In response to this:
The @NASA_SLS boosters burn 1.5M pounds of propellant in 2 minutes – an average 6.25 tons of propellant every second! #FactFriday
— Explore Deep Space (@XploreDeepSpace) July 11, 2014
I tweeted this:
If total ascent burn time's ten minutes, @NASA_SLS burns about $10M taxpayer dollars per second. @XploreDeepSpace
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 11, 2014
Meanwhile, SLS developing is costing $200k an hour. Every hour of every day.
But maybe that’s too abstract of a figure. The Ariane 5 costs around $120 million per launch and can put 21 tonnes into LEO. So SLS development is costing around 15 Ariane 5 launches a year. That’s 300 tonnes a year, or 26 tonnes a month in opportunity costs just ticking away. Somehow it’ll be worth it, right?
I like the concept of what you did, Rand, but I’ve long had quibbles with the twitter concept of enforced brevity, because points such as yours are well worth expounding.
You’re saying six billion per launch here. That’s in the range of my, and a lot of other, estimates for the true cost per launch (assuming the development cost is amortized over a 30 year system lifetime) and inclusive of yearly operational costs (scarily, many don’t seem to understand that the standing workforce is a cost factor, let alone the biggest one). And more frighteningly, how many are so math challenged that they won’t instantly see that you’re saying 6 billion per launch?
It’s not like a lot of us having been pointing out for a while that it’s several million a launch. The tweet, as are all tweets, are for people who get it. I can’t aim one at everyone.
(several million s.b. several billion)
Well, since the projected launch rate is around 16 nanohertz, the program will only cost about a hundred dollars a second, averaged out over the years, SLS development costs and non-Orion payload (should there ever be any) costs omitted. Who could object to that?
For the $12 billion over 7 years to get 1 SLS to fly by 2017, you could fly 42 SLS-equivalent amounts of payload to LEO. Put another way, you could put 70,000 kgs in LEO via SLS in 2017 versus 2,976,393 kgs in LEO via Falcon 9. That’s one helluva govt-operated premium price per pound to orbit.
The opportunity costs of what could be done with the same amount of money over the same time period are heartbreaking.
Bad for the digestion. I don’t recommend dwelling on it.