I’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.
Transparency 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.
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.
You 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.
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.
Taking 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.
My point is that the people who created this project didn't have the same goals as you or I would have, and their goals have probably been accomplished.
Notice the use solid rocket fuel in the SLS and the mandate from Congress to retain the skills and experience. What else uses solid fuel? The US ICBM arsenal.
Well could it be the F9 etc. are targeted at a very well established commercial class with tons of buyers, economic outputs, stable market, opportunity for re-use.
Whereas SLS is more like big fantasy science missions, much less frequent and nobody willing to really pay for it but government?
Its actually much worse then that. These are not the 'cost' for F9/FH, that is the price. The cost of these launch is like 1/2 to 1/3. Part of the price is also amortizing past development cost.
In the SLS launch non of that is included. If you take into account the full development cost and amortize them over all the launches (and calculate the interest on government debt) the price is actually way higher then what you have listed.
- SLS is more powerful then FH but not by as much as people think.
- SLS is human-rated and FH is not, but that is mostly because there is no reason to human-rate the FH.
- SLS has the potential to be extend significantly to outperform FH by a much larger margin but that will cost another X billion and another Y years.
- SLS was supposed to be cheap by using lots of legacy technology. So in reality Falcon series are actually pretty much newer and more modern in pretty much every design aspect. Of course when SLS was designed Falcon was 'unproven' and the parts of the SLS were 'proven'. However of course this has totally reversed by now.
SLS rocket is simply a bad design. It was the outcome of a bad process partly pushed by congress on NASA and partly by NASA engineers own failure to analyse the situation properly. A large part of this is the believe to reuse 'proven' technologies and more importantly to reuse that same workforce.
Because it used Cost+ contracting the contractors have no intensive what so ever to perform well. The keep getting their bonus payments for good performance even, something that independent government reviews has pointed out multiple times.
So to sum up, there is very little to almost nothing that is gained by SLS. Its a huge part of the NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing developments. You could fully fund the lunar lander program AND do other preparation for moon bases for example.
Edit: This talk form 2011 is quite interesting. I often call it the SpaceX antithesis talk. He even mentions SpaceX a couple of times and references them without naming them.
He quite literally says 'if we can't make this affordable they will from in future just let SpaceX do it' and he made it clear their main design goal is affordability and having a program that could meet milestones. Well, that didn't work out so much. See:
>> 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.
Insurance, 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.
Then you aren't going up. Rockets are massive tanks of explosives flying through the air at supersonic speeds. That person is there to protect the people on the ground. Launch escape systems will protect the crew, but given the energies involved, the crew is less important than the potential for killing hundreds on the ground, or potentially thousands onboard a cruise ship.
"CAPE CANAVERAL — Air Force safety officers sent commands to destroy SpaceX's failing Falcon 9 rocket after its launch from Cape Canaveral on Sunday morning, but long after a malfunction had already caused the rocket to break apart, officials confirmed Monday."
"Some launch systems use flight termination for range safety. In these systems the RSO can remotely command the vehicle to self-destruct to prevent the vehicle from traveling outside prescribed safety zone. This allows as-yet-unconsumed propellants to combust at altitude, rather than upon the vehicle reaching the ground.[1]"
"As of 2016, a total of 32 US orbital launch attempts have ended in an RSO destruct, the first being Vanguard TV-3BU in 1958 and the most recent being Cygnus CRS Orb-3 in 2014.[...] Some launch vehicles (for example, the Titan family) have included an automatic destruct system to activate in the event that the solid rocket motors or upper stages separate prematurely; this is separate from the standard RSO system which is activated by manual command."
Hey, I wanted to respond to your comment from 18 days ago but responses there have already been disabled (so I'm hijacking this comment). The question was about "> Housing market returns are very bad. Between 1948 and 2004 the real increase in value in the U.S real estate market was less than 1% a year." versus the "Return on everything" paper from 2018. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585224)
On page 85 of the paper, they actually point out that the real capital gain is ~0.7-0.9% per year on average (with a huge standard deviation of 8%, since it's very market specific), which seems to agree with the submitted article, but that the rest of the return, 5.33% (stddev: 0.8%) comes from rental yield (of course in the case of your own house that becomes money saved from not paying rent). Those two added together are what give the total rate of return on housing.
Airliners have been proven to be much safer than rockets. By way of example, spaceflight has a 3% fatality rate for astronauts [0]. If (pre-COVID) Heathrow airport (80,000,000 passengers in 2019) had a similar fatality rate, 7000 people would die every day, at that airport alone. Airliners are massively, massively safe.
This is the actual goal of Starship: airliner-type safety. Of course I doubt that they will reach that goal, but by striving for it then perhaps the next generation of rocket might.
Contrast with NASA manned vehicle requirements, which call for a 1:270 chance of loss of crew or loss of vehicle.
To add to everything else already mentioned, when launch price goes down, it suddenly becomes feasible to build much cheaper satellites: both because you can afford to build them heavier, and you can take more risk. That reduces insurance costs.
None. If you want a heavier satellite you simply have to pay proportionally more to launch it. Nobody outside of government agencies comes anywhere close to the maximum load of a single super heavy launch, and even that "battleship" approach to satellites is giving way to smaller devices. So the mass isn't really the limiting factor, rather it is cost. Doubling of launch weights for a price, being able to launch at a 50% discount, won't result in any spectacular technology. What will happen is that big communication satellites will be given large fuel tanks, longer service lives, that ironically might reduce the number of needed launches of large satellites to geostationary orbit. NASA will be able to more cheaply explore the solar system. While people wanting to launch on the cheap will benefit, they generally won't have the funds to push any technological boundaries.
Falcon 9 launches are often less than $60M. A big chunk of that is the disposable second stage. Fairings are also a few million dollars. Insurance rates on Falcon 9 launches are currently 4%, so ~$2.4M. I'd be shocked if non-rocket/fuel costs were more than $15M.
>That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button.
I think (at least at the Eastern Range), they started leaving this seat empty for Falcon launches in 2017 once the automated flight termination system was qualified. This system also reduces staffing requirements at the radars in Bermuda and all over the place
I hear mixed stories about this. The automated system does exist, but there is also a need to supervise the automated system and so I read that there is still human in/on the loop. The russians suffered an accident tied to a similar system that triggered a launch escape tower prematurely, causing a fire that eventually destroyed the entire rocket on the pad. The flight had been delayed but the system was still activate. After several hours it perceived the slow rotation of the earth as the rocket being off course and triggered.
SpaceX is already launching for less then 100 million. You don't need to close a larger part of the ocean for a bigger rocket.
SpaceX is actually building its own rocket launch facilities in South Texas. They are also already evaluating sea platforms.
Insurance rates for Falcon 9 are already very low, the lowest in the industry. If Starship can double or triple the flight rate insurance will go down by quite a bit. Also the costumers pay for insurance, its not part of the SpaceX price quoted here. In addition, government don't actually insure things like Artemis program.
> That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button.
That job doesn't exist anymore for SpaceX launches.
In fact, if you look at the total labour for launch, its going down considerably and it will continue to go down. Look at SpaceX operation in South Texas, an explicit goal of their whole design process is to make things cheaper and faster and that goes for operations as well.
Another example is the capsule retrieval operations. During Appollo damn near a whole battle fleet was sent, now its one ship and some available cost guard.
2 million $ per launch is quite extreme however there is absolutely no reason why it should cost over 100 million. Even with the Falcon 9 today, the second stage is actually large part of the cost and a fully reusable system would reduce that consderably. The fuel for Starship is actually cheaper then for the Falcon 9 as the Falcon 9 uses RP-1, helium and a couple other things Starship no longer has.
The steel construction should actually end less expensive then the Falcon 9 construction. This of course doesn't go for the full human capable Starship, but just the Cargo version of the rocket compared.
The Raptor rocket engine is more complex then Merlin and will likely be somewhat more expensive until it significantly overtakes it in production rate. However SpaceX has shown to be able to make engine quite cheaply and with reuse the per flight cost is trivial.
Please explain why Starship should cost (internal cost) more then 2x of Falcon 9.
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.
It 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.
As 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..
What 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.
The 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.
As 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.
falcon? 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.
I'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.
And 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.
You 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.
SpaceX funded most of the Falcon 1 program themselves. The DoD was one early costumer.
SpaceX got some funding for Commercial Cargo program but that was mostly for the capsule, it didn't fully fund the Falcon 9.
The whole Falcon 9 improvement, such as Merlin 1D engines and all the other improvements were funded from SpaceX themselves.
The same goes for the complete SpaceX re-usabilitly program.
Under the Commercial Cargo contract part of that money was for human rating the Falcon 9 but is mostly about paper work and certification. A few issues were addressed that were financed with this contract. That money was for the capsule.
The Raptor program was a SpaceX own development. They got a small grant from the air force for a small Raptor version but that is a tiny part of the program and the current Raptor is very different. All of that was done without any funding from government.
The complete Starship program was funded by SpaceX themselves until last year when they got comparatively small amount for the Starship as a Moon lander study, but not nearly enough to fund the program.
The complete Starlink program was funded and developed by SpaceX without any government contracts.
Its flat out false to say that everything SpaceX has done was government funded. SpaceX has and had many commercial flights and has multiple rounds of investment of private money raised.
In reality SpaceX very likely bit to low for both CRS and for CommercialCrew. SpaceX had to invest private funds to get these programs operational. Boeing considered SpaceX bid so low that it would be impossible for SpaceX to finish the capsule and reasoned that when that happened they could also ask for more money, but SpaceX didn't ask for more money and finished the project.
And the argument that it all builds on decades of NASA engineering effort, well that is partly true. But you could just as well argue that Space build on all engineering effort of humanity.
NASA or its contractors have never even come close to making an engine so operationally cheap as the Merlin, or an engine that was as reusable as Merlin. Nothing NASA has ever done is close to as impressive as Raptor (RS-25 is neat design but production and cost nightmare). NASA has not build a cargo or crew capsule in 50 years. NASA has not managed to design a new rocket in 50+ years. NASA own attempts at rocket development have universally failed.
NASA never managed anything close to capturing a reusable orbital booster. Programs like DC-X are not in the same league.
People need to stop claiming that SpaceX is simply a couple guys who found some drawings at NASA and said, he we can copy that. SpaceX has done things NASA was not able to even with budgets 10-50 times higher. Most of the things SpaceX profited from were done decades ago.
And in the opposite direction it is actually the case that NASA learned a huge amount from SpaceX as well. NASA got full access into Space re-usability program like the engines, super-sonic retro-propulsion. SpaceX has the first data on pusher escape systems. Full-Flow Stage Combustion engine are now something NASA can study because of the Moon Lander program. SpaceX way of doing software development have very much changed NASA approchs as well.
And all of that is before we consider the organizational changes at NASA that happened directly because of SpaceX. Many NASA engineers have talked about how contact with SpaceX directly changed their perspective and how they tried to bring this culture into NASA. Dan Rasky is one good example of this, his talks on the subject are informative.
What makes SpaceX (and in a different way BlueOrigin) different is exactly that they go and get their own funding for when they want to work on a project. If government has some contracts open that they can use their technology for they are happy to do it. Eventually government will fly regularly with Starship, but that is different from SpaceX Starship program being funded by government.
SLS 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.
Never 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.
> 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
I 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.
That 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.
SLS 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.
I’m intrigued at the idea that this failure “puts the squeeze” on private companies to get their projects in order faster and more efficiently. Then again I’d rather see Elon or Jeff make the trip ahead of me, as a vote of confidence. I don’t want to get spaced bc of an asshole PM at deep blue! :D
An "orbital Starship" plus a successful orbital refueling is the real game changer. Goes from 150T to LEO TO 150T anywhere in the solar system. SLS block 2, which is another decade (?) away, can only send 45T to Earth escape velocity.
And orbital refueling only costs six (?) times as much as a LEO flight.
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.
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.
This 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.
You 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.
I 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.
SLS 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.
I didn't realize there was any other way to interpret it besides "getting green (successful) results for all of the tests" (there are 8 test stages planned). I think we're both wrong though:
The big difference between NASA and SpaceX lies in how fast they each move, and what they are failing at.
Failing at launching the first private rocket on a tight budget, at landing a rocket for the first time, or at iterating on rocket designs at pace rarely, if ever, seen before is expected. As a matter of fact, it’s success that isn’t expected.
Failing at making yet another (very expensive) rocket built by supposedly experienced manufacturers overseen by a huge public organisation over more than a decade with huge funding? Well, it’s a bit disturbing to say the least.
SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.
SpaceX's approach also deals with the real problem, which is a program having the wrong goals, rather than making mistakes in working toward a given goal. How many of you have built a product that ended up working great, but was a failure because it was the wrong product?
Lore suggests that that's a misconception, born of the Agile myth that the only thing that existed before the invention of either XP or Scrum was waterfall.
The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit, agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting back out of LEO again, including to Mars.
I was making a commentary more of what I see the difference between NASA vs SpaceX's approach today. I wasn't around for Apollo, and given their crazy compressed timeframe for getting to the moon back then, there must have been some agility there....
I was really agreeing with the previous commenter, which I guess is a statement about today, and not how NASA operated in the 1960s...
> SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.
My mistake for invoking the Agile vs Waterfall debate... (and potentially being wrong!)
Congress and the Nixon administration trapped NASA in LEO. There was extensive planning inside NASA for applications of Saturn-Apollo technologies [0]. Two of the ambitious ones were a manned Venus flyby [1] and a permanent Lunar base [2]. After the Apollo I fire Congress lost its appetite for space and slashed NASA's budget [3]. The Nixon administration went all-in on the Space Shuttle which ate up all of NASA's manned spaceflight budget. Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project were the only AAP projects to survive and only at the cost of Apollo missions 18-20.
The Saturn-Apollo program had a super-heavy lift rocket (Saturn V), a man-rated heavy lift rocket (Saturn IB), a Lunar trajectory capable command and service module, a lunar lander, and a workable wet workshop space station (Skylab).
Congress tossed all of that away. The Space Shuttle program wasn't a bad idea, a heavy lift vehicle that provided a shirt sleeve environment but could support EVA is actually an awesome thing for LEO. But Congress scrapping Saturn-Apollo trapped NASA in LEO because the Shuttle was only capable of LEO. It's not a platform that can support manned Moon missions let alone any more distant bodies.
Not only that, but the nuclear rocketry program for Mars was making breakthroughs like the nuclear lightbulb hybrid reactor & closed loop rocket engine [1] - that the public wouldn't see until declassified papers hit JPL's archives in the 2000s. This program was cancelled by Nixon, setting us back at least half a century.
Not really a setback, because there was no place for that technology. Lack of space reactors wasn't and isn't a roadblock. Had that development continued it would have been largely wasted, and the knowledge gained would have decayed away.
It easily functions as a self-breeding terrestrial reactor that reaches criticality with 1/500th to 1/1000th the fuel of existing nuclear reactors (~20kg). The design requires active power that shuts down the reactor on failure, making any accident a complete nonevent. It can even be kickstarted without huge amounts of enriched fuel with the addition of a neutron gun (which they used to test the design without nuclear fuel). The core infrastructure required to support such a reactor are also covered by far less red tape (mostly centrifuges).
It would have changed the face of power generation at a critical time for climate change if it was allowed to reach fruition. Instead it was locked away in UTC & NASA archives.
The requirements for a space reactor, and for a terrestrial reactor, are radically different. No space reactor will make sense for terrestrial power generation. The temperatures are different, power density is different, safety cases are different. A 20kg reactor likely needs highly enriched fuel (space reactors are typically fast reactors too, so we're talking about something that's almost a bomb there.)
An external neutron source does not greatly change the needed enrichment (since any practical subcritical reactor would still need k fairly high, so it is only a bit subcritical.)
Just read the papers. There are dozens on that archive covering the design, theory, and testing - all of those issues are covered. 20kg is actually a high number optimized for a certain plasma temperature that radiates in UV without losing criticality. All things being equal (enriched uranium hexafluoride), at higher temperatures and pressures the reactor needs far less fuel but it causes too much degradation to the reactor walls to be economical or useful except in cold boots.
The terrestrial reactor and the rocket engine versions are different in how they transmit power from the reactor core to do useful work but not radically so - the core irrotational vortex compressing a high temperature plasma in a single crystal beryllium oxide chamber is the same in both designs and has been tested. The difference is in the cooling gas - hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles to absorb the black body radiation of the plasma for the rocket and water going through a steam turbine for terrestrial power generation.
It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was driven by that, not by a "lack of will".
It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.
In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack.
The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.
The engineers knew from the beginning that the Shuttle made no sense. The mission numbers used to justify it were always absurd and assumed a flight rate that they knew wasn't going to be achieved.
Had NASA engineers actually build a better design for Space Shuttle, lots of budget would have been available to do more. The Space shuttle could have done much more much better things if it was designed differently.
And had my father had two X chromosomes, he'd have been my mother. There has to be a reason to entertain contrafactuals; you can't just state them and assume that outcome would have been likely.
The point here being that it was not bureaucracy or the government that trapped NASA in LEO. It was NASA own design process.
Blaming everything always on the congress/president is a way for NASA to never take responsibility. All the success gets credit to NASA but failure is always somebody wrong doing.
Totally disagree. With the same budget a much more successful vehicle could have been built.
Simple changes like not going for hydrogen, separating main engines from Shuttle itself, not using hydrogen on the first stage, vertically mounted shuttle and so on.
No, I don't think so. The underlying problem was the Shuttle was a One Big Bite attempt at developing a very complex technology. That doesn't work. Development of something like that has to be iterative. Shuffling the deck chairs with different propellants wouldn't have made any difference.
The Gemeni and Apollo projects were very iterative, and rife with failures.
They launched a new mission every few months!
Apollo burned downed and killed the crew, the next Apollo was up a few months later! The second moon mission was launched a few months after the first.
1960's NASA was a little bit like SpaceX.
That said - we should remember that Space X is iterating on already established tech, at somewhat of a smaller scale. They started smaller. Let's see how it works with their newer, bigger gear that is breaking boundaries.
I don't think the negativity is directed at NASA so much as Boeing. They've made a business out of grifting, and this is just another example of it.
Shelby is more concerned with staying in office than making advances in space, and it shows. That's not NASA's fault, they're trying to do the right thing IN SPITE of the political pressure to waste money in order for a politician to be able to claim he's "creating jobs" in his state.
NASA probably could be as nimble as SpaceX if they didn’t have to rely on Congress, whose goal is not to build a successful rocket, but to spread the money funnel across the States. Imagine if SpaceX’s board suddenly said “the company’s goal is now not to get to Mars, but to employ as many people and contractors as possible in all 50 states!” You’d basically get NASA.
It could be a lot more efficient if they stopped trying to be subtle and instead spent more time thinking.
Openly admit NASA is a basic infrastructure assurance program, much like the Interstate highway system is. (Yes, it's Military capable infrastructure, for moving troops and stuff around. It turns out that useful infrastructure improves overall economic fitness and activity as well.)
Then group up all of the infrastructure spending and make sure it gives every citizen roughly equal value. Sometimes this can be justified in lower shipping costs for produced items from farms and backbone redundancy across the country. Other times it's connecting land and sea ports to the cross country grid. Evaluating a fair share of the commons and of resources to maintain the commons is a hard problem.
NASA also falls under various civic services the government proves because it makes sense for just one place to do the work; or at least for a baseline that private entities can compete against. The distribution of these programs also forms part of the weight to balance government improvements programs among areas.
I don't think that's a charitable reading of the GP. More like "the government is aiming for something other than efficiency, and it gets what it's aiming for".
If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might see NASA taking a different path.
I agree that it isn't the goal, but that's part of the point.
And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for government to government, especially for a program that ultimately has so much of an impact on military capabilities and national security.
But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted to."
My point isn't so much that private sector can do things efficiently (certainly not always), so much as government generally can't, especially starting from a point of inefficiency.
Yes it's a matter of incentives. The problem is saying incentives for government work could change, is very different than them actually changing. Some of those incentives are inherently rooted as part of what makes government... government.
It's also important to note that while NASA might make multi-year plans they have to deal with a yearly budget from Congress and Congressional mandates. NASA has a relatively small budget but a lot of different tasks, manned spaceflight is only one of those.
They have to drop whole missions after years of planning and construction because the next year's budget is a billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets pushed to the next fiscal year.
My impression is that the big difference between NASA's human spaceflight program and SpaceX is that, where NASA has failures, SpaceX has stretch goals that weren't met.
This is an unfortunate consequence of any insufficiently iterative development process.
> 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.
That's because they're required to by law. There's an entire section of the United States Code that's dedicated to this.
SpaceX made failure part of its strategy. Rocket explodes, no big deal, we expected that, the next one is ready.
NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot of time and money making sure things work the first time, so when they don't, then it is a problem.
This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace.
> Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, making several versions of the STIG rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle would not be as traumatic. “That was our critical mistake in the last few years, because we should have been able to put more of these together,” he said.
It is not that NASA doesn't have the right to fail, but in their case, it is a major setback, and it is a bit disappointing considering how much SLS went overboard.
Wasn’t this simply a byproduct of Congress trying to control the process? The idea of hard deadlines and low risk.
Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure political pressure instead of organizational culture.
Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at all.
No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example), NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only looks at the absolute number of failures instead of absolute number of successful missions or their cost so NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme caution for self survival.
This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.
They are very different kinds of failure though... This was not an exploratory "try something new" test. This was an integration test to verify that all the "on paper" work was correct. The whole point of SLS is that its use of technology with extensive "flight heritage" is supposed to avoid having to break new ground.
This is like discovering a major issue during the shakedown cruise of a new ship. It's better to find the issue now, and that's why they test, but the point of this test wasn't to learn anything new, it was supposed to just prove that it works as expected.
SpaceX is generally very up front about tests that they think have a high likelihood of failure, and the tests that do fail tend to be doing genuinely "new things" (like belly-flopping a booster).
I'm not a SpaceX fanboy here (I think Elon in particular is pretty insufferable), but it's not really to fair to compare SpaceX's development testing failures with this integration test failure.
So I listened to a podcast about this... but SpaceX and Boeing/NASA are explicitly taking two different approaches to proving their rocket will work. Obviously we know SpaceX is proving their rocket through system level tests. But for SLS the plan has been to use a long accepted NASA approved method of proving their design where individual parts are so thoroughly tested and proven to work that they don’t need many flight tests of the full system. In fact I believe the original plan was one flight test without humans and then have the second flight be a manned mission! So they really aren’t supposed to fail like this.
So at the core are two different approaches to proving their system, where SpaceX totally expects some failures and SLS is supposed to be proven before it even flies. Personally I’m a fan of the SpaceX method but I can understand why the old guard space developers would choose this slower more cautious method.
I tried to find it a bit but I’ll do a more thorough search to see if I can figure out where I learned this. I’ll let you know if I find it.
EDIT: Did a thorough google search and looked through my podcast lists but I haven't been able to find it. I did find this podcast in my listening history which may or may not cover the topic, but unfortunately I don't see a transcript I can search through:
Adding to your comment, this closing made me sad: "So what had been viewed as a strength of the program, using heritage hardware, instead became a liability. Saturday was only the first real hardware test for the rocket. It cannot afford too many more liabilities like those on display."
If anything they cannot afford _not_ to have more failures like that. In fact on the spectrum of failures this one was near the best possible outcome since something was learned without destroying the entire assembly. But with this kind of reactive thinking they may turtle up and slow down progress until the program gets canceled.
My comment (in support of NASA) was that an isolated test failure shouldn't be looked upon as a failure of their entire programme. Instead it's actually a signal of progress being made (however slow that progress may be).
There were plenty of isolated testing failures like this (some much worse) leading up to the moon landing.
It did go very well overall, but 3 astronauts died in testing (totally avoidable), several of the test-launches of the rockets didn't go to plan, and later Apollo missions had various incidents.
Its actually wasn't. If you actually look at the cost involved. Putting all the funding into Shuttle simply made the Apollo architecture to expensive.
A much, much, much, much better strategy would have been to keep the Appollo hardware and evolve it. Plan for 1-2 Saturn V flights every year. Use the F1 engine on a smaller vehicle (like Saturn 1B) and use that vehicle as the work horse for both the military and NASA.
This would have allowed them to mass produce the engine, reuse the same pads. It would have given them much more capability compared to Shuttle and it would have been considerably cheaper.
It was bad engineering choices, not simply the budget. They cut the wrong things.
That wouldn't have been continuing Apollo; that would have been salvaging something from the effort. I do agree it (or something else, like Schnitt's MCD booster concept) would have been far better for the country, even if they wouldn't have gotten Nixon as many votes in California.
Failure at NASA isn't like failure at SpaceX. This was the culmination of 10 years of simulations and pork jobs. For SpaceX its the culmination of a couple weeks of wielding on a tent using private money instead of direct public funds.
Difference is SpaceX welded some tanks on a field. This program spend 20 billion over 10 years designing the whole system on paper with very little iterative testing.
This not a prototype, this is the actual rocket that should fly. It has already spent over 1 year on the test stand to do 1 static fire. SpaceX did 3 static fire in ONE DAY last week.
Consider this, when SLS started development SpaceX Starship literally didn't exist on paper, the engines didn't exist, the facilities they were built in didn't exist, they didn't even have approval to build facilities.
So SpaceX designed a totally new engine, a engine mass manufacturing line, multiple new test stands, designed threw many iteration on the Starship design, build a totally new private space port with a huge manufacturing facility. All of this was done for a budget that is less then what SLS gets PER YEAR and not just a little less.
One year of SLS development could have likely funded all of SpaceX research and development over the last 10 years.
NASA simply should not build its own rocket. And even worse they should not blow unlimited amounts of money into these contracts while they are showing absurdly bad performance. In fact, I think the government should systematically be compensated with stocks of these companies when they go over budget and over time by this amount.
The whole program is political, it serves no function. Payloads like Europa Clippers are fighting politically for the right NOT to launch on SLS. Having SLS around forces NASA into suboptimal moon architectures. SLS is a political straight-jacked for NASA. With the SLS budget alone so many amazing project could be funded, it is hard to even comprehend.
We can 'cut the slack' on this issue, but the issues keep coming and the rate of delay is pretty crazy and the cost are even crazier.
> 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.
Fantastic, totally agree. Lets do more of that, and less giving Boeing and LM money for not performing well.
While 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.
“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.”
The 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.
Apparently that wasn’t a problem for SpaceX. The problem with NASA is its corporate culture and political micro-management not lack of engineering skills.
Space-X had to start over from the beginning. They built a small booster, and then a bigger booster, and then a better version of the bigger booster, then an even bigger booster and a spacecraft. Took 18 years. That's longer than it took NASA in the 1950s and 1960s.
NASA is trying to do a giant booster without anybody who built a booster recently.
It 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.
Without 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.
The launch cost will likely be much higher than that. I don't think that would even cover the marginal cost of making another rocket. The fixed costs will be substantial (what, you thought all those Shelby-voting engineers in Alabama would be laid off once development was done?)
Any real effort to go to the moon will involve propellant stockpiles and transfer in space. These could use LH2, which could be sent up on F9/F9H. There is no reason to do the injection to the moon using the F9/F9H upper stages.
I will add that even ignoring F9/F9H, there is no sustainable lunar or Mars program using SLS. The plans to go to Mars would be a flags-and-footprints dead end like Apollo. For space, it should either be go big or don't bother.
I 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.
Failure 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.
152 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadMaybe 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.
NASA prides itself on sourcing components from / having a presence in each of the 50 states.
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.
If you think of that as the actual purpose, this is a successful project.
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
My point is that the people who created this project didn't have the same goals as you or I would have, and their goals have probably been accomplished.
I assume they’d have to build an additional adapter to handler wider payloads.
Whereas SLS is more like big fantasy science missions, much less frequent and nobody willing to really pay for it but government?
As a very, very crude way of looking at it?
In the SLS launch non of that is included. If you take into account the full development cost and amortize them over all the launches (and calculate the interest on government debt) the price is actually way higher then what you have listed.
- SLS is more powerful then FH but not by as much as people think.
- SLS is human-rated and FH is not, but that is mostly because there is no reason to human-rate the FH.
- SLS has the potential to be extend significantly to outperform FH by a much larger margin but that will cost another X billion and another Y years.
- SLS was supposed to be cheap by using lots of legacy technology. So in reality Falcon series are actually pretty much newer and more modern in pretty much every design aspect. Of course when SLS was designed Falcon was 'unproven' and the parts of the SLS were 'proven'. However of course this has totally reversed by now.
SLS rocket is simply a bad design. It was the outcome of a bad process partly pushed by congress on NASA and partly by NASA engineers own failure to analyse the situation properly. A large part of this is the believe to reuse 'proven' technologies and more importantly to reuse that same workforce.
Because it used Cost+ contracting the contractors have no intensive what so ever to perform well. The keep getting their bonus payments for good performance even, something that independent government reviews has pointed out multiple times.
So to sum up, there is very little to almost nothing that is gained by SLS. Its a huge part of the NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing developments. You could fully fund the lunar lander program AND do other preparation for moon bases for example.
Edit: This talk form 2011 is quite interesting. I often call it the SpaceX antithesis talk. He even mentions SpaceX a couple of times and references them without naming them.
He quite literally says 'if we can't make this affordable they will from in future just let SpaceX do it' and he made it clear their main design goal is affordability and having a program that could meet milestones. Well, that didn't work out so much. See:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweLWCBHpUE?t=0
Key points: 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$)
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.
Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
I'm not going up until that job is eliminated!
"CAPE CANAVERAL — Air Force safety officers sent commands to destroy SpaceX's failing Falcon 9 rocket after its launch from Cape Canaveral on Sunday morning, but long after a malfunction had already caused the rocket to break apart, officials confirmed Monday."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety
"Some launch systems use flight termination for range safety. In these systems the RSO can remotely command the vehicle to self-destruct to prevent the vehicle from traveling outside prescribed safety zone. This allows as-yet-unconsumed propellants to combust at altitude, rather than upon the vehicle reaching the ground.[1]"
"As of 2016, a total of 32 US orbital launch attempts have ended in an RSO destruct, the first being Vanguard TV-3BU in 1958 and the most recent being Cygnus CRS Orb-3 in 2014.[...] Some launch vehicles (for example, the Titan family) have included an automatic destruct system to activate in the event that the solid rocket motors or upper stages separate prematurely; this is separate from the standard RSO system which is activated by manual command."
On page 85 of the paper, they actually point out that the real capital gain is ~0.7-0.9% per year on average (with a huge standard deviation of 8%, since it's very market specific), which seems to agree with the submitted article, but that the rest of the return, 5.33% (stddev: 0.8%) comes from rental yield (of course in the case of your own house that becomes money saved from not paying rent). Those two added together are what give the total rate of return on housing.
I mean, so were Concorde jets...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
Contrast with NASA manned vehicle requirements, which call for a 1:270 chance of loss of crew or loss of vehicle.
To add to everything else already mentioned, when launch price goes down, it suddenly becomes feasible to build much cheaper satellites: both because you can afford to build them heavier, and you can take more risk. That reduces insurance costs.
I think (at least at the Eastern Range), they started leaving this seat empty for Falcon launches in 2017 once the automated flight termination system was qualified. This system also reduces staffing requirements at the radars in Bermuda and all over the place
That person (the Mission Flight Control Officer) doesn't exist for SpaceX launches, they use an automated system.
https://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/icg/providersforum/2019...
SpaceX is actually building its own rocket launch facilities in South Texas. They are also already evaluating sea platforms.
Insurance rates for Falcon 9 are already very low, the lowest in the industry. If Starship can double or triple the flight rate insurance will go down by quite a bit. Also the costumers pay for insurance, its not part of the SpaceX price quoted here. In addition, government don't actually insure things like Artemis program.
> That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button.
That job doesn't exist anymore for SpaceX launches.
In fact, if you look at the total labour for launch, its going down considerably and it will continue to go down. Look at SpaceX operation in South Texas, an explicit goal of their whole design process is to make things cheaper and faster and that goes for operations as well.
Another example is the capsule retrieval operations. During Appollo damn near a whole battle fleet was sent, now its one ship and some available cost guard.
2 million $ per launch is quite extreme however there is absolutely no reason why it should cost over 100 million. Even with the Falcon 9 today, the second stage is actually large part of the cost and a fully reusable system would reduce that consderably. The fuel for Starship is actually cheaper then for the Falcon 9 as the Falcon 9 uses RP-1, helium and a couple other things Starship no longer has.
The steel construction should actually end less expensive then the Falcon 9 construction. This of course doesn't go for the full human capable Starship, but just the Cargo version of the rocket compared.
The Raptor rocket engine is more complex then Merlin and will likely be somewhat more expensive until it significantly overtakes it in production rate. However SpaceX has shown to be able to make engine quite cheaply and with reuse the per flight cost is trivial.
Please explain why Starship should cost (internal cost) more then 2x of Falcon 9.
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-a...
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.
A business that lives only with government support is a de facto government entity.
Sorry that facts offend you.
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.
And most Falcon launches are not for the government, you know.
SpaceX funded most of the Falcon 1 program themselves. The DoD was one early costumer.
SpaceX got some funding for Commercial Cargo program but that was mostly for the capsule, it didn't fully fund the Falcon 9.
The whole Falcon 9 improvement, such as Merlin 1D engines and all the other improvements were funded from SpaceX themselves.
The same goes for the complete SpaceX re-usabilitly program.
Under the Commercial Cargo contract part of that money was for human rating the Falcon 9 but is mostly about paper work and certification. A few issues were addressed that were financed with this contract. That money was for the capsule.
The Raptor program was a SpaceX own development. They got a small grant from the air force for a small Raptor version but that is a tiny part of the program and the current Raptor is very different. All of that was done without any funding from government.
The complete Starship program was funded by SpaceX themselves until last year when they got comparatively small amount for the Starship as a Moon lander study, but not nearly enough to fund the program.
The complete Starlink program was funded and developed by SpaceX without any government contracts.
Its flat out false to say that everything SpaceX has done was government funded. SpaceX has and had many commercial flights and has multiple rounds of investment of private money raised.
In reality SpaceX very likely bit to low for both CRS and for CommercialCrew. SpaceX had to invest private funds to get these programs operational. Boeing considered SpaceX bid so low that it would be impossible for SpaceX to finish the capsule and reasoned that when that happened they could also ask for more money, but SpaceX didn't ask for more money and finished the project.
And the argument that it all builds on decades of NASA engineering effort, well that is partly true. But you could just as well argue that Space build on all engineering effort of humanity.
NASA or its contractors have never even come close to making an engine so operationally cheap as the Merlin, or an engine that was as reusable as Merlin. Nothing NASA has ever done is close to as impressive as Raptor (RS-25 is neat design but production and cost nightmare). NASA has not build a cargo or crew capsule in 50 years. NASA has not managed to design a new rocket in 50+ years. NASA own attempts at rocket development have universally failed.
NASA never managed anything close to capturing a reusable orbital booster. Programs like DC-X are not in the same league.
People need to stop claiming that SpaceX is simply a couple guys who found some drawings at NASA and said, he we can copy that. SpaceX has done things NASA was not able to even with budgets 10-50 times higher. Most of the things SpaceX profited from were done decades ago.
And in the opposite direction it is actually the case that NASA learned a huge amount from SpaceX as well. NASA got full access into Space re-usability program like the engines, super-sonic retro-propulsion. SpaceX has the first data on pusher escape systems. Full-Flow Stage Combustion engine are now something NASA can study because of the Moon Lander program. SpaceX way of doing software development have very much changed NASA approchs as well.
And all of that is before we consider the organizational changes at NASA that happened directly because of SpaceX. Many NASA engineers have talked about how contact with SpaceX directly changed their perspective and how they tried to bring this culture into NASA. Dan Rasky is one good example of this, his talks on the subject are informative.
What makes SpaceX (and in a different way BlueOrigin) different is exactly that they go and get their own funding for when they want to work on a project. If government has some contracts open that they can use their technology for they are happy to do it. Eventually government will fly regularly with Starship, but that is different from SpaceX Starship program being funded by government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-D
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-l...
> 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
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.
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.
And orbital refueling only costs six (?) times as much as a LEO flight.
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.
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.
(WSJ, paywall etc.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixin...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeings-other-big-proble...
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.
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.
"The term “green” refers to the new hardware that will work together to power the stage, and “run” refers to operating all the components together simultaneously for the first time." --https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/green-run-test-...
I still think these tests should be run more than once though, the RS-25's were originally reusable anyway.
The big difference between NASA and SpaceX lies in how fast they each move, and what they are failing at.
Failing at launching the first private rocket on a tight budget, at landing a rocket for the first time, or at iterating on rocket designs at pace rarely, if ever, seen before is expected. As a matter of fact, it’s success that isn’t expected.
Failing at making yet another (very expensive) rocket built by supposedly experienced manufacturers overseen by a huge public organisation over more than a decade with huge funding? Well, it’s a bit disturbing to say the least.
SpaceX's approach also deals with the real problem, which is a program having the wrong goals, rather than making mistakes in working toward a given goal. How many of you have built a product that ended up working great, but was a failure because it was the wrong product?
The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit, agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting back out of LEO again, including to Mars.
For example, see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240112230/Interview-Fro...
I was making a commentary more of what I see the difference between NASA vs SpaceX's approach today. I wasn't around for Apollo, and given their crazy compressed timeframe for getting to the moon back then, there must have been some agility there....
I was really agreeing with the previous commenter, which I guess is a statement about today, and not how NASA operated in the 1960s...
> SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.
My mistake for invoking the Agile vs Waterfall debate... (and potentially being wrong!)
The Saturn-Apollo program had a super-heavy lift rocket (Saturn V), a man-rated heavy lift rocket (Saturn IB), a Lunar trajectory capable command and service module, a lunar lander, and a workable wet workshop space station (Skylab).
Congress tossed all of that away. The Space Shuttle program wasn't a bad idea, a heavy lift vehicle that provided a shirt sleeve environment but could support EVA is actually an awesome thing for LEO. But Congress scrapping Saturn-Apollo trapped NASA in LEO because the Shuttle was only capable of LEO. It's not a platform that can support manned Moon missions let alone any more distant bodies.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby
[2] https://www.wired.com/2013/11/moonbase-apollo-1968/
[3] https://www.wired.com/2012/08/before-the-fire/
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730003970
It would have changed the face of power generation at a critical time for climate change if it was allowed to reach fruition. Instead it was locked away in UTC & NASA archives.
An external neutron source does not greatly change the needed enrichment (since any practical subcritical reactor would still need k fairly high, so it is only a bit subcritical.)
The terrestrial reactor and the rocket engine versions are different in how they transmit power from the reactor core to do useful work but not radically so - the core irrotational vortex compressing a high temperature plasma in a single crystal beryllium oxide chamber is the same in both designs and has been tested. The difference is in the cooling gas - hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles to absorb the black body radiation of the plasma for the rocket and water going through a steam turbine for terrestrial power generation.
It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.
The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.
Blaming everything always on the congress/president is a way for NASA to never take responsibility. All the success gets credit to NASA but failure is always somebody wrong doing.
Simple changes like not going for hydrogen, separating main engines from Shuttle itself, not using hydrogen on the first stage, vertically mounted shuttle and so on.
They launched a new mission every few months!
Apollo burned downed and killed the crew, the next Apollo was up a few months later! The second moon mission was launched a few months after the first.
1960's NASA was a little bit like SpaceX.
That said - we should remember that Space X is iterating on already established tech, at somewhat of a smaller scale. They started smaller. Let's see how it works with their newer, bigger gear that is breaking boundaries.
I can’t argue with that!
Why shouldn't NASA take advantage of technology developed by others? NASA has saved a lot of money through this.
NASA budget has actually gone up over the last couple of years.
SpaceX got funding from NASA. So literally part of the funding NASA got was from the NASA budget because NASA bought things from SpaceX.
And SpaceX gave NASA some of the best deals in the history of spaceflight.
Shelby is more concerned with staying in office than making advances in space, and it shows. That's not NASA's fault, they're trying to do the right thing IN SPITE of the political pressure to waste money in order for a politician to be able to claim he's "creating jobs" in his state.
http://innerspace.net/congress-2/richard-shelbys-war-against...
Openly admit NASA is a basic infrastructure assurance program, much like the Interstate highway system is. (Yes, it's Military capable infrastructure, for moving troops and stuff around. It turns out that useful infrastructure improves overall economic fitness and activity as well.)
Then group up all of the infrastructure spending and make sure it gives every citizen roughly equal value. Sometimes this can be justified in lower shipping costs for produced items from farms and backbone redundancy across the country. Other times it's connecting land and sea ports to the cross country grid. Evaluating a fair share of the commons and of resources to maintain the commons is a hard problem.
NASA also falls under various civic services the government proves because it makes sense for just one place to do the work; or at least for a baseline that private entities can compete against. The distribution of these programs also forms part of the weight to balance government improvements programs among areas.
If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might see NASA taking a different path.
And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for government to government, especially for a program that ultimately has so much of an impact on military capabilities and national security.
But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted to."
Companies are incentivized to make money. In this case, the government is incentivized to provide lucrative contracts to contracted corporations.
In the 60s, when a different incentive existed, the government (i.e. NASA) was incredibly efficient.
Yes it's a matter of incentives. The problem is saying incentives for government work could change, is very different than them actually changing. Some of those incentives are inherently rooted as part of what makes government... government.
They have to drop whole missions after years of planning and construction because the next year's budget is a billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets pushed to the next fiscal year.
This is an unfortunate consequence of any insufficiently iterative development process.
That's because they're required to by law. There's an entire section of the United States Code that's dedicated to this.
NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot of time and money making sure things work the first time, so when they don't, then it is a problem.
This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace.
> Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, making several versions of the STIG rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle would not be as traumatic. “That was our critical mistake in the last few years, because we should have been able to put more of these together,” he said.
It is not that NASA doesn't have the right to fail, but in their case, it is a major setback, and it is a bit disappointing considering how much SLS went overboard.
Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure political pressure instead of organizational culture.
Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at all.
This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.
This is like discovering a major issue during the shakedown cruise of a new ship. It's better to find the issue now, and that's why they test, but the point of this test wasn't to learn anything new, it was supposed to just prove that it works as expected.
SpaceX is generally very up front about tests that they think have a high likelihood of failure, and the tests that do fail tend to be doing genuinely "new things" (like belly-flopping a booster).
I'm not a SpaceX fanboy here (I think Elon in particular is pretty insufferable), but it's not really to fair to compare SpaceX's development testing failures with this integration test failure.
So at the core are two different approaches to proving their system, where SpaceX totally expects some failures and SLS is supposed to be proven before it even flies. Personally I’m a fan of the SpaceX method but I can understand why the old guard space developers would choose this slower more cautious method.
EDIT: Did a thorough google search and looked through my podcast lists but I haven't been able to find it. I did find this podcast in my listening history which may or may not cover the topic, but unfortunately I don't see a transcript I can search through:
https://theorbitalmechanics.com/show-notes/ella-atkins
If anything they cannot afford _not_ to have more failures like that. In fact on the spectrum of failures this one was near the best possible outcome since something was learned without destroying the entire assembly. But with this kind of reactive thinking they may turtle up and slow down progress until the program gets canceled.
I may just have blindspots in my history knowledge here, but the moon landing was pretty much an unqualified success, no?
My comment (in support of NASA) was that an isolated test failure shouldn't be looked upon as a failure of their entire programme. Instead it's actually a signal of progress being made (however slow that progress may be).
There were plenty of isolated testing failures like this (some much worse) leading up to the moon landing.
A much, much, much, much better strategy would have been to keep the Appollo hardware and evolve it. Plan for 1-2 Saturn V flights every year. Use the F1 engine on a smaller vehicle (like Saturn 1B) and use that vehicle as the work horse for both the military and NASA.
This would have allowed them to mass produce the engine, reuse the same pads. It would have given them much more capability compared to Shuttle and it would have been considerably cheaper.
It was bad engineering choices, not simply the budget. They cut the wrong things.
This not a prototype, this is the actual rocket that should fly. It has already spent over 1 year on the test stand to do 1 static fire. SpaceX did 3 static fire in ONE DAY last week.
Consider this, when SLS started development SpaceX Starship literally didn't exist on paper, the engines didn't exist, the facilities they were built in didn't exist, they didn't even have approval to build facilities.
So SpaceX designed a totally new engine, a engine mass manufacturing line, multiple new test stands, designed threw many iteration on the Starship design, build a totally new private space port with a huge manufacturing facility. All of this was done for a budget that is less then what SLS gets PER YEAR and not just a little less.
One year of SLS development could have likely funded all of SpaceX research and development over the last 10 years.
NASA simply should not build its own rocket. And even worse they should not blow unlimited amounts of money into these contracts while they are showing absurdly bad performance. In fact, I think the government should systematically be compensated with stocks of these companies when they go over budget and over time by this amount.
The whole program is political, it serves no function. Payloads like Europa Clippers are fighting politically for the right NOT to launch on SLS. Having SLS around forces NASA into suboptimal moon architectures. SLS is a political straight-jacked for NASA. With the SLS budget alone so many amazing project could be funded, it is hard to even comprehend.
We can 'cut the slack' on this issue, but the issues keep coming and the rate of delay is pretty crazy and the cost are even crazier.
> 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.
Fantastic, totally agree. Lets do more of that, and less giving Boeing and LM money for not performing well.
“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.”
"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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.htmlNASA is trying to do a giant booster without anybody who built a booster recently.
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.
Any real effort to go to the moon will involve propellant stockpiles and transfer in space. These could use LH2, which could be sent up on F9/F9H. There is no reason to do the injection to the moon using the F9/F9H upper stages.
I will add that even ignoring F9/F9H, there is no sustainable lunar or Mars program using SLS. The plans to go to Mars would be a flags-and-footprints dead end like Apollo. For space, it should either be go big or don't bother.
The distraction of this program is immense, and when it's done you have a non reusable rocket in a reusable age.