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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.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @01:10AM (6 children)
Also, that's just not relevant to when the SLS program was created - SpaceX was a fledgling company that had just barely managed a handful of orbital launches and wasn't really being taken seriously yet, Falcon Heavy was just a "future goal", and nobody else had reached orbit. The Space Shuttle was being decommissioned, Ares V had been recently canceled, and we weren't going to be launching large military satellites on Russian rockets. If we wanted reliable heavy-lift potential under U.S. control, a cancel-proof SLS program was the safe bet. (notwithstanding cost-plus contracts...)
It no longer matters that it might well be much better to spend that money on other things - the SLS deal was made so that it'd take a political miracle to break it. A working Starship + SuperHeavy would hopefully deliver that miracle, but it doesn't seem realistic to expect a series of exploding pressure tanks to make quite such a compelling argument.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 07 2020, @01:55AM (1 child)
It's a matter of timing, that's all.
We've seen the rocket landing blooper reel. People in the know understand that this is how SpaceX does development. Keep in mind that unlike the Starhopper flight, these pressure tests are not live streamed by SpaceX itself. After it's out of the prototype stage, they can prove it works by repeatedly launching Starlink sats, or by taking Bridenstine's hint from a few months ago and landing a Starship on the Moon. Except they seem to be getting paid for such a demo now, as of a week ago. Starships will be cheap enough that multiple units could be abandoned there, maybe containing some goodies and useful bulky materials that astronauts can extract later.
To have a chance of killing SLS, SpaceX has to show off Starship feats before SLS even starts flying. In-orbit refueling in particular would deliver a severe blow to SLS since SLS can only get about 30-35% of its max LEO payload to the Moon (TLI [wikipedia.org], not surface). SpaceX could fly a commercial payload (communications satellite) on Starship as soon as next year. The November 2021 planned launch date for uncrewed SLS could easily slip due to work halting because of the coronavirus. Same with a Q4 2022 crewed launch, which could pit it against the Starship #dearMoon launch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @01:39PM
Sure, it's the way SpaceX does things, and I'm a big fan of their trial-and-error approach - but it doesn't inspire confidence that they'll actually manage to get Starship fully operational on schedule. Not to the levels necessary to swing a political miracle. There's a lot of innovation in Starship, which also means there's a lot of potential for major setbacks due to unforseen problems. And as I think I alluded to above, there's a strong feeling that Musk engenders a cult of personality, and if anything happened to him his businesses could flounder. (Not unlike Apple, whose innovation mostly died with Jobs).
I think you're right that it's a matter of timing - when Starship flies, SLS will be in trouble. Successful reentry and orbital refueling would make it extremely difficult to continue to justify SLS. But for now they're both future aspirations in a neck-and-neck race to orbit - and SLS has immense political support for reasons that have nothing to do with reaching orbit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2020, @04:00AM (3 children)
The thing is, it's almost a decade past when the SLS program was created. And here we are with a massively delayed and overpriced giant rocket that no one needs and no one can afford even if they did.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @01:06PM (2 children)
Yep, and it's just one political miracle away from being canceled. That's the problem with creating a cancel-proof project to withstand the normal political winds of changing administrations - it's also cancel-proof in the face of better options that develop independently.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 07 2020, @01:42PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 07 2020, @02:43PM
Well, before SpaceX, the space industry was pretty much *all* white elephants. The immense focused funding of the Apollo program had passed, which meant delivering similar funding took many more years - and that had opened the door to a track record of projects being cancelled for political reasons. After all, space delivers minimal immediate benefits, and that fat budget is mighty tempting target for politicians looking to (look like they're) tightening the government's belt.
I'll be glad to see it go, but at the time it was kind of the only realistic option for funding such a large project to completion. Even if SpaceX was being taken seriously, there was no way they could have gotten government funding to immediately jump to Starship development (even assuming that would have been wise) - they just didn't have the pork-spreading power of the established players.