Personally I hope this expensive boondoggle built by the worst space company of the last decade gives us a huge fireworks show tomorrow and gets promptly cancelled, like it should have been a long time ago.
But I certainty would cry about it failing and I would suggest that success or not, the program should be canceled after this launch.
The real risk is it works and leaders are tempted to throw more money at it until it has a chance to kill Americans, like the Shuttle it is replacing.
Really? Maybe you missed the recurrent theme on HN, that of disruption of bloated and inefficient legacy companies that should be dead already but government subsidies keep them afloat. And they innovate precisely as if they have zero skin in the game.
I'll be watching tomorrow morning hoping for a spectacular explosion that takes out ground facilities along with the rocket. Perhaps then the ensuing government finger-pointing will expose this mess for what it really is -- a poorly conceived, incredibly expensive jobs program masquerading as a "moon rocket".
People have made the inevitable comparisons to SpaceX's Superheavy/Starship, and there have naturally been responses pointing out that Starship is far from proven. That's absolutely right, but think about this: If SpaceX never reuses a single nut, bolt, or hunk of stainless steel, SH/Starship is by far the better launch system. Fully expendable, it would cost somewhere in the range of 10-25% of an SLS launch, while delivering something like twice the payload to orbit.
I'm super-excited about the growing enthusiasm for going back to the moon, landing on Mars, building larger and more capable orbital installations, and who knows what else. SLS enables none of that. It is both too expensive, and too rare, to be a part of any effective program. By merely existing, SLS sucks money out of other programs that could show real results.
I promise you this: If we go back to the moon with SLS, it will make Apollo look like the better program. That, in spite of 50+ years of technological advancement. I'd rather sit here on earth than let our spacefaring dreams die that way. The other day I turned 50, which means I'm too young to remember any of the moon landings. If we rely on SLS now, it's unlikely that I'll live to see the next attempts.
Do you think SpaceX literally dies if SLS succeeds? What kind of logic are you using to think that a successful SLS moon mission sets humanity back?
I would assume you know that government space programs take a fuckton of money to operate on, and that they take years if not a decade or more to execute. SpaceX wasn't anywhere near proven 10 or 15 years ago. Cutting SLS doesn't mean SpaceX and BO suddenly get $30b in funding.
By such logic, we should have wished the other shuttles had blown up in the 90s too.
And the whole reuseability of SpaceX's rockets would be impossible without modern computers, software and fabrication technology. No, NASA or anyone else couldn't have done that twenty years ago. Maybe ten years ago, with a ton of dough more, but not that long.
Also I don’t know what kind of supercomputers you think are running on falcon, but we’ve been landing robotic probes on many planets for decades.
All it would have taken would be NASA funding the R&D and making it part of the requirements. Unfortunately cost effectiveness was never high on their list.
I don't know what you think Falcon is running on, but they are definitely using more advanced and faster computers than those used for landing probes on planets. Even those raptor engines are quite complex in terms of regulation. Also, SpaceX certainly used lots of computing power for simulation of all sorts. Neither the computing power nor the algorithms have been around for decades, necessarily.
Point is reuseability isn't easy. Nor necessarily cheaper. SpaceX can't do it on the scale of SLS, by the way. They had more trouble than anticipated with Falcon heavy at "only" 26t to LEO. SLS can do almost four times as much. Starship may be able to do it. But it is far from ready for prime time.
The Shuttle did prioritize reuse to some extent, but the design was frozen and never iterated on. Buran automated the landing and had plans for landable side boosters. DCX also demonstrated propulsive landings.
The thing is these were all side project. NASA really never prioritized economical systems as demonstrated by living with the Shuttles exorbitant costs and building SLS. Even though by driving down costs they could of performed orders of magnitude more science.
Obviously politics is to blame, not feasibility.
Buran automated landing is a different thing and more in line with aerospace autopilots. DCX was thirty years ago, used cutting edge technology at the time and didn't come back from anywhere near orbit. Reuseability has largely been rejected as too difficult, costly and risky. SpaceX has had a tough time showing it can work, most of the other companies have not yet succeeded.
Yes. If Shuttle failed faster NASA would be less motivated to make intentionally terrible decisions.
The greatest irony of these defenses is perhaps that if Starship fails, then SLS actually can't get to the moon short of backups that haven't even been decided yet never mind built, whereas if SLS fails you can still just run the rest of the components as-is and switch out SLS/Orion for two pretty much stock Crew Dragon flights.
How does the potential failure of Starship impact the success or failure of SLS?
I have no idea how you or anybody else can say with a straight face that they're a space fan. What a laughable idea.
It is one thing to think it may fail on some technical merit, or to wish it had been done differently, but to actively wish for a rocket to blow up is unpatriotic and irrational.
I may hope that SpaceX can get Super Heavy to a lunar landing by 2024 as well but I'm not going to wish that human space travel gets set back.
The mere existence of SLS as a program would have run the US space launch capability into the ground if it weren't for SpaceX serving as the seed for 'New Space' launch companies. Without SLS we could've had refuelable second stages to provide a genuinely sustainable lunar presence (Boeing outright tried to get the guy who proposed such at ULA fired because it would make SLS mostly pointless) without having to rely on sheer luck of having a motivated private party.
So if anything, it's unpatriotic to wish for the success of SLS since it fundamentally represents everything that's wrong with the US and allowing it to continue is the same as allowing politicians to continue screwing over the average person.
That said, while I'm hoping for it to fail, I don't expect an explosion tomorrow to be able to make it fail, if anything it'll just give Congress an excuse to transfer more money to Boeing. I'd rather it fly properly and then be cancelled after a 3rd or 4th flight when it becomes way too clear that SLS is useless (Ideally SpaceX will have done the DearMoon and Polaris Dawn flights by then). SLS will fail but not because it'll fail to fly, but rather because it will fail to be worth flying.
I'd also love for a reckoning where every politician responsible for pushing the program is punished but there's zero chance that'll happen.
How many times did SpaceX blow up before getting a rocket into orbit?
I'd give SLS an 85% chance of reaching roughly the correct initial orbit, and only a small chance of leaving a smoking crater.
Yes, they really do. They want the second flight of this rocket ever to be crewed. That's obviously not going to happen if the first launch goes wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Launch_System_la...
They aren't doing the SpaceX thing of iterating fast and blowing up a few rockets early on.
The companies who have put this together are very experienced at making launches successful.
The self congratulations do seem premature, but they are very good at blowing time and money budgets on disposable solutions that optimize for the maximum payroll per flight… absolute world class experts at what they do.
Last thing you want to do is lose the vehicle because you decided some issue wasn't worth running down.
In any event, the weather was lurking in the background and might well have caused a scrub regardless.