That's not what they said.Skipjack wrote:Yeah, where Boeing has indicated that they will not continue the CST 100 development if NASA does not commit to at least a certain about of launches (with them) a year.
Besides, why should they? Boeing has no obligation to keep a crew capsule running if it isn't going to make them any money. This has nothing to do with cost plus or sole-source.
That was pretty funny... but the fact is they were willing to compete in the same arena, under the same rules, as SpaceX, Boeing, SNC, etc.And Liberty was dead the moment NASA did not give them any CCDev funding this round.
...hmm. ATK is on the "interested parties" list for CPC...
That's why I mentioned depoliticization. Certainly some areas of NASA need to internalize the idea of "affordability", which has been quite the buzzword around the SLS project for the past year or so. But NASA is underfunded for what it's supposed to be doing. HSF, science, aeronautics, all of it. Match the funding to the mission and let the engineers do their jobs.What does "fully fund" mean? I am all for more money for science and NASA in particular, but I am for spending it well.No, it's time to fully fund NASA and try to shake some of the politics out.
Uh, no. Radically advanced one-off development projects like that are exactly what single-vendor cost-plus is for. There's no way to reliably predict the cost or schedule beforehand, so a fixed-price milestone-based project would rapidly become a train wreck. And paying multiple companies to do the same thing just multiplies the cost of the train wreck by the number of companies. NASA might have been able to run the program for a lot less than $8.8B, but it wouldn't have gotten a telescope out of it.Well take the JWST for instance. I think that they should have done a CCDev like contract for that.
Now, there does appear to have been contractor malfeasance in connection with JWST, and I expect (I hope) there will be consequences. But a good chunk of the cost increase was simply fixed costs to keep the program going over an extended schedule; trying to fund multiple vendors would have made that considerably worse.
...Shuttle?Well their RLV tech got further than anything NASA has ever attempted
Mercury Redstone was as much an RLV as anything SpaceX has ever gotten off the ground. IIRC they haven't managed to recover a nominally-intact first stage yet, never mind anything in good enough shape to refly. Their original plan for reuse was an abject failure, so they're changing tactics. I'm hoping they're successful too, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch...
It also has to do with the cost of refurbishment and the significantly lower payload for the same launch infrastructure and ops requirements.The whole myth of the launch rate required to make an RLV pay of is of course a myth too. The launch rate is needed to get a return on the initial developent cost which is naturally higher for an RLV.
You have no idea what SpaceX will end up spending to make Falcon reusable. They're still feeling their way.That however is of course much more relevant for a multi billion government programme with a giant development effort (full of fancy new technology) and a huge standing army to support it), than a slick and comparably low cost, efficient private development effort and operations like the one SpaceX is doing.
Skylon gets a lot of flak for its high development cost. This is probably because it's the only RLV program that has mapped out its development in sufficient detail to come up with an honest estimate.
Depends how much payload they lose, how much money they had to sink to make that part reusable, and how much it costs to turn that part around for reflight.SpaceX already is profitable with the launch rate that they have, being able to reuse at least part of the vehicle will only make that margin better, not worse.
They do have an advantage in that their RLV is already flying as an ELV. This gives them an excellent baseline and fallback position, as well as a revenue stream. They have another advantage in that their boss cares more about the RLV than about the sunk money...
The tipping point for orbital launch is about $2500/kg ($800/lb in 1994). Above that, the market is inelastic.It is also pretty clear from the way the suborbital market has clearly developed that the market for space launches does increase when the prices come down far enough.
That's a fallacy. It's not the cost of the fuel that kills you - it's the cost of everything else. All else being equal, if you need a bigger rocket to do the same job it's going to cost more, and not because it uses more fuel.People are so concerned about mass fractions, when the fuel only makes a completely negligible part of the cost of a rocket launch, e.g. 200,000 out of 50 million for the F9).
The insight underlying Sea Dragon was that all else is not necessarily equal. Estimating cost based on dry mass only works for systems of comparable complexity and sophistication.
If I scratch your back, and you scratch mine, both our backs get scratched.SLS is about fueling money to ATK. Shameless Shelby even bragged how he managed to insert the language into the NASA bill to make sure that they have to use ATK for the development of the SLS.
The 5-seg boosters were already nearly ready, and well suited to the task. Assuming SLS flies, they will do quite a good job of muscling the rest of the rocket through the maximum gravity and drag loss regimes. And the political support of the Utah delegation improves the chance that this thing will actually accomplish something useful.
Furthermore, the advanced booster competition is most certainly not a lock for ATK. It has been suggested (by an SLS worker, I believe) that the Block 1B idea of delaying the advanced boosters is good partly because it gives the liquid guys time to mature their proposals, balancing the playing field and making it less likely that the advanced boosters will be solids too...
SLI was working on low-cost TSTO RLV technology. The SSTO was just higher profile. Like I said, SLI should never have been cancelled.Waaayy to ambitious.VentureStar was an attempt at a reusable SSTO.
There have been a couple of bodges, but it seems to me that the main problem is that they are trying to work within an inadequate budget for politicians who change their goals every 4-8 years, often for no good reason.Personally I am annoyed with NASA after 30 years of broken promises I have come to the conclusion that they simply can not do it and I think it is time to try something else.
Even with the vulnerable spaceplane hanging off the side, it had one of the lowest failure rates of any rocket ever, and it was safer in its last years than ever before. Take away the spaceplane (and upgrade the engines to the far more robust Block III, as is the plan) and the reliability should be extremely good - there was only ever one LOM that resulted from a non-spaceplane-specific problem, and that problem was subsequently fixed. The fragile TPS and lack of a LAS has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical reliability of an inline SDLV.This is all of course BS.A clean-sheet design - any clean-sheet design - would take considerably longer than SLS, and would lose a lot of political support. Furthermore, a clean-sheet MCD rocket would not have the technical history of Shuttle-derived, and thus not as much confidence in its reliability
1. the shuttle was never save to begin with.
Constellation was slow because Ares I was a stupid idea. SLS is (relatively) slow because its funding is barely adequate to keep it alive.2. Constellation was never fast to develop and the SLS is not either.
This is an egregious apples-to-oranges comparison, besides being inaccurate.3. SpaceX clearly shows that a clean sheet design can be done faster than anything NASA has ever attempted.
The long pole is usually engine development, and SLS doesn't have much of that (J-2X is basically good to go (ahead of schedule), the 5-seg boosters are basically good to go, and the SSME is good to go until such time as the Block III simplifications can be implemented). Even without brand-new engines, from-scratch development generally takes longer than modification of an existing design. True MCD could potentially mitigate this due to simplicity, but SpaceX doesn't do true MCD...
If you're going to use the word "ever", you're going to have to acknowledge that SpaceX took about the same amount of time from inception to first launch of the Falcon 9 (with extensive help from NASA) as NASA took from Kennedy's speech to Armstrong's boot print. Apples to oranges...
The EELVs are neither clean-sheet nor MCD. They're actually quite expensive, though their technical history means they are pretty reliable.4. The EELVs have a pretty decent flight history. You can launch crew on them and launch the cargo separately. That is what should be done anyway. It simplyfies operations enormously, since you dont have to worry about failures as much for the pure cargo flights. That makes everything cheaper.
I don't need to look it up. I've been aware of this for years, and the held-back study thing was hard to miss. SLS still has some operational advantages, supports a high-rate program better (not that such a program looks real likely right now), and is somewhat more Mars-forward (go Elon/Bond/Park/Woodward), but for low-rate lunar or NEA exploration the EELVs work fine. Mind you, it's still not cheap; you can't use them as is, and you still need spacecraft (Orion etc.). You also need to convince the Air Force to let you mess with their launchers. More importantly, the politicians don't seem to want to fund it.5. The EELVs would actually be capable of doing a BEO mission. There are several studies about this, both by NASA and Boeing. They were held back for political reasons, but some senators like Rohrabacher got really annoyed about this and have been making some noise. Look it up!
It appears that ACES is going ahead anyway, and NASA is looking into the technology for their CPS... we may get DIRECT yet...
SLS plus Orion plus infrastructure plus L2 gateway plus reusable lander plus lunar base could be less than 0.2% of the current federal budget, maybe a lot less. SLS itself could be maintained for perhaps 0.04-0.05% of the budget. How cheap does it have to get to stay under the radar?If we go to the moon again, we should do it to stay there and never leave. For this we need to have the cost low enough that it stays underneath the political radar. Otherwise it will get cancelled like Apollo did.
I'm not in favour of a rush to Mars.Mars is the same issue.
That's not the point of NASA exploring space. SLS is not a goal; it's a tool. Private industry is supposed to follow in NASA's footsteps, taking what NASA proved was possible and making it profitable. NASA's attempt at making LEO access affordable and routine ended with SLI. An SLS-based exploration architecture should be eminently affordable for the United States. If Congress wants to slash NASA to the point where it isn't, that's their problem, and switching launchers would not necessarily help, because it would just eliminate NASA HSF's remaining base of support.For an architecture like that, the most crucial thing is to make access to LEO affordable and routine. The SLS is not contributing anything to that and thus is worthless, at least at this point in time (though I think it is generally worthless).
Look, I'm not arguing that SLS is the best idea ever. But you're painting everything black and white with a very broad brush, and frankly I'm getting kinda tired of it...