NASA SLS/Orion/Payloads

[tater]

19 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

SLS/Orion is essentially exactly what Shuttle detractors spent decades insisting the Shuttle should immediately be replaced with - a capsule based crew system and a seperate heavy lift cargo system.  Essentially an Apollo CSM and a Saturn V class vehicle.

If it was a clean slate design, then I guess I'd agree. Of course given the abysmal proposed launch cadence, the EM missions are now comanifesting cargo. Orion, plus a piece of DSG, so it's not even doing that basic split that Constellation added.

 

19 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

On a modest tangent though, I get so weary of the insistence that everything be "revolutionary".  This isn't consumer market stuff to impress your friends.  The isn't the latest iShiny that'll be replaced in eighteen months.  This is millions and billions of dollars worth of workaday vehicle.  Evolutionary works.

I agree that spaceflight in general need not do this, but I suppose I think that perhaps NASA should concentrate on the ideas that don't have a market, or are not clear to. Look at the commercial stuff that is generating interest. SpaceX is doing for real elements of what DC-X was doing (NASA/DARPA). Bigelow? NASA's TransHab.

And to be clear, I don;t mean revolutionary in that sense, I mean it in terms of real, long term changes in the way things get done. Reuse (Shuttle as an experimental model of an expensive kind of reuse), for example. There is a place for evolutionary as well, certainly, but for any of the high-profile crew missions that NASA has suggested over the years, there is a revolutionary aspect to get the TRLs up to snuff (perhaps inventing whole new technologies that are needed).

[DDE]

44 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

SLS/Orion is essentially exactly what Shuttle detractors spent decades insisting the Shuttle should immediately be replaced with - a capsule based crew system and a seperate heavy lift cargo system.  Essentially an Apollo CSM and a Saturn V class vehicle.

Not exactly. It’s Ares IV - whereas having the separate Ares V and either a mature Ares I or Commercial Crew would have saved a lot of hassle.

[sevenperforce]

22 minutes ago, DDE said:

Not exactly. It’s Ares IV - whereas having the separate Ares V and either a mature Ares I or Commercial Crew would have saved a lot of hassle.

Unrelated: Ares IV is weird nomenclature. It should be Ares VI; it's the combination of Ares I plus Ares V, not one-less-than-V.

[Bill Phil]

22 minutes ago, DDE said:

Not exactly. It’s Ares IV - whereas having the separate Ares V and either a mature Ares I or Commercial Crew would have saved a lot of hassle.

Not quite. Ares V and Ares I were two vehicles. They had a huge amount of issues and, ultimately, it became a huge hassle to develop two launch vehicles. Thus: SLS.

[sevenperforce]

46 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Not quite. Ares V and Ares I were two vehicles. They had a huge amount of issues and, ultimately, it became a huge hassle to develop two launch vehicles. Thus: SLS.

Ares IV was the proposed evolution of Ares V, where an Ares I upper stage would be placed on the Ares V base to make a man-rated SHLV comanifesting crew and cargo.

[Canopus]

18 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Ares IV was the proposed evolution of Ares V, where an Ares I upper stage would be placed on the Ares V base to make a man-rated SHLV comanifesting crew and cargo.

I can‘t find much about the Ares IV but from what i have seen, it doesn‘t look like it could launch cargo with the Orion MPCV.

[Starman4308]

2 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

SLS/Orion is essentially exactly what Shuttle detractors spent decades insisting the Shuttle should immediately be replaced with - a capsule based crew system and a seperate heavy lift cargo system.  Essentially an Apollo CSM and a Saturn V class vehicle.

On a modest tangent though, I get so weary of the insistence that everything be "revolutionary".  This isn't consumer market stuff to impress your friends.  The isn't the latest iShiny that'll be replaced in eighteen months.  This is millions and billions of dollars worth of workaday vehicle.  Evolutionary works.

That... seems contradictory to me. You say "capsule based crew system and separate heavy lift cargo system", but that's not what SLS is: SLS combines the capsule with the heavy lift cargo system to loop back around to one of the Shuttle's problems. It costs money to crew-rate a vehicle, and construction winds up being more expensive because of all the inspections that need to be made.

At least in hindsight, what should have been done was a conventional capsule on a medium lift vehicle, ala the Commercial Crew Program, and then if they needed anything fancy like a space station, send that up separately on non-crew-rated and presumably more economically viable HLVs/SHLVs.

What really should have been done IMO was to replace the manned space program with much more scientifically valuable and economically efficient unmanned programs, but it's all too often heresy to suggest that maybe we don't need to put astronauts on Mars.

[Bill Phil]

44 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Ares IV was the proposed evolution of Ares V, where an Ares I upper stage would be placed on the Ares V base to make a man-rated SHLV comanifesting crew and cargo.

I know what Ares IV is. It's just that Ares I and Ares V would've put a strain on NASA.

[PB666]

2 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

SLS/Orion is essentially exactly what Shuttle detractors spent decades insisting the Shuttle should immediately be replaced with - a capsule based crew system and a seperate heavy lift cargo system.  Essentially an Apollo CSM and a Saturn V class vehicle.

On a modest tangent though, I get so weary of the insistence that everything be "revolutionary".  This isn't consumer market stuff to impress your friends.  The isn't the latest iShiny that'll be replaced in eighteen months.  This is millions and billions of dollars worth of workaday vehicle.  Evolutionary works.

If its not revolutionary then the price should decrease over time and efficiencies should be found, SLS is not that.

4 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

That... seems contradictory to me. You say "capsule based crew system and separate heavy lift cargo system", but that's not what SLS is: SLS combines the capsule with the heavy lift cargo system to loop back around to one of the Shuttle's problems. It costs money to crew-rate a vehicle, and construction winds up being more expensive because of all the inspections that need to be made.

At least in hindsight, what should have been done was a conventional capsule on a medium lift vehicle, ala the Commercial Crew Program, and then if they needed anything fancy like a space station, send that up separately on non-crew-rated and presumably more economically viable HLVs/SHLVs.

What really should have been done IMO was to replace the manned space program with much more scientifically valuable and economically efficient unmanned programs, but it's all too often heresy to suggest that maybe we don't need to put astronauts on Mars.

Not one, but two, it also uses those damn solid boosters, which were designed to be recycled but won't be.

At least if the remaining RS-25Ds were used on the shuttle we would definitely have gotten something out of them, but we will have to wait to 2020 to ever see if SLS fly's at all. If they said we are going to hold one STS to launch at some future point another Hubble refuel and/ upgrade, it would be worth more than SLS. My bets are that the service module will not be ready in 2020.

 

[PB666]

2 hours ago, tater said:

 Reuse (Shuttle as an experimental model of an expensive kind of reuse), for example. There is a place for evolutionary as well, certainly, but for any of the high-profile crew missions that NASA has suggested over the years, there is a revolutionary aspect to get the TRLs up to snuff (perhaps inventing whole new technologies that are needed).

But the shuttle _could_ have evolved to be more efficient (e.g. F9 boosters, lower mass, less crew, a lower maintenance RS-25 - the so-called RS-25F). Many of the criticized design elements of the shuttle either have been or should have been non-adherent parts of orbiters core and could have been altered as to make it more cost efficient. The shuttle was a thing, by the time SLS becomes a thing (after 10 years of public sector waffling) its function relative to its price will be obsolete. Building the SLS will be like building a mainframe industrial server when any off the shelf computer can do the same for a fraction of the price.

Yes F9/FH does have its weak spots going to GTO, but that weak spot is a function of the cheapest part of the rocket (in the expendable version) and thats  the second stage. If SpaceX was not working on the BFR they could use the current technology to replace the second stage with a metholox version and get 50 more ISP and they would be up there with SLS to GTO. So nothing about SLS's function that is revolutionary. In addition they are going to step down the ISP of their heaviest version (RL-10B-2 is too bulky and too low in thrust) bringing the metholox engine and H2 engine closer together in performance. Note that RL-10C is vaporware.). If this is truly a weal spot, I would like to see just how many customers the FH has by the end of the year and based on the ratio of LEO to GTO of H2 based launch systems we could guess what it should be if they were higher efficiency in the second stage.

The third thing is that if SLS bypassed the human rating process relative to SpaceX people may start asking whether ULA is getting preferential treatment.

[Canopus]

Falcon Heavy expendable payload to GTO is 27 tons. SLS block 1b GTO payload is 48.5 tons. Not comparable and i doubt a methalox upper stage could make a big difference.

I‘m not saying that pure payload mass trumps in Spaceflight. But suggesting that FH would be an cheap and simple alternative to SLS is simply not true. The whole mission architecture would have to change, have to involve multiple launches and possibly refueling of stages. 

Edited March 2, 2018 by Canopus

[PB666]

11 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Falcon Heavy expendable payload to GTO is 27 tons. SLS block 1b GTO payload is 48.5 tons. Not comparable and i doubt a methalox upper stage could make a big difference.

I‘m not saying that pure payload mass trumps in Spaceflight. But suggesting that FH would be an cheap and simple alternative to SLS is simply not true. The whole mission architecture would have to change, have to involve multiple launches and possibly refueling of stages. 

How many more PLs to GTO are between 27 and 48.5 tons. And BTW many GTO PLs carry their own ion drive systems with ISP 8 times that of RL10C engine, if you can get most of the way to GTO, most of these can circularize far cheaper than than S2 metholox, kerosene or hydrogen fueled engine can. If space X can get 48.5 tons even close to GTO and partially circularized, whose going to waste the 450,000,000 dollars more just to get the additional 20 tons of PL.

Again, we can talk about what all a SLS can lift into GTO once they have flown once to any orbit. Till then its just faux-statistics.

[sevenperforce]

18 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Falcon Heavy expendable payload to GTO is 27 tons. SLS block 1b GTO payload is 48.5 tons. Not comparable and i doubt a methalox upper stage could make a big difference.

I‘m not saying that pure payload mass trumps in Spaceflight. But suggesting that FH would be an cheap and simple alternative to SLS is simply not true. The whole mission architecture would have to change, have to involve multiple launches and possibly refueling of stages. 

Methalox upper stage would make a HUGE difference, especially if the upper stage was stretched (as it would be).

Multiple launches are no problem when you have a reusable vehicle and rapid pad turn-around. Anything SLS can launch beyond LEO, FH can launch to LEO (most likely with side-booster reuse) and use a second launch to dock a BLEO stage to it.

A methalox upper stage for Falcon Heavy, all expendable, would be very close to what SLS can do.

[Canopus]

Exactly. Falcon Heavy was meant to launch Communication satellites into GTO. Nothing less and nothing much more. The SLS is designed to launch payloads beyond earth orbits. They are not interchangeable.

3 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Methalox upper stage would make a HUGE difference, especially if the upper stage was stretched (as it would be).

Multiple launches are no problem when you have a reusable vehicle and rapid pad turn-around. Anything SLS can launch beyond LEO, FH can launch to LEO (most likely with side-booster reuse) and use a second launch to dock a BLEO stage to it.

A methalox upper stage for Falcon Heavy, all expendable, would be very close to what SLS can do.

And all that would have to involve additional developments which SpaceX would probably never do because it isn‘t required for satellite launches. 

[PB666]

4 minutes ago, Canopus said:

And all that would have to involve additional developments which SpaceX would probably never do because it isn‘t required for satellite launches. 

The marketplace may dictate, if the market by the end of the year does not pick up, then it may be only a launch vehicle for SpaceXs satellite digital information services.

The price to GTO for anything larger than 2.5T is currently prohibitive, if that can be but by 2 or 3 fold there could be an expanding market. Demand markets (the intercept between supply and demand) when the supply cost drops markedly, this results typically in higher frequency of demand.

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Exactly. Falcon Heavy was meant to launch Communication satellites into GTO. Nothing less and nothing much more. The SLS is designed to launch payloads beyond earth orbits. They are not interchangeable.

I would argue that the SLS is designed to use STS hardware for, uh, whatever.

[tater]

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Falcon Heavy expendable payload to GTO is 27 tons. SLS block 1b GTO payload is 48.5 tons. Not comparable and i doubt a methalox upper stage could make a big difference.

I‘m not saying that pure payload mass trumps in Spaceflight. But suggesting that FH would be an cheap and simple alternative to SLS is simply not true. The whole mission architecture would have to change, have to involve multiple launches and possibly refueling of stages. 

As a reality check, the Orion CSM is what, 25 tons? So the cargo payload of SLS to gto is 23.5, since pretty much every launch has an Orion on top, because launches cost billions.

So it seems like 2 FH flights put 27 tons of cargo in GTO, and also put the Orion CSM in gto with margin (diameter is the only concern, so replace with D2 or CST-100 as needed).

[PB666]

1 minute ago, tater said:

As a reality check, the Orion CSM is what, 25 tons? So the cargo payload of SLS to gto is 23.5, since pretty much every launch has an Orion on top, because launches cost billions.

So it seems like 2 FH flights put 27 tons of cargo in GTO, and also put the Orion CSM in gto with margin (diameter is the only concern, so replace with D2 or CST-100 as needed).

But the FH 2S could be refueled in LEO so . . . . . anyway when Orion actually gets to the point the service module can launch then its something to discuss. I'm not saying the service Module will never be ready, but I will believe it when I see it. It could be ready after BFR is a thing. This is the problem with something that's never ready you can compare with something that exists, or equally other things that don't exist (And probably the second is a bit more fair comparison).

It just gets to the point one tires of sitting around waiting for something that should, on a Apollo timeline, to be done more than a year ago whose very earliest launch time is December of 2019 and more than like it won't make that.

[tater]

It’s not like SpaceX or Boein have a capsule that exists either (but both will before Orion, clearly).

I still think that the notion of SLS as a cargo lifter is pretty much off the table, it’s too expensive. At the point where they run out of planned missions and could add cargo, it’s already obsolete, IMO.

[Canopus]

Both refueling and orbital maneuvers like rendezvous with already launched cargo would basically require a new upper stage for Falcon to be developed, something which doesn't seem to be on the plan for SpaceX. That's why i think a more realistic SLS replacement could be Vulcan ACES where all those capabilities are already going to be included.

12 minutes ago, tater said:

So it seems like 2 FH flights put 27 tons of cargo in GTO, and also put the Orion CSM in gto with margin (diameter is the only concern, so replace with D2 or CST-100 as needed).

I don't think either CST-100 or Dragon 2 are able to carry out missions long enough and don't have the capacity to maneuver to be of any real use beyond low earth orbit. So Orion might even outlive SLS and fly on other LV's.

[sevenperforce]

8 minutes ago, PB666 said:

But the FH 2S could be refueled in LEO so . . . . . anyway when Orion actually gets to the point the service module can launch then its something to discuss.

Falcon Heavy's upper stage can't be refueled in LEO, not without a near-complete redesign.

Extra range can be providing by mating a zero-payload Falcon upper stage to a previously-launched payload, though, with virtually no modifications.

15 minutes ago, Canopus said:

I don't think either CST-100 or Dragon 2 are able to carry out missions long enough and don't have the capacity to maneuver to be of any real use beyond low earth orbit. So Orion might even outlive SLS and fly on other LV's.

It already has, more or less.

If they want to use Orion BLEO, they can have it launch unmanned and then send crew to it on Starliner or Dragon 2.

[Starman4308]

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Exactly. Falcon Heavy was meant to launch Communication satellites into GTO. Nothing less and nothing much more. The SLS is designed to launch payloads beyond earth orbits. They are not interchangeable.

For all currently finalized payloads that aren't makework for the SLS? They certainly are interchangeable. There's two things that will use the SLS: EM-1 and EM-2, both of which are essentially makework. The third thing that might use the SLS is the Europa Clipper, and the only reason to use an SLS for the Europa Clipper is for a direct Hohmann transfer instead of using a Venus slingshot.

Nothing else is funded, and I remain to be convinced that you could come up with some sort of payload that absolutely has to be launched on SLS, instead of (possibly in multiple trips) a much more economical commercial launch vehicle. While orbital assembly is a pain... so is a rocket that costs more than $2 billion to launch, and can maintain an operational tempo of 1 launch/year at absolute best.

4 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Both refueling and orbital maneuvers like rendezvous with already launched cargo would basically require a new upper stage for Falcon to be developed, something which doesn't seem to be on the plan for SpaceX. That's why i think a more realistic SLS replacement could be Vulcan ACES where all those capabilities are already going to be included.

I don't think either CST-100 or Dragon 2 are able to carry out missions long enough and don't have the capacity to maneuver to be of any real use beyond low earth orbit. So Orion might even outlive SLS and fly on other LV's.

It's not like the current Orion design is a paragon of extensive capabilities. Too much to waste on LEO, not enough for anything except high lunar orbits which are, once again, makework for SLS/Orion. Were Congress/NASA to get serious about an ambitious manned program that actually does something useful, the capsule might be usable, but they'd have to return to the drawing board for the service module.

Were there an actual program to do something useful for which designs have been finalized, payloads constructed, etc, I might agree with just biting the bullet and funding SLS. Right now, however, there is basically only makework at that stage, plus some vague plans that smack of standard Congressional "fund it to keep jobs in my district and then cancel it the moment it'd start to get really expensive".

[tater]

Mission duration could be achieved for cst-100 or D2 via docking with a hab module in LEO, and I suppose both companies could make proper service modules.

It could be possible to launch  capsule, and follow up with FH lofting a hab (not dense) with loads of remaining propellant, and that gets used to push the pair wherever within the limits S2 coast times.

All that said, I don’t see FH replacing SLS, because I don’t see many useful SLS missions worth replacing.

[Canopus]

5 minutes ago, tater said:

Mission duration could be achieved for cst-100 or D2 via docking with a hab module in LEO, and I suppose both companies could make proper service modules.

It could be possible to launch  capsule, and follow up with FH lofting a hab (not dense) with loads of remaining propellant, and that gets used to push the pair wherever within the limits S2 coast times.

All that said, I don’t see FH replacing SLS, because I don’t see many useful SLS missions worth replacing.

Of course they could develop service modules and habitat modules but that would mean waiting another ten years in the end.

As for SLS, i think it can lead to a positive outcome, in the form of the commercial lunar landers that might be developed.

[sevenperforce]

10 minutes ago, Canopus said:

As for SLS, i think it can lead to a positive outcome, in the form of the commercial lunar landers that might be developed.

BO will develop Blue Moon whether they have SLS to fly it or not. It will be able to fly on New Glenn or Vulcan.

50 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

For all currently finalized payloads that aren't makework for the SLS? They certainly are interchangeable. There's two things that will use the SLS: EM-1 and EM-2, both of which are essentially makework. The third thing that might use the SLS is the Europa Clipper, and the only reason to use an SLS for the Europa Clipper is for a direct Hohmann transfer instead of using a Venus slingshot.

Nothing else is funded, and I remain to be convinced that you could come up with some sort of payload that absolutely has to be launched on SLS, instead of (possibly in multiple trips) a much more economical commercial launch vehicle. While orbital assembly is a pain... so is a rocket that costs more than $2 billion to launch, and can maintain an operational tempo of 1 launch/year at absolute best.

EM-1 can be done in two launches with Delta IV Heavy or Falcon Heavy. EM-2 can be done in 3 launches with Falcon Heavy or 4 with Delta IV Heavy. And I believe Europa Clipper can be done via direct Hohmann on Falcon Heavy with two launches.