[New] Space Launch System / Orion Discussion Thread

[StrandedonEarth]

12 hours ago, Meecrob said:

Much of the cost is in certification. You can get material from the same factory, but the aerospace material can be, for example, 10x the cost of the non-aerospace grade material because the aerospace grade stuff has been tested to finer tolerances. In many cases, the material can be identical, the only difference is one was exposed to expensive tests to determine the exact characteristics of the material.

I recall an old story about how the instrument panel light bulbs in a Lear jet are identical to the dashboard bulbs in cars, but cost (10X? 100X?) as much for that reason. Guess which replacement bulb was usually used?

Edited May 27, 2023 by StrandedonEarth

[magnemoe]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:53 AM, Ultimate Steve said:

In aerospace, cost does not have very much to do with raw material cost and technological maturity. It depends some, but other factors dominate.

I was going to say simplicity in there as well, but I now know better than to call the SLS SRBs simple. They are very complex, but in a different way from liquids.

There is far greater cost impact from the following, in no particular order:

• Economies of scale (small production rates = high costs)
• Handling costs (Moving a giant explosive skyscraper around land and sea is not cheap)
• Facility costs (Have to build buildings safe enough for your explosive skyscrapers) (Have to build and upgrade launch facilities for your explosive skyscrapers)
• Regulatory costs (Have to prove your buildings and transportation architecture are safe enough to parade your explosive skyscrapers through populated areas)
• Employee costs (More employees is more expensive, more experienced employees are more expensive, and if you don't have the wow factor attracting employees for less, that's expensive)
  • All that infrastructure has employee costs too, for maintenance and stuff
• Effective use of time (If you have 1000 employees and some finite amount of work, it can either take a year or ten years depending on how good your employees are and how well their time is utilized) (And then you are paying 10x much in salaries for the same product)
• Any number of other factors

"Solids are simple and cheap!" is the simplification told to the mainstream public in every book about space ever, and all else kept equal, that is probably true. However, rarely is all else kept equal in the real world.

Also large organisations has their internal red tape who has its place if used correctly as in stopping dangerous or expensive stuff, in mass production you don't want redneck fixes, yes they can get you over an bump but will cost you.
But this can be taken way to far, friend worked on designing and building high speed airport train in Norway. 
Then the lighting in the toilets on the trains came up and it was multiple meetings, note not the fixture as I think they bought the design, But the fluorescence bulb used. 
This get insane then you realized it  was 15 something trains each with one toilet. Yes it was expanded for long range trains, but its still less than 50 toilets. 
They spent more money discussing this none issue than the cost of the bulbs during the life span of the trains and they are switching to led anyway. 

He got a bit liquided off, bought the 5-6 relevant bulbs and called for an meeting on an mostly finished train. Cycling trough the bulbs he bought on his stuff budget in company and asked who they preferred. 
 

[darthgently]

It really comes down to an ancient rule of thumb:  Other people's money with low accountability will be spent less efficiently than one's own or money with more accountability attached.

Also: More red tape is not the same as more accountability or more efficiency, no matter how many unelected bureaucrats support this approach

https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-faults-agency-on-sls-booster-and-engine-overruns/

 

[tater]

 

[darthgently]

1 minute ago, tater said:

 

They simply don't care if the inefficiency is blatant or not.  It seems in that game as if the "score" among bureaucrats, politicians, and adjacent industries is nearly all size of budget, with actual results being a cost-plus afterthought.  An easy slippery slope when it is other people's money

[tater]

The mission is $$$$,$$$$,$$$ in districts.

Mission accomplished.

[tater]

 

[Minmus Taster]

2 hours ago, tater said:

 

What happened to capsule reuse? Wasn't that part of the point of Orion to begin with?

[StrandedonEarth]

4 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

What happened to capsule reuse? Wasn't that part of the point of Orion to begin with?

Still need one to fly while others are in refurbishing, which will probably be hangar queens so they can be milked like cash cows…

[tater]

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105609.pdf

[RCgothic]

To the surprise of nobody anywhere.

[SunlitZelkova]

Is this going to bring about any actual change though?

[Royalswissarmyknife]

Just now, SunlitZelkova said:

Is this going to bring about any actual change though?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Not a chance

[tater]

18 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Is this going to bring about any actual change though?

There is not any plausible change that could alter this.

Dropping the RS-25s to $70M, lol. Berger notes Be-4 is "under $20M," when per Bruno's math I get a number more like $6-7M. Raptor <$1M as he says. Even SLS with Raptor-priced RS-25s only drops the cost by ~$0.5B, so the thing is still $3.5-4B a flight. To be a reasonable price per launch, the entire system—including Orion—would need a marginal launch cost a solid order of magnitude lower than it currently is.

[Codraroll]

On 9/9/2023 at 1:38 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

Is this going to bring about any actual change though?

Not by itself, but it's a brick in the wall, as it were. Once more commercial suppliers get up and running, it will probably become more politically viable to acknowledge that SLS is way too expensive for what it offers, and there will be few remaining reasons to continue its support, even as a jobs program. Some congresspeople will continue to fight for it, but they will get outvoted eventually, and this report of the costs will probably be a key argument in the process.

[StrandedonEarth]

It should serve as a clear warning to oldspace that they can no longer charge such outrageous prices (for legacy hardware, no less) and expect to stay relevant. It's simply unaffordable in the long term, and short-term gigabudget projects are pointless.

[tater]

30 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

It should serve as a clear warning to oldspace that they can no longer charge such outrageous prices (for legacy hardware, no less) and expect to stay relevant. It's simply unaffordable in the long term, and short-term gigabudget projects are pointless.

The spending was in fact the point of SLS/Orion, though.

It was never about a sustainable lunar exploration/development program. Remember that the principle complaint by many about SLS from the start was NOT what it cost, the cost issue is incidental. Those of us who have hated SLS/Orion from the start <raises hand>, hated it because it was "a rocket to nowhere." if SLS cost even more, but was actually a vehicle capable of mounting useful missions my concern about price would still be there, but couched as "if it cost half as much, we could have twice as many awesome SLS flights!" Instead, the cost argument is, "Why are we spending so much on a launch vehicle that is useless?"

 

[Jacke]

Not to defend the costs of SLS....

There is no commercial market for beyond GEO.  And no crew-rated commercial rocket that has a good C3.  Don't mention Starship, as its C3 isn't good, without a LES will never be crew-rated, hasn't even flown successfully once, and the usual pacing element, the engines, are not in good shape.

So, for the United States, for crew-rated beyond GEO, it's SLS or nothing right now.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Jacke

[tater]

57 minutes ago, Jacke said:

So, for the United States, for crew-rated beyond GEO, it's SLS or nothing right now.

Any cislunar crew mission architecture for SLS could have been accomplished with existing launch vehicles using a EOR mission profile and specialized upper stages—for grossly less money. Remember that a bunch of different people at one time were working on lunar missions using Shuttle to deliver components/crew to LEO.

And SLS does nothing at all on its own that is useful. Gets Orion to a distant lunar orbit. Yipee.

57 minutes ago, Jacke said:

  Don't mention Starship, as its C3 isn't good, without a LES will never be crew-rated, hasn't even flown successfully once, and the usual pacing element, the engines, are not in good shape.

Um, right now Starship is literally the only way NASA expects SLS to accomplish a useful lunar mission. Useful = surface. All other SLS mission proposals are useless make-work. The only reason to be near the Moon is to visit the Moon. Back when the garbage mission was ARM... yeah, garbage mission that needed zero humans, they added Orion to make it more expensive and dangerous (crew risk is always nonzero)—can't see anything else it adds.

So it's SLS or nothing for useless crew missions. And SLS plus Starship for the only current useful mission.

If the BO lander is a thing (and I really like it), then we're in a world with F9, FH, Vulcan, and NG all as fully operational vehicles, even without Starship working (and we'll have a better idea on that literally this month). Having all 4 of those vehicles means that an EOR model is even more possible than it was with just F9 and Atlas V, etc.

Edited September 12, 2023 by tater

[RCgothic]

8 hours ago, Jacke said:

Not to defend the costs of SLS....

There is no commercial market for beyond GEO.  And no crew-rated commercial rocket that has a good C3.  Don't mention Starship, as its C3 isn't good, without a LES will never be crew-rated, hasn't even flown successfully once, and the usual pacing element, the engines, are not in good shape.

So, for the United States, for crew-rated beyond GEO, it's SLS or nothing right now.

There is right now a commercial flight around the moon scheduled.

[darthgently]

Is orbital refueling of SS being considered in the C3 here?

[tater]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

Is orbital refueling of SS being considered in the C3 here?

I'm fine with only looking at stuff that actually exists, and SpaceX has yet to demonstrate this.

SLS/Orion is currently the only extant vehicle for BLEO crew missions, but the set of missions it can accomplish includes none that are actually interesting. This has always been true of the program, it is a "rocket to nowhere."

[darthgently]

30 minutes ago, tater said:

I'm fine with only looking at stuff that actually exists, and SpaceX has yet to demonstrate this.

SLS/Orion is currently the only extant vehicle for BLEO crew missions, but the set of missions it can accomplish includes none that are actually interesting. This has always been true of the program, it is a "rocket to nowhere."

True, all must be proven.  But does anyone really think orbital refueling is not possible or not feasible?  Because simply not having been done is a lot different than not easily imagined at all. 

Automation (as demonstrated everywhere these days from craft auto-docking to ISS, to F9 boosters landing themselves) makes safe, unattended, orbital rendezvous and refueling easily imaginable, if involved.

Boil-off and cryo shelf life at any orbital fuel depot is maybe a bigger problem than the refueling itself in the the bigger picture

[tater]

Just now, darthgently said:

True, all must be proven.  But does anyone really think orbital refueling is not possible or not feasible?  Because simply not having been done is a lot different than not easily imagined at all. 

Automation (as demonstrated everywhere these days from craft auto-docking to ISS, to F9 boosters landing themselves) makes safe, unattended, orbital rendezvous and refueling easily imaginable, if involved.

Boil-off and cryo shelf life at any orbital fuel depot is maybe a bigger problem than the refueling itself in the the bigger picture

No, I think it's going to be done. Sadly, SLS itself resulted in virtually no work being done to create this technology. Senator Shelby famously forbade NASA from working the issue at the risk of budget—precisely because it obviates the need for SLS.

[kerbiloid]

The truth about SLS origins is revealed.

Spoiler

Spoiler