/sci/ - Science & Math

US Spacecraft fleet in the early to mid 21st century.

SpaceX Dragon docked at a commercial bigelow produced space station

SLS Block IA

SLS Block IB

I really wish they'd rename the SLS to something more iconic, like the Ares or some shit. It's quite similar to the Ares under the Constellation program anyways.

Orion MPCV over Luna

filename

Poo in loo spacecraft at ISS - note this spacecraft would probably not have that service module nor would it have the docking node to be able to shit in the streets of the ISS

CST-100 at the ISS

Falcon Heavy

Orbital ATK rocket garden in northern Utah

JAXA HTV-5 approaching the ISS

Falcon 9

>>7504162
That gave me a boner watching that, thanks!

Let me know if there's something you'd like me to post, I've got a lot of different things saved.

The 500th, yes FIVE HUNDREDTH, Soyuz preparing to launch from Baikonur 9/2/15 Wednesday, carrying three astronaughts to ISS.

>>7504228
Fucking epic.

Soyuz capsule launch, or just Soyuz in general? I thought it had over 900 successful launches, the rocket itself at least.

When will SpaceX attempts its next landing ?

>>7504291
Currently they don't even have a firm date for a return to flight, so it's up in the air. Last I heard December was the likely month for a RTF.

>>7504294

>>7504294
Thanks dude

>>7504314
That's a badass gif

>>7504314

>>7504317
Btw I'm getting these from here
>>>/wsg/679613

>>7504326
Nice.

>>7504521
I love how the Russians just keep adding engines to build bigger rockets.

>>7504548
Boosters work, everyone does this.

>>7504558
There's a difference between boosters and 30 engines in your first stage.

>>7504565
Every single rocket in that diagram uses liquid boosters however, it's not like there are 30 engines in the first stage of any of those unless you consider the boosters the first stage.

>>7504565
>>7504548
Why would you design a new bigger engine when you already have a small one that works. Just lash five of them together and you have the power of a big engine.

>>7504590
Indeed, because you can also design it where if one or two engines fail, it still can make it to orbit. Every major rocket has been designed like this for the most part.

>>7504578
The N1 had 30 engines in its first stage.

>>7504594
The problem with that is getting them to fire up and throttle in sync, hence why the Soviets never put a man on the Moon.

>>7504600
The N1 isn't in that image though.

It's not a problem getting that many rockets to fire up in sync, look at the most reliable rocket of all the time, the Soyuz. The Vostok and Voshkod rockets before it were essentially the same thing.

>>7504600
pic related

>>7504606
>Soviet rockets were made from Lego

I knew it

>>7504294
Rumor was November actually.

>>7504831
Depends on who you heard it from just saw something for November 15 for the CRS-8 mission

>>7504831
Ok further reading shows NO EARLIER THAN Nov 16, 2015

I wish I could post pictures :(

>>7504982
>>7504831
Yeah, NET November now. December or January is entirely possible.

But it's not just return to flight, it's return to flight with an upgraded rocket. Because they weren't sure of the thrust the Merlin 1D could be trusted for, they somewhat undersized Falcon 9 1.1.

So now they're using 15% more thrust and pre-chilling the propellant so it's denser, and they can fit more in the same tank volume. With this capacity upgrade, they should be able to attempt landing of the first stage after every launch, not just the ones with smaller payloads.

http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/09/01/falcon-9-rocket-to-be-grounded-longer-than-expected/

>>7505986
Right, thing is it's only now that it is at the advertised capacity. It's not like they had needed it yet, but now they can do a lot more with this rocket.

All I know is that however cool the SLS is, the people making it are fucking NASA with the profits they demanded. They wanted to be compensated for the slower flight cadence of the SLS compared to the old shuttle, since flights to the ISS were not going to be handled by the SLS.

SLS flights should only cost 5-600 million, not the 1+ billion like each shuttle launch was.

>>7505986
Incidentally, they always planned for this upgrade. That's why Falcon Heavy had performance figures so much more than triple Falcon 9 (~53 tons to LEO vs. ~13 tons).

>>7506032
>it's only now that it is at the advertised capacity
Not true. They always advertised less than its full capacity. But the margin between advertised capacity and true capacity was not enough for landing attempts.

>>7506040
From what I read on /r/spacex, people were saying that the quoted full capacity of the Falcon 9 is just now being realized by this upgrade. This upgrade isn't unexpected or somehow beyond what SpaceX always intended.

>>7506032
>however cool the SLS is, the people making it are fucking NASA with the profits they demanded.
SLS exists only to distribute those profits. As a design, it makes no sense. They're using parts of a 1970s reusable vehicle to make an expendable vehicle. Of course that's going to be horribly expensive.

A whole lot of what goes on in government is congressmen fighting over pork for their districts. SLS is a pork rocket, as the shuttle was a pork rocket, the guys who had the shuttle pork in their districts have fought to have the SLS pork in their districts.

The justification for this is the claim that it would be easier and more cost-efficient to adapt shuttle parts than just build a new rocket, but it's a bullshit excuse to keep giving most of the same contractors the same amount of money every year as they got during the shuttle years.

The same guys fight to underfund Commercial Crew because its success would make their game too obvious and their pork too hard to keep funding.

>SLS flights should only cost 5-600 million, not the 1+ billion like each shuttle launch was.
Why? With the shuttle, they were at least able to recover and reuse the engines.

These are the same main engines, except they're using more of them per flight, and they're not recovering them. They were designed for reuse, so they are super fucking expensive and hard to produce.

>>7506041
>This upgrade isn't unexpected or somehow beyond what SpaceX always intended.
True, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the capacity for their advertised figures before, it just means they didn't have the surplus capacity above their advertised figures which they intended for landing and reuse.

>>7506068
As a design, it's actually pretty damn good.

The only real problem with the SLS is that it isn't using parts in common with other US made rockets to keep costs down. It really should have used something that could have some commonality with something else. However, that's a real problem when at the time, and even currently, the only American made rocket engine worth a fuck is the Merlin that would have any commonality. The Atlas uses a Russian engine, and the Delta's engine sucks major ass.

Check out the DIRECT proposal. If we had gone with DIRECT as soon as the shuttle was doomed, we'd have been back to space and those companies wouldn't have been able to argue the profits around like they did under Constellation.

SLS adopted a lot of these ideas from DIRECT but it was too late to prevent Boeing and others from being greedy fucks.

http://www.directlauncher.org/

It is cheaper and quite efficient to adopt the shuttle tech - the SSME is the only engine we have of that size because nothing else was allowed to challenge the shuttle politically, and thus Aerojet Rocketdyne didn't bother to produce anything else. The SSME isn't even that bad, it's actually fairly good and since we have a lot of experience with it, it's still the best choice for a heavy lifting rocket. Again, the only problem with SLS is that it was turned into a pork project.

>Why? With the shuttle, they were at least able to recover and reuse the engines.

Refurbishing the entire thing is why it all cost so much. Refurbishing an entire shuttle and maintaining the shuttle fleet was fucking super duper expensive.

>>7506084
>True, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the capacity for their advertised figures before, it just means they didn't have the surplus capacity above their advertised figures which they intended for landing and reuse.

Yeah that's probably more accurate than how I explained it

>>7506068
Keep in mind for the Constellation's Ares V, they were indeed designing a new first stage engine. However, the RS-68s would have been 20 million cheaper per engine than the SSMEs. We could have at least gone with SSMEs at first, since we had a bunch, then changed to the RS-68s later.

>>7506096
Commonality with shuttle parts is worthless. The shuttle was designed around reusability. It's full of compromises and additional expenses in service of that goal.

Before you say, "We already have them!", no we don't. Not for an expendable vehicle. We didn't have production capacity set up for these reusable parts. Replacing a shuttle was a big deal.

There was no reason to expect that building a new expendable rocket out of shuttle parts would be faster, easier, or get better results than say, reviving the Saturn V, which was at least designed to be an expendable rocket.

DIRECT was an incompetent "lego rocket" design and wouldn't have worked. If you look at their DIRECT v3, it is basically a slightly smaller SLS. It wouldn't have been much easier. Shuttle propulsion was highly optimized, and is difficult to rearrange. Furthermore, it was always designed around the assumption that the final orbital burn would be handled by the OMS. To expect to go to the final orbit with the SSMEs alone is not reasonable.

>>7506109
RS-68s would never have worked together with the SRBs. Their ablative cooling couldn't cope.

Besides, they were designed as booster engines, not sustainers. They have poor Isp for lox/h2 engine.

>>7506129
I don't think you understand that it would have been cheaper than the shuttle because we already had those parts in development. SLS would be quite cheap if it wasn't for the insane contracts they were able to convince congress to give them. That, and the production lines for a lot of components were goofed by the switch to the Ares V.

>
DIRECT was an incompetent "lego rocket" design and wouldn't have worked. If you look at their DIRECT v3, it is basically a slightly smaller SLS. It wouldn't have been much easier. Shuttle propulsion was highly optimized, and is difficult to rearrange. Furthermore, it was always designed around the assumption that the final orbital burn would be handled by the OMS. To expect to go to the final orbit with the SSMEs alone is not reasonable.

Are you making shit up? Literally I have never seen anyone say this. Do you have a source?

>>7506132
Indeed.

>>7506068
I don't understand what you expected them to have developed for a HLV.

What engines would it have used?

>>7506129
I just read through the Direct 3.0 thread from one of the engineers who worked on it. No one in the entire 168 page thread mentioned the problems with the SSMEs or even asked about it.

>>7506197
>No one in the entire 168 page thread mentioned the problems with the SSMEs or even asked about it.
During the shuttle development process, they originally planned on testing them only separately. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and they started testing them in triplets. Their vibrations shook each other apart. They eventually worked that out on the test stand, but then when they flew them, they came back full of broken turbine blades and other damage.

Their spacial arrangement and proximity to the SRBs matters. This kind of trouble is why SLS was scaled back to 4 engines, from ARES V's 5. It was going to take them additional years to make Ares V work even though there's little difference from SLS except the additional SSME.

>the Direct 3.0 thread from one of the engineers who worked on it.
The same guys who figured they could just stick RS-68s on, no problem.

>>7506153
>What engines would it have used?
There's no reason they couldn't have started producing the F-1 again. It would take some time and money, but so does every option.

You know, they had to redesign the SSME to be able to produce it after the shuttle salvage and spares run out. It's not really easier to revive a 1970s engine than a 1960s one.

They've been researching it anyway, as a possible higher-performance, lower-cost replacement for the SRBs. However, it's looking like that won't happen because the acceleration would be too high without redesigning the rest of SLS.

Kind of shows how this idea of evolving the SLS into a higher-performance rocket is especially terrible.

>>7506449
>Kind of shows how this idea of evolving the SLS into a higher-performance rocket is especially terrible.

That makes sense, a lot of these are problems many other rocket designs had over time.

N-1 had that problem, the Saturns even had rattling problems initially, and the Ares I showed that they'd even fly the rocket knowing that it was a stupid idea.

Do you have any sources for this though? I'd love to read more on it.

>>7506151
>SLS would be quite cheap if it wasn't for the insane contracts they were able to convince congress to give them.
Why should it be cheap?

Lox/h2 and large solids are each more expensive than lox/RP-1. The SSME wasn't designed for cheap production. The RS-68 was, and Delta IV is STILL way too expensive, because lox/h2.

A conventional, straightforward lox/RP-1 booster and lox/h2 upper stage is the obvious way to make a cost-effective big fucking rocket.

The space shuttle arrangement was driven by the desire for first-try reusability. The large solid boosters would be the most naturally rugged for splashdown. Igniting the lox/h2 orbital stage on the pad would ensure a minimum failure rate at separation.

Keeping that arranagement for a purely expendable rocket and sticking an upper stage on top of it is just dumb and wasteful.

>>7506488
SLS should be a lot cheaper, and was intended to be cheaper. The re-usability didn't pan out on the shuttle because of the refurb costs. Without those costs, each launch of the SLS should be cheaper adjusting for inflation. The companies behind producing the SLS were able to negotiate contracts that basically made up for the costs - they figured since NASA was used to paying that much per launch, they should be making that (namely Boeing).

>>7503992
>>7503994
>>7504023
>>7504041
>>7504056
>OP spends some of his time dumping nice images and webms
>the macbooks 4chan is running on get fucked and it's all lost

I'm sorry, if anyone wants to see them just go to the archive
https://archive.moe/sci/thread/7503183/#7503992

>>7503183
And yes you shouldn't go on /b/ for anything, if you want to post something on 4chan do it on the board that is dedicated to it

>>7506515
It's ok, thanks for linking the archive. I've been downloading a lot of space pictures lately and plan on eventually uploading them all organized somewhere for people to download from one source.

>>7506488
Ok so what would our ideal ship look like?

Obviously lox/RP-1, using some kind of F1B perhaps?

RL10 upper stage, since it obviously is a good choice and would have some commonality with other rocket upper stages being used.

Would it even bother with SRBs? I can imagine that Orbital ATK would be pretty pissed if it did not, and they do provide quite a bit of thrust fairly cheaply. Lots of issues with SRBs, however.

Are we assuming some kind of direct setup? I don't particularly like that DIRECT was assuming to launch missions to the ISS. I rather like how we're doing it with the CCP. I'd rather this rocket have been a pure HLV.

>>7506537

Direct is a cult of space shuttle nuts who didn't want the ride to end and colluded to rig requirements force selection of a rocket nearly identical to what they had been pushing when the new space policy didn't have a shuttle derived heavy lift rocket in it.

SLS isn't padded, that's what it costs. SLS has fixed costs, what it costs per year to run, and marginal costs, a cost per each copy. It's total costs are a mixture of the two figures depending upon flight rate.

A fair heavy lift selection program would have seen entries by ULA and SpaceX. ULA's pitch would be what is called Atlas Phase 2 or EELV Phase 2.

>>7506690

That would have never happened for many of the same reasons the Constellation and the SLS have issues, plus others:

1. Inefficient engines, or
2. New engine development costs, or
3. lol russian engines

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38335.0

>>7506698

The guy talking shit about EELV Phase 2 in that thread is a Direct groupie shitting on EELV because he's a brainwashed pro-SLS nut who is hostile to alternatives.

New engine is a billion dollar price tag: the admin included one in its space policy, and reviving the SSME has already racked up a billion in charges with more to come when they have to start building more.

The engines are fine. EELV phase 2 is basically a beefed up Vulcan. It's has unparalleled second stage technology.

>>7506700
Yeah, and Vulcan baseline is nowhere near close enough to compete with the SLS in terms of lifting anything. It still relies on engines that don't even exist.

ACES indeed will be neat, but you still need some 6 core Vulcan.

You'd also have to wait on the AR-1 ( BE-4 wasn't even a drip on someone's dick at the time) and you'd still need a huge multi core rocket with new launchpads, new facilities, etc. to work. It would have laid off all those people and people would have never let that happen ( not that I care, fuck them, they've been fucking our space industry for far too long).

The Delta path was not going to be viable, either. RS-68 sucks, hydrogen sucks, and Boeing rockets suck.

I'm not really supporting anything, this is a fun discussion. I'm learning a lot.

>>7506709

Vulcan isn't being built to be an HLV. It doesn't matter that it doesn't meet SLS specs because we are talking about a different beefier rocket that would have been ULA's submission had they won the HLV program spot

> with new launchpads, new facilities

SLS has been racking up 400 million a year in ground facility work costs. SpaceX's LC-39A pad work shows new build and repurposing is completely viable and affordable enough in alternative. Reuse of facilities doesn't mean free, reuse can be more expensive than clean sheet.

>would have laid off all those people and people would have never let that happen

The dirty secret of SLS is that this happened substantially anyways and was required for productive development of the platform. They'll recreate a new operations capability when SLS is coming out of development.

Rocketdyne says they only need 4 years to build AR-1 if they get the funds. They would have had plenty of time for engine dev.

>>7506719
I wish I could get actual figures on these, because both sides of the argument just spout these things without any real comparisons/reports, based on a lot of what it? kind of stuff. I have no doubt a setup based off of common tooling would have been cool and cheaper, but who knows?

We could have had an AR-1 multi-rocket engine first stage with an ACES second stage HLV.

>>7506698
Thats some Kerbal tier "moar boosters"

>>7506924
This. For some reason, the design is pretty stupid.

For the kerbal term: Have played the game for 3 years, you actually don't do that. I usually make them really realistic

>>7506941
Well, you can't credit the Delta IV people with making a good design. The Delta IV is an inefficient fuel guzzling POS.

New Falcon Heavy renders

>>7507174
Eh... the basic design of Delta IV isn't bad. I would say it has many excellent features.

The essential problem with the EELVs was the launch volume death spiral. These were intended to be high-volume rockets serving the commercial market. Boeing and LM both expected it to be winner-take-all, and each expected to win.

But the launch market contracted to the point that the prize they were fighting over ceased to exist, the Arianespace partner governments were united behind one option and determined to pay whatever subsidies necessary for *their* rocket to have marketshare, the military contracts came with tremendous interference into operations and injection of government inefficiency, and the cut-throat attitude led to industrial espionage that threatened to draw both companies into a litigation apocalypse.

With both companies looking at losing fortunes, and the US government looking at losing their investment without getting any suitable launch vehicle for its needs, ULA was born and the costs and prices of the EELVs stopped having any strong relation to the merits of the vehicle designs.

>>7507406
Fair enough, however the Delta IV was just a more expensive and less efficient rocket from the start, unless I've heard too many fanboy theories.

>>7506698
>3. lol russian engines
They're good engines, though. Blue Origin and AJR are basically cloning the Soviet tech with their staged-combustion designs. Plus, LM was required to license and certify a capability to produce them in the USA.

The Atlas V's RD-180 is actually a scaled-down version of a more powerful engine designed for the Energia boosters.

Energia had four side-boosters, each powered by an RD-170, around the central hydrogen-fueled core. There is no reason why they wouldn't work with the core as an additional lox/RP-1 one, powered by a fifth RD-170 (or rather, the dual-gimballing RD-171).

Each RD-170 is more powerful and has higher Isp than the F-1 which powered the Saturn V, and is eminently suitable for working in teams on such a huge rocket. Furthermore, the RD-171 has been kept in active production thanks to Sea Launch. There is no reason that, with ULA as the customer, the RD-170 and 171 couldn't be produced to similar reliability standards as the RD-180.

A five or six engine RD-170/171 is a straightforward design exercise based on proven, recently-produced hardware which would be far superior to the Saturn V. With cross-feed, it should easily be able to reach the highest proposed goals for the advanced variants of SLS and Ares V.

J-2X is an upper-stage lox/h2 engine designed by combining knowledge of the original J-2 (from the Saturn V) with recent RS-68 production experience. It can be regarded as a revival of the J-2, or an upper-stage-ification of the RS-68. This is the planned upper-stage engine for SLS, and it's the most sensible hardware choice on it.

It's a shame that this design wasn't seriously considered.

>>7507464

>They're good engines, though.

Not disagreeing, but imagine the political shit storm. Even making them here would have never happened.

Using an RD-180 or even an American produced version wouldn't have been an option. AR-1? Sure.

>>7507465
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia#Vulkan-Hercules

Vulkan-Hercules was really quite a straightforward and rational design for a superheavy. Compared to SSME, RD-0120 was at least intended from the beginning to be economical as an expendable engine.

It could have put up an ISS equivalent in 2 or 3 launches, which would probably each have cost no more than a shuttle launch. Lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and probably not revived for cooperation on the ISS due to making the shuttle look bad.

>>7507597
Can you imagine how buttflustered Americans would be if Russia did something like that? Managed to launch their own station in just 1-2 launches.

>>7507615
Dumping my Energia pictures now

>>7507627

Despite the fact those images aren't loaded further up in the thread, I can't reupload them.

New Falcon and Falcon Heavy renders

>>7508284
>>7508286
Yeah those got deleted by 4chan when their macshit servers failed