What do you think of the SLS?

[ImmaStegosaurus!]

Even a lousy plan is better than no plan. At least SLS means NASA is engineering something new and not just putzing around in LEO as they used to. Cancel SLS and you could axe whole organization too as they become bit redundant if they have no spacecraft or rockets.

[SR]

The SLS is incredibly expensive to develop and build.

They should go for a smaller reusable rocket like the falcon 9

[NSEP]

I really like the payloads the SLS is going to carry though.

[Nibb31]

6 hours ago, SR said:

The SLS is incredibly expensive to develop and build.

They should go for a smaller reusable rocket like the falcon 9

Why should NASA design and build a rocket like the Falcon 9 instead of just using Falcon 9 ?

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

I really like the payloads the SLS is going to carry though.

The only payloads that are funded are Orion and Europa Clipper. 

[tater]

6 hours ago, SR said:

The SLS is incredibly expensive to develop and build.

They should go for a smaller reusable rocket like the falcon 9

What good does a small rocket do if you want much larger diameter payloads, or more massive payloads?

The trouble with SLS is that it lacks a mission. For a private company to make a rocket, then go look for payloads is one thing, but NASA has to sink all the cost of running an expensive program, build the bloody thing, then it needs payloads, which will then be "designed to fit" SLS, instead of being designed to be optimum, with a LV then designed to get the parts where they need to be. SLS is putting the cart in front of the house, IMO.

[NSEP]

9 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

The only payloads that are funded are Orion and Europa Clipper. 

But the other ones, the ideas. Like the manned mobile rover thing. Its not just going to drive, but also other space operations like spacewalks. This thing:

There are many more ideas, but i dont have the time to find the source.

Edited October 16, 2016 by NSEP

[tater]

4 minutes ago, NSEP said:

But the other ones, the ideas. Like the manned mobile rover thing. Its not just going to drive, but also other space operations like spacewalks. This thing:

There are many more ideas, but i dont have the time to find the source.

 

Ideas don't matter. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. They need programs, and honestly they need them in place now or very soon, or they have nothing. SLS is a money hole unless they can launch at least 2 times per year, every year. That's 2 multi-billion dollar payloads every year, since what's the point of using a ridiculously expensive LV to launch cheap payloads? So they need "ideas" for what to launch, then they need billions of $, and years of effort to come up with payloads. The way things stand, they might as well light money on fire as a project.

[Nibb31]

You must be referring to the Boeing powerpoint with all sorts of fantasy missions for the SLS. It's wishful thinking, nothing more.

Ideas are nothing unless they get funded by Congress. There is no funding, and no political will for any of those other missions at this stage. It takes at least 10 years to complete a complex aerospace program. Since none of those programs has received a green light from Congress, they are not going to fly in the next decade. Since SLS only has 3 actual flights manifested, it will be sitting in a hangar gathering dust (and wasting billions) for several years, if it isn't cancelled.

[DerekL1963]

34 minutes ago, tater said:

The trouble with SLS is that it lacks a mission.

The Senate Launch System does have a mission - funneling pork to campaign contributors and keeping jobs in a key Congressional district in a battleground state.

Or, in other words, don't forget that even though they enthusiastically cheerlead it for political reasons - SLS is emphatically not a NASA program.

[tater]

1 minute ago, DerekL1963 said:

The Senate Launch System does have a mission - funneling pork to campaign contributors and keeping jobs in a key Congressional district in a battleground state.

Or, in other words, don't forget that even though they enthusiastically cheerlead it for political reasons - SLS is emphatically not a NASA program.

True, I meant a "real" NASA mission, as opposed to the mission of the SLS program, which is jobs/pork/etc. Of course the same can really be said of NASA, period, it's always been primarily a jobs program, we just forgot about that during the Space Race/Apollo era.

[NSEP]

1 hour ago, tater said:

 

Ideas don't matter. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. They need programs, and honestly they need them in place now or very soon, or they have nothing. SLS is a money hole unless they can launch at least 2 times per year, every year. That's 2 multi-billion dollar payloads every year, since what's the point of using a ridiculously expensive LV to launch cheap payloads? So they need "ideas" for what to launch, then they need billions of $, and years of effort to come up with payloads. The way things stand, they might as well light money on fire as a project.

Those ideas are pretty important, otherwise NASA, wont redirect any asteroids, and wont get people Mars. And i am not talking about 1 payload per launch of course. And nobody said i was talking about cheap payloads neither.

[Frybert]

Folks, while NASA as a whole is a government run Institution and SLS (like many NASA programs) has deep political roots, let's do our best to avoid discussing those things on THIS forum. If the topic has gotten to the point to where the only left to discuss is the politics, then perhaps this thread has run its course. So let's all do our best to avoid that so we don't have to close this thread. 

[Nibb31]

7 hours ago, NSEP said:

Those ideas are pretty important, otherwise NASA, wont redirect any asteroids, and wont get people Mars. And i am not talking about 1 payload per launch of course. And nobody said i was talking about cheap payloads neither.

Until NASA gets a budget increase and clear orders from those-that-shall-not-be-named, NASA is not redirecting any asteroids or getting anyone to Mars.

The "Journey to Mars" phrase that NASA appends to each of their press releases is just PR. There is no funding for it and no  mandate from the powers above. They are not working on going to Mars.

Edited October 17, 2016 by Nibb31

[Wjolcz]

 

12 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Europa Clipper. 

That one wins my vote.

Not sure what to think about the whole SLS program. I think it will be one of the last expendeble rockets to fly once it's finished. They are building it mainly because they have the shuttle engines still laying around, don't they?

IMO the future is in reusability.

Edited October 17, 2016 by Veeltch

[tater]

15 hours ago, NSEP said:

Those ideas are pretty important, otherwise NASA, wont redirect any asteroids, and wont get people Mars. And i am not talking about 1 payload per launch of course. And nobody said i was talking about cheap payloads neither.

They're not redirecting any asteroids, anyway. ARM, which is a "legit" Orion/SLS mission is an Orion mission that absolutely doesn't require Orion or SLS at all. Send probe to asteroid. Collect a sample. Take sample to cislunar space. Orion picks up sample with crew---for reasons---profit? Any such probe could just as well return the sample directly. If you combined the cost of the probe and the Orion/SLS that will be expended, you could have an even bigger, better probe. It's make-work, not "an idea."

People going to Mars? OK, let;s say that is the goal. Figure out the Mars craft first, then make a LV to fly that mission. If SLS turns out to loft 10% less than needed, all of a sudden they need extra launches, whereas a LV designed for the task would have done the job more efficiently.

Edited October 17, 2016 by tater

[todofwar]

15 hours ago, tater said:

True, I meant a "real" NASA mission, as opposed to the mission of the SLS program, which is jobs/pork/etc. Of course the same can really be said of NASA, period, it's always been primarily a jobs program, we just forgot about that during the Space Race/Apollo era.

I mean, why not throw in the National institutes of health, national science foundation, and a decent chunk of the department of Energy while you're at it? NASA is an organization devoted to doing science. And that may or may not have benefits for the country as a whole but I would hesitate to call it simply a jobs program. 

As for SLS, I think it speaks to the overemphasis on launch systems when it comes to NASA. They're better off spending their time and money on getting useful scientific payloads ready, and let others worry about the launch systems. But there's the national pride in having our own launch capabilities, so here we are. I personally don't mind sending astronauts up on Soyuz rockets.

[tater]

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

I mean, why not throw in the National institutes of health, national science foundation, and a decent chunk of the department of Energy while you're at it? NASA is an organization devoted to doing science. And that may or may not have benefits for the country as a whole but I would hesitate to call it simply a jobs program. 

I wouldn't disagree with those characterizations, either. It;s easy to tell if an organization is a pork/jobs program: is it most efficiently operated?

That would generally require that it all be in one place. If it is spread over as many districts as possible--it's pork. 

 

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

As for SLS, I think it speaks to the overemphasis on launch systems when it comes to NASA. They're better off spending their time and money on getting useful scientific payloads ready, and let others worry about the launch systems. But there's the national pride in having our own launch capabilities, so here we are. I personally don't mind sending astronauts up on Soyuz rockets.

Commercial crew is what we should be doing, and that;s a good, efficient use of money. Contracting launches makes sense. SLS is pork, however.

[todofwar]

1 minute ago, tater said:

I wouldn't disagree with those characterizations, either. It;s easy to tell if an organization is a pork/jobs program: is it most efficiently operated?

That would generally require that it all be in one place. If it is spread over as many districts as possible--it's pork. 

 

Commercial crew is what we should be doing, and that;s a good, efficient use of money. Contracting launches makes sense. SLS is pork, however.

At the risk of getting too off topic or political, I'll say there are reasons to spread things out over a wide area. Your car isn't made in one place, as an example. It pulls in components from all around the world. As for scientific research institutions, beyond a certain size you loose any benefit to having it all in one place. And switching to having multiple institutions competing with each other for funding allows you to generate competition and spur more rapid advancement. Now, for something like SLS that doesn't make sense because having multiple institutions competing to make the best most efficient LV would be like Ford asking different plants to make different Mustangs and see which is best, and the private sector is happily rising to the challenge anyway. But having Ames and JPL both working on astrobiology projects does make sense, because there can be competing theories about how something works and both will be driven to prove themselves right and get more funding. And they will serve as a check on the other's work to ensure it's good science.

Can science be made more efficient? Yes. But that has much more to do with the fact that scientists are never trained to be managers, and yet are often tasked with being managers. Just putting the entirety of the NIH in one place, or moving all the national labs to one location, won't automatically make everything better. We decided science is important, and are paying money to make science happen. That's not pork, and it's not just job creation.  

[tater]

Why fabricate SLS in Louisiana, then boat the thing to KSC? Jobs (i.e.: votes) for poor, LA, that's why. Contractors being in different places are fine, that;s just where they set up shop. NASA facilities all over makes no sense. Why is Mission Control in Houston, for example? Because TX and LJB, that's why. No other reason to have mission control switch from KSC to JSC the moment the bird clears the tower. Pork.

 

[todofwar]

4 hours ago, tater said:

Why fabricate SLS in Louisiana, then boat the thing to KSC? Jobs (i.e.: votes) for poor, LA, that's why. Contractors being in different places are fine, that;s just where they set up shop. NASA facilities all over makes no sense. Why is Mission Control in Houston, for example? Because TX and LJB, that's why. No other reason to have mission control switch from KSC to JSC the moment the bird clears the tower. Pork.

 

I'm not arguing that SLS is not inefficient due to politics, I even said NASA should not be in the business of making LV's, I was just saying that not all science is pork just because it's decentralized. If we really wanted our own launch capabilties, I would say just contract out explicitly. Make Boeing and Lockheed and SpaceX bid on a super heavy launcher that only NASA can use, they offer prices, we pay them, they make it as efficiently and low cost as possible. It gets assembled and launched and controlled from one site. But as you have said, that's not what SLS is for. I sometimes wonder how much the people at NASA even care about it. Seems to me most people there are not directly involved with LVs, they just want their experiments in orbit somehow.

[tater]

NASA facilities are not about "science" for the most part, we have Universities, and NASA can also fund research. Their facilities are spread around---because politics, no other reason.

You need East and West coast launch facilities. Past that, there's no reason for much duplication other than that. Vandenberg is close enough to LA that half of NASA could just be in LA... but then not so many votes.

The other half could be in FL... but then no so many votes.

 

[DerekL1963]

15 minutes ago, tater said:

Vandenberg is close enough to LA that half of NASA could just be in LA...

o.0  Vandenburg is a USAF facility, rarely used by NASA.   (Not that it's a duplicate anyhow, because it can't reach the majority of the orbits that can be reached from the Cape and vice versa.)
 

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Their facilities are spread around---because politics, no other reason.

The majority of NASA facilites pre-date NASA and are scattered about for a wide variety of reasons, not all of which are politics.  Michoud for example is making SLS tanks because that's where big tanks have been manufactured since the 60's - they were manufactured there in the 60's because it was an existing facility that could be repurposed far cheaper than building a new facility.

[tater]

35 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

o.0  Vandenburg is a USAF facility, rarely used by NASA.   (Not that it's a duplicate anyhow, because it can't reach the majority of the orbits that can be reached from the Cape and vice versa.)

Totally true. The point was that NASA needs at most maybe 2 launch facilities (or access to 2).

 

35 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

The majority of NASA facilites pre-date NASA and are scattered about for a wide variety of reasons, not all of which are politics.  Michoud for example is making SLS tanks because that's where big tanks have been manufactured since the 60's - they were manufactured there in the 60's because it was an existing facility that could be repurposed far cheaper than building a new facility.

Which would be fine if it were just a contractor. Nationalizing it, however, is a different story. 

It's like the Pentagon. They would prefer to close most bases in the US... and everyone in government agrees as long as the base closing is not the one in their own district.

NASA could certainly streamline and eliminate many facilities. Take tanks... when/if they move to 100% composite tanks, then what? Build those facilities at Michaud, because it's a big floor space, or build it where it is most efficient to do so?

[Kryten]

NASA only has two launch complexes, and one of those is a small sounding rocket base.

[todofwar]

1 hour ago, tater said:

NASA facilities are not about "science" for the most part, we have Universities, and NASA can also fund research. Their facilities are spread around---because politics, no other reason.

You need East and West coast launch facilities. Past that, there's no reason for much duplication other than that. Vandenberg is close enough to LA that half of NASA could just be in LA... but then not so many votes.

The other half could be in FL... but then no so many votes.

 

Umm, what do you think Curiosity is? Or Cassini? Those are science projects. Pretty much all of NASA's job right now is science. JPL, Ames, Goddard, Glenn, those are all research facilities focused on science. NASA also does some funding of independent research too, but they do tons of in house research as well. Even KSC has research beyond launches going on right now.