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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 Saturday May 09 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)
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)
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
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?