homepage Forums SimHQ Community Community Hall Back to the moon

I consider success inspirational. Continual failure to get a rocket off the ground when private enterprise competition sets new records is anything but inspirational. On the other hand, Elon has done a lot of good for space and I'm glad we have him and his ventures around.

What's with all the hating on NASA in this thread?

.... but out of that you've got an awesome rocket that has a fair chance of working as designed.

Any rocket, car, airplane, ship etc that costs an order of magnitude more to operate than available alternatives that can perform a given task as well or better is not "awesome".

Available alternatives?!?

Like, SpaceX, dude.

But AVAILABLE? I wasn't aware SpaceX had an AVAILABLE alternative to the SLS and Orion capsule...

I’m driving to watch the launch today. Hopefully it will be a go.

It's not looking good ATM they are 2 hours behind because of a Hydrogen leak

So why does NASA use liquid hydrogen as a fuel for its rockets, if it is so difficult to work with, and there are easier to handle alternatives such as methane or kerosene? One reason is that hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, meaning that it provides better "gas mileage" when used in rocket engines. However, the real answer is that Congress mandated that NASA continue to use space shuttle main engines as part of the SLS rocket program.

In 2010, when Congress wrote the authorization bill for NASA that led to creation of the Space Launch System, it directed the agency to "utilize existing contracts, investments, workforce, industrial base, and capabilities from the Space Shuttle and Orion and Ares 1 projects, including ... existing United States propulsion systems, including liquid fuel engines, external tank or tank related capability, and solid rocket motor engines."

During a news conference on Saturday, Ars asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson whether it was the right decision for NASA to continue working with hydrogen after the agency's experience with the space shuttle. In 2010, Nelson was a US Senator from Florida, and ringleader of the space authorization bill alongside US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas. "We deferred to the experts," Nelson said.

By this Nelson meant that the Senate worked alongside some officials at NASA, and within industry, to design the SLS rocket. These industry officials, who would continue to win lucrative contracts from NASA for their work on shuttle-related hardware, were only too happy to support the new rocket design.

Among the idea's opponents was Lori Garver, who served as NASA's deputy administrator at the time. She said the decision to use space shuttle components for the agency's next generation rocket seemed like a terrible idea, given the challenges of working with hydrogen demonstrated over the previous three decades.

"They took finicky, expensive programs that couldn't fly very often, stacked them together differently, and said now, all of a sudden, it's going to be cheap and easy," she told Ars in August. "Yeah, we've flown them before, but they've proven to be problematic and challenging. This is one of the things that boggled my mind. What about it was going to change? I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone."

Now, NASA faces the challenge of managing this finicky hardware through more inspections and tests after so many already. The rocket's core stage, manufactured by Boeing, was shipped from its factory in Louisiana more than two and a half years ago. It underwent nearly a year of testing in Mississippi before arriving at Kennedy Space Center in April 2021. Since then, NASA and its contractors have been assembling the complete rocket and testing it on the launch pad.

Effectively, Saturday's "launch" attempt was the sixth time NASA has tried to completely fuel the first and second stages of the rocket, and then get deep into the countdown. To date, it has not succeeded with any of these fueling tests, known as wet dress rehearsals. On Saturday, the core stage's massive liquid hydrogen tank, with a capacity of more than 500,000 gallons, was only 11 percent full when the scrub was called.

Perhaps the seventh time will be a charm.

An independent report published Thursday contained troubling findings about the money spent by the agency on propulsion for the Space Launch System rocket. Moreover, the report by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin warns that if these costs are not controlled, it could jeopardize plans to return to the Moon.

.....

The report found that efforts to refurbish RS-25 engines, manufacture new ones, and produce solid rocket boosters for the initial Artemis missions have resulted in about $6 billion in cost increases and more than six years in schedule delays compared to NASA's original projections.

To put this into perspective, Martin is talking about the cost increases, not the total cost of the engines and boosters. This means that overruns for the propulsion system of the SLS rocket alone are costing the space agency about as much as it will spend on developing two reusable lunar landers—SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

......

There are other head-scratching issues raised by the report. For example, the current cost of manufacturing a new RS-25 main engine—which will be used for the Artemis V mission and onward—is about $100 million. NASA and Aerojet are trying to achieve a 30 percent cost savings by the end of this decade, bringing the cost down to $70.5 million.

However, in projecting these savings, Martin notes that NASA neglected to include some costs: "When calculating the total cost of the new RS-25 engines, NASA and Aerojet are only including material, engineering support, and touch labor (hands-on labor effort), while project management and overhead costs are excluded." Who knows, maybe Aerojet's managers will work for free for a few years.

Compared to the private sector, even getting the cost of an RS-25 engine down to $70.5 million is a preposterously high price. Blue Origin manufactures engines of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.

Based on all of the new data in his latest report, Martin said his office has had to revise its estimate of the total cost of a Space System Launch, inclusive of ground systems and the Orion spacecraft. It is now $4.2 billion.

He specifically noted that since a 2014 “record of decision” by the FAA, allowing SpaceX to develop launch facilities at Boca Chica (originally for the Falcon family of launch vehicles), “SpaceX has invested more than $3 billion into developing the Boca Chica launch facility and Starship/Super Heavy launch system.”

The statement did not break out the investment between the launch vehicle itself and infrastructure. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, in an April 29 online discussion on Twitter, the social media network he also owns, estimated that the company would spend about $2 billion on Starship this year.

“It’ll probably be a couple billion dollars this year, two billion dollars-ish, all in on Starship,” he said, adding that he did not expect to have to raise funding to finance that work. He also said in that conversation that he expected Starship to launch four to five more times this year and “would be surprised” if the company didn’t achieve orbit by the end of the year.