Oh I don’t know. When it comes to national disgraces, we have the COVID response, CHAZ, the Geo. Floyd riots and now possibly the Hurricane Helene response that cause SLS to pale in comparison.
But I wonder what would happen to NASA if it just decided one day not to procure anything from the money earmarked for SLS by Congress? Who’d get impeached? Now that’s a hearing I’d love to watch….
Oh and how could I forget the withdrawal from Afghanistan? That alone set the world on the path to peaceful co-existence…
No Raygun, so we got that going for us.
To my credit, I had to look that up…
That’s a superb article IMHO.
NASA/congress won’t cancel SLS, due to having squandered so many billions on it.
However, I do think there’s a way to save the SLS program, and actually make it useful and vastly less expensive.
The solution, unsurprisingly, is a fusion between SpaceX and NASA technology. To make this work, SpaceX needs to make a massive change to Starship/Superheavy, via renaming it to Starship Launch System. Must has changed Starship’s name before, and I’m confident that it’s possible to do so again, to Starship Launch System (abbreviated as SLS).
As for NASA’s technical contribution, NASA brings to the table one, and only one, non-terrible contribution; the #JourneyToMars hashtag. Musk, who owns Twitter and thus its technical staff, is probably capable of incorporating that hashtag into SpaceX’s twitter account.
I think this would work, because when it comes to government programs, semantics is always more important than engineering or economics.
The disgrace is government program mismanagement – not just NASA (when was the last project they delivered that was actually on time and on budget?), the DoD (The Navy’s ship building, the AF KC-46 tanker project, the Army Artillery system, the Marines amphibious trucks). There is nothing the government does that is on time or budget: There is no compelling reason for the government workers, or contractors, to make it happen: They will not lose their jobs. In fact, with increased budgets come increased GS-levels and ‘performance’ bonuses
Yes.
SLS looks like a waste of money at $100b but when put in the context of all the other ways government has misspent money over the same time period, it’s not that bad nor out of the ordinary.
We spent $450 billion servicing illegal immigrants. Hard to believe government contractors let that money slip through their fingers, so that means they were probably in on it too.
The govt contractors are now called NGOs
$450 billion, and on the third day of the fiscal year the DHS says FEMA is out of money to help in Carolina.
Radar guided 155mm howitzers firing saboted zirconium slugs are capable of shooting down incoming ICBM warheads. There are (or were) close to 2,000 barrels. The hundred or so 5-inch naval guns could do the same. Where are they now? They could’ve defended the continental US cities while we developed nuclear powered railgun sites. All lost. “Against stupidity, the gods themselves content in vain.”
That was a depressing read and I kept hoping it would be over but it kept going on and on, just like SLS.
Everyone at NASA needs to be fired and start from scratch. WTF is this not going to work BS? All the programs need to be cancelled.
New people need to be brought in and they can choose to rehire former employees that meet the needs. New programs need to be developed to work with Starship and Superheavy.
There also needs to be a better mix of reproduceable quantity that take small measured risks and incrementally improve capability vs one off feats of origami.
New people fresh out of university? Maybe hire someone away from SpaceX?
Anywhere.
NASA doesn’t need to focus on launch and that means there are a lot of skill crossovers with other industries. Just pick motivated intelligent people and give them some supporting agents and they can learn as they go.
If IFT-5 is successful then it will be pretty hard for either incoming administration to ignore the implications. The Mars Society is putting forth a proposed bill calling on NASA to come up with a new plan to go to Mars by the end of this decade. The timing is good as several factors are coming together.
Elections have consequences. If the current junta remains in power next year, there is zero probability of improvement anent anything space-related. If Trump returns to the Oval Office there is a decent probability that things will improve. It really is as simple as that.
We don’t have space for all the deep state bureaucrats who need a prison cell. It’s hard to imagine how Trump will accomplish what needs to be done, even if he survives. Musk is smarter than me. Maybe he can figure it out. If he survives.
Trump should have fired “The Resistance” at NASA the first time.
NASA will become a global warming propaganda machine and there wont be $ for anything else. Telescopes and robotics might not even survive.
That is my greatest fear.
With “experts” re-framing the psychology of space travel as not a virtuous desire to make us a multi-planetary species but rather a pathological need by wealthy (i.e. evil) sociopaths to escape “reality”. Thus seen as an inability to cope and therefore requiring “treatment” not development.
There is also the enviro-loon crowd that thinks we have no right to violate the sanctity of the spheres beyond Earth.
Trump didn’t kill SLS last time he had the power. He long ago passed the threshold of this maxim:
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus – false in one thing, false in everything
I’m voting Libertarian.
Trump didn’t have enough support in Congress.
What we have here is a failure of perspective. SLS has succeeded brilliantly in achieving its real goal. That goal has nothing to do with the Moon, human space flight or anything besides preventing the layoff notices and auction flyers from going out, once the futility of the shuttle boondoggle was finally allowed to end. The ever receding moon landing is actually its main innovation. As the probability of that Moon landing asymptotically approaches zero, it, nevertheless remains, thus perpetuating the program forever. The self licking ice cream cone is strictly amateur hour.
That is, unless some American should manage to do it without NASA. Preventing this is the job of the FAA and EPA. A successful Chinese effort would only serve to spur SLS on as an answer to the competition.
The question left unasked, let alone answered is: What is there on the surface of the Moon that we need? Water? There’s lots of water here. How many thousands of tons would we have to land on the Moon to produce the first thousand tons of Moon water? Remember that “water” is actually frozen mud at best and more probably hydrated minerals that would have to be excavated as any other mineral with heavy machinery, further crushed and processed to extract water. Here the low gravity lunar environment works against us. The D11 Cat that weighs 229,000 lbs. here has less than 40,000 lbs. of traction there. Any blasting would be a nightmare. Far better to find it somewhere more accessible.
The LCROSS experiment clarified that it is water and not just hydrated minerals. It was measured with an average of 5.7% which is one part in 18.
Anything Colaprete, the PI of the LCROSS mission, told me a couple of things:
– The rate of sublimation of water ice indicates that it is in small granular form not slabs / chunks of ice. This makes sense because there are no day/night cycles in the PSRs to melt and refreeze the ice.
– The slight delay in the initiation of the ejecta indicates that the icy regolith is relatively fluffy rather than hard/consolidated like permafrost.
The presence of large quantities of water on the Moon (600+ million cubic meters) has its greatest value in reducing the cost for ascent and descent propellant rather than for export. Rather, the value of the Moon is primarily as a destination in its own right attracting the budgets of countries (national pride) and the savings of private individuals (personal and group significance). It is a real but moderate-sized market.
The Moon has value as a learning exercise but is a sideshow to what we should be doing. Thankfully, it isn’t an either or affordance trap.
It is an unpopular opinion but I think most of the Moon will end up as some sort of monument status. A lot of people don’t have the right perspective of what is available to us in the solar system because we have been Earth locked for so long.
“A set of parachute failures, including both crashes during testing and later, the discovery mere weeks before the first crewed launch that critical clips had not been closed before being obscured behind an uninspectable flap.”
I remember working on ISS before it flew. It being another Boeing product. I was looking over 2D drawings of the Node 1 ECLSS air circulation system as a maintenance engineer. I noticed two fasteners tucked behind some part with a drawing label saying “item removed for clarity”. I saw that same nomenclature on all 4 sides of this duct work, and I knew there were no columns in ISS. I contacted Boeing, and an engineer assured me it was an access panel.
A few months later, I went through a tools course that Astronauts go through to get more familiar with their kit. I talked to the instructor, that told me he just did a refresher course for Astronauts heading to KSC to go over the now delivered Node 1. One of their first duties on orbit was to replace part of the duct work that need a butterfly valve actuator that needed to be flown in a middeck locker as it couldn’t tolerate the shaking in the cargo bay during launch. The fasteners holding it in place were the ones I identified earlier. The crew were going to practice doing this with the actual flight hardware at KSC.
After 8 hours trying to perform a task that was supposed to take 2 hours from setup to tools put away, the flight crew gave up. The fasteners weren’t behind an access panel. They were facing the bulkhead. Except now, the Node was delivered and the design couldn’t be fixed. Every removable fastener on station was designed to be self-capturing to prevent a nut or screw floating around the facility to get stuck. Now, I had to sign off on one of the first maintenance tasks on orbit, which was to disassemble the fasteners not meant to be removable, so the crew could replace the butterfly valve, and hope that loose fasteners wouldn’t get lost in the Node’s air duct system.
I see nothing has changed at Boeing.
Good eye!
The blogpost linked can’t seem to go 2 sentences without speweing a lie or a twisted truth about the program as a factual statement without backing.
There are definitely things SLS can be criticized for but most of the arguments in that post are not it.
Oh I don’t know. When it comes to national disgraces, we have the COVID response, CHAZ, the Geo. Floyd riots and now possibly the Hurricane Helene response that cause SLS to pale in comparison.
But I wonder what would happen to NASA if it just decided one day not to procure anything from the money earmarked for SLS by Congress? Who’d get impeached? Now that’s a hearing I’d love to watch….
Oh and how could I forget the withdrawal from Afghanistan? That alone set the world on the path to peaceful co-existence…
No Raygun, so we got that going for us.
To my credit, I had to look that up…
That’s a superb article IMHO.
NASA/congress won’t cancel SLS, due to having squandered so many billions on it.
However, I do think there’s a way to save the SLS program, and actually make it useful and vastly less expensive.
The solution, unsurprisingly, is a fusion between SpaceX and NASA technology. To make this work, SpaceX needs to make a massive change to Starship/Superheavy, via renaming it to Starship Launch System. Must has changed Starship’s name before, and I’m confident that it’s possible to do so again, to Starship Launch System (abbreviated as SLS).
As for NASA’s technical contribution, NASA brings to the table one, and only one, non-terrible contribution; the #JourneyToMars hashtag. Musk, who owns Twitter and thus its technical staff, is probably capable of incorporating that hashtag into SpaceX’s twitter account.
I think this would work, because when it comes to government programs, semantics is always more important than engineering or economics.
The disgrace is government program mismanagement – not just NASA (when was the last project they delivered that was actually on time and on budget?), the DoD (The Navy’s ship building, the AF KC-46 tanker project, the Army Artillery system, the Marines amphibious trucks). There is nothing the government does that is on time or budget: There is no compelling reason for the government workers, or contractors, to make it happen: They will not lose their jobs. In fact, with increased budgets come increased GS-levels and ‘performance’ bonuses
Yes.
SLS looks like a waste of money at $100b but when put in the context of all the other ways government has misspent money over the same time period, it’s not that bad nor out of the ordinary.
We spent $450 billion servicing illegal immigrants. Hard to believe government contractors let that money slip through their fingers, so that means they were probably in on it too.
The govt contractors are now called NGOs
$450 billion, and on the third day of the fiscal year the DHS says FEMA is out of money to help in Carolina.
Radar guided 155mm howitzers firing saboted zirconium slugs are capable of shooting down incoming ICBM warheads. There are (or were) close to 2,000 barrels. The hundred or so 5-inch naval guns could do the same. Where are they now? They could’ve defended the continental US cities while we developed nuclear powered railgun sites. All lost. “Against stupidity, the gods themselves content in vain.”
That was a depressing read and I kept hoping it would be over but it kept going on and on, just like SLS.
Everyone at NASA needs to be fired and start from scratch. WTF is this not going to work BS? All the programs need to be cancelled.
New people need to be brought in and they can choose to rehire former employees that meet the needs. New programs need to be developed to work with Starship and Superheavy.
There also needs to be a better mix of reproduceable quantity that take small measured risks and incrementally improve capability vs one off feats of origami.
New people fresh out of university? Maybe hire someone away from SpaceX?
Anywhere.
NASA doesn’t need to focus on launch and that means there are a lot of skill crossovers with other industries. Just pick motivated intelligent people and give them some supporting agents and they can learn as they go.
If IFT-5 is successful then it will be pretty hard for either incoming administration to ignore the implications. The Mars Society is putting forth a proposed bill calling on NASA to come up with a new plan to go to Mars by the end of this decade. The timing is good as several factors are coming together.
Elections have consequences. If the current junta remains in power next year, there is zero probability of improvement anent anything space-related. If Trump returns to the Oval Office there is a decent probability that things will improve. It really is as simple as that.
We don’t have space for all the deep state bureaucrats who need a prison cell. It’s hard to imagine how Trump will accomplish what needs to be done, even if he survives. Musk is smarter than me. Maybe he can figure it out. If he survives.
Trump should have fired “The Resistance” at NASA the first time.
NASA will become a global warming propaganda machine and there wont be $ for anything else. Telescopes and robotics might not even survive.
That is my greatest fear.
With “experts” re-framing the psychology of space travel as not a virtuous desire to make us a multi-planetary species but rather a pathological need by wealthy (i.e. evil) sociopaths to escape “reality”. Thus seen as an inability to cope and therefore requiring “treatment” not development.
There is also the enviro-loon crowd that thinks we have no right to violate the sanctity of the spheres beyond Earth.
Trump didn’t kill SLS last time he had the power. He long ago passed the threshold of this maxim:
I’m voting Libertarian.
Trump didn’t have enough support in Congress.
What we have here is a failure of perspective. SLS has succeeded brilliantly in achieving its real goal. That goal has nothing to do with the Moon, human space flight or anything besides preventing the layoff notices and auction flyers from going out, once the futility of the shuttle boondoggle was finally allowed to end. The ever receding moon landing is actually its main innovation. As the probability of that Moon landing asymptotically approaches zero, it, nevertheless remains, thus perpetuating the program forever. The self licking ice cream cone is strictly amateur hour.
That is, unless some American should manage to do it without NASA. Preventing this is the job of the FAA and EPA. A successful Chinese effort would only serve to spur SLS on as an answer to the competition.
The question left unasked, let alone answered is: What is there on the surface of the Moon that we need? Water? There’s lots of water here. How many thousands of tons would we have to land on the Moon to produce the first thousand tons of Moon water? Remember that “water” is actually frozen mud at best and more probably hydrated minerals that would have to be excavated as any other mineral with heavy machinery, further crushed and processed to extract water. Here the low gravity lunar environment works against us. The D11 Cat that weighs 229,000 lbs. here has less than 40,000 lbs. of traction there. Any blasting would be a nightmare. Far better to find it somewhere more accessible.
The LCROSS experiment clarified that it is water and not just hydrated minerals. It was measured with an average of 5.7% which is one part in 18.
Anything Colaprete, the PI of the LCROSS mission, told me a couple of things:
– The rate of sublimation of water ice indicates that it is in small granular form not slabs / chunks of ice. This makes sense because there are no day/night cycles in the PSRs to melt and refreeze the ice.
– The slight delay in the initiation of the ejecta indicates that the icy regolith is relatively fluffy rather than hard/consolidated like permafrost.
The presence of large quantities of water on the Moon (600+ million cubic meters) has its greatest value in reducing the cost for ascent and descent propellant rather than for export. Rather, the value of the Moon is primarily as a destination in its own right attracting the budgets of countries (national pride) and the savings of private individuals (personal and group significance). It is a real but moderate-sized market.
The Moon has value as a learning exercise but is a sideshow to what we should be doing. Thankfully, it isn’t an either or affordance trap.
It is an unpopular opinion but I think most of the Moon will end up as some sort of monument status. A lot of people don’t have the right perspective of what is available to us in the solar system because we have been Earth locked for so long.
“A set of parachute failures, including both crashes during testing and later, the discovery mere weeks before the first crewed launch that critical clips had not been closed before being obscured behind an uninspectable flap.”
I remember working on ISS before it flew. It being another Boeing product. I was looking over 2D drawings of the Node 1 ECLSS air circulation system as a maintenance engineer. I noticed two fasteners tucked behind some part with a drawing label saying “item removed for clarity”. I saw that same nomenclature on all 4 sides of this duct work, and I knew there were no columns in ISS. I contacted Boeing, and an engineer assured me it was an access panel.
A few months later, I went through a tools course that Astronauts go through to get more familiar with their kit. I talked to the instructor, that told me he just did a refresher course for Astronauts heading to KSC to go over the now delivered Node 1. One of their first duties on orbit was to replace part of the duct work that need a butterfly valve actuator that needed to be flown in a middeck locker as it couldn’t tolerate the shaking in the cargo bay during launch. The fasteners holding it in place were the ones I identified earlier. The crew were going to practice doing this with the actual flight hardware at KSC.
After 8 hours trying to perform a task that was supposed to take 2 hours from setup to tools put away, the flight crew gave up. The fasteners weren’t behind an access panel. They were facing the bulkhead. Except now, the Node was delivered and the design couldn’t be fixed. Every removable fastener on station was designed to be self-capturing to prevent a nut or screw floating around the facility to get stuck. Now, I had to sign off on one of the first maintenance tasks on orbit, which was to disassemble the fasteners not meant to be removable, so the crew could replace the butterfly valve, and hope that loose fasteners wouldn’t get lost in the Node’s air duct system.
I see nothing has changed at Boeing.
Good eye!
The blogpost linked can’t seem to go 2 sentences without speweing a lie or a twisted truth about the program as a factual statement without backing.
There are definitely things SLS can be criticized for but most of the arguments in that post are not it.