Discussion for article #230851
Pretty cool—evidently the final version of the SLS will be as big as the Saturn V. BBC has the launch if you missed it.
SLS + Orion = Colossal waste of money.
For me at least, there is little that is more exciting than space exploration. Robotic probes, telescopes, landers, rovers, radar mapper, manned space flight (with a reason), cosmology, and even the technology of getting there is fascinating to me. What isn’t thrilling is spending billions on a capsule and rocket that is ungodly expensive, and the only current mission will be to go into lunar orbit, and maybe, maybe if we manage to tow an asteroid into lunar orbit there will be a mission to said asteroid. Tens of billions of dollars for that? Why? Oh yes, congress wants it–especially the congress critters who’s States are at the feeding trough for this boondoggle program.
Take a look at program costs for the SLS, and see if your still excited about it. The cost this expendable launcher is mind numbingly high. Orion itself is absurdly expensive.
Holy Shit! We launched a new spaceship! That’s AWESOME!
And the estimated cost of the program through 2025 will be $41 billion for four launches–1 on the Delta IV Heavy (today’s), and 3 on the SLS. Holy Shit, that $10.25 billion per launch!
I never even heard of it before today, and have no opinion. It could well be too expensive. But is it obscenely too expensive in a way that will handicap space exploration for a long time, or just too expensive for a perfect world? All I know is when I was a little kid regular people were excited about space exploration. Maybe there were cost overruns and boondoggles in the creation of the first sailing ships, or the Panama Canal. People are people, you can’t get away from that. But today they’re talking about going to Mars. Our mass culture is so uniformly sad and tawdry in recent years—just once in a while, I’d like to be a little inspired about something.
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It’s not that Orion and SLS wouldn’t be a system worth having, it’s that it’s far too expensive especially considering a private company will have something earlier and possibly more powerful then the SLS. Oh, and massively less expensive as well.
Here’s a good introduction on this:
This is the same program Obama cancelled shortly after his inauguration. This launch could have happened four years ago, and we could have a manned space program again instead of relying on the Russians.
Yes, I also thought the plan was for SpaceX and its ilk to be doing this by now. What happened to that?
Obama did cancel Ares, but Orion continued to be developed. We (America) still would not have had a manned space flight capability by now, even if Obama hadn’t cancelled Ares. Orion will not launch again for around 4 years – it’s first manning flight. SpaceX and the ULA both have manned spacecraft. SpaceX (I think) is due to launch there’s late next year, or early in 2016, with the ULA’s CST-100 around 6 months later. SpaceX just flew there 4th or 5th mission the deliver cargo to the Space Station and another will launch on about 2 weeks. SpaceX will try to propulsively land their first stage booster on the next flight, and then re-fly it sometime next year. That has the potential for enormously reducing the cost per pound to orbit. SpaceX already has the lowest cost per pound to orbit right now. That point to all this is we can get more mass into orbit for far less money, not just for delivering cargo and crew to the ISS but for going other places as well.
But I also saw somewhere that this project will provide the building blocks for a manned exploration of Mars.
A lot of that is investment in technologies that will be used far later than that, and there’s something to be said for making technological advances if for no other reason that to push the wonder and joy of science and engineering for the future of our country.
That money is being spent in our country’s economy, employing people and creating markets that didn’t exist before. It is developing new and innovative ways to solve problems that face not only space exploration but also terrestrial needs.
Would I rather this was spent on roads and bridges and water lines and other infrastructure upgrades? Sure. But it won’t be, and taking it away from science and engineering is short sighted.