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SLS

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Let the fisking commence:

They say politics stops at the water’s edge — and as former leaders of NASA under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, we can tell you it definitely stops at the atmosphere’s edge. America’s determination to continue to lead in space is one of our truly bipartisan national priorities, underscored by the sustained and shared commitment across administrations and Congress to deep-space discovery and exploration and the world’s first human landing on Mars. And as the annual appropriations bills wind their way through the House and Senate, leaders of both parties must join together to continue this commitment — and fully fund the innovative new technologies these challenging new missions will require.

What “innovative new technologies”? The whole point of SLS is to use existing technology (mostly Shuttle technology from the 1970s). There is absolutely nothing innovative about SLS. It’s recapitulating the sixties.

First among these is building a new rocket launcher powerful enough to lift the enormous cargo loads needed to support human exploration of Mars or to reach even deeper beyond the red planet into the depths of our solar system and beyond.

I love how they think that “power” is a useful metric for a launch system. You see it all the time from NASA and its acolytes: “The most powerful rocket ever built.” It’s a space program designed by Tim the Tool Man: MORE POWER (grunt, grunt, grunt).

NASA’s Space Launch System will feature the highest thrust and largest payload capacity ever developed. The SLS will offer almost two-and-a-half times the payload mass and six times the volume of any existing or planned U.S. launchers. The SLS in its final form will have about 10 percent greater lift capacity than the Saturn V — the only other beyond-Earth-orbit human launcher ever flown.

Yes, because we all know that nothing can ever be done for the first time. We have to do it the same expensive way we did it in the sixties, when we could waste anything but time, and didn’t have any experience with orbital assembly.

There are significant reasons why heavy lift is crucial for deep-space human exploration. Future Mars landings, for instance, would require at least the equivalent mass of the International Space Station — which took 10 years and 30 missions to complete — to be launched from Earth. The SLS, with its 130 metric-ton lift capability, could accomplish this in just six or seven flights, making the missions far less complex and more cost-effective.

In contrast, it would take about 30 flights of our current Delta, Atlas or Falcon 9 heavy-launch vehicles to do the same job. More launches necessarily mean more cost and risk.

Let’s ignore the disingenuousness of using Shuttle/ISS as an exemplar of orbital assembly.

And let’s be generous and assume they can somehow do two flights a year, and they can do it in only six, not seven flights. Let’s also let the development cost be sunk. If the budget is two billion a year, that’s a billion dollars a flight, and six billion for the six flights. That’s a little less than 800 metric tons. A Falcon Heavy can do that in sixteen flights with margin (at a very moderate flight rate of about five per year), at a price of $120M a flight, or a total cost of about two billion, one third of the SLS cost, even with the generous assumptions for SLS. And most of those flights will be propellant, so if one doesn’t work, no big deal.

Only the SLS has enough room to accommodate large, critical payloads such as planetary landers and bulky in-space habitats and other structures. Packaging such systems into a space six times smaller would be extraordinarily challenging and would dramatically increase cost and risk while limiting overall mission capabilities.

This is just hand waving. Show me the numbers. Show me the analysis. For four billion dollars savings I can do a hell of a lot of repackaging.

The SLS’s higher thrust also means faster transit times to deep-space locations, reducing the cost of mission operations, allowing simpler spacecraft design, and giving mission planners critical flexibility. For example, using the SLS reduces the transit time for the Europa mission by half compared to other launch vehicles. And ultimately, these benefits will accrue not just to space exploration and human spaceflight missions, but to all potential rocket users — including the Department of Defense, and civil and commercial operators.

More attempts to baffle with techno-BS. It’s not “higher thrust” that allows faster transit times, but greater payload. Yes, if you insist on doing it in a single launch, you can obviously do more with a bigger launcher. but there’s no reason to insist on that. Exactly the same thing could be done with three FH launches and fueling the injection stage on orbit.

The SLS vehicle design materialized from an extensive, unbiased set of NASA technical studies that compared all possible scenarios, with a focus on efficiency and budget constraints. Experts inside and outside of NASA were fully integrated into the decision-making process. Among the factors driving the selection of the 130 metric-ton SLS design were human exploration requirements, the state of propulsion technology, the health and capability of the industrial base and the overall budget outlook.

Really? Then why don’t you show us the analysis, Doug, Steve, and Dave? Because the only one I’ve seen shows that it’s the most expensive way to do it.

The resulting choice built on propulsion technologies developed and “battle tested” in the space shuttle program, which has an unparalleled flight heritage and demonstrated record of reliability. That will drive down design and development risk and keep long-term costs low. Contrary to some suggestions, the SLS will be very competitive with the advertised price of commercial U.S. systems — on the order of $4.5 million per ton of payload.

Wait. I thought you told us that it was “innovative technology.” Now you’re telling us that it’s old and “battle tested”? Which is it? And what “demonstrated record of reliability”? A smaller version of the SRB you propose to use destroyed Challenger. And you’re claiming a cost per flight of $4.5M x 130 or a little less than $600M? Show me how you get that. Is it a marginal cost? If so, it’s more BS. Again, even ignoring development costs, you have to include all annual costs, and give us the average. And even if it’s true, FH has an advertised price of about $120M/53 or a little over $2M a ton. How can you imagine that a vehicle that costs twice as much per ton is “competitive”?

NASA’s current policies and its commitment to the SLS represents a pragmatic and cost-effective approach to meeting our deep-space exploration needs. It will allow us to focus on a variety of missions to explore space, advance our knowledge of our solar system, learn more about the history of our own planet, accomplish a truly historical Mars landing and inspire future generations.

More unsubstantiated BS and blather.

At a time when so many issues seem polarized and gridlocked, bipartisan congressional support for NASA’s steady, determined march forward to produce the SLS and cement America’s leadership for another generation shows our nation, and its oft-maligned political system, at its very best.

Yes, it’s a “march forward” all right. Right toward a cliff.

[Thursday-morning update]

“The Cancelled Ares V Team Has A New Rocket To Sell You.”

[Update a few minutes later]

GAO: Expect overruns on SLS:

Limited cost and schedule reserves place the program at increased risk of exceeding its cost and schedule commitments. Although the SLS program is committed to a November 2018 launch readiness date, it has been pursuing an internal goal for launch readiness of December 2017, with the time between December 2017 and November 2018 being designated as schedule reserve. The SLS program expects to use a significant amount of schedule reserve, in part to address some technical challenges, and plans to shift its internal goal from December 2017 to tentatively July 2018. This shift will reduce the amount of available schedule reserve from 11 months to just 4 months. In addition, the program planned for cost reserves of less than 4 percent each year and has already allocated those funds for this year, which leaves no reserve funding available to address unanticipated issues.

Of course, the lesson from the Usual Suspects will be “See?! SLS needs more money!”

[Bumped]

22 thoughts on “SLS”

  1. What a bunch of crock that article…

    The SLS’s higher thrust also means faster transit times to deep-space locations, reducing the cost of mission operations, allowing simpler spacecraft design, and giving mission planners critical flexibility. For example, using the SLS reduces the transit time for the Europa mission by half compared to other launch vehicles.

    No actually what we need for such missions is not a big booster. What we need is nuclear-electric propulsion (e.g. Project Prometheus) so that instead of just passing things like Europa at high speeds and just taking a couple of snapshots we can actually orbit those places. Electric ion propulsion allows extended missions with more well controlled flight paths. Nuclear because once you go to Jupiter and beyond solar panels become a lot less useful.

    the space shuttle program, which has an unparalleled flight heritage and demonstrated record of reliability

    Two Shuttles were broken into tiny little pieces killing all hands on board. Is this a record of reliability? Last I heard the Shuttle had about as good a chance of killing a crew as Soyuz. Which is based on the R7 launcher the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, used in 1961.
    I think you have been spending too much time reading ULA press releases or something and think you can use reliability to bash someone like SpaceX. The thing is ULA uses one-segment Aerojet solids in Atlas V and you use the same type of multi-segment ATK solids that killed the Challenger shuttle crew.

    SLS is old tech. Bad old tech at that.

    1. Vitriol aside, Challenger wasn’t destroyed and the crew killed by “solids”. That was caused by people that knew better ignoring a known problem (cold O-rings) and making a really stupid decision. People were the cause of the Columbia loss as well from acceptance of foam loss as routine to the decision to not do everything humanly possible to determine the extent of damage and face the daunting task of trying to save the crew if possible.The CAIB report pulls no punches and is a telling expose of both. What’s a true tragedy is how the lessons learned have not been heeded. That is people at work including the decades long devastating impact of politics on the agency, not technology. Solve the former and we just might get the latter. In so many ways the CAIB had it right: “NASA does not exhibit the attributes of a learning organization.”

  2. we can tell you [politics] definitely stops at the atmosphere’s edge.

    That’s a knee-slapper. I’m old enough to remember when Walter Mondale wanted to end the space program and use that money to solve problems here on earth.

  3. 30 flights … Falcon 9 heavy-launch vehicles

    That line: Soooo disingenuous. By calling the ‘Falcon 9 heavy-launch’ they lead the reader to think they’re including Falcon Heavy in that math.

  4. Perhaps the SLS is using cutting edge battle tested technology from the 70’s? I can totally see why you Fisked this one.

    The SLS vehicle design materialized from an extensive, unbiased set of NASA technical studies that compared all possible scenarios, with a focus on efficiency and budget constraints.

    And thus they picked the world’s most expensive rocket engines and decided to throw them away with each launch, which is cheaper than recovering them, which is what we used to do because throwing the engines away was too expensive.

    That and some of the other pro-SLS arguments make me wonder if circular logic and contradictory points can be described with orbital elements.

  5. From the article:

    Douglas Cooke is a former NASA associate administrator for exploration systems. Stephen Cook is a former NASA Ares projects manager. David King is a former NASA Marshall Space Flight Center director.

    NASA, NASA, NASA, oh and former Ares project manager and former MSFC director. Get the picture yet?

    1. No? Let me spell it out for you… You, you young NewSpace punks, stay off our lawn…

      1. Yes, that’s better. Thanks.

        I was also thinking, it’s not FH or depots that would be the SLS killer (although in a rational world either should.) I think it’s the refuelable ship in orbit. It would not only make the waste of SLS obvious because it could accomplish more and have no need for SLS in any of its own missions, but could be put into orbit using D4H today (or FH) for just a few hundred million. Actually, because you want to keep the mass down and volume up… replacing the upper stage of the F9 with a 13 ton ship is even better… faster and lower cost.

        Anything the SLS might then be proposed for would be done faster and at less cost by that 13 ton, 200+ m^3 refuelable ship.

        1. BTW, the missions for that 13 ton ship could vary from needing 1 to 5 FH supply launches. A minimal unmanned probe mission would need just one FH to fuel it. A fully manned mission would have four FH to fuel and one general supply launch.

          The equipment packages on that ship would upgrade over time and be used repeatedly for continuous missions.

          SLS would then have to die.

          1. How close do you think everything would be to achieving a stable orbit if stage two was -made- “The upper stage” by attaching -just- the necessary avionics to the current stage two?

            That is: There is no stage three of any sort, the aim is to get a almost completely empty stage two into -any- sort of orbit.

            Stage two already has a near-vacuum rocket nozzle, engine, sizable tanks, etc.

            Perhaps use the total amount of “payload” for ‘stretch and fuel’ for stage two?

          2. Remember Laika? I propose a mission to put a hibernating ground squirrel on orbit around Mars.

            They can hibernate for 7-9 months every year so it should cut down on consumables a lot.

          3. Al, if I’m getting what your saying, an upper stage refueled on orbit might be a good stage to drive your payload to somewhere beyond Earth Orbit. The one catch I see is a reasonable match between propulsion capacity of the refueled stage and what the mission needs. All the better if the mission payload is a fair match to what the launcher can orbit so refueling the second stage is the major operation conducted in low Earth orbit.

          4. Al, you got it.

            PeterH, you would just need fuel bladders feeding into the regular tanks if those tanks weren’t already enough for a particular mission.

  7. Then why don’t you show us the analysis, Doug, Steve, and Dave?

    Is there any chance of posing this question in a forum where Doug, Steve, Dave or an SLS program manager might be obligated to respond?

    2. Comments have already been posted to their Rollcall article. The comments include a link to Rand’s fisking, a NASA engineer calling B.S., I posted a cartoon, and a few others. So far no comments sympathetic to their position.

      If I were in their shoes, I’d certainly feel obligated to respond. But will they? I expect them to jam their fingers in their ears and loudly sing “La, la, la, laaaa!”

      1. More likely, they’ll just attribute dissent to a few hotheads and make sure their next article is in a forum that doesn’t allow comments.

    1. just a rehash of a similar op-ed

      And how. I did a little synoptic exercise by putting the two OpEds side by side and highlighting similar passages with the same color. Seven differently colored blocks of text in exactly the same order in both of them, most of the same-colored blocks lined up next to each other.

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