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Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

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Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#81

Post by msgodel »

fn-mote wrote: post #61
readthenotes1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren Buffett had this line that we would have no budget deficits if it we're required that every Congress person who voted for such would be ineligible for re-election. Pushing the cost burden on subsequent generations is a cowardly way to deal with our financial problems. When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars). The #4 cost currently is paying off interest (not princ…

It’s funny but economically wrong to ban deficits. I agree we are spending too much now, but the solution should not be to stop all spending. The problem is deeper than just a deficit.

It might be more optimal to run a small deficit but I don't think you can trust the legislature with it.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#82

Post by adastra22 »

ginko wrote: post #45
somenameforme wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. And I'm contrasting this against SLS cost "projections", which invariably end up lowballing reality. I'm steel-manning the argument for the SLS as much as I can, but it's still just nonsensical. The idea we need to compete against ourselve…

>I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.

It is enough payload.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#83

Post by perihelions »

oivey wrote: post #40
Dig1t wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Where did you read this?

(Not OP) They're from this .csv table of cancelled NSF grants posted on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959129#43959536 ("The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia (sigarch.org)"—65 days ago, 150 comments)

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#85

Post by ginko »

ACCount36 wrote: post #74
ginko wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but each module separately can be launched by Falcon Heavy. How do you know that they can feasibly be launched separately? Do you think NASA would have asked for a launch vehicle the size of SLS if could have done a manned lunar mission with something less then half its size?

Oh, they know it. Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all. A lot of what NASA has been doing with SLS is just trying to... rationalize its existence. This is what gave us NRHO, Gateway and others. Reportedly, some of the people at NASA just believe that having an inefficient, wasteful and corrupt space program is better than not having it.

>Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all.

That's just not true. Saturn V had a paylod of 43,500kg to TLI. Only the largest configuration of SLS(Block 2) exceeds that with 46000kg. A Falcon Heavy is far below that.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#86

Post by ginko »

adastra22 wrote: post #82
ginko wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.

It is enough payload.

[flagged]

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#87

Post by mastermage »

ginko wrote: post #51
Panzer04 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just build a second Falcon Heavy. If there was a genuine possibility of SLS being competitive, that's one thing. It's another when it's worse in basically every way.

Falcon Heavy as a TLI payload of 16,800kg. A fully decked Orion spacecraft weighs 33,446kg. Really the only alternative to SLS for Artemis would be Starship but that hasn't even achieved orbit yet (meanwhile SLS already did a successful lunar orbit and return).

Add to that the fact that to my knowledge while falcon heavy claims it can achieve TLI it has never actually done so.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#88

Post by mastermage »

adastra22 wrote: post #82
ginko wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.

It is enough payload.

According to whom?

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#89

Post by somenameforme »

ginko wrote: post #45
somenameforme wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. And I'm contrasting this against SLS cost "projections", which invariably end up lowballing reality. I'm steel-manning the argument for the SLS as much as I can, but it's still just nonsensical. The idea we need to compete against ourselve…

>I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.

In partial reuse mode, you get 57k kg from Falcon Heavy vs 95k kg from SLS, with the catch that you can launch 25 Falcon Heavies for the same cost as 1 SLS. And that's exclusively the recurring (and likely greatly low-balled) per-launch costs, ignoring the tens of billions of dollars that have (and are) being dumped into its development. In reality those also need to be aggregated into its cost per launch.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#90

Post by somenameforme »

adastra22 wrote: post #79
somenameforme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The administrator is definitely one of the weakest links in the system. Bridenstine was looking amazing for NASA then at one point he did a hard 180 and suddenly just became an unthinking Boeing cheerleader, and is largely responsible for the catastrophe that is Boeing's Starliner. And then as soon as he left office he suddenly is in a senior advisory role for some military industrial complex orgs, probably pulling 7…

Starliner was a catastrophe long before Bridenstine was ever involved.

Absolutely but it never should have been greenlit, allowed to simply skip tests (in flight abort) after essentially failing the pad abort test where only 2 out of 3 parachutes deployed + propellant leak in beyond optimal conditions, and so on.

That craft was not even remotely fit for humans and there was far too high a chance that their 'test pilots' lost their lives in something that never should have been allowed to have a human in it to start with. And that all happened under Bridenstine.

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