NASA Defends SLS, Again
NASA defends Space Launch System against charge it ‘is draining the lifeblood’ of space program, Huntsville Times
“NASA is defending its Space Launch System against a new analysis arguing that SLS is too expensive to fly and is “draining away the lifeblood – funding – of the space program.”
“I understand the premise of the article,” NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Dan Dumbacher told al.com and The Huntsville Times in a July 23 interview, “but I think we need to realize there’s a broader set of trades that really form up the decision process.”
Dumbacher referred to “Revisting SLS/Orion launch costs” by John Strickland published July 15 on the website The Space Review. Strickland is a member of the board of directors of the National Space Society, but wrote the article independently.”
Update: The Congressional debate over NASA’s asteroid capture mission ignores the ageny’s real spaceflight problem, Houston Chronicle
“Being the subject of congressional infighting, of course, does NASA no good. But this battle is a distraction from NASA’s real problem, which neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to acknowledge. Namely, the space agency is being tasked with building a huge and powerful rocket it will not be able to afford to fly.”
There is no surprise here… SLS is a public works program. As everyone has been told over and over again. More public sector jobs are needed. Big government is the answer. The private sector is doing just find. Sit down and don’t rock the boat.
It doesn’t even seem like a defence. Nowhere does he question Strickland’s figures or analysis.
More a series of pleas in mitigation?
My guess is that, when it all hits the fan, the excuse will be: “Don’t blame us, it wasn’t our idea!!!”
To be fair, Congress has repeatedly cut the budget request from the White House.
When resources are limited, one needs to use those resources wisely. SLS is not a wise use. Notice that the NASA rep did not actually disagree with Strickland, just tried to justify their plans.
maybe a lot in congress that don’t have a say in how NASA is run “butcher” NASA’s budget because of big wasteful program’s like SLS and Orion that are mainly intended to provide job’s in certain district’s.
“The bottom line is that from a human exploration perspective, all of our analyses that we’ve done over the years have consistently shown that we need a large launch vehicle on the order of SLS and its future evolution in order to do the exploration missions out beyond Earth orbit to the moon, asteroids and eventually to Mars.”
Let’s dig up a few archives:
Internal NASA Studies show cheaper alternatives than SLS:
http://www.nasawatch.com/ar…
Even with additional budget, a cheaper path forward exists.Who gets to decide the “NASA” position? Where are these studies?
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“With the smaller launch vehicles, you have to launch more often and you have to do more on-orbit assembly with it. There’s a risk to the astronauts in on-orbit assembly, there’s a risk when you increase the number of launches.”
But at least 70% of the mass is cheap propellant–way more risk is likely acceptable. Further, the 2005 ESAS’ goal “was to eliminate all 3 launch solutions due to AR&D risk” : http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/140…
However, ISS data supports a catastrophic AR&D (autonomous rendezvous and docking) failure rate about 1000x lower probability than was used in ESAS when analyzing propellant depot risks. http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
So tweak a value here or there to make a case close or not?
—-
For a one year round trip to Mars:
Dumbacher: “Orion gives us about a 21-day capability; now
that is obviously a short time, but what is missing in that is that we
will eventually have to develop what we call the habitat module, or ‘the
habitat.’ … Orion would be attached to the habitat. It would remain
‘quiet’ (essentially powered-down) once we got the astronauts to the
habitat, and it would be reactivated once we needed to get the
astronauts back home.” http://www.americaspace.com…
So billions are being spent on technology that will parked BLEO most of the time. Tough spot to be in for sure: trying to make a very weak case close.
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Alternative solutions funded by the government are necessary. If the private sector is doing just fine, then they do not need public support. Even depot centric is a public works program, but it provides flight rate to the commercial launch sector to bring down costs, SLS does not, nor does Orion.
muomega0,
Good comments. After reading your post, two things occurred to me:
1) Everyone has pretty much ignored time in their arguments for or against SLS. Do we need SLS? Is it a good idea or a bad idea? These, I think, are insufficiently detailed questions. Do we need SLS now? Will we need SLS 5, 10, 15, years from now? etc… are more useful questions. But, of course, the answer(s) require some details and firm commitments with respect to the programs to be executed over the next X years. If we accept that time is an important factor, then almost every comment written to date about SLS becomes essentially meaningless.
2) Do we really need a HLLV? Well, we all know that American aerospace engineers and managers are the best and smartest in the world; it says so right here in the fine print. However, it just might be worth looking at what other people think. Is Russia/Ukraine either working on or expressing a need for a LV with lift capability similar to SLS? Are ESA, China, Japan, India, Israel, France, the UK, Iran, or either of the Koreas either talking about a SLS-sized HLLV or expressing interest in launching anything on the US’s SLS? Not that I’ve seen or heard. So, could it be that only certain members of the US Congress, and now certain employees of NASA (plus a handful of bloggers), believe that an SLS-sized HLLV is necessary for BEO, or any other purpose?
Two final thoughts: 1) nothing the size of SLS is ever likely to be made reusable, when reusable is the direction in which all space vehicles should be moving; and 2) Wernher von Braun thought through and proposed many different ambitious space missions — HSF, unmanned and combinations — and he never saw either the need or the desire for anything as big as SLS.
1)Staging is the key to optimize LV performance. For the lunar and especially the Mars HSF missions, it will be required (except shoestring missions) to assemble the mission elements and propellant. Since over 70% of the mass is propellant, which is cheap, it can launched in the most cost effective manner with more risk than launching the priceless crew or expensive cargo.
– If one assembles the hardware and propellant on-orbit, then the size of a *single* is driven by the annual metric tonnes per year and the costs. Take twice a year lunar missions: 120,000kg*2=240mT. Divide by 10. If one had only one LV, it would be sized at 24 mT. For a mars flyby, its 450 mT, but with windows every 2 years, so 450/10/2 ~ 23 mT. Double this mass for a long stay on Mars, so perhaps 46 mT for *single* LV from a single pad. (“10” is simple a rule of thumb that spreads the fixed costs over 10 launches–it depends on the relative fixed/recurring cost however.)
– Finally, look at the mass and volume of each piece of mission hardware “dry”: capsule 9mT, habitat, 20 mT, lunar lander 15mT (wet), GCR mitigation (20 mT), Mars HSF aerobrake (10 to ? mT) , LEO depot (<20 mT), etc. To date, have not identified a piece greater than 20 mT dry.
So in simple terms, replicating a *single* LV and adding pads appears to be the most cost effective solution forward, around 20 mT, which leads to:
2 The US and world have multiple LVs. So the HSF demands would provide flight rate to the existing US and IP fleet, which would reduce commercial launch rates.
SLS would may make sense if the fixed costs which includes operations were significantly less. But since 70% of the mass is propellant, which is cheap, why mix that with expensive cargo and priceless crew?
So if transfer stages and landers were resuable, the IMLEO is reduced further each of these missions==smaller LV. Add electric propulsion, likely reusable, same result. A reuaseable LV? Would not propellant be a great way to check out the reliability with minimum cost risk launch propellant?
HLV technology is cool rocket science. The technology development over the decades has resulted in better paths forward today, and significant challenges ahead remain. The case to retain HLV above 20 mT has not been made clear–it is simply mandated by law.
Excellent analysis.
Lets face it at the current historically anemic levels of funding SLS is going to take a long time to get finished; but when complete it will be a far more capable BEO system than anything currently contemplated by the “private sector”. What does that mean anyway they all spend government money. Get back to me when Exon spends big bucks with Elon to go prospecting. So, if our august leaders ever do decide to get of their duffs we can do something significant in exploration. Because without a more significant and reliable funding stream; I don’t care how long you hold your breath and valsalva; the “private sector” won’t lay the golden egg you desire. I pause for reply…go ahead boys get your knives out.
I recall well before falcon 9 that musk was planning to make his rockets reusable. And spacex did attempt to recover the first falcon 9 boosters.
Wasn’t falcon 9 designed to be recoverable from day one? Isn’t falcon 9 1v1 a result of falcon9s failure to be recovered??? falcon 9 was a test rocket all along for a falcon 9 R.
Spacex is planning to build giant ferry boat to Mars it will most likely look like a giant falcon Heavy.
So Spacex has a heavy lift program now. These smaller rockets are test rockets for this larger MCT Mars Colonial Transporter.
HOW DO YOU BUILD AN AFFORDABLE HEAVY LIFTER??
You design it to be reusable!
Isn’t spacex:s grasshopper program the critical path to affordable heavy lift???
Common sense
Folks:
Bottom line.
Space isn’t a big enough issue to matter at the ballot box. Until that changes, don’t expect anything positive to happen with NASA.
It may be a national heritage, but in government, it’s a ‘bottom feeder‘ on the sub-committee totem poll.
tinker
Assuming what you say is true, is that fact acceptable? Can it be changed? If so, how? From a government’s perspective, a great many issues are lost in the noise and not part of the signal. But that sometimes changes for one issue or another.
The converse is, of course, also true; a topical issue today can disappear from the government’s view next year. So, if we could elevate the status of space, what do we need to do to keep it from dropping off the radar again?
You’ve nailed the problem, John. Can you suggest any solution(s)?
Yes, we did spend a lot in 1966, but the spending started going down quickly. We spent a lot because we wanted to beat our cold war enemy. There’s no such enemy now, and history shows quite well that even with said enemy, popularity for the programs and support for the spending died quickly.
We need to drum up support for real, sustainable programs. Apollo was not one, and SLS is not one.
Resources -are- limited. Of course we could spend multi-trillions of dollars per year on any project whether it is building death stars, pyramids, whatever. But we don’t and we won’t. Political reality is that the President and the Democratic party desire to spend a certain amount for Space and the Republican party demands a lesser number by a few billion. The amount actually budgeted will be bracketed by those limits. That is reality. Like it, don’t like it. That is all the Space lobby can achieve. It may not be what WE like, but them’s the breaks. So, having to live in the real world, we have to choose, and SLS is a bad choice that will end nowhere.
The argument, especially in the last few paragraphs, makes a lot of sense to me. In a perfect world, sure… we’d build the launch vehicles along side things to put in them simultaneously. But in our world of budget (and budgets necessarily mean priorities), if we can only do one thing now, it makes perfect sense to choose the launch vehicle first and what it carries second.
The SLS… we’ll have it forever. The Delta, Titan and Atlas legacies lasted decades and will last decades more for two of those. Our investment in the SLS now could mean we just suck up and lay the foundation for the big launch vehicle in our toolbox for the next century. Does anyone seriously expect launching large objects into space in the second half of the 21st century will look any different than the general idea of putting it in a large rocket and blasting it off? I rather doubt it.
RIght now, when the Government wants to put something in space on a budget, it uses an Atlas. When it want’s something with more finesse and reliability, it uses a Delta. I don’t see any reason why we cant add “when it wants to launch something big, use an SLS Cargo”.
If this means it drains what that cargo is now to get that capability up and running, in my view, that’s perfectly fine. Mars or the Sun or some Asteroid isn’t going anywhere. But we pay for it now, we’ll never have to do it like this ever again. It’s like building Nuclear Aircraft Carriers. The first one costed an arm and a leg over its conventional cousins, but after the initial investment, we had that down and could evolve it and exploit it over decades.
An alternative view: What it means is that we would be locked into an extremely expensive system for decades, forced to stick with technology from the late 1970’s that will be almost 40 years old before it carries people into space. Consequently the money to develop new technologies will always be meager.
I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. In other technology ares being “locked in” to a specific platform, even for decades, while it does have its downsides is often outweighed by the benefits of modularity. The Intel Core series CPUs in so many computers for example, as an evolved version of the P6 microarchitecture created for the Pentium Pro back in 1995. Intel went back to it after the NetBurst microarchitecture in the Pentium 4 turned out to be a dead end. Or the ARM architecture that is ubiquitous in Smartphones, tablets and embedded systems was created in 1985.
Being “locked in” isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you upgrade the components of it step by step. Now obviously modern ARMS are very different from ARMv1, but getting there to here required a long series of incremental changes.
This approach makes complete sense with respect to both the modular design of the SLS and the realism of budgets. In the early 2020s it’ll go from SRBs to Liquid Boosters, then from RS-25D to RS-25E. Then from a Delta Interim Upper stage to a J-2X powered one. And then we can go from there over the course of the decades after the early 2030s. If something comes along that is more efficient, lighter and more capable than the RS-25E, replace that. In the 2040s, if using four liquid boosters, maybe with different engines themselves, becomes desirable, eventually throw that on. If in 2060 some new lift technology comes along that makes a hydrogen-oxygen engine undesirable to persue further, redesign the core below the upper stage and keep the boosters.
That is what I see when I see the SLS. Segments that can be individually upgraded as technology advances. And unless getting big things – and I mean a lot bigger than anything EELVs are close to doing – is going to fundamentally change this century (and does anyone really, honestly think that?) the way to do it is going to be, broadly, a big rocket that sheds stages. And the way to have a big rocket is with strap on boosters (SLS) or in-line (Saturn V). But either way, it’s looking like that.
So when I see SLS, I see ARM or P6… a basic design that can be modularly upgraded for decades as technology comes along that replaces components And the SLS of the late 2060s may look very different from the one of the early 2020s, but it’ll get there in a very modular, very evolutionary manner. I’d consider that a success story, because it’ll be as capable as we need, but also costs will be spread across developing and implemented upgraded upgraded technologies over decades, rather than just throwing the whole thing away in the 2040s and starting over with a new design yet again.
But then again, the “new design”, rather than the upgraded old design does seem to be the decades long NASA M.O. that most other industries figured out was foolish decades ago. I think that’s one reason why I find SLS so promising… because its not a clean sheet plan. It’s that approach that got NASA the JWST. I guess we’ll see how much the 2020 Mars Rover really is an upgraded version of the MSL.
Indeed. While stating that ‘resources are mis-used’ is often a euphemism for goring the incorrect ox, in this case it’s true. The USA is an incredibly rich country with the ability to fund education, health care, and rebuild a modern infrastructure as well ass up port robust space operations–or, we could start a couple of trillion dollar wars and cut already-modest taxes at the same time.
This is a leadership issue field in large measure by a lack of smart energy policies that keep our worldwide interests skewed.
Nobody is a stronger Democrat than I am. But our President has failed to show us exactly HOW ‘we can’. It’s true that the Congress is nothing less than obstructing any WH policies. So? He wanted to be President. Figure it out. Make it work.
Why is it that Dumbacher thinks the only way to do re-usable launch vehicles is by having them crash into the ocean, recovered, and MAYBE salvaged!?! Grasshopper being implemented into Falcon can’t come soon enough.
I want to congratulate Michael Reynolds for identifying a fallacy and virtually duplicating a comment I made in a private email last night.
JKS yesterday:
However, he (Dumbacher) directly contradicts himself on the issue of Orion reusability and also implies that all reusable rockets would need to land in corrosive salt water. They have apparently not been noticing the Grasshopper flights. Why would you need landing legs if you intend to land in the water? Even an automobile flooded by fresh water is ruined as far as an insurance company is concerned. A typical rocket is 1000 to 10,000 times more expensive than an auto.
Michael Reynolds:
Why is it that Dumbacher thinks the only way to do re-usable launch vehicles is by having them crash into the ocean, recovered, and MAYBE salvaged!?! Grasshopper being implemented into Falcon can’t come soon enough.
Not quite word for word but the same exact point and the same analogy.
Good work Michael.
Dumbacher also implies that the only valid launch cost value that NASA could release is a single value, when NASA could easily emulate the graph I included in the article and give a set of costs based on the frequency of launch. With the manpower data from the Shuttle era I am sure they could get it within 25% of correct.
John Strickland
You are getting excited. BTW, it was Bush who bailed out the banks and the insurance companies, not Obama. However, be that as it may, I am not brainwashed. I work very actively to increase funding for space. But I am living in the real world. Like it, don’t like it, space funding is not going to exceed 18b/yr ever, unless something like a Chinese manned lunar landing occurs. Private space is going to be where the action is. NASA should get out of the boondoggle business and use its scarce resources to fund trips to the Moon, Mars, wherever and not burn the cash on a dead-end rocket.
I’m not so optimistic that Americans wil suddenly awake from their slumber after watching the new “Cosmos” anymore than online proseltyzing by NASA officials. Consider that ex-NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez couldn’t win the hearts-and-minds of voters in a keenly-contested Congressional election last year. Senator Bill Nelson (the only astronaut elected into public office since John Glenn) advocates SLS, but has he done enough to articulate its value to Obama and the rest of the nation from his lofty perch?
Nelson was not technically an astronaut, he was a space flight participant. Another Senator, Jake Garn, also flew. I think the bashing of Newt Gingrich for supporting lunar bases pretty well shows what would happen to Nelson if he got to enthusiastic on space.
Hari,
Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmidt was also a Senator and Apollo astronaut Jack Swigert was elected congressman, but died before taking office. Senator Jake Garn and Rep. Bill Nelson were flown as “Congressional Observers”. Hernandez lost because it was an off-year election that the Republicans won.
Dumbacher’s responses are delusional.
If you were to have wanted to defend the numbers, then there are many people in NASA with great skills at presenting such budget …umm…numbers, and what is achieved (such as flights, and by when). What you see is an interview where that road was not taken. This is because the SLS/Orion budget numbers, and what you may get for the dollars planned, if done right, are indefensible.
On the other hand, you have to sympathize with people who have arrived at these positions of power, only by way of coming to believe, and then enable, such delusions. It’s kind of sad. It’s a path of professional and personal development that’s all to easy to get trapped in. It could be anyone here. The system, and it’s processes and incentives, in the end, has to change to make such organizational or individual paths less likely to dominate.
Funding for Apollo collapsed after the Apollo 11 landing; the last three landings were cancelled, followon plans were dropped, and Nixon cancelled Apollo in 1974 because flying a few people to the moon with giant throw-away rockets was not practical. it still isn’t.