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This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:

SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.

Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.

Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.

Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.

The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:

1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.

2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.

On the surface, the changes appear logical.

The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)

Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.

SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)

I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.

Starship is irrelevant. SLS was dumb already in 2011 when Starship doesn't exist. Its a dumb system and was never the right system. NASA own analysis showed that.

People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.

Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.

The only reason NOT to cancel SLS outright is "we can't get anything better". "Sure, it's pretty dumb, but it can be built, and good luck getting anything better built."

Starship is important because the closer Starship gets to coming online the more obviously wrong that line of thought is.

As is, Starship, with its first stage being online and reusable already says "we could have done something like SLS much cheaper if we were smart about it". When the second stage comes fully online, the argument for SLS will diminish further.

It's a total jobs program. I don't know what Starship will be, but at least Starship is trying to do something new and potentially very valuable. Maybe it is too ambitious but SLS is not that ambitious and not that successful :(

> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.

If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?

And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?

I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.

For me its the commodities.

I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.

But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.

When Korolyov worked on N-1 rocket in 1960-s, some plans included building a hydrogen upper stage. http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html Hydrogen is rather hard to keep cold, but that stage was designed to work for over 11 days.

Falcon-9 flies almost every other day, about 3 times per week. Methane is way more storable than hydrogen. Of course we'd like to compare numbers, but, given that Starship is way bigger than than N-1 stage - about 15 times, and there is the law of squares-cubes, which for our case says the bigger the tank the less percent of boiloff per unit of time, and it's methane, and we can afford to lose a little and top off with another tanker...

Now, how many tanker flights we'll need? That's a favorite riddle in Musk's plans :) . Korolyov, again, had some early ideas for 5 tankers - https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/sever-the-bridge-... ... For Starship - if you have 1500 tons of fuel in the Starship, and 150 tons of payload in a tanker, you need 10 flights. You can probably optimize, or be disadvantaged by some obstacles - so, 8-12 flights? That many can fly in less than a month. We can also use additional measures to reduce boiloff - better protection from the Sun, active cooling, maybe more permanent orbital refueling depot - but still, with our today's Falcon-9 flight rate we may consider one Starship per month refueled on LEO. Even if some refueling flights won't be successful, the replacements could be sent.

I personally suspect Starship will fly much more often than Falcon-9. We're so much better in rendezvous and docking these day than we were during Apollo flights, the reliability is so much higher - just take a look how many Falcon-9 flights in a row are successful - so I don't think operationally LEO refuelling will present a significant problem. And I'm sure we need maybe a couple of years to see first examples of that.

Space is hard, yes. But we're getting better, for sure.

Theres a huge difference between sending up a stage full of H2 and transferring H2 from one stage to another with acceptable losses at cryo temperatures.

NASA is actually further ahead with space refuelling tech than SpaceX. But either way the tech is unlikely to work at scale this decade.

Allow me to reply with an anecdotal story.

In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.

It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.

They are already past the point that they could have expended Starship and just reused Super Heavy and launched payloads successfully. It is only their own goals to have a fully reusable system that is preventing it.

SpaceX is the undisputed king of launch cadence. Falcon 9 just flies every other day nowadays.

If anyone can take "we need 14 launches per mission" and make it work, it's SpaceX.

Boil off isn't somehow unsolvable. We know cryogenics can work in space, and SpaceX's approach is actually less aggressive than Blue Origin's requirement of zero boil off on LH2.

> But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed

If only Starbase was located somewhere near abundant gas pipelines, within spitting distance of of the Texas Shale Oil boom…

All of SapaceX rockets waste close to half their payload capacity on extra fuel for landing, extra equipment for landing, and they still have a 100% failure rate on every super-heavy launch they've ever attempted. SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history. NASA's super heavy rockets have been working successfully since 1967. NASA did build the first single-stage-to-orbit rockets that also successfully landed, but it immediately realized that was a huge waste of resources. Instead, they put parachutes on rockets and then refurbished them instead. So NASA gets double the payload capacity for free. The boosters currently strapped to the SLS that's about to go to the Moon are the same ones that previously took space shuttles to orbit in the 90s. NASA has been to the Moon and Mars; SpaceX has never made it to either, and just last week Elon said they've officially given up on going to Mars, and they're hoping to make it to Moon in another decade instead. NASA is going next month. SpaceX is just vaporware being run by a drug addict whose only goal is to sell it to the public markets before the house of cards comes down.

They’ve already caught and reused a Super Heavy and had multiple successful soft landings in water with Starship.

> SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history.

SpaceX's number of successful launches last year exceeded the total number of launches by all other U.S. agencies over the past decade.

It would be great to have some actual numbers. How did reuse work out for Falcon 9? How much does the reused boosters for SLS cost? What's the cost and performance of an expendable Starship vs SLS?

Wow, you have absolutely and shockingly little knowledge about any of this, do you?

I’m disgusted with Musk and can still see that SpaceX is the best thing going right now.

Why do Starship launches explode? Because SpaceX is pushing the envelope in multiple directions at once. Why is SLS “reliable”? Because it’s doing absolutely nothing new whatsoever, and doing it at an appalling cost in dollars and time.

Going to Mars takes about the same delta-v as the moon.

SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.

Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.

Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad

Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?

Surely the could put a traditional upper stage on Super Heavy and just go directly to the moon, no? I’m not sure what the obsession with second stage reuse is, because you lose almost all your margin.

I'm not sure what the obsession with airplane reuse is. Why not just build a new one for each flight?

You don’t gain additional margin throwing away an airplane. Reuse is a lovely idea but the rocket equation is a harsh mistress.

Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.

The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.

Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.

Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.

If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

> If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.

And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.

NASA does not seem to be constituted to be able to engage in a coherent manned space program of actual value. It's a long standing systemic issue.

They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.

Might as well get some ROI out of it though.

IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.

The Blue Origin skepticism is based in how many decades they spent in making buildings instead of rockets and how long it has taken them to get anything to orbit.

The Blue Origin hate is mostly how opaque the program is compared to SpaceX.

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Is it clear how many SLS launches would be needed to subsume Starship's part of the mission?

It doesn’t matter because SLS can’t launch but once a year if lucky. And so far they have never even approached that.

You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.

And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?

Do you think perhaps you should give SpaceX as much time as NASA has had for SLS to fail at its goals before complaining that SpaceX’s system in testing isn’t accomplishing all of its goals?

Sure, that's fair. My comment above was just about the poster claiming that v3 will prove that Starship can succeed on all of its goals.

Your comment was a strawman about launching satellites around the moon which is literally no one’s goal.

We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.

I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.

You have to consider that Starship has not reached anywhere near the operational goals for Artemis, and there is no realistic time line for when it might. So we really do have no idea how much it might cost by the time it reaches the milestone SLS has already cleared (successful flight in lunar orbit, with a full payload that it successfully deploys).

You also have to consider that SpaceX has the fastest, most reliable, most cost efficient launch service in operation ever, and are using the same methodology to develop the most advanced launch system ever attempted.

We also have to consider the other major Musk lead company Telsa had the best selling car in the world and string of successful cars leading up to that before completely shitting the bed on the Cyber Truck.

I want Starship to be a success and reduce the cost to orbit and beyond, but past success does not in any way guarantee future success.

You must compare the AI chip in the Tesla vehicle to the chip in F-35 "Fat Amy" on value for money thermal design.

Life has no guarantees. Past success is the best predictor of future success regardless.

True but we know for a fact that it doesn't consume 4-5 billion $ a year for the last 15 years like SLS/Orion because SpaceX couldn't afford that. If you actually do some basic math and look at SpaceX revenue and so on, you can make some pretty decent guesses. And SpaceX is analyzed in detail by lots of people.

Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.

Only if the SuperHeavy booster can achieve the same performance as the SLS (payload to orbit), with similar levels of operational complexity.

The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.

Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.

Actually, we already know that with booster reuse disposing of 12 tanker starships will cost less than an SLS launch and actually be able to get to the moon, which SLS with Orion can’t actually do.

We don't, because Starship has not had even one successful flight with any appreciable payload. It's absolutely possible that the booster will need to be completely redesigned, and become much more expensive, in order to achieve the mission goals.

It's also worth noting that a captured booster has only once been successfully flown again - and certainly not in the kind of tight time line that the in-orbit refueling operation requires (first flight was March 6, second flight was October 13 - and no more flights are planned anyway). There is currently little proof that boosters can be "rapidly and fully reused" as needed to match any of the cost promises.

Then it should be equally worth nothing that SLS has only launched once.

I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.

To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.

It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.

I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.

Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.

SLS has flown once. What are you talking about?

SLS has had one fully functional operational flight, where it deployed satellites in lunar orbit. Starship has had 0 operational flights, and a bunch of dummy test flights without payload and without even attempting to reach LEO.

Sure, but it's a bit disingenuous to one one hand have one successful flight, and on the other hand 11 test flights of varying success (reaching space but not orbit) and dismiss the latter because the former has technically flown infinitely many times more successful real flights. The absolute value is so low, 1 vs zero.

You can take another tack then - kilometers traveled (while in control of the rocket) multiplied by payload. This should be a more comparable metric, and the conclusion will be the same without the pesky 0: Starship tests have flown only a fraction of what SLS has achieved in its single successful flight.

> the capabilities are so far mostly just talk

lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, things like delivering a real payload or orbiting the earth.

Yes they've reflown a caught rocket, and they've soft landed in the ocean. I can do those things with a paper airplane.

Not at orbital speeds you can’t. You’re being deliberately obtuse.

They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.

One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.

Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?

And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?

I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.

Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.

If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime

Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?

This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.

The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.

You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.

That’s just the ISS on the moon instead of space, which is also uninteresting.

Well, luckily for me and at least a couple of other people, we seem to have better imaginations than you. Must be boring at your place if you think taking a walk on the moon or going for a drive to see the sights is uninteresting.

It's the next step of progress. Did you suddenly become bored because you learned to walk after crawling? Sounds kind of like you did to me.

> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.

This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.

There would have to actually be meaningful best spots. If a base gets de-facto control over a 10 mile circle of arbitrary wasteland, it's not a very compelling claim to fight over.

If your 10-mile circle has any water in it at all it’s extremely valuable.

Are there likely to be more than 0 spots with usable water, but less than 20 or 100?

Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.

Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.

And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.

> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.

Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.

You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.

The biggest problem right now with Starship is the heatshield problem. If it's a one and done flight it's actually still worth it but full re-use without solving the heat shield problem is not actually possible (right now). It turns out slamming into Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocity or higher is one of those things that pretty much every material we've thrown at the problem has had problems being used forever. We need to do experimental flights in order to provide more data to materials folks working on this. Honestly I respect the hell out of anyone working on this problem because it's the next big tech hurdle we need besides landing a booster. And this one is still not solved.

I would agree. The heatshield is tricky. But they have shown they can survive without parts of the heatshield. But its a problem for rapid re-usability.

That said, I think Starship architecture can be useful even if this issue is not fully solved.

Starship can be much, much cheaper then SLS even if they throw away the upper stage.

Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.

NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.

All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.

This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478

This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.

If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.

No. This works if you are able to tell a work of fiction and don't have to provide evidence.

And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.

Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)

The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."

Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.

It works perfectly well when you’ve got deep pockets and unmanned test vehicles though.

False. SpaceX development of Starship is much cheaper then SLS despite using more test vehicles. The claim that building hardware rich is more expensive is not really shown in the data.

NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.

Those deep pockets are funded by the same pot we all feed from.

And everyone should be happy that pot is TEN TIMES smaller than the pot holders draining the pot with the same goal.

I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.

If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.

Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.

The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.

And F Scott Fitzgerald died in poverty essentially unknown, while James Patterson is worth over $800 million.

Wholly untrue. Fitzgerald made a ton of money, was well known, and overspent.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/04/f-scott-fitzgera...

I'll take Things That Never Happened for 500 please.

2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.

SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).

The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.

1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.

You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.

NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.

By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.

NASA says its baseline is to not kill astronauts and yet it is currently planning to send astronauts on a mission in space with an Environmental Control System on its first space flight in a capsule that has flown in space once, and was different on that one flight, and had unexpected heat shield problems with another different heat shield and on a untested return path that is guessed to fix the issues. Actions speak louder than words.

The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.

I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.

Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Wrong. Both were lost because of a fundamentally BAD ARCHITECTURE. And that architecture was bad because the NASA engineers who designed it, had never designed anything like it before and were never able to test or evaluate any of their assumptions.

Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.

Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.

Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.

> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it.

Should such testing have been needed? No.

Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.

> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore

The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.

Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.

In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.

Record low launch temperatures are exactly the kind of boundary pushing conditions that would warrant unmanned testing in a way that not all of those previous 25 would have been. Then again, so was the first launch, and that was manned.

> I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible

Valid.

> Record low launch temperatures

Were not necessary to show problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There had been previous problems noted on flights at temperatures up to 75 degrees F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that the O-rings were not fully sealing the joint even at 100 degrees F. Any rational assessment of the data would have concluded that the joint was unacceptably risky at any temperature.

It might have been true that a flight at 29 degrees F (the estimated O-ring temperature at the Challenger launch) was a little more unacceptably risky than a flight at a higher temperature. But that was actually a relatively minor point. The reason the Thiokol engineers focused on the low temperature the night before the Challenger launch was not because they had a solid case, or even a reasonable suspicion, that launching at that cold a temperature was too risky as compared with launching at higher temperatures. It was because NASA had already ignored much better arguments that they had advanced previously, and they were trying to find something, anything, to get NASA to stop at least some launches, given that they knew NASA was not going to stop all launches for political reasons.

And just to round off this issue, other SRB joint designs have been well known since, I believe, the 1960s, that do not have the issue the Shuttle SRBs had, and can be launched just fine at temperatures much colder than 29 F (for example, a launch from Siberia in the winter). So it's not even the case that SRB launches at such cold temperatures were unknown or not well understood prior to the Challenger launch. The Shuttle design simply was braindead in this respect (for political reasons).

I should point out that the Buran launched and took earth, with bad conditions, completely automated. It's sad how it ended.

> So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle.

That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.

> If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits

As far as the launch to orbit, which was the flight phase when Challenger was lost, every Shuttle flight pushed the vehicle to its limits. That was unavoidable. There was no way to do a launch that was any more stressful than the actual launches were.

You can push the environmental conditions of the launch e.g. winds and temperatures.

See my response to Mauling Monkey upthread on why the cold temperature of the Challenger launch actually wasn't the major issue it was made out to be.

Note also my comments there about other SRB designs that were known well before the Shuttle and the range of temperatures they could launch in. Those designs were used on many unmanned flights for years before the Shuttle was even designed. So in this respect, the unmanned test work had already been done. The Shuttle designers just refused to take advantage of all that knowledge for braindead political reasons.

Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.

They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Jumping straight into manned testing was quite reckless, but politically necessary. If they had tested the shuttle without crew, that would have gotten people thinking that crews probably aren't necessary for a lot of shuttle missions, in particular launching satellites. It also would have prompted people to compare the cost of shuttle launches to other unmanned rocket launches, in particular for commercial satellite launches (which they were doing until the Challenger disaster.) These are comparisons that would have been very problematic for NASA as a political entity.

> They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched.

Which mission are you referring to?

If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."

The overpressure caused by the SRB ignitions exceeded predictions due to the geometry of the launch pad. This overpressure forced the orbiter's bodyflap away, beyond the design limits of the hydraulic system that controls it. John Young said that if he had known this, he would have ejected, which would have caused the loss of the shuttle.

Ah, I see. But in fact the body flap was not inoperative, and the Shuttle landed safely. So this looks to me like a case where Mission Control turned out to be justified in not telling the crew what had happened.

One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.

They made the right call, kind of, and only by accident. John Young had telemetry for the flap available to him in the cockpit but didn't notice it happen at the time. NASA ground control also had the telemetry, but also didn't notice / understand until after it was too late to eject (which was only possible during a narrow window for ascent, and not at all for reentry if the body flap had been inoperable.) They also simply got lucky the hydraulic system performed beyond it's designed safety margin.

The lesson is that people can be irrational even it the logic is sound.

The problem there is the Shuttle was deliberately designed so it couldn’t be flown unmanned, which risked lives and wasted money for lots of simple satellite launches.

  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...

The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".

Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).

What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.

Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.

SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.

I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.

Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.

Sorry, what? Starship 11 proceeded with a totally nominal ascent, orbit, descent, and powered landing that would end up with it standing on the ground, were it not deliberately landed into water.

What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.

No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.

I'm 99% confident Starship 11 was actually a sub-orbital test so you can't credit it for successfully entering orbit (my memory is confirmed by Gemini but caveat emptor).

Because when you're testing you put your rocket in an orbit that makes it reenter, but you can still show it has the performance to do it.

They still need to show they can reliably relight the engines to deorbit. They're actually very good citizens there. Prove you can deorbit before putting anything in orbit

They did reach orbital velocity though. If they'd aimed slightly differently they would have attained orbit, and reentry was as difficult as if they had done that.

NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.

SLS/Artemis seems mostly to be just a program designed to funnel money to traditional aerospace contractors so that they don't close down their space business (SpaceX has already made their business unviable without government subsidy) and force a lot of their skilled engineers and technicians out of space jobs just in case these are needed for some future war. A trickle of rockets, lots of people employed practicing hand building and engineering skills for space skills crafting something every couple of years. It doesn't look like a real program designed to create any significant value, much like the some of the government fusion programs seem to be primarily a way to keep nuclear scientists and engineers employed.

I had a lightbulb moment when someone said 'the point of iterative approaches is not to find bugs, it's to do something (small) successfully and build confidence+learn'. There's a subtle but important difference between the iterative approach that SpaceX takes and 'debugging through exhaustive retries', and I'm worried NASA would look like the latter (and admittedly, some of the more recent starship launches look that way too).

The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.

I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)

NASA can't adopt SpaceX's approach, because any failure will be used to attack them in Congress and in the media.

NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.

They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).

Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.

NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.

Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.

Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.

Only the latter achievement was a real intention. The former is just the malarkey useful to sell it

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.

Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.

It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.

SpaceX is currently on a streak of over 300 successful Falcon missions in a row. I'm not convinced their approach isn't compatible with risk aversion.

They push their test rockets to failure and learn from what goes wrong. That seems to be a pretty good process for getting a solid production rocket.

Tell that to the Starliner crew and the Artemis II crew.

> The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.

If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.

Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.

Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?

I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1

If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one

Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.

But their mistakes on Starliner have cost them billions whereas the mistakes on SLS has cost the taxpayers billions.

SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.

NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.

correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.

I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.

They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.

The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.

The risk profile is very different.

Doesn't Artemis intend to launch humans? It seems like Space X Starship approach is hella dangerous for astroanuts.

Once Starship has launched 1000 times without problems it'll be obviously safer despite having no abort system

If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".

Except of course that SpaceX is launching Astronauts right now and has a perfect safety record and operate the safest space vehicle ever built.

Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.

inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development

I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.

R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.

That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.

"For all Mankind" is a great alternate history show that imagines the N1 succeeding.

I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus.

Have to reread it too.

Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.

Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.

N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.

EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.

> N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time.

That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.

His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.

> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.

I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.

Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.

I think this claim of being 'way too complex' is a bit over the top.

Sure it was complex for the electronics and some other aspect in the Soviet Union, but not by that much.

N1 actually flew and it mostly failed when engine outs and vibration started to cause other issues with piping and so on.

I think those are solvable problems. With engine reliability going up, whole system reliability would go up to. The piping issues and electronics issues were fixable in time.

Russia was on the right track. They had the right kinds of engines they needed. An engine that could also be used on smaller vehicles to have a shared family. Engines that could be restarted and tested.

They arguably should have started with a smaller rocket with those engines and only gone to N1 when they were reliable.

N1's upper stages were designed to function standalone as lower-capability carriers, just like Saturn IVB / Saturn IB. A few more test flights and most probably USSR would have had N1-base lineup to replace R-7 and Proton and have 100-ton class heavy booster. However, Chelomei pushed his UDMH-fueled UR plan which resulted in the Proton, and Glushko wanted OKB-1 for himself.

> Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.

My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.

ULA has nothing to do with SLS.

Sorry, antique brain fart.

It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).

They don’t do the fabbing or (a lot of) the engineering now - they contract it all out. They could oversee those contracts differently but that would just be hiring SpaceX instead of Boeing or Blue Origin. Which they are doing some anyway.

If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting.

NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.

NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.

Perhaps it is best to accept that SpaceX is a unicorn.

What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?

I don't know or care about some classification of SpaceX, but about what they do. My description is accurate, I think.

I don't understand the second part: NASA doesn't do groundbreaking work, because you found one project, in progress, that hasn't broken new ground yet?

First Time NASA did that was how we got Apollo I and lost three astronauts.

They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since.

Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.

SpaceX managed their methodologies with Falcon 9 and Dragon without losing any crew.

That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.

There were no humans on those Starships that blew up.

Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.

Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.

So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.

The Saturn V never blew up, either.

I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating

A human rating is only necessary for NASA missions. Do you think Falcon 9 will never fly crew because of all the explosions SpaceX had developing it and landings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system

NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.

NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.

The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.

EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.

This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.

Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.

It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.

Insane that this is getting downvoted.

Like others have said, its easy to blow shit up and improve when you dont have congress breathing down your neck and threatening to cut your budget.

They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.

And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.

> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.

They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.

Not only were they not trying to reach orbit, they are specifically trying to do risky things that they can learn from. It's not exactly destructive testing because they hope to succeed, but it's close.

That just seems like a huge waste of money

Each Expendable Starship Super Heavy launched costs less than a single engine on the Artemis program.

Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos.

The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.

You can't compare costs for a rocket that doesn't work yet. It's fictional. As I said in my post, if we are comparing fictional rockets then I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.

That sounds a lot like the infamous paper rocket comment about Falcon Heavy versus SLS being a real rocket. Meanwhile Falcon Heavy has launched something to the orbit of Mars, launched multiple (including NASA) missions to space and SLS has orbited the moon once with multiple problems.

Of course you can. It wasn’t fictional when Superheavy flew back and was caught, was it? It costed real money, not fictional. What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing?

Until it actually works every dollar is waste.

SpaceX is paying tuition for an education. Is every dollar you spend on college wasted until you graduate?

Do you think that about cancer research, or antibiotic research, or development of the JWT?

It wouldn't if you were scheduled to fly on it.

By the time people are scheduled to fly on it, it will have launched 100s of times and SLS wilk have launched once. Which so you want to ride on?

Elon Musk's net worth now (sadly) near a trillion dollars... :/

He is spending it effectively to colonize the sky. That makes him the MVP of the whole biosphere.

Easy not to fail when you are purposefully not trying to succeed

I doubt they set out to launch eleven times without reaching orbit.

They very explicitly were not setting out for orbit for most of them.

Yes, but if you asked someone at SpaceX before flight 1 where they would be by flight 11, I doubt they would have been happy about the reality.

And?

Not a single one of them had reaching stable orbit in the flight plan.

This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?

When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.

The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.

> When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.

That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?

The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.

NASA has killed 19 astronauts. SpaceX: 0

SpaceX has flown 18 crewed launches on a single type of vehicle, all in the 2020s, all of them either doing an ISS run or an orbital launch. NASA has had over 200 manned launches spanning well over half a century, flown on all sorts of tech, with vastly different designs, kinds of engineering culture, mission profiles. They were the organization that did first-of-its-kind missions. You just bringing up two numbers makes it seem like the companies existed at the same time and were essentially equals, and not like there's a historical innovator that spilled some blood while pushing the limits and a modern private business that made some innovations but is still treading on ground that's so well-known because of all the experience and knowledge we already gathered from those past risky ventures.

Again, that is put so vaguely as to be actionably useless.

So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.

SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.

NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.

On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.

You don't test the nozzle on _launch day_, what kind of ridiculous statement is that? You think the Air Force is paying SpaceX so they can test things the day it flies?

All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.

A couple days before COTS-1[1] was to launch, a crack was discovered in the second stage nozzle. Rather than wait a month to fabricate and install a new one, SpaceX had a guy climb inside the rocket and use some shears to cut off the lower third of the nozzle. The rocket launched without issue.[2]

So while you're right that SpaceX doesn't typically do this sort of thing, NASA did pay them to fly an untested nozzle design.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_COTS_Demo_Flight_1

2. See the section titled "Snipping the nozzle" at https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/forget-dragon-the-fa...

It was a demo mission and that change was actually consulted and approved by NASA.

SpaceX is willing to blow up a rocket, even if it exploding is fully planned and expected. That's it, really not hard to comprehend.

Columbia. Challenger.

The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.

And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.

NASA is constrained by the triple-whammy of taxpayer dollars, an administration that hates public science, and a market that rewards private enterprise more than them.

JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.

So is Artemis cheaper than Starship then?

Are you familiar with the definition of the word "constrained"?

I was referring to the quote “JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it.” That makes it sound as if JPL can’t afford to follow the SpaceX strategy, hence my question.

I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.

The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.

They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.

It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.

All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.

A couple of new posts by Nasa Administrator Isaacman:

Launch cadence across NASA programs:

https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456699175497741

An infographic showing the new architectures:

https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456713507356713

It's interesting how Artemis III (the new one) will try to prove out both HLS landers in one LEO mission.

Every new story about Artemis gives me even more respect for the Apollo engineers.

I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.

NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.

More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense, and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk. Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit, for example, is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call. Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.

And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.

Orion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.

Which goes back to the Pork-on-a-stick requirement that everything be about keeping the workers still employed.

I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.

In a few decades we will look back and say now is peak (space) USA with SpaceX launching successfully, creating Starlink, Blue Origin finally reaching orbit, Rocket Lab reaching for Neutron, even ULA making BVlcan work.

Yeah, it's a wonderful time for private companies doing things in space using research paid for by tax payers and for billionaires aiming to become trillionaires. Outside of that, it's technically interesting but totally boring compared to the hope and excitement of the Apollo era.

We came in peace for all mankind...more of that would be nice.

None of the private companies are making billionaires become trillionaires but if SpaceX going public does create a trillionaire it will be at cost of saving the taxpayers billions of dollars.

And if you don’t think landing and reuse of F9 first the isn’t exciting, I don’t think your priorities are right.

to be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good

back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily

Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex

What is that based on? NASA's recent accomplishments are far beyond anyone. Off the top of my head: The many Mars missions, JWST, Europa Clipper (still in progress), etc. SpaceX hasn't left Earth orbit, afaik.

SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster to Mars orbit.

DART is an example of both an incredible NASA accomplishment and a SpaceX launch that left Earth orbit.

You meant cinematographers, right?

Relevant: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.

If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.

Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.

(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)

Yes! I just got to go there earlier this month for the first time. They even have the lectern from the Kennedy speech (and the speech itself)!

Went to Florida some years ago when my kids were all teens and pre-teens. Did Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, the works.

We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.

Been once as a kid and once as an adult. Wonderful place. The rocket garden is wonderful.

Make sure you look at ALL the stuff in the rocket garden and make sure you take the bus to the Apollo center and make sure you do them in that order.

If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.

I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.

Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.

Sadly, I feel the same way. Here's a great video of Starliner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A

Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.

So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.

> Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus.

That's irresponsbility and incompentence in any position, especially at that level of management.

How? He essentially said that the program would not work as designed and would probably kill people. That is both true and necessary to say in order to fix it--these are exactly the lessons NASA (allegedly) learned from Challenger.

The GGP said he threw people under the bus. That's different than making changes to a program.

> true

I don't believe you can know that. Saying it with assurance - by Internet randos or by the NASA administrator - is more a signal of a lack of analysis. Other people aren't idiots and complex technology issues aren't that certain - those are self-serving fairy tales.

Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.

Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program

As someone who worked on Orion I find this comment section hilarious.

Tell us about the flammable tape and the heat shield and the ECLSS and the power hiccup, about how while Orion has been in development SpaceX has built and deployed Cargo and Crew Dragon 2 and flown 20 crews into orbit, or how it costs six times more than Crew Drahon, so far. Or about the side hatch not opening easily under pressure (Apollo I anyone?). Or the status of the docking system for Artemis II.

How so? Hearing from someone who has worked in this environment would be enlightening.

Just as the comment above says. This discussion is a lot of armchair software engineers who don't understand the processes arguing about things they don't have any actual insight into. Just normal HN pedantry and certainty in subjects they have no expertise in. Also loads and loads of either astroturfers, or true believers in SpaceX. Mixed with a lot of hate for NASA, which having spent many 80+ hour weeks with working with many of their engineers, I find extremely sad (but maybe fitting for these political times).

But nothing you just said is enlightening, it's just shit-talking people who would probably admit at the drop of a hat that they aren't not aeronautical engineers.

Do you want to provide your specific insights into the announcement in the post?

We're just going off what we read in the news. I'm sure that informed commentary from someone with first-hand knowledge would be interesting.

JFK set the goal 8 years out, not less than three to align with his presidential term to try to make himself look good. He also got a lot of feedback from NASA on the timelines of what was possible so the goal wasn't pulled out of thin air.

Challenger was pretty directly caused by the Reagan admin pressuring NASA to launch it too, so yes?

Politicians have pressured NASA for launches previously and it has killed astronauts.

JFK set a goal that NASA managed to meet, but it is kind of difficult to see it as a hard deadline considering JFK was dead for years before any of the Apollo launches took place.

But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.

Re: JFK and the 60s, I think the experts were in charge and had the final say on launch decisions with buy-in from all parties. Space exploration is certainly not risk-free.

Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.

I don't understand the hostility.

NASA got astronauts killed during Apollo, for some reason people forget about that or think it doesn't count because they weren't flying when it happened. After that they pumped the brakes and reevaluated their approaches, but the whole program remained extremely risky.

NASA was also far better funded back then and didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them. Things move a lot more quickly when money isn’t a concern and you’re not having to scatter R&D and manufacturing across the four corners of the earth to get congress on board with you.

> NASA was also far better funded back then

Is that true? The US has far more money to spend now, in real dollars.

> didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them

Is that true? I doubt it. Big budget programs then probably were no different, though with fewer transparency and anti-corruption laws and rules.

You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.

Artemis II is a disaster in progress.

I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.

I watched an interview with the current NASA admin and he seems very competent. Good choice there. He basically implied SLS was a dead end outside Artemis and other options will be the future. It was also clear the influence of the Congress jobs program seems to be making him choose his words carefully.

I have been awake too long so I am probably stupid. Please have mercy.

I don't understand. NASA says they goal of landing on the moon in 2028 is not realistic.

They are adding a launch in 2027 to do more testing.

Great.

It will be followed by one possibly two lunar landings in 2028. Are the now 2028 landings primarily testing SpaceX integration?

The Artemis rockets are huge, and extremely expensive. And the build time is considerable.

Now they are planning 3 rockets in two years, each of which is not reusable?

Then they have to build those in parallel, which makes sense but incorporating wha you learn in 2027, into rockets you have already nearly finished seems an odd approach

Jared Isaacman is the best possible person to have as NASA admin. He genuinely cares and is trying to revitalize NASA to its glory days.

They're getting slightly bullied into following their own rocket certification process. Wild they're going right to human flight without their three unmanned certification flights, etc. NASA themselves will not allow mission critical payloads on rockets that don't meet that process. But they're (trying) to skip it with Artemis.

Fun read on Artemis https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

Is it time to start sending delivery bots into space.

Same contractors (Beoing) who built Starliner...

Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A

I made sure to watch the first SLS launch in person as I'm not confident they will be able to launch again.

If Artemis fails does that mean it goes ...

I honestly wonder why NASA bothers. To me it seems like a massive waste of money when SpaceX can do it much cheaper.

Does this vindicate Destin from Smarter Every Day?

2-years ago he presented concerns to NASA.

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU

No it doesn't. Because literally anybody who knows anything about NASA and follows the Space industry in detail has known about most of the issues since 2015 or even in 2011 when this whole new Post-Constellation shit-show started. And many of the problems have been talked about since the day NASA created Artemis. Destin is just more famous then many of the people in nerd forums.

Destin analysis is ok and he makes a number of good points, but it very pro-Alabama (Mafia) inside NASA and contractors since he very clearly is influence by the strong Albama presence and those are the parts of the industry he interacts with.

So Destin misses a huge amount of the relevant puzzle pieces, or he simply doesn't talk about them.

He also simple makes a few assumptions that are fundamentally wrong, namely the different targets of the program. The goal was never to repeat Apollo and landing a few people a few times is totally different from the original goals of Artemis.

Had the same thought. NASA already cracked this nut with Apollo; if you’re gonna crack it again and differently, be real sure your solution is better.

Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?

The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.

Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.

The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.

On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.

But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.

Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.

> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.

Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.

The budget is very much different, as % of the total federal budget (4% vs 1%) and in USD adjusted for inflation (60B vs 20B).

The “% of the federal budget” comparison is mostly a rhetorical trick. It can matter politically, sure, but it’s a terrible way to compare programs across time. Apollo happened before a bunch of Great Society-era spending and later expansions in the federal budget. Comparing shares across radically different eras is basically apples-to-elephants.

I spent some time trying to get solid numbers because I was actually interested in this.

Inflation-adjusted averages:

Apollo-era NASA average (FY1961–FY1972): ~$44.2B/year (2024 dollars)

NASA average over the last ~20 years: ~$25B/year (2024 dollars)

So over FY1961–FY1972 (12 years), that’s roughly $44.2B × 12 ≈ $530B in today’s money for all of NASA.

And what did that buy?

A NASA that was basically inventing the modern space industry:

- building launch sites (LC-39 etc.)

- building huge test facilities and stands

- building control centers / mission operations

- building manufacturing capability at scale

- building/expanding NASA centers

- building DSN and deep-space comms infrastructure

- massive amounts of fundamental research and basic engineering research

- building multiple human spacecraft programs (Mercury → Gemini → Apollo)

- developing major new engines (F-1, J-2, and a bunch of others)

- building multiple rockets and variants

and flying tons of missions, including 6 Moon landings

But of course, NASA wasn’t only Apollo. Even though Apollo dominated, NASA also did a bunch of major non-lunar work: Mariner, Orbiting Solar Observatory, Echo / Telstar / Relay / Syncom, X-15, and the beginnings of Skylab, etc.

A good summary is here: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

That article’s Apollo-only number is around $257B (in 2020 dollars) depending on what you include. I used 2024 $ above for budget. But its close.

Now compare to Constellation and its children (Orion + SLS).

A fair estimate for the cost to get to where we are today is around ~$90B (not counting suits or the SpaceX / Blue Origin landers). And what did we get for that? So far, a few test very incomplete flights.

Artemis/SLS is not doing Apollo-style clean-sheet propulsion development. It mostly reuses Shuttle-era propulsion (RS-25 + solids) with restarts/updates, rather than developing new engines like Apollo had to.

Looking forward gets fuzzier, but current projections suggest roughly:

~$20–25B more before the first crewed lunar landing (assuming the schedule doesn’t slip again)

then for five more landings, under optimistic “one per year” cadence assumptions, maybe another ~$30B or so

So you end up around ~$150B total if everything goes right from here. And note: this assumes huge savings because SpaceX and Blue Origin are spending lots of their own money rather than NASA building its own lander in the Apollo style.

So very roughly:

~$150B (Constellation → SLS/Orion → first 6 landings, optimistic) vs

~$250B-ish (Apollo-only, depending on inclusion choices and dollar basis)

And my basic point still stands: Apollo had to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and the foundational research base from scratch. A gigantic amount of that 1960s infrastructure is still in use today, and 60+ years of engineering and technology progress should matter. That alone should be worth well over $100B in “things you don’t need to reinvent.”

In pure execution terms, it’s hard to argue Apollo wasn’t on a totally different level.

By your own data, Apollo had 65% more money than SLS/Orion.

My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.

SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.

So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that. The reason is that nobody cares about going to the moon. That shows in fuzzy requirements and much less money for it.

BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.

And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.

I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!

Actually less than half at best were behind Apollo and most thought it cost too much and that social programs were worth supporting more, and after the landings succeeded we didn’t continue anywhere because even that support waned.

Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.

No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.

Orion was never aiming for anywhere. It was always meant to be a flexible module that could be used for whatever some future plan would come up with. It was developed as part of the Crewed Expeditionary Vehicle program explicitly as a flexible platform. Orion block 1 was originally supposed to be a shuttle replacement for transit to the ISS. The constellation program under which Orion started to be built ostensibly had ambitions beyond just going to the moon, including missions to both Mars and Near Earth Asteroids, but those follow on targets were never really fleshed out. The SLS was created after constellation was cancelled with no clear mission defined; its intent to keep supplier contracts going was clearly stated at the time. Artemis was a program created to give the SLS destinations to go to, none of which are Mars.

I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.

Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.

The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.

11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.

We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction?

Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.

How many of those traffic accidents could have been prevented if traffic engineering was a serious engineering profession and road deaths were not simply accept as a 'fact of live'.

How many lives would have been saved if a bridge for trains instead of cars were designed?

Sure and sometimes you just need to actually issue safety equipment and install a fall net.

The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.

What is it then? What is real? It has to be environmental and safety regulations, long running environmental studies, general bureaucracy and NIMBYism holding construction and infrastructure back right? That’s what held up the high speed rail in California (along with funding factors). We’ve always had unions so that shouldn’t be it.

I mean you're demonstrating the exact problem right here: you aren't talking about any specific instances or processes, just vague concepts.

"It's regulations" "it's nimbyism" "it's environmental studies".

Concepts. Not the real actual implementations, their stakeholders and their impact on the project.

Things are so bad that we can't even seem to manage to install a fall net[0] in a timely manner.

[0]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-12/golden-g...

I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.

But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.

Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.

We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.

Basically because we don't feel like it.

If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.

The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.

The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.

So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.

Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.

Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.

Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.

This complete nonsense. The Apollo team was much, much, much, much larger then any V2 team. And mostly Americans.

And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.

> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.

And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.

So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.

> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.

Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.

It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.

Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.

That doesn't imply that it was faster though. It just implies they didn't have the technology to simulate it, nor CNC machining to do it another way.

I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?

it's because we "destroyed the technology" :^)

Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.

This is just nonsense. First of all, the companies in the 1960s were all there for profit and all made profit. And the politicians in power back then also tried to get contracts to companies in their districts. Why do you think the NASA control center is in Houston?

SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.

By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.

In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.

It isn't a fixed-price contract. They've been granted multiple "milestone" extensions as well as new contracts for things they're not capable of, clearly. One thing is for sure, no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves while telling the rest of us we need to be "more hardcore" and preach more austerity bullshit.

Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.

>In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.

How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?

I think you are just talking out of your ass. Please provide some sources.

The milestones and options are all defined in the original contract and each milestone is assigned some monetary value. There were a set of extension option that add milestones for a second lander that NASA choice to pick up. All this was specified in the original contract.

Starship won one small additional contract that I know of, that was about liquid transfer in Orbit, but that just one of 20+ minor contract about space operations.

> no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves

If it fails SpaceX will not get the money covered in the milestones. So if it fails it will 100% be SpaceX that pays. Why are you making stuff up?

Also, SpaceX has been the most successful NASA contractor in the last 20 years and its not even remotely close, so your confident that it fails is just bias.

NASA own estimation is that the SpaceX lunar program will cost more then double what they are paying SpaceX. SpaceX is giving the government an absolutely insanely good ideal and building a lunar lander for like 1/10 of the cost the lunar lander estimates were during constellation. SpaceX will be LOSING MONEY ON THIS DEAL.

Same goes for BlueOrigin, they can only bid because its Bezos hobby project, they will not make money from the lunar lander anytime soon.

All the contracts are public, if there are contracts that SpaceX got for Starship beyond the original lander contract and the minor demonstrator contract I mention above, please link them.

> Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.

Kathy Lueders has fantastic reputation with everybody in the know and has worker for NASA for 20 years. Its also wrong to say that it was just her, there is a whole team doing the evaluation with lots of experts involved.And after her the report had to be approved by a whole bunch more people.

If you have any actual evidence of wrong-doing, please come forward.

Funny enough Boeing did actually get caught cheating, a NASA executive was actually fired because he was giving Boeing details about the contract and giving them chances to re-submit the bid.

In terms of the technical evaluation see:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/option-a-sou...

And the GAO about why the protests were rejected:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/b-419783.pdf

BlueOrigin's 'National Team' and SpaceX received the same technical evaluation level while SpaceX was only like 50% of the price.

There is really no question that it was the only sensible selection. Anybody would have done the same selection. In fact had Kathy Lueders not selected SpaceX she might have been fired for bias and wrong doing.

It was then followed up by lobbying on the side of BlueOrigin where they got their senator from Washington involved and forced an increase in budget so they could also participate, but they were forced to lower the price by a huge amount as well.

So the result is NASA gets two lander program for about 1/4 or cheaper then was expected 20 years ago during Constellation.

If that's not an amazing deal I don't know what is.

> How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?

Its so crystal clear that you don't know anything about rockets and you're only goal is to perpetuate anti-SpaceX hate.

SLS 'first' flight is literally 95% things that already existed, doing something very conventional. It is literally using engines that were built in the 1970s. And its using solid state boosters form the same factory as those of Shuttle. Its literally just a bunch of old parts in slightly different configuration.

And its already cost 50 billion $ in development without even having to design anything new. The launch cost are absurdly high, so high that NASA can barley fund a SLS any anything else at the time. Notice how during Constellation they never even started to build a Lander, they never had the budget for it.

Starship on the other hand is a completely new architecture, with brand new engine, brand new infrastructure, brand new manufacturing sites and so on. And its trying to do much more then SLS. Its trying to be reusable and support distributed launch, and be a lander.

If all NASA wants is a simply rocket that can launch stuff, then SLS shouldn't be compared with Starship at all. SLS is more like Falcon Heavy or New Glenn, just 10-50x more expensive. Notice how Falcon Heavy also worked the first time it flew, because it was just parts of existing rockets in a new configuration. Its almost like its easier if you build with components that have flight heritage. Crazy how that works.

If NASA wanted just a simple big rocket they could have gotten there much cheaper then SLS. So the whole SLS vs Starship comparison doesn't even make any fucking sense in the first place. The goal of Starship was never to be SLS. Falcon Heavy is already 90% of SLS and if NASA had wanted to, they could have paid SpaceX to boost its performance a bit (something that had been studied 15 years ago already). And now between Vulcan, Falcon, New Glenn there are plenty of options if all you want is launch.

Honestly what kind of idiotic engineering evaluation is it to say 'X worked first time' so its forever better then anything else that didn't work the first time. That's not how we evaluate engineering projects ever even if you were comparing the right things in the first place. This argument just proves that you are not seriously trying to engage with the issues of Artemis program.

The SLS and Orion project have been so incredibly deeply flawed from the start. Its a huge mistake that they exists. The were bad designs to begin with and they are badly executed.

Constellation was a bad program by Bush Jr that was aimed at the moon, it would have been 4 expensive project, a human rocket, a big cargo rocket, a earth-moon capsule and a big new moon lander. Most of it Shuttle based, because everybody knew Shuttle was going to die, but they wanted to keep the workforce. Of these the human rocket was one of the dumbest human rocket designs ever, and it was so absurdly hilariously over-budget that the program basically had to kill itself. Orion was being worked on but was also over-budget and behind. The never even got to the big rocket or the moon lander.

Obama and his space team had some better idea, namely using commercial rockets and new contracting structures. You only need normal commercial rocket if you simply invest in distributed launch. Any analysis shows that this was going to be cheaper but NASA was never allowed to explore that. So they wanted to cancel the incredibly expensive badly designed Constellation program and did so. But Congress, Republicans and Democrats lead by later NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Alabama-man Richard Shelby wouldn't let it happen, they saved Orion by giving it a mission it was not suited for and transformed the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rocket from Constellation (the horribly over budget complete shit-shows) into SLS.

The way this happen is funny. NASA did a bunch of analysis on different very big rocket. And NASA analysis was perfectly clear, the cheapest and long term best option would be a RP-1 fueled first stage with big engines. So basically a Saturn V modernized. So basically going away from Shuttle legacy (Of course commercial rockets and distrusted launch would have been even cheaper, but they were not allowed to investigate that). Commercial companies were also never asked for suggestion, despite both SpaceX and ULA offering.

Congress lead by Richard Shelby and friends wouldn't allow that. So they specifically wrote the bill in a way that made it absolutely impossible to do anything other then a Shuttle derived. They wrote in 2010-2011 that the a rocket with 70t to LEO had to launch by 2017 and then later be upgraded to much more then that. And that made it clear no engine other then already existing RS-25 and the Shuttle Solid boosters could work.

But of course, Constellation was dead, SLS was literally just a rocket that didn't have a mission. Literally non, it had no uses. So Obama space team just came up with some mission that didn't really made sense, but at least they could pretend in marketing material that SLS was anything other then job creation.

Of course the program has just continue to done badly and done all the things anybody with a brain could have predicted already in 2012. Its incredibly expensive legacy hardware. Every aspect of the design makes it not only expensive but also incredibly hard and slow to produce. Every aspect of it makes it hard to operate.

SLS had the best possible budget, often getting more money in the Budget then they even asked for. It has been the darling of congress. SpaceX is delayed, and there are congressional hearings and questions. Tons of paid for media and so on. SLS that consumes more money per year then SpaceX received for the whole moon-lander barley gets mentioned. Under Trump 1 Bridenstein tried to launch an investigation if Orion could be launched on anything other then SLS. This was a pretty bad idea, likely mostly don't to pressure Boeing. Shelby basically told him that he would have to resign if he continued investigating this.

Jared Isaacman just like all the NASA Administrators before him know that this program is incredibly stupidly designed. Its program designed around a bunch of legacy hardware. And really dumb requirement. Really dumb contracting structure. And so on.

Isaacman is at least trying to contain how much money gets drained into the SLS money-pit, by dropping the also late and also over-budget EUS upper stage. This stage would likely have been just another endless money pit inside the money pit. And instead they might get away with a somewhat smaller money pit.

All of this is just an embarrassing shit-show from beginning to end. Between Shuttle derived vehicles and Orion NASA has spent already something on the order of 100-150 billion $ and what they got out of it was 1 SLS launch and a few Orion tests that never tested the whole system. Its going to cost much more and its not gone get much cheaper anytime soon. On the meantime, the complete development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, re-usability and human rating Falcon 9 plus Falcon Heavy, plus Cargo Dragon 1, Cargo Dragon 2 and Crew Dragon cost on the order of 5 billion $ conservatively.

And I'm not saying this as a SpaceX believer who wants all money to go to SpaceX. Distrusted launch (including refueling) where many companies can compete is the right answer specially for launch.

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Did we ever get clarification as to how the Dragon 8 crew member got hurt and why SpaceX got warned? https://www.popsci.com/science/nasa-spacex-safety/#:~:text=%...