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Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

Pigs may not be able to fly but soon we'll get proof of pork barrels being able to do so.

What does SLS add to the already existing panoply of launchers, other than revenues for those companies which stood to lose out on the retirement of the Space Shuttle? Why is this thing set to dump SSMEs which were designed for reuse into the ocean after a single launch? Did they at least fix the problems with those o-rings which caused the loss of an orbiter before using derivatives of those SRBs on this launcher?

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The shuttle o-rings were working exactly as designed. The shuttle management was full of bureaucracy that decided it needed to 'move fast and break things' and ignore known cold weather launch condition issues like failure of o-rings. The o-ring engineers/designers objected to the launch and refused to sign off on it, but they were overruled by management and ignored.

There is a presentation by Edward Tufte claiming that PowerPoint caused, in part, the shuttle disaster. Hang on...

The claim is that PP's economy of words meant that the presentations to each level of management got more and more dismissive of the danger, the higher up the chain they went. Euphemisms got more and more bland, until the top people thought "screw it, we're launching."

Note that I'm not endorsing that theory, since I haven't seen the slide decks that got used. It's disputed here: https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-th...

I find that dismissal to be completely missing the point. Tufte wasn't arguing physics, he was arguing that PP euphemisms caused top execs to minimize the danger.

There is a presentation by Edward Tufte claiming that PowerPoint caused, in part, the shuttle disaster.

I can imagine him blaming a presentation style, but PowerPoint?

The Challenger exploded in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

PowerPoint didn't exist until 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint

Powerpoint is such an enormous force it has collapsed in on itself into a blackhole that tunneled through space and time. Powerpoint is slowly leaking into the past and destroying our history before our very eyes.

I have some PowerPoint templates to sell to you for the low price of $100.00

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

Tufte decrying PowerPoint in relation to a shuttle disaster was about about the Columbia, not the Challenger.

Facts. Why this keeps getting swept under the rug successfully when there’s first hand witness statements to back this up is beyond me.

This isn't getting swept under the rug successfully, everybody who spends a few hours researching shuttle knows this.

However having o-rings that are this fragile was a large part of the problem with shuttle. It was fragile, to get it to be able to launch at all an increasing amount of issues had to be ignored. To many failure points, leading to far to many close calls.

What is actually surprising is that only 2 shuttles failed.

> 'move fast and break things'

Wow, they invented that phrase? I had no idea.

> The shuttle o-rings were working exactly as designed.

This isn't true actually. From the very start the o-rings were not functioning as designed even in warm weather. They realized even before the first shuttle launch that the o-rings weren't compressed properly and were being partially extruded through the SRB joints when fired, and allowed some gas to escape out the joint around the o-ring, causing partial o-ring erosion. NASA decided not to worry about it and continue with the design. Turns out this problem was even worse during cold weather...

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

The seals were already somewhat fixed after the shuttle blew up. It would still be better not to have any seals at all and just have the boosters be one piece, but you would have to build a new factory (probably in a different state, can't have that!) to make them. It's probably mostly fine how it is.

Or you know, you could just not use solid rocket boosters at all. Solid rocket booster make absolutely no sense at all, they are only used because they represent a political interest.

Note how there was no attempt at using them for Apollo and no new rocket company uses them.

The only reason so many countries relay on them because it sharing costs with ICBMs.

NASA own internal investigation suggested the same thing, but politics is more important.

If there's significant overlap with ICBMs I could see it being reasonable from the perspective of maintaining military production readiness.

Imagine you need a bunch of people trained to do X, and machines capable of Y, in order to build your missiles, but you don't need many missiles right now, but if a war against a major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly. Either you keep making missiles you don't need, or you somehow train people and maintain machines without actually using them, either way you're spending just to maintain readiness for no immediate value. Or you find a close enough use where you can get some value by producing something similar enough that you can convert to military use rapidly.

That wouldn't be so much political pork as actually practical. But I know little to nothing in this area, so just speculation.

Solid fuels have a limited shelf life. There is always low level production to replace expired rockets whether you use them or not.

And there are also regular tests as systems get upgraded etc.

I would think that if you find yourself engaged with a major power, expending your supply of ICBMs, replacing them is probably one of the few things you no longer need to worry about.

> If there's significant overlap with ICBMs I could see it being reasonable from the perspective of maintaining military production readiness.

In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.

In general, I think by now the technology has diverged quite a bit as the requirements for launching potentially humans and ICBMs is quite different. I don't know how closely the technologies are still linked between the solids used on rockets like Vulcan and ICBMs.

In France this is certainty the case for example.

> major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly.

Lets hope we don't need to rapidly ramp up production of ICBMs since they are mostly just used to carry nukes.

If you think its politically necessary to fund that infrastructure just do so with your military budget. Tying down other space activities, specially civilian, is a bad idea.

> In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.

The huge Space Shuttle SRBs were never an ICBM part themselves. The military angle enters the picture when you realize the SRB fuel is the same fuel used in ICBMs, made by the same company (originally Thiokol, then ATK, which merged with Orbital Sciences to form Orbital ATK, which was then purchased by Northrop Grumman.)

The fuel itself yes, but the military has no use for huge multi-part boosters.

You're responding to a comment in which I told you that the Space Shuttle SRBs were never missile parts.

Yes, I was agreeing with you. But granted, unnecessary comment.

Japan's space program focuses on cost effective solid rocket boosters and does not build ballistic missiles out of them. Liquid engines generally have the advantage in ISP, which is why they dominate large rockets. But solid rockets have substantial savings in manufacturing and operational simplicity that shouldn't be simply handwaved away.

Japan focused on solid fuels because they needed to build rockets that were impractical enough to not be usable as ICBMs. They had to do crazy things like launch them sideways.

This comment makes no sense. Missile and rockets both go sideways. Modern missiles all use solid fuel. Japan's solid fuel rockets are build by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which uses the same fuel and manufacturing expertise to also manufacture missiles.

https://youtu.be/UZaIs6oSlOI - By sideways I mean slanted on launch because they had no guidance system.

Solid rockets will never be effectively reusable. They may have made sense early on, but in 2022 they're clearly an evolutionary dead end.

They didn't actually make sense early on.

Continuing rockets like Saturn 1B and doing a Saturn 1C would have been vastly smarter then all the Atlas/Thor rockets since then.

Solids were a result of military launchers wanting to continue to relay on technology for ICBMs and those ICBM producers having political influence.

Solids are a sad unnecessary diversion. They massively increase operation complexity from manufacturing to launch.

> savings in manufacturing and operational simplicity

Solids are very dangerous and complex to handle. The end to end infrastructure cost absolutely does not make them viable.

Are you seriously suggesting something about operational simplicity when you are dealing with a material that is highly explosive and can easy kill a whole launch crew if badly handled?

In addition, solids require very expensive launch infrastructure to modify the boosters to fly specific routes. Check out the highly complex infrastrucutre the Europeans deploy in Kourou.

There is a reason, non of the new commercial companies even remotely want to touch solids, they are avoid like the plague.

The solid based Pegasus rocket is vastly more expensive then the air-launched liquid fueled Virgin Orbit rocket.

Japan with their solids never were a series competitor in the international launch market and their launch rates were always very low.

And solids are also never practically reusable as the expensive part is the whole fuel manufacture and infrastructure.

Solids are just a bad idea and make no sense when fully consider. Only nation state driven launchers would use them.

Nobody builds SRBs "out of" missile boosters, but they are built by the same manufacturers. Fat contracts for one keep the business afloat for the other, keep the workers for one busy and practiced for the other. It's welfare for defense contractors using the same technology, facilities and expertise as the weapons, NOT part re-use. Part re-use was never the argument, not with the Shuttle and not now.

> Japan doesn't have ballistic missiles.

The Japanese SRBs are built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Do you know what else they manufacture? Missiles of course. Not ICBMs, but they do manufacture missiles, particularly the powerful SM-3 Block II.

> soon we'll get proof of pork barrels being able to do so.

Leaky pork barrels don't fly it seems, the launch was scrubbed due to (among others) an engine bleed problem [1].

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637493

What does SLS add "to the existing panoply of launchers"?

It can lift almost 100 effing tons into LEO... and is human rated.

It's the only rocket currently capable of putting Humans near the moon. And now its about to prove itself or not...

SpaceX and Blue Origin were nowhere near where they are today in terms of launch capacity, reliability, or reuse.

The fact you're referencing "did they fix the defect from Challenger in 1986" tells me what I need to know.

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