Problems Delay Launch of NASA's SLS Rocket - Again (cnet.com) 78
With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, NASA's SLS would've been the most powerful rocket ever launched into space, notes the Orlando Sentinel.
But instead on Saturday morning, "NASA scrubbed its second attempt to launch the Artemis I mission into lunar orbit..." reports CNET. "During a press conference later in the day, Jim Free, an associate administrator at NASA Headquarters, said we shouldn't expect to see a third attempt within this launch period, which culminates Tuesday." (Though the mission manager the next launch attempt could be as late as mid-October.)
"This time, the culprit was a liquid hydrogen leak that showed up while the team was loading the rocket's core stage...." According to the space agency, the leak occurred "while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket" and that "multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak, by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket, did not fix the issue."
This is the second time the Artemis I mission has been delayed. Liftoff attempt No. 1 was scheduled for Monday, but launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had to call a scrub then as well, because of an unyielding problem with what's known as an engine bleed test. (This process is meant to allow the engines to chill to the right temperature by releasing a small amount of the fuel).
"We were unable to get the engines within the thermal conditions required to commit to launch," Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said during a press conference on Tuesday. "In combination with that, we also had a bent valve issue on the core stage, and it was at that point that the team decided to knock off the launch attempt for that day."
But instead on Saturday morning, "NASA scrubbed its second attempt to launch the Artemis I mission into lunar orbit..." reports CNET. "During a press conference later in the day, Jim Free, an associate administrator at NASA Headquarters, said we shouldn't expect to see a third attempt within this launch period, which culminates Tuesday." (Though the mission manager the next launch attempt could be as late as mid-October.)
"This time, the culprit was a liquid hydrogen leak that showed up while the team was loading the rocket's core stage...." According to the space agency, the leak occurred "while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket" and that "multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak, by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket, did not fix the issue."
This is the second time the Artemis I mission has been delayed. Liftoff attempt No. 1 was scheduled for Monday, but launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had to call a scrub then as well, because of an unyielding problem with what's known as an engine bleed test. (This process is meant to allow the engines to chill to the right temperature by releasing a small amount of the fuel).
"We were unable to get the engines within the thermal conditions required to commit to launch," Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said during a press conference on Tuesday. "In combination with that, we also had a bent valve issue on the core stage, and it was at that point that the team decided to knock off the launch attempt for that day."
Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
Its almost like building this pork truck with leftover space shuttle parts and plans that were scrapped a decade ago could be a problem
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
SLS and Orion are both being built under cost-plus contracts. There's no reason for Boeing or Lockheed Martin to cut corners. SpaceX, by contrast, is doing its parts of Artemis on fixed-cost contracts.
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Boeing loves MAX corners cut ... in case you haven't been paying attention
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SLS and Orion are both being built under cost-plus contracts. There's no reason for Boeing or Lockheed Martin to cut corners.
While that is true, it is also true that there are no performance penalties, and the contracts are guaranteed to the vendors by Congress. They are not under any price pressure, but they are also not any "do a good job" pressure.
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SpaceX is only doing the moon lander, using new technology. Totally different.
Artemis should have been cancelled years ago. It's little more than a jobs program.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
But the parasites who destroyed it got rich, which is all they care about.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
It provided a lot of jobs in a lot of states. Which is what the senators wanted. Everything else is secondary.
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yes, you are correct. that is why I called it a pork truck, its only existence is to launch a very large number of dollars around the moon ...
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AKA Senate Launch System
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What's the cost per launch up to? 2 billion and climbing?
If the thing ever gets launched it may bankrupt the country.
Without a launch, there is no lauch cost. (Score:2)
It's more like rehearsal to show off how big this rocket is to other space companies like SpaceX or BlueOrigin.
Although BlueOrigin just barely made it to space to entertain some wealthy individuals for a few minutes.
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That's projected cost / launch
Are you stupid or just an ass ?
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It is based on the perils of fueling a rocket with hydrogen when sitting right next to it is a massively loud and dangerous explosive.
Hydrogen alone is dangerous all on it's own when any sort of spark is present. Now stack an explosive solid rocket booster next to a hydrogen tank. What could possibly go wrong in that situation?
Remember the US Space Shuttle that blew up during it's ascent into space? The dangers of ice cold O-rings securing a highly explosive solid rocket fuel assembly. Thank you Dr. Feynman
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LH2 (Score:4, Insightful)
(And yes, I'm aware of all the things that make dealing with LH2 a hard problem.)
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I think its not a bad choice but they didn't put in the resources needed to make it reliable.
Re:LH2 (Score:5, Informative)
Space exploration aside, liquid hydrogen could be such a good energy storage and transportation medium, if only it weren't so tricky to hold on to.
I doubt liquid hydrogen would make a good energy storage and transportation medium. LH2 has about the same energy per volume as compressed natural gas (which is something like 99.9% methane) and about one quarter the energy per volume of liquid hydrocarbons. Not only do hydrocarbons have better energy density but they won't freeze everything around it. Imagine what an airplane would have to look like to use LH2 for fuel. The fuel could not be in the wings because they'd frost over and/or be too thick and heavy from insulation and reinforcements. We tolerate LH2 in rockets because the use of hydrocarbons runs the risk of everything getting covered in black carbon if the mix isn't exactly right in every place at every time. LH2 is also energy dense by mass, something like triple that of liquid hydrocarbons but the mass of the tanks from insulation and such take away quite a bit of that advantage.
What we are seeing is a shift from LH2 in rockets to cryogenic methane. Methane isn't immune from creating black carbon but improvements in rocket design has made the problem tolerable. Methane is a compromise between LH2 and the other popular choice of rocket fuel, RP-1. RP-1 just means "rocket propellant number one", as in it's such a popular rocket fuel that it's number one on the list. RP-1 is basically jet fuel or kerosene that's been highly filtered of sulfur and other contaminants common to petroleum products that might foul up the pumps or interfere with a consistent burn.
Getting hydrogen to a liquid takes a lot of work, and is only done where the volume of the tanks would be a problem such as on a rocket. For anything stationary, like a power plant using hydrogen for energy storage or someone wanting to pipe hydrogen somewhere as an energy transfer medium, then the hydrogen would likely just be compressed. If the goal is to get to a "hydrogen economy" of using hydrogen based fuels for transportation and a means of energy exchange then we'd likely use hydrogen for hydrocarbon synthesis and then move it about and burn it like we do petroleum products today.
I can imagine seeing in the near future rockets fueled from synthesized hydrocarbons. Synthesized hydrocarbons would not have the contaminants found in petroleum, so that could be quite an improvement right there in costs and engine performance. With LH2 being already a very expensive fuel the costs of synthesizing a highly pure methane would be an easier sell than synthesized methane as a substitute for common natural gas that is piped into homes and factories all over the world. A common residential furnace isn't going to care much about the fuel being that pure. Once they've developed the process well enough to get costs down from serving the rocket launch market then they could move into synthesizing jet fuel and other kinds of fuel where a clean burn is a matter of safety and performance. Then, many years later, we might see synthesized hydrocarbons replacing petroleum products in every market. Use carbon from CO2 sucked out of the air to synthesize the fuel and it's a double win, it's clear of sulfur and carbon neutral. The fact that it is a drop in replacement for common petroleum based fuels is certainly going to be a selling point.
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We solved global warming, now stop scaring everyone's kids to death over it.
The body of your post makes a lot of sense, but care to elaborate on that one?
Ever looked at the development of glaciers, fossil fuel production or atmospheric CO2 trend?
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What does NASA have to do with designing rockets? They're designed and built by contractors, NASA just pays for it. With cost-plus contracts in SLS's case. That seems to be the big boondoggle.
Then again Boeing is in a similar position with Starliner - it's become obvious that their loss of competence isn't limited to airplanes, but in their case they don't have a cost-plus contract and are already running heavily into the red (I think I heard ~$100M and climbing?), with no realistic prospect of ever gett
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partly true, in the case of the Shuttle NASA did the design, and subcontractors did the manufacturing engineering and build-out. The guys at MSFC have eggs on their faces right now, big time. I worked in the Shuttle program for a few years and back then the guys at MSFC were the best, now it appears that most of them have retired because these new generation engineers aren't worth their diplomas.
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Maybe the problem isn't the quality of the engineers at NASA but them being handed 50 year old designs to start from. This is no doubt the best stuff that could be found in the 1970s but we learned a few things since. Lessons learned like how to get methane to burn cleanly in a rocket bell.
Maybe it is a bit of both. I'm quite certain it is a bit of both, but there's really no knowing how much each played a part.
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Congress didn't force anything, they came up with a jobs program with guidelines on reusing what they could out of the shuttle program and Aires/Constalleation projects. What you have is a system that should work but for these kinds of issues to happen now after the billions spent is a flying pig.
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> they came up with a jobs program with guidelines on reusing what they could out of the shuttle program
>What you have is a system that should work
You need a paragraph break between these two statements, because they really are not related.
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The rocket scientists in Congress are premier assholes. Back in the 90s, they forced Lockheed to double down on composite cryogenic hydrogen tanks, and that essentially killed VentureStar. It wasn't the aerospike engine btw.
Re: LH2 (Score:3)
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NASA probably did bust their butts. They made sure the engineers were properly diverse, and made sure that the managers had to be women or bipoc or lgbt. They really busted their butt doing that.
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Words can't convey how much this rocket sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Words can't convey how much this rocket sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yes .. but it is their fault too for not ditching the Artemis prime contractors that are run by people who only care about money and don't care a damn about space (Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman) for an innovative company where people actually give a shit -- (if not SpaceX, there are plenty of other companies like Relativity Space, Firefly, Electron, Astra, Impulse Space, etc.) Work for a company where the CEO stays up at night trying to figure out how to make life multi-planetary and how to make the best rocket engine.
Re:Words can't convey how much this rocket sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since SLS is a jobs program, and a pork distribution system, including those specific contractors is the point of SLS. This is why it's bad. I'd love for some more options that aren't SpaceX to exist. SLS isn't a real one. Now that SpaceX exists, and SLS is wrapping up, it would be nice if the next NASA vehicle project could actually be competitive with SpaceX in some meaningful way.
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Well, hopefully, they have input on which company they choose to work for. It's a choice to work for Boeing when there are a bunch of startups dying to hire aerospace engineers. SpaceX alone has hundreds, possibly well over a thousand, job openings for mechanical and aerospace engineers. So does Blue Origin. Even Relativity Space has hundreds of openings.
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people who only care about money and don't care a damn about space
If you don't care about money then you don't give a damn about going to space. There's no going to space if there's not enough money to build the rocket, so the engineers have to make a delicate balance on costs to that of some money-is-no-object ideal.
Work for a company where the CEO stays up at night trying to figure out how to make life multi-planetary and how to make the best rocket engine.
You mean Elon Musk and SpaceX?
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Of course you have to care about money, but within the context of the goal. Nobody is saying "money is no object" .. it's extremely important.
They will have to work together anyway. (Score:2)
Well, yes .. but it is their fault too for not ditching the Artemis prime contractors that are run by people who only care about money and don't care a damn about space (Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman)
They have all the human rated launch hardware capable of TLI. If they can get it to launch, Starliner would work well with commercial operators getting to the moon.
for an innovative company where people actually give a shit -- (if not SpaceX, there are plenty of other companies like Relativity Space, Firefly, Electron, Astra, Impulse Space, etc.)
It's still going to take some time for SpaceX's human rated systems to come together for Starship. SpaceX stuff will probably be going on in parallel with Boeing's as SpaceX will be busy making a lot of un-crewed Starship launches to set up infrastructure and land supplies on the moon. SpaceX is doing great things yet still building the instit
Wrong headline. Boeing delays launch (Score:1)
Not to mention, after 50 years they're crowing about a 15% increase in lift capacity.
Can we just give $$$ to Bezos or anyone not named Musk, just to keep healthy competition? Cuz Boeing is clearly out of the picture since the McDonnel takeover. Hell, McDonnel can't even make reliable airplanes anymore. We're gonna give them a cost plus contract, plus entrust human life, to these MBA
Re:Wrong headline. Boeing delays launch (Score:4, Informative)
Can we just give $$$ to Bezos or anyone not named Musk, just to keep healthy competition?
No. Giving money to Bezos is a stupid waste. His plan is stupid. It's also not necessary. Bezos has enough money to fund his own rocket program. Let him fund it himself.
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Not to mention, after 50 years they're crowing about a 15% increase in lift capacity.
That's a "holy shit" kind of improvement, even after 50 years. I remember people picking their jaws up off the floor because someone figured out how to get a 3% improvement on the efficiency of a locomotive engine. That took longer than 50 years.
We're gonna give them a cost plus contract, plus entrust human life, to these MBA assholes?
If you believe you can do better, and can prove it somehow, then I suspect you will get the undivided attention of NASA.
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I vaguely recall a scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai (book or movie, don't recall) in which a young engineer says his pre-war accomplishment at some steel company (like Chicago Bridge and Iron) was to reduce the amount of steel required in some standard girder by a couple percent. Apparently it was a big thing.
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Musk et. al. are Boeing's competition. If they keep sucking, they will eventually be eaten by the others.
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After 50 years, they're lucky they can even figure out how to do it at all. Don't forget this crop of engineers are the ones who in school got participation trophies and were told that in math the right answer didn't actually matter.
Side question (Score:2, Funny)
Why the hell are we paying Boeing double SpaceX's fee per launch to the ISS? It is so unfair. The pay for the same task should be equal. Equal work equal pay. Could it have something to do with the biodata forms SpaceX filled out? I understand that SpaceX's CEO Gwynne Shotwell is a woman and its largest shareholder Elon Musk is an African-American, but I thought we are past that sort of discrimination. Instead, we should be paying SpaceX that double amount, if not for the sake of affirmative action but also
Re:Side question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell are we paying Boeing double SpaceX's fee per launch to the ISS?
Because ISS is a jobs program, and a handout to Boeing, not a serious attempt at building an economically viable launch vehicle. Therefore the cost of doing the same job with SpaceX is irrelevant. It is a perverse form of socialism with corporations in the flowchart.
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The SLS is not meant to be economical. It's optimized for heavy lift in a single shot. SpaceX doesn't have any production rockets with its capability.
Even when Starship is out of development, it's limited to LEO without as-yet undeveloped in orbit refueling. It will be cool when it works but it's not a capability NASA should rely on it cause it's complicated and will likely take years to get right.
The SLS is also a capabilities program. Every second moron bitches that we "lost" the ability to build the Satu
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Starship already has a contract to launch to GEO, so it is not "limited to LEO". References: https://www.skyperfectjsat.spa... [www.skyperfectjsat.space] https://www.thecgo.org/benchma... [thecgo.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It can do 150t to LEO, so even without refueling, it is more powerful than SLS and can do way more than SLS can, especially if you give up reusability. Furthermore, again, without refueling, it will still be way cheaper than SLS for heavy lift to GEO+, especially if they use a many-times-used Starship for a nonre
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Hehe at Musk being an African-American. You're not wrong :)
Re: Side question (Score:1, Interesting)
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Yes. Which just goes to show how ridiculous the name is to begin with.
Since the whole term is now synonymous to "Black person", regardless where they come from, which is just as stupid.
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--
We will soon have the option to harvest our farts, so we can post & comment on stats about them.
Re: Side question (Score:1)
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But IÃ(TM)m sure you donÃ(TM)t think that discrimination ever existed at all and that it still exists.
Huh?
And why are you trademarking everything?
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Diversification reduces overall risk.
This project needs to die (Score:2)
Just let SpaceX do the heavy lifting. It's clear after 10s of billions of dollars sunk into this project that it's obsolete and has been plagued with problems despite having 80% of it already built or slightly modified from prior projects. Even if they launch this there won't be another Artemis flight until 2024 each one costing $4.1B!!
If we do the whole program that's $93B through 2025.
Scrap it, save money and spend it elsewhere. NASA needs to get out of the rocket design business.
Re: This project needs to die (Score:2)
This is something I truly don't understand. Musk is an ass, but SpaceX is really well positioned to become the standard for heavy lifting. They haven't launched Starship yet but it's hard to see how it'll be more expensive than the SLS, and has a much higher payload capacity and thrust. Musk claims a few million $ per launch, which is unrealistic, but the current estimate for an SLS launch is $2 billion, so even is Musk is off by 10 or 100x, Starship will still be way cheaper.
So what's the end game? SLS g
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> What am I missing? I can see the "pork" argument for the rocket development, but not for long term end use.
Redundancy.
"If you have two you have one, if you have one you have none."
Is SLS good redunancy? Nope. But there's a reason to have options besides SpaceX. You want to keep SpaceX on its toes and also guard against some unpredictable problem with SpaceX.
Somebody want to go wake up the guys at Blue Origin?
That said, the impatience on the first launch of a brand new rocket from some of the people
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The guys at Blue Origin will probably not wake up...
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I'd rather have 10 missed launch dates than 1 catastrophic failure. Everyone remembers how long it took to get the JWST into its L2 orbit, just imagine the furor if it had exploded 5 miles above the launch site.
I'd rather be remembered as overly cautious than an over-eager failure.
Re: This project needs to die (Score:2)
Totally agree. No need to waste rockets and/or valuable payload just because we want to see a launch. I think these SLS delays are not so much prudence because of payload, but because the consequences of failure are so bad. Failure would be very high profile, with Congress watching, and come across as a waste of taxpayer money (imagine the headline saying "$23 billion rocket explodes"). Another fundamental difference between private vs public rocket development - many variants of Starship and its component
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"NASA needs to get out of the rocket design business." Agreed. Rocket design is (and should be) engineering; there is no "rocket science." What NASA needs to do is the science: planetary probes, space telescopes, and advanced propulsion systems for interplanetary travel (ion drives, for example).
giant sucking sound (Score:2)
Bridenstine's Monster sucks more and more taxpayers' money into Boeing's pockets.
This dog don't hunt.
One way to get it into space... (Score:4, Funny)
With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, NASA's SLS would've been the most powerful rocket ever launched into space,
Load it into a Starship and launch it into space. Probably the only way it will ever get there.
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Rockets are complicated. (Score:4, Informative)
There's a reason why "rocket science" is synonymous with "really complicated".
I saw a couple bits of trivia that I found interesting. One is that private companies are working on their own launches of people around the moon, and they might beat NASA to it. This launch isn't carrying any people, it's a test of all the systems before putting people's lives at risk. The launch with people aboard comes later, and NASA might be beat to this milestone of putting people in lunar orbit by private companies. It is unlikely for a private company to beat NASA to putting people on the lunar surface though, that's really expensive and risky so only governments are willing to fund that so far.
Another interesting bit I learned was that the insulation on the tank is naturally a light yellow color, not orange. The insulating foam turns orange in the sunlight. The rocket has a tan. Will the foam change color more yet from sitting outside while they work on repairs?
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It will either be repaired within a week or so on the pad, or will go back to the VAB.
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You have to give NASA some credit... it's been 50 years since they launched a big rocket to the moon. It seems that they're a bit out of practice with their pre-launch preparation process.
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Even for SpaceX, the haven't actually launched starship to orbit yet. It will be a great achievement when they do - but we'll have to wait and see how that goes. Its also a very large, very ambitious launch vehicle.
Let us all face it. (Score:1)
The cat is on the roof (Score:2)
https://ivanmisner.com/cat-roo... [ivanmisner.com]
Maybe the powers-that-be in NASA know SLS won't work in part or in whole, and are afraid any failures post launch will cancel the program.
These delays keep the money spigot open.
Is the phrase ... (Score:2)
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No, but "Real Soon Now" is.