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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: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday March 29 2018, @12:14AM (4 children)
That's so insulting. Sorry, NASA's "free" stuff is not that useful. The problem is in the label "expensive research". It's a long way from that to "cheap, mass-produced rocket", an area in which NASA has zero history. You'll need to look to the US Department of Defense for that sort of expertise with their ICBM programs.
Here's what NASA itself [nasa.gov] had to say about the SpaceX development effort for the Falcon 9 (see Appendix B, page 40):
Notice that the traditional pricing is still the official traditional pricing and that NASA looked at SpaceX's books to verify their costs. So NASA would price development of the Falcon 9, a full order of magnitude higher than it took SpaceX. And then, of course, we would have inevitable cost overruns on top of that.
While SpaceX is not similarly forthcoming about the costs of Falcon Heavy (it's over half a billion USD) or BFR, this has all been paid for by SpaceX not US taxpayers. I think the only development that has been explicitly paid for by NASA was the Dragon capsule and that was by milestone not cost plus.
Well, now that you know that SpaceX did something that NASA was completely incapable of doing, you'll correct that thinking, right? I'll also note that SpaceX did the most awesome car commercial of all time, and has done really well with vertical landing of its rocket stages and a level of rocket reusability that everyone thought was going to be out of reach for at least decades.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday March 29 2018, @12:57AM (3 children)
I think you got me wrong. Sure, Space X as any good capitalist enterprise can and will, well, capitalize on a good bag of inventions. They will mass produce and they will cut costs and they will make lots of money out of it but, but, they can not innovate and they will need innovations for the next step which probably will not be done by Space X, but some other company. Regardless, they will need serious research that only governments can provide and that's why we need to keep NASA projects going even if they are, supposedly, 10X more expensive. Otherwise China or Russia will discover those yet unknown things and Space X or whatever will not be able to keep up. That's how real world works. Government has to provide silver lining for companies to be able to function.
There is nothing insulting in there. Business can only exist in the right environment and good scientific research and cutting edge development is a necessary part of it. Business by itself can't do it no matter how well run.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday March 29 2018, @05:51AM
I disagree. Here, SpaceX did extensive innovation to get where it is now. It's demeaning to claim that the national space programs laid out various things like vertical landing, staged combustion, reusability, telemetry, secondary payloads, etc, like Legos on the floor, and like a toddler, SpaceX merely had to assemble these things in a suitable order. Even if idea generation were somehow beyond the capabilities of a company (and it's not), the creation of a viable business operating at a far lower price point from a haphazard collection of ideas going back 50 years (which no one else had figured out yet) is a huge act of innovation in itself. Remember innovation is not just coming up with ideas, but making them work.
But then we get to the second problem, which is the equally demeaning assertion that SpaceX (and the rest of the planet's businesses) can't come up with new ideas. Here, Musk claims to be planning Mars infrastructure for a settlement and he's far from alone in that. That's innovation that NASA has barely touched.
Well, right there we have the rate of idea creation slowed by a factor of ten merely because we involved NASA. That's a typical problem with the government approach.
Notice that the story is about a NASA official ruling out a superior launch system merely because it can't perform a mostly irrelevant task (throw a particular amount of mass, 45 metric tons directly on a Trans-Lunar injection orbit). But what he doesn't mention is that there are several multiple launch configurations that can do the same job for about 700-800 million USD less in launch costs (unmanned 2-3 Falcon Heavies assembled in low Earth orbit (LEO) or 2 Falcon Heavies and a Falcon 9 for manned missions - the latter rocket would bring the people) and higher reliability. Also, by ending SLS right now, we would have considerable funds to devote to lunar activities now.
There are superior alternate approaches such as creating a non-profit to do the research which removes most of the political rent-seeking and other conflicts of interest that come with government agencies and their contractors. But then one wouldn't be able to siphon off a enormous amount of public funds with little accountability.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:50PM (1 child)
I think that it is NASA that cannot cooperate.
Hear me out: there was some discussion about cooperation between ESA and the Chinese government. But: the US government forbids cooperation with Chinese in space, therefore ESA had to choose between USA and China.
Similarly, the Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 were not coupled to the ISS. Why not? NASA is forbidden to do it.
With that kind of attitude, it becomes very difficult to share research. Each country has their own competences. But why would e.g. a Russian psychology department or a Chinese hydroponic agriculture department cooperate with NASA, when at each given moment there could be a US senator that, for the home audience, writes a law "all cooperation on X with Russia or China is verboten"?
There's no reason otherwise why we can't have a moon base with lots of independent bits constructed and launched by different countries, each with their own competences, but with the same interfaces: liquids and gases infrastructure, common wiring and airlock standards, etc. The idea of a "moon village" of this sort was mentioned in september 2017:
Moon village the first stop to Mars: ESA [phys.org]
I am not aware that any country except for the USA has any policies or laws in place like "we don't want to play ball with country X in space".
Of course space projects are prestige projects that attract healthy competition between countries, but without healthy *cooperation* things don't advance beyond a certain point.
Do you all remember the Apollo [wikipedia.org] - Soyuz [wikipedia.org] mission? That was a brilliant example of cooperation (well that's what the newspaper said; I have no idea of the bickering behind the scenes of course).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 29 2018, @08:02PM
So even if we were to ignore giving China an opportunity to steal US military and trade secrets (good enough reason for me to keep them off), why is international cooperation valuable at all? All it did was greatly increase the price tag on the ISS. My estimate is that between making the ISS international (particularly with Russia being on the critical path of ISS construction) and forcing most of the ISS to fly on the Space Shuttle, the cost of the ISS was tripled.
Or we could have a moon base operated by, say, a SpaceX spinoff. That would work just as well and be a lot cheaper for those international groups.
They aren't progressing past that point now. Guess cooperation just isn't that healthy.