The latest analysis of the programmatic disaster to come. With bonus Orion problems.
This is simply insane.
32 thoughts on “The Senate Launch System”
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The latest analysis of the programmatic disaster to come. With bonus Orion problems.
This is simply insane.
Comments are closed.
Once the reality of SLS sets in, it will be cancelled. However, the infrastructure, contracts, and workforce that we have built up to develop and fly the SLS cannot simply be excised from the HSF budget. It will still cost NASA $3 billion per year to do nothing.
Winnah!
This is the real truth behind why SLS seemed like a good idea to congress in the first place. We can’t just cut the money we used to spend on the Saturn V, so we’ll develop the Shuttle! We can’t just cut the money we used to spend on Shuttle, so we’ll develop SLS!
That money goes to NASA civil servants and contractors in districts which Shall Not Be Questioned. If you think of that as money which will be spent no matter what (and Congress does), then SLS gives them something to do.
It’s completely sane and a triumph if your objective is Guaranteed Annual Pork, with no possible end or gap.
They have found an area of total unimportance to the public, and made its continuance of supreme importance to the few who are directly involved in controlling the purse strings.
It will never be defined as a programmatic disaster, only something that needs ever more money – similar to the Webb telescope.
As those numbers firm up, Congress will have to intervene to kill it. If $70 million a seat on Soyuz is too much, what can they say about a billion a seat, or even more?
I have a real problem with the assumption that there should be no interest on the development money spent. In any rational (read honest) investment calculation, that $3B a year for ten years would be a $45B-$60B investment at start of operations including interest accrued during development.
After that, even a 5% interest rate would give $2B-$3B a year for interest alone with nothing applied to principle. Look at the amortization table for a $60K house on a thirty year note and multiply by a million for the proper monthly payment on this monster. If you consider it a high risk, as I do, then use the higher interest rates on the table if they go that high.
As I recall, one of the many mistakes of the Space Shuttle program managers early one was to neglect to figure in the future value of money, etc.
The time value of money doesn’t apply to other people’s money.
I despair even more when someone suggests developing a reusable HLV. if NASA does it, the cost will be many times that of SLS, leaving even less money for payloads. The author assumes that SpaceX will succeed in making Falcon reusable, and do so at low cost. As much as we are all pulling for SpaceX, the success of a reusable Falcon development program is far from guaranteed, no matter what the cost.
There is a sweet spot in payload capability, where vehicle development cost for an RLV are affordable, and getting substantial mass into orbit requires many launches. This requires an infrastructure in orbit where satellite components can be assembled into complete spacecraft, and the support of that infrastructure and delivery of parts keep the flight rate high enough to amortize vehicle development quickly.
This is a system architecture problem, and unless one plans it that way, it will fail..
Those who howl for the death of the SLS undercut themselves by not offering any viable alternative, except of course not venturing beyond LEO.
Your personal lack of ability to understand the proposed alternatives does not mean they have not been proposed.
Howl for the death of the SLS
I like it. It goes with Rand’s background graphic. Howl away, folks.
How exactly do you discuss alternatives when nobody is talking payloads? Doesn’t the payload determine the launch system? Shouldn’t available launch systems define payloads?
Commercial ventures have shown the ability to scale with the market. Government has show the ability of not understanding what a market is.
Who are all these idiots in charge? How do they get to spend our money? These are not complicated questions?
In terms of market payloads, and looking at the projected flight rates, I’d think a company in the early 1970’s would’ve had a vastly easier time buying an all-up Saturn V (minus the LM and Apollo CSM) for a commercial launch than they would putting anything on top of the SLS.
I don’t understand why SLS supporters want to wait a decade or more and spend tens or hundreds of billions when that same money could be spent right now on launching payloads. $4b a year would buy not only a lot of launches but payloads to go on them.
Complexity seems to pop up a lot but China is doing autonomous docking and other complex tasks and considering their steady progress we can’t afford to lose a decade or more.
I have yet to read a good defense on why SLS is needed or superior to using smaller launchers. Feel free to link one.
“I don’t understand why SLS supporters want to wait a decade or more and spend tens or hundreds of billions when that same money could be spent right now on launching payloads.”
This has always mystified me too. Under any plausible mission set an architecture of propellent depots and on-orbit assembly accomplishes more missions — many more missions — than an HLV-centered architecture with the same amount of money.
“Those who howl for the death of the SLS undercut themselves by not offering any viable alternative, except of course not venturing beyond LEO.”
Now we know you’re just trolling. There is no way you can routinely read this blog and not know the non-SLS BLEO architectures put forth by Boeing, ULA, and NASA, in addition to the commenters here.
I keep wondering if people who say that are really that stupid / ignorant, or just liars.
Mark, I find it interesting how you can’t acknowledge any sort of beyond LEO activities using existing commercial launch vehicles. It’s always a false dilemma where one needs whatever the big rocket of the day is or one doesn’t do it at all. All I can say in response is that NASA hasn’t developed a working big rocket since the Shuttle. I don’t think the SLS will blemish that record either.
Mark, in 1959 a guy called Wernher von Braun proposed to assemble and operate a 12-man Lunar base (Project Horizon) using only Saturn C-I and C-II launchers, which had payload performances lower than or equal to current vehicles… but I guess you don’t know much about space history.
I’m tired of this BS. The alternatives are easy: spend the money in some other way. The money spent on just the design of the SLS in 2012 alone would buy 30 Falcon 9 launches, or nearly 20 Falcon Heavy launches.
If you can’t imagine what one might be able to do with 20 FH launches then you need to sit out this argument because your IQ is found severely wanting. That’s 1,000 tonnes to LEO. That’s more than 2x the mass of the ISS. I imagine that would be a reasonable start to, well, any mission you damned well pleased.
And again, that’s with the money spent in ONE YEAR to effectively finish up the paperwork on the SLS. Imagine what could be done with, say, 5 years of that budget? Split it 50/50 between developing new hardware and paying for launches (on D4H or FH or what-have-you). Pretty soon you’ll start to have a serious exploration program on your hands.
In contrast, we’ll fritter away tens of billions of dollars without launching anything into orbit for years and years, and without developing any sort of payload to make use of this vaunted heavy lift capability.
But it isn’t BS; it’s a reasoned strategy to use NASA and its funds for political and/or personal aims that have *nothing* to do with space.
The simple fact is that people like Mark Whittington, along with most politicians and many NASA staff, are not genuinely interest in spaceflight and the benefits it can bring to mankind: they see it merely as a means to wield power and/or enhance their personal status. Once you understand that, their actions are not crazy but quite logical… and rather selfish!
Although I generally agree you are totally missing the point that the reusable launch vehicles should be both the program and the payloads. There is little or no money, commercial or government, for the payloads for the program that you imagine – whatever that is. That paradigm is over.
A fictitious Jamaican HLV doesn’t have a significantly lower flight rate than the SLS (zero flights per year versus perhaps one flight every four years, which given the need for a few crewed test flights might amount to one real flight per decade). It would make the Spruce Goose look like a successful trans-oceanic airliner. The viable alternative to the Spruce Goose was anything cheaper that could get airborne more than once.
As long as NASA exists in its present form you will have SLS or something similar channeling pork to feed NASA centers in the various Congressional Districts. Where do you think most of the 18 billion dollars from NASA’s budget go? Get rid of SLS and another project will just pop up in its place to channel pork to the Congressional Districts.
That is why it is time for America to reboot the nation’s space policy, get rid of many of the space centers and move beyond NASA’s monopoly on space.
“As long as NASA exists in its present form you will have SLS or something similar channeling pork to feed NASA centers in the various Congressional Districts.”
It doesn’t have to be that way. They could spend the money on something useful. It would still provide jobs at the appropriate NASA centers and the various Congressional Districts. It just wouldn’t be wasted.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Michael,
As a current NASA employee with 30 plus years at one of the major human spaceflight centers, my opinion is it does have to be the way Thomas recommends. The NASA cultural problems run very deep. Almost everyone I work with worships daily at the NASA-designed-and-operated Heavy Lift Booster altar. Almost everyone I work with finds it difficult to believe the commercial crew folks can succeed, ever, without NASA civil servants riding to the rescue sooner than later. A large part of of the NASA HSF cultural rot, in my opinion, is the need to be in CONTROL. SLS and Orion are means of maintaining NASA CONTROL of US human spaceflight; commercial crew vehicles and use of commercial expendable boosters to launch US HSF missions threatens NASA CONTROL of US human spaceflight. NASA should be de-constructed to return it to a NACA-type organization, in my opinion.
BlueMoon
BlueMoon, I think you nailed it. Technology is a very effective red herring. Anything government touches from top to bottom is about control.
They’ve gotten so good at it that even with the whole solar system of potential worlds and the potential for O’Neill colonies with a total economy many times the earths… they intend to keep control even if they have to use the U.N. to do it.
This country was founded on the belief that people have rights, not governments. No group of people can get together, sign agreements and enslave all the rest of humanity, unless the rest are just sheep waiting to be sheared. Exceptionalism, something our constitutional professor, messiah and commander doesn’t understand one bit, is that no other country in the history of the world has said, we will lend government some power but ultimately it belongs to We the People. Our ‘leaders’ have subverted that, but we fixed it once. We could do it again. But I think it’s too late for America. If it is to happen, it will have to happen over the next hill.
The right to go over the next hill and make a claim is as old as humanity. People need to assert their rights before we lose an entire solar system.
Ken,
Many people have said that Congress does not care if SLS and Orion (and Constellation and other failed NASA HSF programs before that) ever fly…they just want to keep the $$$ flowing to their districts and the major contractors.
Regarding control of HSF, many of the NASA HSF mid-upper and below managers have a similar mentality, in my opinion: They do want to design and fly hardware, but delaying deliveries and flights for a long time, or scrubbing entire programs and starting over, is tolerable so long as they remain in CONTROL of all US HSF planning and whatever flights there may be. I’ve shared that opinion with a number of co-workers, and many of the older ones agree with me.
A very sad situation. I am proud to be a NASA employee and proud of the work I’ve done. I believe NASA’s workforce has the capability to do incredible work to advance HSF, if we can get clear national-level policy direction, adequate funding for the policy, and if the managers and workers have the proper cultural mindset. A lot of ‘ifs” there. Probably too many.
BlueMoon
I know you’d like to be part of something that really accomplishing something more. Robin Goodfellow July 17, 2013, 2:08 am comment should embarrass enough people to bring about that sort of change but it will not for now. BlueMoon, you sound like a guy with the right kind of work ethic that likes to be proud of what you do. It’s got to be frustrating.
NASA should be completely restructured, along with the entire federal civil service. If there is going to be government involvement in space, then James Bennett’s idea of a Space Guard makes sense, along with a severe reduction in the scope of NASA, the closing of many centers, and the conversion of the remaining centers into Federally Funded Research and Development Centers like JPL.
Of course, this will not happen – things will go along as they are now until the US plunges over the fiscal cliff.
Remember that SLS has essentially been designed by staffers working for a handful of Senators, not by folks given a mission and a budget.
If that were the case, it would be more likely they would design a system that could have its modules launched via Falcon Heavy or Delta Heavy to the ISS and assembled there for lunar, cislunar or other even more ambitious missions.
This is a jobs program brought to us by Democrats and Bob Michel-style GOP politicians that think they just have to be to the right of Democrats to get elected.
And, the result – just like the Shuttle postponed the now-vibrant efforts to create private-sector launch capabilities, they are going to suck the air out of any Federal incentives to buy private-sector rides to the Moon.
I would think it’s now even money that the first Orion lunar mission (if it happens, they still argue back and forth about skipping “doing the Moon again”) will result in NASA astronauts landing on the Moon and being asked by Bigelow Lunar Hotel valets if they want their vehicle garaged for micrometeoroid protection during their stay. … 🙂
Well, the conflict I see is that a Space Launch System designed by lawyers is necessarily going to be designed to be so expensive and have such a low flight-right so that it won’t be useful for launching any significant number of lawyers far into outer space, which is what we’d all prefer to use it for.
Okay… let’s use the figures in the linked article, and let’s assume that SLS launches a payload (not a development flight) once every year. (I think that’s a gross exaggeration of the flight rate, but let’s use it.) Let’s assume also no future cost overruns in opps or development, and also no schedule slips. (Putting us well into deluded fantasy territory).
That still gives us a net launch cost of about $20,000 per pound to LEO!!! And that’s assuming 130 tons payload, which as I’ll show later, is not a viable comparison as it’s not going to happen. (the real picture is a lot worse).
What’s the predicted launch price for Falcon Heavy? Under $1000 per pound (and that’s assuming that they fail to make any of it reusable)? Let’s assume that FH development doesn’t go as planned, so double the cost per pound. Heck, let’s double it again, to $4000, and add an extra grand for cheese or something, and round up, making it $5000 per pound. . . making it 1/4 the cost per pound of SLS. So, in that scenario, you could put four times the mass in LEO that SLS could for the same price. Or twice as much at half the cost.
This applies to existing launchers as well (I’m just using Space X as an example because it’s widely known here) as all are cheaper per pound than SLS. Sure, using multi-launch adds some weight and complexity, but nowhere near that much. (it also allows for a much more flexible mission design. If you need an extra module or propulsion unit, you can add it, something you can’t do with single-launch)
Then we get to the real issue; what, precisely, can you do with a single SLS launch? It’s not enough for a real asteroid mission (that’s why the nonsense about relocating a tiny asteroid for a manned mission – because SLS/Orion can’t manage more). So, what SLS is useful for is one thing; a single-launch manned mission to the Moon – which NASA has officially said it won’t be doing.
Another little fly in the ointment; the version of SLS in development is block 1, with a payload to LEO of about 70 tons planned. The 130 ton claim comes from the BlockII, which would fly in 2030 or after (and whose dev costs are not included anywhere).
So, to compare SLS with FH, the only way is to compare planned operational payload capacity for the initial versions: 70 tons for SLS, 58 tons for FH. That’s about a 17% difference. That’s not a huge difference – except in price. Might FH’s claimed payload capacity end up being less than expected? Sure… but so might SLS.