[New] Space Launch System / Orion Discussion Thread

[Barzon]

Why would Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator himself lie about the cost, and say SLS is 800-900 million per launch. If he says that's the cost, you can sure as hell trust him.

[tater]

Just now, RCgothic said:

For publically funded missions I'd take total appropriations divided by number of missions (inc cancellations not transferred). Doesn't exclude any R&D costs, years with no flights, or unused hardware.

Yeah, when SLS/Orion is over, I would do that to calculate actual cost, as people have done for Shuttle.

I was giving SLS the best possible number that is reasonable going forward. Ignore all dev costs, and only consider annual program costs, plus marginal launch costs, divided by launches that fiscal year. A lowball launch cost, basically. It's not "900M$," it will be more like 2.5 B$/launch considered that way.

The difference with commercial launches is that from the gov/NASA POV, what matters (also ignoring dev costs) is what they get charged for the launch. So ig BO would fly NG for 200M$, say, that's the cost. Done the same way retrospectively later, we might find that NASA have given BO a billion in dev money for a NG suitable for Orion, and we'd add that in, divided by flights.

The reality is that NASA dev is not about cost, it's about doing the work. It;s a tech jobs program, and comparing cost is not really the point.

@ZooNamedGames keeps bringing SpaceX into the thread, too, as if private money being spent to make huge rockets is somehow a bad thing.

My problem with SLS was and is primarily that it is not designed to complete any useful mission.

1.Orion is a bloated version of the Constellation MPCV (bloat to be expected, not a slam on Orion, actually).

2. SLS was switched from the Ares V plan to only use the SHLV for cargo (EOR) to being a crew rated LV.

3. Given 1 and 2, SLS/Orion should have been scaled to complete some useful BLEO mission all alone. This would require further mass increases to Orion (the SM) to allow it to do LOI and return from a wider variety of lunar orbits, AND it would have required the ability to comanifest useful cargoes like a sortie lander.

4. This would require an SLS that could send something on the order of 70 tons to TLI I think, maybe more.

 

3 minutes ago, Barzon said:

Why would Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator himself lie about the cost, and say SLS is 800-900 million per launch. If he says that's the cost, you can sure as hell trust him.

He's playing with the numbers. One, he was talking about way in the future, not current costs—when will the new production hit, Artemis 6? Later?

Two, he's not including program costs at all.

16 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

For publically funded missions I'd take total appropriations divided by number of missions (inc cancellations not transferred). Doesn't exclude any R&D costs, years with no flights, or unused hardware.

Saturn V? $42Bn in 2019$ for 16 missions. $2.7B each.

Crew rating Falcon 9 and dragon R&D? $3.4Bn over 9 missions. $378m each.

Commercial Resupply Services? $1.6B for 12 flights. $133m each.

This way there can be no argument over who got what.

Fair enough.

[Barzon]

1 minute ago, tater said:

I was giving SLS the best possible number that is reasonable going forward. Ignore all dev costs, and only consider annual program costs, plus marginal launch costs, divided by launches that fiscal year. A lowball launch cost, basically. It's not "900M$," it will be more like 2.5 B$/launch considered that way.

 

The annual program costs do not equate launch costs. Launch costs are not paying the rent, mowing the lawn, painting facilities, employing workers.

Read this blog post by Wayne Hale, and you'll understand why  annual program costs do not equate launch costs.
https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/what-figure-did-you-have-in-mind/

[tater]

Just now, Barzon said:

The annual program costs do not equate launch costs. Launch costs are not paying the rent, mowing the lawn, painting facilities, employing workers.

Read this blog post by Wayne Hale, and you'll understand why  annual program costs do not equate launch costs.
https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/what-figure-did-you-have-in-mind/

I've read that and I don't care.

If NASA doesn't want us to equate those costs, they should do better accounting.

Here's the operative quote from that blog:

Quote

The standing joke around the Shuttle program office in the last years goes like this: “The first Shuttle launch of the year costs $3 billion; all the rest of the flights are free.”

In other words, if there is to be a program at all, a specialized skilled workforce dedicated to that program must be paid, specialized facilities dedicated to that program must be maintained, and all of those things must be paid for, never mind however many times a year they are used.  A real space program is not a buy-it-by-the-yard kind of thing.  The incremental cost of any additional shuttle flight was more realistically in the neighborhood of $200 million – not cheap – but a lot less than the $1.5 billion figure that comes from the ‘simple’ computation that throws in everything and divides by 135.

That was my simple calc to give SLS the best costing:

Annual program cost divided by flights each year.

SLS will cost ~2.5B$ a year, and the first launch costs 2.5B, and if they fly more, it costs less.

The difference here is that we KNOW that the Rs-25s alone are 584M$/flight (for the second part of that quote above listing 200M as a marginal cost for Shuttle). So 2.5B for the first, then some hundreds of millions for each additional launch (maybe that's the 900M figure).

[Barzon]

Just now, tater said:

we KNOW that the Rs-25s alone are 584M$/flight

No they are not. The RS-25 is NOT 146M$ each.

[Flavio hc16]

11 minutes ago, tater said:

 

My problem with SLS was and is primarily that it is not designed to complete any useful mission.

1.Orion is a bloated version of the Constellation MPCV (bloat to be expected, not a slam on Orion, actually).

2. SLS was switched from the Ares V plan to only use the SHLV for cargo (EOR) to being a crew rated LV.

3. Given 1 and 2, SLS/Orion should have been scaled to complete some useful BLEO mission all alone. This would require further mass increases to Orion (the SM) to allow it to do LOI and return from a wider variety of lunar orbits, AND it would have required the ability to comanifest useful cargoes like a sortie lander.

4. This would require an SLS that could send something on the order of 70 tons to TLI I think, maybe more.

 

.5 build the ares 5 again ( as 70 tons to TLI is more or less what it should have had)

.6 profitt?? (Do sometyhing usefull)

 

[tater]

4 minutes ago, Barzon said:

No they are not. The RS-25 is NOT 146M$ each.

Um, yeah, they are.

AJR got paid ~2B for the first few flights worth.

Then they got paid another billion+ specifically to develop the new RS-25s, including 6 engines.

 

Edited May 18, 2020 by tater

[Flavio hc16]

4 minutes ago, Barzon said:

No they are not. The RS-25 is NOT 146M$ each.

no, it's more

 

[Barzon]

Just now, tater said:

Um, yeah, they are.

AJR got paid ~2B for the first few flights worth.

Then they got pad another billion+ to develop the new RS-25s, including 6 engines.

The new contract is for more new engines, 20M cheaper than the first batch of new engines.

No. They aren't. The contract is not purely for engines. It pays for additional development, employing workers, and many other things. If the contract was purely for engines and ABSOULUTELY NOTHING ELSE, then yes, the RS-25 would cost 146M$. However this is not the case, meaning that the RS-25 is not 146M$ per engine.

[tater]

New contract is ~100M$/per engine, but also includes money to develop the new engine (when they already got paid for that).

Just now, Barzon said:

No. They aren't. The contract is not purely for engines. It pays for additional development, employing workers, and many other things. If the contract was purely for engines and ABSOULUTELY NOTHING ELSE, then yes, the RS-25 would cost 146M$. However this is not the case, meaning that the RS-25 is not 146M$ per engine.

They already got paid over a billion to do exactly that, dev the new engine. That was on top of being paid 127 M$ for each SSME they refurbed.

All that matters is the number of engines, divided into the cost.

[RCgothic]

29 minutes ago, Barzon said:

Why would Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator himself lie about the cost, and say SLS is 800-900 million per launch. If he says that's the cost, you can sure as hell trust him.

I also like Jim Bridenstine and I can just about see how excluding R&D and fixed program costs $900m might be the marginal cost to build an extra SLS each year.

RS25s for flight 10 (excluding earlier, higher cost engines) are $100m each.

SRBs $50m each.

ICPS $200m.

Core stage (excluding engines) $200m.

That's $900m.

 

But the program as a whole costs $2B per year and will cost that amount whether or not an SLS gets built. If two get built, that would be $2.9B per year if the $900m marginal cost is accurate, but I'd be extremely surprised if we ever see 3 core stages in a year due to manufacturing capacity limitations.

You also have to consider the R&D costs to date $15B so far.

So a reasonable estimate to 2030 is ten flights (as the engines have been purchased) for $35 to $39B. The actual cost as opposed to the marginal cost is therefore likely to be $3.5B to $3.9B each.

If SLS gets cancelled after 2025 and five flights then it will have cost in the region of $5B per flight.

 

And ok, as the timeline goes on and more flights happen the cost does eventually converge (at 2 flights per year and infinite flights) at $1.45B each. 

But in the same timeline Superheavy, New Glenn, Vulcan, Falcon Heavy will all be flying at at maximum 1/4 as much cost and far more than 1/4 the payload, flying commercially the missions that SLS/Orion should have been flying inclusive if it had just been designed a little larger and more capable, and people will look at that and go:

"Well this is how we should have been doing it from the start."

Edited May 18, 2020 by RCgothic

[tater]

Does AJR have a "products" page where we could buy some RS-25s if we want? What if someone out there is like Bezos or Musk and wants to make a rocket, but doesn't want to dev stuff like engines. How much do they write the check for?

Bottom line is it doesn't matter, I used the Hale blog and said that's fine. Annual costs divided by launches, plus some marginal cost. Want the RS-25s at only 100M each? Whatever, so 2.5B$ +400M$ per additional flight? What number do you want, the 200M from Shuttle? Sure, why not.

1 flight a year is 2.5B/flight.

2 a year is 1.4B$/flight

Note that doesn't include Orion at all.

You think they'd ever fly more?

Edited May 18, 2020 by tater

[RCgothic]

Yeah, it doesn't matter how much of the money given to AJR is for R&D and retooling or whatever, and what proportion is actually spent on constructing RS25Es and RS25Fs, bottom line is number of units out the door divided by appropriations.

16 engines refurbished at $127m each.

6 engines at $193m each to recertify and restart production.

18 engines at $100m each.

 

That's $134m each unless and until they buy more. ($150m each if you include the refurbished RS25 original purchase price, but given some of these may have gotten value from previous missions flown that may be unfair.)

Edited May 18, 2020 by RCgothic

[tater]

[snip]

The contracts are all out there. Add the 3 up, divide by the number of engines.

That's actually a lowball, because it doesn't count the fact that the first SLS launches are in fact using engines NASA already paid for once.

(and I mean marginal cost of SSMEs in production, not SSME dev costs at all, or constant STS era refurb costs)

Edited May 18, 2020 by Vanamonde

[sh1pman]

[snip]

Why do you guys dislike Berger so much? I mean, why him specifically. He's not the only one on space twitter who dislikes SLS.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Vanamonde

[Barzon]

Why not?
He blatantly lies in his articles, admits to being biased and yet does nothing to try alleviate that, and is just a bad reporter overall. He mixes his own personal opinions into his so called "news articles".

[Canopus]

Berger certainly deserves a spot on SpaceXs payroll if you ask me.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Canopus

[sh1pman]

5 minutes ago, Barzon said:

Why not?
He blatantly lies in his articles, admits to being biased and yet does nothing to try alleviate that, and is just a bad reporter overall. He mixes his own personal opinions into his so called "news articles".

Didn't know that. What did he lie about? I don't read his stuff much, or twitter in general lately. Prefer our domestic channels on Telegram about space and astronomy news 

4 hours ago, ZooNamedGames said:

 It’s been just short of a decade of funding SpaceX as part of the CCP to build a capsule (& it isn’t even reusable!).

Forgot to address - so now you care about reusability, isn't that a surprise!

[ZooNamedGames]

54 minutes ago, tater said:

You're acting like the 2 are mutually exclusive. Why?

What is "30 billion of booster cores" from?

The cost of an SLS launch is the cost of the annual SLS program, plus any marginal costs, divided by the number of launches that year. Adding Orion of course adds quite a bit, as Orion alone is like a billion or more a flight.

We know the annual SLS costs. We know the flight rate won't exceed 1/year for a long time.

3.5bil you day for 1 core- round down as production is streamlined, x10 for 10 cores, is 30mil.

4 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Didn't know that. What did he lie about? I don't read his stuff much, or twitter in general lately. Prefer our domestic channels on Telegram about space and astronomy news 

Forgot to address - so now you care about reusability, isn't that a surprise!

Reuse has a place. Deep space isn’t it.

[tater]

11 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

3.5bil you day for 1 core- round down as production is streamlined, x10 for 10 cores, is 30mil.

Can you rewrite that in a sentence?

NASA said it was purchasing 10, but for some reason it didn't mention the cost except it was inexplicably still going to be cost-plus.

 

30 minutes ago, Barzon said:

Why not?
He blatantly lies in his articles, admits to being biased and yet does nothing to try alleviate that, and is just a bad reporter overall. He mixes his own personal opinions into his so called "news articles".

The arguments against SLS are strong virtually everywhere. I'm interested in supporters who aren't on the SLS gravy train. Any positive reporting on SLS (as a program generally), would have to be biased for SLS. Look at the OIG reports.

Regardless of all the cost/pork aspects, go right to the initial problem:

What is SLS for?

Be specific. I want to know what mission SLS (and only SLS) can accomplish on its own.

Can't be BLEO human exploration, because Orion can't go anywhere interesting.

14 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Berger certainly deserves a spot on SpaceXs payroll if you ask me.

How? All he does is PO people in AL, where a lot of the NASA money gets spent. How does his niche reporting benefit SpaceX, exactly?

 

What about Jeff Faust, hate him, too?

https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-boeing-look-ahead-to-long-term-sls-production/

Quote

Bridenstine didn’t state a price target for the SLS under any new contract, although at a NASA town hall meeting Dec. 3 he estimated the per-vehicle cost to eventually reach $800–900 million. In an interview with CNN Dec. 9, he estimated a single SLS today costs $1.6 billion, but could get down $800 million under a long-term production contract.

Could.

We could land Starship on the Moon as the Artemis crew lander in 2024, too. Could. We could land on the Moon with crew in 2024, period. Could. LOL.

 

Edited May 18, 2020 by tater

[Canopus]

Come on now @tater i wasn‘t being totally serious.

[RCgothic]

I have't seen anything substantaited against Eric Berger, as far as I can tell it's semi-libelous sour grapes from SLS supporters. A popular science editor of a popscience website is not required to be friendly towards a bad system.

We can all add appropriations and divide by usefulness accomplished, Eric's not the only one lamenting SLS's opportunity cost. NASA Spaceflight stream gave SLS such a kicking earlier.

 

[tater]

[snip]

I know, but seriously, he's a reporter that only space geeks read, and the ones who love SLS (who probably work on the program ) hate him and don't read him. The other people that read him already hate SLS. I disliked SLS long before I knew about Berger.

3 hours ago, Barzon said:

I'd say lunar orbit is pretty damn interesting.

It is? In what way? What are humans going to do in distant lunar orbit that could not be done better by something like LRO?

Get irradiated?

Sending people to the Moon itself at least has some interest, sending people "near" the Moon buys us exactly nothing.

[snip]

I was talking about public proponents/reporters, not you.

 

Edited May 18, 2020 by Vanamonde

[Barzon]

22 minutes ago, tater said:

It is? In what way? What are humans going to do in distant lunar orbit that could not be done better by something like LRO?

 

What's the point of doing any HSF then? What can humans do that robots cannot do better?

[ZooNamedGames]

3 hours ago, Barzon said:

 

I'd say lunar orbit is pretty damn interesting.

[snip]

I’d use my new “Orange rocket bad” bingo board here but I know I’d win within a few hours so there’s no point.

3 hours ago, tater said:

I know, but seriously, he's a reporter that only space geeks read, and the ones who love SLS (who probably work on the program ) hate him and don't read him. The other people that read him already hate SLS. I disliked SLS long before I knew about Berger.

It is? In what way? What are humans going to do in distant lunar orbit that could not be done better by something like LRO?

Get irradiated?

Sending people to the Moon itself at least has some interest, sending people "near" the Moon buys us exactly nothing.

I was talking about public proponents/reporters, not you.

 

We can’t go anywhere more interesting if we can’t live on the moon. Period.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Vanamonde