10 SLS Flights And No Footprints on Mars
After 10 SLS flights no one is walking on Mars. #JourneyToMars https://t.co/DIzZXK44bL
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 30, 2016
Notional schedule of future missions, through EM-10 in 2030. One set aside for ARM crewed mission, rest simply “proving ground” cislunar. pic.twitter.com/7FRfzGwg3P
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) November 30, 2016
Well, the 2015 Agency Mission Planning Model (https://www.nasa.gov/sites/… had them doing nothing identifiable every two years out to 2035. So I guess doing nothing identifiable every year out to 2030 is at least a change.
BTW, the baseline Orion is supposed to support four people for 21 days. How are they going to get to 30?
Hab.
Space bars, like we had on Skylab.
A Bigelow space habitat docked to the spacecraft.
Where are the later ones supposed to go for 30+ days? Are 4 people sitting in Orion playing cards or are they docked to a Bigelow station orbiting near the Moon?
Why would they need a Bigelow module? They have more than enough room in an Orion capsule for playing cads.
And based on current SLS plan and architecture…we couldn’t even land on the Moon within the next 15+ year time period, given the fact that, well, you know, there is NO FRIGGIN’ lander that is part of the planned (or even notional) architecture.
It is also a crying shame that NASA has pretty much nixed any and all serious research and development into space-rated high power density fission-based nuclear reactors…which, IMHO, is the key to human deep space exploration and/or establishment of long-duration human bases/settlement.
I absolutely agree. The last time the US orbited a reactor was in 1966.
Most space power reactor concepts are fueled with highly enriched uranium (HEU) and not activated until after launch. Although it is a material requiring security against theft, HEU has the same level of biological toxicity as natural uranium and produces no significant toxic environmental hazard in the event of a launch explosion. In this respect it is quite different from the plutonium used in RTGs, which is highly toxic, mainly due to its higher level of spontaneous radioactivity.
Don’t forget the Cassini gravity assist maneuver.
That’s not a reactor. A RTG, like the three on Cassini, the one on Curiosity, and the ones on the Voyager and two of the Pioneer spacecraft, is a very different beast. It’s a radioactive source which is naturally decaying and keeping one end of a thermocouple hot. A reactor involves a subcritical but very enhanced decay rate and (usually) a heat engine. RTGs max out at about 1 kW per unit. Designs for space-bar reactors go from 20 kW and up.
Thanks for the explanation!
It is possible – just possible – that the irrational fear of nukes in space will find very little support in the new admin.
There is also a rational fear of nukes
Historically, the very rational fear isn’t of reactors or nuclear material itself. That’s fairly safe. What is a rational concern is someone doing something stupid with them. The risks involve a sizable component of human error. Or, more properly, people making really bad decisions rather than the normal sort of goofs. For a space-bar reactor that can be mitigated by getting them well above low Earth orbit before turning the on. (Assuming you are worried about human life, rather than contamination of a lifeless asteroid or something.)
Prometheus wasn’t cancelled because of “irrational fear of nukes”, it was cancelled by Griffin (along with a full quarter of the science budget) to channel more funding to Ares/Orion.
Presumably it would have been on the list of tech development programs brought back to life under Obama’s 2010 plan. And hence is now blocked by SLS/Orion.
Correct yes; I wasn’t referring to a particular mission, merely to the refusal to consider nukes as power sources mostly because Americans are science-stupid, by and large.
Sorry, I thought people were generally aware of Prometheus. It wasn’t a specific mission, it was a general program to develop a new generation of nuclear reactors, principally for future NEP missions, but it was intended to “put the tool on the shelf” for any future use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Cancelled as soon as Mike Griffin took over. And nothing shows how little interest the proponents of the Constellation program had in actually going to the moon than that. If you wanted a permanent lunar base, given the 14 day “night”, what better technology to have than a space-rated nuclear reactor. If you want to develop ISRU fuel from polar ices, what better power source that a space-rated nuclear reactor.
If, otoh, your only interest is in a pathetic mimicking of Apollo’s “big wocket”, then yeah, Prometheus was just in the way.
In my experience, the fear-of-the-fear-of-nuclear-power seems to be more common these days than the actual fear-of-nuclear-power.
Excellent points. Any serious exploration of the outer planets or the Moon will require a substantial source of electric power not dependent on the Sun. The only source currently feasible at the required power levels is a reactor.
I though Block 2 was only for cargo. Is this Block 1A with the new boosters?
Block 1B with advanced boosters
Absolutely no goals in mind for 9 joy rides around the moon. Inspired yet? How can they ask for the billions and billions this will cost with a straight face?
Because its creating federal jobs in their districts? Ever hear about the “bridge to nowhere”?
Rocket to nowhere. Or, (very expensive) welfare for aerospace engineers.
I suggest you look at acquisition for any other government project; especially defense and you will see a lot of straight faces. At least we get a real heavy lifter out of it, if they ever do decide spend the money to go some place.
Structurally there is something wrong with NASA’s human space flight program. We were flying 4-6 Shuttle flights a year with a very sophisticated, high maintenance vehicle and it was costing us about $3 billion a year. Now we are supposed to fly one Orion SLS mission every year (or two) in a vehicle that is not nearly as sophisticated, a booster not a lot different from a Shuttle, an Orion Service Module built by ESA, and yet the price for a single flight is probably higher than 4-6 Shuttle flights. (And note that there is no cis-lunar hab module or lander of any kind-those of course are additional). Why do we keep getting less and it keeps costing more?
I’d guess that this is what happens when you put managers in charge of projects who themselves have never designed or built any space hardware. They think that everything is so difficult that they have no way to judge a reasonable cost. Its cost+. The contractor makes more by charging more. There is no incentive to do things on a budget or a schedule. The contractors snooker the NASA managers every time. You’d think that after a few years someone would catch on.
An appealing argument in some quarters, but likely not entirely supported by facts (which I don’t have, by the way).
I think if you research the backgrounds of the managers, from the top on down, you will find an amazing dearth of legitimate DDT&E experience. Being a flight director, especially in a program that had been ongoing for a generation before you doesn’t count for much. Similarly, having negotiated a contract for use of a Russian module that was built when you were in college doesn’t count for much either.
Congress set the size and cost of the HLV/capsule and has zero missions that NASA must achieve.
Q1: How does Congress judge a ‘reasonable’ cost of $B/yr divided by zero missions? Was not Congress, not NASA, snookered by this infinity mission cost as Congress wrote but apparently did not read the bill?
Q2: Why did Congress ignore NASAs internal studies of alternative approaches 10Bs less?
http://spaceref.com/commerc…
“Provided, That not less than $1,197,000,000 shall
be for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle: Provided further, That not less than $1,857,000,000 shall be for the Space Launch System, which shall have a lift capability not less than 130 tons and which shall have
an upper stage and other core elements developed simultaneously”
EM-1 etc are test flights, not missions.
There are assorted reasons. Eventually these will become clearer should someone really delve into this in detail, talking to the people, pouring thru numbers.
For one, throwing things away versus the refurbishable Orbiter. Orion basically goes down the path of being about the same amount of work as Orbiter, except work of a different kind (the Orbiter’s 25% refurb). Hence, the Orbiter project office became about dollar for dollar the Orion project office. Or put most simply – JSC’s money there has remained JSC’s money, and the Orion work just fills the funding available (at low productivity).
The organizational complexity does not necessarily track the apparent vehicle complexity.
As well, the core is not just an ET with cheaper disposable engines. “Sustaining” Rocketdyne went down a similar path of what was being spent before on a yearly basis once again being spent, or assumed as “basic Rocketdyne keep around costs”. In this case keep them around to make disposable vs reusable engines. Same dollar amount (apx.) per year. No incentives or capability for “more” at the same amount of $.
The Orbiter Main Propulsion and Power systems, always a major complexity, was transferred over to the ET. Except more complex, larger, and manufacturing one every throw, versus checking out how it did, reusing it all on an Orbiter. Added engines(s), added plumbing, etc. Checkout? Just as much for a very long time, even for brand new hardware, given low volume. Again, it’s hard to get anyone to say we had 1000 people before, but only need 100 now. VPs don’t get rewarded for that. The easy path? I had 1000 people. I still need 1000 people. And maybe 1500. (Bonus time!)
SRB/SRM’s were always at a high fixed cost. Contractors are loath to cut the price in half for half as much. Costs don’t behave that way. Rather the basic cost is to get a unit done at all, and the rest gets tacked on inside that basic cost. So now the savings there from not flying, as during development, are years NASA still has to keep ATK doing something to “keep them around”. Might as well get something, like an upgraded booster, an added segment, etc. Even if these things were not done at all the “keep around” cost would be about the same! The upgrade gets NASA something new, i.e., might as well.
The list is long.
The list of missteps in predicting how contractor relationships behave, what sustaining a prior capability means, what little negotiating leverage NASA actually has, and more missteps, all at the expense of future capability, goes on and on. (With my own admission of guilt there.)
I get the idea the Congress sets the budget, but not how NASA spends it all and gets so little. Every aerospace project I have been involved in, and there were a few, the budget was estimated based on vehicle mass, system complexity, and an intelligent guess for new technology development. In Orion/SLS, there is little new tech development required, the systems are pretty well known. But what you are saying is that cost is no longer based on the system, but rather on politics. At this rate no one is going anywhere anytime soon.
>flying 4-6 Shuttle flights a year
I remember those days. It was like Grand Central Station with lots of astronauts marching to the astrovan, loading into Shuttle, then week or two later they exit the orbiter like from a airliner exiting passengers on the tarmac so they can do walk around, get pictures with various people. And the traffic jams around Cocoa Beach and Titusville.
SLS/Orion is completely expendable. At least with the shuttle, the orbiter, including the SSMEs, were reused on every flight. Yes, maintenance between flights was expensive, but imagine the cost and schedule implications if the orbiter was disposable. That’s Orion.
At about $2 billion per flight, that is $20 billion to do next to nothing.
I wouldn’t call it nothing. Mars is a mandatory minimum year something long in which Murphy can kill you and there is no turning back. The tech needs to be tested and some of the wrinkles ironed out.
And they’ll be doing infrastructure building and science along the way.
It’s the long gaps between those missions that bugs me. Together with the costs, it may not be sustainable for long enough to get to Mars. The price per launch needs to come way down and the crewed launch cadence out of LEO needs to go way up.
SLS/Orion might end up being just stepping stones to Mars rather than the transport.
There’s no funding for tech development, let alone in-space testing, precisely because of the existence of SLS/Orion.
There’s no funding for infrastructure (beyond that necessary to launch SLS) or science, precisely because of the existence of SLS/Orion.
Yes.
And the broader purpose of SLS/Orion is Planetary Science…which has been pillaged in order to build SLS/Orion. That and the huge gap between test flight and first exploration mission (actually another test flight) makes it look like the makings of another one-launch wonder.
Human spaceflight aside, it’s interesting that the Europa multiple flyby mission isn’t listed. That mission has been directed by Congress to plan on a SLS launch by 2023. Even if this is just a preliminary list of manned missions, I don’t see a gap in the schedule for EMF (unless they think they can manage to SLS flights a year, or do EMF in 2022.)
That might be about how many Falcon Heavy flights there’ll be before someone walks on Mars. 😉
Of course, the schedule will be packed in a bit tighter.
Interesting point. My first reaction was that SpaceX has a history of schedule slips. Then it occurred to me that SLS does as well.
Schedule slips in development can probably be expected from any spaceflight project involving envelope expanding tech. Flight schedule slips in interplanetary travel for flying systems are deal-killers because of limited launch windows. F9 LEO and GSO schedule slips cost customers money, and are very bad, but manageable. SLS is billed as exclusively an outer orbit and solar orbit launch vehicle and thus had better not have any schedule slips at all because such would make it totally unsuitable.
I wonder about that.
By this time don’t we actually know how to build rockets? SLS isn’t even a rocket in the sense that the actual engines are proven hand-me-downs. So basically it’s a couple of big tanks, some guidance hardware and the like. It is not new tech.
Over simplification, of course. But still.
You mean building rockets isn’t exactly rocket science? (Sorry, I couldn’t pass that up.)
Seriously, modern launch vehicles are a big improvement over those of the 1960s. That’s largely due to incorporating new technology, and that’s where the development cost and schedule slips crop up. Of course, you can get excessive cost and schedule slips just from poor management, but there are valid reasons as well. Compared to aviation, I think rocketry is still at an early stage. Building and flying fewer than a hundred launch vehicles of given model, before shifting to a significantly different design is the norm. How long has it been since that was true of aircraft? Sometime in the 1930s?
Thank you for the polite ruler slap. You car correct. This is possible case of knowing waaay to little about a subject.
Still: rockets are being built all over the planet now. And why are we building an entirely new vehicle? Are we getting better fuel mileage?
Rockets are subject to some very basic equations. And unlike airplanes, where incremental improvements in jet engines plus experience with control surfaces has made real strides, a rocket operates for 10 minutes at the most.
I understand the various flavors of rockets. And I don’t know enough to answer this question: what is the incremental improvement that SLS offers over Saturn- which by the way was 100% reliable? Yes, Saturn had its own history of mix-and-match, but still it lofted a hell of a lot of mass. IS SLS more efficient? Does it have more gizmos that improve operation in that 10 minute lifespan? How much more efficiency can you get when mixing fuel and oxidizer?
More to the point: are we fussing with rockets because that’s all we can do? Making better tires because we haven’t figured out how to make a car?
I didn’t intend any ruler slapping, and you’re making a good point. I can’t honestly say how SLS will be an improvement over the Saturn V in any meaningful way.
It is a new, almost clean-sheet, design incorporating modern (or more modern) technology. That’s where the cost and schedule issues come in. Will the result be significantly better?
It may be more reliable: Saturn was 12 1/2 for 13 (Apollo 6 had some upper stage problems which put it in the wrong orbit.) Someone could argue that it would have been ~95% reliable, if we’d flown enough, while SLS will be 99% reliable. We never had enough Saturn flights to prove this one way or another, and I doubt we’ll ever have enough SLS flights. But I’m sure people can point to some SLS feature and say, “this avoids a problem that might have come up with Saturn.”
SLS certainly has a lower initial mass to payload mass, and higher efficiency/specific impulse engines. But it isn’t clear to me why that matters. Cost and reliability to put 120 tonnes on orbit are things the user cares about. The initial mass of the rocket really isn’t important. So improvements there aren’t a big deal.
Personally, I’d say SLS is a new design, with new(er) technology, but it’s not really delivering a better launch vehicle than the Saturn V was. I wouldn’t say the same thing about the Falcon Heavy. That’s a new design with new technology, but it also promises to deliver better performance in meaningful respects.
“while SLS will be 99% reliable” Perhaps, but perhaps not. The abysmally low flight rate of SLS won’t help reliability one bit. Saturn V launched at a rate that will be two to four times that of SLS. That’s quite non-trivial.
I’m not claiming that SLS will be 99% reliable. That sentence started with, “Some could argue…” I’m not one of them, but I’m fairly sure there are people who would say SLS will be 99% reliable. Personally, I think any claims to 99% reliability, given the low flight rates, are absurd.
Take the Saturn V, and credit it with 13 out of 13 successful launches (calling Apollo 6 a success, not a partial failure.) Statistically, all that track record means is that there is a 50% chance the true reliability was over 94.8%. And a 10% chance its reliability was only 83.8%, and they just got lucky. Since SLS will have a similarly small number of launches, statistics won’t back up any meaningful claims about reliability.
As far as the low SLS flight rates go, I heard a presentation at the last OPAG meeting, where someone involved with SLS said the low flight rate wasn’t a reliability issue. He said the planned rate was now about the same as the flight rate for the Delta IV Heavy (nine launches since 2004), and they didn’t have reliability problems from low flight rates. Personally, I question this, since the Delta IV Heavy has quite a bit in common with other Delta IV’s.
The glory is in the details. SLS is just a big rocket, and the engines aren’t new, and tanks and guidence are roughly the same, but based on the best best practices of our time. But Orion is hardly just another capsule, and has to withstand inter-planetary flight re-entry velocities. All of those things have never flown together in this configuration, and there are probably some new things slipped in to all of it. I think that overall that makes it new tech…in 2018. Maybe not so much in 2022.
I thought Orion couldn’t manage interplanetary reentry velocities, just translunar ones. Did I misunderstand that?
My memory might be off on it, but I recall that the heat shield is supposed to withstand Mars return velocities. I don’t think that “there and back again” test flight tested for that though and I read that that was a flawed shield anyway and the improvement will still need a flight test.
This confirms that the test was for lunar return, and seems to imply that the design objective is for Mars return…without really saying it.
https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
Aaaand here I’d the article where I read about the flaw they corrected for post EFT1 capsules…
https://spaceflightnow.com/…
“So you mean even if Santa Claus delivered it to us we couldn’t afford to operate it?!”
Only if you are flying one SLS per year. IMO the operating overhead for three or four SLS flights per year is the same as a single SLS flight.
Basically the Congress didn’t fund any payloads for the SLS to have any scale of economy from sustain production. The current one or less SLS production rate per year means you are restarting the production line and gathering parts every year.
My guess is that when the steel casing segments for the SRB and the re-furbished RS-25 SSME get used up, there will be no new production replacements. Since that will required an increase in the annual NASA budget for at least a deadcde or so..
There’s a hard production limit of 2 per year, and realistically 1 per year. Beyond that they’d have to drastically increase funding to pay for new production and integration facilities.
As I understand it the current production rate was set due to the lack of payloads. Of course for a higher production rate you will need more funding for another shift on the production line. Don’t believe that more facilities than what is sited currently at Michoud is required.
From what I’ve read, it’s a lot more than just adding an extra shift, the existing first stage production line was designed around a maximum of 2 flights per year. (Mainly Boeing’s side, but the engine production seems worse.) They would essentially have to build an entire new production facility for anything over 2/yr. And realistically, when you max out a production line for something this complex, minor problems inevitably delays the entire production chain. So 1/yr is more realistic, IMO.
AIUI, there are similar obstructions around vertical integration and launch. Much of the excess capacity that the Shuttle needed to achieve 4 flights per year has been rendered unusable to SLS.
You got it! (Greason did too).
Note that 9 out of these 10 flights have an asterisk * by them for ESA built Service Modules, which have NOT been agreed upon.
Everybody knows this is a boondoggle.
The manifest shown is sad as well for being fantasy. Nominally the SLS with Orion may make 3 to 5 flights by 2030. The bad news isn’t what’s shown, a hidden advertisement, as disappointing as it seems to some here, myself included. We are underwhelmed. Internally the feeling is achieving that manifest would be a good thing, great even. The bad news is the reality behind the lie is far worse.
Rocket to nowhere.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Forget Footprints. They don’t even have the precursor items like EDL test articles or propositioned fuel processing and return vehicles which will require several pre-two year opportunities to have occurred before sending people. Meaning there is at least another 6 to 8 years lost in there anyway. I dont think people selling this to DC seem to understand what still needs to be accomplished before hand.
Fellow space cadets: you might want to go over to National Review for George Will’s latest column:
“Boondoggles: The Transaction Costs of Democracy”
“…After seeing reconstruction of Manhattan’s West Side Highway take 35 years (construction of the George Washington Bridge took 39 months), Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan despaired that whereas America once celebrated people who built things, it now honors those who block building.”
“…now honors those who block building”.
That just sums it up perfectly.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.c…
You point is a good one, by and large, but I would point out that the West Side Highway was a tragic example of highway madness – lessons still being learned, by the way.
I’d point to Mr. Christie’s refusal to build a new tunnel; or Gov. Scott’s antipathy towards the rail infrastructure Florida needs.
Never fear, though, as the president elect has proposed large tax incentives for private industry to build and own new infrastructure. Gov. Scott tried to sell some big highways here in Florida after his election; public outcry was stunning and swift.
Has NASA changed the contract for new engines?
There are currently 16 engines salvaged from the Shuttle program, enough for four launches. NASA has contracted 6 more to be delivered by 2027. Enough for one extra launch plus a couple of spares. That’s an absolute maximum of five possible launches by 2027 (realistically, 2028.)
The timeline gives 7 launches by 2027, 8 by 2028.
Where are the additional 10 engines coming from?
Paul, I’m not sure we should take this schedule as gospel. Trump has already admitted the NASA budget isn’t going up so maybe NASA will fly around the moon and come back but nothing more.
I hate to admit Trump is right but there really isn’t any extra money to give NASA to land on the moon, mars, or some rock. Check out those OMB charts, they are very real and very sobering. If Trump tells NASA there’s no money and to go pound sand at least he leaves no ambiguity.
My question is this. Since NASA will never get enough money to explore the solar system would it be better to get rid of human spaceflight completely and put all the remaining money into the other great things NASA does?
I’m just talking in terms of status quo. With the existing contracts, the schedule is already impossible. Not just “they’ll probably end up a bit late”, I mean they physically don’t have enough rocket engines to meet this schedule.
Rot. The combination of Trump’s tax cuts and defence and “infrastructure” spending is going to blow out the debt by over half a trillion dollars in his first term. And that’s ignoring his “wall”.
He and his supporters are clearly not concerned with OMB projections.
(Scare quotes around “infrastructure” since it looks like his intention is to merely subsidise private developments (you know, like his own, his friends’, his investors’) without any government ownership or control over the resulting assets. Private airports, docks, toll-bridges and toll-roads all at the taxpayers’ expense. It seems to be the first draft of a plan to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from the US.)
I don’t think we have enough information about this schedule. It may be a goal, and intended to get people within NASA thinking about what needs to be done to achieve that goal. For example, noting that current RS-25E production plans are inadequate. I don’t know, but I do know they couldn’t justify a higher production rate without pointing to some plan or goal which requires more of them.
The 6 new RS-25E/SSME variants are most likely staying on Earths to be use as test articles for basically what amounts to a entirely new engine.
A follow-on contract for additional RS-25E by the end of next year for even a remote possibility of more RS-25E available past the fourth SLS flight. Presuming there is no hiccups in the development t of the RS-25E.or the SLS.
If all six ordered engines are intended for testing, and from what I’ve read the contract sets 2027 as the delivery date, then how could an additional 16 production engines be ordered for delivery and flight before the test engines are even delivered?
According to this schedule, they’ll run out of engines in 2024.
If we ever construct an EML Gateway station, this is what the SLS manifest would look like. Such a station, rotating crew, would cost so much, we could kiss both the Moon and mars good bye.
This is a frigging joke.
NASA is about to be relegated to the trash heap of history with this. This is over $10 BILLION a flight.
Horrible. No one wants to fly this… except congressmen and senators.
Good grief! Mueller and Low are turning in their graves…