[Space] Space Launch System, SLS - Page 2

On August 07 2011 03:45 Hakker wrote:
This is a true casualty of this entire financial crisis. Who knows where we would have been as a race if we had invested into space technology,ven 50 years ago this wouldn't have been acceptable. Exploration has been humanities largest endeavor for thousands of years and now its coming to an end just because some guys on wall street decided that one yacht wasn't enough.

On August 07 2011 03:44 OsoVega wrote:

Yeah the government taking money and creating jobs with it is in fact creating jobs when you're not talking about the free market, creating jobs isn't necessarily a good thing. In the free market job creation will always be the result of production or at worst, someone foolishly investing which is at least their choice. The government on the other hand, takes money from the people to create jobs. Sometimes this is good but it is often bad. The government may be foolishly investing just like the man in the free market and instead of this coming at the expense of one man who chose to do that it comes at the expense of all tax payers who may or may not have supported the investment.

On August 07 2011 03:57 semantics wrote:
Yup long history of bad investments, nasa is also does it part by creating research needed for the rockets we used to scare off the rooskies by increasing reliability of our rockets from 60% chance of hitting their target to 96% by the end of the 80's

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, today issued the following statement regarding NASA's implementation of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, particularly with regard to the direction of U.S. human spaceflight programs:

"Today NASA is scheduled to formally receive the independent cost assessment for the Space Launch System (SLS) that was requested by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). I expect this independent assessment will confirm what myself and the NASA technical staff have known for many months - that the SLS plan is financially and technically sound, and that NASA should move forward immediately.

"I remain very concerned about continuing delays. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act required NASA to bring forward a plan by January 10, 2011. The political leadership at NASA and at OMB has dragged their feet on implementation. After many requests for NASA to comply with the law, the Commerce Committee finally initiated a formal investigation earlier this summer. While that investigation is ongoing, I reiterate my call to NASA and the Administration to proceed with its SLS development program immediately, in compliance with the law.

On August 20 2011 22:22 Catch]22 wrote:
Why spend money on space? Useless waste

On August 20 2011 22:22 Catch]22 wrote:
Why spend money on space? Useless waste

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Florida's U.S. senators say Alabama's U.S. senators misunderstand a federal law they all helped write, a law requiring NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket.

Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, says the two delegations agree on the main point: NASA should start now on the new rocket formally known as the Space Launch System (SLS).

Yet despite Shelby's focus on the bottom line, the dueling views aired in two August letters to the White House, marking a rare public split in the congressional front pushing the new rocket.

The Alabama senators are furious that the White House has delayed development of Space Launch System even though Congress approved it last November in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and appropriated $1.8 billion for it for the fiscal year that ends this month.

On August 20 2011 22:42 whitelly wrote:


i was about to answer that but, Why spend time on you?Useless waste

On August 07 2011 04:49 lithiumdeuteride wrote:
Sorry for the long post, but I have strong feelings about this topic.

I want to point out a fundamental difference between the Saturn V (the Apollo launch vehicle) and this new SLS rocket. This won't be news to anyone who follows the history of the US space program.

The Saturn V was designed with a specific goal in mind - land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth. Orbital mechanics dictate how much delta-v (change in velocity) is required to do this. The Saturn V's design was that it should fulfill the goal, while achieving maximum reliability and minimum cost. Nobody knew what type of vehicle would be the best design, so many designs were compared in numerous trade studies. Eventually, they settled upon a three-stage booster with a LOX-kerosene first stage, and LOX-hydrogen upper stages. The ullage motors (used to settle the fuel in the weightless environment of freefall) and the launch abort system (LAS) were chosen to be solid rocket motors.

The important thing to note is that the politicians set the final goal, and the engineers had complete freedom to do what they deemed necessary to achieve it. When skilled engineers design something, the result, unsurprisingly, is a good design.

Compare this to the SLS. Politicians are constraining this rocket design by inserting language into legislation which requires it to use components manufactured by businesses in their states/districts. Needless to say, politicians do not make good engineers. Their decisions would not result in a capable vehicle, or a cost-efficient vehicle, or an innovative vehicle, because their decisions are made according to the financial gain of a small number of people.

I'll now illustrate why the SLS is a poor design. First, solid rocket motors are simply bad outside of a few narrow uses, like ullage and escape motors (as on the Saturn V) and long-term storage (missiles in silos). Not only is the specific impulse of solids significantly lower than liquid fuels, the entire motor is a combustion chamber. Combustion chambers contain high pressure, and thus require thick walls. This makes them very massive. So, while they provide very high thrust, they do so for only a short time, and a large mass penalty is incurred. A liquid-fueled rocket, on the other hand, is made of a light, thin-walled tank operating at low pressure, feeding into a small combustion chamber operating at high pressure. The fuel mass fraction achieved with liquid fuels far superior, as is the specific impulse, and that leads to a superior rocket.

Second, the SLS's funding does not match its ambition. This leads to the extremely expanded time scale NASA has reported. But the effect is worse than you might think. Halving the budget does not merely double the timescale. It's far worse than that, due to the presence of fixed operating costs. You've heard about economies of scale, wherein it becomes cheaper (per part) to make something when you make a large number of them. Part of the reason for this is the recurring fixed cost of operating a facility and paying salaries. When you fund a large project with a small amount of money, you get truly abysmal efficiency.

And in case anyone is about to complain that NASA gets too much money already, remember they gets about 1.6% of the US discretionary budget, which is only 38% of the total budget. I can't take seriously an attack on NASA's budget from anyone who hasn't first come up with a way to curb the absurd quantities of money given to the 'defense' industry, and a way to fix social security.

In short, politicians are ruining the US space program and they must be stopped.

On September 04 2011 05:09 Catch]22 wrote:
Or, because you have no actual reasoning why space travel is anything worth investing in at the moment. We have enough need for the money back home on earth.

It used to be on some allure of supposed research performed in zero gravity, but that never yielded any results at all. Spend the money on something worthwhile instead of the space program.

On September 04 2011 05:09 Catch]22 wrote:



Or, because you have no actual reasoning why space travel is anything worth investing in at the moment. We have enough need for the money back home on earth.

It used to be on some allure of supposed research performed in zero gravity, but that never yielded any results at all. Spend the money on something worthwhile instead of the space program.

On July 29 2011 11:18 Z3kk wrote:
I'm just not sure as to whether they should continue the space program, at least for the time being... :x

For now, I really do not think money should be invested--at least so heavily--into NASA programs.

On July 29 2011 11:18 Z3kk wrote:
I'm just not sure as to whether they should continue the space program, at least for the time being... :x

For now, I really do not think money should be invested--at least so heavily--into NASA programs.

On September 04 2011 05:28 sunprince wrote:


Spending money on space programs offers little direct benefit, sure. But the indirect benefits, such as the advancement of our technological edge, as well as job and economic growth, are huge. In fact, we're probably regaining most of every dollar we spend on NASA, as opposed to spending areas such as defense or entitlement programs, where we lose most of it.

It's not about any specific field of research. It's just general space-related research that universities could never afford to do on their own. We pour tons of money into university research in a variety of fields not deemed "worthwhile", because the expansion of our scientific research often yields unexpected benefits. Just take a look at the technologies we have because of NASA alone.

NASA has been plagued by terrible mismanagement, some of it the fault of the agency, of some of it the fault of political tug-of-war in Congress constantly wasting their time/money with changing plans. But at it's heart, NASA is a worthwhile program. We just gotta figure out how to spend on it responsibly.