NASA's SLS Moon Rocket Is 44 Percent Over Budget and 3 Years Behind Schedule, Report Says (upi.com) 106
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Construction on NASA's mobile launcher program for the new Space Launch System moon rocket is 44 percent over budget and three years behind schedule, a new report said. The space agency has built one massive rolling platform to move its moon rockets, with another on the way. Crews are adapting the first launcher to be mated with the SLS rocket for its first launch, planned later this year. But the first launcher cost $308 million more than a budget set in 2014, for a total of $693 million, according to the report released Tuesday from NASA's Office of Inspector General. Construction of the first platform "lacked coordination and competition with design contractors, coupled with ... design errors and integration challenges that drove the project's cost increases and schedule delays," the report said.
Thanks, TRUMP! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, his uncle *was* a professor at MIT.
Re: (Score:3)
"Well, his uncle *was* a professor at MIT."
His granddad had a whorehouse in Klondike, that's more along the family business. He also fled military service in Germany.
Re: Thanks, TRUMP! (Score:2)
headline a bit misleading (Score:2)
But the report being discussed in the news artible is not about the rocket; it is about the tower for the launch pad, not the rocket itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Thanks, TRUMP! (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow what excellently bad humor detection you have!
Re: (Score:2)
Trump? SLS was an Obama-era boondoggle. Development was started in 2011...
Basically, it's someone's attempt to buy votes wherever the Solid Boosters are made, plus more votes in Huntsville. It's been pretty much obsolete since the first landing of a Falcon 9....
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Thanks, TRUMP! (Score:2)
And you still have Shelby, so...
Maybe for not much longer. Just saying.
Re: (Score:2)
Obama's contribution was basically to rename Constellation to SLS and pretend that'd make it less of a boondoggle. The program has been a clear failure for well over a decade.
Re: (Score:2)
Constellation/SLS is what you get when you let thundering herds of lawyers and political appointees set budgets and manage an engineering program.
Re: (Score:2)
WHOOSH!!!!
Re: (Score:1)
It's not all his fault, but both are bloated, over-budget, and behind schedule.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The losing Northrup YF-17 morphed into the F-18 for the Navy.
Re: (Score:2)
You do realise the fly off competitions were never between completed aircraft, right? They were always prototypes built for the demonstration flights and always needed significant development after the contract was awarded - there was 5 years between the YF-16 winning the contract and the F-16A being accepted into service, and the two aircraft were very different.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The YF-16 was the equivalent of the X-35 or YF-22 in terms of development status when each won their requisite fly offs - took 5 years of further development and testing before it entered service.
The X-35 never carried any bombs because it wasn’t a requirement of the fly off competition, not because of some inherent failure on its part. Equally the YF-16 almost crashed during take off on its maiden flight due to a design flaw.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't Worry (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't Worry (Score:5, Insightful)
the SLS pretty much exists only to light a fire under Elon's ass. A very very expensive fire but just a fire nonetheless.
Absolute bollocks. The primary function of the SLS is supply an an endless quantity of government pork to the state of Alabama, under the guidance of that Republican good-old-boy Senator Shelby.
Re: (Score:1)
Shelby shallbe the first tester.
Re: (Score:2)
Alabama? Isn't that where they filmed Deliverance? For the longest time I thought that was a documentary, at least well into my 40's...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Blue Origin may also provide some competition to Space-X. At the moment they haven't yet done an orbital launch, but they seem to be making slow but steady progress, and they also have a heavy booster in their plans.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Don't Worry (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you figure? If the SX Starship is even minimally successful - can reach orbit, but is completely non-reusable... it's promising to still be dramatically cheaper to build than the SLS. There's no fire that could be lit under the SLS that wouldn't consume it, unless the Starship is a complete failure.
Though I suppose a funeral pyre is still technically a fire lit under someone...
Re: Don't Worry (Score:2)
How do you figure?
Our man 'Elon the Tyrant' very much lit a fire under ULA, not the other way around: they're so stupid and corrupt, not only are they not even in motion, to even that not only are they not moving, their Weinstein-esque asscheeks are beginning to blacken and they don't even know it.
Re: Don't Worry (Score:2)
to even that not only are they not moving,
One of these phrases doesn't belong...
Re: (Score:2)
Cheaper to SpaceX at least. Unlike Falcon 9/Heavy
and the Dragon capsules where there actually are a few alternatives the Super Heavy/Starship would have a monopoly without the SLS. They could set practically any price they'd like...
Re: (Score:2)
>They could set practically any price they'd like...
True, but without an existing market for such lift capacity, demand is likely to be very dependent on price. In such situations the smart money is on pricing to maximize total profit, rather than profit-per-launch.
Besides, the real money is likely to be in sub-orbital passenger flights, at least until we have a *lot* more going on in space. And for that Starship needs to have a proven safety record, which means lots of launches under their belt. Star
Re:Don't Worry (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just amazing: the SLS is literally cobbled together from used shuttle parts. Not even used designs, but actual alread-built parts. And yet, in the time NASA has been pretending to build it, SpaceX was started from scratch, launched 83 rockets, and will almost certainly launch Americans to the ISS from US soil before the SLS flies.
At this point, I'd bet on Starship + Super Heavy flying, and completely obsoleting SLS, before SLS launches a real payload.
Re: (Score:3)
It's just amazing: the SLS is literally cobbled together from used shuttle parts. Not even used designs, but actual alread-built parts.
Maybe they should have outsourced it to the teams on Junkyard Wars. They know how to meet deadlines, and scrounge together used parts to make something functional.
Re: (Score:2)
Boeing has been building it, or at least pretending to. Considering their success with the 737 MAX perhaps it's just as well that the SLS will probably never leave the atmosphere.
So what is it giving them problems? (Score:2)
Strong enough elastic for the slingshot, or getting enough water pressure from constant pumping?
We did it wrong, and git off my lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
We should have kept Apollo and incrementally improved it. Russia saved boatloads of money using the incremental approach, and have a reliable system.
Throw-it-out-and-start-over fails more often than not. Same with most software and software stacks I have to say. The whippersnappers F themselves with fads way too often...and get away with it for some reason.
Are you arguing (Score:2)
in favor of retaining Java over Python/Julia/TypeScript/Swift/Objective/Rust?
Or are you telling us "get off of my lawn and I will code in C?"
Or are you genuinely an Old Man as I am, and we should not have abandoned Pascal? FORTRAN?
Re: (Score:2)
The 737 is still a viable platform. Throw new engines and MCAS on it and it'll be fine.
Re: (Score:2)
The 737 is still a viable platform. Throw new engines on and forget about MCAS. Train and certify the pilots on the new system instead of using software to pretend that the MAX was like the old planes in order to save the airlines money and make Boeing money.
I'm no fan of Boeing, especially the sleazy way they've been handling the 737 MAX situation and how they treated Bombardier with the C-Series (now the A220 I believe). But the platform could handle the new engines if the company doesn't try to make it f
Re: (Score:2)
Ratfor wasn't bad to work with. And Fortran is still in use today, exactly for the reasons the GP poster suggests: sixty years of practical experience optimizing its output for efficient numerical computation. About a quarter of the source code for the R language is written in Fortran. R is a gawdawful hack of a language ecosystem, but it's impressively fast.
Re: (Score:1)
Python and Java are about the same age. They tend to be used in different kinds of projects. It's more of a situational tool-fit than old vs. new.
Delphi/Lazarus is a pretty good tool. It's easier to manage the UI than most DOM-based GUI emulator web stacks, which seem to break on every other browser update or brand change. And if more used Delphi/Lazarus, the remaining kinks would probably g
Delphi/FPC/Lazarus (Score:2)
The interesting thing is how Delphi/FPC's compiler switch for Delphi 7 compatibility has evolved into a modular, object-oriented version of Pascal.
The advantage of Pascal is that it was simple. The disadvantage of Pascal is that it is too simple. Wirth spent much of his career extending Pascal into something less simple/more usable with Modula, Modula 2, Oberon and eventually something he called Component Pascal.
There are people out there using Delphi/FPC. Component Pascal, not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Java has actually "launched" stuff (Score:2)
The SLS hasn't even gotten anything off the ground.
Re: We did it wrong, and git off my lawn (Score:2)
We should have kept Apollo and incrementally improved it.
Absolutely not: we didn't need evolutionary - i.e. incremental - changes to existing tech; for spaceflight to become economical enough to actually make a difference to our species, we needed revolutionary improvements - tweaking existing designs simply wasn't going to cut it.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, okay, but until you finish Enterprise, we'll use incremental improvements with our chemical rockets.
Although the EM drive was likely to be a flop, a sliver of me was really really hoping it would surprise all and prove real.
Re: (Score:2)
Found the PHB.
Evolving working tech, iteration after iteration, would lead to whatever goals we set for ourselves. I know it's more exciting, and movie-like, to have a whiz kid come up with a revolutionary idea and change the industry overnight, but in the real world that has almost never actually worked. Name any tech you might call "revolutionary", and I'll show you the incremental steps taken to get there.
We spent ungodly amounts of money and engineering brains developing Apollo, and then we scrapped i
Re: We did it wrong, and git off my lawn (Score:1)
Found the PHB.
Holy shit, there's a new one. I trust you won't mind if I take your desperation as a compliment.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll take it as admission that you realize you were full of shit, seeing how all you could respond with was snark.
Re: (Score:1)
But the plan is so simple:
1. Invent revolutionary technology
2. Profit!
Re: (Score:3)
Russia has an aging rocket that can put a capsule into low Earth orbit. They can't tweak that to do much more.
Falcon 9 can do that at a fraction of the cost. Starship and Ares, uh, SLS, are designed to be able to put people on the moon and Mars.
Risk and innovation are good. The problem is that most of the real money has traditionally been thrown to giant military contractors who do that incremental thing you're talking about. SLS is used shuttle parts cobbled together to make something like Apollo. SpaceX a
Re: (Score:1)
If Russia put modular stages in orbit via multiple trips, they could. It's how they built and supplied MIR.
It's too early to call it.
Re: (Score:2)
Falcon 9 can lift around twice as much mass as Soyuz to LEO or GTO, and costs $62M vs around $48M. Falcon Heavy costs $90M, but can lift 3x - 4x as much as Soyuz. For heavier payloads, both can be significantly cheaper per kg - especially if you don't need multiple trips.
Re: (Score:1)
So they claim. I'm not saying they are wrong, just that it's too early to know the actual numbers. Sales brochures are rarely the most accurate source of info.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if the Russians has managed to get their heavy lift rocket working back in the 60s. They were very unlucky with it and gave up right on the verge of success. But imagine they had it and the Moon Race had continued.
That bit of bad luck followed by lack of political will and foresight set space exploration back many decades.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if the Russians has managed to get their heavy lift rocket working back in the 60s. They were very unlucky with it and gave up right on the verge of success.
They were nowhere near success.
Possibly if chief designer Sergei Korolev hadn't died in 1966 he might have been able to salvage the project, but no, N1 was a bad design.
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding was that the design itself wasn't bad, but the control systems that existed at the time were woefully inadequate. Even if they had moved away from their analog systems to digital controllers there wasn't a computer on Earth adequate to manage all those engines.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. The Russians and US both had plans to build moon bases, space habitats, all kinds of things.
Instead, the Russian attempt at a design leap blew up and then they chased the US down the shuttle hole.
Re: (Score:1)
If Kennedy hadn't died the Moon landings might have been a joint mission. I've been trying to find more information about any plans that were in place, but it was still early days back then. Some kind of Lunar rendezvous seems to have been likely, with technology sharing and finally a joint crew making the final descent.
Re: (Score:2)
Apollo was already technically obsolete the first time it flew. Apollo was based on the older Mercury platform, rather than the newer, more advanced Gemini platform. There was a plan for a "Big Gemini" with a larger crew, but it got axed to make way for the shuttle. If the US wasn't so focused on the shuttle for deploying/maintaining Keyhole spy satellites, "Big Gemini" might have delivered more science. Then again, it might not have.
Re: (Score:2)
"We should have kept Apollo and incrementally improved it."
Sorry the Apollo flight computer just died a few days ago.
She had 102 years.
Keeping stuff and improving it isn't working here (Score:2)
Keeping stuff and improving it isn't working too well here either. It would be a special miracle SLS was only 44% over budget. It was already three years late three years ago [spacepolicyonline.com] - SLS 1 was supposed to be at the end of fiscal year 2017.
What is keeping stuff and improving it doing for us here? This is a program with no up side. There are no technology improvements - it uses Shuttle engines, shuttle SRBs, and a step back in that the engines are intentionally discarded after every mission now. It's pure tech
Re: (Score:1)
Reusable engines is still experimental. If and when it proves reliable for manned flight, then we can switch over. It has to prove itself for unmanned flight first.
Humans make mistakes, but if you stick with a platform you learn from those mistakes. If you throw it out and start over, you invent new mistakes to make.
If we can put a man on the moon... (Score:2)
why can't we put a man on the moon. Yes, I know a silly remark but at times I wonder if the Apollo program was an unusual set of circumstances. What is missing besides the political will is an industrial base (when we built everything from steel to transistors here) and educated workforce where you can get a college education without going into debt.
Someone posted on NASAWatch "I have yet to meet a civilian that heard about Artemis and SLS."
Re: (Score:2)
Apollo was the beginning of the space program. Goals were set, resources allocated and we got it done. Yay. Now the MBAs and politicians see that space is going to be an ongoing program. So how can we squeeze some profits and back scratching out of it?
Re: (Score:2)
Apollo had a cold war rivalry with an opponent who was ahead of us at every step of the space race until the Moon. And the US wasn't broke and old.
Re:If we can put a man on the moon... (Score:4, Interesting)
at times I wonder if the Apollo program was an unusual set of circumstances
Uhm yes, has anyone ever doubted that?
1) Losing the space race to Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin was a kick in the balls for the American pride.
2) The military needed to put a civilian face on their missile R&D after the Cuban missile crisis
3) Because JFK got assassinated later presidents couldn't de-fund or meddle with his legacy.
All three put together created more or less the perfect storm. Only 25 years earlier being able to hit London with a V-2 (320 km range) was a novelty and that one only had to blow up on arrival. Apollo 11 went 200,000+ km away to the Moon, landed softly and returned. That's absurd. But that's also why when the perfect storm ended it also collapsed, when sanity returned the price was way too extreme for flags and footprints.
Re: (Score:3)
The price had nothing to do with it, at maximum the NASA budget never exceeded 4.5% of the federal budget while the military is almost never under 45%. The last three Apollo missions were cancelled only **after** all the hardware had been purchased, most of it had been delivered, and even the fuel had been paid for. The only remaining expense was the last and least expensive step of actually carrying out the mission. The first scientist to step foot on the moon was also the very last astronaut.
The decisi
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure when the military budget was last at 45% of the total budget. But for the the last 20 years, it's tended to be closer to 20% than 45%. And closer to 15% than to 20% most of the time....
Perhaps you meant the "discretionary" part of the budget? Which discretionary part is about 1/3 of the total budget....
Re: (Score:2)
If it's not discretionary then it's not part of the budget. It's just an expense.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the Cuban missile crisis was a little too late to explain America's all-in entry in the space race, it was already well underway.
Re: (Score:2)
The difference is that we had a compelling reason to put a man on the Moon in the 60s: to prove to the world that capitalism had bigger balls than communism. And proving that wasn't *just* a macho thing, it actually mattered.
It's quite natural for Americans to see capitalism as natural and beneficial for everyone, but a lot of people in the world lived and still live in countries that are theoretically capitalist but where life is crap for most people because of corruption and the political dominance of he
Re: If we can put a man on the moon... (Score:2)
What is missing besides the political will is an industrial base (when we built everything from steel to transistors here) and educated workforce where you can get a college education without going into debt.
Well ...
1. You absolutely can get a college education in the US without going into debt. I have a close personal friend doing it right now (a year away from PhD).
and
2. I would say that SpaceX has handily debunked the idea that the US space industry is hampered by the lack of "an industrial base (when we built everything from steel to transistors here)".
So out of your entire comment that just leaves "political will" ... and given that even Trump is pretty keen about sending astronauts to Mars, I'd say you
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, good grief. Every president since Bush the Elected has declared that they were sending men to Mars. None have ever delivered the funding to even start the process though, so it's just more blah-blah-blah.
Re: (Score:2)
DO try to remember the way federal funding for ANYTHING works in the USA. For a start, ALL spending bills have to come from the House of Representatives. Then go through the Senate. And then, finally, the President gets to sign the spending bill. As is. He can't line-item it. So if the House doesn't want to spen
Re: (Score:2)
Don't pretend to be naive, you know as well as I do that the White House submits proposed spending to the House of Representatives. IIRC in the last quarter century only Clinton regularly asked for more money for NASA than the House budgeted. No one since Lyndon Johnson has ever even attempted to request the sort of money that would allow NASA to prepare for a new manned mission beyond LEO.
Re: (Score:2)
Though some get a college education without debt but many do. Interesting mention about SpaceX, good pointing they are cranking out hardware (which then begs the question why is Boeing and LockMart so slow?).
Political will... now that sure generated some responses. Few months ago on CSPAN or some other documentary type channel had interview with Roger Launius, former NASA chief historian, said reason why we never went back to the moon is because there is no reason to do so.
Though Trump via Pence started
I volunteered to help for free at the time (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I volunteered to help for free at the time (2012) and they did not take me seriously. Fortunately the Astrobiology folks at Ames did.
Help what? Could you maybe be more specific?
Only 44% and three years? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I've just been around long enough to see how this usually plays out.
How does this compare to SpaceX? (Score:2)
Building man rated rockets is really hard. Trashing NASA is easy. Slashdot Pundits love to criticize any government project from the safety of their parents basements. Grown ups look at the complete situation.
Re: (Score:2)
Falcon wasn't over budget from NASA's point of view, because SpaceX was on a firm-price contract of $1.6 billion for 12x ISS resupply missions (which NASA estimated would otherwise have cost them nearly $4 billion [nasa.gov]).
Unlike SLS, which is on a cost-plus contract, and the bill to NASA just keeps getting longer.
Re: How does this compare to SpaceX? (Score:3)
SpaceX Falcon development was also late and over budget. How does does the SLS compare?
Good question. Let's compare!
The entire development cost of the Falcon 9 (from drawing board to flying v1.0) was about $300 million.
The SLS was - in 2014 - projected to cost $7 billion to develop. However there has already been almost $12 billion spent on the program, without a single rocket ready for launch; that's 40 times more money spent than on the Falcon 9 with no end in sight.
Worse yet, the projected per-launch cost is estimated at about $800 million. Even if you ignore the $12+ billion spent to d
44% over budget for a government program? (Score:2)
Duh. Planning innovation is a ridiculous concept! (Score:2)
Pork spending aside, let's finally face it: The concept of planning how long you will take and how much it will cost, for *coming up* with something, has always been a ridiculous attempt, of trying to force innovation into a industrualization conveyor belt production mindset.
You can only put a time and a price on something (an atomic action) you *precisely* know how to do! Like making another chair just like the one you just made.
Everything else is always gonna be bullshit. Sorry, managers. Time to face rea
Re: (Score:2)
Congratulations! You just "invented" DARPA!
Why.... (Score:1)
government project behind schedule ? (Score:2)
Ah, the joy of cost-plus contracts (Score:2)
This is all "cost-plus" contracts. Meaning that the contractor gets all of their costs paid, plus guaranteed profit on top. The longer they take, the more they overrun the costs, the more money they get. What's not to like?
Cost-plus contracts are supposed to be reserved for risky research endeavors. Let's see if we can build a prototype that can do (nearly impossible thing). Building big rockets like SLS? That's not a research problem at all, it's all engineering. Hard engineering, sure, but engineering. Th
Rebrand in a Couple of Years (Score:2)
In a few more years they will just rebrand the project again (remember Constellation?) with a new budget and timetable and say that everything is on budget and on time.
Re: (Score:2)
NASA has been "Lost in Space" for decades.
Hell, we have to depend on the Russians to get to space now.
I doubt if we could put a man on the moon again due to their incompetence.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt if we could put a man on the moon again due to their incompetence.
Well, that's literally what we are discussing here.
Re: (Score:2)
IMHO, NASA made a huge mistake designing SLS to use Liquid Hydrogen fuel & should/must modify the design ASAP to switch to using RP-1 fuel!!!
(RP-1 is the fuel used by much successful Space-X rockets (Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy) & good old Saturn V ("The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload.")!!!
From (also) Wikipedia:
"RP-1 has a lower specific impulse than liquid hydrogen (LH2), but is cheaper, stable at room temperature, far less of an explosion hazard, and far denser. RP-1 is significantly more powerful than LH2 by volume."
But it also says:
"Chemically, a hydrocarbon propellant is less efficient than hydrogen fuel because hydrogen releases more energy per unit mass during combustion, enabling a higher exhaust velocity. This is, in part, a result of the high mass of carbon atoms relative to hydrogen atoms. Hydrocarbon engines are also typically run fuel-rich, which produces some CO instead of CO2 as a consequence of incomplete combustion, although this is not unique to hydrocarbon engines, as hydrogen engines are also typicall