Using Fuel Depots Instead of Giant Rockets

EccentricAnomaly writes "The New York Times has a story about a leaked NASA study that showed it would cost $80 BIllion less and get astronauts to an asteroid sooner if NASA used fuel depots instead of developing a new rocket. According to the article, NASA's response to the leaked study is to start developing fuel depots in addition to continuing its new rocket program. Because, after all, who doesn't need more cool stuff."

Comments

Re:More drool for the space fool

[Skarecrow77]

there's no reason to visit Italy, Australia, Hawaii, or wherever it is that may be interesting to visit, when you have pictures of the place on the internet? That's the same thing right?

Now human experience counts for nothing?

Yes yes, I know, robots are better than internet pictures, still though, a virtual experience isn't the same, any more than madden 2012 is the same as playing NFL football.

We -certainly- have the energy, money, and will to do human space exploration, we're just currently wasting all 3 on other endeavors.

Let's have both.

[Sasayaki]

We could easily have both. Easily. Let me show you how:

NASA's budget: $18.724 billion (Fiscal Year 2011) (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)

Department of Defense's budget: $663.8

Which does NOT including Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are approximately $900 billion, and does NOT including the care for the approximately 33,000 wounded veterans those wars have produced... which is probably a few billion, but I couldn't find an easy source so let's just go with nothing. But remember it's there.

Adding those into DoD's budget gives: $1,563.8 billion. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States)

That means that DOD gets 83 times as much as NASA gets. They could reduce their budget by 1/83rd and double Nasa's budget.

A country needs defense. I get it. But seriously -- NASA is one of those organizations that, if your pour money into it, does AMAZING things. Things that give so much back to the scientific community -- things like computers, insulation, search and rescue, navigation, everything. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many technologies can be traced back to the space program... and while DoD are great inventors too, especially in medical treatment, materials, transportation... NASA gives so much back too and no brown people have to die.

Can't we just have a couple less B2 Stealth Bombers (B-52's bomb brown people just fine) and a couple less F-22's (F-15 Eagles still have never been defeated in combat) and GET THE FUCK TO MARS?

Re:Let's have both.

[hedwards]

Yes, but they also study climate change which automatically negates all the good stuff they do to the smaller government lobby.

Re:Let's have both.

[Richard_at_work]

Can't we just have a couple less B2 Stealth Bombers (B-52's bomb brown people just fine) and a couple less F-22's (F-15 Eagles still have never been defeated in combat) and GET THE FUCK TO MARS?

The B-2 is no longer produced, so nothing but sunk cost and amortised operating costs there, and the F-22s production is finishing very soon.

Re:Let's have both.

[bmajik]

Here here!

The ENTIRE APOLLO PROGRAM cost 160 billion in ADJUSTED 2005 Dollars!!

That's all missions over the entire program, all support technologies that had to be invented for it, -- everything, the whole enchilada.

So, _every year_ we spend about 6 _APOLLO PROGRAMS_ blowing up people that don't even matter to us. We borrow 9 APOLLO PROGRAMS every _year_.

I recommend 1 "Apollo Program" as the new unit of measure of government stupidity. All things the federal government does should be measured in terms of Apollo programs and then the question should be asked, "was that as awesome as how many apollo programs it just cost us? No? then get rid of it"

I'm one of these irritating libertarian/anarchist types that hates government, but damn if I don't have a soft spot for the space program. If we're going to have a huge federal monster it might as well do things that pay dividends (unlike bombing foreign brown people -- or giving domestic brown people "free" iphones)

I don't know much about the modern difficultues within NASA. I'm sure that it is surrounded by a bunch of flagellate "private" corporations who bilk NASA and uncle sam for every penny they can and do substandard work. And I suspect it is filled internally with fiefdoms and micro-politicians who care much more about maintaing clout than working towards some overarching shared goal.

I want to understand what NASA was doing right in the 60s and re-institute that culture, environment, and most importantly, operational excellence. And I want to utilize the exiciting private work that has finally started happening in space exploration.

I don't care how it gets done, I want more American boots on foreign worlds instead of foreign battlefieds. If we need to call it the militarization of space to make it strictly constitutional, so be it. There was a different article about what to do with old satellites. Hell, blow them up. Develop our anti-satellite missile systems and space-based lasers to the point that we can safely dispose of satellites whenever cleanup would be most convenient. We can bill foreign entities to dispose of their stuff for them (at discount rates, since we're doing it to perfect our capabilities).

The point is, its embarassing that our national priorities seem to focus entirely on blowing up poor people abroad and creating a cycle of dependant poor people domestically.

Let's instead focus on growing the small fraction of people who still look towards the infinite skies and dream of what the human race can acheive.

Re:Let's have both.

[CrimsonAvenger]

Adding those into DoD's budget gives: $1,563.8 billion.

Umm, no.

You added eight years worth of supplemental and emergency appropriations ($900 B) onto last year's military budget.

The same article showed the correct amount to add for this year: $37 billion.

Which would make the correct value $700.3 billion, less than half what you asserted.

Re:Let's have both.

[medcalf]

I'm all about getting to Mars. Heck, offer me a one way ticket and I'm off. But here's the deal: NASA is not going to get us there. Today's NASA is not the entrepreneurial NASA of the 1960s or even the 1970s. This is an Iron Law bureaucracy whose job is to keep working, which they do by spreading money across a lot of important Senators' districts. Note the important fact left out of the summary: this finding of getting there cheaper with fuel depots was buried by NASA for months because they didn't want to interfere with the SLS funding, which like Constellation before it is almost certain to never, ever fly. Consider that the last successful NASA development program for rockets was run in the 1970s, with the Shuttle. (And that was only successful if "success" means "getting people into space" as opposed to meeting cost or capability targets.) The only new rockets since then have been commercial, and NASA is in a love/hate relationship with those.

Re:Let's have both.

[jfengel]

Still, a goodly sum of money. And a lot of people are prepared to see it reduced.

The question is where you direct the reduction. There's a lot of demand to see it put into debt reduction; that is, reducing DoD spending AND not increasing NASA's spending, so that the deficit isn't quite so big.

There are good arguments to be made for either. I'll let you know if I ever hear anybody engaging in one, rather than spouting ideological and partisan talking points.

Re:Let's have both.

[Sasayaki]

You are correct, and I stand corrected.

It's still what I call a metric fucktonne of money, when the entire budget for NASA is a rounding error for the DoD.

Re:Let's have both.

[glodime]

Mod Parent up. Thanks.

I'm still in favor of using some of that $700.3 billion to double NASA's Budget.

Re:Let's have both.

[DanDD]

> So, _every year_ we spend about 6 _APOLLO PROGRAMS_ blowing up people that don't even matter to us. We borrow 9 APOLLO PROGRAMS every _year_.

Ahem. Please keep this kind of generalization to yourself. All humans matter to me, especially those that need blowing up. However, I do appreciate your sentiment that our priorities are severely skewed.

Re:Let's have both.

[tiqui]

Many misconceptions here

First, we stopped buying B-2 bombers and F-22 fighters long ago

Second, Bush43 and Obama have both dramatically under-funded a number of vital weapons systems, like ships and submarines, that wear-out over time and must be periodically replaced. The money that should have been used to keep stuff current over the past decade was largely diverted into the wars and to various various emergency/unforeseen systems like the move from Hummers to MRAPS, the move from recon drones to armed drones which happened as a result of lessons learned during the wars and has been expensive because many of these programs were rushed. As a result, we have a wave of high-cost replacement programs on the horizon that can only be delayed for a limited time.

Third, Simple-minded people always say "well those shiny new bombers/ships cost a billion each, so lets just cut a couple and use those billions elsewhere" however the cost is actually not just the cost of the item but also a portion of the overhead of the program (part of the R&D, part of the factory cost, part of the costs of tools and jigs and test equipment, training for workers, etc) so when you reduce the number of items purchased, the remaining units carry a bigger chunk of overhead and their prices go up. Often, these military systems use custom materials, custom jigs, and very exotic production techniques requiring special custom tools etc. If you start by saying you will only buy 100 bombers, then you cut back to 50 then 40, etc the overhead costs make the per-unit cost skyrocket; this is not like iPods being churned-out by the millions on a highly-automated line where making a dozen fewer has no impact. At numbers as low as our purchases of big weapons systems have been in the past several decades, and with congresses in the habit of awarding contracts for hundreds of items and then reducing the buys over-and-over during the production runs, contractors cannot justify the set-up of highly-automated and optimized production lines and each unit becomes almost hand-built (during WWII, by contrast, the government bought huge numbers, in many cases actually increasing its buys, so massive production lines were built and then hundreds of bombers rolled-out of some factories every month with the full advantage of mass-production). As a result, you never save as much as you think you will when you cut back on your purchased quantity in this era, and you even drive-up the long-term operation costs

Fourth, The biggest part of the pentagon budget actually is not hardware; it's personnel. Not just the current people, but all the costs for all the retired ones including benefits to vets who served in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, The Gulf War, etc.

Here's some easier low-hanging fruit: Obama spent about $800 Billion in two years on his stimulus package and is now calling for about $400 Billion in one year (which is the same cash burn-rate) in a "jobs bill". Funny that he did not just spend $3 Billion per year to keep thousands high-tech workers employed at NASA and contractors by keeping shuttles flying while building the new systems. He still could give NASA and even commercial space a huge boost for only a few billion of this new bill, but he has not proposed to.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[PeterM from Berkeley]

So, we should pay multiple billions so that one or two people have "the human experience"?

Maybe when we have "Total Recall" and can experience other people's memories!

'till then, I'd rather send the robots, until we have a VIABLE strategy for actually exporting humans into permanent off-world colonies.

--PM

Re:Uhm...

[Richard_at_work]

Things that are designed to be refueled, can be refueled. Amazing what can happen with a little planning, isn't it?

Old idea that hopefully gets used.

[Graff]

This is an old idea that should have been implemented long ago. Fuel tanks can survive much higher g-forces and can be built and launched relatively cheaply compared to satellites and personnel.

In fact, fuel is just about the perfect candidate for a mass driver where energy can be stored up and then released in a burst into a linear induction motor or similar technology. This means that much less expensive and less polluting energy sources can be used in the launch as opposed to most rocket fuels. It's also inherently safer since you don't have a 5000 degree F flame that you need to feed and control.

Once the fuel tanks are exhausted they can be converted into modules for space stations or spacecraft, probably much more efficient than building them to survive a re-entry to get re-used. Why waste all the energy it took to get them up there and the energy it would take to send up a pre-built module when you can design the tanks for re-use?

Yeah, there's a lot of complexity that I'm doing some hand-waving around but it's still a great concept that should be developed further.

Re:How do you get to fuel depots without a rocket?

[Hentes]

In increments. The idea is, it's cheaper to get the fuel up using lots of small rockets currently available than trying to build a giant one on Earth.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[Skarecrow77]

yes, when humans have actually gone there, they can give firsthand accounts. robots can't. until we have sci-fi levels of virtual reality (which should never really happen with the transmission delay), sending a robot in place of a human is -not- the same. I'm not saying stop robot research, obviously that's beneficial. I'm saying that send robots first, to scout out for humanity.

Multiple billions of dollars spread across the economy of humanity is a drop in the bucket.

Re:Satellite better than Moon base regurgitated

[NEDHead]

What no one is saying is the real reason for the space efforts. As all slashdotters know, the tides are an important part of our ecosystem, and yet every day the moon moves further away, reducing the tides before our very eyes. The only practical solution is to put a stop to this disaster, by tying the moon to the earth with a stout cable. This will also provide an anchor at each end for the space elevator ( how all those nutters think a space elevator anchored at just one end is going to work is beyond me).

NASA has no choice on SLS

[WindBourne]

CONgress, namely Shelby(R), Wolfe(R), Hatch(R), Hutchinson(R), Coffman(R), Nelson(D), and many others, are pushing this nightmare. The only reason is not because they believe that it is needed for the space program, but these slimes have turned NASA into a jobs bill.

The good news is that by 2014, SLS will be dead. The fact is, that once SpaceX launches FH, no president will support. It does not matter whom is in office. The project will be dead. Hopefully, we will then hold a COTS for 2 SHLV. At the same time, HOPEFULLY, these above slimes or whomever replaces them, will continue funding for NASA to support nuclear engines (not for launch on earth, but interplanetary travel and perhaps launch on the moon and mars), private space, ISS partners exploration of the moon, and NASA continuing their push for BEO.

Re:NASA has no choice on SLS

[FatLittleMonkey]

Falcon Heavy simply does not have the payload capability for manned, deep space flight.

You didn't read the report? Or the summary? Or the headline?

Nothing intended to launch on the 130 ton SLS has more than 50 tons dryweight. So instead of launching it fuelled on a $1.5 billion launcher, you launch it dry on a $0.125 billion launcher, and launch the fuel on some other $0.125 million launchers. $1.5 billion worth of mission for less than half price. Bargain!

Even assuming Falcon Heavy is ready on time, SpaceX is still in business in 2014

What chance do you think the SLS has of every reaching its first mission? On time, on budget. After burning through its $60 billion development budget?

and they haven't started multiplying their prices after they have gone public

They are signing commercial contracts at a list price of $125 million per launch. (Less if you don't need the entire 50 tons.)

Re:More drool for the space fool

[Arlet]

What kind of worthwhile first hand accounts have we gotten from astronauts that went to the moon or to low earth orbit ?

It's not NASA's fault they're developing both...

[the gnat]

According to the article, NASA's response to the leaked study is to start developing fuel depots in addition to continuing its new rocket program. Because, after all, who doesn't need more cool stuff.

Undoubtedly NASA reacted this way because the US Congress has legislatively mandated development of a new heavy-lift rocket to preserve jobs in states with influential (Republican) senators, as a substitute for the cancelled Constellation program. It no longer matters what NASA itself thinks is the most efficient and technologically feasible solution. Even if the fuel depot plan would save twice as much, in practice it is ultimately subject to Congressional veto.

Re:Uhm...

[Temkin]

The Apollo J-2 was designed to restarted way back in 1967, as was the Aerojet AJ-10 from the late 1950's.

AJ-10 variants were used for both the Apollo SM engine, and the Shuttle OMS pods. They were designed to remain fueled for long periods of time and be re-ignightable. This is a solvable problem.

Re:Fear Factor

[medcalf]

Oh, please! First, it would be in active use, so it would be boosted as the orbit decays (by the rockets it's refueling, most likely). Second, fuel depots wouldn't be reentry shielded and fuel is highly flammable, by definition. So if one were allowed to deorbit, all that would hit the ground is a bit of metal, and not much of that. Satellites fall all the time with little risk on the ground.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[WindBourne]

That is how aviation got off the ground. That is how large ships were created. That is how cars were create. That is how railroads were created. The rich started first and then as the price came down, the average person can go. It is about economics.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[bmajik]

Somebody has to be the first.

I don't expect to go into space in my lifetime. But I'd like my kids to have a better chance than I did.

I want humans to venture forth from Earth in every direction towards every destination. We can work towards that goal even if we have no idea when we'll acheive it. And doing so is worthwhile even when we have so many other challenges closer to home.

The fact of the matter is that no matter how much time and money we spend, we will not "cure" hunger, poverty, and war. These attributes are baked into the human condition. So long as man has free will, some men will choose destructive ends.

Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.

Finally, the exploration of frontiers unknown brings out the best our kind has to offer. It is why we exist. When we navel gaze we are not fulfilling our purpose. We are not leaving the legacy our descandants deserve.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[Arlet]

All those things has a positive return on investment. People invested in railroads and ships because they could make money moving stuff around.

Manned space travel is just a useless money pit.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[Arlet]

Except that we know more about space than Columbus knew about the earth. We can be pretty sure that on our way to that asteroid, there's only a cold hard vacuum.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[CRCulver]

Seriously? All the astronauts from all countries have given first hand accounts of their reaction to space.

The OP said worthwhile accounts. While a poetic statement about "beautiful desolation" or looking down on the Earth might sound nice, it doesn't advance our knowledge of space much.

It's the first hand accounts that really capture people's imaginations. To watch the short film "Yuri" or talk to someone who watched the first moon landing live.

Sure, the public watched the first moon landing and got fired up, but that enthusiasm dropped like a rock with subsequent landings. Human endeavours in space no longer interest the general population. As much as nerds like to talk about the importance of capturing people's imaginations, all the initiatives they launch fail.

Re:More drool for the space fool

[CRCulver]

Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.

Why? That narrative about it being humankind's destiny to expand and live forever just doesn't hold any more. Plenty of thinkers have speculated that the human race has other possible futures, such as voluntary extinction (declining birthrates in the wake of robots doing almost everything, for example), replacement by a new AI species, living on Earth inside a virtual reality instead of expanding outward, etc.

Finally, the exploration of frontiers unknown brings out the best our kind has to offer. It is why we exist. When we navel gaze we are not fulfilling our purpose.

The "purpose" you want to shackle people to is an accident of evolutionary biology. As a sentient species with (relative) free will, we can choose to enjoy this life we have before us and we are not obliged to propagate humanity unto the ages and fill the cosmos. We owe our descendants nothing if we choose not to have descendants.

Re: Guns, lots of guns...

[DanielRavenNest]

Fuel is a good candidate to launch with a high-g device, but a mass driver is not the most economical way to get it off the Earth. It is fairly easy to show that a pipe will cost less per foot than induction coils and a frigging huge power supply to feed it, for the same job of accelerating a projectile. Generally, these type of devices are called "hypervelocity guns", defined as when the muzzle velocity is hypersonic (ie more than Mach 5 or 1500 m/s). This is roughly twice the muzzle velocity of large military guns.

In 1993 I was the study manager at Boeing for using a large gun to deliver fuel to a depot, which then was used to send communications satellites to GEO. The savings was you needed 75% less conventional rocket to launch the satellite dry. Hypervelocity guns are not new, they have been used for ballistic and re-entry testing for about 40 years now. NASA owns several of them. Mainly they need scaling up and "industrializing" - setting them up for regular operations, rather than research use.

To reach the highest muzzle velocity, you want to use the lightest gas (Hydrogen), and heat it, so the speed of sound is as high as possible. Speed of sound is the same as speed of pressure waves in the gas, and when your projectile exceeds that speed, there is no way for the gas at the back end to affect the projectile any more, because it outruns the pressure waves. So the gun gets very inefficient at that point. To make hot hydrogen, it is easiest to store it at room temperature in pressure tanks, then run it through a heat exchanger before it gets to the barrel. There is nothing that goes "boom" like a small gun, it's closer to natural gas pipeline operations (in fact, we sourced the gun barrel from a pipeline maker in the study). Find a suitable mountain, such as Cayembe in Ecuador (the highest point on the equator, and the right slope), and put a 2 km long x 60 cm I.D. pipe pointing up. Load a 600 kg projectile about 4 meters long into it, and it will accelerate at 900 g's, and come out with a muzzle velocity of around 5600 m/s. You lose around 1 km/s of that to air drag, and then use an onboard rocket to finish getting to orbit. Net payload to orbit is around 100 kg, which does not sound like much, but if your launcher is at the equator, you can potentially launch 15 times a day to a single depot destination. Over the course of a year that comes to 550 tons (minus downtime for maintenance).

For launching people and delicate cargo, Hawaii is the best location. Assume a 20 km pipe x 10 m diameter, pushing a 500 ton vehicle. It works out the pressure in the barrel needs to be 2 atmospheres (200kPa, 30 psi). That gives you 3 g's acceleration, safe for humans and satellite parts. Muzzle velocity is 1100 m/s (Mach 3.6), which is not a huge fraction of orbit velocity, but a nice running start before you light up your on-board rocket. Given those starting conditions, a reuseable non-cryogenic rocket should have a payload of around 35 tons, which along with a 10 meter diameter should be plenty for any cargo or people you want to launch. This is the upper end of what you might want to build, for your first low-g cargo launcher you can go a lot smaller.

I love this plan.

[trout007]

Here is the beauty. You never get really good at something unless you do it often. You need lots of practice. But currently we are stuck in a catch 22 with rockets. The payloads are very expensive so you want to make sure your rocket doesn't fail. This requires lots of money typically to verify everything.

Fuel delpts turn everything upside down. Now you are launching something cheap, fuel. You can make the rockets as cheap as possible and even with a few failures it's no big deal since you are only out cheap fuel. But even with cheap rockets if you launch them often enough you will get very good at it and reliability will increase as you identify problems.

This is great for NASA too since the majority of beyond earth orbit mass is propellant. It can launch they payloads dry and do that on much smaller and cheaper rockets. Also it can just pay for fuel delivered to the depot. Any failures are on the customers dime.

Re:How do you get to fuel depots without a rocket?

[petes_PoV]

If you want a manned mission the whole spacecraft has to be built to a higher standard of safety. That makes it heavier and more expensive. If you can get the fuel that would be needed for most of the mission into orbit (that's the hardest part) in a cheaper, lighter, unmanned rocket that's a more efficient use of resources. Once the fuel is up, providing it stays up and doesn't leak away - a hard task with liquid H2 - then you only need the expensive craft to be capable of lifting itself to meet the fuel dump. That makes the overall cost a lot less. (It also means you have some margin built in. If one of your fuel "tankers" fails in flight, you haven't lost the whole mission - you can just launch another one to replace it before the precious cargo is sent up).

What?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Did you read the report? It was comparing the cost of SLS launched missions to the moon or an asteroid, with depot enabled versions of missions to the moon or an asteroid. They weren't trying to argue that every rocket in the world is refuellable, nor even most, they were saying that launching a LTO transfer stage empty, then fuelling it in orbit, is cheaper to develop and fly than building a Really Big Rocket.

You can launch a 100 ton lunar transfer stage on SLS, say, with a 25 ton dry weight and 75 tons of fuel.

Or, you can launch the 25 ton stage empty on a Falcon Heavy or a Delta IV Heavy, plus three fuel missions on similar rockets, and it will cost billions of dollars less. (Their scenario is more detailed, obviously.)

SLS is an expensive and harmful way to do these missions. It actually makes us less likely to go beyond Earth orbit, and wastes two to three decades and many tens of billions of dollars doing so.

Prior art

[savuporo]

This does not come up in a lot of these conversations, but we have a "fuel depot" in orbit right now. It uses storable propellants, not cryogenic ones, but nobody says you cannot leave LEO with nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). In fact, that propellant combination was exactly the one being used to land on the moon in Apollo program.

The fuel depot on orbit of course is ISS Zarya or better known as FGB. It gets fuelled up by Proton's on a regular basis, and ISS uses the propellant for station keeping. Considering the mass of ISS, boosting its orbit is no small feat.

Russians also have a spare module, used to be called FGB-2 sitting somewhere in the hangar. It was proposed as various additions to ISS at some point.

In summary, storable hypergolic orbital propellant transfer is a well known, well developed and currently used technology. Yes you need quite a bit more of it to do burns with delta-v in order of km/s, but the maturity of the solution and abundance of off the shelf engines and propulsion module designs using hypergols may well outweigh cryogenics in overall system designs.
Propellant is also relatively cheap, even nasty stuff like hydrazine, and just lifting more of it would provide the much needed demand side for the globally stagnant launch industry, which has been in the oversupply mode for years, i.e. there are far more operational rockets than there are paid payloads.

The point that "propellant depots" is nothing new, and in fact NASA's current flagship HSF program uses it needs to be made more often. Switching to cryogenics would be a new development even if not that complicated, and may or may not be worth it, depending on overall mission requirements and other elements of system architecture.

Re:Uhm...

[FatLittleMonkey]

"Re-entry and landing
The vehicle began re-entry by firing the Orbital maneuvering system engines, while flying upside down, backside first, in the opposite direction to orbital motion for approximately three minutes, which reduced the shuttle's velocity by about 200 mph (322 km/h). The resultant slowing of the Shuttle lowered its orbital perigee down into the upper atmosphere. This OMS firing was done roughly halfway around the globe from the landing site."

From "Space Shuttle" on.

Once shut down, about 12 minutes after launch, the SSME's are never fired again until they have been removed from the orbiter and fully serviced.

Re:How do you get to fuel depots without a rocket?

[FatLittleMonkey]

As others have said, you use smaller rockets to launch the mission payload "dry", and to launch the fuel separately. But to explain the cost savings, let me use an example:

The SLS is projected to cost over $60 billion to develop and around $1.5 billion per launch. The biggest version is supposed to launch 130 tons, but the first version will only launch 70 tons. (And remember, $60 billion is only for the rocket, it doesn't include the cost of the actual mission hardware.)

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy will probably cost less that $0.5 billion to develop, and is already taking commercial orders at something like $0.125 billion per launch. It is intended to launch over 50 tons.

For the price one 130 ton SLS launch, you could pay the entire development costs for Falcon Heavy and still have enough to buy 8 launches of 50 tons, or 400 tons total. And once Falcon Heavy is developed, each subsequent $1.5 billion could buy 12 FH launches, or 600 tons.

600 tons for the same price as 130 tons.

So instead of spending $60 billion to develop SLS, it could be spent on actual missions. Isn't that a more intelligent way to run a space program?

Re:More drool for the space fool

[kiwix]

We -certainly- have the energy, money, and will to do human space exploration, we're just currently wasting all 3 on other endeavors.

Actually I think we currently have a little problem with money and energy.