Is that applicable when the rocket scientists themselves mostly despise this thing?
SLS as a platform was forced on the scientists by the politicians.
Also from a science perspective: the funding of this boondoggle has sucked the air out of the room, lots of other projects weren’t funded to make this thing happen. Seems like all SLS discussion is inherently political.
I consider a highly complex engineering effort identifying a bug before production and preventing an incident before the system has ever been tested end to end a victory. But I’m sure your systems never have production issues.
I think OP could have better illustrated their point. Which I believe is that governments are pretty bad at succeeding with projects that require innovation. This is especially true of the US in the last 20 years. Not to mention the public sector pays 2-5x more than government agencies. I’m not saying this is a problem purely solved by better pay and greater talent, but I don’t think we can say it’s not.
The US government is plenty fine of funding technological innovation. Look at the military industrial complex. F-35, despite being a gold plated boondongle is a really capable aircraft that is getting cheaper to produce.
Hydrogen is stuff from hell when it comes to engineering challenges. Not as bad as some of the "Things I Won't Work With" chemicals [0], but still. I am almost convinced that whatever direction the future carbonless energy production takes, hydrogen won't be a significant part of it.
Exactly. This event just makes all the hydrogen car people even more entertaining.
At this point I’m fairly convinced hydrogen cars were a coordinated plan by oil companies to delay EVs. It probably would have worked if Tesla hadn’t come out of nowhere.
Could you explain what the problems are? I don't have a strong opinion either way, but you can buy hydrogen cars. In the city where I live there are hydrogen buses and garbage trucks and they seem to do fine?
Mostly hydrogen is the smallest element so molecules of hydrogen (H2) are extremely hard to contain. They leak from everywhere so your entire infrastructure has to be designed with very tight tolerances and even still, you’ll have leaks. In addition, those leaks can prove to be dangerous since it’s so reactive and flammable, so you have a highly leaky flammable gas at high pressure…
So you think, well fine, we can just generate it on site via electrolysis — alas, hydrogen actively destroys metal containers via embrittlement. Not so much in hydrogen gas, but any process where you’re running chemical or electrolytic reactions;
I have the impression that the problem of hydrogen leakage from vehicles is vastly exaggerated. A study on two commercial hydrogen cars found leakage rates of 2-6 mL/min (Table 4 in [1]). At this rate, it would take over 15 years for the tank content of a Toyota Mirai (5 kg of H2) to leak out.
The Hydrogen isn't leaking from vehicles since they take so many precautions to ensure they don't, including those tight tolerances and special materials. You just need to replicate that at every step of the supply chain which becomes onerous and expensive.
I think it's an okay fit for fleet vehicles where the headaches are closer to worth it, but the volatility + the difficulties in safely and reliably containing the compressed gas are the main issues.
This is the thing... there is no "one size fits all" but the nay sayers look at hydrogen and say "nah too hard for anything". They're wrong. Hydrogen will be huge in the NEAR future... it just wont be a silver bullet.
while the dominant powers in the world get fat and rich (and sick) off liquid dino's.
The world finally has motivation to get out of that rut. Dominant powers will make hydrogen work for them because thats how a corrupt capitalist society works.
You are ignoring economies of scale and the externalities of a mass market technology. Electricity is everywhere and even so, electric cars had and still have a huge barrier to overcome in providing adequate infrastructure. Once a technology takes off, it's virtually impossible for an incumbent to replace it unless it provides drastic improvements, because of the momentum the old technology has.
Well, H2 is an "also ran" at this point: it has lower energy efficiency (losing the majority of input energy in the cycle from electrolysis -> compression -> fuel cell -> electric), it requires more expensive and practically non-existent infrastructure, it's theoretical range advantages are negated by the need to have a small COPV bomb on board, forcing the longest range Hidrogen cars have less range than the equivalent electric, they are more expensive and complex, requiring expensive, platinum based catalysts, pushing the prices of H2 models into a multiple over the equivalent BEV. There is nothing that H2 can do that BEV can't do better, with the exception of fast refueling, which is becoming less and less of an issue.
For cars the race with BEV is irredeemably lost, and even for trucks the hydrogen industry needs to perform some technological miracle to stay in the game.
Hydrogen vehicles are essentially an oil company scam. They are fraud, at a physics level, vs EVs. They fall apart the second you take a serious, first-principles look at how they work.
HN rate limits my replies you can read my sibling comment if you’d like more information.
this is a deeply cynical and irresponsible statement.
granted, most of it is made via non-renewable dirty methods... but there is VAST sums of money pouring into Green Hydrogen.
Its going to become dominant in very few years. 5-8 is my guess.
Its not that it doesn't work at all, but while there are some trial uses of hydrogen in automotive. Its the very extreme minority of cases.
You can buy one of only a few models of car, and those are only sold in absurdly small numbers.
For trucks there are more trials going on but real mass production of hydrogen trucks isn't really a thing for a few more years (and many expect those will be further delayed).
There are many reasons for this. Just something as simple as count how many different sub-systems are required between a BEV and a FCEV. In addition that basic disadvantage, the end to end energy in efficiency is worse, so its more expensive. In addition to that, the infrastructure required is about 10-100x more expensive.
Tesla as one start up rolled out a global (or lets say in the developed world) EV charging infrastructure. The same amount of money invested in hydrogen infrastructure like not even have resulted in enough locations to charge the whole West coast. And because you can't charge at home, you need many more such locations.
So really end to end it makes no sense pretty much from any direction you look at it and has been absolutely destroyed in the market. Some people still have hope for trucks, but there too the trends are pretty clear.
Hydrogen has one thing going for it in that it only takes 5 minutes to fill up once you find a pump. Electric takes 4-6 times as long or more.
Right. This is the main issue for us for going electric. We barely use the car, but when we use it, it is often for longer distances (visiting my in-laws, who live in another country, holidays). Having to 'refuel' longer and more often is very inconvenient.
Most normal people don't drive many hours without making a 20 min break. Doing a 5-10 min break every couple hours seems reasonable. Even just pieing and stretching the legs. As long as the supercharges are placed well its perfectly fine.
I know there are some extreme people who basically push and pie in a bottle if they have to, but most people don't travel that way.
Modern EV can refuel large part of the battery in like 15min.
There is still an advantage, but it gets smaller with every generation of vehicle.
I've traveled between the bay area and Los Angeles (a six hour drive) many times with a large variety or different drivers. The longest break was a 20-30 minute stop the Greyhound bus makes at a Burger King in the middle of nowhere. But the bus also, doesn't take the shortest route for some reason.
In a private car, the more passengers the greater the chance that someone will ask for a bio break. But if it's just me driving, or I'm the only passenger, the trip is typically a non-stop push. Often without stopping for even 5 minutes at an overpriced gas station in the middle.
Using a current gen EV introduces nearly an hour delay each way when you factor in range limitations and excessive charging times compared to gas.
For trucks operation cost is the most expensive. Hydrogen itself is far more expensive compared to electricity and hydrogen infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive then hydrogen infrastructure.
Part of the issue is that this rocket doesn't just use hydrogen, it uses cryogenic liquid hydrogen, which apparently is even harder to manage. To quote from an excellent writeup [0]:
> Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.
Elon Musk responded to this article with the following tweet [1], which to my understanding is a pretty reasonable take:
> Accurate assessment. Raptor design started out using H2, but switched to CH4. Latter is best combo of high efficiency & ease of operation imo. Delta-v difference between H2 & CH4 is small for most missions, because CH4 tank is much smaller & no insulation is needed.
I just think of hydrogen cars as electric cars with a competing battery technology. I think li-ion batteries have just come a longer way in energy density, lifecycle, and charging speed than anyone expected 20 years ago.
Hydrogen is an extremely inefficient (200-300% the energy waste of an EV) battery that’s notoriously difficult to handle, contain, and transport safely. Unless we’re mining gas giants hydrogen is not a fuel source, so you have to immediately toss 40-50% of the energy you produce to create it. You lose a ton then transporting it to its point of consumption, and even then converting that (wastefully) stored energy to kinetic energy is STILL less efficient than an EV. Instead, all of that energy used to make hydrogen could have been sent via the grid at 90-95% efficiency to an EV that will store and convert that energy to motion at 85-90% efficiency.
A hydrogen economy means tens of PWH of waste energy vs a pure EV economy.
The only reason you’d want hydrogen is if you’ve invested trillions in the oil industry and hope to repurpose that infrastructure.
On the other hand, solving these challenges presents many rewards in space. It seems like a chemistry gift from the universe, if you can transmute between one of the highest energy density fuels to water, electricity, air, and radiation shielding. And water is laying on the ground on many bodies in the solar system.
One final gift is you can quit burning hydrocarbons to get to space, if you can figure out how to do this sustainably.
It's all about trade-offs. It may be worth the trouble for space craft, and that may open up aircraft applications, or we may have hydro-something in airplanes instead of hydro-carbons - Ammonia (hydrogen+nitrogen), Magnesium Hydride, etc.
So is gasoline, but our main problem with gasoline is the carbon dioxide that is created when you burn it.
The products of ammonia hydrolysis (or any other chemical reaction that releases energy) are N2 (same as atmospheric nitrogen) and water.
Yes, if we leak ammonia, that is very very bad. Ammonia is also an immediate, serious, and acute irritant. Any significant ammonia leak is dangerous to human health.
Using ammonia as fuel doesn't "just" release n2, it also release a lot of nitrogen oxides, which are significantly more powerful greenhouse gases than CO2, contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain, and destroy tropospheric ozone.
There are problems with every idea. I was not suggesting that we should just burn ammonia. Even if I was, there is no way I was outlining a whole solution in a short internet comment.
Why would you want to quit burning hydrocarbons? The combustion product of hydrogen is water vapor, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
This is confused: water vapor is indeed a fairly potent greenhouse gas, but it remains in the atmosphere for only a short time. Adding water vapor to the atmosphere, even in large quantities, does not result in any non-rounding-error impact on climate.
> I am almost convinced that whatever direction the future carbonless energy production takes, hydrogen won't be a significant part of it.
Just based on the fact that it's the most abundant element in our 'space' (earth, atmosphere, reasonably accessible), I do really hope that you're wrong with this.
I'd feel a lot better about the fate of humanity if we somehow found a way to use Hydrogen as our primary fuel (if we can't otherwise do so with solar/wind/tidal).
I think HN is at least somewhat qualified to speak to the talent side of the issue.
Is this a matter of NASA failing to attract and retain the best engineers because of non-competitive TC? In this case, where are the 10x rocket engineers who would have prevented these problems?
Is this a matter of lost institutional knowledge, where it's been so long these kinds of rockets were launched that the people who knew everything about them died or retired?
Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
I am not one of those people you describe who is qualified to speak on the talent side of things (although I suspect the hypothetical 10x rocket engineer who would prevent this does not exist). The real answer is quite clear and well documented by the press: This is a matter of NASA being dependent on hiring defense-industry contractors in the districts of key Congressional sponsors for almost all of its funding, rather than making good financial or engineering decisions.
It's not a problem of engineering talent but of politics.
They made the problem harder to solve by choosing architecture that makes congresscritters happy at the expense of making the rocket way more expensive than it needs to be.
No politicians ignore high paying jobs in their districts.
People throw stones at NASA for optimizing within its system of funding, but it was a fairly brilliant move in the 50s and 60s, and is still a brilliant move today.
Both NASA and SpaceX et al. can be optimal in their own funding landscapes.
That would be true if that's what they were doing. But NASA can't actually optimize the way you suggest. NASA is hard locked in particular architectures and locations. They are not free to make a design and then allocate it to different districts. If NASA could actually optimize like that, they could actually make rational choices, but they can't.
While I was a NASA engineer for the past five years, NASA loved to brag that thousands of businesses from all 50 states of the union have a hand in SLS. It's not popularly known as the Senate Launch System for no reason.
Essentially the Senate in 2011 wrote a bill that mandated NASA to build a rocket by 2016 AND that uses existing contractors. So there was literally no way other then just using exiting Shuttle components to even attempt to do that.
The real answer here is that NASA simple doesn't have the flexibility. The 10x engineers you want should have existed in 1970, because that's where most of the technology was developed.
NASA was forced by congress to put together a large rocket with all existing technology and infrastructure, something they have not done since the 1970s. The last rocket they tried Ares 1 was maybe one of the worst rocket designs ever made and cost an absurd amount of money given its possibilities.
NASA is also hard locked into locations, the NASA Johnson Space Center is politically important and wanted the development. Are the best engineer in that location or in LA where SpaceX put its main engineering efforts.
> Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
Its a hard to solve problem either way. Made harder by the history and constraints at NASA.
The more relevant question is, should you solve this problem? As Elon Musk often says, are you asking the right question?
That is why for profit rocket company have largely moved away from hydrogen and away from solid rockets.
It’s so astronomically expensive ($2B per vehicle, no reuse) that if it does launch, I would predict they’ll only ever launch a few until the next group of politicians arrive to cut wasteful spending.
"Wasteful" is always in the eye of the beholder. Spending in one's own district is never "wasteful". It's only other people's spending that is a waste.
So while politicians love to talk about cutting "waste", they never actually do. It's something that exists in aggregate but somehow no actual program ever gets cut.
Each program does exist for a reason. Cutting the budget is about making hard choices between reasons. And nobody ever loses reelection for failing to make hard choices.
The US has the luxury of being able to borrow cheaply, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to do so. But that means that the politicians campaigning most loudly about "waste" get to say a lot without ever grappling with genuine issues.
However, the reality is NASA has tried to fuel this rocket before. They had rolled out the rocket in a Wet Dress rehearsal. They tried multiple times and failed each time.
Then they rolled it back in and said, in a few weeks we are gone launch. And everybody that was following this was like 'Seriously? You failed to fuel this rocket every single time you tried, and now you want to launch?'.
So when they tried again 2 times fuel the rocket and both times it failed to be fueled nobody at all was surprised. We are now at 10+ attempts and not a single time has the rocket ever been actually fully fueled.
So really this was more of a Wet Dress rehearsal then a launch attempt.
Many people now demand of NASA, do a real Wet Dress rehearsal and actually prove that you can actually fuel this thing before you actually try to launch it.
You captured my feelings much more eloquently than I would have.
It would have been fine if they acknowledged some fueling problems and said they wanted to continue troubleshooting on the launch platform so they could test everything there while it was assembled. That way they could work on problems found there while disassembling the rocket to fix the hydrogen fuel leaks back in the assembly room
I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories:
"Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly done it in 1969?"
This won't change anything. They are surely gearing up to deny that Artemis goes to the moon even after it does. Hell, today we actually could do it with CGI, which we couldn't in 1969.
Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.
That if it was fake Russia wouldn't have stopped everything, would have tried a little bit more to go there and would have proven the world how fake the US was.
These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
The scientists and engineers were actually trying to get to the moon back then. This thing in the launchpad is just a giant dildo monument to bureaucracy and “jobs creation” with going to the moon being merely an undesirable side goal they’d rather not have to do anyway.
I think this is part of it, but I’m certain the real heads at NASA are busting ass to get this done. Probably a lot of dead-weight, also we didn’t have the help of a couple thousand of Germany’s finest working 80 hour weeks to defeat actual threats to humanity. I feel bad for a lot of these folks… it must be an uphill battle.
Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything.
Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s.
Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on.
So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
Good point, so I looked up inflation-adjusted Apollo costs, which came to $257 billion.[1] By contrast, SLS so far has been closer to $20 billion.[2]
But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower.
Apollo was many missions, totally bootstrapping and industry, plus lots and lots of infrastructure. This included all the subsystems, multiple engines and so on and so on.
SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
Yep, the Apollo cost includes eight trips to the moon (landing or flyby) plus several trips to LEO. That's another $50B or so tacked onto Artemis just for the SLS launch costs. That takes us to $100B total, to reproduce something done 50 years ago with an engine from 40 years ago. Plus it doesn't include the landing module, which SpaceX is working on.
I agree that the graph is misleading, but your response is misleading as well. It looks like we spent more than twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars at the peak in 1966 (49 billion) as at the peak in 2021 (23 billion), and generally we spent 1.5x-2.5x as much during the Apollo era vs. the last decade.
Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
If this first launch failed, it might actually make the program faster because it would allow NASA with some support form Congress to kill these dumb programs and free up the budget for smarter things.
NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things.
Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'.
The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on.
To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO.
So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft.
NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO.
How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it.
NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.
It absolutely has been cited as evidence by my moon-landing-denying friends. "It's a struggle now, yet they claim they're using the same technology as they used back then when the field was young? Seems unlikely."
Well, I'm sure logic isn't going to deter conspiracy theorists, but the Saturn V that look us to the moon in 1969 used Kerosene as fuel not liquid hydrogen which is notoriously leak-prone.
FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled.
It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...
Saturn V did use liquid hydrogen for its second and third stages. One of the original plans for SLS was to adapt and modernize the original Saturn hydrogen engine, the J-2.
Only the first stage of the Saturn V used kerosene and it dropped off at about 61 km altitude. The two upper stages that actually pushed the spacecraft to the moon used liquid hydrogen.
Most deniers wouldn't stop even after dozens of successful crewed launches, just like most flat earthers keep spreading their nonsense when they could send a balloon with a camera and take shots of the Earth curvature by themselves.
Also, some of these people profit from others' stupidity, so a small percentage of them, I'd dare to say the most active, are perfectly aware that we in fact went to the Moon and the Earth isn't flat, but books, gadgets, TV appearances, YouTube ad impressions, conventions, and generally having at disposal a huge flock of gullible people, brings money, popularity and by extension, power (see politics).
Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."
Not that two failed launch attempts are all that big a deal in the grand scheme, but they just add more evidence to the already weighty pile that says that SLS is a bad rocket and a dead-end path.
It depends with what you mean with 'this capability'. What specifically are you talking about, a rocket that can throw 39t to moon rather then 23t. Ok sure I guess, but at the price you can launch 300t the moon.
If you design a mission specifically for SLS then yeah, SLS difference matters, but if you simply want to make a good architecture, you much rather go with the smaller cheaper rocket.
In terms of Orion, can Dragon do everything it can do. No not by itself Orion plus the Orion service module can do some thing Dragon can't. But Dragon can do most things and with a few simple add-ons like extend tank in the trunk.
So in reality if NASA had the freedom to plan, a few years ago they could have switched a Falcon Heavy/Dragon architecture and achieved the same thing. SpaceX would likely even have been willing to do things like cross feed and potentially even a Raptor based upper stage. All of these would have been ready far earlier then when Orion will actually launch with humans.
So just saying, SpaceX doesn't support something is a really narrow view. It doesn't support it but SpaceX certainty would have the capability to do the Artemis 1/2 missions if NASA had asked them too.
And all of that while completely ignoring Starship, just with the capabilities they had in 2019. Between then and now SpaceX could have already done this mission quite easily. And likely they could have done it 5 more times before Artemis 2 launches.
> Not that two failed launch attempts are all that big a deal in the grand scheme
The question to me is, does SLS have a grand scheme? The entire program is specified and budgeted for about five missions, with extensions uncertain. Each launch is a tremendous (and tremendously expensive) affair, and this launch is the first time that all of the SLS systems are coming together.
Commercial launch services (not just SpaceX) get to amortize these sorts of failures over dozens to hundreds of eventual launches, but SLS is not designed to "fail fast" as a learning experience.
The grand scheme is to have a more than one option and path forward to a moon mission, keep the US' aerospace building capabilities fresh and available, and probably also to provide some of the usual pork barrel giveaways to the usual folks. It is both unfortunate but understandable. In an alternate timeline people might now be upset that NASA and the US put all their bets on SpaceX that could now not deliver for some reason.
Yes, the price tag is an abomination and the engineering strategies outdated and frankly kind of embarrassing. But hindsight is 20/20.
> more than one option and path forward to a moon mission
Then SLS is the exact opposite. Building around existing commercial crew and commerical rockets would be that.
SLS/Orion is the actual both 'single point of failure'.
So really SLS/Orion is the opposite of what you suggest.
> keep the US' aerospace building capabilities fresh and available
And by that you mean removing money from the actual productive aerospace industry and instead keeping age old infrastructure in place and rebuilding production lines for old outdated technology.
Had this money actually been invested in the advanced aerospace industry, the US would have more and better aerospace capability.
So again, SLS/Orion is literally the opposite of what you suggest.
> provide some of the usual pork barrel giveaways to the usual folks
That's its real and only goal.
But again, there would have been other ways to do this.
> US put all their bets on SpaceX that could now not deliver for some reason.
That was never the alternative. That's just a strawman.
> But hindsight is 20/20.
Its not hindsight. Its actually mostly known at the time. If you look at the internal NASA studies, they all indicated that many other paths including using commercial rocket and building a Saturn style rocket would have been far, far better.
It's not that they were two failed launch attempts. They were actually more like two more wet dress rehearsals that they should have done before trying to launch. But they didn't, and now still have not managed to complete a full wet dress rehearsal satisfactorily. There was no indication they were actually ready to launch going into this and there still is not.
NASA management is the problem. Sixty years ago launches somehow got done with pencil and paper.
It's time to clean house and stop wasting tax dollars on failed management.
I confess I hope this programme is quietly shelved. From everything I've read it is at best refining decades old tech, not really pushing to whole new areas. This launch is literally re-using Shuttle engines. And I can't seem to find a good, non-hand-wavey explanation as to why we should be going to the Moon at all. I'd personally trade this whole thing for an autonomous rover on Venus that lasts a month.
Reusing shuttle engines only to throw them into the sea. The RS-25s are engines that were designed for the shuttle program to be able to be refurbished and reused after each flight. Using them on this disposable rocket stage is like using a Stradivarius as firewood because you happen to have one lying around.
The reason for going to the Moon is that it's close to impossible to launch a manned expedition to any other planet directly from earth. Hope this explanation is not too hand wavy.
On top of that, have people forgotten all the scientific progress that the first moon shot ignited?
It stands to reason that the the next step (a semi-permanent moon base, progress towards being able to launch more stuff into deeper space) will provide similar benefits.
What they are against is giving untold billions to old Shuttle contractors to fly a overpriced single use rocket.
We will not get advanced technology from a moon program unless the moon program FINANCES ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. This moon program is the opposite, it tries to keep old technology alive.
If you want a moon program that finances advanced technology, what you should do is build large reusable rockets that deliver small modular nuclear reactors to the moon. And also some drone/robots that build habitats autonomously. That would actually be providing technology benefits on earth.
I read somewhere (and can’t seem to find the link) that the rollback to the VAB is because there is a small battery powering the abort system that has an approximate 3 week lifespan. And this past sat was near the end of that timeframe.
The lifetime of the launch abort battery is indeed a factor. It is normally rated for 20 days, and they extended the rating to 25 days for this launch, but when that time is up the entire vehicle stack does need to be rolled back to the VAB to access and (replace? recharge? retest?) the battery.
However, my understanding is that the current rollback is needed to address the hydrogen leak; they are not (quite) yet at the end of the rated battery lifetime.
The first is as you say, there's a timeline constraint based on the launch abort battery. It's previously been stated that NASA could attempt to get a waiver for the timeline.
But second reason is that the number of remedial and inspection actions you can perform on the launch pad is obviously more limited than in the VAB. Given that NASA did try for an immediate relaunch, it's likely that they've already tried and exhausted their highest value launchpad inspection and remedial actions.
- "Due to the orbital dynamics of the Artemis I mission to fly an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the Moon, NASA will next have an opportunity to launch from September 19 to October 4. However, making that window would necessitate fixing the rocket at the pad, and then getting a waiver from the US Space Force, which operates the launch range along the Florida coast."
- "At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon."
- "If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary to service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31."
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32702211 ("NASA – Artemis I – Liquid Hydrogen Leak Detected Once Again", 94 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32702761 ("Artemis I Launch Attempt Scrubbed", 108 comments)
No different than our approach to infrastructure, education, Healthcare, broadband....plenty of money, no results
Or we can turn this into yet another bitchfest about government inefficiency.
SLS as a platform was forced on the scientists by the politicians.
Also from a science perspective: the funding of this boondoggle has sucked the air out of the room, lots of other projects weren’t funded to make this thing happen. Seems like all SLS discussion is inherently political.
While there big problems with the SLS program such a small delay on the pad is not one of them.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
At this point I’m fairly convinced hydrogen cars were a coordinated plan by oil companies to delay EVs. It probably would have worked if Tesla hadn’t come out of nowhere.
So you think, well fine, we can just generate it on site via electrolysis — alas, hydrogen actively destroys metal containers via embrittlement. Not so much in hydrogen gas, but any process where you’re running chemical or electrolytic reactions;
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42154-020-00096-z
This is the thing... there is no "one size fits all" but the nay sayers look at hydrogen and say "nah too hard for anything". They're wrong. Hydrogen will be huge in the NEAR future... it just wont be a silver bullet.
Is what fans of hydrogen have been arguing for 30 years.
The world finally has motivation to get out of that rut. Dominant powers will make hydrogen work for them because thats how a corrupt capitalist society works.
Well, H2 is an "also ran" at this point: it has lower energy efficiency (losing the majority of input energy in the cycle from electrolysis -> compression -> fuel cell -> electric), it requires more expensive and practically non-existent infrastructure, it's theoretical range advantages are negated by the need to have a small COPV bomb on board, forcing the longest range Hidrogen cars have less range than the equivalent electric, they are more expensive and complex, requiring expensive, platinum based catalysts, pushing the prices of H2 models into a multiple over the equivalent BEV. There is nothing that H2 can do that BEV can't do better, with the exception of fast refueling, which is becoming less and less of an issue.
For cars the race with BEV is irredeemably lost, and even for trucks the hydrogen industry needs to perform some technological miracle to stay in the game.
HN rate limits my replies you can read my sibling comment if you’d like more information.
granted, most of it is made via non-renewable dirty methods... but there is VAST sums of money pouring into Green Hydrogen. Its going to become dominant in very few years. 5-8 is my guess.
You can buy one of only a few models of car, and those are only sold in absurdly small numbers.
For trucks there are more trials going on but real mass production of hydrogen trucks isn't really a thing for a few more years (and many expect those will be further delayed).
There are many reasons for this. Just something as simple as count how many different sub-systems are required between a BEV and a FCEV. In addition that basic disadvantage, the end to end energy in efficiency is worse, so its more expensive. In addition to that, the infrastructure required is about 10-100x more expensive.
Tesla as one start up rolled out a global (or lets say in the developed world) EV charging infrastructure. The same amount of money invested in hydrogen infrastructure like not even have resulted in enough locations to charge the whole West coast. And because you can't charge at home, you need many more such locations.
So really end to end it makes no sense pretty much from any direction you look at it and has been absolutely destroyed in the market. Some people still have hope for trucks, but there too the trends are pretty clear.
Electric still comes out ahead despite this handicap.
Right. This is the main issue for us for going electric. We barely use the car, but when we use it, it is often for longer distances (visiting my in-laws, who live in another country, holidays). Having to 'refuel' longer and more often is very inconvenient.
I know there are some extreme people who basically push and pie in a bottle if they have to, but most people don't travel that way.
Modern EV can refuel large part of the battery in like 15min.
There is still an advantage, but it gets smaller with every generation of vehicle.
I've traveled between the bay area and Los Angeles (a six hour drive) many times with a large variety or different drivers. The longest break was a 20-30 minute stop the Greyhound bus makes at a Burger King in the middle of nowhere. But the bus also, doesn't take the shortest route for some reason.
In a private car, the more passengers the greater the chance that someone will ask for a bio break. But if it's just me driving, or I'm the only passenger, the trip is typically a non-stop push. Often without stopping for even 5 minutes at an overpriced gas station in the middle.
Using a current gen EV introduces nearly an hour delay each way when you factor in range limitations and excessive charging times compared to gas.
I expect this will be a solved issue by 2030
If the oil companies chose to expand out their infra on the highway system with hydrogen, it may make more sense with long haul, big truck routes.
Battery power scales more proportionally to weight than hydrogen.
> Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.
Elon Musk responded to this article with the following tweet [1], which to my understanding is a pretty reasonable take:
> Accurate assessment. Raptor design started out using H2, but switched to CH4. Latter is best combo of high efficiency & ease of operation imo. Delta-v difference between H2 & CH4 is small for most missions, because CH4 tank is much smaller & no insulation is needed.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-...
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1566233000458592256
A hydrogen economy means tens of PWH of waste energy vs a pure EV economy.
The only reason you’d want hydrogen is if you’ve invested trillions in the oil industry and hope to repurpose that infrastructure.
One final gift is you can quit burning hydrocarbons to get to space, if you can figure out how to do this sustainably.
Nitrogen in many forms (including ammonia) is bad news for natural ecosystems.
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/09/nitrogen-the-environmental...
The products of ammonia hydrolysis (or any other chemical reaction that releases energy) are N2 (same as atmospheric nitrogen) and water.
Yes, if we leak ammonia, that is very very bad. Ammonia is also an immediate, serious, and acute irritant. Any significant ammonia leak is dangerous to human health.
There are problems with every idea. I was not suggesting that we should just burn ammonia. Even if I was, there is no way I was outlining a whole solution in a short internet comment.
See https://climateer.substack.com/i/60052576/you-thought-the-ma... for a slightly longer explanation.
Just based on the fact that it's the most abundant element in our 'space' (earth, atmosphere, reasonably accessible), I do really hope that you're wrong with this.
I'd feel a lot better about the fate of humanity if we somehow found a way to use Hydrogen as our primary fuel (if we can't otherwise do so with solar/wind/tidal).
100 years from now it may be all hydrogen fuel cells, but that doesn't help anything today.
Is this a matter of NASA failing to attract and retain the best engineers because of non-competitive TC? In this case, where are the 10x rocket engineers who would have prevented these problems?
Is this a matter of lost institutional knowledge, where it's been so long these kinds of rockets were launched that the people who knew everything about them died or retired?
Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
They made the problem harder to solve by choosing architecture that makes congresscritters happy at the expense of making the rocket way more expensive than it needs to be.
Read: prevents program cancellation
Many politicians don't care about science.
No politicians ignore high paying jobs in their districts.
People throw stones at NASA for optimizing within its system of funding, but it was a fairly brilliant move in the 50s and 60s, and is still a brilliant move today.
Both NASA and SpaceX et al. can be optimal in their own funding landscapes.
Do you have a source for this "architecture"? Not calling you out, I'm genuinely curious.
EDIT: I found an article about the contractors and how it all got put together, interesting read for those outside of the defense contractors world https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/28/artemis-i-and-the-...
Essentially the Senate in 2011 wrote a bill that mandated NASA to build a rocket by 2016 AND that uses existing contractors. So there was literally no way other then just using exiting Shuttle components to even attempt to do that.
This reddit thread has a lot of resources about the actual design of what SLS ended up being and how the design process clearly suggest to NOT DO what they eventually did: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
Eric Berger form Ars Technica has lots of articles on the topic, see: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/former-nasa-official...
NASA was forced by congress to put together a large rocket with all existing technology and infrastructure, something they have not done since the 1970s. The last rocket they tried Ares 1 was maybe one of the worst rocket designs ever made and cost an absurd amount of money given its possibilities.
NASA is also hard locked into locations, the NASA Johnson Space Center is politically important and wanted the development. Are the best engineer in that location or in LA where SpaceX put its main engineering efforts.
> Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?
Its a hard to solve problem either way. Made harder by the history and constraints at NASA.
The more relevant question is, should you solve this problem? As Elon Musk often says, are you asking the right question?
That is why for profit rocket company have largely moved away from hydrogen and away from solid rockets.
So while politicians love to talk about cutting "waste", they never actually do. It's something that exists in aggregate but somehow no actual program ever gets cut.
Each program does exist for a reason. Cutting the budget is about making hard choices between reasons. And nobody ever loses reelection for failing to make hard choices.
The US has the luxury of being able to borrow cheaply, and it's not necessarily a bad thing to do so. But that means that the politicians campaigning most loudly about "waste" get to say a lot without ever grappling with genuine issues.
However, the reality is NASA has tried to fuel this rocket before. They had rolled out the rocket in a Wet Dress rehearsal. They tried multiple times and failed each time.
Then they rolled it back in and said, in a few weeks we are gone launch. And everybody that was following this was like 'Seriously? You failed to fuel this rocket every single time you tried, and now you want to launch?'.
So when they tried again 2 times fuel the rocket and both times it failed to be fueled nobody at all was surprised. We are now at 10+ attempts and not a single time has the rocket ever been actually fully fueled.
So really this was more of a Wet Dress rehearsal then a launch attempt.
Many people now demand of NASA, do a real Wet Dress rehearsal and actually prove that you can actually fuel this thing before you actually try to launch it.
It would have been fine if they acknowledged some fueling problems and said they wanted to continue troubleshooting on the launch platform so they could test everything there while it was assembled. That way they could work on problems found there while disassembling the rocket to fix the hydrogen fuel leaks back in the assembly room
Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.
These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
Just look at this graph, it says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3...
Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything.
Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s.
Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on.
So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...
SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
Given how much technology has advanced and how much more technology and knowlage is available, it should be much cheaper to do the same.
For example, https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-dela...
Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things.
Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'.
The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on.
To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO.
So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft.
NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO.
How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it.
NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.
FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled.
It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X
Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."
If the private launch services didn't exist how they are, SLS would be heralded as the latest generation of rocket.
The timing is terrible for all sorts of reasons.
If you asked me to bet at even odds on who would be able to do two, or five, or ten launches to orbit first, my bet would be on Starship.
If you design a mission specifically for SLS then yeah, SLS difference matters, but if you simply want to make a good architecture, you much rather go with the smaller cheaper rocket.
In terms of Orion, can Dragon do everything it can do. No not by itself Orion plus the Orion service module can do some thing Dragon can't. But Dragon can do most things and with a few simple add-ons like extend tank in the trunk.
So in reality if NASA had the freedom to plan, a few years ago they could have switched a Falcon Heavy/Dragon architecture and achieved the same thing. SpaceX would likely even have been willing to do things like cross feed and potentially even a Raptor based upper stage. All of these would have been ready far earlier then when Orion will actually launch with humans.
So just saying, SpaceX doesn't support something is a really narrow view. It doesn't support it but SpaceX certainty would have the capability to do the Artemis 1/2 missions if NASA had asked them too.
And all of that while completely ignoring Starship, just with the capabilities they had in 2019. Between then and now SpaceX could have already done this mission quite easily. And likely they could have done it 5 more times before Artemis 2 launches.
The question to me is, does SLS have a grand scheme? The entire program is specified and budgeted for about five missions, with extensions uncertain. Each launch is a tremendous (and tremendously expensive) affair, and this launch is the first time that all of the SLS systems are coming together.
Commercial launch services (not just SpaceX) get to amortize these sorts of failures over dozens to hundreds of eventual launches, but SLS is not designed to "fail fast" as a learning experience.
Yes, the price tag is an abomination and the engineering strategies outdated and frankly kind of embarrassing. But hindsight is 20/20.
Then SLS is the exact opposite. Building around existing commercial crew and commerical rockets would be that.
SLS/Orion is the actual both 'single point of failure'.
So really SLS/Orion is the opposite of what you suggest.
> keep the US' aerospace building capabilities fresh and available
And by that you mean removing money from the actual productive aerospace industry and instead keeping age old infrastructure in place and rebuilding production lines for old outdated technology.
Had this money actually been invested in the advanced aerospace industry, the US would have more and better aerospace capability.
So again, SLS/Orion is literally the opposite of what you suggest.
> provide some of the usual pork barrel giveaways to the usual folks
That's its real and only goal.
But again, there would have been other ways to do this.
> US put all their bets on SpaceX that could now not deliver for some reason.
That was never the alternative. That's just a strawman.
> But hindsight is 20/20.
Its not hindsight. Its actually mostly known at the time. If you look at the internal NASA studies, they all indicated that many other paths including using commercial rocket and building a Saturn style rocket would have been far, far better.
See: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
It stands to reason that the the next step (a semi-permanent moon base, progress towards being able to launch more stuff into deeper space) will provide similar benefits.
What they are against is giving untold billions to old Shuttle contractors to fly a overpriced single use rocket.
We will not get advanced technology from a moon program unless the moon program FINANCES ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. This moon program is the opposite, it tries to keep old technology alive.
If you want a moon program that finances advanced technology, what you should do is build large reusable rockets that deliver small modular nuclear reactors to the moon. And also some drone/robots that build habitats autonomously. That would actually be providing technology benefits on earth.
However, my understanding is that the current rollback is needed to address the hydrogen leak; they are not (quite) yet at the end of the rated battery lifetime.
The first is as you say, there's a timeline constraint based on the launch abort battery. It's previously been stated that NASA could attempt to get a waiver for the timeline.
But second reason is that the number of remedial and inspection actions you can perform on the launch pad is obviously more limited than in the VAB. Given that NASA did try for an immediate relaunch, it's likely that they've already tried and exhausted their highest value launchpad inspection and remedial actions.
- "At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon."
- "If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary to service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-...