The reasoning behind SLS sort of made sense 10 years ago. We didn't know that Starship, New Glenn and Falcon Heavy were coming down the pipe. We decided that the US & NASA needed super-heavy lift capability. Previous attempts to design a heavy lift vehicle were lost to political regime change and congress in-fighting. Previous attempts to design a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle were cancelled due to its virtual impossibility.
So NASA & Congress designed a program that was unkillable. It greased too many wheels and lined too many pockets to make it easy to kill. It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.
So now when we complain that it's a pork-filled boondoggle that's impossible to kill, that was the plan, and there was a certain logic behind it. It makes no sense in a world with Falcon Heavy, Starship & New Glenn, but who would have predicted that with confidence in 2010?
The Constellation Program [1] that preceded SLS had two vehicles - Ares I for ISS crew and supplies after Shuttle was retired, and Ares V for occupying the moon. The missions gave some justification for needing vehicles. Their design was primarily a means to preserve existing contracts and jobs. Additional wheel greasing made it happen.
That stuff about re-using parts to reduce risk is just what people say because it sounds good, but isn't inherently true. Kind of like how "drug delivery" and "machine learning application" are go-to pseudo-justifications for many research proposals.
Constellation was eventually canceled when ISS resupply went to the Commercial Crew Program [2]. Ares V was stripped down and reimagined as the mission-less SLS. SLS is not really intended to do much more than exist for the time being.
There are a lot of factors that will go into canceling SLS - infighting between NASA centers, preserving jobs and contracts with Old Space companies, even more wheel greasing. I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Too big, too expensive, too low flight rate. These all problems contribute to each other.
Also, large solid rockets are very troublesome. They can not be fueled on the pad, so they are heavy and dangerous from casting to stacking to launch. There will never be a high launch rate reusable rocket with solids.
> It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.
Politicians can't design a rocket and cannot get what is "ultra-conservative". Rockets are not Lego blocks that you can just mix and match. They're explicitly designed a certain way to support a certain load profile. Even if the parts of the SLS _look_ like they have low risk, they do not and that's why the vehicle has taken so long to develop.
One example, if the shuttle boosters were could actually have been used directly they wouldn't have needed to extend the number of segments from 4 to 5, redesign the liner between the segments, and completely redesign the nozzle. It's a new booster.
Second example, even though the shuttle external tank looks like it's being used, in previous iterations the shuttle external tank did not support any axial loads, it was simply held on to the bottom of the Orbiter. Now the external tank has to withstand the entire axial load of the rocket so it's basically redesigned from scratch.
Perhaps the problem was deciding that the U.S. needed to have a super-heavy lift capability in the first place. A lot of the U.S. space program seems to be rather aimless, doing things because they seem cool rather than practical. We shouldn't really be surprised when situations like this occur.
> using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.
If only that was so. Using a bunch of old tech in a new way does not actually lead to great success. The re-qualification of the RS-25 alone took years and cost 100s of millions. And that is without producing new ones.
SLS is the last major gasp of a military industrial complex that has completely taken over congress. The fact that we're paying $146M for each engine on the SLS (takes 4 to launch) and SpaceX is promising an entire launch for Starship at <100M is obscene. (Oh, and SLS ends up at the bottom of the ocean...Starship you can just refuel).
While I don't agree with all thing Musk, he's revolutionized the global spacelaunch industry by reducing costs 10x. Now, totally dominant in an industry, he's making that rocket obsolete in favor of a better one (Spaceship).
If you think it's the last major gasp, you're gonna find yourself awful disappointed. One does not simply kill a jobs program. There'll be SLS, and then some other 2 trillion dollar airplane, then some satellite system, and again and again forever. Nobody votes to kill these projects because of the jobs they maintain. There will always be more
The plans for Starship are haisy, not scrutinised and it has not been delivered. So far design has changed massively, it was scaled down a lot, and it's stil a vehicle looking for a purpose.
I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point withing the next 10 years.
All the best luck to spaceX, but you can't base the entire national space programm on something that flaky.
SLS solidly gets you to the moon, and you van make real plans on it. If it turns out to be redundant, that's ok
Starship launch price should only be a couple millions (see the article).
<100M is _technically_ right, but very far off. Since Starship will be fully reusable, it's upfront building investment (the ~100M price-tag you are referring to), spread over the lifetime of the vehicle, plus staff/maintenance/fuel for launches.
Falcon 9 was already a +10x reduction (~~1.5B per launch -> ~70M, likely cheaper for reused boosters), and Starship will be another +10x cheaper than F9. This means Starship will be >100x cheaper than competitors (excluding small-sat rockets like the Electron)
Of course, a large part of the cost of those engines is that they're designed to be reusable (a difficult task with hydrogen/oxygen engines due to thermal shocks and hydrogen embrittlement). This made sense when they were being built for the Space Shuttle. It no longer makes sense now that they are using the same engines for an expendable first stage.
His material is SpaceX heavy but far from exclusive, and he works very hard to recognize and compensate for any biases he might have when doing deep dives and analysis.
There's quite a lot of technical material in many of his videos, presented in an organized, pleasant and approachable fashion.
It’s crazy to see this here. I knew Tim in college; it’s crazy because he bought this old cosmonaut suit as a prop for his photography and it just kind of took off on random corners of the Internet and then next thing I know he’s doing this stuff with NASA and now he’s on the front page of HN.
the channel is one of my top recommendations, but I think another thing that should be pointed out is he posts an article version of each of his videos. I really really wish this was more common.
Who would have known the SpaceX experiment would work? There is some case to be made that US Gov was overly conservative and not willing to innovate, but I suspect that's safer than using taxpayer money on a SpaceX-like iniative that suffers as many failures as SpaceX did initially. Can you imagine the political fallout? We don't have an appetite for that from the Gov any more, not like we did in decades past.
NASA and the US Gov made the decision to fill a strategic gap the only way they knew how (and the way that had worked in the past). Now, other options are emerging, but not available and certainly not certified.
While it might not have been known that SpaceX would work, it's been known since the 1960s that cost optimized launchers could be much cheaper than what was being done.
Arthur Schnitt's MCD design philosophy dates from the late 1960s.
One of the tragedies of the Shuttle program was that it was pursued instead of this. Simply cost optimizing and evolving the Saturn 1B could have led to something a lot like the Falcon 9 (perhaps not with the reusability, at least at first), years before SpaceX.
Personally, It smacked me in the face as obviously going to eat the rocket industry's lunch in 2013 with Falcon 9 v1.1. Cost optimised boosters while testing landing tech on paying commercial flights was a no brainer.
Only reason SpaceX exists is because of the US Gov commercial programs. They wanted to create a more robust private space industry and they did it. Tax payer money was spent on SpaceX as the US Gov was the biggest customer for a long time. This is what governments do, they create markets. It was intentional and it worked just like it did countless times in the past.
Long duration projects face the risk of looking silly when something radically changes the landscape. SLS took the safe route back to mostly expendable launchers from a "reusable" system that was the result of extensive feature creep and left the agency with some psychological scars (and some extremely cool and inspiring museum pieces).
As the author says, some things are impossible until they aren't. Starship may still hit a development wall, but, at this point, it's doubtful. If it works, it changes the landscape completely.
While I see a lot of discussion about the contents of the article (politics, engineering, etc...) I want to comment on the article itself. Very well done. A delightful read during lunch. Bravo!
It's not really fair to put the N1 in the category of successful giant rockets that have flown. Yes it flew, it exploded every time. No third stage of an N1 ever made it to low earth orbit.
So ironic Saturn-V is drawn as carrying 140 tons, while Apollo CSM is 30 tons and Lunar Module is 15 tons, yet Space Shuttle is drawn carrying just 27 tons. Definitely a case of apples and oranges.
The chart is tons to LEO. Saturn V wasn't designed for LEO, but it certainly could have dropped that much there. (Skylab used a pretty fair fraction of that capability.)
When you're comparing launchers you have to pick some baseline target orbit. LEO is a good lowest common denominator, but isn't quite fair as launch systems optimized for higher energy orbits (like the Saturn V) lose some of their advantage. But a higher orbit is even less fair to systems designed for LEO; choose anything else, like GEO or lunar insertion, STS would have a big fat 0.
They are listed with numbers about payload to (quite low) LEO. Apollo CSM and the Lunar Module were launched into a much higher-energy trajectory. The Saturn V could have launched 140 tons to LEO, it just never did. IIRC the most massive thing it ever launched was ~90 tons of Skylab.
Related to this, I found this article [1] interesting, from Arstechnica in September: Charlie Bolden [former NASA administrator] says the quiet part out loud: SLS rocket will go away
I find the point that SpaceX has no plans beyond the next step hard to believe. I could imagine they perhaps have no firmly officially approved plans like a full waterfall project, but surely there must be already a lot of trade studies on the next steps, and at least some rough plans.
Or maybe the even have approved plans, but with the understanding that they could change quickly as new data comes in.
Otherwise a project like StarShip is likely not feasible. For example for a Mars project you must at least have some idea that long term live support is feasible with the chosen size. They likely have that idea based on data from ISS, but I bet there were some preliminary studies on this at least.
Tim Dodd is an amazing and pure soul, bless his heart. His fair, thorough, and well-researched explanations of this topic, and others, including his other recent video on just Starship vs Falcon 9 and Heavy, are real eye-openers.
And, as others here have said, yeah, hindsight is 20/20, given that the SLS will almost certainly be a boondoggle, and barring any major failures on South Padre or something... inconceivable... its utility will likely be obviated before it even launches.
But, even as an avid newspace fan for the past 10+ years, I still have to say, it wasn't terribly obvious Starship would launch on "Elon Time"... or "Elon Time 2.0.", even only two years ago when Elon unveiled "Dear Moon", he hadn't even announced he'd be building Starship out of stainless steel. Yeah, and he builds them like water towers are built, in ring sections, not advanced composites. I shudder to think back even 10 years...
Like, since it's pretty much fully reusable, yes, both stages, it could cost less than a million dollars to launch 150 metric tons to low earth orbit, which is pretty handy, because they're using it to launch a network of thousands of communications satellites in ridiculously low orbits that'll probably decay in only a few years and it's looking like that's actually gonna work really well. Yeah, way better than the one time Motorola tried it.
Oh, and if you wanted to get 150 metric tons to GTO, you just need a single orbital refueling launch. The moon, mars, just a couple more orbital pitstops.
Oh, and it uses a rocket engine design that's never even gotten off the test stand the handful times it was looked into before.
Yeah, hindsight's a... cough
Oh, did I mention there's a global pandemic? And President Trump got voted out of office. And Apple replaced all their Intel chips with the one they have in their iPads and smart phones, and it wound up being way better. Yeah, Intel's in a pretty tough spot, actually. Oh, and try to find as many Pokemon cards as you can, some people have paid their mortgages off that way.
Yeah... Time travel's gonna be hard to explain. Especially since nobody has DVD burners anymore.
The title made me think the post was something to do with starship.rs, comparing it with a newer, potentially even better shell prompt that I had yet to hear about. I feel weirdly disappointed.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|5 years ago|reply
So NASA & Congress designed a program that was unkillable. It greased too many wheels and lined too many pockets to make it easy to kill. It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.
So now when we complain that it's a pork-filled boondoggle that's impossible to kill, that was the plan, and there was a certain logic behind it. It makes no sense in a world with Falcon Heavy, Starship & New Glenn, but who would have predicted that with confidence in 2010?
[+] [-] OnlyOneCannolo|5 years ago|reply
The Constellation Program [1] that preceded SLS had two vehicles - Ares I for ISS crew and supplies after Shuttle was retired, and Ares V for occupying the moon. The missions gave some justification for needing vehicles. Their design was primarily a means to preserve existing contracts and jobs. Additional wheel greasing made it happen.
That stuff about re-using parts to reduce risk is just what people say because it sounds good, but isn't inherently true. Kind of like how "drug delivery" and "machine learning application" are go-to pseudo-justifications for many research proposals.
Constellation was eventually canceled when ISS resupply went to the Commercial Crew Program [2]. Ares V was stripped down and reimagined as the mission-less SLS. SLS is not really intended to do much more than exist for the time being.
There are a lot of factors that will go into canceling SLS - infighting between NASA centers, preserving jobs and contracts with Old Space companies, even more wheel greasing. I'm interested to see how it plays out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program
[+] [-] Gravityloss|5 years ago|reply
Too big, too expensive, too low flight rate. These all problems contribute to each other.
Also, large solid rockets are very troublesome. They can not be fueled on the pad, so they are heavy and dangerous from casting to stacking to launch. There will never be a high launch rate reusable rocket with solids.
[+] [-] mlindner|5 years ago|reply
> It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.
Politicians can't design a rocket and cannot get what is "ultra-conservative". Rockets are not Lego blocks that you can just mix and match. They're explicitly designed a certain way to support a certain load profile. Even if the parts of the SLS _look_ like they have low risk, they do not and that's why the vehicle has taken so long to develop.
One example, if the shuttle boosters were could actually have been used directly they wouldn't have needed to extend the number of segments from 4 to 5, redesign the liner between the segments, and completely redesign the nozzle. It's a new booster.
Second example, even though the shuttle external tank looks like it's being used, in previous iterations the shuttle external tank did not support any axial loads, it was simply held on to the bottom of the Orbiter. Now the external tank has to withstand the entire axial load of the rocket so it's basically redesigned from scratch.
[+] [-] bnralt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickik|5 years ago|reply
If only that was so. Using a bunch of old tech in a new way does not actually lead to great success. The re-qualification of the RS-25 alone took years and cost 100s of millions. And that is without producing new ones.
[+] [-] agsacct|5 years ago|reply
While I don't agree with all thing Musk, he's revolutionized the global spacelaunch industry by reducing costs 10x. Now, totally dominant in an industry, he's making that rocket obsolete in favor of a better one (Spaceship).
[+] [-] vikramkr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|5 years ago|reply
I have significant doubts that we will see it launch at that price-point withing the next 10 years.
All the best luck to spaceX, but you can't base the entire national space programm on something that flaky.
SLS solidly gets you to the moon, and you van make real plans on it. If it turns out to be redundant, that's ok
[+] [-] CraftThatBlock|5 years ago|reply
<100M is _technically_ right, but very far off. Since Starship will be fully reusable, it's upfront building investment (the ~100M price-tag you are referring to), spread over the lifetime of the vehicle, plus staff/maintenance/fuel for launches.
Falcon 9 was already a +10x reduction (~~1.5B per launch -> ~70M, likely cheaper for reused boosters), and Starship will be another +10x cheaper than F9. This means Starship will be >100x cheaper than competitors (excluding small-sat rockets like the Electron)
[+] [-] skykooler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diederich|5 years ago|reply
His material is SpaceX heavy but far from exclusive, and he works very hard to recognize and compensate for any biases he might have when doing deep dives and analysis.
There's quite a lot of technical material in many of his videos, presented in an organized, pleasant and approachable fashion.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumbledober|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|5 years ago|reply
NASA and the US Gov made the decision to fill a strategic gap the only way they knew how (and the way that had worked in the past). Now, other options are emerging, but not available and certainly not certified.
[+] [-] pfdietz|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster
One of the tragedies of the Shuttle program was that it was pursued instead of this. Simply cost optimizing and evolving the Saturn 1B could have led to something a lot like the Falcon 9 (perhaps not with the reusability, at least at first), years before SpaceX.
[+] [-] NewLogic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mempko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andromeduck|5 years ago|reply
At a fundamental level, industry responds to price incentives and government responds to political incentives.
[+] [-] rbanffy|5 years ago|reply
As the author says, some things are impossible until they aren't. Starship may still hit a development wall, but, at this point, it's doubtful. If it works, it changes the landscape completely.
[+] [-] pfdietz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|5 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/WVKC54H3v78
[+] [-] BadThink6655321|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccooper|5 years ago|reply
When you're comparing launchers you have to pick some baseline target orbit. LEO is a good lowest common denominator, but isn't quite fair as launch systems optimized for higher energy orbits (like the Saturn V) lose some of their advantage. But a higher orbit is even less fair to systems designed for LEO; choose anything else, like GEO or lunar insertion, STS would have a big fat 0.
[+] [-] Tuna-Fish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samizdis|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/former-nasa-administ...
[+] [-] hwc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nn3|5 years ago|reply
Or maybe the even have approved plans, but with the understanding that they could change quickly as new data comes in.
Otherwise a project like StarShip is likely not feasible. For example for a Mars project you must at least have some idea that long term live support is feasible with the chosen size. They likely have that idea based on data from ISS, but I bet there were some preliminary studies on this at least.
[+] [-] DannyB2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danpalmer|5 years ago|reply
That said, it's "re-use" by ejecting them and parachuting them down to a safe landing, so who knows if that will work.
[+] [-] generalizations|5 years ago|reply
> If it were not for NASA’s initial investment of nearly $400 million for the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX would not be here.
Is this true? I thought SpaceX was well under way before they figured out Falcon 9 or the dragon module.
[+] [-] m0zg|5 years ago|reply
For the same reason why we still manufacture tanks, only to then park them in the desert: pork.
[+] [-] cryptoquick|5 years ago|reply
And, as others here have said, yeah, hindsight is 20/20, given that the SLS will almost certainly be a boondoggle, and barring any major failures on South Padre or something... inconceivable... its utility will likely be obviated before it even launches.
But, even as an avid newspace fan for the past 10+ years, I still have to say, it wasn't terribly obvious Starship would launch on "Elon Time"... or "Elon Time 2.0.", even only two years ago when Elon unveiled "Dear Moon", he hadn't even announced he'd be building Starship out of stainless steel. Yeah, and he builds them like water towers are built, in ring sections, not advanced composites. I shudder to think back even 10 years...
Like, since it's pretty much fully reusable, yes, both stages, it could cost less than a million dollars to launch 150 metric tons to low earth orbit, which is pretty handy, because they're using it to launch a network of thousands of communications satellites in ridiculously low orbits that'll probably decay in only a few years and it's looking like that's actually gonna work really well. Yeah, way better than the one time Motorola tried it.
Oh, and if you wanted to get 150 metric tons to GTO, you just need a single orbital refueling launch. The moon, mars, just a couple more orbital pitstops.
Oh, and it uses a rocket engine design that's never even gotten off the test stand the handful times it was looked into before.
Yeah, hindsight's a... cough
Oh, did I mention there's a global pandemic? And President Trump got voted out of office. And Apple replaced all their Intel chips with the one they have in their iPads and smart phones, and it wound up being way better. Yeah, Intel's in a pretty tough spot, actually. Oh, and try to find as many Pokemon cards as you can, some people have paid their mortgages off that way.
Yeah... Time travel's gonna be hard to explain. Especially since nobody has DVD burners anymore.
[+] [-] DarthGhandi|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ruph123|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] boomskats|5 years ago|reply