NASA Human Landing System

[tater]

Of course if they manage to get Lunar Starship to the Moon at all, then SLS/Orion is done.

Why? Because the capability to have a cislunar tug/ferry system comes along for the ride as a tug is just a lower mass SS (dump the nose cone like a fairing). It looks like if SS can deliver a little over 150t to LEO as propellant, it can do a RT to Gateway propulsively with just 5 tankers flights (with margin). If they can aerobrake, they only need ~250t of props for a Gateway round trip (2 tankers). Fuel up a Transfer SS docked to ISS. Send crew in as many vehicles as you like (add more ports to ISS). Load transfer vehicle, take crew to Gateway, put em on LS, land on Moon, return to Gateway, head to LEO, dock at ISS, repeat.

 

[KSK]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Now they could use the actual moonship for dear moon but I guess not, simply because you want to stuff the moonship with lots of stuff you want landing on the moon. 
An drill rig for core samples is high on my list, 2-3 rovers who can be remote controlled, so you can drive outside of walk back distance as you send another to rescue you. 
The limiting factor on moonship is orion as other says. 

Time to dust off the old Lunokhod plans then.

[magnemoe]

28 minutes ago, KSK said:

Time to dust off the old Lunokhod plans then.

The training module for it anyway, you drive with an 3 second delay but this is trivial with modern tech anyway.  Might even be relevant to have an group of unmanned rovers onboard who is controlled from earth  and expand the capabilities of the  ship. I say the same will be relevant on Mars missions too but here controlled from starship crew. This will be fast cars compared to current rovers as they are charged at the ship 

[kerbiloid]

A hollow external sphere with a smaller internal sphere rolling inside.

Spoiler

 

Edited April 18, 2021 by kerbiloid

[RCgothic]

Nevermind the rest of this thread, but this summary graphic of the selection is pretty good. I don't know how to find the original source.

 

 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, RCgothic said:

Nevermind the rest of this thread, but this summary graphic of the selection is pretty good. I don't know how to find the original source.

 

 

 

That graphic is pretty telling.  Cost lines alone give the answer - but the other lines (beyond the 'gooned up the proposal' part) have to sting a bit for Bezos and crew. 

 

Would be nice to see SpaceX get a competitor - but that is unlikely in the near future 

[wumpus]

If Spacex can get Starship to the Moon, what in the world is SLS going to be doing?  Of course it has two more years of pork, but I suspect a side effect of Congress choosing Starship (by only paying enough for the Starship option) is that any post-Shelby plans won't require the SLS at all.

[tater]

5 hours ago, RCgothic said:

Nevermind the rest of this thread, but this summary graphic of the selection is pretty good. I don't know how to find the original source.

[sevenperforce]

@taterOh these are fun.

• Dynetics: "Mass estimate physically impossible and at negative margin"
• Blue Origin: "Unsubstantiated claims for commercial approach"
• Dynetics: "Lack of awareness of schedule risk"
• Dynetics: "Lack of detail and technological justification for refueling process"
• Blue Origin: "Uncertainty over propulsion system component suppliers"

[wumpus]

20 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

@taterOh these are fun.

• Dynetics: "Mass estimate physically impossible and at negative margin"
• Blue Origin: "Unsubstantiated claims for commercial approach"
• Dynetics: "Lack of awareness of schedule risk"
• Dynetics: "Lack of detail and technological justification for refueling process"
• Blue Origin: "Uncertainty over propulsion system component suppliers"

"Uncertainty  over propulsion component suppliers".  Is this implying that they may have to use some sort  of hydrolox (almost certainly RL10, especially if LM completes their purchase of Aeodyne) instead of pressure-fed hypergolics, as typical for landers?  I can't imagine that buying pressure fed hypergolics would be an issue, although internal politics with the Lockheed conglomerate may matter more than physics.

"Lack of awareness of schedule risk".  Yes,  Elon time has officially infected the rest of "new space". 

[tater]

23 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

@taterOh these are fun.

SS is clearly better, it's so much better as to seem like science fiction, not reality, so I tended to discount it as a possible choice. I honestly thought they'd need to just build it to prove it works.

Dynetics was previously my fave of the 3 as a NASA choice... wow, that document savaged them. How could they have spent 253 MILLION dollars on essentially sitting at a computer designing the final proposal and not have noticed/cared/addressed the fact that their lander to too heavy to, you know, LAND? They could literally have published mass and engine specs, and inside a day members of this forum would have said, "Um, this lander doesn't work? Did they typo the mass?"Ditto NSF.  This is not a "deep in the weeds" level of problem to be worked out later. Pretty astounding (I want my share of the $253M back, lol).

National Team got $579M to write that second proposal. They have facilities, they make engines, so at least some of that probably resulted in testing Be-7. Maybe they managed to push some TRLs elsewhere.

SpaceX got $135M... and we've seen that spent in real time in Boca Chica. Dunno what it cost them to write the final bid, but they at least spent dev money on moving the program forward.

Edited April 20, 2021 by tater

[RCgothic]

If NASA had enough money to pick any of the three it wanted, SpaceX would still have got it is my interpretation of that document.

The only reason not to would be keeping angry congresspeople appeased, which wasn't one of the scoreable criteria.

[tater]

9 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

If NASA had enough money to pick any of the three it wanted, SpaceX would still have got it is my interpretation of that document.

I think they left the door open to have more money thrown at them to pick another, but it seems bizarre that there should ever be a multi-stage bidding process like this where the bid prices are so far off each other.

I'm surprised they don;t do a first round as they did, with money to generate the final pitch—and where each primary bid becomes known to all. Then have a process that states that the winning bids must meet all contract specifications at which point the lowest bid wins, and any bids not within some additional % of that lowest bid, or some absolute number of dollars will be disqualified, even if they meet the specs. It's absurd that Boeing got ~2X what SpaceX did to not deliver Starliner yet.

The first bids were on the order of $10B, $6B, and $2B, right? They all knew SpaceX bid only 2.something. The 253 and 579 million they got to refine should have been used to figure out how to drop the contract bid far, far closer to $2.something billion. Any bid coming in at 2X+ the low bid should simply be dismissed as not cost effective—since the final choice includes looking into if the pricing is realistic. .

[RCgothic]

Good spot here. Potentially Lunaship's tanks have gotten bigger.

 

 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, RCgothic said:

Good spot here. Potentially Lunaship's tanks have gotten bigger.

 

 

I'm not inclined to read too much into the graphic.

[tater]

4 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

I'm not inclined to read too much into the graphic.

yeah, it's not their best render effort

Would be interesting to figure out what their propellant margins are, perhaps a small increase in props makes a difference in the ease of accomplishing mission goals though. They certainly don't need more crew volume, the default SS has about 3/4 the floor area of my house, LOL (assuming 3m deck heights). Plenty of room for 4-7 people (7 if they sensibly load it with crew in LEO with CCVs).

[tater]

 

[RCgothic]

Lol. What were NASA supposed to do? Buy a lower-rated product at twice the price with a budget they don't have?

Suspect Jeff doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

Edited April 27, 2021 by RCgothic

[Mitchz95]

 

[tater]

The other losers also filed:

 

Because clearly NASA should have picked the most expensive choice that was also incapable of (checks NASA document), landing.

$253M was not enough money to come to a conclusion that they could have gotten by giving the dry mass, propellant mass, and engine thrust and I_sp—to literally anyone reading this post on a game forum.

 

[Flavio hc16]

When Blue claimed the SpaceX weakness in this

 

>Risk of engine damage on landing on lunar surface as experienced on Apollo 15. 

 

Did the Raptor & its auxiliary RCS somehow get placed so low it touches the lunar surface & damage its bell? Did Blue actually have more risks here lol?

 

>Risk of engine plume damage on critical systems as experienced on Apollo 16, and descent

plume debris erosion as observed on Surveyor III from the Apollo 12 landing.

 

That's precisely why they develop this auxiliary RCS! And Raptor components underneath is definitely protectable by reinforcements

 

>In contrast, Blue Origin’s proposal is compatible with existing launch

vehicles, utilizes only 3 launches, and employs heritage systems that have been **flight tested.**

 

Hell yeah, the entire Starship & Raptor testings so far were in alternate universe!! /s

 

>All of these

events must occur within a short timeframe, with little margin for error, in order for SpaceX to successfully perform this Option A contract. 

BO also literally claims on p.44 of their protest that “Starship has no flight heritage or validation of performance.” They’re living in an alternate universe.

 

Yeah, just pretends NASA & SpaceX to be completely blind about this, lol

[tater]

https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.spaceref.com/news/2021/BlueOriginProtest.pdf

The complaint by BO. Many of the apparently ~175 pages are entirely redacted.

No sign of Dynetics yet. The reality is that such complaints are SOP with contracts like this by the losers.

Had SpaceX lost, they'd have a complaint as well.

[StrandedonEarth]

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. SpaceX also protested when they lost a bid, but at least then SpceX had a leg to stand on. BO and Dynetics dont

[kerbiloid]

I hope, at least the Phobos lander will  be from Lockheed Martin.

(Because Phobos is tidally locked).

Edited April 27, 2021 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

4 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. SpaceX also protested when they lost a bid, but at least then SpceX had a leg to stand on. BO and Dynetics dont

Well, I guess they are lucky you aren't the one they have to convince.