NASA's Space Launch System Searches For a Mission

schwit1 writes: Managers of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) are searching for a mission that they can propose and convince Congress to fund. "Once SLS is into the 2020s, the launch rate should see the rocket launching at least once per year, ramping up to a projected three times per year for the eventual Mars missions. However, the latter won’t be until the 2030s. With no missions manifested past the EM-2 flight, the undesirable question of just how 'slow' a launch rate would be viable for SLS and her workforce has now been asked." Meanwhile, two more Russian rocket engines were delivered yesterday, the first time that's happened since a Russian official threatened to cut off the supply. Another shipment of three engines is expected later this year. In Europe, Arianespace and the European Space Agency signed a contract today for the Ariane 5 rocket to launch 12 more of Europe’s Galileo GPS satellites on three launches. This situation really reminds me of the U.S. launch market in the 1990s, when Boeing and Lockheed Martin decided that, rather than compete with Russia and ESA for the launch market, they instead decided to rely entirely on U.S. government contracts, since those contracts didn’t really demand that they reduce their costs significantly to compete.

Ooh I Got One!

[Greyfox]

Can we use it to shoot Congress into Space? We could call it an "Emergency preparedness for giant asteroid strike" or something! Of course once IN space, they might have to stay there for a while. Giant asteroid and all that. Earth might not be habitable again for decades!

Screwed up Congress

[surfdaddy]

NASA has a lot of problems and bureaucracy. While I like the IDEA of NASA, unfortunately the current REALITY is quite different. NASA is full of bureacracy, it's horribly inefficient and risk-averse. Congress is micromanaging the tasks and budget. So when we criticize NASA for no mission, part of that is because they really can't do anything with any consistency. And Congress is mostly interested in preserving pork jobs in their own districts. So we get the SLS, a huge rocket that is costing billions, without a decent mission, and a low flight rate that will make it horrendously expensive....forever... Meanwile, an efficient upstart called SpaceX is actually DOING THINGS and being BOLD, and certain senators are trying to make sure they don't succeed because SpaceX is disruptive and endangers their districts' jobs. So the US is basically fucked - we aren't leading, we aren't spending our money wisely, and NASA has become an expensive shell of its former self. And our newest hope, SpaceX, is only there because of the vision of Elon Musk... and even he is having to play politics to make sure his company isn't shut out of future NASA business. Thank our corrupt Congress, where local district money is more important than the health and leadership of the entire country.

The same phony accounting that plagued the

[Anonymous Coward]

Space Shuttle. For decades, people complained about the high costs of operating the shuttles - with the "obvious" implication that cutting the shuttles would free-up lots of money for something better. After the shuttles stopped flying, however, two things became clear: [1] much of the cost was simply the fixed-costs of the agency (which by the screwed-up methodology politicians like, was assigned to the shuttles) and [2] each shuttle flight was actually remarkably cheap... cheaper per ton to orbit than Apollo or Gemini and cheap enough that the program cost was essentially the same per year whether we flew 6 missions or no missions (the bulk of the costs were fixed NASA costs, NOT the actual costs of the missions).

Now that SLS is NASA's big project, all the big costs of the agency are getting assigned to (blamed on) SLS and so it appears that SLS will be the most expensive rocket ever (even though it is essentially a shuttle stack minus the orbiter). NEWS FLASH: WHATEVER program NASA does will become the most-expensive program! If NASA cancelled SLS and flew all future missions on Dragons atop Falcons, suddenly all NASA overhead costs would be assigned to THAT program and IT would become too expensive to be sustained... ALL the fixed costs for the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center, etc would get assigned to the "Dragon Exploration Program" or whatever it would be called. That's how the accountants in DC handle programs like NASA, the pentagon, etc.... they need to assign every expense of an agency to some program as part of getting congress to fund it.

Wrong way to do it...

[Kittenman]

Aren't you supposed to have the problem before you have the solution?

Nasa: Hey, we have this great launch system
Everyone: Cool! What are you going to do with it?
Nasa: .....

No slight to Nasa (who've done amazing things) or to the States (ditto), but shouldn't you set a goal, and then go towards it with the right tools? (something like ....First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.)