have friends there, especially if they used to be legislators. They have some carrots and sticks, but those are actually weak and indirect tools. If the President's party controls a house, they can usually invoke party discipline (the general sense that doing something will be good for the party and a whole and therefore good for the individual members), perhaps with some of those carrots-and-sticks for recalcitrant allies. But it's rare for the President's party to control both houses, especially considering the filibuster. If a President made it their top priority and it were something that the party got behind them on, they could perhaps make an all-out push, calling in favors and making deals. It would come with a lot of ill will, from their own party as well as the opposition, because that's not how Congress likes to work. They see themselves as a deliberative body and don't like outside interference -- especially when it upsets the balance of their own dealmaking. So the short answer is no, the President doesn't have that kind of power. Even if they wanted to, which they generally don't. Nobody is going to jump up and down to say, "Yay, look how efficient this President is, saving .01% of the overall budget". And while they might score a few political points off of hurting somebody that their allies don't like, it's generally not something Democratic presidents are into. (I'm afraid there's no non-partisan way to say that the culture war is asymmetric.)
- jiggawatts 3y agoSomething I've observed about catastrophically bad projects is that there can be a point where the enormity of the failure is impossible to acknowledge, and hence the failure ceases to exist in some sense. Once the double-think kicks in, it becomes strangely easy to forge ahead and commit. After all, there are no acknowledged problems! It's essentially the "Emperor has no clothes" story, but nobody believes the little boy telling the truth, because the "emperor is naked" is such an absurd statement to make. That's just silly, so of course there must be a deeper truth, a greater story, a hidden meaning.
- credit_guy 3y agoSLS is actually very affordable if seen from the correct angle: a know-how preservation program. After the end of the Cold War, the US reduced drastically its military expenditure. The danger was that some day will come (like, you know, the 2020's) when the US will need to restart the missile assembly lines. How do you keep enough people trained at an affordable cost? Well, you keep them busy building a rocket that never launches. Any single launch is money down the drain. You still need to launch, because if you don't you are in danger of fooling yourself: you think you maintained a qualified workforce, but actually they are all impostors. But other than quality assurance, the launches themselves are not important, they are just a cost. So you want to launch as few times as possible.
- tim333 3y agoMissile assembly lines are still there. The HIMARS ammo plant is going full out. Minuteman and Trident are still things, indeed in the UK we ordered some not long ago. There's also moon landing type tech at SpaceX and some other startups are working on interesting stuff - Stoke Space is quite an interesting one.
- jessriedel 3y agoTo my knowledge, the SLS program isn't preserving any appreciable amount of ICBM know-how. They are essentially non-overlapping technologies. The explanation that SLS is a jobs program seems to fit the evidence much better.
- samhuk 3y agoInteresting, this was almost word-for-word how I was explaining it to a non-space-nerd friend of mine. I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true. If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no? To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house. I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.
- Gud 3y agoThankfully the rest of the worlds superpowers, India, China and Europe are run by cronies too, so it all evens out. I don’t think these mega empires are good for the world, too much central power and too many management layers between those who rule, and those who do. A lot of rules to follow that often seems arbitrary.