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NASA Approves Production of Most Powerful Rocket Ever
As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, NASA has given a green light to the production of a new motor, dubbed the Space Launch System, intended to enable deep space exploration. Boeing, prime contractor on the rocket, announced on Wednesday that it had completed a critical design review and finalized a $US2.8-billion contract with NASA. The last time the space agency made such an assessment of a deep-space rocket was the mighty Saturn V, which took astronauts to the moon. ... Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware, spurring criticism that it's a "Frankenstein rocket," with much of it assembled from already developed technology. For instance, its two rocket boosters are advanced versions of the Space Shuttle boosters, and a cryogenic propulsion stage is based on the motor of a rocket often used by the Air Force. The Space Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group and frequent NASA critic, said Space Launch System was "built from rotting remnants of left over congressional pork. And its budgetary footprints will stamp out all the missions it is supposed to carry, kill our astronaut program and destroy science and technology projects throughout NASA."
. Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware, spurring criticism that it's a "Frankenstein rocket," with much of it assembled from already developed technology.
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design. A new design would take extra years of testing before it is ready for use but if we can tweak existing tech, and make it useful for deep space why not??
Based on the next sentence it tells me that they are more concerned with bringing home the bacon than making progress in space.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
From 10 miles away in Titusville, Fl. I will always remember the pounding of my chest form the rockets. Let's go to Mars.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
If I compare that amount to all the money wasted so far on useless "wars" by the U.S.A., it's not much.
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The high cost and slow development of SLS will increasingly make it a loser in its political battle with the new commercial companies. Eventually legislators will recognize its impractically and unaffordability -- especially if the commercial companies continue to meet their milestones and achieve success, as they have been doing. When that happens, the influence of individual senators like Shelby to shovel pork to their particular states or districts will be outweighed by the overall political benefits for everyone in Congress to get American astronauts into space quickly and cheaply on an American-built spaceship.
It looks like someone is confusing anti-US with anti-Iraq-war.
I think it's more the fact that the whole program feels like it is being stitched together based on which existing technologies and contractors contribute to which congressional seats, rather than which technologies are really a good fit in the long term. As well as the fact that beyond a fairly nebulous manned astroid-capture mission, there doesn't seem to be any great plan or will to have a concrete goal for the booster in general. If Congress earmarked $50B over the next decade to put a research station on the Moon or Mars and insulated it from the year-to-year whims that always infect NASA's budget process it'd be one thing, but they aren't. They're trying to build a rocket and then hope two administrations from now it gets a mission funded.
On the technical side, any believe there's no place for solid motors on crewed flight anymore except to ensure campaign donations from Thiokol and United Space Boosters.
Second, while waiting for the new SSME derivative to get finalized and into production, they intend to fly the existing engine inventory. As one of the larger flown relics from the shuttle program, and with several dozen laying around, many of us would rather see them distributed to smaller museums that didn't get orbiters instead of splashed in the ocean. And as a result of the decision to use up the existing stock, the entire expendable stack is built around an engine that's was originally designed for reusability, with all the cost and engineering penalties that implies, and is ultimately too small for the job anyway. If you don't try to fly the existing SSME stock, something like a larger, more modern F1 derivative may start to make more sense, enabling a more powerful liquid first stage without having to bolt solids on the sides to get it off the pad.
This
Is it bigger than the Rockomax!
I don't understand the criticism regarding ...
Basically, they are repeated all the old mistakes of Shuttle and ISS. Single unaffordable top-down designs, expensive sole-source cost-plus contracts, convoluted designs more intended to feed the contractor networks in Congressional districts than to deliver improved hardware, flubbery half-hearted missions that mutate to fit the rapidly contracting hardware abilities rather than hardware designed for missions. And because everything is so expensive and poorly planned, development has to be smeared out over decades, giving time for endless Congressional budget games with the attendant schedule and cost blow-outs, and design compromises piled on top of design compromises just to get something launched.
Paraphrasing Gen. Augustine, in the analysis over Constellation (SLS's precursor), "If someone handed it to NASA, already build and paid for, NASA still couldn't afford to operate it."
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Looks like getting the KSP dev team to talk to NASA was productive!
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Nasa 2014 - about $18 billion
Iraq + Afghanistan - $4 to $6 trillion
So about 200 to 300 times more for the war than what NASA gets this year.
So SRMs are good, and likely to be used in pretty much every first stage from now to the day we invent a beanstalk or something and get rid of rockets.
Hardly. The big problems with SRMs are that you can't reuse them and you can't test them; yes, you can test that SRM #1 worked fine on the ground, but you'll actually be launching with SRM #2, which can only be tested by firing it, which means you can't then use it to launch anything.
You can't build a cheap launcher with SRMs, because a cheap launcher has to be reusable. You can't build a really safe launcher with SRMs, because every flight is the first flight for the SRMs.
Good grief...we had one of the best heavy lift rockets in the world, the Saturn V launch system. (The apollo was on top, not the lift part). Even after getting hit by lightning, Apollo 12 continued to go, Apollo 13, had a center engine cutout, continued to work. Only lift rocket that had a 100% success rate. It was a proven design, and, you can bet since it was made in the era of slide rules, it could be improved on to be even better, but no, can't do that...let's just spend a TON of money we don't have, design something new, that will of course have a few billion dollars of glitches & cost overruns, and come in way over budget. (Just look at the F-35). Sometimes, it's better to look at what worked, before going off on a new design.
Um, no. The "huge rocket" is just to get the major pieces into space. Space assembly makes the outrageous cost of ground assembly seem like pennies.
Also, that "gentle nudge" is anything but, with escape velocity for earth being half again the speed of low earth orbit.
We need a heavy lift vehicle that can get pre-assembled major components into space for the foreseeable future. I sincerely doubt this is the right way to do it, but when you ask the former executives of the current big space corporations and politicians to come up with a solution, this is what it will look like every time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
While I cannot disagree that this is not the way I'd choose to solve the heavy lift problem, to worry that $2.8 Billion (or even 26 Billion) is going to be the lie item that bankrupts the country seems to be missing the 3000 Billion we've spent over the last 13 years to avenge the loss of a pair of buildings costing less than $2.3B in today's dollars and fewer lives than the number lost in motorcycle accidents ever year.
The stupid is much deeper than this minor boondoggle.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In his 2010 budget proposal, President Obama essentially proposed the elimination of US Manned Spaceflight. He cancelled the Constellation program and replaced it with NOTHING. The ISS would have continued for a few years with Americans riding Russian rockets to and fro, and there was a nod to "commercial space" guys like SpaceX (who would have had ISS as their only actual destination for just a few years, but that was it - no PROGRAM, no PROJECT, no DESTINATION. This was no surprise, since early in his 2008 campaign, Obama had promised the teachers unions that he would stall NASA for at least 5 years and shift the money to "education".
In an act of nearly open rebellion rarely seen these days in Washington, Obama's proposal went down in bi-partisan flames. NOBODY in either party supported him. His NASA team then proposed continuing the Orion capsule but launching it unmanned (without a launch abort system) on an EELV to the space station only for use as a "lifeboat". That did not go over well in congress either. Obama agreed to extend the life of ISS as far as to 2028 (but Russia has thus far only agreeed to 2020) but that too was not enough to make the Senate happy. A bi-partisan group of senators led by Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison came up with the SLS plan and forced it upon the administration. THAT is why its bitter critics call it the "Senate Launch System".
Without this rocket, the future of NASA and its astronauts would be nil. Critics live in a fantasy world where cancelling SLS would mean the cash would flow to their fave fanboy rockets - SOME imagine piles of cash for waves of EELV launches, while others imagine Elon Musk getting the billions and building a Mars Colonial Transport rocket... NEITHER would happen; Once you take that cash from NASA, the political support for spending that money "in space" will go away because the congressional districs affected all around the country would collapse. in 2010 we nearly saw this, and NASA facilities in Florida and Texas are already practically "ghost towns" as a result. ONE more event like the 2010 fight could end it. Once NASA gets out of manned spaceflight, ISS ends - and then there's no destination for "commercial" spaceflight companies and no certainty of customers bying tickets. People who want Musk and SpaceX to thrive need NASA to be in the manned space business and SLS is in that path (it keeps the manned program going, but is too big to be practical for routine ISS crew rotations). As for the lie that it's so expensive that there's no money to develop payloads: it's been repeatedly debunked - Once SLS is flying, the development money will no longer be being spent and in subsequent years that part of the NASA budget will pay for payload developments. The real key to SLS is that it develops a hugely-capable rocket during years Obama intended to waste and where he had no space "vision", and that rocket will be available to future presidents who won't have to wait to develop it and can USE it if they HAVE a "vision thing"