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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday November 26 2016, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-faster-cheaper....-pick-two dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Poor NASA: it's got a president who doesn't like its climate research and wants it to pay more attention to putting humans on the Moon and Mars – but its launch vehicle for that kind of mission is costing too much.

That vehicle is the Space Launch System, a rocket hoped to be capable of one day hauling loads up to 130,000kg and reaching Mars.

In a Request For Information (RFI) that hit Federal Business Opportunities late last week, the agency revealed wants to trim the costs to build, operate and maintain the SLS, Orion, and Exploration Ground System (EGS) projects.

As the RFI notes: "Given NASA's assumption of flat funding levels, minimising POM [production, operations and maintenance – The Register] costs for SLS, Orion, and EGS is critical to free resources for re-investment".

The money it hopes to free up would make it easier to fund space walks, docking systems, Mars exploration and safety efforts.

The RFI opens up pretty much the gamut of SLS and Orion activities, including whether or not there's a commercial user base for the lifters.

At the end of last week, NASA announced that the SLS's propulsion system is in the Marshall test stand, ready for the first test of its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS).


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @06:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @06:31AM (#433145)

    These companies are not supporting the industry, they're holding it back. You are substantially underplaying how little progress they've made and the reasons for it. It wasn't more than a few years ago that the big players in the aerospace industry were stating that SpaceX's vision of rocket landing and reuse simply was impossible. Yet here we are today and after numerous successful recoveries, SpaceX will be launching the first "flight tested" rocket in a matter of months.

    Or the SLS system itself. It's still using solid state boosters which even astronauts have expressed major concern about. If you're not familiar with the tech solid state boosters are essentially giant firecrackers. You set it off and there's no stopping it - period. They're very cheap, very unsafe, and completely non reusable. You can get the tubes the firecracker is packed in (they were the giant white tubes on the Space Shuttle for instance) but that really is the analog of getting the paper a firecracker is wrapped in and claiming you have a reusable firecracker. This sort of design completely precludes future reuse scenarios like to-from Mars, yet we the taxpayer are spending tens of billions of dollars funding its development. That's just so wrong.

    After SpaceX did manage to compete we've seen the emergence of various other companies looking to follow in SpaceX's footsteps such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. And all of this for what is still a relatively small piece of the pie. Pulling the life support for the dinos wouldn't kill the energy, it would completely revitalize it with a huge vacuum created that would be rapidly filled with fresh ideas, goals, and concepts. It'd be the best thing possible for the industry.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday November 26 2016, @07:53AM

    by tftp (806) on Saturday November 26 2016, @07:53AM (#433155) Homepage

    Yet here we are today and after numerous successful recoveries, SpaceX will be launching the first "flight tested" rocket in a matter of months.

    The Space Shuttle was reusable from day zero (except the Hydrogen tank.) You can reuse anything and everything. The devil is in the details - such as the cost of refurbishing the vehicle. I do not know if SpaceX can do better than STS, but the latter was enormously expensive to overhaul.

    There are other issues as well. A returnable, reusable component has to fly to the orbit (or half-way) and return. The mass of parts and fuel that is used for the return leg is NOT lifting the payload to the orbit. Then there is a problem of damage and wear. If you do not know in what condition the component will be after return, you cannot schedule a flight with that component - you simply don't know how long will it take to get repaired. Reusable components sound very good and green, but oftentimes it is cheaper and more practical to build a new metal tube with a few pumps and pipes. That process can be streamlined, automated, and you get controllable quality. How do you get certainty about this or that piece of metal that flew 100 miles up and then down, was exposed to thermal shock, extreme vibrations, low and high pressures? You just don't know. The first cracks are invisible; but they can fully develop in milliseconds.

    This means that it is up to SpaceX to decide how well they are going to flight-qualify the used sections. They may use X-ray defectoscopy on the whole body of the section... or they can just wipe the soot with wet napkins and call it ready. The latter will be very cheap, of course. But will it work well enough? It remains to be seen. If they choose to do the STS-level overhaul, then it is cheaper to just remove the serial number from the "flight-tested" rocket and bolt it to the new one. At this day rockets test the strength of materials to the limit.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @03:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @03:18PM (#433234)

      The Space Shuttle was in no practical way reusable. The main engine required extensive refurbishing to get into a usable state again. It got back to Earth in one piece, but it was not meant for reuse. The recovered boosters were not only the solid rocket boosters, or 'firecracker casings' I mentioned, but also soaked in an saltwater bath before being recovered. I'd wager it's extremely likely that recovering and refurbishing them was vastly more expensive than just scrapping them. But since the taxpayer is paying for it all with a practically infinite budget for these companies, who cares about costs or efficiency right?

      SpaceX recently did a successful static fire test of one of their recovered rockets almost immediately after recovering it. Reuse, like you mention is not easy, and even for airplanes it'd be far easier to simply throw them away and start with a fresh one each time. And nearly every major plane crash has been related to maintenance issues of some sort. But consumers can't afford to pay a million dollars per ticket like we collectively ended up paying literally more than a billion dollars per launch for the Space Shuttle. And the fact rocket launches stuck to that antiquated model has likely been a reason our space program has seen barely incremental improvements since the sixties. For somebody who just experienced the moon landing, can you imagine their expression if we told them that 50 years later we'd have failed to put a human on any other terrestrial body, had 0 permanent establishments on other celestial bodies, and that we still didn't even have the means to have a ship deliver a significant payload to one target and then transit a significant on arrival payload to another location? You'd sound cynical to the point of being ignorant.

      Technology does not push itself forward. It only advances when its pushed forward by people. The reason you're sitting here talking about how incredibly difficult it would be to reuse rockets is because the biggest (and for many decades only) major players in the industry spent minimal to no effort pushing technology forward other than in the most minimally incremental ways. If not for the space race of the 60s, it's entirely possible you could be sitting here in another parallel world in late 2016 telling me about how absurdly impractical it would be to put a man on the moon. Like Kennedy said, "We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hawd."

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @10:42PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @10:42PM (#433430)

        You forgot the Shuttle itself. It wasn't just the engines that needed a full overhaul between each flight. The heat shield tiles had to be inspected and replaced every time, as well. And they weren't even all the same size or shape, so you had thousands of individual tiles that needed to be crafted. Heck, early on it was taking about forty hours to attach a single tile, and there's about 31,000 of them...

        No, the real reason so much of the Shuttle is being reused for the SLS is pork. Got to keep it spread around. The only reason the SRBs were done the way they were (ie. in segments) is transportation limitations, and it's the segmentation that caused the Challenger disaster (along with management, of course).

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:52AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @12:52AM (#433482)

          it's the segmentation that caused the Challenger

          That's an oversimplification. You can't make a single vessel that size in one piece, and reasonably work with it either. It needed to be in smaller parts apart from the transportation aspect. And the transportation aspect wasn't an issue of pork. You weren't going to have a factory to manufacture those things right there in Florida.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @04:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @04:33PM (#433282)

    I work in the space industry and let me tell you how backward and inefficient it is. SpaceX looks so cool simply because the competition is so awful.