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Russia Abandons Super-Rocket Designed To Compete With SLS
schwit1 writes Russia has decided to abandon an expensive attempt to build an SLS-like super-rocket and will instead focus on incremental development of its smaller but less costly Angara rocket. "Facing significant budgetary pressures, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has indefinitely postponed its ambitious effort to develop a super-heavy rocket to rival NASA's next-generation Space Launch System, SLS. Instead, Russia will focus on radical upgrades of its brand-new but smaller Angara-5 rocket which had its inaugural flight in Dec. 2014, the agency's Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, decided on Thursday, March 12." For Russia's space industry, it appears that these budgetary pressures have been a blessing in disguise. Rather than waste billions on an inefficient rocket for which there is no commercial demand — as NASA is doing with SLS (under orders from a wasteful Congress) — they will instead work on further upgrades of Angara, much like SpaceX has done with its Falcon family of rockets. This will cost far less, is very efficient, and provides them a better chance to compete for commercial launches that can help pay for it all. And best of all, it offers them the least costly path to future interplanetary missions, which means they might actually be able to make those missions happen. To quote the article again: "By switching upper stages of the existing Angara from kerosene to the more potent hydrogen fuel, engineers might be able to boost the rocket's payload from current 25 tons to 35 tons for missions to the low Earth orbit. According to Roscosmos, Angara-A5V could be used for piloted missions to the vicinity of the Moon and to its surface." In a sense, the race is now on between Angara-A5V and Falcon Heavy.
SpaceX found that hydrogen fuel is not an improvement over methane when you include all the extra complexity (and weight) of dealing with super cold and very small atoms, both resulting in brittle metals. SpaceX does intend to switch to methane, which is a small improvement over kerosene, and unlike kerosene does not leave difficult to clean residue in pipes and engine parts.
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
At a total cost of way over $1B per flight (unless it flies more than once or twice per year, which is highly unlikely), you can be sure that even the 130 mt version of SLS will be in much smaller demand than a $100M semi-reusable Falcon Heavy with a ~40 mt capacity, or even the expendable ~$150M, ~55 mt version.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm not sure exactly what commercial uses there are for really heavy launches.
Economy of scale? But that's only worthwhile as long as the heavier launcher won't hit low launch frequencies and unsustainable infrastructure costs. Which is definitely the problem that the SLS will hit.
Comms and science do not need to be so large
Circular logic. Right, they don't need to be so large because we've learned to make them smaller...and we've learned to make them smaller because we had no choice, large rockets were prohibitively expensive. But that doesn't mean that, e.g., science couldn't use more capable vehicles. Science can always use more capable vehicles. Missions could be much easier with them (or even possible in the first place), and a cheaper larger launcher could make even the mission itself cheaper (besides launch costs).
Galileo would have gotten to Jupiter almost four years faster with Centaur-G instead of the less-capable solid stage it was forced to use. That meant extra four years of running (and paying) the mission team without results, and also four years less of hardware lifetime once the probe got to its destination. The Mars Science Laboratory wouldn't have had to use a working but convoluted and custom-designed landing system. In a few years, a payload of this size (or even somewhat larger) would simply use a "marsified" Dragon-derived lander with no parachute and just a longer segment of propulsive landing. It might weigh almost twice as much, but who cares?
You could use serially manufactured components instead of custom designs if you weren't forced to shave every kilogram.
Ezekiel 23:20