How do we go from this

You mean to this

Nice space dildos.

want more?

Because reusable everything and space stations make people go WOW right? If pic related happened and a moon station was made then yes, reusable everything would bring public attention a more monies, not low earth orbit snore fests.

M-maybe.

>with saturn shuttle we could have maintained the heavy lift of saturn v in addition to having the shuttle
it's just not fair

>space shuttle to the moon

I knew that episode of Jackie Chan Adventures was realistic!

If I recall correctly, the Saturn Shuttle configurations had fatal flaws that prohibited them from being viable, but for the life of me I can't remember the specifics. It looked cool, but something about the design didn't make it worthwhile.

Maybe the stress of the shuttle's weight and drag on the top of the SaturnV would have cause catastrofic failure? Although at first glance one would believe this could be solved by placing it at the bottom of the rocket instead of the center top.

It's probably something of that nature. If you're stuck placing the orbiter at the base, you instantly justify 90% of the Shuttle's design criteria.

But the Russian shuttle didn't even have boosters

Or am I missing something by that 90% figure?

Well theres no making a successful vehicle if you are always stuck with a 80 ton orbiter that needs hundreds of millions of dollars of refurbishment after every launch

They were on RP-1 though
not solids

Everything about Russia's shuttle was a better design than NASA, still kinda pointless though

>Going to space so elitists, politicians and billionaires can high-five each other

Seriously, what the hell is the point of all this when we have bigger problems down here on Earth? Sure, we need satellites, cellphones and everything and those are incredibly useful but going to the Moon, Mars and beyond is such a fucking waste of money. I get that you grew up with star wars and science fiction movies and these are cool things to do. It costs tens of BILLIONS of dollars for this fantasy.

Are people really this delusional?

it ditched all of its engines

If the Orbiter is the goal, the Shuttle architecture is basically one of the only ways to do it.

The Russian shuttle threw away the engines after every launch, which was less technically complex but not really "better" in light of the irrelevance of the mission profile of the orbiters themselves.

The buran only flew once.. and ofc the boosters were thrown away.

It did almost launch a bitchin' looking orbital space laser once. Almost.

>the moon base meme
maybe after mars

It only costs so much because the globalists and higher ups make it so. Do you really believe the F35 or the SLS reallty cost what they say they do?

wtf i hate inspiring generations of scientists now

black ppl all oppressed n sheeeit but whitey's on da moon!!!!

>new space race with multiple teams feverishly working to make reusable heavy-lift rockets and dreaming of space tourism, planetary colonization,and even asteroid mining

Fucking spectacular.

this is my favorite pasta

Do they just pick random numbers because it looks cool? Where's Falcon 6 or 7 or Saturn IV?

What happened to the design documents? Did they really not keep them?

The main engines too. On the Russian shuttle the main engines were attached to the external tank and were expended along with the tank. I know that they planned to eventually make the side boosters flyback and be reusable but I'm unsure if they ever had any such plans for the main engines.

Falcon 9 is named Falcon 9 because it has 9 Engines. Saturn 5 was named because it was the 5th design in the Series. Atlas V, Delta IV and Araine 5 are named because they're the 4th or 5th generation of their launch vehicle family.

>exploration is fucking useless
get back to the Fifteenth Century, faggot

>we need satellites, cellphones and everything
Guess where those originated, Sherlock.

The industrial logistics that can make Saturn V's no longer exists.
We're stuck here forever.

.
Pretty much this. It is just ridiculous how much such a rocket and it's components cost while the technology used is 50 years old. Look at what SpaceX did. They use technology commonly available and are therefore able to reduce the prices a lot.
NASA would be able to do the same and build a complete new rocket that's far cheaper. But that's not how public funded companies work.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. Of course SLS will cost much more than a falcon/kg to orbit, because it will launch something like once every year at best. Better pricing in privates comes mainly not from reuse (yet) but industrial methods: a factory making a lot of merlin engines will make them overall cheaper than making whole factories for a couple RS25 and SRBs. Same reason Ariane 6 is projected to be in the same price range as spacex without reusability. So making a big awesome nasa rocket will always be expensive unless you commercialize its launches. So far they haven't needed to because they have an ok amount of funds, whereas ESA for example needed ariane to be commercial because they could never afford to build rockets just for science and institutional

itt: idiots who think the only thing that matters is having an idiotic payload capacity.

the saturn V was an impressive rocket, sure, but with launch costs starting at 1.16 billion in todays dollars, it's completely worthless when most customers just want a car-sized box in space.
and for those who do want a heavy payload up there, falcon heavy and new glenn will soon have them covered for a lot less green.
go to the wiki pages of SV, Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9, and the Shuttle, work out the cost per ton into GTO and LEO, then come back to me with a valid argument

The documents aren't the point. We don't have the factories and tooling used to build the Saturn V anymore, also so much of the manufacturing process was manual labor that it would be difficult or impossible to replicate that process.

Now if we wanted to build a Saturn V 2.0 or something to that effect we could, but that would essentially be just developing new technology meant to replicate the old. The end result would look like a Saturn V and have similar performance, but the internals would be very different.

Rebuilding the Saturn V is the most stupid idea ever. The goal should be to build a new rocket with todays technology.
This would even be much cheaper.

Shuttle had a worse dollars-to-payload fraction than Saturn V, because it combined a very high expended hardware and operations cost with a shitty useful payload fraction. It also couldn't directly place any payloads onto geostationary transfer orbit.

Saturn V had a better cost per kg payload, but each launch was very expensive because of how large the rocket was and how much the hardware cost. Every part of the Saturn V required lots of manual labor to produce, and lots of time, thus it was expensive.

Falcon 9 costs $61.2 million to launch up to 22.8 tons into LEO, which works out to about $2,864 dollars per kilogram. Falcon Heavy will cost $90 million to launch up to 54.4 tons to LEO, which works out to a lower cost per kilogram of $1,654, nearly half that of the Falcon 9. This cost reduction is due in part to the high manufacturing volumes associated with each rocket, combined with the fact that the components of the rocket are designed to be easy to manufacture and are almost all produced under one roof as opposed to in separate facilities spread across the country. The entire Falcon family of rockets only uses one turbopump design, for example, and the use of spin forming rather than tubes makes the nozzles far cheaper to produce.

For a super-heavy lift vehicle, these same design principals of ease of manufacture, hardware commonality, and all-in-one factory production would lead to a significant drop in cost per unit.

I agree that it makes no sense to try to replicate the Saturn V. My point was that even if we wanted to start building new Saturn V rockets, we simply can't.

Who cares anyway nowadays? Blue Origin and SpaceX will build rockets far better than the Saturn V within 5 years AND start their own Mars missions.
NASA should be closed down. It has become nothing but a waste of tax payers money in the past 20 years. Too much political interests, too much buerocracy and not enough vision and can-do attitude.

>Falcon Heavy will cost $90 million to maunch up to 54.4 tons to LEO

That's actually wrong. Those numbers surprised me too at first, but turns out it's two different numbers. 54.4 tons to LEO, or 22 to GTO, is the heavy expendable configuration, for wich the price tag is still uncertain. However the $90 million version is the reusable one, wich loses a lot of performance due to boostback and gets down to 8 tons to GTO. It's the same with f9 actually, it can theoretically send over 8 tons to gto, but is set back to 5.3 to be able to land the booster

They don't have the funding to tool back up for Saturn production, so they are trying to get by with space shuttle parts. It's literally as simple as that. The funniest part is that there were actually a whole bunch of STS-based partially-reusable heavy lift vehicle designs floating around back in the 70s, but they killed all of them.

NASA should become more of an operator of facilities in orbit and on ground. Take some of the risk off the private enterprises that undoubtedly are streets ahead the rest.

I don't think they've outlived their role, all the while they take part in interesting shit like rosetta/philae, observatories and telescopes and the space station. But I do agree they're not the most agile organisation for groundbreaking research and development.

They would have killed for such 3d animation back in the 60s, no doubt. Too bad they only had a working heavy lift rocket.

>NASA should be closed down

Implying spacex are developing all their technology alone and they can build their own life support, scientific payload and probes.

>who is paying for spaceX

>rosetta/philae
that's ESA though

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding
a bunch of people. You're probably talking about how "hurr durr nasa is paying for spacex" but that's through contracts, meaning nasa is spending its money in a more rational way than building the same craft themselves (which they can't, in an as-economically viable way).

I stand corrected, and also suck cocks.

>>the moon base meme
>maybe after mars

Having a base on the moon makes Mars insanely easier.
A base on the moon could create fuel and other supplies, which in turn lower the number of launches from earth.

Prerequisites fusion reactors, son. Can't make current chemical rocket fuels from moonrock, and the infrastructure to send and build harvesters on Moon would probably cost as much as some of the ITS launches. Not to mention the prestige and public excitement around landing on a different planet for the first time will help the space effort immensely.

It will be the most televised and watched event in human history. Imagine how many feeds of video, text and audio you will have available and consider how much money will be generated from that.

I agree with you from an orbital scientific standpoint, but not from an economic or technological standpoint. A lunar base would lower the dV needed and thus the cost. But until reusable space tech is perfected, there's still too much risk and cost in trying multi-stage refueling from an untested source of untested fuel.

>Prerequisites fusion reactors, son
No it doesn't. Fission is entirely sufficient, certainly long enough to kickstart the production of solar power satellites.

Citation needed.

>implying making a several minute computer animation distracts or delays from the development of the vehicles that those videos are showcasing

Having a Moon colony (not a base, which wouldn't be able to supply anything) would make going to Mars slightly easier in terms of required mass launched from Earth, however since we don't currently have a Moon base, building one would require such a massive investment of time and money that simply building big rockets and going directly to Mars is far, far cheaper.

Saying colonizing the Moon would make Mars easier is exactly the same as saying colonizing Mars would make the Moon easier. It is simply a way of getting your destination explored and developed first, by framing it as a prerequisite to colonizing the other destination. There is no reason we can't do Mars first, or the Moon first, or both simultaneously, despite what anyone tells you.

At least we can all agree that 'visiting a near Earth asteroid on the path towards X' is a NASA meme, and would be a waste of time and resources that is a total side step away from colonizing space. Until we have a strong presence in space and building O'Niel cylinders becomes feasible there's no reason to send people to asteroids, and even then there's little justification for it.

>Imagine how many feeds of video, text and audio you will have available and consider how much money will be generated from that

please kill this meme, money generated by views on the Mars landing would not be funneled into whatever organization pulls it off, and even if it were there's no way it would offset the costs. Also, considering how fast public interest died during the Apollo era once they actually landed, the 'revenue stream' if you want to call it that would go from inadequate to essentially non-existent.

the fact is that the vast majority of people don't give a shit about space travel and will continue to not give a shit in the future.

>However the $90 million version is the reusable one

Citation needed, I've never seen anything from SpaceX saying that the Falcon Heavy price tag displayed on their website is for the reusable configuration.

Also, a Falcon 9 launch always costs the same (unless you factor in the cost of Dragon when they're sending stuff to the ISS for NASA, since NASA also pays for the vehicle), regardless of whether or not the booster is going to be recovered or expended during the flight.

I'm pretty sure the $90 million figure for Heavy is the price assuming all cores are expended, meaning the price would always remain $90 million if all three cores are expended, if only the center core is expended, or if all three cores are recovered. This would mean that SpaceX would still break even on a Heavy launch even if all the cores failed to land successfully, and it means that if all three cores are recovered they simply make a lot more profit on that launch than they would otherwise. It's just a safe business tactic really, rockets are not as reliable a airliners yet, so if you can ensure you won't operate at a loss while still undercutting the competition in price, then why not?

The biggest obstacle to Mars first right now is that we simply don't know how to do it. We simply don't have the necessary skills to slow down and soft land with precision the huge mass needed for a Mars mission which is 30 days at the least.

Those proposed vehicles, like the Shuttle C and the DIRECT/Jupiter lineup were not chosen of course but they didn't die there. They eventually were modified and chosen for the Constellation program, then later modified further and became the SLS after Constellation was cancelled.

SLS is essentially the culmination of decades of people who know launch vehicles trying to make a sensible rocket using Shuttle hardware as a selling point, vs political unwillingness to change and continuous setbacks and restarts in terms of administration goals.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Pricing_and_development_funding
>$90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016 (with no published price for heavier GTO or any LEO payload)

here is your citation. They are deliberatly ambigous on the website, but if you click on princing, written very small under the $90m tag is "up to 8.0mT to GTO".
spacex.com/about/capabilities
Next to "Performance" is a little, discrete *. Scroll down, and * actually means "Performance represents max capability on fully expendable vehicle"
Do your research.

>We simply don't have the necessary skills to slow down and soft land with precision

I would argue that we actually do have the technology. However, people generally don't include it as a viable option because it necessitates a very large launch vehicle because it requires a lot of mass. If we ignore trying to minimize mass, just to take a look at all options, then the one that immediately sticks out as the best is simple retro-propulsion. You start in orbit, you dip into the atmosphere to bleed off speed, and then when the timing is right you fire your engines to slow from supersonic velocity down to a few dozen meters per second to steer yourself downwards the last kilometer or so, then touch down at

>This is future stuff, but it isn't sci-fi stuff
this is precisely what I meant. Right now not only have we not tried supersonic retropropulsion, and the amounts of extra fuel per kg to mars surface makes a mars mission very expensive until we develop better ideas (the lifting body you mentionned?) or make these worthwile. On the other hand moon landings, we can do no prob (and we descelerate from a much lower velocity).

>Do your research.

Stop being hostile and fuck off.

Since the Falcon 9 numbers also show that disparity, wouldn't that mean that every expendable Falcon 9 launch so far has actually cost more than the $62 million they advertise? I'm pretty sure the disparity comes from the fact that the payload attach fitting can currently only handle up to about 10 tons, which would imply that for heavier payloads there would be an added cost for a custom PAF that would be able to handle the weight.

This would mean that, for example, and interplanetary probe launched with Heavy that only weighed 5 tons would still have a launch cost of $90 million, despite expending all cores. However a payload with a mass of 15 tons going on to GTO or LEO would cost $90 million + $X million, where X is equal to the cost of developing and manufacturing a stronger, custom PAF for the launch, regardless of how many cores can be recovered during the launch. This is similar to how a Dragon flight to the ISS costs $62 million for the Falcon 9 + $X million where X is equal to the cost of the Dragon capsule, despite the fact that the first stage can easily be recovered during a Dragon launch to the ISS.

This makes perfect business sense to me. Of course the added cost of the PAF skews the $/kg payload numbers, but even only considering the ~10 ton limit with the current PAF, it still works out to about $6200 per kilogram for the Falcon 9. It's important to note that, aside from maybe the Saturn V/Apollo stack, no launch vehicle is ever loaded to its max payload limit. The maximum payload limit comes from a basic calculation of a rocket's deltaV when loaded with mass until that deltaV becomes equal to the minimum amount required to reach whatever example orbit you choose. In real life it would be pretty much impossible to actually max out the payload of a rocket for a given orbit and actually make that orbit. Thus, the actual $/kg payload number varies significantly across payloads.

>the amounts of extra fuel per kg to mars surface makes a mars mission very expensive

Consider reusable launch vehicles and the added mass can be accounted for without increasing the price to what a smaller mission would cost given an expendable launch vehicle.

SSRP has been done, although the vehicle doing it (the Falcon 9 first stage performing a reentry burn in a Mar-equivalent regime) was not taking advantage of the shock front that can be created if the engine is small enough; the stage was simply slowing down with rocket power. Personally I think SSRP may be useful for medium and heavy Mars probes, using a small amount of propellant and a tiny engine pointing into the shock front during reentry to expand the shock front and increase drag, but for larger missions it makes sense to just use a bigger rocket and use it to slow down directly.

Lifting body reentry vehicles have been done, for example ESA's IXV technology demonstrator vehicle. The principal advantage of a lifting body vehicle is that it can be scaled up far more than a capsule, because of the superior relationship between surface area and mass of the lifting body. This relationship can be further improved by decreasing the mass density of the vehicle by making it bigger and having its propulsion system do double duty, using most of the propellant to leave Earth and therefore perform entry at Mars with mostly empty tanks and a very good lift to weight ratio. The remaining fuel would be then used to land on the surface.

Landing on the Moon is much simpler, yes, but by necessity requires more mass than even the direct propulsion landing option on Mars. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, your landing craft needs at least 1730 m/s of deltaV in order to land from a 100km circular orbit. Comparatively, despite having a higher orbital velocity, a craft landing on Mars can make use of the air to slow down and only needs to have a few hundred meters per second of deltaV minimum in order to land.

Although I hadn't considered the PAF issue, to my belief Ariane5 ECA does fly at max payload with the sylda. If it were the SOLE issue in raising the capability x2.8 for almost the same price tag they would have made it their main goal as it would ensure market domination, and would probably have figured it out by now. However, I have a hard time believing that this vehicle could launch 22 tons to GTO whilst landing 3 boosters (and getting down to $1600/kg to LEO?!). Either their projected price includes profit from reusability thus lowered payload, or their reusability is pointless and the rocket is insanely profitable when expendable.

Nothing that can't be solved with a bit more delta-v. Time to dig out them N-Thermal Rockets. Call them eco-friendly since they don't waste useful oxygen by burning in it in SPACE and people will love it.
That should give the martian payload a bit more breathing space.

I actually forgot a detail, lifting body mars entry is probably not possible, because of earth rocket size constraints. You would need to either make it really small to fit in a heavy lifter's fairing, or make a shuttle style launch, which sounds quite impractical for Mars. I guess you could assemble stuff in orbit, but it does add a lot of mission complexity

make materials strong enough to survive the heat in a nuclear rocket engine, and not only will we have super efficient rockets but also a gateway to ssto tech

Worst post in Veeky Forums history

An expendable Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX about $40-45 million, incrementally. This doesn't include their development or fixed costs, so they've been operating on quite a slim markup, depending on reusability to eventually make it profitable. With a billionaire behind it and sweetheart contracts from NASA, it's sustainable as an expendable, but it'll never be a business success.

That's why they limit payloads at the advertised price to those consistent with reuse.

For Falcon Heavy as an expendable, the margin is even slimmer. They've basically added the incremental manufacturing cost of the side-boosters, or even a little less, to the cost of the F9 launch. They're really depending on at least reusing the side boosters.

Payloads more than those advertised as consistent with the advertised price have to be specially negotiated (i.e. tens of millions of dollars more).

>But the main issue is budget, and NASA's prime directive getting changed by the short sighted executive branch every 4 years.

fucking this. you guys have no clue how wasteful your government is and what the culture inside these organizations is like.

there are good people, but there are also whole groups of guys that are just looking for some easy cheesy boondoggle project to milk a paycheck out of.

its called white mans welfare for a reason and it needs to stop. the mission scope of NASA needs to be narrowed and refined so faggots can't allocate funds for their retarded time wasting (((research)))

>They don't have the funding to tool back up for Saturn production, so they are trying to get by with space shuttle parts. It's literally as simple as that.
No it isn't. It would have been cheaper, faster, and produced better results to tool back up for Saturn V production (they even did most of the work of redesigning the F1 and J1 engines for modern production, and incorporating them into the SLS design has been in and out of the plan), but then some of the shuttle contractors would be left out, and production facilities would likely be moved around, out of some electoral districts.

SLS is political as fuck. It's all about pork.

>Either their projected price includes profit from reusability thus lowered payload, or their reusability is pointless and the rocket is insanely profitable when expendable.

SpaceX has historically been focusing on lowering the cost of expendable rockets more than building reusable rockets, which is why Falcon 9 started out as a cheap expendable rocket and is now becoming a cheap partially reusable launch vehicle. Going forwards they appear to be shifting towards producing highly reusable rockets (ITS) instead of making them as cheap as possible. This makes sense, because if they tried doing it the other way around, their vehicle would have been very expensive to fly until the started nailing down reusability, which is not a good business model for a startup company.

Having a cheap rocket does not mean that making it reusable is meaningless, in fact it simply means they can make much more profit per launch while still having a lower price than the competition. For example, maybe a Falcon Heavy can be launched fro $90 million in a fully expendable mode and still make profit, BUT the margin would be slim. The advantage there would be that since your price remains low, more people will buy your launch service, which keeps your production volume high and your overall cost lower. However, recovering the side boosters or all boosters while keeping the price at $90 million means that suddenly you're making much more profit for the same launch cost, helping your business by making more money without deterring customers by changing the launch price to keep that high profit margin even on fully expendable launches, which would necessitate a higher price.

In short, I think SpaceX is planning on taking a hit on profits for expendable Heavy flights in order to ensure more orders for Heavy launches which can recover boosters and thus return much higher profits.

>I see the future.
>You see dildos.

We've already built and tested NTRs, in the 50's. They run at a cooler temperature than conventional chemical rockets but since their exhaust is so light their Isp outstrips even the best possible chemical rockets by about 2x. The tradeoff is comparatively low thrust, but in space absolute thrust matters far less than Isp.

SSTO is a meme, you can get better performance and a much more cost effective launch system by using a reusable lower stage and a reusable upper stage to launch payloads, plus you don't need extreme advances in materials and propulsion technology.

>retarded time wasting (((research)))

True, NASA directives are haywire, but if you give in to factions "research is bullshit, only exploration matters" then it's formally the same as "exploration is useless money wasting, only earth observation matters"

You don't need to make it fit in a fairing, it's already aerodynamic anyway and doesn't have wings to mess with the center of lift/drag, so you can just put it on top of the stack with an interstage fairing between the launch vehicle and the Mars EDL vehicle. Again, combining the EDL vehicle with the Mars transfer stage makes the EDL vehicle better at performing reentry, because it has a lower overall density and can slow down more easily in the upper atmosphere of Mars.

Obviously this would require a dedicated system but for landing heavy things on Mars a dedicated system makes a lot of sense. The launch vehicle would consist of a (preferably reusable) lower stage, a (preferably reusable) second stage, and the Mars EDL vehicle itself, which would use its own propellant to burn onto a Mars intercept, then use the atmosphere at Mars to slow down, making a final landing burn using the last bit of fuel left in the tanks. The payload bay would contain whatever you wanted to land on Mars, be it a habitat module or roving vehicle that astronauts could drive around, bulk solar panels, or whatever.

i don't think research in general is bullshit. the fact that the mission statement of NASA is so wide that virtually anything can get underneath its funding umbrella is whats idiotic.

i've worked for various federal organizations and the ones that were the best stewards of taxpayer dollars had a very specific wheelhouse that they stayed in.

You're right.

>muh 90 day report

That fiasco has colored any manned mission to anywhere as impossibly expensive, and it's a result of old space programs desperately trying to justify their existence.

>but it is VERY important we study what zero G does to cancer because that could definitely lead us to a cure :^)

A lot of NASA enabled ""research"" is pretty bullshit honestly.

Thanks for the more in-depth margin part I hadn't though about.
However what i meant is that unless an expendable 90m Falcon Heavy launch is made at a loss, the announced payload capacity would make insanely cheap, and nobody could compete. That is why I find it unlikely for it to be possible, and that the 90m price factors in reusability, which makes sense: after all the beast has three f9 cores so you could expect it to cost at least twice as much.
Otherwise making a profit is easy:
Suppose a 90m, 22.2 tons to GTO, fully expendable FH launch makes no profit, and just balances expenses. Now make that launch price to 150m. You are still OVER 1.5x cheaper than current f9 per kg to gto (63m/5.5t = 11500$ per kg for f9 VS 150m/22.2t = 6750$ per kg to gto for fh), and just made 60m pure profit on a single launch.
If that was the actual math they would do it. It's not, and that's why the 90m launch factors in projected reusability, giving spacex a vehicle in a similar price range as f9, but also allowing them to target mars and the moon in an expendable launch if they want to.

I want to step in on this quite granular cost discussion and point out that the situation with the first SLS launches will be "We can send up a 70 ton payload for $2 billion"

Which is fucking embarrassing isn't it?

>Suppose a 90m, 22.2 tons to GTO, fully expendable FH launch makes no profit, and just balances expenses. Now make that launch price to 150m. You are still OVER 1.5x cheaper than current f9 per kg to gto (63m/5.5t = 11500$ per kg for f9 VS 150m/22.2t = 6750$ per kg to gto for fh), and just made 60m pure profit on a single launch.
>If that was the actual math they would do it.
It's probably about what they would charge for a launch that pushed the limits of what Falcon Heavy can do as an expendable.

And yet, the $90m price tag is probably still providing a small profit. So why limit the payload and keep the price so low? Because the recovery attempt is *also* a profit, just a non-monetary kind. These would be very expensive experiments without a customer to pay for the launch.

Remember how early they set that price. They weren't counting on reuse working. They were counting on being able to make a recovery attempt, to assist in developing reusability. Besides that, they still don't *know* how much money reuse can save. They certainly didn't know years ago. They hope they can eventually sell a reusable launch for around $10 million, but that's if everything works perfectly, they can't know when that'll be possible while they're still developing the tech.

Another important thing to consider is the market. Most customers only want to launch about 5-7 tonnes to GTO, so the excess capacity isn't a selling point. And SpaceX isn't all that established, they still have reliability and schedule issues. They needed a big price advantage to win lots of contracts.

It's more like $1 billion, but yeah it's pretty sad. The full heavy cargo version of SLS will be able to send 50 tons to Mars though, so that's cool.
Honestly I can't think of any other argument than "it's a big and cool rocket so I want to see it fly" (which is true btw), or maybe "the SR25 is a really good engine so don't let it die"

>the situation with the first SLS launches will be "We can send up a 70 ton payload for $2 billion"
It's really more like "we can send up a 70 ton payload for $10 billion".

You have to factor in those development expenses. They only get 4 or 5 launches before they run out of scavenged shuttle engines and have to go back to the drawing board to redesign it to work with new engines, and they've already committed to using two just for test launches (unmanned and manned).

Someone did the math on it honestly early on: the program would cost $40 billion for four flights, completed around 2025. And after that, there's no reason to believe the option of developing it for further use will have any value. So $10 billion per launch.

If they insisted, like the shuttle, on ignoring economics and not doing anything interesting in space for several decades, *then* they might get it down to $2 billion per launch.

>Remember how early they set that price

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Pricing_and_development_funding
>with announced prices for the various versions of Falcon Heavy priced at $80–125 million in 2011,[28] $83–128M in 2012,[29] $77–135M in 2013,[50] $85M for up to 6,400 kilograms (14,100 lb) to GTO in 2014, and $90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016

So... how early?

>It's more like $1 billion
When people are claiming things like "it will cost $1 billion" or "it will cost $500 mlilion" they're not really talking about cost. They're talking about the amount they can save by not doing a launch. The SLS program can launch maybe once or twice per year, but it'll go on costing billions of dollars per year whether or not it's launching, just to keep the option open.

SLS is a low-launch-rate rocket with large fixed costs and large development costs. If you're going to amortize those development costs honestly, you've got to account for the time value of money and charge interest on the investment for as long as you're launching rockets. By the time it starts launching once a year, $1 billion/year won't even pay the interest on the development funds, let alone pay anything toward the fixed costs and the incremental costs of actually building and launching a rocket.

>spacex can take over as our primary launch service provid-

>Most customers only want to launch about 5-7 tonnes to GTO, so the excess capacity isn't a selling point

I don't agree, as not only does Ariane fly 2 regular 5 tons satellites, but FH isn't projected to fly much more than twice a year, and F9 would remain a workhorse for single satellite launches. This would make finding multiple clients on a single FH launch less difficult than it is for europe, and they would just need to make a payload adapter.

To be fair, every launch company went through that at some point. Hell, the most reliable rocket on the market started off trying to make 90° adjustments to its trajectory, providing one of the most majestic failures ever.

>you can't trust private companies to do NASA's important wor-

>failures happen therefore we should close down everyone except spacex that way we are always grounded 6 months out of the year

>amortize those development costs
Why would SLS do that?
It was never meant to launch at a profit.

>>$85M for up to 6,400 kilograms (14,100 lb) to GTO in 2014
>>$90M for up to 8,000 kilograms (18,000 lb) to GTO in 2016
These are basically the same price, and the low end has been in the same approximate range since 2011.

They definitely didn't have confidence in reuse working on their first Falcon Heavy launch back in 2011, and were taking into account the high probability that they'd lose all launched stages.

By 2016, they were talking about discounts for launching on a previously-flown stage.

They're not going to lose money if they do a Falcon Heavy launch for $90 million and don't get any of the stages back.