New Mars Forums

WSJ’s SpaceX Story Raises Many Alarm Bells, But Few Are Based in Fact
By John Bonazzo • 06/04/18
Observer

Things may look bleak for SpaceX, but Elon Musk isn’t beaten yet.

The space transportation company told The Wall Street Journal this weekend that it won’t launch a pair of space tourists into orbit this year, as it had previously promised. There’s now no exact timeline for when the tourist mission will occur (though the Journal initially claimed it would happen in summer 2019).

“SpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals on a trip around the moon, and there is growing interest from many customers,” SpaceX spokesman James Gleeson told Observer. “Private spaceflight missions, including a trip around the moon, present an opportunity for humans to return to deep space and to travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them, which is of course an important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal to help make humanity multi-planetary.”

Musk had announced with great fanfare in February 2017 that SpaceX would send two paying customers around the moon and back again aboard the Falcon Heavy. The tourists were never identified, but reportedly paid a large deposit.

This delay seemingly points to bigger issues at SpaceX—and the Journal framed it as such by spotlighting the company’s history of missed deadlines.

SpaceX expects to launch between 25 and 30 missions this year—it’s completed 11 thus far, with the most recent one going into orbit this morning.

But after 2018, prospects seemingly look much bleaker. SpaceX projects that it will launch 40 percent fewer missions next year.

Some of this is expected: SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC there had been a “slight slowdown” in satellite orders for 2019 (such orders must be made two years in advance).

But the Journal goes further, claiming there is much less demand for SpaceX’s largest rockets than the company predicted.

The Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s biggest rocket launcher, went on its maiden voyage in February. Analysts thought the craft, which has five million pounds of thrust, could upend the space industry.

But according to the Journal, the smaller Falcon 9 rocket is capable of putting most existing satellites into orbit on its own. The price of the Falcon 9 has also decreased of late.

As such, the Journal includes a claim from space entrepreneur Charles Miller that there was “no commercial need” for the Falcon Heavy at this time.

One look at the SpaceX website proves this isn’t true, however. There are at least four Falcon Heavy missions listed on the company’s current launch manifest (which is frequently updated).

Furthermore, Miller is a former vice president of international communications at Boeing—which coincidentally is one of SpaceX’s main competitors. So it makes sense that he would cast doubt on Musk’s efforts.

SpaceX certainly has many challenges ahead on the road to interstellar dominance. But when media outlets manufacture fake issues out of thin air, that just makes the company’s job harder.

http://observer.com/2018/06/spacex-wall … e-tourism/

The speed of space travel is currently limited by the quantity of chemical fuel that spacecraft must carry. Robert Zubrin, President of Pioneer Astronautics, introduces the dipole drive - a new propulsion system which uses ambient space plasma as propellant, thereby avoiding the need to carry its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93pX9_7vYb0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPXzNDhz6p8

The first three missions of NASA’s next big rocket will have to settle for a less-powerful ride
The powerful Block 1B won’t debut until 2024 at the earliest
By Loren Grush
May 22, 2018

The first three missions of NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Space Launch System, will all fly on the least powerful version of the vehicle that the space agency plans to build. NASA is moving forward with its plan to use a downgraded version of the SLS for its second and third flights, according to a memo from NASA headquarters obtained by The Verge. The original plan was to fly those two flights on a much more powerful upgrade of the rocket, but now, it seems that version won’t debut until 2024 at the earliest.

The SLS, meant to take humans into deep space, has been under development for the last decade, with its first three missions mostly set in stone. For its debut flight, called EM-1 and scheduled for 2020, the rocket will send an empty crew capsule called Orion on a three-week voyage around the Moon. Then a few years later, NASA plans to put a crew onboard: a second mission, called EM-2, will send two astronauts on a three-week-long trip around the Moon. Around that same time, NASA plans to use the SLS to launch a robotic spacecraft to fly by Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, called the Europa Clipper mission.

However, these three missions weren’t all supposed to fly on the same version of the SLS. NASA is planning to make two main variants of the vehicle: Block 1 and Block 1B. Block 1 is the less powerful form of the rocket, capable of getting 209,000 pounds (95 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. Block 1B is designed with a much more powerful upper stage, allowing it to carry about 287,000 pounds (130 metric tons). NASA’s plan was to fly Block 1 just once for the first SLS flight, and then fly Block 1B. But now NASA is going to fly all three missions — EM-1, EM-2, and Europa Clipper — on Block 1. The memo, signed by Bill Hill, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, directs the space agency’s contractors to start planning for the change. A NASA spokesperson confirmed this change to The Verge.

In April, former NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said that NASA might make this change — thanks to an unexpected influx of cash it received from Congress in March. The finalized spending bill for fiscal year 2018 gave NASA an extra $350 million to build a second launch platform for the SLS. And that gave NASA more options for how to move forward with the first SLS flights.

Right now, NASA only has one mobile launch platform — a slow-moving structure designed to carry the rocket to the launch pad where it’ll then take off. However, this one platform can only support flights of the Block 1 SLS at the moment. The platform would need significant upgrades to support the bigger and heavier Block 1B. And all that refurbishment would take time — at least 33 months to complete. During that time, nothing can take off from the platform. So under the original plan, NASA would first launch the inaugural mission of SLS on a Block 1 and then cease all flights of the rocket for nearly three years, while it upgraded the mobile launch platform to support the Block 1B. That meant the second flight of the SLS would be held hostage by however long those upgrades took.

To avoid this mess, Congress decided to give NASA the money to build another mobile launch platform, one specifically designed to fly the bulkier, more powerful Block 1B. This way, NASA could get started building the new platform now, to have it ready for the second flight of the SLS. But ironically, NASA is using this new money to shake its rockets up. Now the space agency is going to build the second, more robust platform while launching multiple Block 1s on the existing platform in the meantime. According to the memo, NASA will aim to have the second platform ready for a Block 1B launch in the beginning of 2024.

What’s still undecided is which mission will fly first — the Europa Clipper mission or the first crewed flight of Orion. Both are planned to occur around the same time, but Europa Clipper could fly before EM-2. It all depends on which one is ready to go the earliest, according to the NASA memos obtained by The Verge. NASA has set the date for this second flight to occur in mid-2022.

The decision to fly multiple Block 1s may have to do with the fact that the powerful upper stage needed for the Block 1B, called the Exploration Upper Stage, is going to cost way more than originally planned, according to Ars Technica. Plus, the new stage is being designed from scratch, so it’s likely going to take many years to have the hardware ready for a Block 1B flight. Meanwhile, the first Block 1 flight is scheduled to happen around 2020. If it proves its chops by then, it’ll be easier and quicker to simply launch more Block 1 rockets over and over again. So this decision could mean the SLS will fly more rapidly in the future, instead of NASA waiting many years for the Block 1B to materialize.

Flying on these less powerful Block 1s will change the mission profile of at least the crewed flight of the SLS. It won’t be able to carry extra payloads as NASA had originally planned, but it will still get the astronauts around the Moon. It’s unclear exactly how the Europa Clipper’s mission will change; however, the Block 1 is still capable of sending the spacecraft on a direct path to Jupiter. NASA says that Europa Clipper has the opportunity to launch each year from 2022 to 2025. Other similar rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, don’t have as much energy to do a straight shot and would need a gravity boost from another planet, according to Barry Goldstein, the project manager for Europa Clipper, as Space News reported.

Still, the fact that we won’t be seeing the Block 1B for a while doesn’t bode well for the SLS program. Critics of the rocket say it’s too costly to build and fly, especially when there are comparable vehicles like the Falcon Heavy, which can put similar amounts of weight into low Earth orbit and is cheaper to launch. NASA and Boeing, the manufacturer of the SLS, claim that the space agency needs the SLS because it’s so much more powerful than anything else on the market. But the longer the Block 1B takes to build, the harder it will be to make that argument.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/22/1738 … er-mission

NASA’s Jim Bridenstine Agrees Humans Are Responsible for Climate Change
By Eric Niiler
05.17.18

It's no secret that the Trump administration has filled cabinet positions and other senior staff jobs with people who reject or ignore established climate science. On Monday, for example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington that he’s “not going to get into the climate debate.” He also said he could not endorse climate research by one of his own agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose satellites, aircraft flights, and ocean buoys support scientists' consensus that humans are behind rising carbon dioxide levels and the resulting impacts of climate change such as sea level rise and changing weather patterns.

But today, something unusual happened. NASA’s brand new administrator, Jim Bridenstine, laid down a pretty big marker in agreement with established climate science. And if Bridenstine’s position on climate change has shifted toward the scientific mainstream, he may find himself staking out a lonely position among his former Republican colleagues in Congress.

“I don’t deny the consensus, I believe fully in climate change and that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way,” Bridenstine told NASA workers during a televised town hall from headquarters in Washington. He said that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and “we are putting it into the atmosphere in volumes we haven’t seen before. We are responsible for it.”

In contrast, at a climate hearing this week, Republican members of the House Science Committee said that the Earth is not warming (it is), that rocks falling into the ocean are causing sea level rise (they aren’t), and that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing bigger (it’s not).

While there were no audible gasps in the room at NASA headquarters (at least that the microphones picked up), there were a few smiles and raised eyebrows. That’s because Bridenstine’s own position on climate change had been somewhat up in the air. He was only sworn into office three weeks ago after a bruising confirmation battle in the Senate that lasted nearly a year. Democrats opposed Bridenstine based on his previous statements on the issue of the human contribution to climate change.

One of those statements came during his remarks on the House floor in 2013, when Bridenstine was a Republican congressman from Oklahoma. The Earth’s temperature had not risen for 10 years, he said, and President Obama should apologize to Oklahomans for wasting money to study global warming instead of destructive tornadoes. Left unsaid was that scientists have linked climate change with an increased frequency of more destructive storms, hurricanes, and drought events.

Then, in November 2017, during a Senate hearing on his nomination, Bridenstine said that humans contributed to climate change, but that he didn’t know by how much.

Perhaps Bridenstine’s thinking has evolved, or he’s realized he’s now heading an agency with an Earth science budget of more than $1.9 billion (of NASA’s nearly $20 billion). NASA officials did cancel a small $10 million carbon budget monitoring program last week that was responsible for checking sources and sinks of carbon emission around the globe. However, Congress reversed a White House decision to nix four climate-related space observing missions and stuck them back in the budget.

https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-jim-b … te-change/

SpaceX’s workhorse rocket takes flight
by Jeff Foust
Monday, May 14, 2018
The Space Review 

The latest version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the company says, incorporates lessons learned from the more than 50 launches the company has performed to date. But, perhaps, there are still a few more lessons to learn.

During the first attempt to launch the rocket on Thursday, the countdown proceeded apace until 58 seconds before liftoff, when the onboard computer “threw an abort,” in the words of the commentator on the company’s webcast of the launch. SpaceX offered no other details other than that engineers were “scrubbing the telemetry logs” for the issue, but with the launch already pushed back 90 minutes into a launch window lasting a little more than two hours, ran out of time.

“I think truly remarkable to launch an orbit-class rocket—the same orbital-class rocket—twice in one day,” Musk said.

The problem, it turned out, was not a flaw with the vehicle itself. Instead, the company said at the beginning of its broadcast of the second launch attempt the next day, an “artifact of an earlier test sequence” involving a ground system triggered the hold. This time, there were no last-minute issues, and the rocket lifted off at the beginning of its launch window, successfully placing a French-built communications satellite for Bangladesh into geostationary transfer orbit less than 35 minutes later.

At first glance, that Falcon 9 looked little different from the previous versions of the rocket. Its interstage section between the first and second stages was now black, as were the four landing legs at the base of the first stage. Those superficial aesthetic differences, though, hid more substantive changes to the vehicle in the company’s quest to make it more reliable and more reusable.

In a conference call with reporters shortly before the scrubbed launch attempt Thursday, SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk said that this “Block 5” version of the rocket is really the sixth version of the rocket. “Because we had version one; version 1.1, which was really like version 2; arguably a version in between that; and then a bunch of blocks,” he said.

Whether you call it Block 5 or Version 6, Musk said a major change in the vehicle was an emphasis on rapid reusability. “The key to Block 5 is that it’s designed to do ten or more flights with no refurbishment between each flight, or at least no scheduled refurbishment between each flight,” he said. “The only thing that needs to change is you reload propellant and fly again.”

SpaceX already demonstrated reusability with the previous Block 4 version of the rocket, with 11 reflown first stages launched to date. However, the Block 4 version required more maintenance between flights, and were only being flown a couple of times. “With Block 4, we’d optimized it to probably about a week’s worth of refurbishments if pushed. Maybe, call it about ten days of work between flights,” he said. But Block 5 is “really better in every way than Block 4.”

How much better? The no-refurbishment goal of the Block 5 first stage means it is at least theoretically feasible to fly it twice within 24 hours, and Musk has set a goal to do just that later next year.

“So it’s going to take some amount of time—we’re going to be very careful and deliberate about this—but that will be I think truly remarkable, to launch an orbit-class rocket—the same orbital-class rocket—twice in one day,” he said.

He didn’t provide additional details about how that would be carried out, but the company faces challenges beyond just rapidly reusing the booster. Presumably, the first launch would be for a payload light enough to enable the stage to return to land, where it would be lowered to the horizontal position and trucked back to a processing facility where it can be fitted with a new upper stage and payload and taken to the pad for another launch attempt.

“Would you rather fly in an aircraft that’s never had a test flight before, or would you rather fly in an aircraft that’s flown many times successfully?”

That assumes that the pad itself can be turned around in less than 24 hours, but SpaceX get around that by doing one launch from Launch Complex 39A and the other from Space Launch Complex 40, several kilometers away at Cape Canaveral. The Eastern Range would have to be able to support that fast of a turnaround, although the Air Force has stated one goal for its “Drive for 48” range upgrade is to be able to handle two launches in 24 hours (it was prepared to do so earlier this year for Falcon 9 and Atlas 5 launches.) Also, the payloads have to be available and processed in parallel to support the back-to-back launches.

That goal, though, appears primarily to demonstrate that the Block 5 first stages can be reused frequently, and last a long time. “There’ll be some moderate scheduled maintenance at ten [flights], but we believe that the Block 5 boosters are capable of on the order of at least a hundred flights before being retired, maybe more,” Musk said.

Musk said he expected that customers, once reticent to fly on previously-flown boosters, will soon come to prefer them. “I think the general sentiment will change from feeling like a flown rocket is scary to feeling like an un-flown rocket is scary,” he said. “Would you rather fly in an aircraft that’s never had a test flight before, or would you rather fly in an aircraft that’s flown many times successfully?”

With that kind of reusability, Musk said he anticipates building just 30 to 50 Block 5 first stages, even though he expects the vehicle to perform at least 300 launches before being retired in favor of the company’s BFR (officially, Big Falcon Rocket).

Reliability and human spaceflight

Another key motivator for the Block 5 upgrade, Musk said, was reliability. The Block 5 will be used for launching commercial crew missions for NASA—Friday’s launch was the first of seven launches of the new vehicle required before NASA will allow it to be used for crewed missions—as well as for national security missions for the Air Force.

“We need to exceed all of NASA’s human-rating requirements for Block 5, and they are quite extensive, as well as meet all of the Air Force requirements for extreme reliability,” he said. “I really don’t want to jinx fate here, but this rocket is really designed to be—the intent is to be—the most reliable rocket ever built. That is the design intent. I hope fate does not punish me for these words, but that is unequivocally the intent.”

Among those changes is a redesign of the composite-overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) used to store helium in the upper stage propellant tanks to pressurize them. The failure of one COPV caused a Falcon 9 second stage to explode during preparations for a static-fire test in 2016, while another, coming loose from a strut that broke at loads lower than it was rated for, led to the failure of another during a 2015 launch, the only two Falcon 9 failures to date.

Redesigning the COPV was critical for enabling the Falcon 9 to carry crews. A report by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel earlier this year suggested that more COPV testing was needed before allowing crewed launches. “In our opinion, adequate understanding of the COPV behavior in cryogenic oxygen is an absolutely essential precursor to potential certification for human space flight,” it stated in its annual report.

“Man, we have tested the living daylights out of those things, 17 ways to Sunday,” Musk said of the redesigned COPVs. The new COPV is the “most advanced pressure vessel ever developed by humanity,” he said later in the call. “I’ve personally gone over the test design, I’ve lost count how many times. But the top engineering minds at SpaceX have agonized over this. We’ve tested the living daylights out of it.”

“The reason it’s so hard to make an orbital rocket work is that your passing grade is 100 percent, and you can’t fully and properly test an orbital rocket until it launches.”

NASA panels have also raised questions about the so-called “load-and-go” process of fueling the Falcon 9 shortly before flight—propellants are loaded starting less than 40 minutes before liftoff—and after astronauts have boarded the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Some, like former astronaut Tom Stafford, chair of the NASA’s ISS Advisory Committee, have criticized that approach as going against a half-century of experience in human spaceflight operations, where fueling is done prior to crews boarding the vehicle.

Musk downplayed those concerns as “somewhat overblown” in the call. “We certainly could load the propellant and then have the astronauts board Dragon. That’s certainly something we could do,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be necessary, any more than passengers on an aircraft need to wait until the aircraft is fully fueled before boarding.”

For much of the call, which lasted for more than 45 minutes, Musk went into deep detail about the various changes to the Block 5 version of the Falcon 9, from the strengthening of the “octaweb” structure that holds the nine Merlin engines in the first stage to the use of titanium, rather than aluminum, grid fins to control the first stage on its descent. “I’m giving a lot of technical information and hopefully this is interesting, but I’m happy to answer any detailed technical questions you may have as well, following this, within the bounds of ITAR constraints,” he said at one point.

But Musk also sounded a little stressed about the launch. “You know, it could be a thousand things that go right on this rocket, and one that goes wrong, and a passing grade for rockets—the reason it’s so hard to make an orbital rocket work—is that your passing grade is 100 percent, and you can’t fully and properly test an orbital rocket until it launches,” he said. “Man, anyway, I’m stressed. It’s like PTSD.”

“Any good wishes would be appreciated,” he told the reporters on the call.

Full reusability and the BFR

Musk emphasized throughout the briefing, as the company has done in the past, that the that the Falcon 9 Block 5 (or version 6) will be the final major update to the vehicle, as it looks ahead to the BFR.

There will be, though, minor updates to the vehicle based on experience on its initial flights. “There’ll be a handful of small changes,” he said. “If this hypothetically version 6, that’d put us at sort of 6.01, or 6.02, that sort of thing.”

However, Musk has talked about attempting to recover and reuse both the payload fairing of the Falcon 9 as well as the vehicle’s upper stage. The company has performed some experiments trying to guide the payload fairing back, using a parafoil to enable a precision landing on a ship equipped with a large net. Those landings haven’t been successful yet, but Musk said those efforts will continue, in part because of the large expense of the fairing: about $6 million each.

Musk hinted on Twitter earlier this year about using a “party balloon” to recover the upper stage, which many interpreted as using some kind of inflatable ballute to protect the upper stage during reentry and return to Earth. He didn’t discuss that specific approach but did say that the company will collect data on the upper stage’s reentry conditions.

“Gradually, over the course of this year, we’ll be adding more and more thermal protection to the upper stage and try to see what’s the least amount of mass necessary to return the upper stage in a condition that is reusable,” he said. “I’m quite confident that we’ll be able to achieve full reusability of the upper stage. In fact, I’m certain we can achieve full reusability of the upper stage, the question is simply what the mass penalty is.”

Being able to recover and reuse the first stage, upper stage, and fairing could save about 90 percent of the costs of a launch (Musk estimated that 60 percent of a Falcon 9’s cost goes into the first stage, 20 percent into the second, and 10 percent for the fairing, with the other 10 percent going to launch operations.) “We may be able to get down to a marginal cost for a Falcon 9 launch, fully considered, under $5–6 million. That would be quite exciting.”

“I’m quite confident that we’ll be able to achieve full reusability of the upper stage. In fact, I’m certain we can achieve full reusability of the upper stage, the question is simply what the mass penalty is.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that the launch price will be going that low. Musk revealed in the call that the company has been offering modest discounts on Falcon 9 launches that feature a previously-flown first stage: $50 million a launch, versus a list price of $62 million. But even with full reusability of the Falcon 9, price decreases will be more gradual in order for the company to recoup its costs.

“We still have a bunch of fixed costs to cover that need to be divided over that number of flights. And we need to recover the development costs of recovery. And pay for BFR. And pay for the Starlink constellation,” he said, the last item being SpaceX’s proposed broadband satellite constellation, with thousands of satellites.

The BFR that Falcon 9 launches will help fund development of will eventually take over, but the numbers Musk provided in the call suggest that it will be some time before the BFR takes over. With SpaceX planning about 30 launches this year, that 300 Block 5 Falcon 9 launches would take ten years to complete. Even increasing the flight rate to, say, 50 a year—roughly one a week—would imply that the Falcon 9 will remain in service into the mid-2020s.

SpaceX, meanwhile, has won approval by local officials in Los Angeles to build a factory for producing BFR vehicles at the Port of Los Angeles, where they can be shipped by sea to its launch site. Musk said in the call that the company’s launch site near Brownsville, Texas—still under development three and a half years after a ceremonial groundbreaking in September 2014—will be used for the BFR, with Falcon 9 using existing launch facilities in Florida and California.

At the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington last Wednesday, another SpaceX executive, Josh Brost, confirmed earlier statements by Musk that BFR testing will begin next year with short hops of the upper stage, or “spaceship,” element of the vehicle. “We are working to build the first upper stage right now,” he said during a conference panel. “As early as the first half of next year we’re going to have our first upper stage doing vertical takeoff and landing tests. We’ll mature that capability as fast as possible.”

Musk, at last September’s International Astronautical Congress in Australia, said that SpaceX would launch the first BFR missions to Mars, carrying cargo, in 2022, followed by crewed missions in 2024. Those dates remain in place, Brost said, but like Musk said last year, “they are aspirational.”

Musk declined to talk about BFR development last week, other than passing references to the vehicle, focusing instead on the Block 5. That vehicle is set to become SpaceX’s workhorse for the next several years—perhaps a decade—generating the revenue the company needs for Starlink, BFR, and the company’s human Mars ambitions. That did not come easily, though.

“This is a ridiculously hard thing, and it’s taken us, man, from 2002, 16 years of extreme effort, and many, many iterations, and thousands of small but important development changes,” he said of the long path from SpaceX’s founding to the Block 5. “Crazy hard.”

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3495/1

A SLS rocket that doesn't exist yet and won't fly for years!    Boeing forgot to mention the BFR.   Ed Heisler

The following is posted at Boeings website:

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In February, Elon Musk’s SpaceX test launched the Falcon Heavy — a rocket that SpaceX touts as the “most powerful operational rocket in the world.”

However, the Falcon Heavy failed to impress the spaceflight department at NASA. Bill Gerstenmaier, the head of spaceflight at NASA, said the Falcon Heavy is“too small”for NASA’s needs.

Ouch.

Gerstenmaier went even further, stating that NASA’s exploration programneeds the “unique capabilities of the SLS rocket.”

The Boeing-built SLS rocket is the only spaceflight vehicle that can provide NASA the tools it needs for deep space exploration. The SLS can bring equipment into space that is too large for the Falcon Heavy.

The Falcon Heavy launch turned heads in February, but SpaceX’s rocket is a smaller type of rocket that can’t meet NASA’s deep space needs. Once theBoeing-built SLSis operational, it will be the most powerful rocket ever built.

Watch U.S. Fly will keep you updated as the competition between Boeing and SpaceX heats up.

https://watchusfly.com/nasa-spacex-falc … ploration/

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The response from ARS Technica

Boeing blast —
Boeing slams the Falcon Heavy rocket as “too small”
"SpaceX's rocket is a smaller type of rocket that can't meet NASA's deep-space needs."
by Eric Berger - 4/30/2018

Recently, Boeing created a website called "Watch US Fly" to promote its aerospace industry—a grab bag of everything from Chinese tariffs to President Trump's visit to the company's facilities in St. Louis. Among the most intriguing sections is one that promotes the company's Space Launch System rocket and argues that SpaceX's Falcon Heavy booster is "too small" for NASA's deep exploration program.

"The Falcon Heavy launch turned heads in February, but SpaceX's rocket is a smaller type of rocket that can't meet NASA's deep-space needs," the website states. "Once the Boeing-built SLS is operational, it will be the most powerful rocket ever built."

The Boeing site backs up this claim by quoting NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier, who talked about the differences between the SLS rocket and Falcon Heavy at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council meeting in March. Gerstenmaier, the chief of NASA's human spaceflight program, said the SLS had "unique capabilities" that the Falcon Heavy rocket does not have. However, as Ars reported at the time, Gerstenmaier actually struggled to explain why NASA needed the SLS rocket because the space agency has not yet built anything that will take advantage of those capabilities.

The SLS promotional website also makes some questionable assertions. It speaks of the super-powerful SLS rocket as if it will soon exist. But the SLS booster is probably at least two years away from its maiden flight. Moreover, the version of the SLS rocket that flies in two years will not come close to being the "most powerful rocket ever built." That will come much later, if ever.

Most powerful rocket

The "most powerful" title belongs to the Saturn V rocket. NASA used them in the 1960s and 1970s for the Apollo program, and they had the capability to lift 118 metric tons to low Earth orbit. The initial configuration of the SLS booster will be able to lift 70 tons to low Earth orbit, which is marginally more than the Falcon Heavy and its 64 tons. (Compared to the Falcon Heavy, the SLS will have a more powerful upper stage, enabling it to send more mass into deep space).

NASA does have plans to upgrade the SLS rocket to a 105-ton configuration, but this will not occur until at least the mid-2020s and will probably cost several billion dollars as NASA contracts with Boeing to build an entirely new upper stage. Finally, the 130-metric-ton version—the "most powerful rocket ever built"—has no real timetable. Certainly, it seems unlikely to fly within the next decade.

By then, the proposed 130-metric-ton SLS may well be superseded by the Big Falcon Rocket under development by SpaceX or Blue Origin's proposed New Armstrong booster. In any case, comparing the Falcon Heavy to a rocket that won't exist for at least a decade and without many billions of dollars in public investment seems spurious. Boeing also makes no mention of the huge cost disparity between the two rockets.

There is one final interesting nugget on the Boeing website. The end of the SLS blurb invites readers to "Learn more about why the SLS is the right choice for NASA" by linking to a news story in the London Evening Standard. This is a conservative British tabloid owned by a Russian oligarch and former KGB agent, Alexander Lebedev.

The author of the Evening Standard story, an online general assignments reporter named Sean Morrison, did not listen to the NASA Advisory Council meeting where Gerstenmaier commented about the SLS' capabilities. Rather, he quoted (without linking) from another news article from the "technology news website Ars Technica."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04 … too-small/