The Relationship Between Military and Civilian Spaceflight as Seen Through Different Programs (Past, Present, and Future)

[SunlitZelkova]

This thread is a continuation of the discussion in the Russian Launch and Mission Thread regarding the relationship between military and civilian spaceflight throughout history. It can also be used for such discussions should they pop up in other threads.

Quoting @kerbiloid from here-

Quote

There is no much application for large diameter SRB except strateic rockets and space boosters.
And you have to feed their manufacturers first of all, as it has been discussed in the SLS thread.

A set of SRBs is about 400 million dollars IIRC. That is supposed to lower to 250 million dollars past Artemis III.

https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf

The contract is worth about 4 billion dollars in total as of 2019.

Around 6-7 billion dollars has been spent over the past couple decades to modernize the Minuteman III force, while the GBSD program is going to cost 62 billion dollars (in 2015 dollars) over its 30 year duration. Northrop Grumman itself made around 30 billion dollars a year in 2020, and is part of various other programs like the B-21.

SLS is its own project with its own political aims, and has no relation to the ICBM force.

[kerbiloid]

To say the truth, I don't wish to repeat my arguments third time just to hear again "Apollo and Shuttle were purely civil programmes for national pride".

P.S.
What would happen to the "national pride" if Apollo programme failed?

[SunlitZelkova]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

To say the truth, I don't wish to repeat my arguments third time just to hear again "Apollo and Shuttle were purely civil programmes for national pride".

P.S.
What would happen to the "national pride" if Apollo programme failed?

There aren’t really “arguments” in history, evidence must be presented too. I have presented mine regarding Apollo. It appears we had a misunderstanding surrounding what I said about the Shuttle program.

In regards to the P.S., no one really can say. Some like to think that it would have resulted in a man on Mars in the 80s or 90s, but the drama created by the Vietnam War made such things pointless in the eyes of the public- a Gallup poll from July 1969 had a majority of Americans opposing a crewed Mars mission. If Apollo failed, why go further?

So there was no national pride to destroy. If it succeeded- great, if it didn’t, the “national pride” at that point had rerouted itself towards a more Earthly and international destination, as opposed to the gung ho nationalism of 1961.

EDIT (for clarification)- this assumes the Soviets land first, but what I wrote in the second paragraph of the response to the P.S. would also apply if it is just technical problems that lead to failure

Edited May 6, 2022 by SunlitZelkova

[tater]

13 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

A set of SRBs is about 400 million dollars IIRC. That is supposed to lower to 250 million dollars past Artemis III.

No, that's > ~$451M each. (I had seen some $ pulled out as dev, else $485M/ea)

For the first 3 flights.

The 5 segment dev stuff was in Constellation years ago. Total contract for 7 SRBs is ~$3.4B (1 ground test article, 3 flights).

OIG report page 8.

 

Edited May 6, 2022 by tater

[SunlitZelkova]

9 hours ago, tater said:

No, that's > ~$451M each. (I had seen some $ pulled out as dev, else $485M/ea)

For the first 3 flights.

The 5 segment dev stuff was in Constellation years ago. Total contract for 7 SRBs is ~$3.4B (1 ground test article, 3 flights).

OIG report page 8.

 

Doh!

I still don't see relation to Northrop Grumman's role as an ICBM manufacturer. SLS owes political reasons to its existence to a certain extent (certainly to its continued existence), but not the political reasons kerbiloid suggests.