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

arstechnica.com

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

#141

Post by hwc »

Beached wrote: post #69
michaericalribo wrote: post #8

Bummer! Especially this line: > All of this casts very serious doubt on NASA's plans to launch its Artemis I mission—an uncrewed precursor mission to sending humans to the Moon—before the end of this year. This outcome seems like good safety engineering: prioritize safety and control over speed. Still, it’s a disappointing setback. I want to go to space now! And this moves the eventual realization of space tourism ba…

SLS never was going to enable space tourism. You have private companies doing that, and doing it better than Boeing. SLS is worse than existing rockets in every way but one. Lift Capacity. Near term expected Space tourism doesnt need super heavy lift capacity. cheaper, faster, more reliable rockets already exist to get humans into LEO While Falcon Heavy or Delta may be able to do some of the artemis missions, they cu…

An "orbital Starship" plus a successful orbital refueling is the real game changer. Goes from 150T to LEO TO 150T anywhere in the solar system. SLS block 2, which is another decade (?) away, can only send 45T to Earth escape velocity.

And orbital refueling only costs six (?) times as much as a LEO flight.

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

#142

Post by BurningFrog »

dmix wrote: post #123
BurningFrog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It fits with the OP theory of "an expensive jobs program for Alabama, Texas and Florida." If you think of that as the actual purpose, this is a successful project.

Taking useful rocket scientists, engineers, programmers, etc, plus all of their blue collar support staff from away from productive industry sounds like the worst possible "jobs" program in the world. Calling it a success simply because the money was spent without considering opportunity costs [1] is just bad money management. It's how you end up with these blackhole gov programs in the first place. Extremely wastefu…

To be clear, I agree with you.

My point is that the people who created this project didn't have the same goals as you or I would have, and their goals have probably been accomplished.

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

#143

Post by Jabbles »

pashamur wrote: post #136
Jabbles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it's actually 2 people like in nuclear missile silos. Is there any public information?

Hey, I wanted to respond to your comment from 18 days ago but responses there have already been disabled (so I'm hijacking this comment). The question was about "> Housing market returns are very bad. Between 1948 and 2004 the real increase in value in the U.S real estate market was less than 1% a year." versus the "Return on everything" paper from 2018. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585224 ) On page 85 of…

Thank you :)

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

#144

Post by astroflask »

pfdietz wrote: post #103
giantrobot wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress and the Nixon administration trapped NASA in LEO. There was extensive planning inside NASA for applications of Saturn-Apollo technologies [0]. Two of the ambitious ones were a manned Venus flyby [1] and a permanent Lunar base [2]. After the Apollo I fire Congress lost its appetite for space and slashed NASA's budget [3]. The Nixon administration went all-in on the Space Shuttle which ate up all of NASA's man…

It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was driven by that, not by a "lack of will". It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.

In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack.

The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.

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

#145

Post by dotancohen »

KineticLensman wrote: post #99
dotancohen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't airliners have AFTS, then?

Airliners have been proven to be much safer than rockets. By way of example, spaceflight has a 3% fatality rate for astronauts [0]. If (pre-COVID) Heathrow airport (80,000,000 passengers in 2019) had a similar fatality rate, 7000 people would die every day, at that airport alone. Airliners are massively, massively safe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

This is the actual goal of Starship: airliner-type safety. Of course I doubt that they will reach that goal, but by striving for it then perhaps the next generation of rocket might.

Contrast with NASA manned vehicle requirements, which call for a 1:270 chance of loss of crew or loss of vehicle.

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

#146

Post by pfdietz »

astroflask wrote: post #144
pfdietz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was driven by that, not by a "lack of will". It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.

In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack. The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved b…

The engineers knew from the beginning that the Shuttle made no sense. The mission numbers used to justify it were always absurd and assumed a flight rate that they knew wasn't going to be achieved.

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

#147

Post by pfdietz »

nickik wrote: post #138
pfdietz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And had my father had two X chromosomes, he'd have been my mother. There has to be a reason to entertain contrafactuals; you can't just state them and assume that outcome would have been likely.

The point here being that it was not bureaucracy or the government that trapped NASA in LEO. It was NASA own design process. Blaming everything always on the congress/president is a way for NASA to never take responsibility. All the success gets credit to NASA but failure is always somebody wrong doing.

The point I was making was there was no plausible way the shuttle could have been designed so it would have been successful.

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

#148

Post by Beached »

pfdietz wrote: post #139
Beached wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is widely agreed that the whole program is a failure. Almost 3 years past due date, and most people believe it will still need more than another year. More than double the estimated cost Is providing very little benefit over existing rockets, and providing no benefits over planned rockets in development by others. It is adding no new capabilities, or technologies, and is in fact a step backwards in rocket design,…

Even if SLS delivered the working design instantly at zero cost it would be a failure. The rockets themselves will be too expensive to make and use.

Without the existence of Starship, that is difficult to say. I believe the launch cost per rocket (after the first) is roughly $500-600Mil? When you are the most capable rocket BY FAR, and simply the ONLY rocket in existence that can do the missions, it is hard to say if a significantly higher cost then the next best thing is worth it or not.

A sls block 1 has about 3x the lift capacity to the moon, and the block 2 about 5x the lift capacity. Short of a moon fly by, the falcon heavy would require multiple launches to perform the same mission of SLS.

So the SLS DOES indeed provide lift capability that doesnt already exist. Now if spacex beats Nasa to the moon with starship, all that goes out the window, as startship will be better for sure.

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

#149

Post by nickik »

pfdietz wrote: post #147
nickik wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point here being that it was not bureaucracy or the government that trapped NASA in LEO. It was NASA own design process. Blaming everything always on the congress/president is a way for NASA to never take responsibility. All the success gets credit to NASA but failure is always somebody wrong doing.

The point I was making was there was no plausible way the shuttle could have been designed so it would have been successful.

Totally disagree. With the same budget a much more successful vehicle could have been built.

Simple changes like not going for hydrogen, separating main engines from Shuttle itself, not using hydrogen on the first stage, vertically mounted shuttle and so on.

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

#150

Post by pfdietz »

Beached wrote: post #148
pfdietz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if SLS delivered the working design instantly at zero cost it would be a failure. The rockets themselves will be too expensive to make and use.

Without the existence of Starship, that is difficult to say. I believe the launch cost per rocket (after the first) is roughly $500-600Mil? When you are the most capable rocket BY FAR, and simply the ONLY rocket in existence that can do the missions, it is hard to say if a significantly higher cost then the next best thing is worth it or not. A sls block 1 has about 3x the lift capacity to the moon, and the block 2 a…

The launch cost will likely be much higher than that. I don't think that would even cover the marginal cost of making another rocket. The fixed costs will be substantial (what, you thought all those Shelby-voting engineers in Alabama would be laid off once development was done?)

Any real effort to go to the moon will involve propellant stockpiles and transfer in space. These could use LH2, which could be sent up on F9/F9H. There is no reason to do the injection to the moon using the F9/F9H upper stages.

I will add that even ignoring F9/F9H, there is no sustainable lunar or Mars program using SLS. The plans to go to Mars would be a flags-and-footprints dead end like Apollo. For space, it should either be go big or don't bother.

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