After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test

Its actually much worse then that. These are not the 'cost' for F9/FH, that is the price. The cost of these launch is like 1/2 to 1/3. Part of the price is also amortizing past development cost.

In the SLS launch non of that is included. If you take into account the full development cost and amortize them over all the launches (and calculate the interest on government debt) the price is actually way higher then what you have listed.

- SLS is more powerful then FH but not by as much as people think.

- SLS is human-rated and FH is not, but that is mostly because there is no reason to human-rate the FH.

- SLS has the potential to be extend significantly to outperform FH by a much larger margin but that will cost another X billion and another Y years.

- SLS was supposed to be cheap by using lots of legacy technology. So in reality Falcon series are actually pretty much newer and more modern in pretty much every design aspect. Of course when SLS was designed Falcon was 'unproven' and the parts of the SLS were 'proven'. However of course this has totally reversed by now.

SLS rocket is simply a bad design. It was the outcome of a bad process partly pushed by congress on NASA and partly by NASA engineers own failure to analyse the situation properly. A large part of this is the believe to reuse 'proven' technologies and more importantly to reuse that same workforce.

Because it used Cost+ contracting the contractors have no intensive what so ever to perform well. The keep getting their bonus payments for good performance even, something that independent government reviews has pointed out multiple times.

So to sum up, there is very little to almost nothing that is gained by SLS. Its a huge part of the NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing developments. You could fully fund the lunar lander program AND do other preparation for moon bases for example.

Edit: This talk form 2011 is quite interesting. I often call it the SpaceX antithesis talk. He even mentions SpaceX a couple of times and references them without naming them.

He quite literally says 'if we can't make this affordable they will from in future just let SpaceX do it' and he made it clear their main design goal is affordability and having a program that could meet milestones. Well, that didn't work out so much. See:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweLWCBHpUE?t=0

The requirements for a space reactor, and for a terrestrial reactor, are radically different. No space reactor will make sense for terrestrial power generation. The temperatures are different, power density is different, safety cases are different. A 20kg reactor likely needs highly enriched fuel (space reactors are typically fast reactors too, so we're talking about something that's almost a bomb there.)

An external neutron source does not greatly change the needed enrichment (since any practical subcritical reactor would still need k fairly high, so it is only a bit subcritical.)

That wouldn't have been continuing Apollo; that would have been salvaging something from the effort. I do agree it (or something else, like Schnitt's MCD booster concept) would have been far better for the country, even if they wouldn't have gotten Nixon as many votes in California.

You are very wrong about this actually.

SpaceX funded most of the Falcon 1 program themselves. The DoD was one early costumer.

SpaceX got some funding for Commercial Cargo program but that was mostly for the capsule, it didn't fully fund the Falcon 9.

The whole Falcon 9 improvement, such as Merlin 1D engines and all the other improvements were funded from SpaceX themselves.

The same goes for the complete SpaceX re-usabilitly program.

Under the Commercial Cargo contract part of that money was for human rating the Falcon 9 but is mostly about paper work and certification. A few issues were addressed that were financed with this contract. That money was for the capsule.

The Raptor program was a SpaceX own development. They got a small grant from the air force for a small Raptor version but that is a tiny part of the program and the current Raptor is very different. All of that was done without any funding from government.

The complete Starship program was funded by SpaceX themselves until last year when they got comparatively small amount for the Starship as a Moon lander study, but not nearly enough to fund the program.

The complete Starlink program was funded and developed by SpaceX without any government contracts.

Its flat out false to say that everything SpaceX has done was government funded. SpaceX has and had many commercial flights and has multiple rounds of investment of private money raised.

In reality SpaceX very likely bit to low for both CRS and for CommercialCrew. SpaceX had to invest private funds to get these programs operational. Boeing considered SpaceX bid so low that it would be impossible for SpaceX to finish the capsule and reasoned that when that happened they could also ask for more money, but SpaceX didn't ask for more money and finished the project.

And the argument that it all builds on decades of NASA engineering effort, well that is partly true. But you could just as well argue that Space build on all engineering effort of humanity.

NASA or its contractors have never even come close to making an engine so operationally cheap as the Merlin, or an engine that was as reusable as Merlin. Nothing NASA has ever done is close to as impressive as Raptor (RS-25 is neat design but production and cost nightmare). NASA has not build a cargo or crew capsule in 50 years. NASA has not managed to design a new rocket in 50+ years. NASA own attempts at rocket development have universally failed.

NASA never managed anything close to capturing a reusable orbital booster. Programs like DC-X are not in the same league.

People need to stop claiming that SpaceX is simply a couple guys who found some drawings at NASA and said, he we can copy that. SpaceX has done things NASA was not able to even with budgets 10-50 times higher. Most of the things SpaceX profited from were done decades ago.

And in the opposite direction it is actually the case that NASA learned a huge amount from SpaceX as well. NASA got full access into Space re-usability program like the engines, super-sonic retro-propulsion. SpaceX has the first data on pusher escape systems. Full-Flow Stage Combustion engine are now something NASA can study because of the Moon Lander program. SpaceX way of doing software development have very much changed NASA approchs as well.

And all of that is before we consider the organizational changes at NASA that happened directly because of SpaceX. Many NASA engineers have talked about how contact with SpaceX directly changed their perspective and how they tried to bring this culture into NASA. Dan Rasky is one good example of this, his talks on the subject are informative.

What makes SpaceX (and in a different way BlueOrigin) different is exactly that they go and get their own funding for when they want to work on a project. If government has some contracts open that they can use their technology for they are happy to do it. Eventually government will fly regularly with Starship, but that is different from SpaceX Starship program being funded by government.

SpaceX is already launching for less then 100 million. You don't need to close a larger part of the ocean for a bigger rocket.

SpaceX is actually building its own rocket launch facilities in South Texas. They are also already evaluating sea platforms.

Insurance rates for Falcon 9 are already very low, the lowest in the industry. If Starship can double or triple the flight rate insurance will go down by quite a bit. Also the costumers pay for insurance, its not part of the SpaceX price quoted here. In addition, government don't actually insure things like Artemis program.

> That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button.

That job doesn't exist anymore for SpaceX launches.

In fact, if you look at the total labour for launch, its going down considerably and it will continue to go down. Look at SpaceX operation in South Texas, an explicit goal of their whole design process is to make things cheaper and faster and that goes for operations as well.

Another example is the capsule retrieval operations. During Appollo damn near a whole battle fleet was sent, now its one ship and some available cost guard.

2 million $ per launch is quite extreme however there is absolutely no reason why it should cost over 100 million. Even with the Falcon 9 today, the second stage is actually large part of the cost and a fully reusable system would reduce that consderably. The fuel for Starship is actually cheaper then for the Falcon 9 as the Falcon 9 uses RP-1, helium and a couple other things Starship no longer has.

The steel construction should actually end less expensive then the Falcon 9 construction. This of course doesn't go for the full human capable Starship, but just the Cargo version of the rocket compared.

The Raptor rocket engine is more complex then Merlin and will likely be somewhat more expensive until it significantly overtakes it in production rate. However SpaceX has shown to be able to make engine quite cheaply and with reuse the per flight cost is trivial.

Please explain why Starship should cost (internal cost) more then 2x of Falcon 9.