"I still don't know to this day if my boss, Charlie, was in on the whole deal."
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Former NASA official on trying to stop SLS: “There was just such visible hostility”
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Keeping production lines open? The Air Force has paid billions for readiness programs before.
I don't agree with keeping obsolete and expensive tech around but that's part of the military-industrial pork complex. Force military contractors to get lean or be prepared to keep them big and afloat.
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Maybe it's big, but space is very stretchable, so big things can fit without problems.
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Really great insight. I can't wait to read Escaping Gravity to get the full story.
One nitpick -- it's important the spaceflight community views Starship with a pragmatic attitude. Lori's presented quotes discuss Starship like its a certainty, but it certainly is not. In a way I feel like SpaceX suffers from their own success with the public in this regard. We are so used to their success we forget how incredibly daring Starship as a vehicle and spaceflight architecture is. True innovation always comes with a corresponding large amount of risk. SpaceX and NASA are definitely pushing the envelope here, and the public should keep in mind that daring great things requires a steely eyed acceptance that things may go wrong.
One nitpick -- it's important the spaceflight community views Starship with a pragmatic attitude. Lori's presented quotes discuss Starship like its a certainty, but it certainly is not. In a way I feel like SpaceX suffers from their own success with the public in this regard. We are so used to their success we forget how incredibly daring Starship as a vehicle and spaceflight architecture is. True innovation always comes with a corresponding large amount of risk. SpaceX and NASA are definitely pushing the envelope here, and the public should keep in mind that daring great things requires a steely eyed acceptance that things may go wrong.
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Wrong. They already see the potential. Its part of why they will rent out lab space in someone else space station in the future. Its part of future moonbase proposals. NASA and JPL will have no issues whatsoever in not worrying about cutting mass, in everything and anything they launch.
Its also part and parcel of having their launch costs slashed, which they have already seen, leaving room for more payload.
Are you going to follow up by telling us how the other government dinosaurs are not prepared for Starship and need a sea change also? The USAF already allocated $50M last year in funds to study (semi) ballistic lift concepts.
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That's a very lightweight argument. Delta IV and Atlas V cover large vehicles (the Delta IV Heavy), high energy propulsion (with the RS-68 (D-IV) and RL-10 (both D-IV and A-V)) and solid rocket motors (with both ATK and AJR providing SRBs for D-IV and A-V). Start a long-term program for a RD-180 replacement and you've now got a 100% homegrown launch capability. And doing something like getting Orion launching on an Atlas or Delta would probably have gotten it launching sooner than waiting for SLS to show up.
It seems to me that "keeping the band together" is actually "keeping the band playing the same tunes in the same venue".
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Melbourne's slow, but at least it's not Mims. Nothing good comes from Mims or Micco. And yeah, Orlando's not that bad of a drive (when I lived in Melbourne, I had family living in Orlando), and even Jacksonville, Miami, or Tampa are within driving range for day trips (I made all those drives multiple times).
Unfortunately, Edelweiss closed last year, so there's no longer a place I can recommend for German food (yes, there's the Biergarten downtown; I can't recommend any place for German food in Melbourne).
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It won’t do anything for my (lack of) reception in the back of Costco and a nearby Mallwart, but outdoor connectivity deep into the forests and mountains where no carrier’s signal currently reaches would be a game-changer, even if it’s just enough to send some texts or make a call.
Come to think of it, even improved backhaul would be a welcome upgrade.
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As a launch vehicle there's nothing particularly daring with Starship. It's made of stainless steel which is odd but not unheard of. But in terms of launching many tonnes of mass to orbit there's nothing novel. It's the landing and reuse goals that are new.
But Starship would be completely superior to SLS in every metric (performance and financial) without reuse of any part at all. So Starship succeeding as a disposable launcher is as much a certainty as ULA's Vulcan or any other rocket that hasn't yet flown. When dealing with an experienced launch provider, there's no reason to assume a new rocket won't make orbit within the first few attempts.
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It should be interesting to see which way Switzerland goes. They are looking at F-35s, but France is trying to woo them with some discounts for Rafales.
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Additionally, it's not like expertise in solid rocket motors is going anywhere. The DoD uses lots of solids-propelled devices and the ICBM renewal provides far more money to SRBs than SLS ever could.
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I think the backhaul is definitely part of it, but I can't see Elon coming out for that — it's not big enough, flashy enough a thing for him. I also don't think we're going to see something ala ASTS, though I'd like to be proven wrong — I would welcome a Thuraya-like SatSleeve or satellite hotspot.
Best guess is that they're going to allow you to fall back on T-Mo's 5G if you're a Starlink customer with the hardware already in rectangular Dishy, and if you're on T-Mo, you'll get priority for Dishy. Something along those lines.
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Exactly. SpaceX will likely just fill the rest with Startlink sats, just like they've done with a handful of rideshare missions on Falcon.
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On the surface, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable position, frankly. Especially when placed against the backdrop of needing the Russians to send crew to the ISS.
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No, not really. This is about SLS, which doesn't take people to the ISS, not commercial crew, which the congressional dipshits thought should go to Boeing/Starliner only.
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When it comes to corruption in politics and government contracts, if you can't tell if someone is 'in' on it, the answer is usually, "Yes." It's so widespread that corruption has become the default state of business in America.
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What about preserving the knowledge to make multi-segment solid motors and transport them across the country - say between Utah and Florida to chose an example at random?
/s
Fascinating interview - a couple of brutal answers in the middle.
Beyond SLS, It's a shame that Ms Garver has to place so much faith in SpaceX. I know New Glenn is name checked, but we all know there seems to be a bit too much Graditim there. Interesting that BO have been promoting their non-rocket interests on Twitter recently - perhaps that will be their distinction over SpaceX and their fairly strong transportation focus.
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Following the EELV Atlas development plan would have maintained work on SRBs (since Atlas Phase 1 had configurations from 0 to 6 SRBs) and gotten to a super-heavy launcher (Phase 3 was between 105 and 178 tonnes to a 220 nm circular orbit at 28.5 degrees depending on options and configuration).
All of it was fairly incremental development, too. The biggest change was probably the first one, building Atlas tanks at Delta diameter. Other planned upgrades were adding a second engine to the core, then stretching Centaur and adding more RL-10 to the upper, then adding extra cores and (eventually) cross-feeding them so the main core didn't have to throttle down for the side cores to burn out first. Eventually they'd trade some payload mass for a larger fairing once they started getting volume-constrained rather than mass-constrained.
There was also some thought of using Boctane to eke out a little more performance, but I think they'd have come to the same conclusion that the Russians did with Syntin, that it was too expensive for the minimal gains achieved.
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What about: T-Mobile is going to bundle Starlink base stations with some of their plans for rural customers? And that those base stations might provide picocell services for the area around them.. That wouldn't require new satellites, just additional equipment with the base stations (I guess that's kind of like your backhaul version but on a retail level - I guess it could be both)..
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I was at Boeing Houston during that particular time, and the angry rhetoric toward Obama that was echoing up and down the halls was something else. The crazy level started at "Obama's gonna fire us all and give NASA's money to the democrats!" and went rapidly north from there. The spin that we were fed—from internal boeing news emails, from management, from senior leadership—was that Obama hated NASA, hated space, and hated us. It was pretty poisonous stuff.
My mortgage—and the mortgages of thousands of other folks who were in aerospace at the time—thanks you for the tax contribution. There's lots to show for that money! Just not lots of, you know, space stuff. But it certainly wasn't thrown in a hole in the ground or lit on fire.
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Is it possible that hypersonic-glide re-entry vehicles will be big enough that you will need multi-segment solid motors in silos in South Dakota?
(the SRBs are 50% higher diameter and five times as tall as the first stage of the LGM-118 Peacekeeper, which I think was the biggest solid-motor ICBM the US fielded)
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But the ultimate goal of the F-35 was to actually fly in an operational sense. And while it may not be perfect, it does actually do that. And unlike SLS, per hour operational costs aren’t crazy out of line with other high-performance military jets. However it does suffer from the B-2 problem of being so expensive that you can’t use it on more risky missions, where it’s stealth and other functions are at highest advantage over older aircraft.
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I want SLS to succeed on Monday because for the cost it had damn well better succeed. But unfortunately success will not remove the albatross from NASA's neck quickly enough. Like so much I see around me there are these old entrenched interests standing in the way saying, "Why are you not on the other side of us?"
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It's a very reasonable-sounding load of horse crap and they know it.
By the time Constellation was cancelled and SLS was finally authorized most of the people employed by the Shuttle program had left their various employers. There was a gap of several years. And, as I pointed out above, the solids rocket community is well fed by the DoD. It's not going anywhere.
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Maybe that's the blocker to reuse: bacon just doesn't have the structural integrity to make grid fins. XD
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It is much easier to waste money when it is not yours...
While $10 Billion seems a lot (and it is a lot to NASA) it is not even a rounding error if you look at how much the Federal Govt wastes every year.
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So you're saying that, like almost every single other intractable problem in American politics and government, SLS exists in no small part thanks to the legacy of racism? Golly I'm shocked. Not.
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Yeah, my dad’s last few years of work and his pension thank you taxpayers as well.
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To emphasize the scale difference another way, the empty shell of a space shuttle's SRB, with no propellant loaded, was a few tons heavier than a fully fueled and armed Peacekeeper (~200,000 pounds to 193,460 pounds). Fuel for the SRB massed 5.5 times as much as the empty shell. The SLS SRBs are bigger still because of the extra segment.
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T-Mobile already uses any available WiFi around to place calls if you enable that option. So while bundling might be good, it's not like T-Mobile needs Starlink's WiFi to enable service.
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More importantly, the recommended alternative to Ares/SLS was to improve the commercial offerings of Atlas and Delta to fulfill their roles.
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I feel sorry for the people who've worked on it for so long, but I'd quite like it to fail badly. There might be nothing as effective as a colossal and very public RUD to put a stop to throwing good money after bad.
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Almost. SLS is "better" than Starship for deep space missions, using the forced logic that the Earth-to-orbit launch vehicle must also propel you into deep space. That last "gap" falls apart if you accept the use of optional upper stages as part of the payload.
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Yup. SLS is only 'better' than Starship in that one usage if you intentionally put a bunch of artificial 'requirements' on the mission that deliberately negate the massive advantages Starship brings to the table -- requirements that Starship makes obsolete and irrelevant.
It's like how politicians have contracts written in very specific ways to ensure only one company is even eligible (usually, notably, with direct ties to the politicians in question).
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I think you're right about Starship beating SLS across the board (advanced technology, payload, launch frequency, development cost, and cost per launch).
It's amazing and disheartening at the same time that NASA has to pay $100M per copy for a non-reusable version of the RS-25 hydrolox engine that powered the Space Shuttle 40 years ago and SpaceX is developing a superior reusable methalox engine, the Raptor 2, for Starship for $1M per copy. To me, that's the most glaring disconnect between New Space and Old Space.
I think that the worry regarding Starship's first orbital test flight is that there is a big unknown--can 33 Raptor 2 engines operate as planned for 150 seconds from liftoff to staging?
Rather than building a test stand with more than twice the capability of the B-2 facility at Stennis that was used to fully ground test the first and second stages of the Saturn V, Elon has decided to roll the dice and launch Starship without such a test.
This is new territory for SpaceX. Previously, the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy were completely ground tested (full thrust, full duration) prior to the first launch. With Falcon Heavy, the largest unknown on that first flight was whether the two side boosters would jettison as planned. They worked OK and Elon's Roadster was sent to Mars.
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Exactly. Starship has the performance to lift the wet mass of ICPS + Orion + ESM. Perhaps such a solution couldn't be a lifting body shape for the second stage but if SpaceX has to settle on no reuse there's no reason for that shape. A traditional cylinder with engines underneath is enough.
Yes, it's a three-stage rocket system for TLI. So is SLS.
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Maybe it's big, but space is very stretchable, so big things can fit without problems.
Space is huge.
That statement should be glaringly obvious, since "space" is where the universe keeps pretty much everything.
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