Citing safety, NASA panel advises building a new, costly mobile launcher
Advisers have concerns about "launch readiness" of space agency employees.
kisunssi
Two is one, one is none.
ProfessorGuy
Well, obviously we have to get these rockets into space at any cost because... um....
Asvarduil
Tribus: Austin, TX, United States
ProfessorGuy wrote:
Aperture Science.
We do what we must, because we can.
avilhelmo
Technically, they don't actually *have* to go into space to achieve their primary goal for certain politicians.
nononsense
"This is a rather long gap, however, which raises concerns about "launch readiness" of space agency employees"
We're not even calling them Astronauts anymore?
EricBerger
Space Guy
nononsense wrote:
Not the astronauts, it's the people working ground systems, launch system, mission ops, etc.
The Ulterior
The SLS program is quite a mess because NASA diverged from the original SLS plan and skipped the "Block 0" development. Block 0 was originally a "shuttle replacement" rocket and would use 3 stock shuttle engines on a shortened 1st stage and 2 stock shuttle SRB's and launch an LEO 6 crew version of Orion + 50 tons of cargo to LEO WITHOUT an upper stage.
This was cheap and easy and was supposed to be in operation by 2016. Instead NASA spent the money on developing upgraded engines and boosters and the much more difficult Moon return capable 4 crew Orion, and also the interim upper stage which is next to useless for anything other than testing Orion without cargo.
All that money is gone now, and we should have had one launcher for crewed Block 0 missions to LEO and then a 2nd for heavy lift missions with a full upper stage coming a couple years after.
JohnDeL
If you ever wondered how projects like the James Webb Space Telescope ended up going so far over budget, this article provides part of the explanation. Constant changes in scope do no-one and no budget good.
This is why private industry is better suited to space exploration. It's not subject to whims of politics. I have seen this in other fields as well where government is involved. You start down one path only to be told to stop and pickup another, then the winds change and you back going down the other path. The end result is a null sum.
arcite
Tribus: Canuck in Cairo, Egypt
A mobile launcher for less than half the price of a new fighter jet? That sounds like a bargain.
Soothsayer786
I sincerely doubt the SLS will ever make it off the ground. It's nothing more than a jobs program. Elon and eventually Bezos will leave them eating space dust.
Cadtag
tgx wrote:
When you factor in the whim's and random changes in direction coming out of the C-suite and posturing/money in private enterprise, plus shareholder revolts/RoI it's difficult to claim that private enterprise is inherently better suite to space exploration.
Most major IT projects are in [private enterprises after all, and the overwhelming majority fail or under perform substantially.
NASA stopped being a real space faring organization a long time ago. Musk will be on Mars before NASA finishes their launcher. Ah, that's it. Subcontract the launcher to Musk. It will be ready on Tuesday.
To put this in perspective for about the same price (half billion) you could have put 3 B-330 modules in space on 3 falcon heavies... with a larger internal capacity than the current ISS.
Instead you have a useless chunk of metal that will never be used.
Probably could put an entire moon base on the moon with that money and BFR... SAD.
LieutenantLefse
EricBerger wrote:
It's a nitpick but in that case why not just say "launch readiness of the space agency"?
Last edited by LieutenantLefse on Tue Oct 10, 2017 10:05 am
NASA is just a failed fungus expert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_MBeW59bas
Commercial crew and SpaceX especially got screwed by the divergence as well. The LAW, 2010 Space Act was actually very good and had a good plan, but NASA diverged and didn't follow the plan.
2010 Space Act called for a commercial "life pod" to be developed. Desperately needed by ISS because Shuttle could only stay a couple weeks and our astronauts were always dependent on the Russians to get home in an emergency.
The life pod idea was easy and cheap. It would not be launched with crew, but full of cargo, then cargo unloaded and unfolding seats made ready for an emergency departure, and it could sit there for months or years.
This enabled Orion to use "stock" Shuttle life support hardware and fast and cheap development, and commercial rocket companies like SpaceX would not have to go through all the red tape of crew rating their rockets which makes them outrageously expensive and all the testing for launch abort systems for Dragon.
So now SpaceX has to have a much more expensive rocket with a 1 in 1000 failure rate rather than a 1 in 10 failure rate which is fine for launching cheap commercial satellites. So this really has little to do with the public vs private space debate, and the real problem is forcing private space (commercial) to go through all the nonsense that has to be done for public space launches, crew rated or launching $18 billion Webb Telescope missions where price is not a factor in the launches, but reliability is everything.
Matthew J.
And how many good engineers did we lose because NASA retired the space shuttle years before they had anything to replace it? That's one hell of a "gap" right there.
JJMPLAYER
Meanwhile in the real world Elon will have moon hotel up and bezos will be delivering Amazon fresh.
a5ehren
cb88 wrote:
Well, except that FH and BFR don't actually exist yet, so it would technically be in the exact same state as the SLS.
eyesoars
Have you ever worked for "private industry"?
Wonder Chemist
a5ehren wrote:
All the parts for the FH exist today and I believe most if not all the parts are at the Cape. The logistical block is that they need to keep their one working pad configured F9.
FH exists. It hasn't flown yet, but the hardware is finished and tested. There's not much chance it won't launch.
There are lots of options. I like the Skylab II program, where you take an SLS hydrogen tank section and make a space station out of it. We could launch a space station bigger than ISS in a single launch on SLS.
There are lots of disadvantages to inflatable space stations. They are actually pretty heavy for their size and they lead to strange space station layouts with a lot of wasted space. I've seen this in the plans for BFR where all the equipment has to go into a central core and the free space inflates around it, while in a hard space station, all the equipment mounts to the walls and you have a large central free space area.
chipguy
Good old SLS. The gift that keeps on taking.
DanNeely
The Ulterior wrote:
Even if Nasa had created an evac module as a stopgap, they'd still need to do all the man-rating to upgrade it to a crew launch platform afterwards.
I'm also not sure what the value of an additional down only crew module would be. The Soyuz system already provides as many seats down as there are seats up. And AFAIK the last 2 of them sent up at any time are docked with the ISS to provide an emergency evacuation capability.
gmerrick
Sure the kit needs to be in the central core for "shipping" but once inflated you should be able to add in some struts along the expansion joints to stiffen up the sides and then put up "wall panels" and the move the kit from the central core to where you want to place it.
frostdillicus
Cadtag wrote:
I was on a software project at a Fortune 500 that was delivering on time and on budget that caught the attention of the CTO.
Within 3 months the project was red on both time and budget. The entire data access architecture was changed. Eventually the entire team that was hired for the project quit leaving only the company lifers to pick up the pieces.
Last I heard the project had been dropped due to cost overruns.
Darmat
Tribus: U.S.
This would be very amusing story - if it would not cost so much.
NASA never anticipated rocket with different configuration?
They did not even think about bigger or smaller rocket?
At $300M or more, it looks very shortsighted and such people should not be entrusted this kind of projects, it is obvious that the project is beyond their capacity and competence
So sad...
And these timelines - it all looks like a joke. There is no intent to actually achieve anything, ever.
SpaceX talks a lot, but they also deliver
Building another ML for SLS Block 1B is actually a good idea. Yes it will cost more, but it's the only way Block 1B has even the longest of shots at flying by 2021.
The existing ML can launch the single Block 1 mission, then be converted to Block 1B, so that NASA can actually manage a flight rate of more than 1 vehicle a year.
Even better, scrap ICPS and the Block 1 entirely, and proceed directly to Block 1B. Block 1 does nothing at all to move quicker towards an actual exploration capability. It only tests a partial Orion in 2020, and the core and booster stages.
It would be better to test a full Orion in 2021, plus the core, boosters, and EUS. The EUS is currently planned to fly crew without a test flight, which is insane and a problem that ASAP should really be barking about.
There are lots of advantages:
-If you don't launch with crew, you don't need to launch on a crew rated rocket which could be and should be 10X cheaper. If you are launching a $25 million comsat then a $50 million rocket is expensive. If you are launching an $18 billion James Webb Telescope then a $1 billion rocket is cheap.
The pod does not need a launch abort system. If it fails, only concern is that it doesn't land on Cocoa Beach. Huge mass and expense of these things.
The life support system is completely different. For a launch you want something extremely light than can sustain life and power for 2 weeks or so. Liquid oxygen and LH2/LO2 fuel cells best option. For a life pod, you may only need to support life for 24 hours or less, but it has to sit on standby for months or years. Totally different hardware requirements.
There are a number of factors that drove this decision, mainly the choice to keep the 5-seg SRBs and scrap the J2-X from the Ares program. This led to the large core stage to match the 5-segs, and allowed use of the RL-10 EUS.
In theory, this was a quicker way to the Block 1B capability because it used more existing technology. The problem is it pushed out Block 1B because of delays in making the bigger core stage, and it pushed out Block 2 even more since entirely new boosters are required.
With 4--seg boosters and a smaller core, the LEO capability of Block 1 would have been satisfied, and adding a large upper stage powered by multiple J2-X would have gotten to Block 2 capabilities much sooner (the DIRECT plan).
toadthatstomps
Seniorius Lurkius
Why does the launcher need to be mobile in the first place?
dj__jg
avilhelmo wrote:
Can't you just tell the subcontractors in their respective states that they can just have the money, minus the material costs, if they deliver a life-size cardboard cutout of the rockets? You spare out the money you would waste on the material of the BFUR, the senators will still be happy with all the jobs cutting out cardboard, and you can spend the money you have left on actual space science stuff.
toadthatstomps wrote:
So they can drive it uphill when the sea level really starts rising.
ColdWetDog
The bigger gap was between Apollo and the Shuttle. Apollo wasn't just hardware - it was the enormous supply chain / design team / integration team that was set up over a decade. When Apollo was dropped, virtually all of those things dissolved.
Only to be re created again. Sort of.
Such is the way of the world....
Then you need to add all that in to the cost of the space station. There is an advantage to launching a space station that is ready to go and operate, and all you have to do as add crew compared to a space station that needs lots of missions to just get it into operational configuration.
How many missions did it take just to build ISS? I don't remember; a lot. Compare to Skylab II plans where the station would be launched full of food, water and fuel, and the crew could then get in and go to work on day 1.
And the construction missions get harder and more expensive the deeper into space you go. Now we are talking about a Lunar Gateway station. Try to do what we did with ISS around the Moon and it just becomes insane. You want a space station to launch to lunar orbit fully tested and operational and the only thing you have to do is send crew, and they are good to go for 6 months or more without resupply.
And this is a total requirement for Mars missions. Now the "station" has to launch fully operational and tested for 2 years and resupply or any other service is not an option. And there is no room for any extra mass like struts to support anything. You want a single unit without any connecting hardware because that is going to be the lightest spaceship of its size.
And it's
BeowulfSchaeffer
I wonder if they can lease out the platform to SpaceX...
ranthog
The problem with this is that there pretty much is no money in it. Space exploration has massive long term societal benefits in pushing the technology infrastructure forward, but it is never going to make anyone money.
Manned space exploration will happen the way it always has. With governmental agencies contracting private industry to build them things. That aspect of things hasn't changed one bit. We may have new players in the market, but that aspect of the dynamic hasn't changed. The government is the only entity that can afford to spend money for decades that bears no direct profit.
You have to remember that SpaceX couldn't have made it to LEO with the Falcon 9 without massive financial support of NASA. That investment by NASA is clearly paying dividends here.