NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable | Hacker News Reader

NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

arstechnica.com

169 pointsmpsprd243 comments

Important context…

SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”.

The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned.

My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.

> SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for

Any source?

https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls

Note, NASA has a copy of the original 2010 funding legislation here:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf

Which can also be found here:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-bill/372...

The key part is:

> (2) MODIFICATION OF CURRENT CONTRACTS.—In order to limit NASA’s termination liability costs and support critical capabilities, the Administrator shall, to the extent practicable, extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts necessary to meet the requirements in paragraph (1), including contracts for ground testing of solid rocket motors, if necessary, to ensure their availability for development of the Space Launch System.

Which explains why NASA isn't necessarily getting engines from Blue Origin or other cheaper new comers for example. The senate law dictates that they should continue using existing contracts. Now, could a NASA administrator argue that they should drop Aerojet (as cited in the ars technica article)? Potentially, but Aerojet could possibly sue, claiming that NASA is in violation of the law.

-- From the Shadows

You can just google “Senate Launch System” and find numerous references. Here are a few, including Wikipedia’s chronicle of its funding cycles:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/08/24/...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-del...

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

Honestly, that's like asking for a source for the fact that people need oxygen to live. Fuck, they weren't even allowed to finally correct the design flaw in the solid rocket boosters that was the direct cause of the Challenger disaster – namely the fact that they were made of several segments not for any engineering reason but simply because they were manufactured in Utah (due to pork barrel) and could not be transported to Florida in one piece.

For twenty years now they have tried to build a launcher based on recycling as many ~parts~jobs from the Shuttle program as possible and thus far have flown exactly zero people and exactly zero kilograms of cargo. The Senate doesn't mind, because the STS is a jobs program, not a spaceflight program. (Although it's not like the market for SRBs in particular has been very hot lately given how few of them have been in fact launched, so I dunno. Probably the govt is paying ATK just to keep the plant running so they'll be able to build/refurbish a pair of boosters every two or three years which is the expected STS launch rate.)

Water is wet, the Pope is Catholic, the SLS is a boondoggle.

Imagine being told to design Google in 2000, but in order to save money you have to reuse old software: database from Oracle, OS from IBM, and design around the code from AltaVista. That should only take a few hundred man-months, right?

> Honestly, that's like asking for a source for the fact that people need oxygen to live.

I find this attitude "It's just obvious" to be generally unhelpful. Your sibling comments do a much better job at helping the grandparent get up to speed with context about the SLS program, and associated Senate Legislation.

Being able to cite documents in support of your position is a valuable skill and both helps your own understanding, by clarifying what your understanding is based on, and that of the questioner.

-- From the shadows

The attitude of "I've never heard of this before" has been a common internet troll for at least 25 years. At some point it's not on me to educate you about things that are widely common knowledge, and there's an art to asking for citations without sounding like you're being dismissive, or shifting all of the effort onto the other person.

The top level comment did not achieve this art, but I've seen worse.

Yeah, something like "Where could I read more about this?" or "Could you point me to some discussion on this?" would have been a much more polite way to ask.

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf

The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to develop a new rocket called the Space Launch System. It set performance requirements for the rocket (use just two stages to lift 70 tons into low-Earth orbit, use a third stage to lift 130 tons to LEO, carry cargo and astronauts to ISS, carry deep-space crew capsule, support gradual increase in performance by "evolutionary growth" with new stages), and required that, "where practicable", NASA should maintain existing Space-Shuttle and Ares contracts, workforces, infrastructure, and technologies, and that the rocket be scheduled to launch no later than the end of 2016.

The precise requirements were written to force NASA to design a rocket that maintained lucrative Space Shuttle-era contracts.

https://spaceref.com/press-release/hatch-passage-of-nasa-rea...

Also, the requirement to upgrade existing infrastructure ensured that billions of dollars went into Bill Nelson's district in Florida. (He is now the highest-ranking official at NASA.)

The law did not establish long-term funding for the development of the rocket. As with all NASA projects, money is granted one year at a time in Congress's annual budget. In 2011, NASA announced the plan to build this rocket. In accordance with the law's requirements and intention, it re-used almost all core technologies, infrastructure, and major subcontractors of the Space Shuttle. There was actually some fuss about this at the time:

https://spacenews.com/shelby-nasa-hold-competition-sls-boost...

but the strategy of "give Congress what they want" has worked: the Planetary Society shows that Congress has consistently granted NASA more money than asked for to fund SLS.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls

In particular, Richard Shelby (senator from Alabama, which is home to many NASA facilities, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2018–2021) was a powerful political supporter of the SLS, ensuring its continued funding, and attacking anybody who even suggested it might not be necessary.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...

If/when Starship flies (which, if it doesn't, raises other questions as to the future of Artemis), one has to wonder what the point of SLS will be.

Jobs.

That's the answer. It's keeping the jobs (i.e. voters) in orbit around the senators. They could care less about space, as long as they can say they brought "jobs" to their state. If it does that, it works as designed.

I always hear this and I never hear anyone say they voted for senate based on Abrams tank manufacturing or whatever.

Is it a senate cultural thing that they all tell themselves despite tenuous links to reality?

Is it kickbacks?

Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?

> I always hear this and I never hear anyone say they voted for senate based on Abrams tank manufacturing or whatever.

You never see a senator take credit for a plant opening/expanding on their re-election blurb/townhall? You must be in an incredibly safe state.

> Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?

It applies to them, too. Again, if you're not seeing this, either your senator isn't doing much of it, you're not paying much attention to their campaign, or they are in such an incredibly safe district that their only challenger is Bozo the Clown.

I didn't say that, I said I've never seen it swing a vote. I'm sure people working at the missile factory vote but it's a relatively small number.

Re: infra, you're right, I guess I'm just letting my personal bias in when wondering why they don't do more of that compared to the weapons. It seems like such an easier sell to voters, but the emphasis seems to go the other way.

(Also, in my limited sample size, all of this has taken a smaller and smaller back seat to culture war stuff in modern day campaigning)

Raytheon employs 12,000 people in Tucson alone, about 6% of the number of people who voted in the election for Arizona's 7th congressional district in 2022. Those people also have friends and family who would care if they got laid off.

Thanks for the numbers, that puts it in better perspective.

Although I'm guessing that was an uncontested election, sounds like <10% turnout. Still, it's material.

Unclear what turnout was, but it was at least 25%; district 7 has fewer than 800 thousand people, not all of whom are registered voters.

I can assure you that the people who live in Lima are aware of the politics surrounding the tank plant. If you don't live in Lima, I wonder why you believe you would have heard "anyone say they voted for senate based on Abrams tank manufacturing."

The way it works is, the politicians who got the plant created out there earned some cachet with voters, and politicians today would get crucified by voters and the unions if they tried to move the plant. It's important enough that presidents give speeches there. (to put that fully into context: there is absolutely no other reason for politicians to give speeches there or even to be there, except perhaps some obscure form of self-flagellation) And of course voters in the entire surrounding state are pretty sensitive to the notion of losing industrial jobs, which earns the plant some protection from the state's US senators as well. People on the other side of the state might not be talking about it today, but they'd be talking about the plant if it got closed. Politicians understand this.

It's probably not that simple as they could do what the EU does and create those jobs in purely civilian industries.

It's more about the political economy where funneling through certain well connected companies generate a lot of goodwill among the middlemen who then funds pac's and pay for advertisements then it's about a direct relationship between the senate and the employment status of their workers.

It is exactly that simple. Closing down a tank factory to build something in another state isn't going to help the representative in that district get elected.

But running that tank factory is probably the least effective way of converting tax dollars into employment.

And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.

> But running that tank factory is probably the least effective way of converting tax dollars into employment.

You'd be surprised. See, e.g., steel tariffs costing $900,000 per job saved. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/07/trumps-st...

> And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.

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

Funnelling tax money to the military industrial complex :)

Based on Starship’s partial-success in its very first test flight, as well as how routine rocket landing and recovery is becoming for SpaceX, I think Starship will fly, it’s only a matter of when not if.

The fact that SLS isn’t designed for reusability, making its per-launch cost something like $4billion, means it’s effectively already outclassed, outcompeted, and obsolete.

SLS was already made redundant when the Falcon Heavy flew.

'Let’s be very honest, We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.' - Charles Bolden

Note the reason given here isn't that the Falcon Heavy didn't have as large a payload capacity - that excuse came after it started flying years before SLS, because apparently we're supposed to pretend things can't be assembled in space over multiple trips rather than sending up a multi-billion-dollar rocket.

I'm just wondering what the excuse for keeping SLS around will be after a cheaper vehicle that can beat its payload is here. Jobs, for sure. What else?

Isn't it the case that f9h's lift capacity has increased over the years due to engine improvements and stage lengthening..? Iirc fairing size is still a major limiting factor.

They have a bigger fairing in dev for the military, and the gateway launch

Exactly. But not at the time of the "f9h is not heavy lift" quote

The quote didn't say Falcon Heavy wasn't heavy lift, which was my point. It said Falcon Heavy was just something on the drawing board, versus SLS which was real. Except then Falcon Heavy ended up flying years before SLS eventually did.

Fine, but my point is falcon heavy wasn't really a properly competitive heavy lift at the time, and arguably still isn't. Though it will be soon.

I concur not much excuse remains. I suppose FH needs to be human-rated, but Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon module recently achieved that rating so FH could probably get it too without undue difficulty.

Do we have to wait? Falcon Heavy already has ~75% of SLS Block 1's payload capacity (to LEO). For the $11.2 Billion that's earmarked for the next 4 years of SLS, you could buy 112 Falcon Heavy launces--one every ~17 days for four years. In contrast, the wiki lists a single planned flight for SLS during that period.

Mass to LEO isn't the name of the game for SLS though, it's mass to LLO.

(though yes you could fix that with a small kick stage)

It's cheaper to buy, for sure. But we don't know the costs. It's possible that these launches are far less expensive than SLS, but equally unsustainable.

How might that be? SpaceX doesn't have to manufacture whole new rockets for every Falcon Heavy launch, but even if they did, as far back as 2016 they could build 16 new cores (5 Falcon Heavy's worth) per year.

https://spacenews.com/spacex-seeks-to-accelerate-falcon-9-pr...

This is a really unfortunate situation with geopolitical consequences. It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole.

The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.

This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. So yes we may have the best tech/gear in the world but may be spending way too much to only get a slight edge and find this edge is not even sustainable.

It's not like the money spent just disappears, though, someone gets it. The SLS is a huge jobs program.

Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...

But how much of that ends up in the hands of shareholders and execs? If you want to provide jobs it's better to provide them directly. The shareholders have enough money as it is.

True in the logical sense, but not in the practical sense. Just giving regular people good jobs isn't popular in the US, because why would the megadonors sponsor Senator campaigns if they can't profit from it?

In the US system (oligarchic democracy) the wealthy needs to earn their hefty share, otherwise the thing in question likely won't happen at all.

So what would it take to give NASA the manufacturing infrastructure and expertise to start building its own rockets? Such programs have always been done by contractors, non-government industrial partners. That's part of working in a capitalist economy.

> weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole

That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.

'weakened' is not a binary. Every small step to correct issues is important

> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.

I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.

I generally agree, but I don't think Afghanistan and Iraq were rounding errors by any factor. It's a major percentage of the US'es debt, as in trillions of dollars.

Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.

A truer measure of the [Astan & Iraq] wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.[0] (2015 article)

US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1]

The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse.

0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...

A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term.

Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.

The initial conjecture is that the US' "Adversaries see [wasteful profligacy] as weakness." We have established that the US seems to spend wildly with muted negative outcomes. To an adversary, should that be seen as a weakness or a strength?

Could things be better in the US if it did not spend the way it does? That is a difficult counterfactual. The well adapted US political system never voluntarily decreases taxes, so a safe assumption is that spending/deficit/debt would be the same.

A significant amount of war funding was spent on the MIC, which employs upper middle income US persons in engineering, logistics, HR. The rest is spent on consumables (also from the US) and bribery, which eventually finds safe harbor by holding large bricks of US $100 bills on the low end or US luxury dwellings on the high end.

In the counterfactual, what would have happened to all those white collar suburbs and Miami penthouses?

America is in the enviable position that the entire world is obligated to keep giving them money. Too big to fail.

Thats just because others need to step up their game.

The pentagon's budget is pretty consistent regardless.

We'll give them three quarters of a trillion dollars every year no matter what they spend it on so in reality it doesn't matter if they're war fighting or not, they own us, well 50% of our discretionary tax dollars anyway.

It was a catastrophic failure in terms of money spent, lives lost and enduring repetitional damage on the US that continues to this day. Vietnam was a harbinger of this but Afghanistan/Iraq cemented the notion that if you operate on long term timescales you can beat the US.

UBL may not have achieved his primary goal but he got many concessions: Americans lost many freedoms, trust in government is significantly lower compared to pre 9/11 and given what happened on Jan 6 and everything that led up to it, we may look back at 9/11 as the point which set the stage for the eventual breakup of the union.

Which adversary are you thinking of that has less corruption and less waste than the US? And then has the economy to take advantage of this?

I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything but they still have immense corruption.

> I guess China is the obvious candidate due to reduced costs in pretty much everything

Achievement: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.

Get the poster at https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683

There’s no real way to evaluate the effectiveness of the Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign.

As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues.

Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing.

Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.

The first few Chinese aircraft carriers were probably never intended to be fully combat effective and are mainly intended to develop an experienced cadre of naval aviators. The carriers lack catapults, which means they can't really launch tankers (or any heavy aircraft at all). US Navy carriers almost always have at least one tanker up while conducting flight operations. This makes a huge difference in safety because an aircraft that gets into any trouble has an option to conduct aerial refueling instead of having to rush a carrier landing, or divert to a distant land base. The next generation of Chinese carriers are expected to have catapults but those are technically challenging. I'm sure that this is a priority area for their spies.

I'm surprised they don't have them working yet. An Australian carrier was decommed a few decades ago and went to China for scrap. The Australians stripped most of it but left the steam catapults intact, and I know the Chinese were using them for land based experiments.

The Chinese probably intend to skip steam catapults and go straight to electromagnetic (like on the new Ford class carriers). I don't think they want to deal with steam generation and plumbing.

I'm not sure it makes much sense to worry about carriers for the war in Taiwan that everyone expects- their aircraft can use their airfields.

Peacetime armies are generally bad, but turnover tends to be high when the fighting starts, and the second or third set of generals is often much better.

The most important advantages China has are pretty overwhelming- a giant population, and they own the global supply chain for microchips and batteries, meaning they can replace smart munitions and systems while their opponents can't.

They also have the best setup for doing go it alone, vertical industrial production, much better than the US or Russia. They're fine in any scenario where they don't get totally blitzed in a week.

A few issues there.

For an invasion of Taiwan numbers are important, sure, but it's a wide channel and amphibious assaults are absolutely the hardest kind of operation an army can attempt. Technical competence, and I would also argue operational flexibility at every level, are absolutely crucial.

In terms of supply chains, that matters for an extended conflict, as we can see in Ukraine. However an invasion of Taiwan would either work in the first week or so, or it's over. I suppose they could try a long terms blockade, but that doesn't seem to be their strategy.

China is extremely vulnerable to a blockade themselves though. They have no control of their essential seaborn supply routes, and are highly dependent on external sources for energy, raw materials, high tech parts, and maybe most importantly food and fertilisers. The US can turn all of that off like a tap at a moment's notice.

The sorts of sanctions levelled at Russia since last year would have China on it's knees in months. The only way to mitigate that would be for the PLAN to go toe to toe gobally with the US, UK, French and Australian and Japanese Navys all at the same time. Also maybe India. The Indian Navy is small but it's no joke, and they have two fully operational carriers.

This is word for word regurgitated from Peter Zeihan. Is he your source?

Ive come across Zeihan and I know he talks about this stuff, but there are plenty of alternative sources for the same info.

He's too absolutist for my tastes, he talks about China 'going away' due to demographics. That's just silly, they'll suffer for sure but 1.4 billion people don't just disappear. Also his line about Russia needing to control geographic access points or 'they're finished' is equally silly. They have nukes.

The state of the peacetime supply chain hardly matters. In a major conflict it should be expected that western democracies revert to the centrally planned economic system they used to win the second world war.

The peacetime supply chain determines the possibilities of the wartime supply chain. You can't open a mine overnight, refineries are incredibly expensive and fiddly and require a lot of very specific knowledge, tool manufacturing capacity is incredibly difficult to bootstrap- you don't want to be like WWII Australia, digging up lathes out of junkyards.

America doesn't have the manufacturing base it had in WWII. Then, it took months or even years to ramp up the existing manufacturing to wartime capacity. Now a lot of America's manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other far eastern/southern Asian countries. A modern war between superpowers is likely to be won or lost in a week or two at most even without involving nukes, long before major resupply of equipment is even needed.

>Myanmar

Pretty much all negative coverage of JF17 (joint PRC+PK manufacturing but so far SOLD by PK) are sourced from Indian tabloid rags with no credibility. Myanmar airforce has 100+ PRC airframes, variety of models in the last 30 years with little issue. Pretty much the only useful piece of info so far is Myanmar doesn't have adequate experience operating tech in 4th gen fighters, most of their fleet is 3rd gen. IIRC Myanmar got the jets before they even got simluators, and then bought 4th gen trainers (JL9) from PRC.

>Thailand

Yuan subs aren't operational because PRC couldn't acquire original specified German engines after EU sanctions. There's a period where Thai Navy was deciding whether to accept PRC engines, which they did. Some analysts implied if Thai did not accept PRC engines it would imply they were unsuitable, even more retarded media then spung that as technical issues with PRC engines. Both complete misinformation narratives since there's no basis for evaluating those unintegrated PRC engines at all.

>aircraft carriers

Training carriers based off RU design that analysis suggest PLAN has more or less maximized sortie potential vs when USSR was running carrier ops on similar flight deck. Late 2022 USNI analysis on PLAN carrier ops is they're basically reached "true" blue water deployment, i.e. a few hundred nms near Guam, 1000nm+ from mainland, with no divert airfrields or aerial refueling as backup. Which is about as far as PRC none nuke carriers need to deploy given strategic considerations. Caveate being conservative sorties and pretty clean (light) load outs to compensate for lack of divertion and ski jump. The struggle with PLAN carriers is they won't have catapults and capabilites that brings until 003 and training was hectic because they only had 1-2 carriers training 3-4 crew rotations, somewhat alleviated by converted cruise/barrack ships. TLDR is I would not characterize as overall carrier ops capabilities as struggling as limited by hardware, which TBH is expected since carriers does not seem particularly high priority outside of prestige - given PRC ship building capacity, they could have rushed 10 carriers like US did Forrestal class. Basically most US analysis of various PRC military modernization is they're lacking and focusing on XYZ, but should get there in a few years. Occasionally throw in the word struggle because they watch CCTV7 where miltiary propaganda talks about how hard they work. A few years later, new analysis that they got there (i.e. asw, jointness), something something evolving, modernizing at astonishing rate, but here's the new struggle. Rinse and repeat. Combined with customary but no real combat experience (which no one has in modern peer warfare). But the underlying pattern if you look at meat of improvements year by year is PLA modernizing fast.

I wonder if PRC really sees using a navy as a means of force projection as important. They could have a world-spanning navy like the U.S. has, but haven't made it a priority. No one has done it as well for as long as the U.S., but it's also something that could be erased in a few minutes by some well-placed Long Swords.

Navy + carrier good for peacetime "diplomacy" via show of force / presence. Hence worth pursuing in some capacity. But ultimately PRC can't have world spanning navy because geopolitical conditions to replicate US global basing not present anymore - would take status quo / order changing conflict. And it would still take decades to train for 10+ carrier groups for parity. Therefore (IMO) PRC doubling down on long range (even global) fires, advanced rocketry that can be acquired and deployed at scale, in relatively short time, to destroy prestige platform from PRC mainland basing, without complex forward deployment or doctorine considerations. Basically make sure you have more missiles and ISR with sufficient CEP than enemies can defend/degrade. Hit aircraft carriers, subs, when they're in port, or the 10 fast combat support ships that sustains most of USN critical deployement options. For as large USN is, the system that sustains fleet is extremely brittle (same with PLAN) - carrier escorts have days of endurance on aggressive tasking. Would take PRC rocketry _minutes_ to take out replenishment ship restocking at port and carriers become single deployment assets. This kind of capability was not technically feasible 10-20 years ago - none of US adversaries could disrupt USN logistics. But now is.

IMO US pretty much understands this as well, for as much reporting there is on dysfunction of navy and urgent need to fix, there hasn't been much actions instead we see doubling down on distributed land based fires and increasing aviation standoff range, and ultimately long range bombers strait from CONUS to reduce basing dependencies abroad.

I think you've got a point on strategy and standoff weapons, but I'd question whether anyone thinks a strike on support craft (or even combat vessels) while they're sitting in either U.S. or allied ports isn't an even more serious provocation than hitting our ships at sea. A forward deployed carrier strike group has, as you say, supplies for several days (at least) of unsupported operations, and (as long as the carriers aren't sunk) could carry an impressive punch during that time. I don't know how PLAN anti-submarine capabilities are, but fast attack submarines can carry a heavy conventional punch via cruise missiles. I think it's possible attacks on American soil could result in similar retaliation on enemy soil, such as direct strikes on Chinese naval bases and even political targets.

PRC already assumes mainland strikes, and TBH this has been default assumption for any US adversaries because US has projection capabilities and therefore homeland attacks must be accounted for. US warplanners and politicians haven't been shy about talking up striking PRC mainland, whether they seriously believe so, or whether it's all security theatre to create security delimma for PRC. Never the less, it's baked into the consideration for PRC - what hasn't been considered by US planners and populus are substantial CONUS attacks, because up until now geography has shielded US, but long range strikes / advanced rocketry makes it possible, and adversaries will match escalation when they can. It's only up until recently, US adversaries technically couldn't strike CONUS even if they wanted to, barring desperate propaganda measures like fugo balloons. And it makes escalatory sense since so much of US power/influence depends on CONUS serenity. A world where CONUS is vunerable is a world where others forced to "derisk" from US and reevaluate viability of US security commitment.

As for allied ports and rear support, US basing that enables operations against PRC in theatre, which basically US force structure requires at this point (hence all the wargames trying to convince JP to distributed basing), is IMO even more forgone. Various US partners signalled they wouldn't directly contribute to TW war but will provide rear support, but that's enabling US war regardless, so very likely they're going to get glassed. PRC systems confrontation and system destruction warfare is structured around destroying the softer/easier targets like support ships, tankers, ISR infra etc. Hitting them is doctrine. And ultimately, it's in PRC's long term interest to destroy as much US forward presence as possible, because that's historically how outside hegemons get kicked out, through sufficient force to demonstrate their strategic posture is no longer viable. And US having decades of build up abroad has more dependencies and more to lose if their security architecture becomes unsustainable.

As for unsupported carrier operations, IMO if you consider the sorties numbers their effects are close to negligible. Boat might be nuke powered, but there's only enough supplies (fuel/ordnance) for low hundreds of sorties, 50%+ of which will be buddy tanking / support due to how far PRC A2D2 has pushed standoff range, which leaves a even lower 100s of actual hitters. Assuming no interceptions. Barely enough to dent the 100,000s of targets from mainland. It's not that US CVGs are weak, just PRC operates on another scale, more targets, more concrete, more counter measures etc. Without constant replenishment carriers become single deployment assets with limited use and cost:vunerablity ratio not in their favour. And even then nuke propulsion need to return to dock, where they can be promptly hit with global strike.

The US hasn't seen action against a peer since 1945. Ofcourse there's a reason for that: nuclear weapons.

I think what matters is generational experience, so there are always officers on duty that have combat experience. Since WW2 they've had the Korean and Vietnam wars, both Gulf wars and Afghanistan, plus numerous smaller operations. All of those except Afghanistan involved significant naval support. That's kept the ball moving forward in terms of real world experience.

I am a bit worried about naval officer training though, there have been damaging cutbacks and compromises made on that front. Nothing that's likely to have long term consequences yet, but they need to fix that before it gets worse.

Just look at the evolution of the standard issue kit over the vietnam or the iraq wars to see how the US has been able to use first hand combat experience to rapidly iterate on new paradigms.

> Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign.

I see that as a good sign. Why fight wars if there is no need to. I hope they stay that way and don’t get themselves involved in Taiwan

The Taliban is a good example. IMO they're evil, but not as corrupt as the US. They did a pretty good job running us out of Afghanistan.

> but not as corrupt as the US

I’m wondering how you determined this?

Lawrence Lessig has extensively talked about the concept of ‘institutional corruption’ in American politics, where the political system is not necessarily corrupt in an explicit, quid-pro-quo sense, but rather is compromised by the influence of money, lobbying, and other factors that misalign the interests of politicians with those of the public. First thing to pop in my mind with your question.

OK, but I'm not sure you can argue that the Taliban is more aligned with the interests of the population.

They are the ones running the country now. Not saying it's a democracy, but they effectively undermined the existing, US backed government by going directly to the population and basically just doing government better.

Honestly I just felt like they got more done with fewer people and less money, which is a good indicator of a level of focus that can you can only accomplish if you don't have to worry about the friction of dealing with corrupt layers of an organization or a crapload of waste.

I'd read a long time ago about how the Taliban basically formed a shadow government in parts of Afghanistan that provided justice, schools, roads, and other services because the current government couldn't do it. Just found a good article about it:

https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...

Here's the PDF it references:

https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/12269.pdf

People flocked to the Taliban's shadow government precisely because it was (at least seen as) less corrupt and more efficient than the services propped up by U.S. and its allies. In the PDF above if you search for corrupt you find the word 7 times in the body of the article, and 6 of those are in regards to how the Taliban fought it.

The article is old (2018) but I think that's the point. They were very organized in how they built their network and we saw the results of it as they ran circles around the U.S. in negotiations both with Trump and Biden administrations.[1]

To me it's a crystal clear example of a less corrupt, less wasteful force completely schooling one with exponentially more resources.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal...

> The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.

I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.

> convinced the USSR they couldn't win

i dont think they were convinced they couldn't win - they just realized their economic laggardness.

The remnants of the USSR is still trying to win!

For a real example of "they couldn't win", you'd have to look towards Japan. And is it such a bad thing to "not win"?

SDI is not really comparable. The numbers for the orbital parameters did not add up at the time, but they had Edward Teller behind them.

We suffer real consequences in the form of inflation.

Inflation is not tied to military or NASA spending

It is indirectly when there’s a federal deficit.

I think this is very naive to the history of the soviet union at that time period, how gorbachev's new policies failed, how chernobyl effected everything, and how much of an internal failure this was. the usa likes to claim they ended the cold war and reagan did so by blah blah blah, however, the soviet union would have collapsed given gorbachev's policies failing no matter what the usa did.

God I wish we could go back and do 1991 again. Unfortunately time travel is impossible so I need to stop ruminating on it.

1999 my friend. That's when Boris Yeltsin gave up democracy to Putin. Think of the Russia that could have come from before that decision.

That was the Russia that invaded Chechnya and committed horrific atrocities, bordering on genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War

As terrible as that war was, I really don't think that compares to the changes that occurred post 1999, the freedoms that were lost, nor the casualties that are a direct responsibility of Putin.

> I think this is very naive to the history of the soviet union at that time period, how gorbachev's new policies failed, how chernobyl effected everything, and how much of an internal failure this was. the usa likes to claim they ended the cold war and reagan did so by blah blah blah, however, the soviet union would have collapsed given gorbachev's policies failing no matter what the usa did.

There's no contradiction. The argument is that Gorbachev felt the need to set those policies because he saw how much more successful the US was being economically.

I don't think the chinese are going to look at this and give up.

They're going to say "we can build our outpost on the moon for way less" and then they'll do it.

> This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results.

Isn't this already known though?

The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.

> It weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole.

Accurately

Honestly I would love the US to stop being the biggest spender in so many categories, I just don't think anyone else is really poised to take that spot other than China, which I find even more troubling.

> My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.

A phrase I learned at NASA: "With enough thrust anything can fly".

SLS works because the pork is evenly distributed around the country.

Isnt it also true of every big success NASA have had, that it only existed because of lobbying and political pressure.

We like to pretend that political influence on government institutions is a new "bug" and not something build into the system from day one.

At some level of insanity it seems like NASA administrators have a duty to decline the funding and/or resign. "Our bosses [congress] made us do it" cannot be a carte blanche excuse to waste arbitrary amounts of public money without blame.

> NASA recently said that it is working with the primary contractor of the SLS rocket's main engines, Aerojet, to reduce the cost of each engine by 30 percent, down to $70.5 million by the end of this decade. [...] And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.

If their engine is between 5-100x more expensive than an equivalent engine from competiting companies. Why is it so impossible to be a little bit more agile and consider the other engines?

Because they aren’t made by the parties who lobbied for SLS.

The other engines burn methane, these RS-25s burn hydrogen.

This is a good point, but to extend it a bit, changing the fuel means changing the chemistry of the whole system, changing tradeoffs and thresholds, changing capabilities, all sorts. Rockets very much need to be designed around a particular fuel, it defines so much of the rest of the rocket either directly or indirectly.

At a savings of USD 80 million or more per engine, I'd say it is well worth it to push deadlines or whatever we need to do to consider the cheaper options.

Right now it looks and smells like corruption.

I think it's a false comparison to say 80m per engine today.

When SLS was being architected 10+ years ago, I believe the idea was that the RS-25 engines would be cheaper, and there were spares around. Also there were no $1m engines, not even close. Perhaps there might have been a competitor for 1/2 the price, but would that be worth it over an engine that you already have flight ad maintenance experience with? Probably not, it's certainly not a convincing argument.

Lastly there weren't any Methane engines – both of the hottest engines in the market now (pardon the pun) are Methane based, the Raptor and BE-4, but the decision to use Hydrogen as the fuel for SLS was set in stone years ago and unrealistic to change.

Basically there weren't convincingly better options at the time the decision was made, and changing that decision now would mean basically going back to the drawing board on the entire rocket.

Methane is a lot more dense than hydrogen. You'd have to completely redesign the rocket.

I imagine it also impacts all the other infra (eg, what reagents dou need to store at the launchpad, what do you need to store nearby, do you need cryogenic cooling, etc

It does! The take-off temperature is a very big concern, how much chilling of the rocket needs to happen etc. The ground support equipment I gather is also complex, although I think storage and transport of all those sorts of fuels around tank farms is much more of a solved problem, I suspect you could buy much of it off the shelf (not that NASA would, but SpaceX seem to be buying regular commercial equipment for theirs).

And the whole reason for the hydrogen burning was to keep the space shuttle contractors jobs. Once again it's not a technical reason but a pork barrel one.

Possibility of corruption aside, these are clones of the Saturn 5 rocket engines and tech just scaled up - the whole thing is built for hydrogen which is clean burning (water is the byproduct) but you'd think SpaceX could take the design and make something for 20mil

The RS-25 is related to the J-2 used in S-II and S-IVB upper stages - a very successful engine. The STS program came up a new design based on a high-pressure combustion chamber running at 3,000 psi (21,000 kPa) for higher performance.

The first SLS flights will use available Block II RS-25D engines left over from the shuttle program, and when those run out (and if SLS is still flying) the rocket will switch over to the RS-25E, a cheaper, expendable version.

The F-1 engines used on the first stage of the Saturn V were built to burn Kerosene, and the RS-25 series has no common heritage.

  > The RS-25 is related to the J-2

How so? Other than sharing a fuel type, and thus surely things learned during J-2 development and operation influenced the RS-25 development and operation, so far as I know the two engines are completely different. Different cycles, different power packs (e.g. turbopump), wildly different packaging, different head pressure, different chamber pressure, throat, etc etc etc. I'm pretty sure that the J-2 did not cool the bell with the fuel, though I could be mistaken. Are the combustion chambers similar? What makes the two engines related, other than the fuel type and of course manufacturer?

I defer to http://www.astronautix.com/h/hg-3.html

A development of the J-2 using a high-performance high-pressure chamber engine. "Technology led to Space Shuttle Main Engines".

Edit to add: "In essence, the HG-3 concept eventually became the space shuttle main engine."

https://web.archive.org/web/20051115064042/http://history.ms...

SpaceX is on record with not wanting to use hydrogen for the "pain in the ass factor".

It boils at a lower point than oxygen, so you have to insulate the tanks from each other, it's very.. undense (sparse?) per volume so you need bigger tanks, and it's the smallest molecule that exists and makes leaks and shipping harder.

Methane is slightly less efficient but way easier logistically.

Don’t forget hydrogen embrittlement, a major risk in reusable rockets.

Yeah I bet if they could do without the LOX they'd do it too. But for the oxidiser there is no choice but to use a compressed gas, obviously.

There are some alternatives to O2, various molecules that contain oxygen which react readily. But those same properties that make them good oxidizers (namely, reactivity) also make them toxic and difficult to handle.

Liquefied, not compressed. Pressure vessels are heavy, just liquefy it by getting it really cold. It only needs to perform for 10 minutes in booster stages.

Because the other engines are not made in the relevant senators' states.

Because it is rocket science after all. Changing engines means changing fuel system, weight distribution, avionics, etc.

Rockets are not LEGO.

You can't just swap engines without a significant redesign of the rocket and ground support equipment to match.

the RS-25 burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; the BE-4 and Raptor burn methane and liquid oxygen, but the Raptor uses supercooled densified propellants while the BE4 takes them at closer to their boiling point. Switching between BE-4 and Raptor would require nearly as much work as a switch from RS-25 to either.

The varying density, temperature, and fuel-to-oxidizer ratios mean the propellant tanks would need to change size, and that may have some tricky structural implications with respect to the side boosters of the SLS. And the ground support equipment (launch pad, tower, etc., ) would of course also need to be adjusted to match.

> Rockets are not LEGO.

For a moment there I thought that Low Earth Geostationary Orbit might be a thing.

It could be for a few minutes if your rocket has a LOT of fuel to burn

Because those engines aren't mandated to be used by law.

Those engines didn't exist, their development wasn't publicly announced, and their developers had little if any reputation for successful engine development when NASA locked in their design.

How quickly we forget that just a few years ago the space industry looked very different from how it does today.

While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics.

Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.

Human spaceflight is more or less the marketing budget or loss leader for all the scientific work they do. It gets the public and Congress behind funding the important stuff.

If that is true, I am not sure it is effective as it was in the past. From my viewpoint, the public doesn’t care much and space flight has been normalized.

I think you would have to be an incompetent principle investigator if you sent people to space and couldn't figure out a way to maximize scientific knowledge from it. We've been doing that for decades with the ISS and the moon trips and so on.

I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera and sensors happen to show you.

Now, whether that scientific information is worth the cost? Hard to say. As much as people like criticizing public programs for "pork barrel" this and "bureaucrat red tape" that and whatever.... publicly funded programs are usually run with penny-pinching oversight and angry politicians wanting to get their day of glory by killing programs.

Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.

> Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.

What if we made this third party (I'm guessing blue origin/space x) bear the cost until we have a proven result so they put their money where their mouth is...

They promise USD 1M per engine, they have to deliver at USD 1M per engine. Not a cent more.

That's what recent NASA contracts have been - fixed-price, so the third party bears any additional cost of overrun. NASA has strongly advocated for such contracts.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/03/nasas-nelson-competitive-con...

Just curious, what is something we do on the ISS that actually needs a human hand vs a remotely operated or programmed one? Aside from perhaps studies on the effects of space flight on human health.

This is a common sentiment, but I don't share it.

Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us. For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward, even if it doesn't lead to cancer cures or longer-lasting batteries.

In the same way, sending people into space connects us to all those nameless explorers who sailed into the Pacific in rickety boats, or conquered the Americas (the first time) via the Bering ice bridge.

When I think of the Apollo 8 astronauts seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time, I can almost feel what they felt: awe, perspective, loneliness, and maybe even that primal fear that we all get from being so far from home. I truly cannot wait to watch (and to have my kids watch) astronauts walking on the Moon.

Sure, we can argue about whether we should spend more money on X and less money on Y--that's what democracy is all about. But to say that NASA shouldn't be sending humans into space is, in my mind, missing the forest for the trees.

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us.

That's true only in a very strained and tautological sense of "inspire".

Science has quantifiable results. There are facts that we know and theories we've understood (and discarded!) because of telescopes and probes that we would not know had they not flown. Whether that knowledge has value or not is, I guess, subjective. But it's not only "inspiration" except insofar as you declare that the only reason for wanting to know about martian geology or the early universe or whatever is "because it inspires us". Which is to say: you're making a semantic argument, not a profound one.

There are also facts we know and things we’ve built because someone watched a manned space flight as a kid and decided to go work in STEM because it’s just so freaking cool. Discounting “inspiration” on the grounds that it has no immediate, tangible results is pretty shortsighted.

Also if you’re willing to count facts like “details of Martian geology” as potentially valuable, then one can also say that by doing manned space flight we have learned a lot about how to transport humans to space and keep them alive there, no?

I'm not "discounting" "inspiration", I'm saying that the upthread comment only makes sense if you choose the correct definition for "inspiration", which makes the argument sort of specious.

The simple truth is that there are quantifiable justifications for preferring spending finite resources on science instead of manned space flight. The metrics used might be subjective (because at the end of the day everything is subjective), but that doesn't make them merely "inspiration".

Again, what you're doing is playing a semantic trick with words to respond to what is clearly an almost wholely objective opinion held by other people. That doesn't work. You declaring something "inspiration" does nothing to convince me that launching humans into orbit isn't a ridiculous waste of money.

Even accepting this premise, there's no reason to pick the most expensive option for manned spaceflight.

The ISS cost $100 billion to launch and assemble (and $3 billion to maintain). Tiangong about $8 billion, reportedly. Mir, some $4-5 billion.

The total project cost of Dragonfly mission to Titan (to be launched in 2027 and landing 2034) is projected to be $1 billion. Even the JWST, which had massive cost overruns, still only cost $10 billion. If the NASA built a Tiangong instead of an ISS, who knows what they could have done with the remaining $90 billion. Maybe for a few billion, they could have sent a probe to Europa to search for life under the ice.

I used the word "inspire" as a short-hand for "benefits which have no practical value".

We agree exactly on this: "Whether that knowledge has value or not is...subjective."

Ultimately, we're talking about whether spending money on X has value. If you agree that the value of both crewed spaceflight and robotic probes is "subjective", then by definition there is no objectively correct answer.

We support Hubble because it yields knowledge, and having knowledge is something that we (as a society) value.

We support crewed spaceflight because we (as a society) value seeing humans explore space.

"We" don't though. Plenty of people like telescopes but not meat cans (not least because you can get like twelve telescope for one meat can at the going rate!), and you can't short-circuit that (subjective) debate by just declaring "inspiration". At some point you need to convince people of a value proposition.

I like both.

And since the US Congress is currently funding both, it's actually you who needs to convince people to stop funding "meat cans". Good luck with that.

> For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward

But is putting humans in a low Earth orbit really gaining knowledge about the universe at this point? Surely we've hit the point of diminishing returns by now.

SLS isn't about putting humans in low earth orbit

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions.

If you ignore the huge difference in efficacy and results, sure.

Ultimately, we spent billions on (e.g.) JWST because it makes us feel good. We're not going to get new cancer cures or end homelessness, right? We're just going to get knowledge about the universe. But why? Why do we need to know the shape of the earliest galaxies? It's not going to improve the GDP. We seek that knowledge only because it makes us feel good to know. That's it.

In the same way, we send humans into space because it makes us feel good. We like to see people strap themselves to a controlled explosion and head out into space to explore.

Just as seeing pictures of the universe makes us feel awe, inspiration, and perspective, seeing humans in space gives us perspective on our beautiful, fragile world, and our role in the universe.

I think it's a little reductive to say that JWST is little more than pretty pictures that make us feel good. The drive to understand the universe is more important than the desire to see a cool launch mission.

It depends on what your definition of "efficacy" and "results" are.

If all you want is to collect data on the cosmos for the sake of pure science, then absolutely human space flight is a waste of money.

If your goal is to inspire, create an atmosphere that instills interest in a space program (of all types, including manned and unmanned), promotes STEM fields, and is a jobs program, then you'd probably find it very useful and cost effective to sink money into a human spaceflight campaign.

Guess which one of those goals is NASA's true mission.

These sorts of conversations so often ignore that NASA is an organization controlled by politicians and is ultimately responsible to them and the US public who elects them. It's not the engineers and scientists employed or using the data that NASA creates. At the end of the day, those politicians want to have their name connected with inspiration, not just data on the water content of mars.

How many kids do you know that say they want to be an unmanned rover on mars when they grow up? How often do you hear JFK saying "We go to the moon, not because it's hard, but because sending rovers is really cheap and we'll get a much better bang for our buck." How often do you hear someone replaying "Surveyor 1 has landed, one small step for a robot, one giant leap for mankind."

You don't. And there's a reason for that.

You don't have to like it, but you also can't ignore that in reality, NASA has goals that are not just about the science.

We conducted crewed spaceflight in the 1960s because of the state of robotics at the time. To continue with crewed spaceflight today with the present state of robotics is honestly pretty crass in terms of the risk put on human lives. Not to mention the additional resource drain having to build and transport life support systems.

This is a good point. The government started investing in spaceflight because it was seen as important to defense. In the early 1960's, the best plan for spy satellites were manned space stations (see the planned Manned Orbital Laboratory). But as time progressed, we saw that we were much better off using automated systems for space. Yet we had already started manned missions, so those just kept shambling on, even long after the reason for them no longer existed.

With China and India successfully launching space missions a permanent human presence in the moon and possibly Mars is a matter of time, likely happening in the next decade. This is critical for both science and national security, anything from future interplanetary exploration, mining and development/testing of new materials.

> there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space."

No, we are figuring out - how do you survive in space? How do you take a shit in space? Toilets would constantly break on ISS and it was a huge problem.

And people can get shit done. They are designing robots for mining lunar regolith, but they are all less efficient than a guy with a shovel. You could send 10 dudes to the moon with a shovel and a 3D printer, and they could produce aluminium parts on the moon.

I see this argument enough that I will need to make a form response.

Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight.

The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorers of all kinds. Even if a child doesn't end up being an astronaut, they end up more curious than if we only sent rovers. Because we are human.

It just seems sadly cynical to hear people think "there is no utility to human exploration".

Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine? Probably not when they were concerned with the source of the four humors or whatever it was, and had zero concept of germ theory much less cellular biology. We are spending too much money and effort on process that will no doubt be obviated with a future technology. We are still very far from having a sustainable method for human settlement and colonization, and having people poop in bags on the iss probably isn’t advancing much understanding in those technologies beyond what terrestrial experiments and simulation could do.

"Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine?"

It actually sort-of was, because slow aggregation of knowledge about anatomy helped undermine a lot of the old Galenic dogmas.

> Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.

However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.

Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.

SLS is actually very affordable if seen from the correct angle: a know-how preservation program. After the end of the Cold War, the US reduced drastically its military expenditure. The danger was that some day will come (like, you know, the 2020's) when the US will need to restart the missile assembly lines. How do you keep enough people trained at an affordable cost? Well, you keep them busy building a rocket that never launches. Any single launch is money down the drain. You still need to launch, because if you don't you are in danger of fooling yourself: you think you maintained a qualified workforce, but actually they are all impostors. But other than quality assurance, the launches themselves are not important, they are just a cost. So you want to launch as few times as possible.

To my knowledge, the SLS program isn't preserving any appreciable amount of ICBM know-how. They are essentially non-overlapping technologies. The explanation that SLS is a jobs program seems to fit the evidence much better.

Interesting, this was almost word-for-word how I was explaining it to a non-space-nerd friend of mine.

I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.

If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?

To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.

I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.

> If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?

One still can see it as a "jobs program" from the individual states' point of view. From the NASA link [1], I found out that the prime contractor is in Huntsville, Alabama, and important subcontractors are in New Orleans, LA, and in Northern Utah. Highly trained engineers would certainly find jobs somewhere, but maybe not in the same states, and that would be a hit to the local economy.

So, I can see how some senators and representatives from those states could put pressure for a make-work program to continue without regards for costs and results. But still, the Congress has lots of other members, and there is a pretty good chance that those other members did not mount a strong opposition because they saw the defense implications of keeping the SLS alive.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/fs/sls.html

This doesn't match the data. First, the development of SLS began in 2011, two decades after the missile production had stopped. Second, SLS is designed around the use of shuttle era components which not only are very different from what would be used in missiles, but also specifically reduce the amount of practice that the next generation of engineers can get on developing these systems. Third, the actual rocket and the launches are a miniscule part of the program budget not launching doesn't save much money. Finally, the source of the high price tag is delays and reworks that would be wholly unnecessary if the goal were never to produce a working vehicle and which do not contribute to knowledge retention at all.

Basically, if this is a know-how preservation program, it is horribly mismanaged. And there's no reason why you couldn't have a know-how preservation program that also produced useful results. As with so many things, they're not playing 5D chess, they're just playing poorly.

Missile assembly lines are still there. The HIMARS ammo plant is going full out. Minuteman and Trident are still things, indeed in the UK we ordered some not long ago. There's also moon landing type tech at SpaceX and some other startups are working on interesting stuff - Stoke Space is quite an interesting one.

The affordability isn’t relevant - in fact, the lack of affordability is pretty much the point. SLS is a jobs program, pork barrel spending to keep the MIC contractors and the voters who are dependent upon them sweet. The more it costs, the better it plays in whatever Poughkeepsies or Peorias they make the gold-plated doohickeys in.

So cancel it and tell said MIC companies to build something we actually need, like missiles.

Or a federal free insulin plant. How much would it cost to manufacture and give free insulin to everyone that needs it compared to the cost for SLS?

Sounds like communism! /s

I know you're joking but people actually believe this and will advocate for privatization of shit like this it's just so tiresome

I mean, it's not like Hollywood hasn't spent nearly a century carrying water for the moneyed elites. The premise of so many movies hinges on the solution being some superhero or Ayn Rand-ian mold-breaker that can only happen with privatized super-tech.

We complain about China brainwashing its citizens when the US is the OG offender.

Hollywood has been taking a lot of money from China for a very long time now.

> Or a federal free insulin plant.

It's not just jobs. It's also relevant to US interests to keep industry skills sharp. Manufacturing insulin doesn't require the same skills that manufacturing a rocket requires.

On the flip side: if the skills are so expensive that private commercial entities are doing it for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper then it's arguable that the skills being paid to be kept sharp aren't really so sharp as they're paid to be. That is: at this price, why can't they deliver while private commercial entities can for cheaper?

So it's almost certainly just for the jobs and not really for the skills then.

> That is: at this price, why can't they deliver while private commercial entities can for cheaper?

The contractors making the SLS are private commercial entities. That's the mad thing about it.

> private commercial entities can for cheaper?

Could be private commercial entities don't have to pay to train up the workforce but can just poach. Which is fine, system working as intended.

Insulin costs around $30 when bought from the privately owned manufacturers. No point in having the government manufacture it.

From what I recall reading of some histories of similar messing (including Shuttle), sometimes obvious culprits at MIC wouldn't mind getting a more sensible order... but the senator X and Y are interested in how many "jobs created" will show up for their reelection campaign.

I don't understand how NASA is paying $100M for a space shuttle engine designed 40 years ago. R&D has already be amortized so its just manufacturing the thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25

SLS will use the remaining used Block II RS-25D engines, then (if SLS is still flying) switch to a newer RS-25E, designed to be cheaper and expendable.

Not all R&D is amortized.

You have to factor in "oh shit, everybody who knew how to do that kind of weld retired" or "oh shit, they don't make that kind of valve anymore" as well. The older shit is, the harder it is to find expertise and spare parts.

The sea dragon concept from the 60's is completely impossible today because they literally don't make the kind of cheap steel plate it was designed to use anymore. We can't build saturn V engines anymore (despite extensive blueprints) because those who knew how to do the extremely long, perfect welds involved are all dead and that kind of weld has fallen out of fashion so the skill no longer exists.

You frequently end up re-engineering each bit of "old technology" for the current era's materials and skills, unless you literally maintain an unbroken chain of continual manufacturing all the way along. We stopped building new space shuttles 40+ years ago.

@1970-01-01 well timed other submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422115

The comparison in space enthusiasm and planning is ... significant.

Wernher von Braun wrote a 281 page engineering text masquerading as a fiction novel to pitch Mars.

Current NASA leadership wrote:

- Stabilize the flight schedule

- Achieve learning curve efficiencies

- Encourage innovation

- Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk

I love it when someone says they’re going to cut costs by “Encouraging Innovation”. Almost as much as “Reducing Fraud”.

Political types love these announcements they’re going to get something for nothing.

You have to view the cost of SLS like insurance. Premiums are also a huge waste of money until you need to make a claim. In this case, we didn't; SpaceX came through with flying colors. But that was far from a sure thing 15 years ago, and the risk of being left without access to space was real.

SLS doesn't provide any meaningful access to space.

>SLS doesn't provide any meaningful access to space.

It could have though.

Imagine a world where SpaceX burnt out in the late 2000s, and all that talent and energy moved to Boeing/Lockheed et. al.

Point being that they were far from a sure thing in 2008. The traditional contractors were seen as a safe bet by everyone involved. And the speed at which federal government moves means these things are measured in decades.

I disagree, there was no world where SLS would be flying often enough to meaningfully substitute for a failed SpaceX. Such a world would still have ULA with its Vulcan, which would be the more likely candidate for taking on the work instead, possibly even making it difficult for Boing to can ACES.

That's an excuse that might have worked before the Falcon Heavy started flying. Not a reason to have kept funneling money into an obsolete design afterwards, and not a reason to keep doing so now.

Something I've observed about catastrophically bad projects is that there can be a point where the enormity of the failure is impossible to acknowledge, and hence the failure ceases to exist in some sense. Once the double-think kicks in, it becomes strangely easy to forge ahead and commit. After all, there are no acknowledged problems!

It's essentially the "Emperor has no clothes" story, but nobody believes the little boy telling the truth, because the "emperor is naked" is such an absurd statement to make. That's just silly, so of course there must be a deeper truth, a greater story, a hidden meaning.

I have an incredible idea, give the SLS vertical landing and relaunch capability.

Or just trade each $2 billion [0] SLS launch for a mix of 2000 $1 million [1] Starship launches to orbit, from orbit to destination, and/or returns.

Even if Starship launches have a significant likelihood of costing more than that, just 2 Starship launches per SLS seems like a bargain.

20 would be fantastic.

200 would be surreal.

2000 would be … what on (off) Earth could NASA do with 2000? Put all of NASA, its entire supply chain, and the Senate on Mars! O_o

Then achieve a further cost reduction for trips to Mars surface: just the cost of the electrical current required to operate a Mars habitat airlock.

Talk about time and cost efficiency!!

What is ridiculous is the crazy logic of all this is fairly sound, due to the beyond ridiculous (for today) SLS costs.

I have a funny feeling that the SLS’s days are numbered.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

Time for a "backup plan" Commercial Lunar Crew program.

Do you mean the Human Landing System program?

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

No, because HLS still uses SLS. Imagine if NASA used commercial fixed-price contracts to get astronauts onto HLS in addition to the existing HLS contracts.

There are various theories about architectures that use a Dragon or Starliner to transfer astronauts to the respective HLS vehicle in low Earth orbit before then departing for the Moon.

There doesn't appear to be too much of a reason that shouldn't be possible, particularly since both HLS vehicles are meant to be able to perform orbital refueling, but the idea has oddly remained absent from official public documents.

My personal theory is that like with orbital fuel depots, the idea is being kept out of official public communications until the HLS vehicles are operational (and thus uncancellable), at which point the political will can be more easily gained to cancel SLS without risking another waste-of-life threatening to kill the entire human spaceflight program if it didn't directly buy him votes.

If starship (and thus HLS) flies and can fly humans eventually there’s nothing really stopping it from being the whole mission using more refuelings in LEO.

I don't think they'll cancel SLS just like they didn't cancel Starliner. They'll just buy enough alternate flights that they don't have to actually launch SLS.

Who cares? I would much rather my taxes go to this than be completely wasted on cr*p i don't care about.

Thankfully the rest of the worlds superpowers, India, China and Europe are run by cronies too, so it all evens out.

I don’t think these mega empires are good for the world, too much central power and too many management layers between those who rule, and those who do.

A lot of rules to follow that often seems arbitrary.

Yup, this is what happens when you subsidize states like Alabama with government contracts...

Would a Democratic president have any way to put the screws to this program and the people in Alabama seeing as they don't ever vote Democratic anyway?

There's substantial bipartisan support for SLS and it has suppliers in all 50 states[0].

[0] https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls

Not really.

The budget is written by Congress, and the President doesn't have any direct power in Congress. They often have friends there, especially if they used to be legislators. They have some carrots and sticks, but those are actually weak and indirect tools.

If the President's party controls a house, they can usually invoke party discipline (the general sense that doing something will be good for the party and a whole and therefore good for the individual members), perhaps with some of those carrots-and-sticks for recalcitrant allies. But it's rare for the President's party to control both houses, especially considering the filibuster.

If a President made it their top priority and it were something that the party got behind them on, they could perhaps make an all-out push, calling in favors and making deals. It would come with a lot of ill will, from their own party as well as the opposition, because that's not how Congress likes to work. They see themselves as a deliberative body and don't like outside interference -- especially when it upsets the balance of their own dealmaking.

So the short answer is no, the President doesn't have that kind of power. Even if they wanted to, which they generally don't. Nobody is going to jump up and down to say, "Yay, look how efficient this President is, saving .01% of the overall budget". And while they might score a few political points off of hurting somebody that their allies don't like, it's generally not something Democratic presidents are into.

(I'm afraid there's no non-partisan way to say that the culture war is asymmetric.)

Pork isn't partisan.

SpaceX of ten years ago made SLS look ridiculous.

I think this is a little unfair. SpaceX of 10 years ago didn’t have the same launch capacity and was not human rated, or even close to human rating.

Now the trajectory (no pun intended) of SpaceX was good back then and you might have guessed they would grow rapidly in capabilities and capacity, but it wasn’t a done deal.

I’m no fan of SLS, but it was a very understandable safe bet 10 years ago.

> and was not human rated

The SLS has not launched a human.

No, but that was the plan all along, and it's built out of multiple components that have launched humans. I don't think the plan for F9 was to launch humans for a long time, or at least it didn't appear to be a focus for SpaceX until Commercial Crew came along.

Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning with safety factors consistent with human-rating, rather than the lower safety factors required for cargo (1.4 vs 1.2 if I recall correctly). And with the very first cargo Dragon flight in 2010, SpaceX talked about how the windows and life support system pointed towards their ambition of flying humans on the spacecraft.

Now, as always happens, actually completing the human-rating of Dragon required more work than expected, and Dragon 2 is quite different from Dragon. But, as far as I know, Falcon 9 did not require nearly as many upgrades to be human-rated.

SLS isn't really comparable to the F9s that were launching a decade ago. Either in terms of payload capability or reliability/safety. on the other hand a decade from now its totally possible that Starship is going to make SLS look like the antiquated boondoggle it is.

NASA's problem with the SLS is not really its high cost. A 'high cost' is strictly relative.

NASA's problem is lack of funding. That is something that can't be fixed in today's world. Because the US just does not have the amount of spare cash lying around like it did in the 1960s.

That lack of NASA funding is why I predict that the US will never again put men on the Moon, no matter what all the pundits try to tell us. There just ain't no spare cash, period.

SLS is powered by that inexhaustible fuel..... Pork.

It's all part of the experiment to falsify Einstein's conjecture that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/compound-interest/

Not sure how this is "unaffordable"? Just buy one fewer F35's, done, you just funded the whole thing.

When people talk about the cost of f35s they’re often including the amortized cost of the whole project. Most that money has already been spent.

Yeah, buying one fewer F-35 barely moves the needle on total cost, it just bumps up the per-unit costs of the project because its almost all fixed, not variable, costs.

I’m sure this is true, but “buying one less f35” to me sounds like shorthand for “don’t spend such a stupid amount on the next boondoggle military project”. I assumed it was a given that money had already been spent.

> buying one fewer

Well maybe buying a lot more F-35s would save us money then! :-)

That's exactly what they've done. When you read about how the costs have come down or been kept stable, that's an accounting fiction where they increase the number they're "buying" so that the unit cost comes down.

And most people who counter with that argument seem to forget that a jet has a life after delivery, where maintenance, replacement parts, and the cost of practice ordinance are substantial. You don't just save the cost of "the thing" by not buying it. You save "the entire lifetime cost of that thing".

An F35 is estimated to cost around $30,000 to fly, per hour. Then there's maintenance cost which over the lifetime of the jet packs on millions, and ordinance cost for both practice and deployment, which is insanely high: none of that money has been spent yet, and easily gets us to "we could have funded NASA with this" for just a single jet.

I'm sure some people only look at "omg look at how much it costs to buy one!" and then forget that there's a life after the purchase that costs mind boggling amounts of money that, by simply not buying even a single jet, can actually fund a stupid amount of societal progress, from paying teachers to funding an entire NASA project.

But of course the comment itself wasn't about F35s. It was about "maybe spend less on death toys and more on the parts that make society a good thing like space exploration, the arts, education, health care, etc."

I recently found out the “price” is now at or below $100m per plane now which was a real surprise to me.

I also found out (afraid I don’t have a source to hand) that re-engineering the A10 (is that right?), the darling of F35 criticisers would cost more to retrofit up to modern requirements.

I think it's pretty fair to ask whether the joint program was the right decision in the first place, and the criticism 10 years ago was fair, but yeah it's far too late to turn back.

Yeah it seems like there's a lot of fair criticism of the politics of the program, how work was allocated and bid for, etc. I know very little about it, but it doesn't sound great.

However I think a lot of the criticism focuses on things that aren't really true. The price is one aspect, where the amortisation is now paying off and it's no more expensive than alternatives. Another is the capabilities of the plane – it's not designed for warfare from the movies or from the age when many armchair onlookers were growing up, and so it's easy to make it sound like a boondoggle, when in reality it's a modern platform built for how war works in the 2020s.

> built for how war works in the 2020s

So it's a pilotless drone?

It's meant to act as a low-observability information platform / data hub that can coordinate pilotless drones.

> I recently found out the “price” is now at or below $100m per plane now which was a real surprise to me.

Yeah that's because every time the price of the programme goes up, they "buy" more planes so that the per plane cost goes down. Any plane can be "cheap" if you agree to pay up front for a million of them to be delivered "eventually, nudge-nudge, wink-wink".

The price of having the most capable EW platform on earth is nothing compared to its value for national defense. Traditional cost analysis does not apply to SOTA technology.

it does when it's not the only one you have and you can quite easily achieve the same goal with one fewer on an entire fleet.

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