Kill it to save human spaceflight:
Simply put, the SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade. This money could then be redirected to continue the planned flight tests of the Orion spacecraft with the much lower-cost Falcon Heavy booster while making a robust investment in a first-generation space station in the vicinity of the Moon. An investment in such a cislunar station would provide—by the early 2020s—a multifunctional platform to act as a fuel depot, a workstation for robotic operations on the Moon and a habitat to protect against the more intense radiation environment outside of the Earth’s magnetic field. This station could even be used as a habitat during longer-duration human missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.
Expect to see a lot more editorials like this as time goes on, new systems appear, and budgets get tighter.
NASA has spent over $5 billion on the Orion capsule development. That’s a lot of money for a capsule with ever reducing capabilities. Kill that, too, and contract for both launch services and the crewed vehicles. The SLS is costing billions to develop, leaving no money left over to develop payloads other than Orion. It’s the Rocket to Nowhere.
Instead, take the billions being spent on SLS and Orion and lay out an architecture for actually doing something. Size the payloads according to the launch capacity of existing or soon to exist boosters. If the ISS experience has taught us anything, it’s that assembling big pieces in orbit is possible. Leverage that experience. Contract for the construction of the payloads and the launch services. Then fly the damned things.
For $5 billion dollars Orion had better be bigger on the inside.
It was originally planned to deliver 7 astronauts to the ISS but that got cut to 4 because of weight issues. It was supposed to land on land but they eliminated that capability to save weight. It’s supposed to have a heat shield capable of handling reentries from deep space, but Dragon already has that.
The crew was reduced to 4 because the ISS mission went away.
False, it was never more than 6.
“If the ISS experience has taught us anything, it’s that assembling big pieces in orbit is possible. “
Has it? The Space Shuttle which is no more played a major role in that construction. How do we do it next time?
Some of the pieces (the Russian ones) were launched on Proton rockets, not the Shuttle. Those pieces had to have more systems such as propulsion, TT&C and attitude control to fly them to the rendezvous (like how they built Mir) but it worked.
Or, you could use a rocket to deliver the unit to orbit and have a tug take it to the assembly point.
Tugs are something we will need eventually anyway.
Interesting, but inconsistent. Why not go for Dragon instead? And why insist on an HLV like FH?
Yep why not go for Dragon. Or CST-100 for that matter. The HLV requirement is because Orion is too fat. Period.
A good reason not to use Orion. But note that it could launch with partially off-loaded propellant and do its own circularisation burn. For use beyond LEO it would then have to refuel in LEO, just like the ISS. Maybe even at the ISS.
Here’s an idea. Take the billions being wasted on the utterly failed SLS and Orion projects… and DON’T spend it.
The US 16T in the hole and digging another trillion every year. Stop spending money!
You won’t balance the budget that way. It’s not even close to being the tall pole in the tent. Unless we get a handle on entitlements, we will continue to have budget deficits until we no longer can.
I realize NASA isn’t a budget buster but we’ve got to stop spending money. By claiming that a particular program shouldn’t be cut cause it doesn’t amount to much in the whole scheme of things, tells me that you are either being directly funded by the program or are not serious about cutting the budget.
I think that, to a very real extent, it is counterproductive to focus everyone’s attention away from the elephant in the room by suggesting they can make significant progress by rearranging the furniture.
This is why we cannot make any progress on the budget – every time someone edges close to pointing to the elephant, the chorus pipes up “oh, look, a squirrel”, and the elephant keeps eating and growing.
So what? It’s a luxury. How can you possibly ask little Billy to go without shoes when his sister is still getting Barbie? The fact that they’re both old enough to get a freakin’ job is irrelevant.
By that logic, we will never do anything of moment until every child is shod and dolled, which is to say, never.
You could cut SLS and fund commercial crew and still have some money to give back to the treasury to waste on something else.
And that, right there, is why wasteful projects do NOT get cut. There’s always someone to say “then take the money away completely and do X with it (including not spend it)”. So we let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
If NASA defenders and veterans weren’t afraid that they’d lose the money completely, we could have a discussion about better ways to spend it. But they are afraid, and rightly so — so many people rationally decide it is better to be paid to do something stupid than to be laid off, and keep defending SLS.
FH doesn’t seem like it would be that great for launching parts of a lunar space station unless it was first assembled in LEO.
It doesn’t seem that great because of the upper stage’s low ISP. Now if they developed that Raptor engine…
It could if you used two launches, one for the payload and one either with an EDS (modified upper stage) as payload, or without a payload with the upper stage doing double duty as EDS. This would work just fine even with a kerolox upper stage.
EELVs could do something similar. Their lifting power would be less, but since their upper stage is LOX/LH2 it would need less mass to transport payloads beyond LEO too.
It’s not just human spaceflight, but unmanned as well; SLS has caused big cuts in unmanned probes.
What, exactly, can Orion do that Dragon can’t? Orion has already cost several times the development cost for all of SpaceX, including Dragon and the launch vehicles for it.
I’d love to see Orion and SLS canceled. Give a small part of that money to commercial crew and also restoring some of the unmanned planetary program, and use the rest by NOT borrowing it in the first place.
SLS has caused big cuts in unmanned probes.
To be fair, JWST likely bers the lion’s share of that slice of blame.
Good point, but I think we’re both right; the robotic program got a cut, both due to Webb and also SLS taking ever larger chunks of the NASA budget.
Webb is something I wish had never been authorized, but I don’t favor canceling it now as it’s reportedly about 95% done. Assuming that’s true, I figure we might was well get something for the money spent – though I’d certainly oppose ever starting such a program.
Isn’t the situation due to apportioning work to the different centers? Which centers stand the most from from axe SLS and go ahead with Orion approach? And what can be offered to their congress critters in liu of the axed programs? I think that the element being missed in these type of editorials. There what people consider the ideal approach and then there is what actually will get the votes on Capital Hill.
Whoa, small world! I love your Points of Light, and your OSR blog generally.
“Simply put, the SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade.”
Yeah, that’ll work. ‘Cause whenever NASA frees up money from one place, they get to keep it and spend it on whatever other priorities they have.
Are you suggesting that it’s better for NASA to waste money on junk like SLS than to not get it at all?
At least it keeps the knowledge base alive.
Because the knowledge base of how to design an utterly impractical and largely useless rocket is so very critical to have?
And they don’t even have that particular knowledge. Griffin’s plan was for them to relearn how to do that.
SLS is the whale, so it will go first. But hopefully Orion will as well. Put a Sundancer-sized Bigelow module in Dragon’s trunk and go to town.
Having worked with some people that worked for Bigelow, I’m not real optimistic about their ability to deliver on time.
Perhaps that will change as their product becomes more of a reality. It is amazing they have been able to tread water this long.
They have treaded water by downsizing, staffing up, downsizing, rinse and repeat. I realize that my previous comment may be interpreted as dissing the technical staff’s competence. They have done a good job with the resources they have been given. It’s just been a very unstable place to work.
If the money from SLS was reprogrammed into building a fuel depot and a good deep space stage, the AL congressional delegation might go along with it.
Yes, it would be better to divide the money among several needed developments. There is still a congressional fly in the ointment. This is the point of “favors”, or “political capital”, that needs to be expended for each vote for each project to get other legislators to agree to fund it in a given Center not in their district or State.
Even once we line up 4-40 projects that equal the expenditures on SLS, or Orion, or both, the pols will still be unhappy, because selling 4-40 projects to their peers ,will require *far* more political capital than any single project. That means they will be shorted in what they negotiate for in other areas of the whirling money machine that is the federal budget, because once that capital is expended with a peer, you can go to that well a distinctly finite number of times.
I’d rather depots, in situ resources, landers, and nukes go alongside those improved upper stages, …but that would require expending *lots* of political capital, when the deal is already done with SLS, and Orion.
I think you overestimate the political capital needed. From what I have seen, the NASA budget is rarely an issue outside of the committees that oversee it. It’s not a partisan football for the most part and the amount of money in it is small.
Sort of like the old Vietnam War statement about destroying the village to save it.
Except in the case of SLS, we want to destroy the program in order to destroy it. Because it’s a wasteful and useless boondoggle.
Mark, the SLS just doesn’t make sense. It too expensive and takes too long to develop. It competes with commercial alternatives (which I might add was why I opposed the very exist of the Ares program as well), creating a conflict of interest between NASA and the private sector (I always favor the private sector in such cases).
We probably won’t even see a viable rocket. I suspect NASA already has made most of the same poor design decisions that doomed Ares. And what we going to do with it should it survive to flight? It’ll be too expensive to fly while simultaneously trying to have a serious space program. Just like the Space Shuttle, it’ll suck the oxygen out of the room for any serious space development or exploration.
We might have a capable launch vehicle, but we won’t have capable space infrastructure. That is what SLS brings to the table.
Instead, I’m looking forward to the Falcon Heavy. Currently, it’s demo flight is for later this year. If it is successful (and they’ll have many years before the SLS ever flies to get it to work), then you completely lost any case for the SLS. There’s no point to the slightly better capabilities that are advertised for the SLS when it comes with a vastly higher price tag.