Mar11
SLS, The Backup System
on March 11, 2013 at 10:24 amThis sort of stupidity is on a par with calling it an “insurance policy.” Dana has it right:
Last year’s request for this “back-up system” was more than 300% of the appropriated level of the primary system. By acting on this type of faulty logic, we have created a national debt as large as our GDP and still our nation refuses to take its foot off the deficit spending accelerator. SLS is unaffordable, and with relatively modest expenditures on specific technology development, we do not need a heavy lift vehicle of that class to explore the Moon, Mars, or near-Earth asteroids.”
Of course, it has nothing to do with “exploring” any of those places. It’s pork and workforce preservation.
That broken window needs a fixin’
As Dennis suggests in comments there, we know the eventually. It’s just a question of how much pork will be wasted until everyone figures it out.
If Elon starts making his Falcon XX in Texas, that should be all she wrote.
I can recall few times when the government spent money on a backup in case the primary system didn’t work. One case was the Consolidated B-32 Dominator which was built as a backup in case the Boeing B-29 didn’t work. The B-32 did see limited service during the war but was quickly removed from the inventory after WWII ended. Another possible example was the Titan I as a backup to the Atlas ICBM. There likely are other examples but none quickly come to mind. Was the different atomic bomb designs of the Manhattan Project another example? I don’t know.
In neither of those examples that I listed did the backup get substancially more funding than the primary system. Congress is directing NASA to spend about $2 billion a year on SLS on top of the $5+ billion they’ve spent on Orion. Contrast that to what they’ve spent on commercial space alternatives.
In the case of the B-29/B-32, there was a war on.
With the Atlas/Titan I, it was the depths of the Cold War and there was concern that if the Soviets perfected their ICBM first, we would have been vulnerable to a surprise attack, aka a “nuclear Pearl Harbor” without the ability to respond in kind. That’s not the sort of the thing you would want to guess wrong about.
Was the different atomic bomb designs of the Manhattan Project another example?
Yes, I believe so. The Trinity test was a version of the Fat Man bomb that was eventually dropped on Nagasaki. The Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima was a simpler design that was thought to be almost certain to work and thus was not tested. Also, there was only a limited supply of enriched uranium available at the time.
But yeah, spending 300% more on the “backup” is pretty screwy.
The B-29 was a very sophisticated plane for its day. It had pressurization, radar-assisted bombing, remote control gun turrets and engines made with a lot of magnesium. The AAF ordered it straight off the drawing board. The prototype was lost on an early flight when one of the engines caught fire, something that happened all too often in the plane’s history. Having a much simplier design like the B-32 as a backup made sense because it took an enormous effort to get the B-29 ready for action (read about the Battle of Wichita sometime).
The Titan I was a backup to Atlas. While the Titan I was a true 2 stage rocket compared to the Atlas’s 1 1/2 stages, the structure was much more conventional. The Titan I was also our first silo-based ICBM. It wasn’t operational for very long before being replaced by the storable propellant Titan II and from what I’ve read, they were scrapped instead of used as a launch vehicle. I’m not certain why Titan Is weren’t used even as ABM targets. Perhaps they had enough surplus Atlas missiles and just didn’t need the Titan’s any more.
As for the atomic bombs, Little Boy’s U-235 based gun barrel design was simplier than Fat Man’s plutonium implosion design but IIRC, it was easier to produce plutonium in quantity.
All of those examples were the result of wartime (hot or cold) pressures where waste is standard operating procedure. Spending 3 times as much per year on a backup as the total cost of the primary commercial systems is unheard of even in the annals of government waste.
The CCDev program already includes backups. If Dragon functions perfectly, it can easily handle the trivial number of flights NASA has planned. But Congress is also funding the Boeing CST-100, a similar backup, and DreamChaser, a dissimilar backup.
How many layers of backups does NASA need? How many can it afford?
NASA has never had a backup in the past. Lunar Gemini coulld have been a backup for Apollo, but NASA didn’t want a backup — even during the Moon race, which was much more important at the time than ISS is today.
If two layers of backups aren’t sufficient, why did Congress reduce the number of CCDev awards from five to three?
The conclusions of that now-ancient by political standards 2009 Augustine Committee came to the conclusion that there was a place for a modest heavy lifter – about 75 MT – for a few oversized items.
I think one suggestion (via Jeff Greason) was to use the tooling for the Delta IV’s big cylinders for accommodating LH2, thus enable a lot more propellant for LOX/RP-1 and use the engines from Atlas V.
Just another idea in addition to whatever Elon comes up with that would surely cost far less than the flying pig.
You overlook the way designs evolve once NASA gets funding to work on them.
This is the sad history of “new space.” Whenever a cool new NASA rocket design comes along, advocates jump on the bandwagon to support it, only to lead to disillusionment a few years later. Followed by futile efforts to throw their bodies in front of the giant snowball now rolling down the hill.
Remember Constellation? SLI? X-33? NASP? Even Shuttle?
Instead of “new space,” I think you would be better off to look at very old space — the way everyone expected spaceflight would develop before Sputnik, with commercial spaceflight developing the way commercial aviation did, the US Air Force evolving into the US Space Force, and NASA playing the role of NACA.
That approach died with the X-15. It might have been revived back in 2004, after the X-Prize, but SpaceShip One wasn’t sexy enough for “new space.” Burt Rutan had built the equivalent of an Apple I, but Sean O’Keefe was promising to build a Cray 1. He was going to do Apollo again!
What if activists had passed up the BVSE bandwagon and called for Congress to enact pro-CATS policies like tax incentives, prizes, regulatory and liability reform, and NACA-style basic research instead? Whether we won or lost, would we be any worse off than we are today? Will we be any better off 10 years from now for throwing our support behind another big NASA rocket program?
Cost/benefit analysis for space activists:
1) What percentage of your life have you devoted to trying to “fix” NASA and its rockets?
2) What return have you gotten for 1)?
3) What returns could you have gotten if you devoted the same amount of time to some other pursuit?
Coastal Ron has been attempting to argue reason with Jason Rian at the America space blog. Jason’s latest post on Newspace trolls is—-interesting. SLS will work, and what little Newspace has done is only from government 90% subsidies. I’ve attempted to read the site in order to understand another viewpoint, which I now believe to be a waste of time at that site.
Jason seems to be trolling his own site.
There’s plenty of NewSpace trolls. Jason’s problem is that he really wants there to be two camps. He wants there to be an “enemy” which he can rally against but, more importantly, he wants a side that he can belong to. He wants to be on the “inside”. Jason wants to join the NASA fan club and fight all “those anti-NASA people”.
Unfortunately for Jason, everyone in the space community stopped thinking that way decades ago. NASA is a disappointment, even to people like Jason who feel the need to still defend them.
The SLS class of vehicle is needed to replace the aging Saturn V static displays in Huntsville and Cape Canaveral, which are getting old and presenting maintenance issues.
and bullet holes.
Darn it. Can’t get the desktop site version of this comment thread, though I had it a while ago. The switcher grinds and grinds, brings up the home page, but won’t affect the comment thread. I’m in IE. Anyone else having this problem recur? Could it be a problem with my cookies or security settings? It feels like I’m using an obsolete NASA flight computer instead of a NewSpace 2-GHz processor or something.
Great. I leave a complaint and then it loaded the desktop comment thread for me. ^_^
Hey, we aim to please…
I like how you roll with the punches Rand. Good job!
It really is annoying, but hasn’t been too bad lately.