Newt Gingrich Hints At Anti-SLS Whisper Campaign
Newt Gingrich: A glimpse of America’s future in space in 2024, Fox
“If the Trump-Pence team pushes it, Falcon Heavy rockets could have more than 100 launches through 2024. The New Glenn, which will lift almost as much as the Falcon Heavy and will be rated to carry humans from Day One, could add another 20 flights between 2020 and 2024. Together, these approximately 120 heavy commercial flights would lift as much payload as 60 of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) flights. However, there will be at most four SLS flights by end of 2024, according to current plans. Each reusable commercial flight will also cost less than $100 million, while SLS flights will cost $700 million to $1 billion per launch.”
– Trump Transition Team Wants Old Space Vs New Space Smackdown, earlier post
– Newt Gingrich Thinks SLS May Become a Museum Piece – Soon, earlier post
Gingrich thinks that #ulcats and @nasa_sls will coexist briefly and that SLS could become a museum piece as a result of cost and performance
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 1, 2017
It should be a shout it from every roof top not a whisper campaign. Decade ago an internal HLV might have made sense but now it is time to embrace the near term affordable options outside the gate and not designan architecture beholden to SLS to justify it’s existence. We can either have a robust moon and Mars campaign leveraging commercial and international capabilities or SLS and Orion but not both.
Shuttle-C, launch LEO capsule on Atlas V, done.
Would that include using solid rocket boosters? IIRC, Shuttle-C still used SRB’s and the “Navaho stack” configuration of the Shuttle. I have worked more solid rocket systems than liquid (and I started designing and static testing liquid rocket engines as early as high school, back in the 1950’s), and I don’t trust high value (human or cargo) payloads as far as I can throw a segment with my left hand! As far as using an Atlas V, that is great…so long as you have RD-180’s still available. And don’t tell me ULA can “plug in” a BE-4 to an Atlas V airborne structure without lengthening the fuel tank to the point where bending problems would start to be a problem. Have to go with wider tanks. Can we say “Vulcan, boys and girls?”
Ad LEO! AD LUNA! Ad Ares! AD ASTRA!
Agreed, that ship has sailed. But back when Mike Griffin picked the next transpiration architecture, it would have been a viable option. And as for the RD-180, NASA could have funded a domestic replacement. All it takes is about 5 years and $1+ billion and Aerojet Rocketdyne will design, test, and deliver a new engine to spec.
As for safety of cargo on Shuttle-C, the cargo that’s absolutely never destroyed is the one never launched. By that measure, SLS is the best launch vehicle ever! 😉
“All it takes is about 5 years and $1+ billion and Aerojet Rocketdyne will design, test, and deliver a new engine to spec.”
There’s another company out there that can do the same thing- and at the same time, deliver a new booster capable of propulsive landing.
No extra cost.
Someone should have told Griffin that “better is the enemy of good enough”. Years and tens of billions of dollars later, and we’ve yet to see launch 1 of a crew on SLS/Orion.
I think it won’t matter anyway. SLS won’t have the availability…or the launch cadence…to fill the need anyway. As for spacecraft, the private sector knows how to make those too, and they’ll know who to go to to launch them.
It will be interesting to see how far this stating of the obvious truth about SLS will go now that a new administrator is in place. I do hear that a few more members of Congress not on the committees responsible for NASA are growing unhappy about the money spent on SLS with no results. It will be interesting to see if their numbers grow enough to force a change.
FH vs SLS blog articles now seem to trend a little every time SpaceX or Tesla hit the news for anything. The ghost of Starman lives on and keeps swinging back through and whacking SLS with a baseball bat again and again. Eventually that has to start to cause PR headaches for pro-SLS Senators.
When FH starts flying regular it’ll only get worse.
Kill SLS.
This is a fantastic read. Do not tl;dr this one.
So many excellent points about leveraging what we have and what we could do. The future is exciting.
He’s right, honestly. If you’re willing to do some in-orbit assembly and refueling, then it just makes a ton more sense to go the commercial route assuming SpaceX can deliver on that many potential flights.
Unfortunately Gingritch makes such a broad range of fanciful satements that it isn’t easy toi give this talk any credibility. Moreover, it’s not clear if cancellation of one program ever means funds will be available for another. We should not forget that when Obama attempted to cancel Constellation, he was unable to divert the funds to technology development. If SLS is cancelled we might simply see another program created to keep the funding stream the same.
In my opinion achieving success through the commercial programs is more likely to bring about change. SpaceX and Blue are starting with the commercial and DOD markets, not competing directly with SLS. Although they would accept an order for a launch, neither Musk nor Bezos wants to depend so much on Exploration as a customer that a program cancellation there would be critical to their roadmaps. A more worrisome issue to me is NASA’s decision not to permit testing of the Dragon propulsive landing system with its potential to further reduce operational cost.
Funny how working for NASA carries greater risk than a Commercial Mars program.
Blue Origin needs to put or start attempting to put something in orbit before I’ll take them as a serious contender. For now, they shouldn’t be in the equation.
Ya. Far as I’ve seen so far Jeff Bezos only has one paying customer…and that’s Jeff Bezos. That makes it a hobby.
Hope he starts getting paid to launch his rockets before they’re obsolete.
He has four customers signed for New Glenn:
http://spacenews.com/blue-o…
Insert Morgan Freeman “He’s Right You Know” meme here.
If support for the SLS in Congress finally collapses, a lot of what Newt said could happen by 2024. NASA already has the capability of supporting a significant lunar program leading to human operations, but it cannot switch support to the use of the private launchers without permission from Congress. In addition, NASA’s current mindset simply cannot accommodate the idea of a dozen or more heavy launches a year, a rate that is needed to support a practical lunar mining and science operation. This huge launch capacity now exists and the USA cannot use it.
Further, while launch prices will come down once real competition exists between companies with reusable first stage boosters, that will probably not happen for another 2 years, which is the earliest that the New Glenn should be available. Decision makers will face further indecision when they realize in about a year that the BFR and BFS will soon be real and available. I am already hearing some who say that the Falcon Heavy should be used since it is already available, and others who say that we could start designing payloads or operational plans based on the BFS. The rockets will be ready to use before program funding and payload design will be ready.
If this disjunction in thinking and capacity continues for long, NASA will be left in the dust as the private companies gain the ability to pursue their own commercial space goals.
100 FH launches by 2024? Newt is smoking something that’s not yet legal in his home state. It would mean a launch cadence of 20 per year for FH starting in 2020 when they will only have one or two flying cores at the end of 2018 and will be cannibalizing that program’s funding to develop BFR during that same period.
Even a wild-eyed SpaceX fan like me can’t see that happening.
Gingrich and whisper aren’t usually two words that go together! At a time when Congress is putting extra money into SLS to build a second pad that NASA didn’t even ask for and Richard Shelby from Alabama is becoming the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Musk is ditching his Falcon Heavy so he can pursue his missionless BFR, I’m certain that we will see dozens of FH’s launching every year and the cancellation of SLS – what nonsense! Gingrich is the saddest kind of has been – he is clueless to his own irrelevance!
I read that the new market will be made up of smaller satellites, larger space station modules, and cis-lunar resupply. It’ll be FH (and SLS) that will be missionless.
Repeat after me…No Throwaway Second Stage.
Smaller satellites don’t need a BFR – the more you put on one rocket, the more risk to the entire constellation; what “larger space station modules”? NASA’s talking about de-orbiting ISS and Bigelow wants to launch inflatables. As for cis-lunar resupply, yes, that’s probably a good application but given that NASA’s plan is very minimalist, its hard to see a large number of resupply missions being needed. BFR, if built, will be the A-380 of the Space Age – a huge engineering accomplishment that winds up being a business failure!
If not sure if he was thinking of BFR launching small satellites. Small satellites are definitely a growing market for launch vehicles, and Falcon Heavy isn’t a good choice. BFR also isn’t.
It’s not just the risk of losing a whole constellation in one launch attempt. Arguably, that’s no worse a blow than losing a single, very large and expensive satellite in one launch attempt. But the constellations people are talking about (and any others I can think of) require satellites in multiple orbital planes. That’s very expensive in terms of on orbit propulsion. Something like six launches of six satellites would work, but one launch of 36 would be very inefficient. That means this isn’t going to be a good market for Falcon Heavy, BFR or New Glenn. But it is a market for the new, smaller launch vehicles like Rocket Lab’s Electron.
All true and well said – which makes the commercial market for BFR even smaller!
Those Bigelow inflatables inflate from a particular core diameter…which is larger with the BFR.
I predict that they’ll end up building to the size of the widest ride available. Less on orbit assembly time. Build the whole thing then launch it and expand it like a ship in a bottle. Three or four modules max.
As for the moon, as I’ve said before, I’ve given up on NASA for sending anyone there or to Mars. The resupply contracts will be between launch services and different companies, and maybe the space agencies of smaller countries with something to prove.
I’ve worked SLS. The depths of mind-numbing bureaucracy and technical ignorance on the NASA/MSFC Engineering side is absolutely breathtaking.
NASA/MSFC fiddles while the Commercial Sector makes them irrelevant…
Why wasn’t Newt Gingrich made NASA Administrator? He gets it! The big picture. How it all comes together. He understands the NewSpace / Space 2.0 vision, and is not stuck in a Space 1.0 mindset of Apollo 2.0. The NASA SLS/Orion path will lead nowhere over decades, and see US space leadership slip away as hundreds of billions are wasted on yesterday’s technology. Thank god for commercial space who have stepped into the breach and are trying new things and new approaches.
He gets it? Even IF SX could establish and maintain that incredible cadence, where is the payload to come from?
I’m inclined to say the launch cadence Mr. Gingrich suggested is delusional. But there is a strong tie between launch costs (per kilo) and payload cost. If you aren’t worried about optimizing the satellite, to get as much performance as you can squeeze into ever ounce of launch mass, the the costs of designing and building the spacecraft go way down. It hasn’t been well-studied, but letting the mass go up by a factor of two could cut costs by a factor of five or ten.
That involves little things like using an existing radio, attitude control system or solar array, which is heavier and more capable than you actually need. If the mass isn’t a huge concern, then ordering it from a catalogue is much cheaper than insisting on a custom design which is just right for your application.
I wonder why no one is whispering about shutting down Orion? Its far too expensÃve, taking far too long, redundant at least with the manned Dragon, and maybe with CST too, and besides if were going to the Moon, the Apollo method is totally wrong.
{laughs} If SLS launches four times before 2025, I’ll eat my keyboard.
{laughs} Gingrich is being stupidly generous here. At nearly $4b/yr, even at the unlikely 1 launch per year, that’s still $4b per launch, plus tens of billions in amortised development costs to get there.