The good news about SLS is that it’s not burning fracked natural gas like Elon’s rockets… it’s burning Hydrogen that was produced from fracked natural gas. It’s not green now, but it has the potential to be in the future. Cryogenic H2 requires some expense compared to cheap-and-dirty methylox.
The other advantage of SLS is that these rockets are owned by the people, not private companies. If we want an equitable future in space, we need NASA rockets. Right now the SLS is that rocket.
It doesn't have potential. It's possible, but not practical. Using hydrogen for transport is snake oil - there are plenty of other industrial uses that should have much higher priority.
In order to meet the global industrial demand with green hydrogen, we would need to dedicate 3x the global renewable generation capacity from 2019 entirely to hydrogen production. That simply isn't going to happen - and that's just trying to deal with demand where there are no other options but hydrogen. If you start adding transport the demand will sky rocket. This is great for those in the business of selling hydrogen, terrible for everyone else.
Hydrogen is also an incredibly inefficient fuel, both in terms of burning it and in terms of energy cost to produce.
Methane is also not exclusively extracted through fracking. You're minimising the negatives of hydrogen and sensationalising the competition.
The other advantage of SLS is that these rockets are owned by the people, not private companies.
Yes because Boeing are totally a company for the people, they never take advantage of government contracts and always stay within budget.
Say what you will about SpaceX and the issues with the private sector and publicly traded businesses, SpaceX have revolutionised the rocket industry and driven costs down.
I mean, we’re talking about hydrogen for rockets here which is an absolutely tiny portion of global fuel consumption, wether or not we should be using it for anything else and the costs and scale of doing so is neither here nor there. ( Personally I think hydrogen powered cars are dumb)
In the context of rocket science hydrogen is just a better fuel in absolute terms. It is ~25% more efficient than methane. It’s less dense and thus needs larger tanks, but due to the square cube law that matters less and less the larger the rocket is, so on particularly large rockets like those going to the moon, hydrogen is just flat out better and leads to smaller less costly rockets if done properly.
The problem is that Boeing has been holding nasa hostage and extracting ransom, I don’t think nasa should be reliant on private companies for it’s rockets, they should have a internal department that develops and builds boosters in a similar way to how JPL works with probes and rovers. It would be costly upfront for sure, but would save money in the long run since it would prevent private companies from exploiting public interests in the future.
The SLS isn’t owned by the people ether, not really anyways, all the infrastructure and production lines are owned by Boeing which is just as bad as any of the new companies.
Personally I think NASA should just have an internal booster production team/facility like they do with rovers and probes through JPL.
It’s ludicrous to me that the consensus coming out of the space shuttle program and SLS that nasa’s designs were blamed for cost when the cost mainly came from choices made by private interests and contractors.
But still... you're burning hydrocarbons so you end up producing a lot of CO2 which is going straight into the atmosphere. That's not what I'd call super green.
I get that SLS and Orion have insane congressional approval. And keep getting overfunded because of it. And a lot of that money would go away without them. And there's a lot of interesting development in HLS and CLPS that wouldn't exist without them. But it still just stinks to see how expensive SLS is and that there's basically nothing that can or will be done about it.
Are you familiar with Wernher von Braun? He was a Nazi who ran Germany's V2 rocket program during World War II. He produced thousands of ballistic missiles intended to indiscriminately bombard British cities, they were unable to accurately target specific military sites so they were just aimed at civilian centers and let loose. Slave labor was used in their production, resulting in many thousands of innocent Jews and other concentration camp prisoners dying under hazardous conditions and bombardment of the manufacturing facilities.
After the war he went to work for NASA and was the principle designer behind the Saturn V that took humanity to the Moon. Should NASA have repudiated the Saturn V design and gone with a less capable vehicle? Should people be responding "Fuck Nazi propaganda" whenever the virtues of the Saturn V are mentioned? Or is it possible to separate the evaluation of the merits of a rocket from the evaluation of the rocket's designer?
Elon Musk is a shitty person. The Starship is a fantastic rocket. Both of these things can be simultaneously true.
Interesting tidbit about the V2: as far as I know it's the only weapons system that killed more people during the manufacturing process than it did in actual use. Casualties caused by V2 strikes are estimated to be around 9 000, but around 12 000 slave laborers died making them (see eg the wiki).
In any case, comparing von Braun to Musk is uncharitable towards von Braun: he actually did design rockets and knew what he was doing, where Musk is just a bigoted windbag that emits money. But I do tend to agree with your sentiment though: SpaceX has good designs, but that's completely separate from Musk being a human turd (and his only part in it is the part where he emits money.)
The numbers are bullshit. All money spent on NASA goes back to the economy. And it's all public domain technology. Fascists would love to replace that will privately controlled technology.
The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.
Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn't tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu'uh (see the articles cost reduction "objectives").
The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.
However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don't count.
Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.
How much do they spend on these rockets as compared to military spending? Compared to tax incentives and bailouts for large corporations? For dead-end pet projects for reps who are trying to pander to their demographics, or secure contracts for their buddies in the lobbying business?
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In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage.
"Some NASA officials told us that changes to Artemis mission dates should not affect the SLS program’s cost estimate," the report states.
"Other officials noted that the program’s cost estimate would be expected to increase to account for the delay to the Artemis IV mission, which shifted from 2026 to 2028."