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SLS: Cool Ideas + No Budget = No Payload

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 30, 2012
Filed under ,

NASA’s Huge New SLS Rocket Could Power Missions Far Beyond Mars, Space.com
“NASA is contemplating space journeys far beyond a near-Earth asteroid, the moon or Mars for its new heavy-lift rocket in development. The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is called, could instead visit the moon of Pluto or return samples from other outer planets.”
Keith’s note: Curiously, not a word is mentioned in this article about the cost of these missions (both launching the SLS and building/operating the payloads). The reason for that omission is quite simple: there is no budget to pay for any of these proposed payloads – however cool, nifty, or useful they might be.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

50 responses to “SLS: Cool Ideas + No Budget = No Payload”

  1. James Stanton says:
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    While its great to see this shiny new rocket underway there are no destinations and no money. Me thinks space.com is making spin for someone on the inside.

  2. Tom Sellick says:
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    ewwww space.com   Not a good place for the informed.
    nevertheless, I support the SLS, as have the Orion since day one.  Constellation was not going anywhere yes.  But I saw a lot with Orion and new it pull through.
    Whoever the President will be (and I am STILL undecided) should increase NASA’s budget. 

    • kcowing says:
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      This is not a fault on the part of space.com – they work with what is out there and what NASA people tell them.  And NASA people will never volunteer the truth about SLS payload budgets.

      • Andrew Gasser says:
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        Yes they do Kieth.  They just won’t tell you anything you can quote publicly, you have to keep it off the record. 😉

  3. Nassau Goi says:
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    These articles are painful to read.  The whole premise is that the vehicle lifts more and thus will require less launches for complex missions. Nevermind it will only fly a handful of times. Never mind that its costs and resources are easily better used with already existing and sustainable vehicles.

    This is a guaranteed failure, even if it accomplishes a handful of BEO missions. Every congress and every president for years will have it on the potential cancellation list as long as it exists.

  4. Helen Simpson says:
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    Well, the recipe for success in the eye of Congress here is 5 mT of scientific payload, and 50 mT of ballast. Bricks, concrete, whatever. If it’s a BIG rocket, one that sends a LOT of money to industry (in selected congressional districts), and one that does some science, it’s declarable as a success. Why, a concrete supplier could even get some jobs out of it! Since we’re after firsts, we’ll proudly claim the first shipment of construction materials to Pluto. (With these fabulous SLS’s we’ll be making outposts there before long, no?) Once the launcher is paid for, the rest of it will be pretty affordable. From the perspective of a politician, what’s not to like?

    Of course, what’s being entirely lost here is that huge payloads that have any kind of technological sophistication will cost huge amounts of money. Mass is the single most important variable in space project costing. We simply don’t have the funds to do that.

    Of course, for a Brit, who wrote this piece, U.S. funding issues are easy to ignore.

    It’s easy to get enthused about a hugely capable launcher, but anyone with a milligram of sense would at least attach this caveat to it. I have to agree that this smells a lot like insider spin.

  5. Bernardo de la Paz says:
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    SLS will be the cheapest and quickest way to launch a replacement for ISS, which could well be needing replacement not very many years after SLS starts flying.

    • mattmcc80 says:
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      An Atlas V or Delta IV Heavy can already launch a BA330.  If Falcon Heavy succeeds, it could possibly launch two at a time.  Launch three of them and you’ve got more interior volume than the ISS.  Are you sure about SLS being cheapest and quickest?

    • newpapyrus says:
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       Plus you’d be able to place an ISS replacement into orbit with a single launch instead of multiple launches. But, hopefully, such a LEO station for NASA will simply be a simple way station for astronauts instead of a hyper expensive lab.

      Marcel F. Williams

      • pathfinder_01 says:
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        The ISS masses about 450Mt, can’t lift that with one launch. The reason why the ISS was built the way it was was due to the shuttle and not an issuse of mass.

        • newpapyrus says:
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           The ISS is excessively heavy because it is inefficiently composed of numerous heavy modules with relatively large surface areas.  The maximum proposed pressurized volume for the nearly 500 tonne  ISS is only 1300 m3.  

          A   Bigelow 2100 space station, on the other hand,  could have a volume as high as 2100 m3 even though it may weigh as little as 65 to 100 tonnes.

          Marcel F. Williams

          • pathfinder_01 says:
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            “The ISS is
            excessively heavy because it is inefficiently composed of numerous heavy
            modules with relatively large surface areas. The maximum proposed pressurized
            volume for the nearly 500 tonne ISS is only 1300 m3.”

            Not quite. It is
            heavy because it contains stuff. Mass and Volume is not the same thing. The ISS
            has a rack system so that on each of its four surfaces (ceiling, floor, and
            sides) stuff is installed. Destiny is the US lab (ISS has other labs by the
            way) masses 14MT. It was launched with five racks installed. It has a total of
            24. The rest were delivered by the shuttle on a later flight. The rack system
            also allows things to be moved between modules(like the crew rest quarters each
            a private booth).

            If you look at
            Skylab, the ISS has about twice the interior volume but Skylab was mostly empty
            space. Also during the Skylab program they found that excessive amounts of free
            empty space in a station is a bad idea. It increase crew space sickness and
            crew can get stranded in the middle with nowhere to go. ISS modules are
            designed to reduce crew space sickness by having a distinct ceiling and Floor.

            Anyway the
            shuttle limited how much could be carried to that orbit(other rockets loose
            less because they can drop their fairings). The shuttle encouraged building
            things that needed lots of spacewalks to put together(Russian stations and the
            russian section need very little, they automatically dock). The only advantage
            is the wider isle of the station in the US section.

            Even worse NASA
            used the shuttle for ALL station building and cargo delivery. If some of the
            parts could have been put on different systems things would have gone faster,
            heck 8 flights of the shuttle did nothing but bring up cargo(not station
            modules).  

          • pathfinder_01 says:
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            Also for a given
            volume inflatable stations will mass less than an aluminum is the point of
            inflatable stations.  

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        Marcel,

        You talk often about NASA lifting a replacement for ISS in a single launch on SLS, so you’re assuming that this replacement station, whatever it is, will be available for launch all at once, which seems highly unlikely given NASA’s history.  Or are you assuming that it will be just one or more Bigelow modules, ordered off the shelf?  The various ISS modules took a decade to accumulate.

        I’m also confused as to why someone who is so dead set against the need for ISS keeps using its replacement as an argument for SLS.

        I have to admit, whenever someone puts forth an argument based solely on large payload mass, I dismiss it almost immediately. Even if a new space station was launched as nothing but collapsed inflatables, that would certainly not be the entire payload, unless it is intended to be airless and completely empty of equipment.  You’ve got the air tanks for inflating it to send up and you’ve got all of the instrumentation, furniture, and many, many other things to send up that are part of the station.  And you certainly can’t pack all of that into a fairing as a single payload, with or without the inflatable modules.  So in the end, the total mass of the station isn’t really an issue, because it can’t all be packaged up into single payload, and the individual payloads that it would make up can all be lifted with existing EELVs for much less total cost and much less total risk.

        So, unless you can come up with a realistic and genuine BEO need for SLS, there is still no need for the Senate’s pork rocket.

        Steve

  6. John Thomas says:
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    I don’t recall any mention of cost last month with the L2 Gateway announcement.

  7. newpapyrus says:
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    By the time the SLS is fully operational with it expendable RS-25E engines in full production (probably around 2021), there will be no ISS program. So NASA should have at least $8 to $8.5 billion a year to spend on manned beyond LEO missions. And slightly more funding should be available if you include robotic missions.

    So I think more than $8 billion a year is easily enough money to fund programs related to the SLS system– especially since NASA says that recurring SLS cost should be around $500 million per launch.

    Marcel F. Williams

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Any LV that costs half a billion dollars to launch should be scrapped on principle.  It is not necessary to spend anywhere near that amount of money to accomplish what SLS will supposedly be able to do.  To spend that much money repeatedly on launches is insanity.

      Steve

      • Vladislaw says:
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        then toss in the insane development costs .. 30 billion .. but add in the waste on constellation and I bet it would be closer to 60 billion. 

        SLS and orion need to be cut.

  8. newpapyrus says:
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     Altas V and Delta IV heavy couldn’t launch an Olympus space station which will be at least 65 tonnes plus.

    Marcel F. Williams

    • Vladislaw says:
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      How many olympus sized stations have been built so far?

      • newpapyrus says:
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         How many heavy lift vehicles are currently operational to carry it into orbit???

        Once the HLVs are built and are operational, the Olympus will fly!

        Marcel F. Williams

        • Vladislaw says:
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          No it won’t and the government is NOT supposed to be in the freakin’ transportation business…. PERIOD!

          The very very last thing the Nation needs is some pork train project acting like a commercial company selling transportation systems to the private sector ..

          SHEESH .. that is one of the dumbest ideas ever.

        • Vladislaw says:
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          I want to build skyscrappers in a factory. I want to build them horizontally and then simply drive them to the site and erect them.

          The trouble is… I need a new semi truck .. instead of doing loads of 20 tons . I need trucks and roads that can handle 150 ton loads.

          The federal government should be FORCED to use taxpayer money to design, develop, and test and have built at cost plus a new truck to haul my skyscrapper parts.

          This is just common sense, this is what government was formed for. To fund big trucks that the private sector does not want enough to do it themselves.

          Having the govenment run trucking companies instead of the private sector is just a great business model .. just ask Marcel .. he is a firm believer that the goverment should run transportation businesses.

  9. Bernardo de la Paz says:
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    Yes. Something like ISS is much more than just enclosed volume. SLS could launch a replacement in one or a very few launches – certainly far fewer than would be required using smaller rockets. It is hard to imagine that an ISS replacement will be funded if it costs as much and takes as long as ISS. If ISS can be kept healthy until 2020 or so and SLS becomes available around 2022, it should be practicle to continue and expand on the capabilities of ISS.

  10. John Kavanagh says:
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    In 2009, Space.com also explained that Ares V could “do more than just launch new lunar landers and cargo to the moon. It could also haul massive telescopes that dwarf the Hubble Space Telescope or fling deep space probes on faster missions to the outer planets.” That’s great! Can’t wait for Ares V to fly.

    http://www.space.com/6337-m

  11. Engineer_in_Houston says:
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    In the interest of civility, I don’t want to write what I really feel about SLS in the way I’m tempted to. If you look at the budget over the years SLS has been and will be funded for development, and the budget to maintain the “standing army” that will be required to operate it, and then also consider how much time and money will be required to design and build even a single major payload, you quickly realize SLS is not about building a sustainable, sensible, executable program. If it ever even flies, it will eventually lead to nothing more than a stunt or two. Consider the many billions or even tens of billions that SLS could suck up over the next twenty years and ask yourself (do the math) how much more payload could be launched by existing launchers or growth versions of commercial launchers (that could be ready before SLS is operation), with billions easily left over for payload development. Again, do the math.

    NASA and its industry partners are a great asset to the nation, and can take on any challenges laid out before them. But what we have now with SLS is a fiscal train wreck in the making, and taxpayers should be really ticked off. A great opportunity is being wasted.

  12. hamptonguy says:
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    More than likely the SLS program will be done by 2013 or 2014 regardless of who wins the WH.  Too much money, too few launches, and no real missions.  Nice science project and keeps NASA and contractors busy doing cool technical work but beyond that it seems destined to be the next Ares program.

    • dogstar29 says:
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      If you look closely, the SLS is the Ares V with only modest changes in design and virtually none in contractors or personnel. The Obama administration attempted to cancel Constellation but to all intents and purposes they were prevented from doing so. Ares/SLS was intended to support Mike Griffin’s “Apollo on Steroids”. Apparently he was unaware that steroids have serious side effects, although they do make you feel strong and aggressive.

  13. Marko Horvat says:
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    ‘If you build it right, they will come’… to use an analogy between a corn field and a rocket.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      If even if you never should have been building it in the first place?

      What is the logic for the federal government building and operating a transportation vehicle?  What advantages does it provide for the country and the people to have the federal government competing with commercial industry, instead of encouraging and enabling 
      commercial industry to be competitive within itself, which results in better prices and better product offerings for the people?  Forget about the glamour of big rockets and think about practicality.  No matter what a handful of pork-generating Senators want, NASA should not be in the business of building and operating rockets.  That’s one of the reasons that the aerospace industry exists.  How would people react if Boeing were to to presume to draft and pass legislation?  The whole SLS concept is just plain wrong, from start to finish, and NASA should never have had it forced on them.

      Steve

  14. Jonna31 says:
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    Seems pretty simple how to pay for this to me: don’t extend the ISS past 2020.

    The SLS has another feature that makes it attractive. Like the EELVs, we will have it ready-to-order for decades. Decades. It’s utility is as the big dumb booster of choice (with upgrades) through the 2050s. Do it once, properly now,  and never again. If material science advances to make its compontents cheaper and lighter (see various space shuttle upgrades), by all means, add them in. But have it be part of America’s heavy lift family: light, medium, heavy and super heavy.

    Now sure lots of people say, well we can use an Atlas V with a 5.5M faring and an on orbit fuel depot to do the same job. And to them I say, yeah you’re absolutely right. Also instead of twenty launches to build the ISS solar power system, we could have tossed a Naval Reactors designed nuclear reactor up there in one or two.  But there she is, Miss football-field sized space station, with solar panels already years out of date. 

    Point is: someonetimes you lose arguments, and the EELV-alternative to the SLS as a cargo launch vehicle was lost years ago, and if on-orbit refueling happens, it’s going to be for the SLS after the 2030s. Sorry. 

    • Engineer_in_Houston says:
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      The SLS only ever makes sense if a few conditions are met – foremost among them is that we have to be able to afford the payloads that really would need to be flown on SLS, and only SLS. And we have to be able to afford several of them every year – maybe a minimum of eight or so. And there’s not enough money for that many payloads, nor that many launches. The money we spend developing SLS dwarfs any savings that might potentially occur with any (highly unlikely) high launch rate in the out years, compared to what could be had now or sooner than SLS with commercial heavy lifters. The argument was not lost. The question was hijacked by a few ill-advised members of Congress, and our space program and our space industry will suffer for it.Again: do the math.

      • Jonna31 says:
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        The wiggle room you seek is in the definition of what makes such a payload “affordable”. If it’s anything like the slate of payloads the last ten years, then we should be worried about payloads EELVs can lift, never mind the SLS. Project costs across the board need to be viciously slashed and the big three constituencies uprooted. 

        But that involves, some would say hard, I would say brutal honestly. 

        For example someone would have to tell the Space Telescope community that  their $9 billion JWST was a one off, and it never happens again. Instead they get something one-ninth the  cost. If that is unsatisfactory, they can explain why post-JWST it is important to look a little earlier in the history of the Early universe, at many billions of dollars in cost, as opposed to the slate of other underfunded projects that by 2025 will not have had the exuberant funding of forty years that Hubble+JWST enjoyed. It’ll be very hard for them to justify. 

        My personal favorite is the Mars constituency and their $2.5 billion Martian geology expeditions that conveniently keep forgetting to carry anything resembling a set of biological activity detection experiments. I mean it’s kind of ridiculous .. going to Gale crater, ostensibly to look for life signatures, but really to look at rocks to look for water so that four or five rovers in the future, they can launch a rover that will tell the world what the Astrobiology community has known since the Phoenix lander: Mars is a very dead world, and it’s always been dead. It is sterilized from above and poisonous to life from below. You’re spending billions on JPL job security and the illusion of going to Mars without the expense of sending people. A Mars Robotic Sample Return mission should never, ever happen. Billions of dollars should not be spent to snag a few pebbles worth of Martian silica just to find that *gasp* there are in fact, no native microbes on that world at all.

        The ISS is of course, the third money sink. The only reason to keep the ISS in orbit past 2020 is  to allow the Gateway to be built there.  Everything else will be at least 20 years out of date. NASA has had more than enough time to gather data on Microgravity to cease spending billions on it.

        If we want to seriously do these big, interesting SLS-launched projects, the money is found in making sure that the big three entrenched constituencies are cut down to size. Way down to size. For example don’t give the Mars group another $2.5 billion rover. Give them a $250 million lander. Not enough? Well should have thought of that in the halcyon days of the MERs and the MSL. Oh and if it goes over budget at all, cancel it and put them out to pasture for five years. They get to compete with the people who want to go to Enceladus for relevancy. 

        That’s how you start affording all sorts of expensive projects to obscure new places like Europa, Enceladus and the Kupier Belt, : you make the old places with their entrenched constituencies justify their relevance and free up the money. You create competition based on cost-supression within the pool of projects. You emphasize re-use of technology (rather than reinvention, looking at you JWST) and speed on the return of the investment rather than super-sized programs that cost many billions and take a year off the ground. There is no billion dollar justification for a rover after Curiosity, a super-telescope after the JWST, or another space station whose principle purpose is the never ending study of microgravity. 

        Ultimately it comes down to people. People allowed the JWST to be built. They didn’t stop them and say “Hey, the NRO has a facility to basically mass produce evolved Hubble-class telescopes in Upstate New York. How about we baseline our Hubble successor on these so we can make use of the facility”. No, instead they needed their 18 segmented mirror contraption, essentially single use technology that will never be used on this scale post-JWST. People allowed Curiosity to probe exactly one crater on Mars, instead of, you know, four or more evolved MER-level rovers simultaneously researching four different latitudes on Mars (which is, lo and behold, now a proposed SLS mission). 

        Want to be able to afford putting cool ideas in the SLS? Stop letting the same old entrenched constituencies and the people who inhabit them justify multi-billion dollar investments into the same old places. See to it that the sequels to the JWST/Curiosity/ISS blockbusters are effectively, indie films.

        I hope it happens. But I doubt it will. People are skittish. No one will tell the Mars community (for example) enough is enough and the days of billion dollar expeditions is over. My guess we’ll all still be dreaming about a Europan submersible in the 2040s and reading on Wikipedia how NASA/ESA hopes to launch one by 2061. I’m sure the Computer Generated art will be amazing. 

        • Engineer_in_Houston says:
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          The key is *competition*.

        • Vladislaw says:
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          the only way to slash those costs is to go around congress and NASA. Congress is interested in the tax base of their district, high paying NASA tech jobs are to be protected. What they do and how effective it is … well it is irrelvent, opening up the frontier is actually something they are against, 4 decades of keeping NASA a monopoly has proved that.

          SLS will be canceled.. the righting is on the wall.. it is already slipping its schedule.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Jonathan,
      You’re seeing what you want to see instead of seeing the facts.  And, as Engineer_in_Houston said, the argument was not lost, it was derailed by politicians who don’t give a rodent’s hind end about the technical issues; pork is all that matters to them, and you’re helping them screw NASA, and us, by making up more “reasons” for SLS.

      Here’s a simple question for you: if SLS is such a good idea, how come the rocket scientists never proposed it, just a handful of Senators?

      Steve

      • Jonna31 says:
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        Saying “we should listen to the rocket scientists” has no more credibility than “we should listen to the senators”. Let’s briefly review their track record the last fifteen years. 

        In the late 1990s when the buzz word was “Space Shuttle successor”, rocket scientists swore up and down about how it would be fully reusable launch vehicles that would drop the price per kilogram. To believe them would be to believe that a fleet of VentureStars would open up space for us. Some folks still swear up and down by that at this very site. Well the X-33 was canceled, and the billion spent on developing the XRS-2000 and composite tank mostly forgotten. Somewhere, a stackable linear aerospike engine sits gathering dust. Today, no one serious discusses reusable plane-like or lifting body vehicles as actually doing that. 

        Then rocket scientists, after a series of studies came up with the broad outlines of what would be Constellation. Throwing a capsule on top of a J-2 upper stage on top of a SRB promised to give us an American Soyuz, in their words: cheap and dead simple. But for reasons cataloged oh so many places and times, it and Ares V were conceptually doomed from birth. But while it lived a subculture of NASA rocket scientists took it upon themselves to in their spare to preach the Gospel of DIRECT and how the Jupiter rocket would affordable  quickly, solve all our nations space launch problems at a fraction of CxP’s cost.

        Fast forward a couple of years and DIRECT won. SLS is essentially a variation of the last DIRECT proposal with a different upper stage. It is as DIRECT-like as NASA was going to get. And where are DIRECT’s boosters, coming to defense of rocket they advocated?

        And then we bore witness to the most bizarre debate off all: the liquid booster versus SRB debate. Yes I know liquids are better, safer, cheaper over the long term and so much more. And yes in a perfect world they’d be the obvious choice. I love them as an idea. But some rocket scientists now. Someone should tell them they’ve fast forwarded an argument from the mid 2020s to the early 2010s, because of course NASA can and should use Booster Hardware they’ve launched a hundred plus times, and kick all the variables of a new liquid booster to the future.

        In summary Rocket Scientists want lots of things. The thing they don’t want is one thing. You give one group their liquid fueled boosters, another group will scream for SLS’s end to fund a more Saturn Like all liquid rocket with no booster rockets. The conspicuous absence of the DIRECT legion, circling the wagons around SLS is most jarring. Was supporting it to kill Ares just a means to an end? Where did they go to?

        Steve, you say we should listen to rocket scientists and ask what they want and need. I say, look at what doing just that since 1997 has bequeathed the United States: programs some support, some hate, but never close to completion. Technology developed then abandoned. Poor planning. Insurrection  Chaos. The “debate” doesn’t even have the decency for people to say “hey liquids are great and all, but isn’t that a debate best left to have in the far future, considering everything else we need to worry about with SLS?”. Why? Because of weird axes-to-grind with ATK. 

        I support SLS for one reason and one reason alone: It’s really the first time since the Space Shuttle was built people with authority told a fractious community that has delivered a lot of CG and a lot of powerpoints but little flight hardware that the decision has been made, the debate is over, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door. There were dissenters about Apollo and the Space Shuttle too. But the difference is, decades ago, when the decision was made, that was that. Today, the insurgencies continue and try to kill programs by a thousand cuts. This site catalogs them monthly. 

        So yeah, I’m throwing my lot in with the politicians, because a decade of rocket scientists being left to mostly their own devices has given us a mothballed XRS-2000 engine that fired a few times, the Ares I-X stunt, and a black hole where the Team DIRECT used to be. And you trust these people? I don’t. I think like every other science and engineering field (of which I’m a part of ) smart people get caught up so  much in winning the argument on principle they neglect the wider implications. So no, when a rocket scientist says “a brand new liquid rocket with no Shuttle-derived hardware is the better choice compared to SLS”, I have absolutely zero reason to believe him. Why do I think the boosters of that idea (for example) will mysteriously evaporate just like everyone who preached from the good book of DIRECT did?

        • Steve Whitfield says:
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          Jonathan,
          I’m sure that you’re quite sincere in your assessment above, but some of your assertions are in need of fact checking.  I’m not going to address it point by point, but I will make the general statement that the many program cancellations that you seem to be saying were the doing of technical people “left to mostly their own devices” were in fact political decisions.  I spent more than a decade editing books written by people who were there at NASA and lived through these programs and all of the attendant funding battles, etc.

          I can say with a high degree of confidence that 1) the scientists and engineers at NASA who worked on any of the major programs were never “left to mostly their own devices,” and 2) all of those program cancellation decisions were not made by the technical people, nor even their managers; program cancellations were decided by either the politicians responsible for deciding (or denying) the funding (in most cases), or (in rare cases) by NASA headquarters, but this was rare, unlike DOD where it was not uncommon for “the man at the top” to cancel a program on his own authority.

          You’ve also mixed unofficial activities, like DIRECT, into your thinking, and I don’t consider that relevant.  What a group of engineers do on their own time of their own volition should not be used in assessing NASA activities.  If I may, I suggest you spend some time reading official NASA documents, in particular, the Mission Reports, which NASA creates (and makes available) after the completion (or cancellation) of a mission, or in some cases after completing each major phase of a large mission.  They’ve produced these documents (the actual name is the “Mission Report”) for every mission going all the way back to the Project Mercury missions, and they are the official NASA word on what happened and who did what.  Similar reports exist for the R&D programs (although the document titles vary) which provide all of the unclassified details.  For example, if you wanted to know about the NERVA program, what was accomplished, who did what, what was spent, when it was cancelled and who was responsible for cancelling it, etc., all of that is available from NASA public domain documentation.

          These days, I think too many people turn to web pages, and worse, blogs as their information sources and treat everything they read on line as gospel.  We mustn’t forget that the internet, including the web, is an “end to end” system, meaning that whatever somebody posts is exactly what readers will see; there is no peer review, sanity checking or any other kind of oversight. Basically anybody can post anything, no matter how incorrect or ridiculous it is, and it will be retained as posted (except in those rare cases where comments are reviewed by a moderator, like NASA Watch).  There is a lot of stuff on the web that is just plain wrong, even serious stuff like medical advice, so we all need to consider anything we read on line as suspect until verified by a proper source.  Of course, official and genuine material lives on line as well, like many NASA documents (documents, not web pages) on the many NASA web sites.  We simply need to be diligent in choosing our information sources.

          Steve

        • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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          Just one little comment from one of the “DIRECT Legion”, as you put it: SLS is not DIRECT; it doesn’t even come close.  In fact, it is basically Ares-V before all the performance shortfalls of Ares-I started a process that made it bloat beyond any hope of delivery. 
           
          DIRECT called for a minimum-change common booster core based on the shuttle ET.  SLS requires a totally new, bottom-stacked 8.4m hydrolox core stage that just happens to look like the shuttle ET (before they changed its colour scheme so it looks like Saturn-V instead).
           
          DIRECT called for a lower cost, shuttle-legacy booster could do, thus leaving money for payloads.  SLS calls for an arbritary set of extremely high performance goals based around an unlikely Mars mission plan that make the booster much more expensive, slower to deliver and greatly limits its usefulness whilst simultaneously starving payload development of any funding.
           
          DIRECT called for a booster that could be used as an LEO mission launcher, as a starting mission so the development is not wasted if BEO missions are not fundable (the J-130/Orion/SSPDM system).  SLS makes the booster the objective in its own right and does not consider uses beyond the vaguest proposals.
           
          Former DIRECT supporters have a hard time supporting SLS because we see that, frankly, it is just repeating all the mistakes of Ares-V.  To say ‘DIRECT won’ couldn’t be further from the truth.

  15. Anonymous says:
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    Being a $ numbers guy right now (but an engineer by training
    and experience) I can vouch for the observation Keith makes here, that surreal,
    almost delusional disconnect that occurs when an entire conversation (or in
    this case, an entire article) about the uses of the SLS and Orion goes on and
    on without mentioning money for those payloads, or stages, or spacecraft for
    the journey. Forget to mention the unlikely chance of any such amounts of
    money, ever, in the context of any SLS-like thinking, ever showing up or adding
    up? Yep. The personal conversations I gather on this are usually civil, and
    understated (when one on one, not as much in groups), but quickly get really
    Zen.

    Since Constellation days, these conversations about adding
    it all up usually devolve into one of two paths. One path ends up in a defense
    of SLS and Orion under any scenario as being worthwhile. Repeat-under any
    scenario. I’m reminded of the shrink in Terminator trying to get Reese to see
    his delusion, only to get a perfectly consistent answer back every time. Except
    here there really are no time machines or Terminators. I’ve literally asked
    some leadership thinkers if they would think it successful to have built SLS and
    all and have made only a half dozen uses of it by 2040, yes, 2040! I figure
    that will get them to say “maybe that’s not success!” I’m not picky. But no,
    the only response “yes” – that would be “success”.

    Another path gets into
    discussions about control, and how all good managers know not to spend their time
    on things they don’t control. Management 101. That’s the difference between
    effective and ineffective managers. And so much can happen by 2040 outside of
    our control. Therefore, it doesn’t add up because you’re only taking into
    account the uncertainty you included, not the kind that would help. For
    example, you fail to include the uncertainty of if we have real leadership that
    will give us all the money we need for those payloads to actually use the SLS
    and Orion.

    But we can develop other options, we can work backup options…one’s
    that do add up, sooner rather than later…no…that would be counterproductive, a
    vote of no-confidence in SLS and Orion. Can’t afford that…

    Usually here I go Zen too, once the messianic thinking
    starts, you know, where SLS and Orion are part of “getting ready” for a 2nd coming, a real leader, the public realizing our value, and all that. I head out
    to see if there’s a chocolate donut left. Resign oneself, be Zen, enjoy the
    donut. So when’s my flight back home?

     

    • Vladislaw says:
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      I really wish that NASA would get some sunlight. Name names would be helpful so those conversations could be debatated under the disinfecting sun light of open conversations.

      These people who have such insane fews should be made to have to defend them out in the blogoshphere.

  16. dphuntsman says:
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    The problem is they are not talking about actually closing business cases for any of these scenarios. In the ’80s, the shuttle – which I proudly worked on – was only able to carry most of the payloads it did, scientific and commercial, because the launches were directly subsidized out of the NASA budget. The same will hold true here; unless there are massive NASA operational subsidies like we had on shuttle, a government designed/owned/operated super launch vehicle is simply unaffordable. We in the government should not be in the job of building space trucks, no matter how big the trucks are; we should incentivize the private sector to build the sizes and types that we actually would be able to afford to use.

  17. DTARS says:
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    I know how to get SLS flying sooner???
     
    Cut up whatever is fabed if anything, and launch it into space on a falcon heavy in a year or two!!!

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      George,

      I’m afraid I have to disagree.  Any metal that has already been bent should not be shot into space but rather salvaged to make something more useful, like garbage cans or pots and pans.

      Steve

  18. DTARS says:
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    I just learned the other day that Charley was born in my adopted state. He was here to talk about Stem I think. Hearing him talk about SLS exploration just made me ill.
     
    lolol he said how nasa is a jobs program lololol

    85 percent out to the privite sector.
     
    NO JOKE

  19. bobhudson54 says:
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    Nice plans but it can’t be accomplished with NASA’s state of being. This could be accomplished with both government,private sector cooperation, intervention. No one agency can do this alone in these days and times.

  20. Synthguy says:
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    This post has received a barrage of comments as one would expect. I agree with many of the assessments that there needs to be a credible strategy that matches resources – money – with the machine – SLS and in the current climate, that does not appear to be likely, meaning SLS may ultimately turn out to be a tragic wasted investment, and result in further lost time and momentum.

    I guess my view is that it does not need to be, if a big enough challenge can be found to embark on that makes SLS useful and indeed necessary for success. I’m not talking about manned Mars missions, or rendezvous with an asteroid. I’m talking about something that benefits the US as a whole, and makes SLS a critical asset that then attracts greater government investment.

    The big challenges as far as I can see are… a) energy independence and security in the 21st Century; b) preventing dangerous climate change by slowing anthropogenic induced global warming; c) ensuring human survival against low probability / high consequences threats such as that posed by potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and comets; and, d) generating wealth through investing in space industry – and building a significant and permanent human presence in Space to extract space resources in situ from Low Earth Orbit out to Cislunar Space.

    if you take each of these four ‘big challenges’ I think the SLS can potentially play an important role, which could attract not only US government funding, but also international funding that could make its flight schedule more significant than the odd mission every couple of years, and ultimately, make it pay for itself. For example, how might SLS contribute to building a space-based solar power system that could beam solar power from space to the Earth and thus reduce our dependence on fossil fuels – thereby reducing Co2 output, and slowing global warming – and make the US more independent in terms of energy generation? Could that energy then be sold to other countries, allowing the US to reap a profit, which could then be reinvested back into sustaining SLS operations, or developing the vehicle even further beyond the 130 MT to LEO configuration? Whilst it may simplistic to say a big rocket can haul more stuff, its also accurate – so if space-based solar power satellites could be developed that are more compact, and yet more efficient than massive concepts developed for space-based solar power in the 1970s, could they be put up more efficiently with several in one go on SLS, or would commercial launchers still be more cost-effective?

    SLS does give us the ability to return to the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids and use in-situ resources – for making Space-based solar power, or to mine He3 for nuclear fusion power, or mining certain types of asteroids that are resource rich in rare metals for wealth generation, whilst at the same time getting humans established on a permanent basis on the Moon, in Cislunar space, and able to tap into a vast resource that is simply not accessible if we don’t go back to the Moon. This is why I have always seen the Moon and the Lagrange points as the more logical destination than Mars. Mars is going to end up as ‘flags and footprints’ and once again, we’ll go once or maybe twice, and then the public will lose interest and so will the politicians – the money will dry up and the missions will end, just like Apollo. Better to invest money in something that ultimately pays for itself, and expands national wealth and strategic advantage over our competitors, as well as contributing to the greater human future in space. Attacking the US national debt is vital if the US is to sustain its relative leadership role over rising competitors such as China and Inda. US debt is currently around $16 trillion – heading towards $20 trillion by the end of the decade, and if its not reduced quickly, it will mean a ‘Greece Future’ for the US economy in the next decade. If resource wealth from space can be accessed, and reinvested back into the economy, then its a revenue stream that can not only reduce debt, but ultimately pay for not only the SLS, but more broadly, building a space-based industrial base, which is where the US really needs to go in the 21st Century. USAF estimates done in the 1990s suggest mineral rich asteroids might have a net value of around $9 trillion each. What does one do with $9 trillion that suddenly appears in the national coffers? How many hospitals, schools, and infrastructure programmes can that build? How many more places for kids to go to university and learn to be scientists or engineers and thus secure the US future as a world leader? How about investing that money into green energy solutions that can further reduce carbon output or complement space-based solar power, or make commercially viable nuclear fusion more likely to be achieved?

    Finally there is human survival to be considered. The challenge of potentially hazardous near-earth object (NEOs) is one that cannot be ignored. Part of the solution is what we are doing now – detecting, cataloguing and tracking – though more money and resources need to go into these programmes. But we also need a mitigation capability, particuarly for the NEO we miss. How might SLS – a big, powerful rocket, with loads of development potential, payload capability and long-reach – contribute to asteroid mitigation? Large, deep space asteroid detection and tracking away from Earth, perhaps at a Lagrange Point? A more effective approach to mitigation late in the day, if we’ve let one slip through the net? I’d be interested to hear other’s perspectives on this. But all our resources should be invested in this problem, because if one does slip through the net, or if a long-period comet heads our way from deep space, and we have no credible mitigation option, then what a wasted opportunity, and we’ll be contemplating what might have been for the human race in the final days before impact. Too late then.  

    Ultimately, SLS will either be a white elephant, or potentially a workhorse. Its just a case of how we percieve this asset – and it is an asset, a resource to be used – and how we ‘market’ the vehicle to those who control the money. Perhaps NASA is the wrong agency to be running this vehicle, and a better solution would be to develop it, and then sell it off to commercial actors. Or make it an international vehicle, jointly operated by a consortium of nations. The entirely wrong approach in my view is simply to write it off as a lost cause. Think about it – we are developing a capability we’ve lacked since Saturn V, and this will be more effective than Saturn. 130 MT to LEO is not to be dismissed lightly. What needs to be developed is a solid business case, and that has not happened yet. But there is no reason why SLS cannot be a raging success if it is used to really do important things.

    Dr. Malcolm R Davis,
    Bond University, Gold Coast,
    Queensland, Australia