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