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Exploration

PDR Complete for Space Launch System

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
August 1, 2013
Filed under

NASA’s Space Launch System Completes Preliminary Design Review, NASA
NASA has achieved a major milestone in its effort to build the nation’s next heavy-lift launch vehicle by successfully completing the Space Launch System (SLS) preliminary design review.
Senior experts and engineers from across the agency concluded Wednesday the design, associated production and ground support plans for the SLS heavy-lift rocket are technically and programmatically capable of fulfilling the launch vehicle’s mission objectives. NASA is developing the SLS and Orion spacecraft to provide an entirely new capability for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, with the flexibility to launch spacecraft for crew and cargo missions, including to an asteroid and Mars.

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20 responses to “PDR Complete for Space Launch System”

  1. Spacetech says:
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    I remember reading a story just like this but it was called Ares I

  2. Mark625 says:
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    Cue the SLS haters in 3… 2… oh wait, they’re already here.
    The Ares-1 PDR was nothing like SLS. It had reds all over the place, in critical areas. SLS has passed PDR with no reds at all, and the yellows are low-risk and are being worked diligently. SLS is ahead of schedule and under budget, as opposed to Ares-1 which was late and over budget.

    SLS has the one thing that Ares-1 never had: margin, and lots of it.

    • Anonymous says:
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      It also has a huge and unsustainable program cost.

      • LPHartswick says:
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        Nothing is unsustainable if the politicians want it to happen. And everything is unsustainable if they don’t. We seem to have billions, indeed trillions of dollars to spend on predator drones, high-tech computer and telecommunication surveillance programs, oh and oh yes, revamping 1/6 of the country’s economy. The problem with you guys have is that you believe some of the politicians in Washington are your friends. Some may be but I assure you the vast majority are not. They are for “commercial space” secondarily because it’s cheap, cheap, cheap; but primarily because it is not “The Space Exploration Program of the American People”. Down the road, it’s a lot easier to zero out a contract to a vendor; than it is to stick a dagger in the heart of “America’s Space Exploration Program”. The support among the public for space exploration may be a mile wide, and an inch deep, but I assure you that deed would sink in, and they wouldn’t like it. Does anybody at this website really doubt that if he could, the President would cut the head off the snake. It seems to be the only government spending program that he doesn’t like. Spending a reasonable percentage of the federal budget on the exploration of inter-solar space is sound policy, and good for the long-term interest of the nation. And anybody who can see beyond the bridge of their nose should understand that less than one penny on the federal dollar is insufficient to that need. I am not against commercial space, I want money for both causes. But I don’t believe this needs to be a zero sum game.

        • dogstar29 says:
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          The Obama Administration has consistently asked for more total NASA funding than the Republican House has been willing to appropriate, as well as more funding for commercial space. I see no evidence that “America’s Space Exploration program” consists of the SLS and Orion. Except for Congress and the affected contractors, I did not see a public outcry over the Administration’s unsuccessful attempt to discontinue Constellation.

          • LPHartswick says:
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            You misunderstand me my friend. It was never my contention that the Republicans are any better than that Democrats. On the contrary I think the current political class in Washington is pretty myopic in general when it comes to understanding the benefits of keeping America first in space exploration. I think the President’s Inaugural Parade demonstrated to anyone that was watching his feelings towards space exploration in general & NASA in specific. The moon exploration Rover was dead last. I watched him as he stood there smiling and waving, and wondered what he was really thinking. Talk about the last train out of Boot Hull! Remember, the President didn’t say he was killing off manned exploration of space, just a program. Remember, “been there, done that.” He first formed a blue ribbon commission. A lot of skulduggery can occur behind the cover of blue ribbon commissions. He canceled a definitive plan, albeit severely underfunded, to return us to the Moon “eventually” and then onto Mars. It at least had the advantage of clear goals & objectives, if sadly no money. Then they gave us some gausey vision of going to Mars, via some asteroids, sometime in the 2030s or 40s, maybe, perhaps, and through buckaroo capitalism. Robert Heinlein would be proud. Good grief! When you’re watching a magician you never look at his hands, you look where he doesn’t want you to look if you want to know what’s going on. I’m saying that instead of spending all of our energy sniping at each other over whose ox gets gored, everybody who thinks this is important should start turning the screw on our politicians and make them see the light. With a reasonable funding increase all roads can lead to Mars.To get there we need to have enough money to both pat our head, and rub our tummy. There’s not enough time or space on this blog to go through all the technology development that should be completed for sustainable exploration of the solar system. But serious investments in life sciences, nuclear thermal compulsion, “heavy lift” though I know that’s a dirty word, and all of that is going to take increased and more consistent funding from the political class on both sides of the aisle. And that’s going to take some really heavy lifting by all of us. The really tough job isn’t getting there, it’s educating the lawyers and accountants so we can get there. I guess I’m getting a little sweaty, but what the heck I’m only talking about the future of the country.

    • LPHartswick says:
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      I agree with you, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is good news on a capability that the country needs. I wish that was a little more money, so that development could be speeded along, but given the far-reaching thinkers we have in Washington, this is about as good as we can hope for. If the United States ever does go to Mars, or back to the Moon for anything more than a short stay, it will be utilizing something very much like SLS. That gives some people around here an apoplexy, but the development of this capability gives me hope.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        There was no more money under Republican administrations than under Democrats. Both Apollo and Shuttle were canceled by Republicans. I would say that if people go to Mars, they will have to do so with a system that is less expensive.

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        If the United States … it will be utilizing something very much like SLS

        Sorry, but I have to disagree. I won’t insult you by restating my reasons; we’ve all seen the arguments from both sides over and over. In the end, though, I think sustainability, pertaining mostly to cost, will be the deciding factor.

        • LPHartswick says:
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          You may be right, and I agree that cost will always be a factor; but so will heavy lift. I’ve asked this before and no one answered me, but how many man hours of planning and prep go into a single hour of EVA? Look at what happened recently…finding your way back to the air lock by feel! Ugh! If we had kept developing an evolved Saturn V; how much better and quicker would that space station be? How much more useful in a different orbit? I think…a lot, but then again I’m a physician and its not my field. I do know that the vision of lots of medium launch vehicles with fueling depots, construction tugs, and many individuals doing lots of on orbit assembly violates the KISS Principle. For the foreseeable future building complex systems is best done in a shirt sleeve environment on Terra Firma; to limit your exposure on EVA to the minimum necessary things that must be accomplished.You are right about the money though; on these projected budgets neither camp is going anywhere fast; there is just too much to do with too little provided.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            NASA wanted to go on building Saturn V’s after Apollo 11, but the taxpayers had no interest.

            Ultimately our choice of strategy depends on our goals. if the goal of the program is to land a few Americans on Mars once or twice and do it as soon as possible, heavy ELVs are the best solution, but because of cost it is nonsustainable, as was Apollo. If your goal is to _ever_ see a hundred people in space at the same time, with a level of cost and productivity that makes it possible to sustain that activity, whether by commerce or by taxes, the only feasible path is a fully reusable launch system. We cannot afford both strategies.

          • Ralphy999 says:
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            The impetus of commercial development of space will be service contracts and associated discovery of space assets that are valuable to modern enterprise development. It’s not an either or situation. For instance, we don’t know what the final disposition of the ISS will be but NASA is making darn sure that with its upcoming reconfiguration of the ISS that multiple vehicles can use it instead of the vehicle launch scheduling and docking conflicts it has to avoid now….As congress establishes more outposts commercial interests will follow… Apollo was way ahead of its time with no thought given to commercial interests. The political goal was to beat the Soviet Union which it did. We don’t have that political goal now.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            Actually. LP, the argument about which method is simpler, HLLV or multiple medium-lift, has been successfully argued both ways, and both can be shown to observe KISS. I find that the real differences show up only when things are considered in conjunction with on-going and future operations and objectives, some of which have been only relatively recently added into the equation.

            Sustainability is tied to cost, so let’s leave that as settled. One of the more recent considerations is reusability. Small and medium LVs, and spacecraft, can be transitioned to reusable designs far easier and more cheaply than heavy-lift. It’s an open question as to whether HL can be made reusable at all, let alone economically. One on hand, SpaceX is betting with its Falcon Heavy that it can be done, but the Shuttle experience suggests that it can’t (refurbishing is not reusing). Time will tell, I guess.

            If we envision a future of modularity and multi-use LVs, spacecraft and facilities, then medium lift has several advantages over heavy-lift.

            The issues surrounding multiple-partners, and the inclusion of smaller players, in future programs also benefit from using medium vs. heavy lift.

            Many people argue that doing in-space “assembly” with medium lift is a negative. I see it as the opposite — if we are going to live and work in space in the future, the sooner we learn to do more things in space, the better off we’ll be, since working in space will become a daily activity. The learning the curve is going to be enormous, even though so many people minimize it. Consider how little we progressed in this area from Gemini 12 to ISS.

            I could give lots of other arguments against actually needing SLS or any HLLV, but I recognize that many people can argue just as convincingly, and with as little experience, for a HLLV need and the shortcomings of using medium lift instead. The one aspect that they can’t argue, however, is that medium lift offers more suppliers, lower costs, shorter time frames, less remaining R&D, etc., than HLLV. We’ll get things rolling sooner, safer and cheaper going with medium lift.

            Further developing the Saturn V was never really an option. Once launched, it had an effective life measured in minutes. The walls and tanks were metal so thin that they would literally crumple if you tried to do anything with them after staging. A lot of limiting factors resulted from minimizing the LV weight. Also, the custom tooling for F-1 engines was very expensive and had a life of too few pieces to be practical, even with today’s technology. The manufacturing processes have changed significantly since the Saturn/F-1 days. So, a revisited Saturn V would not end up resembling the original at all (although many of the F-1 engine design concepts are still in use today).

            I agree with you that complex system are best built on Earth, but complexity and size are two different things. This is the source of one of the arguments for modularity in design. Reasonably-sized components should be built on Earth, then launch into space and “assembled” there into larger systems, as opposed to being “built” in space. We could easily fill an entire book chapter listing the reasons for this.

            As for EVAs, a lot of planning and rehearsal goes into every one of them. That’s always been the NASA way. But there can always been unforeseeables, such as the water in the helmet surprise. The fact that they could so effectively and expediently respond this dangerous surprise is a testament to NASA’s training methods.

            Overall, I don’t think you and I are too far apart on most of the issues we’ve discussed, except perhaps the HLLV question, which is one that I think is going to be debated for a long time to come yet, unfortunately.

    • mattmcc80 says:
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      You can’t be under budget when you don’t know how much it’ll cost to build a thing. http://nasawatch.com/archiv… If they weren’t “under budget”, their budget would simply be increased, because it’s a cost-plus contract.

      Meanwhile, nobody seems to be able to articulate a rational justification for SLS’s existence. That requires, at a minimum, that it has a mission which other platforms like Atlas, Delta, or Falcon [Heavy] either couldn’t possibly do, or would be demonstrably more expensive to employ. No such mission exists. No funding for such a mission exists.

    • Mader Levap says:
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      I bet you downplayed any problems with Ares-1 PDR fervently at this time.

  3. Alan Stern says:
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    Actually, SLS has something else Ares-1 never had, Todd May.

  4. Ralphy999 says:
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    The 2017 mission is under a change request to expand the mission to 25 days and establish an orbit 70,000 km past the moon. Are they serious? Yeah, I think they’re serious.

  5. Andrew_M_Swallow says:
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    It appears the cost difference between one launch every 4 years and a SLS launch every year is 3/4 billion dollars per year. Payload extra.