Battle of the Heavy Lift Rockets

schwit1 writes: Check out this detailed and informative look at the unspoken competiton between NASA's SLS rocket and SpaceX's planned heavy lift rocket. It's being designed to be even more powerful than the Falcon Heavy. Key quote: "It is clear SpaceX envisions a rocket far more powerful than even the fully evolved Block 2 SLS – a NASA rocket that isn't set to be launched until the 2030s." The SpaceX rocket hinges on whether the company can successfully build its new Raptor engine. If they do, they will have their heavy lift rocket in the air and functioning far sooner than NASA, and for far less money.

Comments

Competition is good.

[Z00L00K]

There have been way too little competition in this area the last decades. Considering that the Russian RD-180 engines designed in the 70's&80's are still seen as state of the art it is obviously a stagnant situation.

Re:Competition is good.

[Ol Olsoc]

But that's government "progress" for you. Compare 60 years of spaceflight technology from 1955 to 2015 (OK, the years were cherry-picked) and it's still basically the same: LOX/Kerosene or LOX/LH2 and some engines are bigger and some are smaller.

It's short of amazing that you can attempt to attack the evul guvmint on this one. And be so mind bogglingly wrong at the same time.

There are many different types of engines out there. Aluminum perchlorate mixture engines, Hybrid nitrous oxide/polymer engines, some really interesting combos where the fuel is paraffin and with mixed other additives like Al, or Li. Hydrazine rockets, Ion thrusters, solar sails, there are hundreds of designs. Many of which haven't happened yet due to one or another limitation.

The Kero-LOX and Liquid Hydrogen-LOX rockets are just examples of the most powerful liquid fueled rockets.

Lot's of different types of rockets out there.

And lack of any new and more powerful engines that exist that exist are almost certainly not caused by jackbooted thugs, just itching to put loyal citizens in FEMA Death camps while installing a new world order. where we all pay 300 percent of our salary in taxes that go to urban thugs.

It is a matter of physics, which turns out to be remarkably resistant to the invisible guiding hand of the free market. We can build the biggest, bad-assed, Chuck Norris rocket engine that we can dial up the power the whole way to 11, but if we can't pump in the fuel quickly enough, or the resultant temperatures are beyond the melting point of any available material, And neither Grover Norquist not Ayn Rand can fix that.

Maybe the answer is in teaching Intelligent design in school?

Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress on rocketry. Hopefully humorously, but that's for others to judge. None of the engines in use by the commercial outfits are some dramatic new design, and it's all physics and material design, not ideology. Now look at aircraft development from (another cherry-picked 60 years): 1910 to 1970. That went from wooden biplanes to the 747. Sure, there were a few "helpful" eras in between - like 2 major wars and lots more lesser ones, which kicked development up by several notches. But those developments were still the result of commercial companies, just as NASA contracts out work, today.

Re:Competition is good.

[khallow]

Anyhow, I went off the deep end on your idea to illustrate just how silly the idea that the government is holding back progress on rocketry.

Like the US banning private launch vehicles through to 1984? Or maintaining a launch oligopoly funded on the public dollar through to the last decade? Or paying a few tens of billions to develop a huge rocket while not paying a few billion to get someone like SpaceX to develop said rocket.

Re:Competition is good.

[ppanon]

As someone pointed out, the physics of building rocket engines hasn't significantly changed in the last 60 years. That's why the F1 engine is still the most powerful rocket we've ever designed. What has changed are manufacturing techniques like sintering laser 3D printing techniques and computer modeling to allow us to build F1 engines that are slightly more powerful and a lot cheaper than what was built for Apollo. And yet somehow we don't build them. Why? Because there's no demand for it.

There has been a lot of demand for faster, more agile, and more fuel efficient aviation - from combat aircraft for wars to civil aviation in the face of rising fuel prices. That pressure isn't as significant for the launch market because: a) there are only so many safe, useful orbits for satellites where they aren't going to interfere with eachother (in terms of signal transmission - which is what many are used for) and a lot of them are already in use; b) fuel costs are a small portion of launch costs.

So the moral of the story is a) development happens according to demand and changing requirements/conditions and b) supply-side economics is BS - consumption is limited by demand.

Re:Competition is good.

[Rockoon]

It took two world wars and one cold war to get us to where we are today.

Let me translate this for everyone:

"Yes, the government really did outlaw private space flight, and when the ban was lifted it still used its influence in order to raise barriers to entry to prevent competition with the oligarchy, but I think that it had a good reason to."

..and this true statement without the fucking spin is a far cry from negating any argument about how government held us all back yet again. The government did in fact hold us back.

The facts are that a private company can come along and get things done better and cheaper. If we were to believe the argument that the government does it better, then the government would have already done what SpaceX is doing. It didn't, therefore the government did not do it better. It had MANY decades to do so. Instead it prevented better from happening.

This is the Congressinal Rocket not NASA.

[trout007]

NASA never wanted to build this rocket. It was forces in them from Congress. Plus NASA doesn't build rockets it overseas other aerospace contractors.

Re:My money is on SpaceX

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA never had agility. Vision sure, but the entire institution was intentionally designed to be scattered and resistant to change. It's difficult to be institutionally agile when you're operations are spread out into as many political jurisdictions as possible.

No Competition Here!

[Irate Engineer]

NASA would be very happy to let SpaceX build a heavy lift booster for them. Really.

The only reason SLS exists is to keep the congresscritters from the former shuttle supply chain districts happy. That's it. NASA is desperately trying to keep funding going, and they ain't interested in pissing that money away on designing big dumb rockets, but politics says that they must to survive. Rockets are rapidly becoming a commercial technology, which is a good thing.

NASA would be very happy to buy rockets from Elon Musk and/or whoever else can put up competing articles. NASA would much rather be doing and spending its hard-fought budget on things that they do well, pushing the envelope on technologies for hard problems, like getting our asses to Mars, and science missions.

Re:Delay is good. congress operating as designed.

[queazocotal]

'One spectacular explosion' - One explosion would be 92% reliability. (one failure in 12 launches)

Re:Why does it take so long?

[db48x]

Unlike in Kerbal Space Program, when you stack rocket components on top of each other you have to reengineer the bottom one to hold up the top one; they say that they're reusing the main tank, but that might be true in a narrow sense if they reuse the H2 tank inside the orange Space Shuttle External Tank. Then you have to engineer the manufacturing processes and factories for producing any new components (and there will be lots of those), plus the modified one (easier, but still plenty to go around), plus you have to engineer the test facilities for all the components, and you have to test the test facilities, and then test the components, and then test-launch the vehicle, etc. Don't forget to document everything, and to design training procedures so that you can hire new people to build these things, and test them, etc, etc. It actually is rocket science.