50 years after the Apollo program, NASA will have a rocket that costs twice as much per launch as a Saturn V...

1 Trillion over 50 years of its life, and each plane costs less than its inferior counterparts

>Only with development costs included
With development costs included SLS approaches $5 billion per launch

>F1 development started in the 50s
January 10th, 1962
>SLS development started in 2011
And it won't be functional until well into the 2020s

>SLS to LEO: 105.2 mT
70 mT

>With development costs included SLS approaches $5 billion per launch
With development costs included, Saturn V is $3.8 billion per launch and SLS is infinity per launch. SLS has cost $19 billion so far to develop, but Saturn V cost $50 billion.

>F1 development started in the 50s
January 10th, 1962
"The F-1 was originally developed by Rocketdyne to meet a 1955 U.S. Air Force requirement for a very large rocket engine."
"Test firings of F-1 components had been performed as early as 1957."

>SLS development started in 2011
First launch is 2019

>70 mT
For the version that will only fly once for a test flight (that won't even be going to LEO anyways)
Might as well cite Falcon 9's payload at 5 tons to LEO by your logic

>the first launch counts for time but not payload and F-1 development counts toward the Saturn V but Constellation development doesn't count towards the SLS
I wonder how many goalposts you can carry to TLI on your meme rocket :^)

inflation

do you even capitalism ?

>inflation
Buddy if you didn't account for inflation, the Saturn V would be 1/10th of the cost instead of 1/2

Practically nothing was developed under Constellation.

When you talk about 50 years are you talking about when the last of the 2,500 F-35 ordered were delivered?

>American spends 22 trillion dollars to feed, clothe and house niggers

What? USA estimated GDP for this year is only 17 trillion, how can they expend more than the whole country produces?

Since 1964

lmgtfy.com/?q=war on poverty

50 years meaning the entire operational life of the aircraft line, including development and procurement

And absolute (not relative) poverty reduced dramatically, while now the world is more military unstable than 50 years ago.

>senate launch system
Its not like MemeX is any better but NASA still wastes money like a teenage girl

1. This is exaggeration.
2. Reasons for this are fundamental: open media, risk aversion culture and politics. The Congress doesn't care about space at all, but cares a lot about jobs and pork, specificially for alabama in the manned space program case. Excessive media hype for every little thing led to risk mitigation attempts and extremely rationalized perfectionism, which stalled almost every attempt at manned space program, which gave rise to bureaucracy and illusion of something being done.

>>Saturn V development time: six years
>F1 development started in the 50s
>>SLS development time: 12 years (projected)
>SLS development started in 2011
RS-25 development started in 1970. Apples-to-apples.

...and SLS wasn't a new program in 2011, that's just when they settled on a final configuration for Ares V and renamed it to SLS.

...besides which, there's good reason to expect SLS to take 12 years for 2011. EM-1 isn't going to be the complete SLS, it'll be a development test flight with a cobble-job Delta upper stage they'll never use again. For EM-2, the first flight of the complete SLS with a real upper stage, they're talking openly about a possible 2023 launch date.

>Here's some actual numbers:
Those numbers are as fake as your development time claims, though.

what is the point of the SLS?

NASA just said they don't have the funding to go to Mars.

They don't have a moon lander.

You only need a Falcon 9 for ISS. A Falcon Heavy can put you around the moon.

NASA has no plan on how to land on Mars and get back.

Exaggeration, Inflation and the fact NASA's biggest is no longer space exploration but instead about sourcing wing nuts from Congressman Dipshit's district for 3x the price and half the quality because Dipshit wants to run as a Job Creating Space candidate next election.

and being used as a general catchall science department for the government.

NASA shouldn't be doing climate and weather science on earth. Except when it is related to make things that fly. NOAA should be doing the climate and weather research.

>what is the point of the SLS?
It's pork. Same reason the shuttle program was continued so long after it was obvious it had failed in its goals and was grossly uneconomical: once the program started paying so much to so many people, they exerted political influence to keep that money coming.

It all makes sense when you realize that the flow of money for the shuttle program is still going to the same people at approximately the same rate, just under a new name. That flow is the point, not any actual use they might get out of the rocket and capsule.

the shuttle could actually do things beyond putting shit into orbit.

even if it was too expensive for the original intentions. we would have lost hubble and building the ISS would have been harder, longer and more expensive.

While I get why it would be more appropriate for NOAA to do the climate and weather science NASA does, let's be honest here. NOAA is never going to get the same level of funding for such projects as NASA could get and the real reason some people want to shift them to NOAA is to effectively kill the programs.

>F1 development started in the 50s
By that logic SLS development time will be ~40 years because RS-25 and SRB development started in the 70s.

>>For the version that will only fly once for a test flight (that won't even be going to LEO anyways)
Block 1 will fly EM-1, EM-2 and europa clipper.

...

>the shuttle could actually do things beyond putting shit into orbit.
True, but it couldn't do any things that couldn't be done with other combinations of launch vehicles and spacecraft. Project Gemini did rendezvous, docking, and spacewalks with a small, simple 2-stage rocket with a 3.5 tonne payload to LEO, a system under one tenth the size of the shuttle.

>even if it was too expensive for the original intentions. we would have lost hubble and building the ISS would have been harder, longer and more expensive.
Both are false. First of all, fixing the Hubble through use of the space shuttle saved no money over building a second Hubble. There were five Hubble-related space shuttle launches, costing $7.5 billion, which was most of the money spent on the Hubble.

The choice of the space shuttle to launch the Hubble was inappropriate and inconvenient. At roughly 11 tonnes, it didn't need the shuttle's payload capacity, and could have flown on a Titan rocket. The launch of Hubble, in final form, was delayed four years by the Challenger disaster. They spent about $300 million just storing it during this period. The original cost-to-launch estimate for the Hubble was $400 million. It should have been a much less expensive project, providing better results years earlier, if not for the kind of thinking that put it on the space shuttle and used the shuttle to service it.

The story of the ISS is similar. To begin with, the determination to use the shuttle as America's manned vehicle caused the neglect and loss of Skylab, a roughly equivalent practical value to the ISS (and in some ways superior). Consequently, America went from 1974 to 2001 without having American astronauts on an (even partially) American space station brought by an American launch vehicle. ISS, essentially a Mir derivative, is pointlessly oversized, but without making it so, they could have found no reason to involve the shuttle, and thereby make it absurdly expensive.

SLS development started with the constellation program in 2005
You also have to include all the other spending on useless shit designed only to work with the SLS, like Orion

>the shuttle could actually do things beyond putting shit into orbit.
it was a jack of all trades, and a master of none. Poor thermal balance, beta angle/insolation shenanigans, fragility, complexity, costs etc crippled its use immensely. A fleet of smaller specialized spacecraft could do all this much better. Specificially, Apollo with a specialized airlock module could be used to repair Hubble without needing an xbox hueg orbital spaceplane.

>Block 1 will fly EM-1, EM-2 and europa clipper.
No it won't. Block 1 is a one-off flight test article, which will be used only for EM-1, which is purely a test flight for SLS and Orion. It won't have the SLS upper stage, but a Delta upper stage.

Block 1B is the first production version, and will be the first complete SLS. I would give even odds that it actually launches. The political forces pushing for it are powerful, but it's likely that Falcon Heavy will be upgraded to outperform it in multiple-launch architectures costing under 10% of even the lowest marginal cost estimates of SLS (and under 1% of the total-cost reality of an SLS flight) years before it flies.

Block 2 is a pipe dream. It's not conceivable that it will ever fly.

>building the ISS would have been harder, longer and more expensive
complete bullshit. A light tug (maybe even reusable) with a station-based robotic arm could have been used for delivering and berthing USOS passive modules and truss structures as well, maybe requiring to be side strapped on a rocket (or even without that), and it would be cheaper and faster than with space shuttle. Focusing on the shuttle made america lose the race for an orbital station, in the first place.

NASA is a vehicle for congressmen's pork barrel spending, not a vehicle for producing results. It's just a regional welfare conduit. I live in Norfolk, VA and the huge naval base is the same. Legislators fight to keep the whole fucking atlantic fleet here, even though the military knows that it makes 'murica more vulnerable to Russian/Chinese ICBM attacks. Gotta keep other people's tax money flowing to your constituents.

>Block 2 is a pipe dream. It's not conceivable that it will ever fly.
Nope, they've gone too far to just drop it. Key parts (IVF, engine, control systems etc) are already designed or implemented.

Anyone talking about the SLS is still banking on SpaceX failing to ramp up their launches like they want.

Are you nuts? No the SLS is not going to exist for another decade, it'll be cancelled THIS YEAR probably.

>they've gone too far to just drop it.
No, any actual launch of Block 2 is beyond the planning horizon.

The reason they're talking about it like it's a real thing and spending R&D resources on it is that Congress mandated that SLS would have a higher performance than Saturn V, so to pretend to be in compliance with that law, NASA has to make a show of trying to meet that goal.

It's the same sort of thing where they're throwing together a wasteful launch without the real upper stage for EM-1. Congress mandated that SLS (and Orion) should fly by the end of 2016, so NASA planned to throw together a cobble-job version for an unmanned test... then the schedule slipped.

It's because NASA got this law under the Obama administration:
nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf

Obama's style was to sort-of-but-not-really comply with the law. Instead of going back to Congress and saying, "I can't sign this, NASA can't meet these requirements." he just had NASA do it half-assedly.

There's other stuff in there too, like the requirement that SLS/Orion be capable of ISS resupply. NASA didn't even bother to pretend they were working on that.

which means no EVAs until you launch a module that can be lived in and has the EVA suits and air lock.

>SLS is not going to exist for another decade, it'll be cancelled THIS YEAR probably.
I don't think it'll be cancelled at least until Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy are operationally mature, and Dragon carries men around the moon before Orion even goes unmanned.

Possibly they'll also demonstrate a way to use Falcon Heavy to launch larger beyond-LEO payloads than SLS can handle before it's cancelled. The simple thing to do is launch an Earth-departure stage separately from the payload, as Ares V was supposed to do. They can do that with minimal modifications.

Doing the math on that: first they launch a 45 tonne payload to LEO, then they launch an upper stage to dock with it. The upper stage should mass roughly 75 tonnes, with a bit over 70 tonnes of propellant. The total departure mass will be 120 tonnes. For a 3 km/s TLI burn, with the Merlin 1D Vacuum+ engine's Isp of 348s, this gives a 50 tonne dry mass, as much as the Saturn V could launch.

You might dispute that Falcon Heavy can launch 70 tonnes propellant to LEO, when they claim a payload to LEO of 63.8 tonnes. I'm assuming they'll have one more performance uprate to announce, once the Block 5 hardware is flying, but also this will be a mission without the non-payload mass and drag of a 5-meter fairing.

You might also wonder how, even with two launches, Falcon Heavy could compete with Saturn V, which had a lox/h2 departure stage. Mass efficiency is a major factor. The Falcon Heavy upper stage is under 5 tonnes dry, whereas the Saturn V departure stage was nearly 15 tonnes. The J-2 engine also had a relatively low specific impulse of 421s.

My estimates may be a touch optimistic, but it seems clear that a two-launch FH mission will outperform SLS to the moon, and with the light Dragon capsule, will be suitable for Apollo-like missions using conventional space-storable propellants, unlike the weak SLS / heavy Orion combination.

It happened because NASA back in the day literally feared for their lives that the USSR would be the first to militarize space. Nothing quite says motivation like being in second place in the race to survival.

On the contrary, it's government contracting. The SLS is made to use space shuttle engines and space shuttle SRBs so they can keep using the same contractors.

...and there's an even higher-performance Falcon Heavy option, if they pursue a Raptor-powered upper stage with some of the ITS technology.

ITS is designed for in-orbit refuelling with long-term propellant storage. However, it's obviously a major development project, involving a huge new booster, major pad upgrades, etc.

Far easier is to build a single-Raptor, 5-meter-diameter variant which can launch on Falcon Heavy, either as an upper stage or simply as a payload, then load and fuel it to capacity with more launches (about eight launches in total, with reuse of all three lower stages, so total launch cost should be under half a billion dollars).

With this, much larger Earth-departure missions can be assembled, up to about triple the capacity of Saturn V. It also enables the use of the efficient Raptor engine for landing on the moon (the de-orbit burn, which is most of the delta-v; there would still need to be separate landing thrusters, even just SuperDraco could be used for this) and returning to Earth.

They could land about 60 tonnes payload (75 tonnes total) on the moon, without developing a separate moon lander. This is enough to land a Dragon capsule and enough propellant to return it directly to Earth, plus 20 tonnes of equipment and supplies for use on the moon. By comparison, including the astronauts, the loaded Apollo Lunar Module had only about a tonne of mass that wasn't part of either the descent or ascent stage.

This is also a suitable platform for reusable upper stage development.

>central planner fucks up and accidentally downgrades technology
>central planner fucks up and overspends while doing this.
>central planner is using other people's money and is virtually unfireable
>exactly the bullshit you should expect from the government
>DAE hate evil capitalism lmao

This.

That is exactly what capitalism is. There is no "government" in the USA, but there is Lobbyism.

ditch shuttle boosters and strap a bunch of falcon 9 block 50 boosters around the core. then we can see an SLS take off and 6 boosters land.

in fact we just ditch the SLS. go straight to Falcon Heavy and ITS for manned space flight beyond earth orbit.

Socialists always say this kind of shit where they pretend they are anti establishment but then they call for an economic system that requires an extremely powerful and centralized institution to run everything. When your clubhouse finally seizes the means of production, how is this not the ultimately monopoly on literally everything? Aren't monopolies the thing that you people keep giving capitalism so much shit for?

monopolies only exist through government intervention.

And the worst kinds of monopolies are the ones that control really important shit. A monopoly on literally all production in the hands of "the people" aka The Party aka the government would be and has been a shit show.

This is probably the most false statement ever made on Veeky Forums, and that's saying something

>...and there's an even higher-performance Falcon Heavy option, if they pursue a Raptor-powered upper stage with some of the ITS technology.

isn't the USAF already paying into the development of that?

how can monopolies exist in a free market and no state actor to coerce competition away?

someone will compete.

Because the monopoly itself coerces competition away. If it has an unfair advantage, nobody will compete. Some will try, and they will fail.

It may be false in the way that he meant it (I assume he's talking about regulations) but it ends up being true one way or another. Imagine owning a monopoly without the law protecting your claim to your property. Without government, maintaining a monopoly would require that you hire your own private police force. Ultimately there is a reason we fund the protection of property rights using tax money because otherwise it's harder in general to own things.

It depends on how unfair of a situation we are talking about. If we assume that we have a functioning legal system, there really isn't a lot that monopoly can do to beat competition besides just improving their product. Monopolies are known for gaming the system with unjust lawsuits and unfair regulations, but the fault of this should be put on the system they are exploiting more than anything else.

Robert Nozick, is that you?

Nah, unfair monopolies can happen lots of backwards ways. I know one of the obvious examples was AT&T's case. They bought up electric companies to subsidize electricity to themselves, but profit off of their competitor's operations. There's simply nothing competition could do to compete with that. It happened a lot back in the day. Manufacturers would buy up their raw material suppliers to hog it all.

That's what the Air Force funded Raptor development for (at least officially), but SpaceX has only said that they'll develop a Raptor upper stage for F9/H if a customer funds it.

Their only announced Raptor plan is ITS.

>They bought up electric companies to subsidize electricity to themselves, but profit off of their competitor's operations. There's simply nothing competition could do to compete with that.
They could have built their own generating capacity, unless the government was interfering with that.

Cornering the market is a real problem with capitalism, especially when it comes to buying all the natural sources for something, but you can't corner the market for long in something anyone can build.

if a resource is cornered, then competitors will develop a substitute once it is economical.

or the market is free enough for foreign competition.

>22 trillion dollars to feed, clothe and house niggers

>medicaid and medicare is feeding, clothing, and housing niggers
>social security, which requires you to work, is feeding, clothing, and housing niggers
>niggers, which are 13% of the population, are somehow a majority stakeholder in our social welfare system

yeah, nah. most of that social welfare money is spent on aged white people.

That's a nice, tidy, convenient theory, but there's this issue of surviving while someone opposed to your interests controls a resource you need while you're trying to invent an alternative.

There's never been a totally free market economy, there never will be, and there shouldn't be, because of this kind of problem. Absolute free market capitalism is a utopian fantasy, every bit as unreasonable as communism.

Like, what happens if one person owns all the land? That's equivalent to everyone else being his slaves. There's nowhere you can live without his consent.

There has to be a reasonable distribution of claims on the bounty of nature before a market can function. If you let people buy and sell such claims, or form cartels, the effective distribution is going to keep becoming unreasonable, so some intervention is needed to make it work again.

The free market's a good thing, but it can't be everything. Like in all human affairs, you have to strike the right balance between freedom and discipline.

if you own all the land, you're a king.

>F-35 will be in service 50 years
L0Lno fgt pls

Errr.. not him, actually I'm the guy who answers him, but he is talking about the programs associated with "War on Poverty" in use since the LBJ administration, it doesn't count other social programs or social security.

I'm just glad that they used that money to feed a human being instead of using it to "stabilize" another 3rd world nation that would turn into violent and chaotic civil war 10 years later.

>they've gone too far to just drop it
...like they did with the Superconducting Super Collider
in Texas, where $2billion was in the hole? L0Lno fgt pls

>believing the myth of the "free market"
L0Lno, fgt pls
the only "free market" is the Black Market
Lrn2economics

The original point was to make workers take control of the factories but our ant-like behavior prevented that.

No matter what happens, as long as the Dreamchaser gets to fly one of these days I'll be happy.

>Black Market

Not even that one, they can use criminal and violent activities to dominate the market.

" the only way to send a signal to another actors is by price" my ass.

When will apple do something with their 150 billion in cash reserves? You could start a mighty fancy space company with that sort of dosh. SpaceX has gotten a huge amount done with just ~4 billion or so?

Come on Cook, give us an iStation. Proprietary docking port included.

The point of SpaceX is that rapid reuse is the way to go.
I doubt we'll see any massive second stages atop Falcon Heavy.
Especially not a Raptor 2nd stage.

hello there

Many third world countries use 50 year old fighters, maybe USA has finally accepted reality.

I don't see how there's any conflict between that and a massive Raptor upper stage.

A larger second stage would mean that the center core of Falcon Heavy can fly back to land instead of landing downrange.

Raptor 2nd stage + cross feeding would be amazing. Apparently cross feeding is just too difficult at the moment - it was originally supposed to be part of the FH I think

Well, they met their performance goals without crossfeed, and it requires special hardware that they wouldn't want on a single-core launch, so it would stop them from reusing recovered F9 lower stages as FH side boosters.

Also, if they do build a larger upper stage (to actually use in launches, not just to launch near-empty and fill in orbit), it would largely negate the benefit of crossfeed, because they'd have to reduce the amount of propellant in the lower stages to enable the whole thing to still lift off.

If anything, I think with a bigger upper stage, they'd fly back the three lower stages without separating them. It eliminates a staging event, and the hardware to accomplish it, and it makes the landing more reliable by giving them more options for engines to land with (three cores tied together could land on two engines, so they can start a larger number when initially decelerating, then choose which to touch down with if there are any irregularities).

yeah, lol

could you imagine if we kept the F-16 flying all the way to 2024? You know, that far off world of seven years from now?

Ridiculous!

The F-16 wasn't shit, though.

Here's the deal with the F-35: most of the time, they won't fly it in stealth mode, because that means no external fuel tanks, hardpoints, sensor packages, etc., so it would be short-range, practically unarmed, half blind, and so forth, but all of the time it's still paying the cost of being designed around stealth: it's slow, it's unmaneuverable, and it's expensive so there won't be as many. Take stealth out of the picture, and it's a grossly inferior airframe, and they're not usually going to be able to use that stealth.

But it's all worth it to get that option of configuring it for stealth, you say? Yet as a stealth plane, it's not very stealthy, it doesn't have big built-in fuel tanks or bomb bays, and stealth-beating sensors and tactics are going to proliferate as the years go by. Stealth was a fantastic gimmick when it was new, when it was godmode and you could just go in and fuck up the enemy's air defense keystones in advance, but now it's been around for decades.

The next 50 years aren't the last 50 years. UAVs are maturing. AI is maturing. Automated production is maturing. Technological advance accelerates over time.

This is preparing to fight the last war... 30 years in the future.

It's just a program to keep Shuttle era factories going.
They don't even care that the rocket has no missions.

A raptor upper stage would really defeat the purpose of reusability.
If you're gonna put raptor engines on a falcon 9, you might as well put them on the booster and recover them, while ditching a cheap ass Merlin engine on the second stage.
Sure, the army would pay for such launches, but that's just throwing away good hardware.

Christ, you really can't communicate can you?

So the idea in your head is that Raptor engines are super-expensive fancy things, while Merlins are some cheap, disposable junk?

First of all, we have no information on their relative costs at this point. Secondly, we're talking about them in the context of different sorts of reuse, either in-space or actually-landing-on-earth reusable upper stages.

Because both of their failures were upper stage issues, and I doubt they will want to be experimenting with new upper stages.
It's nice to talk about changing the sizes of the rockets, but this is a ton of work for SpaceX, that has literally zero actual monetary return for them.

No government has expressed any wish to build a new cheaper ISS using the Falcon Heavy
Nor has anyone put any money towards recreating Apollo program using the F-Heavy.

What SpaceX needs to do is clear their backlog of paid for launches, while getting their other 2 launch sites online.

>It's nice to talk about changing the sizes of the rockets, but this is a ton of work for SpaceX, that has literally zero actual monetary return for them.
>No government has expressed any wish to build a new cheaper ISS using the Falcon Heavy
>Nor has anyone put any money towards recreating Apollo program using the F-Heavy.
Have you been paying attention? Their announced plan is to build ITS, a giant rocket nobody asked for, for which no established market exists.

They accepted funding from the USAF to develop Raptor as a F9/H upper stage engine, so yes, the government is interested in a Raptor upper stage.

The Raptor upper stage would also serve as a subscale prototype for the ITS upper stage.

I don't know if they'll do it, but it's definitely on the short list of things they're considering.

Yea they want to build their new vehicle, not keep fiddling with the Falcon family forever

If you can build a rocket that costs twice as much but carries 10 times as much payload there's really no reason not to, is there?

I mean a platform like ITS could complete a bunch of Falcon 9 satellite missions in one go

>On the contrary, it's government contracting.

That's capitalism. Private interests finding a way to siphon away tax payer money. Could have been done all in house much faster at half the cost but then fat cats won't get rich.

I smell commies
if you honestly think that anything owned and operated solely by the state is functional, you're delusional and ignorant of history

>Socialist

Just because I'm criticizing capitalism doesn't mean I'm a socialist or a communist. I'm just pointing out, correctly, that it's capitalism that introduces these inefficiencies.

Maybe an industry like space exploration would do best under a centrally planned economy. I don't think it's an accident that both the US success in the 60's and the success of the USSR in getting to space was all very much centrally planned.

That doesn't mean that I want to live in the USSR or that I want the government to centrally plan everything. But nonetheless you cannot just ignore the fact that with any such kind of big project in a capitalist society you have all these inefficiencies due to corruption, because all the big fat cats see a way to siphon away tax payer money.

inflation

That's another failure of capitalism. What the fuck does Apple know about space? Nothing. They make shiny consumer tech gadgets. Completely different market.

Under our system they are given all that capital to push forward innovation despite being clearly inept to do anymore than tech gadgets.

>a business not doing anything in a field that they relate absolutely fucking nothing to is a failure of capitalism
go back to /leftypol/, you swine

>if you honestly think that anything owned and operated solely by the state is functional, you're delusional and ignorant of history

I live in northern Europe. Our governments own a lot of state enterprises and they are so successful that they are buying out the private enterprises of other countries (that were once state owned but got privatized by capitalists). It's a funny situation actually. Our government is technically in charge of very critical infrastructure in foreign countries because those foreign countries were retarded enough to privitise their infrastructure.

I'm sorry that I live in a country that shits all over your ideology. Maybe asked Milton Friedman or Mises for a refund or something.

Columbia/Challenger disasters should have shut down their astronaut program IMMEDIATELY. They are completely incompetent to ignore such obvious hazards that caused those disasters killing a dozen FUCKING ASTRONAUTS.

It's a failure of capitalism that they are given $150B to play with when they are just a fucking toys-for-middle-class-people company.

When you think about it's fucking bonkers.

They will never put that capital to good use. It's just wasted in their hands.

That's fair enough but this sort of thing could have also happened even if the system wasn't corrupt. The problem is that the people who fucked up will not be directly affected by the consequences of their fuck up. That issue is not unique to capitalism.