This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work—for YOU.
289-page pdf of “any emails, memos, letters, or communications sent or received by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, that reference ‘Space Force'” up at muckrock now // https://t.co/YYNlDVITQ7
— Matthew Phelan U+1F339 (@CBMDP) November 9, 2018
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
Comments are closed.
NASA Watch: Your support is needed, support independent journalism.
Thank you for whatever support you can provide. We recently launched this upgraded website which will allow us to expand our coverage. But the design and hosting come at cost, as does adding new services. We're also going looking to add new journalists as we expand.
We'll send a verification code to %EMAIL%.
It includes some info on that lander you’ve been wondering about.
An informative discussion of this issue on the Space Show a few days ago. After hearing it, even this old antiwar protester was thinking “hmm…”
I love this bit of fantasy:
Monday 7/9: 1:00 PM – 1:30 PM: Administrator Interview with Time Magazine
Reporter: Jeffrey Kluger
This is laughable. Not only are they admitting that with current NASA funding that SLS will likely launch every 2 years, they’re suggesting that DOD or international partners would actually pay money to launch on SLS! That’s absolutely laughable.
Even before the Challenger disaster, DOD was looking for a way out of the whole shuttle deal. Challenger was the perfect excuse to pull out of the shuttle program. I don’t see DOD ever getting back into bed with NASA after the absolute disaster of the shuttle program. From a cost and flight rate perspective, SLS looks even worse than the space shuttle. DOD would likely want a Vandenberg site for SLS and the one that was for the shuttle is not an option anymore (SLC-6 is currently used for launches of the Delta IV launch vehicle family).
For much the same reasons, I don’t see “International partners” being interested either. Every possible “international partner” already has their own launch vehicles, so they’d need the “unique capabilities” of SLS in order to make it worth the billions necessary for a single launch.
As for “etc”, the only thing left is commercial customers. Not only is there zero chance a commercial customer would want SLS, NASA is barred by law from launching commercial payloads (this change in the law happened after Challenger).
So this reads to me that increasing the flight rate of SLS is a pure fantasy.
You’re assuming they will charge the full cost for a SLS launch. Even when it was launching commercial payloads, the Shuttle certainly didn’t. For both SLS and the Shuttle, the large fraction of the costs were fixed, regardless of how many launches per year (or, for SLS, years per launch.) If they just charge the incremental cost of an additional launch, and don’t put in amortized launch costs, a SLS launch might not look exorbitant compared to a Delta IV Heavy.
While true, I don’t expect DOD to take the bait. They were badly burned by the space shuttle program’s constantly slipping schedules. I seriously doubt they would ever want to be beholden to NASA for launch ever again.
From what I’ve read elsewhere, NASA could up the production of SLS to support a twice per year launch rate. I’m not sure what sort of investment would be required to go beyond that still quite limited production rate. If you’ve got to start duplicating tooling (and hiring more people to go with it) at Michoud Assembly Facility, then your fixed costs are going to go up in order to support that higher launch rate.
Unfortunately there isn’t a detailed analysis that I’m aware of that would show what kind of investment and increased fixed costs would be needed for an SLS flight rate greater than twice per year.
Like every other official claim about SLS, I doubt even the people who say that mean it.
There isn’t a detailed analysis of the costs of flying SLS once every two years, once every year, or twice every year. There isn’t a detailed analysis of the costs of flying SLS, full stop.
Thinking about fixed costs…can anyone explain the elaborate and extremely machinery that NASA uses for transporting Saturn, then STS, and finally SLS to the pad?
Compare the Russian technique of a locomotive and a track. Or the SX method of a ‘strong back’. Admittedly those huge transporters have panache, but what in the design drives them as a solution?
As I understand it, it’s all about mechanical structure. All rockets have to support their own weight at whatever peak acceleration they reach. But that’s all along the long axis of the rocket. If you stack the rocket vertically and roll it over the the pad on a big transporter, that’s all the mechanical structure has to be designed for.
If you assemble it horizontally, and then erect it, the structure also has to support its weight lying on its side (the tanks’ cross section should stay circular and not sag) and stiff enough not to bend or flex when it’s raised. The strong back helps, but however you do it, horizontal assembly means extra structural mass. Whether or not that’s enough to justify the extra cost is another question. I Also think this is a bigger issue for bigger rockets.
So I guess we are staying that it’s the insistence on vertical stacking that is driving the crawlers?
Actually that reminds me: I never knew why NASA/DOD requires vertical integration?
The crawler goes back to the Saturn V program, and that’s before my time. But the Saturn V was very definitely designed for vertical integration. Once that was set, I think it more or less defined the requirements for the the Vehicle Assembly Building and _something_ to get the rocket from the VAB to the launch pad. I suppose there are other options for transporting a vertical Saturn V, so I’m not sure why they settled on the crawler. Once they already had the VAB and the crawler, using it for the Shuttle and SLS may have been following the path of least resistance.
I don’t think NASA and DoD require vertical integration. I can think of payloads which have flown on horizontally assembled launch vehicles. But there are occasions where vertical assembly could simplify a spacecraft’s mechanical design. I think NASA and the DoD want a vertically integrated vehicle to be available for those occasions.
Rail might be better, but there’s a sharp slope just before the pad that precludes it.
(The pads have to be raised up for the sub-structure (like blast diversion vents), and that structure can’t be built “down” because Florida.)
https://media.defense.gov/2…
In theory a cog railway would work. Well two parallel railways since you need one for each side of the pad. But each pair would only need a center cog rail for the slope, the rest of the several mile path from the VAB could be pushed by a locomotive like the Russians do. The leveling system for the slope would be the same as the current system.
Although I’m not sure what the weight limit is on a cog rail system. Or even the rails themselves since all of the weight of the stack and MLP would be concentrated onto a small section of track. Assuming a similar arrangement as the current crawlers the weight would be spread over four separate tractors, but that would still be a lot of weight on each tractor.
Even if it’s possible, whether this would have been cheaper or better than the roadbed system that they chose I have no idea. I would assume that a cog railway was considered when the pads were first constructed, but for whatever reason it was considered either impractical, impossible, or maybe too uncertain, especially since they had a time limit. But then again the crawlers were beyond the scope of anything that had existed up until that time.
They could just smooth the grade from the VAB to the launchpad. Instead of flat-flat-flat-ramp.
—
Apparently the crawlers themselves only cost $14m apiece in 1965. About $110m each in today’s money. Have a look at how much NASA is spending to fix them for SLS Block I, and then upgrade them for SLS Block II (which won’t ever get built.)
I guess once they had decided on crawlers that it was cheaper to make the ramp as short as they could get away with. The result being a 5% grade. I’ll bet the people who built it wouldn’t have imagined that fifty years later a private company would be hauling their rocket up that same ramp horizontally.
Likely cheaper to simply match the grade on both ends 50 years ago. Lots of fill, true, but nothing compared to, say, a highway.
5% is a formidable grade.
I know that was always the standard claim, but I gotta call bullshit on the “$500m per extra STS launch” claim that went around at the time. (And the $750m/launch for SLS being used by NASA today.)
If you require a certain number of hours of work to pick and replace the felt between every tile of every orbiter after every mission, then if it takes N FTEs for 4 flights per year, it’s gonna take 2N FTEs for 8 flights. Because if you had less than one-FTEs worth of work per year, you’d have cross-trained him to do something else (like tile installation) in his spare time. There might be a small amount of efficiency gain across more missions/yr, thanks to labour specialisation, but not enough to reduce $1.5b per flight to $0.5b.
Likewise, If a piece of equipment costs $X million in maintenance/amortised-replacement costs per year to, say, install/remove SSMEs for four flights per year, then it will cost close to $2X million for eight flights, because machine maintenance is dominated by “hours of use”, not “number of years regardless of whether it gets used.”
There are facilities construction costs that are fixed. Like the foundation and housing for that SSME installer machine. But those are build costs, not maintenance. NASA doesn’t amortise initial build costs across sales units, like a company selling a widget. Nor do they amortise development costs. (Nor do the contractors. They get paid for development costs, for build costs, and for ongoing costs in separate contracts.)
Phones, IT, water, electricity, etc. Sure, you have fixed annual services costs. But if those were responsible for the extra $1b in the $1.5b/flight costs of the Shuttles, I’ll eat my keyboard.
If SLS costs $3b per year for one launch every two years, there is no way in hell that is $0.75b for the vehicle and $4.5b “fixed” costs.
When it comes to the workforce, it really depends on how things are managed. You can’t automatically assume someone who wasn’t needed 100% of the time would be cross-trained to do some other, necessary, job.
First, you might want the ability to surge production without expanding the workforce. (E.g. having people to support one SLS launch per year when necessary, even though only one every other year is manifested.) Second, there may or may not be similar jobs which someone could be easily cross-trained to do. It might not be realistic to ask a tile-felt-stuffer to do checks on engine control microprocessors. Or vice versa.
I hate to say it, but people do sometimes find the easy solution not the efficient one. In the case of someone who may or may not be needed 100% of the time, there is an easy solution. You find jobs that aren’t really needed, but which don’t require much cross-training and might be nice to have done if someone had time to do them. If you increase the flight rate, those labor costs don’t go up, and all you lose is some nice to have extras.
Actually, it could be worse. I’m aware of one company which has an overhead charge number for “no useful work.” Yes, it is set up so someone they need to keep available can get paid for sitting around and waiting for that need to come up.
Let me put it this way, several NASA managers (including Bolden, IIRC) testified under oath to Congress that the unit-price of SLS was $750m.
Do you believe that if NASA were told to increase the flight-rate of SLS from 1 in two years to 4 in two years, the agency would propose a budget increase in, say, 2021 from $3b/yr to $4.124b/yr, excluding payload-costs? Do you seriously believe that if the USAF added a large-sat launch to SLS’s manifest, Boeing would charge them $750m for that extra launch?
No. If you increased the flightrate up to the supposed 2 per year that Boeing claimed they were capable of, were paid for, the budget for those “fixed costs” would suddenly need to double or triple. Oh, and Boeing would invariably put its hand out for $billions more to pay for building additional facilities needed for the increased production before they even got to that point (even though 2/yr was in their original contract.)
Of course the supposedly fixed costs would go up if a higher flight rate were requested. I can even imagine some of the justifications. That guy who was doing make work jobs to fill the time when he wasn’t working to support the lower flight rate? Someone would suddenly decide the make work job wasn’t really just “nice to have” but actually essential. Please don’t misunderstand me. I was describing the logic, not saying I agree with it.
I get that. But I don’t think the process you are describing, even at its worse, comes close to justifying the scale of difference between the actual budgets and the claimed additional costs (“per unit costs”) of STS or SLS.
Instead, what does “justify” it, is that the claimed “unit cost” is simply not true. The claims that “programs are dominated by fixed cost” are not true (or rather are deliberately misusing the accounting term “fixed cost” to imply something completely different.)
If you mean that those claims involve a large amount of creative accounting, I’m not about to disagree. If a publicly traded, private company put something similar in an annual report, I suspect the SEC would take a dim view of it. But there is enough so-called logic and justification behind those claims to provide a thin veil of plausibility. I like to pay attention to things like that; it’s good practice for noticing similarly dubious claims.
Had to laugh reading this as it explains so much of what goes on in India, a country with so many people needing jobs they frequently just stand one behind the next, staring at the person on front doing the actual work.