Possible Humans on First SLS Flight

mashable.com/2017/02/15/nasa-astronauts-first-flight-sls-orion
>On Wednesday, NASA's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot sent out a memo to employees explaining that he has asked the agency to perform a study looking into what it would take for NASA to launch people on the first flight of the giant Space Launch System rocket. This rocket system, which would be the agency's most powerful yet, is currently under development.
This seems like a good idea to me, Veeky Forums.

Other urls found in this thread:

thespacereview.com/article/3170/1
youtube.com/watch?v=lPG0hzoKIto
youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
youtube.com/watch?v=wcHD9AmkxA0
youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

SLS is a huge waste of money. Human spaceflight is a huge waste of money. On a per mass basis, unmanned probes return more science.

So humans should never leave Earth then?

>SLS is a huge waste of money
You could have stopped there.

70 ton payload for $2 billion is disgraceful

Does each unit cost 2 billion or is it only development costs so far?

SLS is the cheapest rocket NASA has ever developed.
SpaceX rockets are unsafe.
(NASA is currently investigating whether to delay their commercial crew contract until they can prove that they can launch without exploding)

Do you believe there will be more than one unit?

Manned spacecraft on totally untried launch vehicle? I see no possible downside.

>Solid rockets on a manned vehicle.

Oh for fuck's sake...

>SpaceX rockets are unsafe. (NASA is currently investigating whether to delay their commercial crew contract until they can prove that they can launch without exploding)

>But will launch men on their own rocket's first test flight?

IT JUST DON'T ADD UP!!!

You are avoiding the question, which makes me believe you had some sort of agenda and my question somehow wrecks it. I was only asking because I don't know. I also don't know the answer to your question.

I'm only into SpaceX stuff.

There's plenty of proof that spacex rockets explode frequently.

The US scrapped its space program because making war brings more short-time profits. Nobody is interested in your opinions anymore. China and Japan are now in charge of space technology.

Can't even test fire it because of the solid rocket boosters

SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
And 1 ground handling vehicle loss due to bad design decisions, plus doing new stuff to improve state of the art rocketry

>SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
lol

SpaceX rockets
are
safe

>SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
Emotionally tempting, factually wrong. They discovered that carbon composite overwrap and solid oxygen will explode when pressed together. It was an unknown unknown as far as failure modes go, but like so many others, seems obvious in hindsight.

ok

A strut failure resulting in a pressure vessel failure resulting in a stage collapse failure was a novel failure mode. The innovation tax is a bitch in rocket science, and the CRS-7 LOV wasn't a failure mode that could have been reasonably foreseen.

>a novel failure mode

sabotaged
payload would have survived if the regulatory jews allowed them to have the escape system enabled. If manned, the people in it would have lived.

that was a ground handling incident during testing, in retrospect carbon should not be in contact with oxygen.

Recommended article -
thespacereview.com/article/3170/1

And if you think SpaceX is bad...
> On December 6, 2010, a new version of the Proton booster lifted off from Baikonur; the rocket was an 8K82M DM-03. The new DM-03 version of the upper stage incorporated additional propellant tankage designed to allow longer burns. All the booster’s systems apparently worked properly, but the vehicle failed to attain orbit.
>The reason for the Proton failure was that the larger DM-03 tanks had been filled with propellants as if was the smaller version. In other words, they did not carefully measure the amount of propellants being pumped into the stage but instead just filled it up, leading to a stage that was much heavier than it should have been for that mission. Even that probably would have been okay if the trajectory had been shaped to make use of the additional propellant properly. If the Proton had flown a lofted trajectory, such as typically is done with the Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, then with aerodynamic drag and gravity losses reduced at the higher altitude the DM-03 could have done a longer burn up where it would have done some good. But the trajectory was not shaped to match the available upper stage propellant and thus, while everything ran just fine, the payload did not attain orbit.

>solids on manned vehicle

What's the problem? I don't see how there's much difference between exploding solid or liquid rocket as far as the crew stuck on top is concerned.

>What's the problem? I don't see how there's much difference between exploding solid or liquid rocket as far as the crew stuck on top is concerned.

When a liquid fuel vehicle explodes, it usually scatters the vapors over a wide area without ignition, as was seen with SpaceX's CRS-7 failure and the loss of Challenger in STS-51L. Solid fuel chunks will just keep burning and burning. It's generally expected that any solid fuel failure will fill a three mile wide area with enough burning material to catastrophically damage any parachute system that would save the lives of the astronauts.

Not germane to the point I was trying to make -- that requiring a system be proved safe before putting a crew in it is a damn fine idea, and exempting your own vehicle from that requirement is a recipe for disaster.

It's a road NASA seems to need to go down every so often, and relearn that "go feer" is not something that can be tolerated in space flight. The results are Apollo 1 and Challenger, and then they have some period of operating according to rational safety guidelines.

In addition to the point raised by the guy that already replied to you, some folks like an engine that can be shut down in an emergency

yes unless they pay out of their own pockets for the sake of tourism

>in retrospect carbon should not be in contact with oxygen.

Basic chemistry is a novel failure mode.

>we should be allowed to kill people because reasons
Why is it only aerospace shitters who say this?

Alternatively you should be put on an operating table and have your organs harvested and sold to help fund spaceflight.

Basic chemistry isn't basic when there isn't an obvious source of ignition. It required sub-chilled liquid oxygen that was close to freezing, an un-coated composite overwrap pressure vessel with aluminum liner, and high pressure helium to find this failure mode.

You can always count on spacex nutters to shit up every thread.

yea ok better to talk about this paper nasa rocket that won't fly for at least 3 years

Flight hardware is being built and the design is finalized, and Exporation Mission 1 is scheduled for September 2018.

Car manufacturers are also pretty big on the concept

drug companies kill hundreds of thousands without people even noticing

t. weebshit

>waste of money
So we lose some paper big deal, the fact we got humans to space is the important thing

SLS will fly before falcon heavy.

the falcon heavy will fly this year

A small group of people could achieve more on mars than a 100 rovers could.

>SpaceX rockets are unsafe.
They aren't. They upgrade and test new technology all the time, iirc the new high pressure helium tank was what caused the explosion.

He'll just have the fall back on older proven technology when launching humans.

>carbon composite overwrap and solid oxygen will explode when pressed together
Sorry? I thought it was because the composite overwrap allowed oxygen bubbles to form under it causing weak points in the high pressure tank.

Not on a per mass basis. If we launch the equivalent tonnage in unmanned probes we'd get more science done.

No, he's gonna make a whole new rocket that has another liner on the outside of the COPV tank, so that liquid oxygen isn't in contact with carbon

Yes ofc they'll explore new options. But for manned flight they'll most likely fall back on more flight tested technology before using it.

A PR disaster after killing astronauts is different than blowing up a 200mil satellite.

>Sorry? I thought it was because the composite overwrap allowed oxygen bubbles to form under it causing weak points in the high pressure tank.

The later analysis was that the aluminum liner shrank at a different rate from the COPV, creating voids which oxygen could make their way into. The oxygen then froze in the liner, potentially damaging the over wrap, but also a place where the increasing tank pressure during helium loading would squeeze the frozen oxygen. The carbon overwrap provided combustible material for the oxygen to react with, and rapid, unscheduled disassembly ensued.

But, to be fair, lunar surface sample return was much more successful with Apollo manned missions than all the probe attempts at the time.

There are advantages to a brain and some eyes on site, especially once your probe is far enough away to make real-time control from Urth impossible.

>rapid, unscheduled disassembly ensued.

An anomaly has happened...
BRFB...

You get such lovely euphemisms in rocketry.

Nope.

> (You)
>But, to be fair, lunar surface sample return was much more successful with Apollo manned missions than all the probe attempts at the time.
At the time, but not anymore.
>far enough away to make real-time control from Urth impossible.
Why do you need real time control for picking up rocks?

Apollo consumed a ridiculous amount of money.

Apollo cost $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars. That's 168 billion in current dollars. How many robots could we send to the moon for that money? What kinds of advancements in robotics would we develop in the process?

>going to Mars for science
This has been a meme since the Viking missions. There is no life (nor was there ever) there, there was once water there, the atmosphere is thin and there's no magnetic field.
Missions to Mars are excuses to lay excess grant money down, and to use government money to create jobs that look like they're useful.

Science helps us better understand our place in the universe.

Sure, Mars may not have life, but why does it not have life?

I see a member working on the science team of the landing site committee for Mars 2020, and let me tell you, there is still a shitload of science to be had.

Maybe not current life, maybe not even past life, but Mars is still geologically very interesting.

A boring example, but its unique regime of seasonally changing atmospheric density and grain size has produced unique dune formations that have never been predicted before.

>Science helps us better understand our place in the universe.
lmao what are you trying to say with this hippie shit?

>At the time, but not anymore

Manned missions: 2,415 samples weighing 380.96 kilograms (839.87 lb)

Unmanned missions: 3 samples returned with 326 grams (11.5 oz)

To date... Let me know when you guys catch up...

>Why do you need real time control for picking up rocks?

Watch how fucking carefully the guys running the probes have to be before moving their craft a few feet, very slowly. Contrast with footage of astronauts bounding around on the Moon. rooster-tailing their go-carts, looking at something and deciding at once whether it is worth sampling...

>How many robots could you send for that money?

Turns out, not that many. Sending probes does not create the excitement that enabled Apollo to be funded at that level.

They've probably spent over $20 billion in development costs so far, including what they spent under the "Constellation" program name.

They've been spending over $1.5 billion/year average since the program was started, and it's going to go up as they get closer to actually launching. I don't think it has any hope of getting down near $2 billion per launch. One estimate pushed early on was that it would cost $40 billion up to the fourth flight, which wouldn't happen until the mid-late 2020s (then, rather than being ready for routine flights, they'd need some redesign work, because they'll be out of leftover shuttle engines, and will have to manufacture new ones, which can't be the exact same because mumble mumble). $10 billion per flight is likely as good as it'll get.

Work on the shuttle successor has been underway since the mid-00s, but they still haven't static-fired more than three SSMEs together. Back during the shuttle program, they initially developed the SSMEs planning only to test-fire them singly, and assume three would work together on launch day. Later they admitted the necessity of testing them together, and when they first put three together, in the configuration that would actually be used on the shuttle, they shook each other apart, and the engineers had to go back to the drawing board.

They're just making excuses to push back the launch date by a few more years. There aren't many young people working on this. It's mostly old guys who know they'll be retiring any day now. They just want to putter around, keep collecting paychecks, and not get blamed for any catastrophes. It's better for most of them to just not launch, especially considering how likely it is that this cobble-job will blow up.

>the excitement that enabled Apollo to be funded at that level.
Apollo wasn't all that popular until they actually started landing on the moon.

It probably would have been cancelled if JFK hadn't been shot little more than a year after his big speech about it. He never liked the idea, or thought it was worth the money. His speech was just propaganda against the claim that Soviet communism was going to advance mankind faster than American capitalism.

OK, now show e a probe program that created that kind of national commitment, for any reason at all.

It wasn't the fact that it was a manned program, it was the fact that it was a rocket competition between nuclear superpowers, a kind of war substitute.

ICBMs were brand new, immature technology. Nobody, least of all the public, knew how a rocket war would play out. Would our missiles shoot down their missiles? Could we blow up their missile bunkers before they even launched?

A decisive demonstration of technological superiority could end a war before it even started. The side that believed it would lose a rocket war would be demoralized.

Besides that, was the sympathy of the scientists. If communism was perceived to be better for science than capitalism, the talent would likely flow toward the East.

Remember that the announcement of the Apollo Program followed and referenced the launch of Mariner II, which was coasting toward Venus and later achieved the first successful probe of another planet.
>Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America" and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
>The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the 40-yard lines.

JFK's point was to express confidence in the superiority of American technology. He actually hoped to back out of the crazy bullshit about a (perhaps technically feasible, but uneconomical and pointless overkill) moon landing later, once things calmed down, or even make it a longer-term joint mission with the USSR.

What the hell are they teaching you in school, sonny? I lived through that period. We were excited and pumped for the Moonshot. The whole freakin' country was united in its support.

It wasn't until we landed about four or five times in relatively quick succession that the liberals in particular started whining about "but money for the poor," and XVIII and above were canceled.

Reminder that the shuttle was crewed on it's first orbital flight.

And they got away with it. It didn't kill crews until later.

Getting away with a stupid idea one time is not a good justification for trying again.

It would be nearly impossible to cancel the first flight at this point and there's a very real possibility that there won't be a second. Putting a crew on the first rocket is a good PR move. especially if they keep the current flight plan. If NASA wants to avoid another reset on it's shuttle replacement and heavy lift vehicle plans they need every chance they can get get to make the program look good.

The white paint on pictures of the first shuttle always annoys me. It looks so wrong to someone who grew up only ever seeing the unpainted orange tanks.

it looks badass
>you are now aware that Columbia would still be in one piece if all of her tanks were painted like that

Solids are also A hell of alot more powerful, a liquid engine will be a more smooth flight while solids will make you feel like your about to go through the flight panel

I'm not saying the paint doesn't look great. It's just that the unpainted orange tank became so iconic.

>Putting a crew on the first rocket is a good PR move
Unless BOOM!

Then not so much.

The issue is that chance of BOOM! is higher on an untested rocket being launched for the first time.

The chance of boom is higher on the first flight, but I think the risk is worth the reward.

>>you are now aware that Columbia would still be in one piece if all of her tanks were painted like that
Yup. They stopped giving the foam a protective coating. That's the foam upwind of the brittle carbon-carbon shuttle wing leading edges during hypersonic flight. Things regularly happened like owls burrowing into the foam to make a nest.

"What are the odds that'll cause a problem? Like, one in a hundred? We're only doing four flights this year. It probably won't come up for decades!"

The public quickly got bored. So much so that the last several missions were cancelled and the public's disregard for it was even mocked in Superman II.

Well SLS has a launch escape system unlike the shuttle, so even in the case of catastrophic failure the crew should survive.

Plus Orion itself has already flown once on the Delta IV Heavy, and the RS-25 and RL-10 engines they're using have been flying for decades. Even the solid boosters are just an extended version of the boosters used with the shuttle.

>Even the solid boosters are just an extended version of the boosters used with the shuttle.
For all the advances you'd think there *should* be, I still chuckle (or did, when they went) at the Shuttle launches. Ever notice all the sparks shooting out of the side towers under the engine nozzles? The best analogy is... a lighted match. Yes, that's ignition!

>Orion itself has already flown once on the Delta IV Heavy
Some Orion hardware has already flown. It had only a passing resemblance to something fit to carry crew in.

>SLS has a launch escape system unlike the shuttle, so even in the case of catastrophic failure the crew should survive.
If the boosters blow up, chunks of burning solid fuel are likely to burn through the parachutes, causing the crew to fall to their deaths. This concern was one of the reasons Ares I was cancelled.

As for launch escape systems, only one of those has ever been used successfully (to save two flight crew). Another one started a fire on the pad, destroyed the rocket, and killed three ground crew. For all the expense put into this supposed safety system, they've been net negative in terms of human life. Both of these cases were on Soviet rockets.

The launch escape rocket has never been activated on an American manned flight or caused a loss of life, but the US had a similar experience, with one useful activation (Mercury-Atlas 3 -- it saved a capsule with "robot astronaut" during a launch failure) and one counterproductive activation (Mercury-Redstone 1 -- the launch escape system fired and left the capsule behind to activate its parachutes while still attached to the rocket).

All of this applies to spacex rockets + a higher failure rate

The technology has improved since then. It no longer make sense to send people.

The russians were able to accomplish their sample return missions with a fraction of the computing power we have today.

>> very slowly
rovers do not need to be fast. We can take our time and have all the best scientists on earth decide whether a rock should be brought home. However, we have the technology to make them fast, we had the technology to make them fast 10 years ago:
youtube.com/watch?v=lPG0hzoKIto

The Russian lunokhod was actually driven further than the lunar roving vehicle.

>a higher failure rate
Than what?

First of all, SpaceX hasn't had any man-rated flights yet. They've been doing a lot of semi-experimental flights, tweaking the vehicle and pad operations, with a certain amount of accepted risk because progress is important as they reach for reusability, improved performance, and lower-cost pad operations. A manned flight would be as conservative as it gets. Secondly, they've had one launch failure. That's not a rate. That's one failure. And it was one that would easily have been survivable by the capsule crew without depending on the launch abort system.

(And no, the more recent blow-up wasn't a launch failure, it was a loss of vehicle during preflight testing, the point of which is to catch problems before an actual flight. It's nothing to be proud of, but it's not a launch failure and was not something that could happen on a manned launch.)

>Robert Lightfoot
That's a fucking fake name and we all know it

>man-rated flights
what a meme
you really think extra inspections would have prevented either failure (it certainly wouldn't have prevented amos6 which would have been a guaranteed crew fatality incident)

>they've had one launch failure

Those sparks are there to burn off excess hydrogen that gets pushed out of the engines during the ignition process. They have nothing to do with actually starting the engine.

Watch any Delta IV Heavy launch and you'll see the giant fireball scorch the boosters just before it lifts off. With the shuttle they were more careful about the excess hydrogen, since it carries crew and the orbiter itself is somewhat delicate.

I really dont get people who think this was a thing. And the only reason i've heard of why this thing was "sabotaged" was either "jews" or ULA-memes

Is this how China does it?

2016:
>nasa doesn't do anything bold or risky anymore! they're getting left in the dust and have been stagnant for decades!
2017:
>WTF??? how could nasa take a risk like that? Those are people's lives at stake!
Reminder that Elon literally said that his ship would probably kill hundreds of the early travelers and everyone was A-OK with it.

The whole fucking country was walking around with Mercury and Gemini boners, Apollo was just the endgame. As soon as 11 landed it went downhill, with a slight peak at 13's "issues".

Why do you still come to Veeky Forums when better alternatives exist?

amos6 was a test fire, so no crew would have been in it
and if the crew HAD been in it, the dragon capsule would have easily carried them away

I've asked myself this so, so many times. Maybe i just like the constant FE, MoonHoax, Fuck/Kill/Marry Musk, Global WarmingHoax, MemeDrive and other similar threads that we have 15 of each day?

Why I enjoy punishing myself like this, i just dont know.

>the dragon capsule would have easily carried them away
baseless speculation

A bird flew between the camera and the rocket just before it exploded.
Some idiots latched onto the idea that the bird was actually a missile because it moved so fast. Not realizing the camera was like a mile away and zoomed in on the rocket, making the bird in the foreground appear to move quickly.

why say so?

>prove my unsubstantiated claim wrong please

well within the capabilities of the dragon to carry them away at 6 g's

>it certainly wouldn't have prevented amos6
That was caused by experimentation with new tanking procedures, and the loss of payload was caused by preflight testing (days before the planned launch) with the payload loaded, both of which absolutely wouldn't have been done on a manned flight.

You still don't get how experimental Falcon 9 is. It's a development platform for flyback reusability. They are constantly changing things and pushing hard for economy.

Any manned launch will not be experimental. It will be a proven configuration.

>would have been a guaranteed crew fatality incident
This is just you being a chimp. Even if there had been a manned capsule, it wouldn't have been seriously damaged until it fell to the ground. There was plenty of time for the launch escape system to kick in even if it had to be manually triggered, and the Dragon launch escape system should be considerably more reliable than conventional ones based on solid rockets, since the SuperDraco engines can be tested with a static fire before launch, and are in fact intended for routine use on landing.

They're going to extensively test Crew Dragon capsules hovering and landing on the same system used to rocket away from an exploding Falcon 9.

The crew would have 90+% survival probability in case of a failure on the pad. Probably 99+%.

...and here is what happens to Dragon 2 if anything goes seriously wrong with the Falcon 9 it's sitting on:
youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
youtube.com/watch?v=wcHD9AmkxA0

It gets out of town in a big hurry.

Failure on the pad is one of the worst scenarios, but there's also enough thrust for it to outrun Falcon 9 at any point during its launch, if there's some loss-of-control failure which prevents a main propulsion shutdown.

Here's the same system during a test of its hover capability, showing the fine control built into it:
youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI

This isn't a "light it and pray" single-use, emergency-only solid-fuel system like the one that'll be on Orion. These will be liquid-fueled engines that have been individually tested, static fired as an installed set, and refuelled for the flight, designed to be used on every flight and brought to such a level of reliability that they can be used for landing.

I want redditers to get the FUCK out

Jesus the pseudoscience bullshit is unreal in this thread