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NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on NASA's ongoing work on a manned trip to the moon. From the report: Without a new administrator even nominated yet, NASA's acting head Robert Lightfoot on Wednesday requested a study of whether next year's first flight of the Space Launch System rocket, billed as the most powerful NASA has built, could have a crew of astronauts. "I know the challenges associated with such a proposition," Lightfoot said in a letter to his agency, citing costs, extra work, and "a different launch date" for the planned 2018 Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). The mission would be launched by the massive SLS, which is still in development, then boosted by a European service module to put three astronauts inside the new Orion space capsule on a three-week trip around the moon. NASA first sent three astronauts around the moon in 1968 in the Apollo 8 mission. The last astronaut to stand on the moon, the late Gene Cernan returned to Earth in 1972. The new talk of a repeat moon-circling mission, aboard an untested spacecraft, has space policy experts variously thrilled, dismissive, and puzzled. "I frankly don't quite know what to say about it," space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University said. Writing on NASAWatch, Keith Cowing called the study request a "Hail Mary" pass to save the life of the SLS ahead of Trump installing a budget cutter to head the space agency. The Government Accountability Office estimates the costs of SLS and its two planned launches (a second, crewed mission is planned for 2023) at $23 billion.
How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?
"This graph shows the amount spent by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the importance of the Apollo program ($100 billion spent over ten years) and of the Space Shuttle ($200 billion over 40 years)". A quick search suggests that NASA's total annual budget for this year is something around $19 billion for context, so Apollo would consume a little over half NASA's total budget per year over the same ten-year period. (That $100 Bn figure is inflation adjusted as far as I can see, and yes, that's assuming that it hasn't become more expensive in real terms to do the same thing.)
"would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?".
In short - often no.
Nobody sane thinks that you can launch SLS for under 2 billion dollars per launch.
This is a launch cost of $30000 per kg of payload.
Falcon 9 can launch the same payload (admittedly split into several) for $5000/kg.
Falcon heavy (debut flight expected within several months) launches can currently be bought for around $1500/kg.
SLS 'benefited' from congress - who at best have a passing knowledge of rocketry, but a very good knowledge of who makes existing hardware in their constituencies mandating that it use shuttle components.
If you can get - for the same launch cost - not 70 tons, but 1400 tons to orbit, even if they are in 54 ton, not 70 ton lumps - it starts being really questionable what the benefit of the 'shuttle derived' heritage is buying you.
I note also that SpaceX has an at least credible plan to get launch costs down from the above $1500/kg to $30/kg or so, in a totally reusable vehicle.
At this sort of cost, it becomes insane not to entirely reevaluate your lunar strategy.
For example, it may become entirely reasonable not to use a lightweight aluminium-lithium stir-welded composite structure which is indeed very light, but requires months of engineering to design and costs millions, but instead a half inch thick decent aluminium structure that costs tens of thousands.
Landing on the moon is much, much harder than just flying around it.
If you're just flying past the moon, you need a capsule of, say, 2 tonnes to carry a couple of astronauts. But if you want to slow down into a low lunar orbit, you need about 25% of your mass in fuel on the way out (an extra 0.5 tonnes) and another 25% of your mass in fuel to slow down into lunar orbit in the first place (an extra 0.625 tonnes, since you have to slow down the fuel you'll use on the way out).
To actually land, you need about 25% of your mass in fuel again to slow down into lunar orbit, another 100% to land, another 100% to take off again, and 25% again to escape lunar orbit. So, working backwards: your 2-tonne capsule needs 0.5 tonnes of fuel to escape lunar orbit. Those 2.5 tonnes need another 2.5 tonnes to get you off the lunar surface. Those 5 tonnes require another 5 tonnes to help land them. And those 10 tonnes need another 2.5 tonnes to put them in lunar orbit in the first place.
Add engines, and tanks to actually hold the fuel, and you get up to the 15-tonne mass of the Apollo lunar landers ... compared to the dry mass of their ascent stage, which was only about 2 tonnes. That's the extra it takes to actually land on the moon.
Good thing that's not what they're actually doing.
If you read the actual GAO report, it doesn't say the rocket costs twenty-three billion. That's the cost of "the first planned SLS flight, the ground systems for that effort, and the first two Orion flights." In other words the costs to meet certain early program milestones, including costs which should properly be amortized across the lifetime of the rocket and crew vehicle.
The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.
That's still a lot of money. Even if you go with expendable costs of half a billion, and billions for the whole mission for sure, well, it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls. Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We've done it (sent a manned ship to at least loop around the Moon) nine times already, almost 50 years ago.
And none of that equipment really exists anymore.
At this point, it's not impressive or useful to replicate Apollo VIII.
Who said anything that the goal was to "impress" you or the American people? If the goal is to use the moon as a base, NASA has to re-develop the technology to get back there. Remember the goal often is a mandate by the government.
It's also insane to send a manned crew on untested hardware. The only time they did that before was for the STS, and that was only because the STS was unable to fly or land without pilots. That was a serious design flaw. This is just a stunt, forced upon NASA due to the obscene cost of the new launch system.
That's a pretty illogical position. Show me the "tested" hardware that will get NASA back to the moon. Most of the tested hardware only exists in museums and are not functional even if NASA wanted to use it. NASA has to build new hardware. They have to test it somehow.
Also when NASA sent men to the moon, all the hardware was "untested" at the time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.