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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

#81

Post by JshWright »

sandworm101 wrote: post #13
Isinlor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comparison of SLS vs. Starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY Key points: https://i2.wp.com/everydayastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2... Mass to the Moon: - Saturn 5: 49 metric tonnes - SLS: 43 metric tonnes - Starship: 156 metric tonnes Price per launch: - Saturn 5: 1.2B dollars - SLS: 0.875B dollars - Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at 0.002B$) Price per kg: - Satrun 5: 2…

>> Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at 0.002B$) Lol. No. That is beyond pipe dream territory. There a innumerable costs associated with spacelaunch that have absolutely nothing to do with reusability. Range closures. Payload integration. Regulatory compliance (ie safety). Telemetry. That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button. That stuff doesn't happen for f…

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

That person (the Mission Flight Control Officer) doesn't exist for SpaceX launches, they use an automated system.

https://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/icg/providersforum/2019...

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

#82

Post by JshWright »

BurningFrog wrote: post #22
sandworm101 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Staraship: 0.1B dollars worse case scenario (Elon aims at 0.002B$) Lol. No. That is beyond pipe dream territory. There a innumerable costs associated with spacelaunch that have absolutely nothing to do with reusability. Range closures. Payload integration. Regulatory compliance (ie safety). Telemetry. That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button. That stuff doesn't happen for f…

> That USAF person in the back of the room with their finger on the destruct button. I'm not going up until that job is eliminated!

Good news! That job was eliminated a couple years ago for SpaceX launches. A computer does it now...

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

#83

Post by giantrobot »

mumblemumble wrote: post #57
tailspin2019 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfall got us to the moon. Agile will get us to Mars...

Lore suggests that that's a misconception, born of the Agile myth that the only thing that existed before the invention of either XP or Scrum was waterfall. The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit, agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting back out of LEO again, including to Mars. For example, see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/224011…

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 manned spaceflight budget. Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project were the only AAP projects to survive and only at the cost of Apollo missions 18-20.

The Saturn-Apollo program had a super-heavy lift rocket (Saturn V), a man-rated heavy lift rocket (Saturn IB), a Lunar trajectory capable command and service module, a lunar lander, and a workable wet workshop space station (Skylab).

Congress tossed all of that away. The Space Shuttle program wasn't a bad idea, a heavy lift vehicle that provided a shirt sleeve environment but could support EVA is actually an awesome thing for LEO. But Congress scrapping Saturn-Apollo trapped NASA in LEO because the Shuttle was only capable of LEO. It's not a platform that can support manned Moon missions let alone any more distant bodies.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby

[2] https://www.wired.com/2013/11/moonbase-apollo-1968/

[3] https://www.wired.com/2012/08/before-the-fire/

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

#84

Post by tailspin2019 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #78
tailspin2019 wrote: post #37

You have to fail to move forwards. A lack of failure is a sign of a lack of trying anything new. Hasn’t SpaceX proved that? The negative commentary around this seems a little in contrast to how we’d talk about a SpaceX “failure” on HN. I know NASA and SpaceX are very different, but Elon is the king of drifting deadlines too. And SpaceX do fail, but they do a good job of “owning their failures” and they keep moving fo…

So I listened to a podcast about this... but SpaceX and Boeing/NASA are explicitly taking two different approaches to proving their rocket will work. Obviously we know SpaceX is proving their rocket through system level tests. But for SLS the plan has been to use a long accepted NASA approved method of proving their design where individual parts are so thoroughly tested and proven to work that they don’t need many fl…

Would you mind sharing a link to the podcast? It sounds interesting!

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

#85

Post by akiselev »

dmix wrote: post #80
GuB-42 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX made failure part of its strategy. Rocket explodes, no big deal, we expected that, the next one is ready. NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot of time and money making sure things work the first time, so when they don't, then it is a problem. This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace. > Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, m…

Wasn’t this simply a byproduct of Congress trying to control the process? The idea of hard deadlines and low risk. Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure political pressure instead of organizational culture. Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at all.

No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example), NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only looks at the absolute number of failures instead of absolute number of successful missions or their cost so NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme caution for self survival.

This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.

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

#86

Post by beerandt »

jbay808 wrote: post #68
beerandt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically... government could be as efficient as the private sector if it wasn't government?

I don't think that's a charitable reading of the GP. More like "the government is aiming for something other than efficiency, and it gets what it's aiming for". If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might see NASA taking a different path.

I agree that it isn't the goal, but that's part of the point.

And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for government to government, especially for a program that ultimately has so much of an impact on military capabilities and national security.

But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted to."

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

#87

Post by superkuh »

mhh__ wrote: post #26
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #16

Add SLS to the list of embarrassing aerospace projects from America F-35, 737 Max, and Starliner.

F-35 is doing just fine at the moment. It looked bad because it was the first modern aircraft to be developed under the watchful gaze of the internet, now it's doing much better in simulated combat as it's aged. It's not even that expensive anymore - it's not cheap by any means - but the new F-16 is basically the same price.

>the new F-16 is basically the same price.

Wow. I didn't believe you at first but wikipedia says the price of a F-16V is $120 million in 2020 while the latest F-35A buy in 2019 had them at ~$80 million a piece.

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

#89

Post by akiselev »

giantrobot wrote: post #83
mumblemumble wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lore suggests that that's a misconception, born of the Agile myth that the only thing that existed before the invention of either XP or Scrum was waterfall. The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit, agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting back out of LEO again, including to Mars. For example, see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/224011…

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…

Not only that, but the nuclear rocketry program for Mars was making breakthroughs like the nuclear lightbulb hybrid reactor & closed loop rocket engine [1] - that the public wouldn't see until declassified papers hit JPL's archives in the 2000s. This program was cancelled by Nixon, setting us back at least half a century.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730003970

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

#90

Post by giantrobot »

ryandrake wrote: post #52
tw04 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the negativity is directed at NASA so much as Boeing. They've made a business out of grifting, and this is just another example of it. Shelby is more concerned with staying in office than making advances in space, and it shows. That's not NASA's fault, they're trying to do the right thing IN SPITE of the political pressure to waste money in order for a politician to be able to claim he's "creating jobs"…

NASA probably could be as nimble as SpaceX if they didn’t have to rely on Congress, whose goal is not to build a successful rocket, but to spread the money funnel across the States. Imagine if SpaceX’s board suddenly said “the company’s goal is now not to get to Mars, but to employ as many people and contractors as possible in all 50 states!” You’d basically get NASA.

It's also important to note that while NASA might make multi-year plans they have to deal with a yearly budget from Congress and Congressional mandates. NASA has a relatively small budget but a lot of different tasks, manned spaceflight is only one of those.

They have to drop whole missions after years of planning and construction because the next year's budget is a billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets pushed to the next fiscal year.

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