SLS Upper Stage Woes on The Journey To Nowhere
SLS upper stage caught in political tug-of-war, SpaceNews
“NASA is stopping work, at the request of Congress, on human-rating the initial upper stage for the Space Launch System, even as the agency argues that its funding projections require it to use that upper stage on crewed missions. At issue is the future use of the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), an upper stage derived from the Delta 4’s upper stage. The ICPS is intended for use on at least the first SLS launch, which will not carry a crew. NASA confirmed Feb. 18 that it has instructed teams to stop work on efforts to human-rate the ICPS for later, crewed SLS missions, following instructions from Congress in the report accompanying the 2016 omnibus spending bill.”
NASA moves to enforce early switch to EUS for SLS, NASASpaceflight.com
“The EUS recieved a specific reference from NASA Chief Financial Officer David Radzanowski in comments made to the media after the announcement, citing that the reduced funding could impact on implementing the EUS on the second flight of SLS.”
Keith’s note: On one hand NASA stops work on anything that would involve use of the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) for a crewed EM-2 mission but on the other hand its FY 2017 budget request is nowhere near enough to develop the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) such that crewed EM-2 can stay on its current schedule. In other words the White House, NASA, and Congress are all but ensuring that the first flight of SLS with humans will most certainly slip – possibly after the second term of the next person to be elected president. NASA started this big Ares-V/SLS effort back in the middle of the Bush presidency. This latest threat to SLS could mean that more than two, double-term presidencies will have passed before NASA can send its new big rocket with anyone on board.
I wonder how many Atlas, Delta, and Falcon rockets you could have bought with the money NASA has spent on Ares-V/SLS? How much sooner could we have begun to build and operate a real cis-lunar infrastructure had we gone with private sector rockets? Yes, it would take more launches, but given the chronic inability for NASA to field its new big rocket, we’d have been further along – for less money – if we’d taken the commercial approaches first envisioned when the Vision for Space Exploration was announced in January 2004. But no, NASA is on a #JourneyToNowhere instead.
– NASA Is Building A Rocket That It Can’t Afford To Use, earlier post
– NASA Begins Its Journey To Nowhere, earlier post
Right on Keith but fielding a real cis-lunar infrastructure was not and has never been the intention of Congress. Fielding a long jobs program and paying the existing industrial military space complex has.
Cheers
Thank you, Dr. Griffin.
Have you noticed the mess with SLS is the symptom not the disease? NASA is not in the mood of getting anywhere, just getting by for another day.
“Report language accompanying the fiscal year 2016 omnibus spending bill” Congress is directing NASA which upper stage to use for particular mission. This is a degree of Congressional micromanagement that even I would not have expected. However no funding is provided. No surprise there.
Ah, well. At least the White House didn’t try to hit Planetary Science with too deep cuts this time (aside from the Europa mission), and the Europa mission cut might be negotiated away in exchange for getting Earth Science funded. The part of NASA making major scientific discoveries will go on.
Not true, Daniel. Congress provided an extra $300m in SLS funding for this earmark. But they only provide funding a year at a time, and the budget request for FY2017 does not assume any such extra funding.
Cislunar architecture for what? It’s going to be a very long time before you’ll be making major rocket components you can reliably use (other than maybe fuel*) off-world, and the costs of all that infrastructure will eat up whatever budget you have so much that you won’t go anywhere else. It’s like how they’ve always proposed adding more to ISS to go beyond just having it as a microgravity research lab, but the money isn’t there.
* Which is only useful if you have a very busy schedule of missions requiring extra fuel. Otherwise, I’m very skeptical that it’s cheaper to land nuclear- or RTG-powered melting machines at the lunar south pole, melt ice, crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen, launch the hydrogen (on what launch vehicles too?), and then rendezvous it with spacecraft versus just doing another launch carrying mostly fuel and having that rendezvous with your ship in orbit.
Now, if we’re talking about orbital propellant depots, then that’s another matter. We’d have to design the depot and test it, but we could fuel it with the cheapest possible commercial launch vehicles and amortize the costs.
Any lunar ISRU technology would require in-space refuelling, at least on the surface. And to be part of a BEO enabling infrastructure, it would require orbital refuelling in LLO/EML2/ESL2/etc. That involves a lot the problems that need to be solved for LEO fuel depots. (Boil-off control, ullage, re-chillers, low-g and micro-g transfer, autonomous operation, etc, etc.) In which case, LEO fuel depots are a “gating” technology towards lunar ISRU.
However, this requires focus on it being a “path” or “purpose”, not on a “goal”. VSE spoke of using lunar resources to enable Mars missions, and assumed the lunar pole volatiles would be part of that, but it soon devolved into an equatorial base, then to a short series of Apollo-type landings-and-return before being cancelled. As such, it still met the “goal” of “returning to the moon”, even if it completely ignored the “path” of developing a long term flexible BEO infrastructure.
(That seems to be a common problem with NASA manned programs. Shuttle, ISS, VSE/Constellation, and now ISS and ARM. They all put the narrowest definition of the “goal” ahead of the original purpose, then ignore that the method chosen to meet the “goal” usually not only doesn’t achieve the purpose, but actively prevents it.)
To add to your argument: the current projected water reserves of the moon (North and South poles) are in the region of one gigatonne = 1 cubic kilometer. A small lake’s worth. (I use Lake Windermere in the Lake District U.K. [0.99 cu. km] as an exemplar.) Total. For all time.
Well until we start importing water from Ceres…
Anyone who has read RAH’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress (or the Moon Treaty) …would be up in arms to hear the profligacy with which this water is to be expended in the name of a commercial profit. Rocket fuel!
Well, why not?
Commercial profit has despoiled the Everglades; garbage runs in rivers across the planet (the Ganges comes to mind); the magnificent Yellow River has been dammed; soils in the American plains blow with the wind; animals in Africa are slaughtered for tusks while sharks are mutilated for fins. The list is endless.
So, we use up some moon water. So what?
So we use up Lake Mead. So what! ;-P
Keith, the other wrinkle to this is that whereas the iCPS, which is simply the Delta IV upper stage with stretched tanks, is a system with lots of flight heritage and therefore likely to be inherently safer, the EUS will be flying crew on EM-2 on its very first mission ever.
Also, what’s the rush to do EUS, anyways? What missions to cislunar space cannot be flown with a 70MT SLS but *can* be flown on a 105MT SLS? And if people say “launching a big hab module *with* Orion… well, why not launch the hab module separately on a non-human rated system.
p.s. when the SLS program was initiated, there was much talk about doing advanced boosters using new hydrocarbon engines… exactly the sort we need to replace the RD-180. But NASA quickly abandoned that idea to contribute to the national interest, while instead creating another design project for a southeastern flight center. Ironically Aerojet was talking about making those engines in Alabama.
Because NASA needs a semi to drive down to the 7-11 to get some milk and a loaf of bread when a Austin Mini would do.
“well, why not launch the hab module separately on a non-human rated system.”
I have been wondering this exact question. WHY do we need a heavy lift launched that is man-rated? It sounds STUPID. Back during Apollo it made some sense because we were not as good at remote operation of space systems. NOW it only makes sense to launch the large piece of the puzzle (hab module) and check it out in orbit BEFORE sending up the astronauts on a much smaller vehicle.
it’s all a moot point. SLS will get canceled ten minutes into the next presidents reign, sold off to Boeing or Lockheed and NASA will go back to send each other memos and padding each other on their backs, and , of course, dolling out money to yet another private industry dependent on government handout to do anything worth while
Oh, you dreamer you.