Artemis 1 SLS Rollout
NASA’s Moon Rocket Keeps on Rolling to Launch Complex 39B
“NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, with the Orion capsule atop, slowly rolls out of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 17, 2022 on its journey to Launch Complex 39B.”
Costly and years late, NASA’s SLS moon rocket rolls to the launchpad for the first time, Washington Post
“Last week, NASA’s inspector general, Paul Martin, told Congress that his office had calculated the cost for the first three flights of the SLS to be $4.1 billion each, a price tag he said was “unsustainable.” In an era when SpaceX and other companies are building rockets that can be reused for multiple flights, Martin said, “relying on such an expensive, single-use rocket system will, in our judgment, inhibit if not derail NASA’s ability to sustain its long-term human exploration goals to the moon and Mars.”
Earlier posts on SLS
Fact check: 17 million pounds of thrust (or more) for @SpaceX #Starship Vs. ~9 million pounds for @NASA_SLS pic.twitter.com/xwjJmualYn
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 17, 2022
Behold! 12 billion dollars!
I heard that in Dr. Weird’s voice (If you don’t watch ATHF, you won’t get it.)
Has Starship rolled out yet in its final config? Nope.
Has SLS? Nope. The FSW, and many structure on the 1st SLS are different from the follow on rockets. This version is not human rated.
This version is Human rated .
That paper requirement of LOC 1:75 which NASA requires for “Human rated” has zip, zilch to do with engineering. The LOC of 1st Shuttle flight was 1:10 in hindsight. Based on materials, shuttle derived engineering, SLS is probably similar. Powerpoint vs reality
To quote the Russians “Testing cost money and we have plenty of cosmonauts.”
SLS Orion has a launch escape system. Space Shuttle did not. That’s no guarantee of survival, but it does radically reduce the chances of a fatal accident.
No its not.
Worse, the original purpose of “Block 1” was to be used for a single test flight, stacking a modified Delta IV stage on top to get “the SLS” flying years before it actually had an upper stage. The actual EUS won’t fly until 2026 at the earliest, assuming the Artemis I, II, and III flights and EUS development all go perfectly to plan. And even that’s not the “final config”, Block 2 is, and that won’t fly until around 2031.
I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but you are incorrect.
Won’t be until 2025 that SLS and Orion rollout in their fully capable config needed for lunar missions. So starship has plenty of time to pass them in the race.
Starship hasn’t been under development for decades either.
Congrats to NASA… long time coming, too much money, and surely a dead end, but good to see a NASA launch vehicle capable of getting humans beyond LEO on the crawler and heading out to the pad.
I follow Starship/Super Heavy development daily, and it looks to me like it will be a few years before they get to an equivalent stage…
You are kidding, right?
Eh? Kidding about what?
Congrats to NASA? This was an important milestone that many folks at NASA worked hard to achieve. I post congrats to SpaceX when they do the same… and would do the same for Blue Origin… if they ever do.
That SLS is a dead end? If SpaceX is successful, it certainly is.
That it’s good to see a beyond-LEO HSF NASA launch heading out to the pad? Sorry I’ve been waiting for this ever since Nixon killed Apollo, and hell yes it is good to see. Would I like it to be a different launch vehicle? Would I like it to be reusable? Sure.
That SS/SH will be at an equivalent stage in a few years? SpaceX seems to be focused on Starlink right now, and are still iterating on exactly how Ship will handle payload doors and payload deployment. They need crew quarters, life support, power generation etc. They will develop crew quarters and life support for the NASA HLS contract, but that’s a couple years at least. And of course infrastructure completion, EDL testing, engine refinement, etc. I’d guess 2-3 years assuming all goes well, longer if not.
Arguably, SpaceX has already gotten a fully stacked Starship to the pad. So why do you think it will take them a few years to get to “an equivalent stage” as SLS? And the schedule calls for an orbital launch later this year.
Also, as a footnote, Nixon didn’t kill Apollo. That was decided on before the 1968 election.
“So why do you think it will take them a few years to get to “an equivalent stage” as SLS? And the schedule calls for an orbital launch later this year.”
My post indicates why I wouldn’t consider the current B4/S20 stack to be equivalent. And yes I know they plan to do a suborbital test this year, and I expect they will. They may even do additional tests that achieve a full orbit this year, that doesn’t address what I was commenting on.
Regarding who killed Apollo, or the Saturn V to be specific… sure Johnson was focused on the war and it was less of a priority, orders for long lead items were halted by Webb under Johnson, and there were already studies looking at some sort of space shuttle (October of 68 according to wikipedia), but Nixon certainly had the option to press for its continuance and he did not, and the Saturn V production lines were scrapped under his administration. Not surprising given the politics, but still he gets the “credit” for “killing” it in my book.
The first flight of a SuperHeavy/Starship will be an orbital one. The plan they filed with the FAA calls for it making less than one complete orbit, but it would still get to orbital altitude and velocity. (I.e. if they did not perform a reentry burn, it would remain in orbit.) That might happen as early as May, while there is basically no chance of SLS flying before June.
If your orbit intersects the earth prior to one full orbit, I call that suborbital. 😉 And yep I understand they plan to reach orbital velocities and altitude…
That seems an odd way to look at it. What if the reentry maneuver fails? Would the Starship then suddenly be in orbit (since it would complete more one full orbit) rather than suborbital? Because of a failure?
Yes, then I would call it an orbital flight, I don’t find that particularly odd. The flight plan would be suborbital, the flight orbital. If Ship or Super Heavy suffered multiple major engine failures and it just did a short hop into the nearby ocean would you call that an orbital flight? I am curious as to why they don’t plan to do a complete orbit. I’d think that for bragging rights they’d want to do a complete orbit… must be some technical reason.
I guess I see the nature of a trajectory as being defined by an object’s position and velocity. Whether that’s an orbit or not at any given instance doesn’t depend on future events. How would you describe a spacecraft fifteen minutes after launch? I’d say its trajectory is either orbital or suborbital at that instant, and that doesn’t depend on future events. You seem to be saying that it would be in an undetermined state, and whether it’s in orbit or not depends on some future event (i.e. whether or not it performs a reentry burn before completing its first orbit.) That’s what seems odd to me.
As for the planned Starship flight, the US military has a large system of radars north of Hawaii. They use it to track and monitor the reentry phase of ballistic missile tests. They’re willing to provide SpaceX with that sort of data if Starship reenters at that location. The easiest way to do that seems to be a reentry burn before completing the first orbit.
Well, I’d say the trajectory’s instantaneous state is just that… instantaneous position, velocity, acceleration, etc… however many state variables you want to include. If we want to characterize the flight as a whole, we have to, well, look at the flight as a whole. That doesn’t seem controversial to me.
And yes, I thought there would be some military involvement tracking reentry, although I thought it would be at Kwajalein. Just curious as to why it would be easier… maybe just more costly.
By that logic, the nature of a flight can not be characterized until the spacecraft has completed one full orbit. If we apply your standard, we could not say that a spacecraft is “in orbit” until then. But for every single launch I’ve watched, either NASA or the launch service provider has said the rocket had gotten into orbit, or that the payload was in orbit, long before one orbit was completed. No one insists on some Heisenberg Uncertainty thing, where they say, “Well, maybe it is in orbit or maybe it isn’t. We can’t say until it’s moved through a full 360 deg.” It isn’t even clear if Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 flight would satisfy your definition: I don’t think it went through a full orbit between the orbital insertion burn and the reentry burn.
Just saw this while checking my disqus account… I made no mention of the term “in orbit”. I see now that you were trying to get me to say that. I said that if we are referring to a space flight or mission as a whole, for it to be considered an orbital flight, orbital spaceflight, orbital mission, etc I’d think it should complete an orbit or at least be planned to complete an orbit.
If you google “suborbital” you’ll see that what SpaceX is apparently planning for their first full-stack flight is consistent with the definition of “suborbital” from a number of sources (e.g. Mirriam-Webster, Wikipedia, etc.)
Just as significant as the schedules for SLS/Orion and the Star Ship, are the missions for the two. Starship has a multitude of purposes, carrying cargo or people, with capabilities of landing on Earth, Moon or Mars. Like an airliner it will be able to carry dozens of people. It will be refuelable in orbit. If it does only a fraction of these things it will be the vehicle that makes the expansion of humans to new worlds achievable. Orion, with its Block 2 SLS, still another decade in the future, will carry a few people on another Apollo-like flags and footprints mission. Apollo did not last very long, less than 5 years. Orion?
Twice the thrust for a tenth the cost. Starship vs. SLS
With respect:
KILL SLS.
In many respects this vehicle represents everything wrong with NASA today: a design started too late after the Shuttle was shut down and all its suppliers laid off; far too much money and time in development; a lack of vision in designing a vehicle that tries to reproduce Apollo. The true cost of Orion and SLS may not only be 50 plus billion dollars the American people have paid for them, even more important NASA holding back the technologies and the timetable for enabling a far larger program exploring the Moon and Mars at a far lower cost to the public.
Several years ago this forum was highlighting the Jupiter program. Everyone seemed to be supportive. It was essentially what we see here – with exception of the second stage. Now that we have it, it is interesting that it took so long and that there is a new kid on the block that will bring something even better to the program; Star Ship. What I find the most interesting is that, despite the massive thrust of the Artemis booster, it still cannot loft as much to LEO as the Saturn V. All that modern engineering, computers and calculators and they can’t do better than the old school guys with slide rules. Why is that?
Blame Congress and the mandate to use Shuttle derived tech.
I haven’t taken the time to try to dig up web archives etc., but my recollection was also that the majority of folks on this forum (and other space related forums), as well as numerous space advocates, were all pushing for a shuttle derived launch vehicle… and they got it: SLS. Given the current SLS bashing, I do find it somewhat ironic… I understand the reasons for the bashing, but still it’s somewhat amusing.
The Saturn V was about as efficient a launch vehicle for getting large payloads to LEO (not to mention the moon) as one might imagine. SpaceX’s Super Heavy will have about double the thrust of the Saturn V but will also not match payload to LEO, but at least there you are sacrificing efficiency for reuse. SLS doesn’t have that excuse.
I think there was a lot of support for a Shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicle as late the early 2010s. That was because there didn’t seem to be an alternative and, if done right, using Shuttle-derived hardware could reduce launch costs. I was certainly in favor of the idea in the early 1990s. But what we got with SLS is a under-capable vehicle (it can’t get Orion all the way to lunar orbit, and that’s without a lander, so it isn’t even capable of supporting an Apollo-like mission.) It was not developed correctly, in the sense that there were no cost savings from using existing technology. And it took so long to develop that better alternatives (Falcon Heavy and in orbit refueling, let along Starship) are around the corner.
I think everyone was in favor of a Shuttle derived heavy launcher in 2005-2010 when there still was a Shuttle, there still were Shuttle supply lines, there would have been commonality between the Shuttle and the unmanned launcher, a lot fewer people would have lost their jobs and their companies. Instead we got a couple diversions called Ares 1 and 5. Then we got the total shut down of Shuttle. Then we had a hiatus which upset tens of thousands of lives. And then we got SLS, a little too late.
Too little, far too late, and given that there is no new technology and mainly a bunch of old, used, repurposed Shuttle hardware, it took far too long and is far far too expensive.