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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 06 2020, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly
NASA will pay a staggering $146 million for each SLS rocket engine:

NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to "restart" production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine.

The NASA news release says that Aerojet has "implemented a plan to reduce the cost of the engines by as much as 30 percent," noting the use of more advanced manufacturing techniques.

[...] NASA designed these brilliant engines in the 1970s for the space shuttle program, during which they each flew multiple launches. A total of 46 engines were built for the shuttle at an estimated cost of $40 million[*] per engine. But now these formerly reusable engines will be flown a single time on the SLS rocket and then dropped into the ocean.

There are four engines on a Space Launch System rocket. At this price, the engines for an SLS rocket, alone, will cost more than $580 million. This does not include the costs of fabricating the rocket's large core stage, towering solid-rocket boosters, an upper stage, or the costs of test, transportation, storage, and integration. With engine prices like these, it seems reasonable to assume that the cost of a single SLS launch will remain $2 billion into perpetuity.

[...] There are a lot of things one could buy in the aerospace industry for $146 million. One might, for example, buy at least six RD-180 engines from Russia. These engines have more than twice the thrust of a space shuttle main engine. Or, one might go to United Launch Alliance's Rocket Builder website and purchase two basic Atlas V rocket launches. You could buy three "flight-proven" Falcon 9 launches. One might even buy a Falcon Heavy launch, which has two-thirds the lift capacity of the Space Launch System at one-twentieth the price[...]

[...] SpaceX is building the Raptor rocket engine to power its Super Heavy rocket and Starship upper stage. The Raptor has slightly more power at sea level than the RS-25, and is designed for dozens of uses. According to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, it costs less than $1 million to build a Raptor engine. The company has already built a couple dozen of them on its own dime. So there's that.

[*] Not adjusted for inflation.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:12PM (17 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:12PM (#991326)

    >NASA won't have the funds.
    NASA won't be the ones industrializing space. Of course, at SLS prices only the most ambitious of private interests will even consider it either.

    >No, they have!
    They have a single example of someone succeeding at small scales at much lower cost, for reasons they don't understand. A single data point does not make for a general trend, and certainly doesn't guarantee that their success can scale to much larger and more ambitious (and expensive) projects. For example, if SpaceX hadn't pivoted to steel, the recent string of test failures would have dealt them a major financial blow that would have slowed things down considerably. At best.

    I completely agree that Starship will eventually render SLS obsolete - it might even manage to do it before SLS actually flies. And hopefully that will be enough to put an end to the SLS program. I would certainly be very disappointed if a new SLS-style program were created at this point, but the SLS program continues for political reasons that have nothing to do with its technical merits, because it was designed that way to keep it from being canceled for reasons that also had nothing to do with its technical merits. Cancelling it will take an immensely compelling argument, and "we may soon have a much better privately-developed rocket" makes for a poor argument for a politician to want to cut a large flow of cash into their state.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:19PM (16 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:19PM (#991328) Journal

    They have a single example of someone succeeding at small scales at much lower cost, for reasons they don't understand.

    Much lower cost is more than an order of magnitude lower cost. I figure at least a factor of 20.

    For example, if SpaceX hadn't pivoted to steel, the recent string of test failures would have dealt them a major financial blow that would have slowed things down considerably. At best.

    Funny how that worked. NASA would have an additional dozen requirements that would be pushed through no matter what. SpaceX already adapted.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:33PM (15 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:33PM (#991335)

      >SpaceX already adapted.
      Yeah, but they were able to do so because they got lucky - someone noticed that some steels have a better strength-to-weight ratio than carbon fiber at cryogenic temperatures. If steel didn't happen to have those properties, or nobody noticed, there weren't a lot of other options.

      Now, far be it from me to badmouth luck - but it's not something to count on

      And hey, assuming they pull off Starship SH, then there will be two data points to go on. Actually, at this point we have several other rocket companies having reached orbit as well - all at a much smaller scale, but that makes for several more data points. Then we can start talking trends - in 2011 we couldn't. SpaceX's Falcon 9 success at much lower cost might well have been a fluke.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:48PM (14 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:48PM (#991339) Journal
        The thing is, that study was published in 2011. The evidence was already building up when they started SLS. Even ten years earlier, we had the EELV (Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle) program which consisted of the Atlas 5 and Delta IV. Even back then, we could have made things work with those rockets. One has to go back 30 or more years.

        But even then, NASA was trying to obstruct commercial launch - first with a Shuttle monopoly law from 1975-1984, and then with an enforced oligopoly of launch providers with niche monopolies (Orbital's Pegasus, Boeing's Delta II, Lockheed's Atlas II, Titan IV (for military payloads of the same size as the Atlas II), and of course, the Space Shuttle (for NASA projects and later the ISS)). This only got busted open in the first place when the US military got tired of it and started the EELV program in the mid 1990s. A half century of obstruction and white elephants.

        NASA should in theory be pushing the envelope. Not just with cutting edge technology and exploration, but also with US industry. If they had pushed commercial launch back in 1970, IMHO things would be amazingly different today, we'd be 30-40 years ahead of where we are now. That is an amazing lost opportunity.
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @03:03PM (7 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Thursday May 07 2020, @03:03PM (#991344)

          Yes - a study with a single data point about a fledgling space launch company that might have just gotten lucky. Very promising, but not necessarily relevant to short-term (less than a decade) goals.

          As for the rest - I won't argue there. When government bureaucracies get cozy with specific suppliers, it rarely ends in high efficiency. The military has plenty of its own examples of that.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:38AM (6 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:38AM (#991947) Journal

            Yes - a study with a single data point about a fledgling space launch company that might have just gotten lucky.

            Because luck will somehow get you somewhere with rockets? A lot of people have tried that and often died that. Sorry, you can't spend an order of magnitude less and expect luck to make up the difference. You need to get it pretty close just to have a functioning system.

            As to the "single" data point, it consists of two rockets and three rocket engines all developed way under schedule and budget compared to NASA.

            • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:04PM (5 children)

              by Immerman (3985) on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:04PM (#992040)

              Luck comes in lots of forms - chance permeates the functioning of our society to the point that statistical analysis shows that your financial success in life is primarily down to luck. (Followed by being born into money - which is also luck)

              Maybe somebody had an incredibly valuable insight early on in the design process, which won't be repeated. Maybe a small team of designers had just the right synergy to really excel, and now one of them has left, or several more have been added, and the synergy is gone. A million little things can cause an occasional radical outlier - there's never any guarantee that any one-off performance can be duplicated. Especially when you start talking about trying to scale things up. Lots of things work well at a small scale or in a small team, that just don't scale up as you try to grow - it's actually a major problem encountered by a lot of small businesses that try to "take things to the next level".

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:49PM (4 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:49PM (#992062) Journal

                Luck comes in lots of forms - chance permeates the functioning of our society to the point that statistical analysis shows that your financial success in life is primarily down to luck. (Followed by being born into money - which is also luck)

                In a deterministic world, what is "luck" and what is "not luck"?

                • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:50PM

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:50PM (#992063) Journal
                  ugh, non-deterministic world.
                • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 09 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)

                  by Immerman (3985) on Saturday May 09 2020, @05:42PM (#992095)

                  Good luck is when chance benefits you, bad luck is when it harms you. Both happen pretty much continuously, but as with any random occurrence the net benefit will tend to vary wildly over time. Which is why anecdotes and small sample sizes are worth only slightly more than nothing in scientific research - you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from them because the noise is probably greater than the signal.

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 09 2020, @11:40PM (1 child)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 09 2020, @11:40PM (#992169) Journal
                    Ok, so now, what is chance?

                    For example, suppose we have a game of chance which on the flip of a fair coin (which can only flip head or tails), gives you 10% of what you bet on heads and on tails, takes away 10%. Repeatedly playing the game over and over, rebetting whatever your current stake is, will slowly reduce your money by about 0.5% per game on average. Now suppose you get 20% when you flip heads and only lose 10% when you flip tails. Suddenly, it's a net earner with about 4% return per game on average.

                    There's a very small chance that you could win big with the first game payouts and lose big with the second after playing a bunch of games. But the odds against those events happening go up as you keep playing.

                    We could say this is all chance, but it's chance with a thumb on the scale. That's the problem with calling things "luck". You're ignoring that the probabilities are almost always biased. There are a number of companies that were in the same place as SpaceX was (for example, Rotary Rocket [wikipedia.org],Ball Aerospace [wikipedia.org], and E-Prime Aerospace [eprimeaerospace.com]) with a launch vehicle idea and a bunch of money. Why they failed where SpaceX succeeded is not just luck.

                    Further, treating this as one data point or one observation is misleading. As I noted, there were numerous achievements - the development of two rockets and three rocket engines, and in addition seven launches (2 sucessful launches out of 5 of the Falcon 1 and 2 subsequent successful launches of the Falcon 9). United Launch Alliance (ULA) also had two successful launch vehicles and its parent companies were trusted enough by NASA to develop the SLS and Orion vehicles. NASA had plenty of opportunity, not just with SpaceX, to develop more advanced and capable launch vehicles from existing ones, which would have had a far lower dependency on "luck" and massive spending over long periods of time than their SLS approach.
                    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday May 11 2020, @03:48AM

                      by Immerman (3985) on Monday May 11 2020, @03:48AM (#992653)

                      My point is only that there's a lot of noise in that signal. Trying to forecast from extremely limited information is an exercise in bias and superstition. And at the time the bias and superstition mostly favored business as usual.

                      Would it have made more sense to put the money towards Starship? Maybe. The government oversight that would likely entail might also have killed them. They also weren't really in a place to seriously think about Starship yet - they had years of challenges to embrace first. And that's assuming the money would have been available for anything else space related in the first place - pork has incredible motivating power in getting a budget approved, and SpaceX doesn't do pork. Would it have been better for space development if NASA had simply not gotten the money at all and crossed their fingers that Starship would materialize?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @05:17PM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @05:17PM (#991736)

          > NASA should in theory be pushing the envelope.
          NOPE. NEVER. They are a POLITICAL organization now (and most of their existence). Sorry to say they are just an expensive offshoot of congress. I always wanted to work for them when I was a wee lad, but when I did work WITH them in the 90s, I was so glad I went private. THEY are the main problem with spaceflight today (and the they included their main arm, congress).

          >If they had pushed commercial launch back in 1970, IMHO things would be amazingly different today
          NOPE. There has been some very amazing advances over the years.
          CAD (huge really-especially with built in analysis tools). 3D printed production metals. Metal plate/metal honeycomb bulkheads. Thinner, more consistent metal sheeting(exterior and pressure vessels). Better forming with titanium. Better nozzles. Electric Thrust Vector Controllers vs hydraulic. Better/cheaper IMUs. Smaller/lighter electronics. MUCH better batteries (we used NiCad WELL into the 2000s). To put it in line with the article, solids($14) vs liquids ($1-2/lb) although that doesn't include the price of the turbo-pump.

          Small nit: add Orbital's Taurus and X-37 to your list.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @06:45PM (4 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @06:45PM (#991765) Journal

            NOPE. There has been some very amazing advances over the years.

            The most important of those amazing advances is higher launch volume which is purely an economic issue. SpaceX had a slow season in 2019, but it still managed 13 launches for the year (and had 20 launches for 2018). The point here is that a SpaceX-like business could have thrived in the 1970s and 1980s with the technology of those days. But it would need launch volume. NASA killed that by first a decade of creating a monopoly for the Space Shuttle on all payloads, public and private, and then the stagnant launch oligopoly for a decade after that. SpaceX couldn't have been created much earlier than it was and still have a viable market for its products!

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @07:10PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2020, @07:10PM (#991783)

              I still partially disagree. Iridium went up in the 90s and Orbital was launching about 20 flights a year back then. They could have done more since they had several different vehicles. I'd say the biggest killer was cell phones (killed Iridium) and lack of sophisticated micro sats (tech problems back then). There just wasn't the market like today and we've had a whole evolution of the tech.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @09:30PM (2 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2020, @09:30PM (#991818) Journal
                Orbital's peak launch rate [wikipedia.org] was six flights in 1998. OSC had other launch vehicles [wikipedia.org], but only the Minotaur I was active back then - it launched twice in 2000.
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @04:53AM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @04:53AM (#991961)

                  Wrong. PEGASUS peak launch rate was 6. That is hardly the whole fleet. And nothing in your links list the military launches except in passing. Here shows some, but many are still missing:
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_in_spaceflight [wikipedia.org]
                  and also other years. Incomplete though. Can't find a better site showing the whole fleet (~35 vehicles in the 90's).
                  Also, I said 90's and Minotaur was just being developed during that time and was the beginning of the end IMNSHO. We were discussing events 25-35 years ago that woulda/coulda/shoulda, but didn't. Orbital and Coleman Research were the Space-X of their day. Young and growing fast. You can hardly find evidence of Coleman online anymore in the launch business, and Orbital has been swallowed by ATK and NG and are a shadow of their former selves. If Iridium had been successful, it might have been a different world, but cell phones stole the business and the rest is history. And again, none of it had anything to do with NASA.

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:22AM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:22AM (#992172) Journal
                    I only count Pegasus since they were the only orbital launch vehicles. There were 5 such launches. The other 5 were suborbital with one failure and one partial failure.