More false memories of it. I guess Mike thinks that if you repeat a falsehood often enough, people will start to believe it. I have never seen a study that justified, or even attempted to technically/economically justify SLS.
19 thoughts on “The Origin Of SLS”
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How else can they control the conversation if they don’t first rewrite history? SLS is the best value for the buck ever, otherwise shut up.
You all don’t get it. The purpose of NASA is to exist. To do that, it needs to spend lots of money in key Congressional districts. Like it or not, SLS is the most effective way to accomplish that goal.
You have two choices: keep shouting at the customer, telling NASA it shouldn’t want what it wants (and growing more and more frustrated), or find *new* customers.
There’s no shortage of possible alternatives. Even if you’ve written off the private sector, there’s DARPA, AST, USAF, NOAA, etc. But “New” Space still obsesses over NASA.
I’m not sure if you guys get it, and just ignoring it to complain; but I agree with Edward. NASA exists to exist. This was made clear to me years back when I saw the “CEV” mockups sitting next to the flown Dragon capsule, with a LM sign proudly displaying “CEV is Built [Near] Me” with dots showing all the Congressional districts getting a part of the pork. SLS is nothing but one big pig with lots of pork to go around, and serves no other purpose than to be that pork. And so long as the pork is there, NASA civil servants have a job. So do many contractors.
Sure, NASA could still exist and expand with flights on SpaceX rockets opening up new areas of space. But that would mean for a period without the pig and its pork. A period long enough for civil servants to possibly lose their job. Too much risk.
Elon needs to make his own market. He has the means to do it, and I think there are customers, other than NASA, for his product.
People like to forget that SLS is not the first time the Senate has dictated the design of a launch system. And the fact that its doing so has killed astronauts.
I’m talking about Thiolol “winning” the SRB selection, with a design that was at the bottom of NASA’s preferences. That was political, caused the the Utah senators as well as the Nixon administration kowtowing to them. As a result, we ended up with a segmented SRB because it had to fit through 19th century railroad tunnels due to being built in Utah (this factor also limited the diameter). At least one of the alternative designs, the Aerojet (and Aeroject had built even larger SRBs, and still holds the record for the largest ever tested) one, was a solid case, not segmented. It had superior performance, plus, of course, being a monolithic casing, no o-rings (which were the components that failed on Challenger… ).
It didn’t hurt that Fletcher was from Utah.
I’m no fan of the Shuttle, but let me just point out that large monolithic solids aren’t necessarily trouble-free either. Sure, the monolithic has no joints of O-rings to fail, but a crack or other defect in the propellant grain is going to be harder to detect. And as you’re manhandling the very heavy monolithic into place, what if it flexes a bit and the grain cracks as a result?
It’s true that segmented solids killed one Shuttle crew, but there were plenty of other safety problems.
Thanks for the info RE monolithic solids.
I’ve never been fond of the idea of solids on a manned rocket. Though I know this wouldn’t apply to shuttle (No LAS, just ejection seats of dubious utility for the first few flights) I hate the idea of solids for manned systems due to their very fast failure modes (No way could a LAS escape them).
Hello Rand,
There’s a similar piece offered by David King, Stephen Cook And Douglas Cooke in the Orlando paper this weekend, too. Try – try hard – to keep a straight face when you get to their assertion that “Contrary to some suggestions, the SLS will be very competitive with the advertised price of commercial U.S. systems — on the order of $4.5 million per ton of payload.”
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-nasa-space-mars-062115-20150619-story.html
I’m wondering what else we’ll see in the way of SLS op-ed pieces from NASA contractors this week.
I wonder how he calculated $4.5 million a ton.
If it’s 130 tons (or 140+ if it’s metric tons), that implies a per-flight cost of about ~$600M+. That has to be a marginal cost, not average.
Rand, totally agreed RE marginal cost.
They’re probably going to spend around 30 billion before the thing actually flies. If we assume one launch per year (actually generous given current plans) for 30 years, that’s a billion per flight in development alone, and ignores fixed costs, etc, etc. If it launches once every two years on average for 30 years, that’s 2 billion per flight in dev alone.
It will have exactly the same problem that Jeff Greason and Sally Ride said that Ares V had. Even if Santa gave it to NASA for Christmas, they can’t afford to operate it.
Or fly it often enough to maintain adequate safety in operating it – by the admission of its own safety panel.
Are you figuring the time value of money here? $30B invested at 10% would be $3B a year income. This doesn’t even include accrued interest during development which probably doubles that number.
$3b/yr is 2 FH per month or one SLS per year.
SLS = 70 ton vs FH 24×50 = 1200 ton.
Of course it’s worse than that since SLS uses up the principle so there is no interest left to pay for any launches.
Wall. Firing squad.
Their numbers seemed to be based around the SLS Block 2 – how else to argue that it would have nearly 2.5 times the lift capacity of any existing or developing heavy lift launcher?
But SLS Block 2 is a paper rocket. It isn’t going to be showing up until the end of the next decade, even assuming the funding is forthcoming. And we’re comparing that to Falcon Heavy as it’s configured now, in 2015? Heaven knows what FH or the rest of the commercial heavy lift market will look like in 2030.
SLS block 2 (and to a degree, later block 1) also has performance figures based on the RS-25E, which has some very hard to swallow performance specs. It’s based on the SSME (RS-25D) and is supposed to outperform it by a significant degree. The RS-25 E is a great engine, with only one small drawback; it does not exist.
They’ve got, assuming no accidents in refit and testing, 16 SSMEs to use on the early flights. After that, they need the paper engine to be a lot more than paper.
Engines that don’t exist are always awesome!
” The RS-25 E is a great engine, with only one small drawback; it does not exist.”
Details, details.