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A vigorous debate is underway among a very small number of NewMars members.
In mid-February of 2025, the United States is in a period of dramatic change, and the future is about as uncertain as I have seen.
The present is right up there with the Cuban Missile crisis, when those Americans who understood what was going on had NO idea if we were going to be vaporized in a few days.
So it is that I have offered the starting premise that the SLS project should be stopped immediately.
There is an argument that the hardware is built so it should be used.
There may some merit to that argument, but I think that the costs of preserving the capability to fly the existing hardware are excessive to the point of being ridiculous.
I think that hardware could be converted to reusability if it were turned over to a completely different set of engineers under modern management.
There is an argument that older engineers might be able to make the transition to productivity under modern management, and in that case hard won skills could be put to use.
In any case, this topic is available for what I hope will be a vigorous discussion, and I invite every still living/kicking member of the forum to toss a post into the stack.
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This post is reserved for an index to what I hope will be a number of posts by members.
RobertDyck: http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 46#p229846
Argues for saving the SLS until an alternative is actually ready to fly.
kbd512: http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 48#p229848
If ready to use then use it, else dump it. Plus Starship evaluation.
Detailed review of potential service providers.
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I do not believe SLS could be converted to reusability. Modifications would be too extensive. Well, SRBs were reusable for Shuttle, however the cost to recover, refurbish, and refuel them cost 90% of new ones. So is it worth it? The new Vulcan rocket of ULA has engines of the first stage in a pod that separates after staging, and returns with a parachute. You could do the same to the core stage of SLS, but how much modification would that require? Companies that built SLS for NASA go out of their way to maximize billable hours and charge several times as much money as the work requires. So such a significant modification to SLS would cost on the order as the rediculous cost of SLS itself.
Should it be cancelled? I would argue not yet. Starship is not yet operational. Wait until it is. Vulcan Centaur can lift 27,200 kg (60,000 lb) to LEO. New Glenn can lift 45,000 kg (99,000 lb) to LEO. SLS Block 1 to LEO 70,000 kg (150,000 lb), Block 1B 105,000 kg (231,000 lb), Block 2 130,000 kg (290,000 lb). SpaceX Starship we're not sure since it isn't finished. SpaceX has said at least 100,000 kg fully reusable.
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tahanson43206,
If the hardware truly is ready to use, then I think we should at least get our first lunar mission out of all the money that was spent on SLS and Orion. If the hardware is still not ready to use, then we've thrown enough good money after bad, at this point, and need to cut our losses so that under-funded solutions that can be used in a practical way are given priority. It would seem that only SpaceX and Blue Origin are going to make this lunar program happen, assuming it happens at all.
If Starship is ready to fly within the next year, and on-orbit refueling perfected within the following year, then there's no point to continuing with the Artemis program. NASA's current cost estimate is $4.2B per lunar mission. If Starship can fly for about $100M, then we can launch 42 times for the same amount of money spent, and deliver 8,400t to LEO. If SpaceX's projected $2M per Starship launch ends up being more like $20M, so 10X their original cost projection, then we can still send a battleship to orbit for $4.2B. You don't have to be very good at math to figure out how a fully and rapidly reusable Starship would make SLS and Orion a pointless endeavor.
I don't think Starship is optimal for landing on the moon in its current form, though. I think Blue Origin's lander concept looks closer to something that would work. Lockheed-Martin's lunar lander also looked like it could work. My preference would be dictating to Blue Origin that they're going to use the existing hypergolic propellants and engines for their lunar lander design, just to drag their lander design across the finish line. Using cryogenic propellants for landers need to mature before we risk the schedule or lives on a bridge too far.
The Dragon capsules are suitable for lunar missions, but if we feel they're less capable than Orion, then we'll send two of them instead of one, because you can do that when you have a gigantic fully reusable vehicle that can refuel on-orbit.
The new mission architecture would be as follows:
1. One Starship booster / upper stage, minus the heat shielding, is sent to LEO. It's staying up there, meaning not coming back to Earth. This is going to be our "space tug" / "space station" variant of Starship. This special version of Starship has a jettisonable payload fairing and contains a habitation / node module permanently affixed to the booster, with significant radiation shielding and additional crew consumables.
2. 5 Starship tankers refuel this upper stage in LEO. If all goes well and our space tug's tanks full, then we're ready to depart.
3. A Falcon 9 booster launches a Crewed Dragon capsule to LEO, where it docks with the Starship space tug.
4. A Blue Origin New Glenn launches a Blue Moon heavy lunar lander to LEO, where it docks with the Starship space tug.
5. The entire stack is propelled on a trans-lunar injection trajectory to the moon.
6. The stack arrives in LMO, where the crew leave their space hab module and enter the lander.
7. The lander departs for the lunar surface, the astronauts figure out whether or not there's lots of liquid water available at the South Pole for refining our ISRU concept required for practical Mars missions. When they're done with their experiments, the lander ascends back to orbit and docks with the booster / space hab stack. The astronauts return to their Dragon capsule for the transit back to Earth. The hab module and booster upper stage remains in LMO, never to return.
8. The Dragon capsule returns to Earth for splashdown.
9. For subsequent missions, we're only restocking the hab module with consumables, so the space tug can carry a heavier lander loaded with full scale ISRU equipment for refueling practice.
10. Follow-on missions will be undertaken to evaluate long-duration surface habitation, ISRU refinement for life support, space suit refinement for durability, and scientific study of the moon to evaluate the suitability of other planets for metals mining. We will conduct some scale experiments with metals refining to test the feasibility of mining and machining lunar-sourced metal ores, which will be required by a prospective Martian colony to construct sufficient habitation space for the colonists and their food production.
Is this slightly more complex than what Dr Zubrin proposed?
Yes. We need a lunar mission architecture that functions as a full dress rehearsal for a Mars exploration or colonization mission, so it must use hardware that works for Mars missions. We will leave some astronauts behind on the new lunar space station to spend 6 months there without resupply, which would be equal to a deep space flight to Mars. If that works, then we've proven that we can live in deep space for 6 months. We'll leave a Dragon capsule with them so they can return to Earth, just in case anything goes seriously wrong.
Starship and New Glenn are man-rated. Falcon Heavy was never man-rated, because it was created as a replacement for Delta IV Heavy to provide Space Force with a heavy lift launch vehicle for national security missions. Therefore, Falcon Heavy is not a viable option for manned missions.
I think we have the budget for two new national security mission launchers, namely ULA's Vulcan and Blue Origin's New Glenn. SpaceX will focus on crewed missions since they seem to be the only ones capable of doing that reliably. Blue Origin will be our second-choice provider for crewed missions using the Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser mini shuttle, and first-choice for landers, with SpaceX being the second-choice or perhaps first-choice for actual Mars missions.
We're relying upon SpaceX and Blue Origin to do the heavy lifting required, and we're using our traditional contractors for specialized pieces of tech that they can spend time and money refining, such as the ACES and crasher stage concepts from ULA. If the crasher stage concept works, then a large habitation module can be landed on the moon, which will serve as the basis for a Mars habitation module.
NASA will continue to focus on HIAD, ADEPT, and inflatables for Mars reentry of cargo / habitation / ISRU modules. We also need them to get their KiloPower reactor flight-ready for reliable surface power for life support, as well as the new BWXT nuclear thermal rocket engine to cut the fuel mass / bill in half, relative to LOX/LH2 or LOX/LCH4. I'm not sure who can begin work on artificial gravity, but someone needs to take up that project as well. There are a lot of different moving parts required to make these exploration and colonization missions work in a practical way. Leaning too heavily on any one hardware or services provider or government agency is a mistake.
Blue Origin - heavy lift launch vehicles, national security launches, lander concept design
Boeing - general hardware fabrication assistance, advanced materials science
BWXT - nuclear thermal rocket engines, nuclear reactors, general nuclear engineering services
ILC Dover - advanced space suit design and hardware fabrication
Lockheed-Martin - capsule systems, lander concept design
Northrop-Grumman - lander hardware fabrication, on-orbit satellite refueling
Paragon SDC - advanced life support and specialty space hardware
Sierra Nevada Corporation - fully reusable mini shuttles, advanced life support
SpaceX - super heavy lift launch vehicles, on-orbit refueling, space capsules, commercial satellite and crew missions (they know how to run their own crewed missions, with or without support from NASA)
RocketLabs - advanced propulsion with small chemical engines, advanced composites fabrication, small sat exploration missions
Aerojet-Rocketdyne - LH2 engines, hypergolic engines, ion engines
ULA - heavy lift launch vehicles, advanced power and propulsion concepts for upper stages, national security launches
That's the list of the companies providing the "stuff we need" to continue on with space exploration focusing on the moon and Mars. There are many others, but those are our prime contractors. They all bring something to these missions that we cannot live without. Mostly, when combined they have a depth and breadth of knowledge and experience that is unmatched by other competitor nations such as Russia and China.
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Copy below of an email sent to Tahanson43206 2-17-20265, regarding SLS reusability. I’ve already posted elsewhere about SLS cancellation. Boeing gave its SLS team their legally-required 60-day notice of cancellation layoffs just the other day.
I don't think the mix of older and younger workers at Boeing could be re-trained very expeditiously to work the reusability problem. Their habits are ingrained fairly deep, and I seriously doubt there has been any change to the corporate culture. That takes a major shakeup that Boeing hasn't had yet. All they've done so far is lose $billions from their bad management culture. Which has been there, about 3 decades now, ever since the takeover/merger with McDonnell-Douglas. That took place as McDonnell-Douglas becoming Boeing, but at the cost of using some of their top corporate managers as a majority of the new merged management. McDonnell-Douglas was a target for merger/takeover precisely because those managers had already run it into the ground.
As for reworking the SLS hardware into reusable hardware, you might do that with the engines and maybe some of the avionics units, but it's just about impossible with the stage/tankage hardware. You don't just rework it, you mostly end up replacing it, or you pay a huge operating cost. The Falcons fly back with aluminum structure because they do 3 burns, not just two! With aluminum, you have to be doing no more than about Mach 2.5 to at most 3, when you hit the atmosphere, which requires the "entry burn". You'll notice nobody else besides SpaceX is doing that, not yet, and even SpaceX no longer does it with their Superheavy booster. It takes a lot of propellant to do the return burn, then the entry burn takes at least as much propellant as the landing burn, probably more. You really cut into payload capability with 3 burns instead of 2. It's an exponential mass ratio thing with the rocket equation.
BlueOrigin eliminated the return burn with their New Glenn, planning on recovering on a ship downrange instead. That saves a lot of propellant and payload capability, but you pay for it with the costs of the returning of the ship with the stage on it, and on handling the spent stage at both ends of that ship journey.
Nobody that I know of is yet proposing the "right thing to do", which is to land the stage downrange somewhere, reload it with propellants there on the surface, and then fly it back to the launch site. You need only hard-surfaced large (really large !!!) landing pads to do that, you don't really need SpaceX's catch towers. Just put the landing legs on your stage, the way Blue Origin already does, which is the simpler brute-force solution. Pad construction is comparably cheap. If you do it "right", you only have to do it once.
If you can divert a bit cross-range after staging, to touch down on dry land downrange somewhere, you don't even need the special ship to land upon. If you have the proper landing pads in place, the landing legs don't have to be so large and heavy (we already saw that with the early Starship-only flight tests). You only need big heavy legs to do rough/soft-field landings. Boosters are uncrewed; so ditching failures in the sea is an easy option for them.
Even I could get the FAA to agree to a plan like that! There are simply fewer failure modes.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2025-02-18 15:31:46)
GW Johnson
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"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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And this is the entire text of my posting in post 503 of Meta New Mars/GW Johnson postings .....
Major news from AIAA’s “Daily Launch” email newsletter for Monday 2-10-2025, with link to a longer Ars Technica article that reproduced here. The 1st 3 paragraphs were in the “Daily Launch”.
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Boeing has informed its employees of uncertainty in future SLS contracts
The White House has not made a final decision yet on the large rocket
By Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, 7 Feb 2025
The primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket, Boeing, is preparing for the possibility that NASA cancels the long-running program.
On Friday, with less than an hour's notice, David Dutcher, Boeing's vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn't take questions.
During his remarks, Dutcher said Boeing's contracts for the rocket could end in March and that the company was preparing for layoffs in case the contracts with the space agency were not renewed. "Cold and scripted" is how one person described Dutcher's demeanor.
Giving a 60-day notice
The aerospace company, which is the primary contractor for the rocket's large core stage, issued the notifications as part of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act, which requires US employers with 100 or more full-time employees to provide a 60-day notice in advance of mass layoffs or plant closings.
"To align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations, today we informed our Space Launch Systems team of the potential for approximately 400 fewer positions by April 2025," a Boeing spokesperson told Ars. "This will require 60-day notices of involuntary layoff be issued to impacted employees in coming weeks, in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. We are working with our customer and seeking opportunities to redeploy employees across our company to minimize job losses and retain our talented teammates."
The timing of Friday's hastily called meeting aligns with the anticipated release of President Trump's budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026. This may not be an entire plan but rather a "skinny" budget that lays out a wish list of spending requests for Congress and some basic economic projections. Congress does not have to act on Trump's budget priorities.
Multiple sources said there has been a healthy debate within the White House and senior leadership at NASA, including acting administrator Janet Petro, about the future of the SLS rocket and the Artemis Moon program. Some commercial space advocates have been pressing hard to cancel the rocket outright. Petro has been urging the White House to allow NASA to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions using the initial version of the SLS rocket before the program is canceled.
Critics of the large and expensive rocket—a single launch costs in excess of $2 billion, exclusive of any payloads or the cost of ground systems—say NASA should cut its losses. Keeping the SLS rocket program around for the first lunar landing would actually bog down progress, these critics say, because large contractors such as Boeing would be incentivized to slow down work and drag out funding with their cost-plus contracts for as long as possible.
On Saturday, a day after this story was published, NASA released a statement saying the SLS rocket remains an "essential component" of the Artemis campaign. "NASA and its industry partners continuously work together to evaluate and align budget, resources, contractor performance, and schedules to execute mission requirements efficiently, safely, and successfully in support of NASA’s Moon to Mars goals and objectives," a spokesperson said. "NASA defers to its industry contractors for more information regarding their workforces."
Long-delayed and expensive
Friday's all-hands meeting indicates that Boeing executives believe there is at least the possibility that the Trump White House will propose ending the SLS rocket as part of its budget proposal in March.
The US Congress, in concert with senior leaders at NASA, directed the space agency to develop the SLS rocket in 2011. Built to a significant degree from components of the space shuttle, including its main engines and side-mounted boosters, the SLS rocket was initially supposed to launch by the end of 2016. It did not make its debut flight until the end of 2022.
NASA has spent approximately $3 billion a year developing the rocket and its ground systems over the program's lifetime. While handing out guaranteed contracts to Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet, and other contractors, the government's rocket-building enterprise has been superseded by the private industry. SpaceX has developed two heavy-lift rockets in the last decade, and Blue Origin just launched its own, with the New Glenn booster. Each of these rockets is at least partially reusable and flies at less than one-tenth the cost of the SLS rocket.
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My take:
I was expecting to see Starliner cancelled before SLS, but it may work out to be SLS first. We will see if Trump’s sowing chaos can overcome the entrenched pork-barrel politics of powerful Senators. Meanwhile, even the Artemis moon program itself could possibly be on the chopping block. That was definitely hinted in the Ars Technica article, in the 7th of 12 paragraphs.
GW Johnson
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"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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From AIAA’s Daily Launch email newsletter for Wednesday 2-19-2025, and found at 10:30 AM CST, there was a link to this Space.com report:
Boeing plans to lay off hundreds of employees working on NASA's SLS moon rocket: reports
News
By Sharmila Kuthunur
published 17 hours ago
Boeing notified employees it is planning to issue layoff notices "to align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations."
Boeing is preparing to issue layoff notices to roughly 200 employees working on the Space Launch System (SLS) — the massive rocket central to NASA's flagship Artemis program — as it braces for the possibility that its contracts with the space agency may not be renewed after they end in March.
Of the approximately 400 positions Boeing initially considered cutting by April "to align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations," the company managed to preserve half of the jobs after daily talks with NASA, Boeing's Vice President and program manager for the SLS rocket, David Dutcher, notified employees in an email last week, according to Bloomberg.
The news of layoffs, first reported by Ars Technica on Feb. 7, comes as six space industry representatives advising President Donald Trump and Elon Musk say they want the duo to cancel the SLS program — or at least phase it out over several years, Reuters reported on Wednesday (Feb. 12).
The development of SLS, for which Boeing is the primary contractor, has cost $23.8 billion between its inception in 2011 and its first Artemis test flight that occurred in late 2022. The megarocket is neither reusable nor inexpensive: it can launch only once every two years and costs an estimated $4.1 billion per launch, making it effectively unaffordable for future Artemis missions.
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• Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin laying off 1,000 employees: reports
• Boeing considers selling its space business, including Starliner: report
Critics often argue Musk's SpaceX could accomplish missions to the moon at lower costs with its reusable Starship vehicle, which is undergoing test flights in preparation for the Artemis 3 crewed mission, currently scheduled for 2027. Historically, however, SLS and Orion spacecraft development has received substantial funding from a broad coalition; the program supports more than 69,000 jobs nationwide as of 2019.
But critics contends that the rocket's costs and slow pace of development mean it should go the way of the space shuttle. "Regarding space, the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program," Musk wrote in a post on X on Dec. 25. "Something entirely new is needed."
NASA itself has not yet officially noted any changes to its Artemis program. At the SpaceCom conference in Florida last month, Kirk Shireman, who is the Orion program manager at Lockheed Martin, said NASA's current approach to Artemis remains effective despite criticism regarding costs and delays, according to a report by SpaceNews.
"What we need to do is tell the people in the new administration and anyone we can talk to this about is, hey, the fastest way to get humans back on the moon is to stay the course," Shireman said, according to SpaceNews.
"Things take a long time to build and certify and, if you throw them away every four years and start over, that's probably the slowest and most expensive thing we could do."
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
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My take: this is confirmation of what I already found. The number of layoffs has dropped to half that in the first reports.
As to why Blue Origin is laying off, that’s another thing to be chased down.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2025-02-19 11:40:24)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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