/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15219683

>>15168990
>>15168997
I remember getting excited for Venture Star, Spaceship 1, AirLaunch, Ares V, Bigelow, Kistler,...
you can probably see why I completely stopped giving a fuck whatsoever about new things by 2010s
>Spacewho? Falcon what? A kerosene powered small rocket for satelites? Oh. It's garbage then. And it will go broke anyway, just like all the others.
only when FH landed both boosters and I saw this graph (and did my own digging) I realised this time it's actually worth getting excited about.

>>14975944
defend this

>>14820331
show them this picture
SLS is so overpriced the number alone is inconceivable to most people
it's like trying to explain people who buy lottery tickets that they are never going to win

>>12588696
And what congress wants is strongly aligned with what their donors want. In this case what oldpsace wants

I think I actually hate SLS more than I hate niggers

>>12493144
It's a small market + FH really needs a bigger fairing. Right now it struggles to make use of its excellent payload capacity because its volume capacity is the same as the Falcon 9. Though they are working on improving it.

Looks like next year there are 4 FH launches slated. All to GTO. Looks like an airforce will involve sacrificing the center core (intentionally this time) and landing both boosters on droneships. Should be pretty sick.

>>12493178
Congress has tied NASA ball-and-shackle to the SLS. They don't have a choice in the matter. From the start NASA wanted to make a Saturn V 2.0 but were forced to play this dumbfuck contractor dicksucking game. https://youtu.be/ZNZx208bw0g

>>12341747
This is outdated, but should demonstrate the difference in cost and capability well enough

>>12253428
Have some more cost numbers.

>>12163787
The SLS program is years late (which is particularly damning since much of it is using already existing components from the Space Shuttle - they have working engines & solid fuel booster designs to use) and very expensive. The price NASA agreed to pay Rocketdyne PER SINGLE RS-25 engine is only a bit less than what SpaceX would charge for a full expendable Falcon Heavy.

>>12087972
The thing with the Apollo missions is that they had to do a ton of novel R&D, and then they ended tossing away all their expensive hardware during the mission. Plus they were in a race to beat the Soviets, and were not bothering to optimise the design for lower costs.

If you can build a vehicle that you can reuse with minimal refurbishment, and doesn't have a mess of cost+ contractors building each part, then your costs go massively down. Ol'Musky has stated that they have the internal marginal cost of a Falcon 9 flight down to $15 million, and that is with throwing away the top stage. Their goal with Starship is a marginal cost of low millions per flight. If they reach even the higher ends of that, then the cost of putting 100 tons on the moon (which will need multiple tanker flights to top off the lander) drops to only $100 million or so. That makes setting up a moon colony reasonable on a trillion dollar budget. Spend $100 billion to drop off 100,000 tons of stuff, then use the other $900 billion to develop and buy said stuff.

>>12019063
A rocket that would've been useful in 2017, but now it's sort of silly to have. At least it's better than nothing.

>>12015147
Does this count?

>>11986754
is bernie retarded or what, look at fucking boeing. not a single launch and a masive money blackhole

>>11969709
>What is NASA as an organization?
An aerospace agency ultimately. Its goals are mishandled by politics, but it still tries to be a space agency.

>I will keep an eye on SLS only because the money seems to be there to produce it. So why not make the best thing possible, or at least watch it.
That's not how NASA funding works. It doesn't get a lump sum of money to do whatever. Each dollar is assigned to a project to be spent in a set way. Cutting SLS and redirecting the money is impossible, because canceling SLS would just take away the money being spent on it. It doesn't justify the misuse of funds on Congress' behalf but it explains why NASA is so constrained.

>>11923616
While you obviously need a certain minimum amount of money to get shit done, how well you spend your cash is also incredibly important. NASA has been forced by Congress to throw a lot of money into contractors spread out in key districts, which ends up being very inefficient. Also, the espionage China is known for certainly hasn't hurt their efforts.

>>11874591
It's only a joke because it's taking so long to launch. If it actually launched before or shortly after the Falcon Heavy, then it would just be an unfortunate but useful stopgap rocket.

>>11855184
You mean this?

>>11794271
>How much does SLS cost again?
The RS-25s cost $146M each so the SLS costs at the very minimum $584M. I think most estimates, that aren't from contractors, for the whole stack being somewhere between $1B and $2B.

>>11714154
As much as I shit on SLS. I hope it launches well before 2023 and that it sees some use.

>>11714172
Share this image to him, and then ignore his stupid ass.

>>11590037
I feel that there's really just a bias towards single launch that's holding back the potential of on-orbit assembly. With existing rockets (namely F9/FH), it's so ridiculously economical that there's little excuse to not explore that branch of mission architecture.

>>11557785
>And that would probably still be cheaper and faster than a single SLS launch.
Not quite. 22 FH for one SLS assuming that the SLS costs $2B per launch. Still a significant amount of TLI mass, about 14 times more than what Block 1B cargo can do.

>>11457217

>>11363338
>"The issue is that SLS will be cancelled before it's even designed."
No one said that. The SLS has already been designed before the project even started.

>"The issue is that SLS will be cancelled before it's even built."
No one who actually pays attention to US politics said that. The SLS has been written into law by the Senate, it would require a massive shift in politcal winds before SLS would get canceled before it was built.

>"The issue is that SLS will be cancelled before it even flies."
See above.

>"The issue is that no administration will ever be willing to fund missions that utilize SLS."
It's a Senate project. Whatever the administration wants with SLS is ultimately irrelevant.

>"The issue is that SLS is an incredibly flawed rocket that will bring down any project it's attached to."
$2B per launch to send 26t to the moon once a year. That is a serious problem for any BEO project as it would take nearly a whole presidential term to do anything worthwhile with SLS. Europa Clipper was soft-booted off SLS so more cores can be used for Artemis because the launch rate is so low. For the price of 1 SLS launch, over 22 Falcon Heavy launches could be purchased. This means that with the FH's 16.8t to TLI, 370t could be sent to the moon for the price of one SLS. For an agency that has always dealt with funding issues since Apollo, that last point should be the most damning. SLS is not useful for space flight. It is a dead-end design that is too expensive despite using preexisting parts.