The GAO is concerned (as well it should be, even though Congress doesn’t give a damn):
Space Launch System: “Based on current budget estimates, program officials have expressed concern that the first launch in 2017 could be delayed.” GAO says that the program will reach Key Decision Point-C (KDP-C) this month (April 2014) and at that point NASA will establish cost, schedule and performance baselines for the initial (70- ton) version of the launch vehicle. GAO highlights funding risks associated with the flat budget profile under which NASA plans to spend $6.8 billion between FY2014 and 2018, and calls the schedule “aggressive.” It also worries that two years after the program was established, “many of the SLS program contracts remain undefinitized.”
Orion: “The mass of the spacecraft remains a top program risk.” GAO says the spacecraft being designed to take humans beyond low Earth orbit aboard the SLS could be as much as 2,800 pounds overweight at launch for the first exploration mission (EM-1) in 2017. The maximum lift-off mass for that mission is 73,500 pounds, GAO states.
Well, one solution to the overweight problem would be to launch without crew. There’s no need to, since they can go up commercially. That way you can remove the escape tower, which adds many thousands of pounds to the vehicle. Not that it should even be built at all, of course.
SLS is completely unnecessary in every way, and in fact actively harmful in many ways. Best case scenario it’ll be one of the most expensive launchers, worst case it never has any successful launches despite wasting billions of dollars.
Orion is almost as bad, but at least has some potential. Though as you point out the imposition of having to design the vehicle/stack for crewed launch reduces the value of the whole system significantly. It’s a shame that there’s such a need for R&D into technology and systems to enable manned interplanetary travel, but so little of the current spending on manned spaceflight is actually going into that.
Launching without crew would help… but it’d still leave issues.
Better, I think, to go a step further and, for safety’s sake, make the pad hold-down clamps on the pad non-releasable. After all, most of the flight dangers, even unmanned, are post-clamp-release, right?
I’m not sure they could even launch it without the giant escape system because the shroud goes around the capsule on ascent. They’d have to build a shroud without the big abort motor,
But that could deprive them of valuable abort test data when the first-ever launch of the one-off block I SLS goes pear shaped.
Don’t worry, no matter what, the first flight of SLS will be a success. It’ll be described thusly; “The successful SLS/Orion vehicle, seventeen seconds into it’s successful first flight, successfully embarked upon several thousand divergent trajectories.”
Congress has no need to be concerned. SLS & Orion are doing their jobs just fine as is. They can be delayed ad nauseum without penalty.
Off topic, but I was pretty excited to learn last night that SpaceX has signed a 20 year lease on LC-39A.
I knew it was in the works, but that was the first that I heard it was a done deal.
I wish that hadn’t happened. It lends false legitimacy to SLS, saddling commercial space with some of its costs even though we’re talking about pad A which won’t be used for SLS. Also letting pad B be used by other commercial players will only make things worse still.
I am completely unable to interpret your thought processes here. The SpaceX lease deal exists, to probably at least a third-order approximation, completely outside the SLS universe. If one wanted to stretch a point seriously past its elastic limit, I suppose one might say that, by supporting a growing tempo of SpaceX operations, starting in a year or so, the future hustle and bustle at LC-39A will, by implication, make the cobwebby stasis in SLS-ville over at LC-39B look bad by comparison. In that way, the LC-39A deal might be seen to be having a negative affect on the perceived “legitimacy” of SLS. How the heck you get this deal adding even a smidgen of positive legitimacy to SLS is quite beyond me.
As for getting “saddled” with LC-39A’s costs, the pad already exists, Dude! It’s built! It’s paid for! By leasing it, SpaceX avoids the cost of having to build the thing from scratch. All it has to do is make the lease payments, cover incremental costs of retrofit and then the ongoing costs of operation. NASA goes from having to continue pissing money away on an otherwise crumbling asset to making a tidy sum by cashing SpaceX checks. SpaceX needs a facility that can support vertical payload integration and crew ingress. LC-39A already has structures that can be thus repurposed much more quickly than they can be scratch-built.
I don’t get how having other commercial users eventually using LC-39B makes anything “worse” either. I’m very dubious that LC-39B will ever be used for a significant number of SLS launches. Allowing other users to launch from it will, even if SLS ever flies, almost certainly wind up being the vast majority of future launch ops from LC-39B. This pad would be the rational center for Blue Origin’s future ops at Kennedy. I’m guessing B.O. won’t have any actual need for LC-39B until at least the 2017 – 2021 timeframe in which SLS is, in theory, supposed to begin flight ops. If, as I suspect, SLS winds up cancelled when the next administration takes office in 2017, then perhaps B.O. can make their own 20-year lease deal – assuming a vastly larger and busier SpaceX doesn’t outbid them for LC-39B as well by that time.
More and more of the facilities at Kennedy/Canaveral will be leased to commercial operators as time goes by. That trend is already obviously well underway. And it’s a good thing!
If they’re all sunk costs, then I agree with what you say. But I was under the impression that maintenance of LC-39 was enormously expensive. Maybe that will no longer be the case if the existing structures built on top of the bare concrete are replaced, but I’m not sure.
The only maintenance NASA was doing on LC-39A was the minimum required to keep it from rusting/crumbling away while they went through the bureaucratic process of making it available to someone who actually had a use for it. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such annual maintenance was in the few-hundred-thousand-to-maybe-a-million-bucks-a-year range. Not hugely expensive, but still a drain NASA could turn to a nice modest profit by leasing it out. The cost of maintaining LC-39A when it was actually being used, of course, must have been much higher. But that’s on SpaceX now, and they will doubtless re-engineer the thing – including those extant tower structures – to suit their needs and minimize maintenance requirements.
What I predict is that LC-39B will be retrofitted with lots of those pedestal-mounted observation binoculars like you see on top of the Empire State Building, so bored NASA employees on LC-39B can put a quarter in the slot and watch the people working at LC-39A to see what launch prep looks like.
Too cruel?
Yes, that was cruel.
Can’t. Stop. Laughing.
Orion is almost as bad??? It’s worse. It’s too big (mass) and too small (volume.)
It fails in every category against other options and cost nearly as much as SLS. SLS is supposed to be 70 tons vs. FH at 53. But since we have no missions to look at and none are funded we can’t say if 53 would be enough for them. However, look at the MCT core and tell me SLS is not already obsolete before it ever flies?
Orion is almost as bad??? It’s worse. It’s too big (mass) and too small (volume.)
And its heat shield is designed for lunar-return velocities, nada mas, and its life support system is speced for 21 days crewed and a six-month “quiescent” (un-crewed loiter) period. IOW, it’s designed for lunar missions and might plausibly be upgraded for the shortest (60-70ish day) NEO visits. Beyond that, there’s not much of any place in the solar system it can take people without a lot of help from as-yet-undesigned/untested/unfunded additional modules and equipment.
Breaking it down for the starry-eyed children:
“It can’t be used for long-duration missions to other planets because it would fill up with poop.”
Jules Verne handled that by just shoving it out the door. But then it floated along with them.
What do you bet they couldn’t shove it out the door on a Mars mission because of the very small chance that it’s trajectory would intersect Mar’s atmosphere, leading to a possible bacterial contamination of the entire planet?