These improvements have been passed on to the Falcon Heavy, and it's expect to put 64,000 kg into LEO, just shy of the SLS's 70,000 kg.
Is the SLS system even worth it anymore? They are using repurposed 1970's shuttle era technology at massively inflated costs. To be fair, no one could have possibly foreseen the quantum leap in rocket technology SpaceX has made over the past 8 years since the SLS was designed. But it's beginning to seem more and more like a government welfare program for Boeing rather than an effective launch system.
Like most things associated with manned space exploration, the tangential benefits of keeping Boeing and USA in operation far outweigh the direct cost and direct benefit.
The guy had a dad who psychologically tortured him, he got thrown down stairs by gangs of blacks in apartheid South Africa, and he completely detached himself from any social connections when he was 17 by moving to Canada. The guy's only reason to live is to fulfill his dreams that he gained from reading every single science fiction book that existed.
Anyway you can think what you want but I know that he's not like the other CEOs that are career CEOs. He's on a mission fueled by intense hardship and retribution
And ULA has a good story about their work on in-space reuse of rockets even if they aren't going to be reusing boosters any time soon.
Even if SpaceX themselves have no interest in going to The Moon, they're not going to say no to a contract to put a Lockheed/ Boeing/ etc NASA funded Moon mission into orbit for them.
So are you saying Musk would just sit back and collect money from Falcon Heavy for the rest of his life? No, he is planning to go to Mars, so SpaceX is going to advance the technology as fast as it can.
Were you really unaware of that? Or perhaps you work for ULA.
Creating methane on a non-Earth body and using that to launch spacecraft would be a different story. ;)
If you want to see the most advanced rocket engine on the planet, look at Arianespace's Vulcain instead. But it can't be used for vertical landings in the current version.
SpaceX Raptor engine, BlueOrigin BE-4, Space Shuttle Main Engine and a number of others are far more impressive then the Vulcain.
Marlin is mostly interesting because of its thrust-to-weight ratio, but there I might agree with you.
That's pretty much the definition of incrementalism.
Yes, there've been a number of watershed transitions, but when you're increasing capability/cost by a factor of ten each decade, that's expected.
As to when it will fly, I expect by the end of the year. They have finally begun static firing actual rocket cores recently, including the heavily redesigned (and another reason for delays) center core.
“Falcon Heavy is one of those things that at first it sounded easy,” Musk said. “We’ll just take two first stages and use them as strap-on boosters. And like, actually no, this is crazy hard, and required a redesign of the center core, and a ton of additional hardware. It was actually shockingly difficult to go from a single core to a triple-core vehicle.”
http://spacenews.com/spacex-to-launch-falcon-heavy-with-two-...
The major reason why Falcon Heavy was delayed for so long is that they were able to make major improvements on the F9. It would not have made much sense to work on a more complicated rocket when there was so much potential in F9.
Falcon Heavy was developed for a pittance compared to the SLS. Even if its delayed another 3 years the SLS would not make a lick of sense.
However, in defense of the SLS 70000kg is the minimum requirement, the rocket will lift more like 80000kg.
Even now it would be cheaper to cancel it. For just the the SLS budget of the next 2 years SpaceX could easily build them the BFR. They could have three different super-heavy boosters from three different companies for the price of the SLS.
> To be fair, no one could have possibly foreseen the quantum leap in rocket technology SpaceX has made over the past 8 years since the SLS was designed.
It was foreseen. They wanted to gather proposals both from inside and outside of NASA because NASA had already realized that it might be much cheaper. They had evaluate how much SpaceX had spend on development and concluded that they would have spent about 10X more.
Non of these investigation were pushed and the SLS 'proposal' was selected. Interestingly another group inside NASA (the only other proposal) want to go back to the F-1 engine.
> But it's beginning to seem more and more like a government welfare program for Boeing rather than an effective launch system.
It was always that. Since its inception everybody called it the Senate Launch System. NASA actually did not want to build it, the Senate forced them and specifically required them to use specific tech. Its nothing but a 20+ Billion pork program.
There is no doubt they could send some pretty large payloads to Mars with the SLS, esp. the later block designs. The question is whether congress is going to commit to the tens of billions to build those designs and actually launch manned missions to other planets or the moon with them.
I'd definitely buy a cubesat launch slot for 3k. Perhaps someone should set up a kickstarter or something.
SLS isn't really suitable for defense satellite launches. It's oversized for the job, and won't be capable of the required flight rates (several launches per year at least) for a very long time, if ever. (Current schedule is years between launches.) It also isn't necessary for launching crew to at least low earth orbit; one of the commercial crew contractors (Boeing) is expecting to send crew up on man-rated versions of the ULA Atlas V.
All of which isn't to say that SLS is cost effective, but it does have capabilities which will be unique for at least a window of time.