After over 2 decades in shop SLS fails first test

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

they have quite a lot of say in the design the SLS and Constellation are built to their requirements not NASAs. Constellation design was laid out by Bush not by NASA

Constellation was suppose to use 6 RS-68 but congress pushed the use of RS-25 from the space shuttle
the amount of pork congress has pushed for. The SLS a single main engines cost more than a Falcon Heavy launcher in full expendable which can do 2/3 of the cargo
Boeing has openly worked to shape the contracts

 

A single RS-25 does not cost more than a Falcon heavy, (which incidentally is by far the most cost efficient system ever built), the later costs 90 million for a regular launch and a fully expendable would run to 150 mil. An RS-25 in it's fully reusable version runs to 40 mil. I haven't been able to spot a value in quick searching for the non-reusable form but i expect it will be much lower build costs, (developmental effects will depend on number of launches, fewer launches means more developmental costs, a problem spaceflight has suffered from for a long time). And finding vehicle manufacture costs for the SLS is even harder. Elon isn't including development costs in the Falcon Heavy price whilst all SLS prices do so the values i can find on it aren't valid for comparison. 

 

The fact that you think politicians had direct input on the specification however confirms somthing i'd suspected all along. You have jack fuck all idea about the engineering side of spaceflight. You can't sketch up somthing on a napkin and have it work. It takes hundreds of experts in multiple fields to come up with a valid configuration. The margin between massive payload lifter and somthing that can't even reach orbit is tiny. The odds that anything that a political committee could come up with configuration wise being able to reach orbit, let alone lift a payload is basically nil.

[GDRRiley]

27 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

A single RS-25 does not cost more than a Falcon heavy, (which incidentally is by far the most cost efficient system ever built), the later costs 90 million for a regular launch and a fully expendable would run to 150 mil. An RS-25 in it's fully reusable version runs to 40 mil. I haven't been able to spot a value in quick searching for the non-reusable form but i expect it will be much lower build costs, (developmental effects will depend on number of launches, fewer launches means more developmental costs, a problem spaceflight has suffered from for a long time). And finding vehicle manufacture costs for the SLS is even harder. Elon isn't including development costs in the Falcon Heavy price whilst all SLS prices do so the values i can find on it aren't valid for comparison. 

 

The fact that you think politicians had direct input on the specification however confirms somthing i'd suspected all along. You have jack fuck all idea about the engineering side of spaceflight. You can't sketch up somthing on a napkin and have it work. It takes hundreds of experts in multiple fields to come up with a valid configuration. The margin between massive payload lifter and somthing that can't even reach orbit is tiny. The odds that anything that a political committee could come up with configuration wise being able to reach orbit, let alone lift a payload is basically nil.

yes it does

Spoiler

On 1 May 2020, NASA awarded a US$1.79 billion contract extension for the manufacture of 18 additional RS-25 engines. Ars Technica, in an article published on the same day, highlighted that over the entire RS-25 contract the price of each engine works out to US$146 million and that the total price for the four expendable engines used in each SLS launch will be more than US$580 million. They critically commented that for the cost of just one engine, six more powerful RD-180 engines could be purchased, or nearly an entire Falcon Heavy launch with two thirds of the SLS lift capacity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

 

I didn't say they worked on the design but they did have input on all the major parts. from engines to payload. that forces you into a design.
sure they didn't pick to run a 10m tank over a shorter 12m tank, they don't care about that. what they are after is their district getting money and companies paying for their election campaign.

I've got family in aerospace who worked at Lockheed in sunkworks and Boeing and I was going to be an aerospace engineer and I have friends studying to be then right now, I know quite a bit about the engineering side

[HenrySalayne]

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

The fact that you think politicians had direct input on the specification however confirms somthing i'd suspected all along. You have jack fuck all idea about the engineering side of spaceflight. You can't sketch up somthing on a napkin and have it work. It takes hundreds of experts in multiple fields to come up with a valid configuration. The margin between massive payload lifter and somthing that can't even reach orbit is tiny. The odds that anything that a political committee could come up with configuration wise being able to reach orbit, let alone lift a payload is basically nil.

@GDRRiley is not wrong. Funding is always for a specific purpose. They'll establish criteria with the sole purpose to get the contract to a certain company or state. And that is the entire story behind the SLS.

Short story:

Not so short story:

 

[CarlBar]

6 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

yes it does

  Reveal hidden contents

On 1 May 2020, NASA awarded a US$1.79 billion contract extension for the manufacture of 18 additional RS-25 engines. Ars Technica, in an article published on the same day, highlighted that over the entire RS-25 contract the price of each engine works out to US$146 million and that the total price for the four expendable engines used in each SLS launch will be more than US$580 million. They critically commented that for the cost of just one engine, six more powerful RD-180 engines could be purchased, or nearly an entire Falcon Heavy launch with two thirds of the SLS lift capacity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

 

I didn't say they worked on the design but they did have input on all the major parts. from engines to payload. that forces you into a design.
sure they didn't pick to run a 10m tank over a shorter 12m tank, they don't care about that. what they are after is their district getting money and companies paying for their election campaign.

I've got family in aerospace who worked at Lockheed in sunkworks and Boeing and I was going to be an aerospace engineer and I have friends studying to be then right now, I know quite a bit about the engineering side

 

First apologies if i sounded a bit nasty earlier, early morning didn't sleep well, frustrated, made me snappy. As an aside cool that you've got the relatives there. it was a field i studied partway to go into too, but IRL got in the way after collage, so i'm not speaking from a lack of engineering knowledge either.

 

Second, that price per engine is including the developmental costs of developing the non-reusable version. Thats why it's a usless figure for comparison. The Falcon heavy is the accumulations of long development efforts on both it and technologies and concepts used from the earlier Falcon 9. That makes estimating it's true development cost tough as it's defrayed over a long period of time and more than one design. But it's definitely in the multi-billions of dollars range. That makes the cost of launches so far in the billion dollar plus range and several hundred million plus over all planned Falcon heavy launches so far, and thats without the material cost per launch.

 

Developmental costs vs number of launches has allways been NASA's biggest issue, they don't do enough launches to defray those costs over enough launches to marginalise them. 

 

And if the politicians aren't doing things like picking tank lengths then they don;t actually have any meaningful input into the designs specifications. They can once a proposal that is workable is presented to them lock NASA into that proposal. And they can set goals like "go to the moon again by X date", both of which are within their purview and very much their responsibility. But whatever they lock NASA into will have gone through NASA first and had NASA's input along the way. And setting goals is their job, it's like saying a politician controls how you drive your car by setting driving regulations. It's technically acurratte from a certain PoV, but it massive simplifies so many elements along they way that it's technically true without being literally true, and thats an important distinction.

[GDRRiley]

its not useless because it is a insane cost to restart a line

 

its kinda hard to get launch numbers up when you are forced to pay so much to contractors.

 

 

41 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

snd setting goals is their job, it's like saying a politician controls how you drive your car by setting driving regulations. It's technically acurratte from a certain PoV, but it massive simplifies so many elements along they way that it's technically true without being literally true, and thats an important distinction.

in my view if they picked the engine, the range and how much weight they wanted to carry and who built it I'd say they designed the car. maybe not down to a low level but certainly at a high level.

[HenrySalayne]

47 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Second, that price per engine is including the developmental costs of developing the non-reusable version.

Are you actually trying to justify the price of these engines because they "developed" a "cheaper" non-reusable variant? Seriously?

To be fair, some money was spend to rebuild the manufacturing line and tooling, but in the end they still wasted huge amounts for nothing. SLS is heavily influenced by politics.

[CarlBar]

6 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

its not useless because it is a insane cost to restart a line

 

its kinda hard to get launch numbers up when you are forced to pay so much to contractors.

 

Yes it is. The issue here is that if you want to compare to the Falcon Heavy you have to compare like for like costs and the Falcon heavy costs do not include the full development cost to date, they're paying off a tiny part of it with every launch, (Ditto the Falcon 9 costs which are in part also part of the Falcon heavy development costs).

 

Also there is no engine currently in existence NASA could use for the SLS. Any engine would have had these "insane costs" as you call them. It's also all but garunteed these 88 engines will not be the last NASA orders, these plus the ones NASA allready has leftover from the shuttles simply won't meet all the Launches NASA is going to need over the longer term. it will probably keep NASA going for the next decade, give or take, but after that they're going to need more.

 

6 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

in my view if they picked the engine, the range and how much weight they wanted to carry and who built it I'd say they designed the car. maybe not down to a low level but certainly at a high level.

 

Sure, but they didn't do that. Dion't mistake a whole bunch of stuff being in a legal bill for the politicians specifying that from the start. Most if not all of that beyond the overarching political goal will have been worked out in talks between the politicians, ANSA, and the contractors. At which point it gets written down to ensure that the money is used in the agreed way for the agreed goals. A lot of contracts between two private companies are written exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons.

 

6 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Are you actually trying to justify the price of these engines because they "developed" a "cheaper" non-reusable variant? Seriously?

To be fair, some money was spend to rebuild the manufacturing line and tooling, but in the end they still wasted huge amounts for nothing. SLS is heavily influenced by politics.

 

the tool doubtless adds a lot, but yes thats how development costs work. You pay off the costs to develop anything, be it a rocket engine, or a new TV design, by incorporating the costs into the price of the final product the smaller the final umber of items produced the more of that cost each item has to bear. In this case the contract appears to be setup to payoff those costs over the first 88 engines. This is actually fairly common when the final total number of items to be ordered isn't known. Later down the line when these engines finally stop being used we'll probably see the stated price per engines, (after inflation adjustments), be far lower because they'll calculate it based on the costs of all the engine contracts divided by the number of engines, and contracts after this one won't have tooling or development costs attached, inflation probably means they won't be as obviously cheaper as you might expect mind until you start adjusting for it).

 

As an example the original budget for the shuttle development was 1.1 billion USD. Adjust for inflation and thats about 8-9 billion USD today.