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NASA's Space Launch System Searches For a Mission
schwit1 writes: Managers of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) are searching for a mission that they can propose and convince Congress to fund. "Once SLS is into the 2020s, the launch rate should see the rocket launching at least once per year, ramping up to a projected three times per year for the eventual Mars missions. However, the latter won’t be until the 2030s. With no missions manifested past the EM-2 flight, the undesirable question of just how 'slow' a launch rate would be viable for SLS and her workforce has now been asked." Meanwhile, two more Russian rocket engines were delivered yesterday, the first time that's happened since a Russian official threatened to cut off the supply. Another shipment of three engines is expected later this year. In Europe, Arianespace and the European Space Agency signed a contract today for the Ariane 5 rocket to launch 12 more of Europe’s Galileo GPS satellites on three launches. This situation really reminds me of the U.S. launch market in the 1990s, when Boeing and Lockheed Martin decided that, rather than compete with Russia and ESA for the launch market, they instead decided to rely entirely on U.S. government contracts, since those contracts didn’t really demand that they reduce their costs significantly to compete.
Can we use it to shoot Congress into Space? We could call it an "Emergency preparedness for giant asteroid strike" or something! Of course once IN space, they might have to stay there for a while. Giant asteroid and all that. Earth might not be habitable again for decades!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...to join the ISS
NASA has a lot of problems and bureaucracy. While I like the IDEA of NASA, unfortunately the current REALITY is quite different. NASA is full of bureacracy, it's horribly inefficient and risk-averse. Congress is micromanaging the tasks and budget. So when we criticize NASA for no mission, part of that is because they really can't do anything with any consistency. And Congress is mostly interested in preserving pork jobs in their own districts. So we get the SLS, a huge rocket that is costing billions, without a decent mission, and a low flight rate that will make it horrendously expensive....forever... Meanwile, an efficient upstart called SpaceX is actually DOING THINGS and being BOLD, and certain senators are trying to make sure they don't succeed because SpaceX is disruptive and endangers their districts' jobs. So the US is basically fucked - we aren't leading, we aren't spending our money wisely, and NASA has become an expensive shell of its former self. And our newest hope, SpaceX, is only there because of the vision of Elon Musk... and even he is having to play politics to make sure his company isn't shut out of future NASA business. Thank our corrupt Congress, where local district money is more important than the health and leadership of the entire country.
Isn't keeping production and the money flow to various Congressmen's states the mission of the SLS anyway? Or they want an official "excuse" before getting all the pork? In that case it could be anything. It doesn't even have to be science, security would work even better. E.g searching for Nazis in the dark (sic) side of the moooon. Oh, damn, I Godwin law'd myself right at the start of the discussion...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Didn't we hear this same lie with the last launch vehicle? Each Shuttle was supposed to fly fifty missions per yearyet it averaged approximately four flights a year.
I mean this has probably been pointed out before... but...
Nasa
Nasi
Arienespace
Uhhhh lol come on please? could we not be more blatant and hypocritical of we tried?
You mean Ares I? Three flights a year? Would this face lie to you?
Aside from the horrific cost of the SLS (18 billion dollars) it is worth considering the fundamental flaws of it. If you use it to launch astronauts with the Orion spacecraft, you are using somewhere around a quarter of the SLS's lift capacity. If you want to use it to send things to Mars, you will need to add another stage, which is non-trivial. Overall, this seems like a giant corporate welfare program for NASA's contractors.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
If you guys truly want to cut cost to the bone why don't you guys outsource your space program to India?
I mean, the cost of the Indian rocket launch system is literally peanuts compare to what NASA pays for its rockets
Lack of missions? Obviously they should sign on with Uber
I supported NASA's "If we build it, they will come." because we needed to establish heavy lift as a foundation to do any manned or heavy robotic exploration and exploitation of space. How about a space plane for low earth orbit and a mini space station for the Moon and Mars.
First, you misunderstand how the US government is supposed to work. The congress (effectively a corporate board) is supposed to decide things like "shall we go to war?" or "shall we go to the moon?" etc, and THEY are the ones who provide the funding. The congress has the constitutional duty and authority to specify precisely where every dollar is spent. Congresses that have a good relationship with the CEO (the president) can CHOOSE to write very basic and vague language in their budgets, leaving the executive wide lattitude in how he carries out their priorities but when relations are bad they can choose to narrowly-tailor those budgets and laws to constrain the CEO. This is why JFK went to congress and said he thought we should commit to a moon mission; he was there to persuade them to authorize and fund what he wanted to do. Try reading the Kennedy moon speech - he says to them, in effect, "here's what I think we should do, and why, and it'll be really expensive and risky and if you choose not to fully-fund this then let's not even try because underfunding the effort would lead to failure". Kennedy was a good president and was able to convince congress to authorize the plan, fully fund it, and give him very wide lattitude in the program. Nixon, on the other hand, had poor relations with congress and after they found him not running the country in the way they wanted they passed a new law requiring all presidents to spend all the money congress provides (previously presidents like nixon had sometimes not done what congress wanted by simply not spending the allocated funds on things they did not like). Reagan faced a hostile congress run by a large majority of Democrats and yet he was able to easily get authorization to build a shuttle to replace Challenger; he regularly met, dined with and had a social drink with Tip O'Neil, the Democrat speaker of the house who HATED his policies.
The current problems at NASA are entirely traceable to a president with horrific relations with congress (he even rarely talks with his own Democrats). He tried to kill the manned program and congress (both parties) pushed back with alarm. They are demanding a NASA with an internal ability to put people in space on rockets that can be used to go to the moon and mars and he keeps trying to shift those funds to earth-studying satellites and to "commercial" spcaeflight to and from lowe earth orbit. President Obama could have solved all this by not continually picking unnecessary fights over a tiny pool of NASA funds - he could have simply asked for NASA's budget to rise a few hundred million per year for "commercial" (a rounding error in budget terms) but instead he has proposed to cut NASA even further.
They could try putting a man on the moon - seen as this hasn't been done before.
that we get rid of the representatives of the people and go dictatorship?
Congress is doing what the public wants. Oh, I know, there's a study that shows they really are not and that its the agendas of the rich that are being implemented... but THAT is what the public is currently demanding. A RICH MAN VOTES ONLY ONCE, just like a poor man. If "the 1%" are always getting what they want, it is because the poor and middle class are voting for that. If you hate all the importation of cheap foreign workers and you hate the telcoms having so much control over the net and you hate the massive security state, then STOP VOTING FOR IT. The key, of course, is that super-rich guys like Zuckerberg and Soros and Gates, and Buffet are all going to use money to directly or indirectly fund campaign ads to help you see that the politicians who's policies you hate on all these issues are "pro-choice" or "pro marriage equality" (or some other divisive thing) and so you will elevate THOSE positions to the top and vote for those candidates - that's fine, but then you HAVE also voted for all those other things you claim to hate. If you voted for Barney Frank because you liked his positions on homosecuality that's fine, BUT you also voted for the 2008 banking meltdown (Frank specifically blocked the Bush administration from trying to prevent it in 2007). If you voted for Henry Wasman because he was pro-gay, and pro-choice, that's fine and it's your right BUT you also voted to give power to the MPAA and you voted for the DMCA. The reason all this bundling of issues works so well for the politicians is that government is now so big and so involved in everything that any "bad" politician can get enough people to vote for him over their objections to certain of his policies by playing up some OTHER policies he also has. I cite the gay and abortion issues here because they are the most-divisive social issues and politicians of both sides routinely use them to get their supporters to vote for them even though they are doing the bidding of lobbyists on EVERYTHING ELSE.
Your problem is NOT with congress... it is with the voters (including possibly yourself) who keep voting OTHER priorities on OTHER issues with the result that you are unhappy with what those ELECTED representatives are doing on this policy.
This is the down side of the great work done by the private launch outfits: they are free to NOT compete for certain missions. NASA still needs a craft for those missions so the traditional built-to-order model is still necessary but for fewer cases which could have amortized the fixed costs. Now you have either makework or are stopping and restarting the line, making the per-mission cost grow.
So far SLS isn't setting itself far enough apart from the boondoggle which was Constellation for my tastes. Its budget has grown from 10 Billion to, by many estimates, $41 Billion by the time it has actually launched a few prototypes. And its per launch estimates are up in the air at the moment, NASA's "$500 Million" per launch is laughable. For the money we're burning on the development of SLS alone we could launch the mass of a Naval frigate into orbit on commercial launchers. Just think of what could be done with that kind of payload capacity.
Space Shuttle. For decades, people complained about the high costs of operating the shuttles - with the "obvious" implication that cutting the shuttles would free-up lots of money for something better. After the shuttles stopped flying, however, two things became clear: [1] much of the cost was simply the fixed-costs of the agency (which by the screwed-up methodology politicians like, was assigned to the shuttles) and [2] each shuttle flight was actually remarkably cheap... cheaper per ton to orbit than Apollo or Gemini and cheap enough that the program cost was essentially the same per year whether we flew 6 missions or no missions (the bulk of the costs were fixed NASA costs, NOT the actual costs of the missions).
Now that SLS is NASA's big project, all the big costs of the agency are getting assigned to (blamed on) SLS and so it appears that SLS will be the most expensive rocket ever (even though it is essentially a shuttle stack minus the orbiter). NEWS FLASH: WHATEVER program NASA does will become the most-expensive program! If NASA cancelled SLS and flew all future missions on Dragons atop Falcons, suddenly all NASA overhead costs would be assigned to THAT program and IT would become too expensive to be sustained... ALL the fixed costs for the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center, etc would get assigned to the "Dragon Exploration Program" or whatever it would be called. That's how the accountants in DC handle programs like NASA, the pentagon, etc.... they need to assign every expense of an agency to some program as part of getting congress to fund it.
If it's not an orbital shipyard, why even bother? ISS is babby's first space station. We need to start getting good at *real* space infrastructure projects.
Aren't you supposed to have the problem before you have the solution?
.....
....First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.)
Nasa: Hey, we have this great launch system
Everyone: Cool! What are you going to do with it?
Nasa:
No slight to Nasa (who've done amazing things) or to the States (ditto), but shouldn't you set a goal, and then go towards it with the right tools? (something like
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The SLS could have a mission: an Apollo 8 style Mars flyby in 2021: http://www.space.com/19985-pri...
That would actually fit within the current flight plan if it became EM-2. 580 days with a larger, livable service module could do it. That would be a mission worth a heavy lift vehicle and an actual date as opposed to "maybe we'll go to Mars in the 2030s" ...
We're going to pay how much for three times a year? This should be three times a month, ramping up to three times a week. What good is three launches a year?
So you're looking for a mission that can be accomplished with three launches a year. How about you launch a drawing board up into space, design yourself a pair of brass balls, and make something that will make them clack more than once a month? We'll have no trouble coming up with missions for you then!
Why don't we bring back Big Gemeni? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The teal dear: essentially an American Soyouz capsule, with a recoverable "capsule" put into orbit by a fully disposable launch system. Nobody seems to know just what the hell the SLS's orbital vehicle will be, or look like - a brief perusal of the wiki articles makes it look more like a desperate attempt to keep as much of the old shuttle program infastructure and supply chain alive as possible (big suprise.) Be it porkbarreling or SpaceX that wins out on the boost vehicle, what will be the orbital vehicle?
There's wide consensus that the Shuttle program was a costly underperformer, but despite its failures it did give us tremendous amounts of data and experience with recoverable, re-usable spacecraft. If we combined a rather large vehicle meant to return with a shuttle-type profile (ceramic heat shield and glide control) with a fully disposable launch and orbital engine system (instead of keeping a costly chunk of it on the vehicle and having to lug it about, like the orbiter's main engine) you could get the best of both worlds - a vehicle larger than what parachute landings and albative heat shields allow for, but small enough to fit on top of a disposable booster (and inside a fairing) and allow for a true launch escape system rather than the very dicey launch setup the shuttles used.
The SLS was built to funnel money to well-connected districts, not for any mission needs....
I don't get why it hasn't even been proposed to send Cassini like probes to Uranus and Neptune.... The two planets least explored by far.
Not the manned pork in things like SLS and the ISS.
Can anyone explain to me why we need the SLS when SpaceX is on track to provide the same functionality for a tiny fraction of the price?