NASA chief explains why agency won't buy a bunch of Falcon Heavy rockets
Since the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket in February, NASA has faced some uncomfortable questions about the affordability of its own Space Launch System rocket. By some estimates, NASA could afford 17 to 27 Falcon Heavy launches a year for what it is paying annually to develop the SLS rocket, which won't fly before 2020. Even President Trump has mused about the high costs of NASA's rocket. On Monday, during a committee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council, former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale raised this issue. Following a presentation by Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, Hale asked whether the space agency wouldn't be better off going with the cheaper commercial rocket.
[...] In response, Gerstenmaier pointed Hale and other members of the advisory committee—composed of external aerospace experts who provide non-binding advice to the space agency—to a chart he had shown earlier in the presentation. This chart showed the payload capacity of the Space Launch System in various configurations in terms of mass sent to the Moon. "It's a lot smaller than any of those," Gerstenmaier said, referring to the Falcon Heavy's payload capacity to TLI, or "trans-lunar injection," which effectively means the amount of mass that can be broken out of low-Earth orbit and sent into a lunar trajectory. In the chart, the SLS Block 1 rocket has a TLI capacity of 26 metric tons. (The chart also contains the more advanced Block 2 version of the SLS, with a capacity of 45 tons. However, this rocket is at least a decade away, and it will require billions of dollars more to design and develop.)
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy TLI capacity is unknown, but estimated to be somewhere between 18 and 22 tons (between the known payloads of 16.8 tons to Mars and 26.7 tons to geostationary orbit).
Does the SLS need to launch more than 18 tons to TLI? No. All of the currently planned components of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (formerly the Deep Space Gateway) have a mass of 10 tons or less due to flying alongside a crewed Orion capsule rather than by themselves. Only by 2027's Exploration Mission 6 would NASA launch more massive payloads, by which time SpaceX's BFR could take 150 tons to TLI or even Mars when using in-orbit refueling.
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(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:04PM (2 children)
Buy two.. buy four..
But that's not the point, oink, oink oink!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by qzm on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:14PM (1 child)
SLS carries THOUSANDS of times more pork, and as we know Pork delivery has, for some time, been the primary mission goal of NASA.
I know the NASA lovers will hate on this, but face facts people, NASA has all but become a butchery, to distribute nice clean juicy pork to whoIever it is decided.
I do truly feel sorry for the remaining actual space scientists and engineers caught up in there.. It must be truly painful to have to try and achieve something against that massive pork distribution bureaucracy.
The US military of course is still a more effective pork delivery tool, however at times you need cleaner pork than they can deliver, and the NASA pork is so clean and shiny and media-worthy!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:52PM
That's it right there.
SLS gets so much money that it can afford to stuff the right pockets. Grease the right palms. Etc.
Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.