Comments on: WSJ op-ed calls on the President to kill the SLS

By: Scott Rankine

Scott Rankine — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 13:56:51 +0000

The Senate Launch System (SLS) is a rocket to nowhere.

Clearly, the spirit of Apollo lives on at SpaceX, not Congress, which seems bent on forcing NASA to expend precious resources on wasteful, pork barrel make-work projects at the behest of crony aerospace lobbyists sporting suitcases of slush fund cash.

This year we will see the first successful return of a Falcon 9 main stage to the Cape to demonstrate rapid reusability.

In 2015 we’ll be treated to the launch of the Falcon Heavy, the largest rocket to fly since the Saturn 5.

Next year will see the first successful crewed launch and return of a SpaceX Dragon capsule that has been designed to enable powered landings back at the Cape, unlike Orion which relies on costly and decades old ocean recovery.

SpaceX’s vehicle roadmap dwarfs the SLS with far greater cost-efficiency and reliability. By the time the first SLS mission flies in 2018 (maybe) it will be obvious to even its most ardent fans that it makes no sense to continue with this program, meaning it will continue to live on for years burning through billions of dollars until certain Senators are no longer running for re-election.

Orion will suffer the same fate as the superior operational capabilities and cost efficiencies of the Dragon become self evident.

Suffice to say, the sooner we embrace the spirit of innovation and common sense that is SpaceX the better it will be for everyone, especially the American taxpayer, NASA and future generations of space explorers.

By: Bill Smith

Bill Smith — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 06:45:52 +0000

Interesting, the science haters want to stop science, mostly they don’t want to check for life on a few moons in our own solar system. They want space corporations to dominate and to be just another industrial machine that pays them money tributes for every issue or election. Science , better science, better machines in space, reaching out further and doing more, would likely need a larger payload rocket. Would they change their idiot minds I wonder, when a large asteroid happens upon a planet killing trajectory with earth. Steeped in stupidity, they’d probably sell Kool-Aid for the event, and claim that the CO2 that blessed coal is putting in the air would protect us with magic zoomies. Save us from these truly stupid politicians and Fox employees.

By: NeilShipley

NeilShipley — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 09:03:38 +0000

This makes no sense. First you say that BO can use Wall Street for funding but they require a return and BO has zero of that at the moment and even VCs require a reasonable possibility. Some years away for BO at this point.
BO has no NASA contracts and there are none on the horizon for them to bid on so no funding there.
And how does SLS and BO figure together? Even if SLS was competitively tendered (purely hypothetical as never going to happen) BO doesn’t have any of the capabilities required for such a project.
Sorry, there’s no logic to your post and as I said previously BO is a long way behind SpaceX and not likely to catch up any time soon. SpaceX has the jump on everyone, period!

By: pathfinder_01

pathfinder_01 — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 08:32:47 +0000

Ah the station agreement was extended from 2015 to 2020, and they are looking to extend the station up to 2028.

By: Dark Blue Nine

Dark Blue Nine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:06:40 +0000

“The United States. through NASA, is going to launch heavy payloads into space.”

No, we’re not. There’s no money in the NASA budget to build any heavy payloads for SLS. There’s not even any money to build an SM for MPCV. SLS and the MPCV capsule have eaten the entire exploration budget.

By: Justin Kugler

Justin Kugler — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:16:07 +0000

The current agreement with the international partners runs until 2020 and my information on the deorbit plan comes from the guy who works for me and used to be on that team, so I stand by my remarks.

Suffredini reported to ASAP himself earlier this month that the End-of-Life plan is not complete and negotiations with the Russians are still outstanding. The nominal outline he presented uses modified Progress vehicles that use up the Service Module’s on-board fuel to do a whole de-orbit, but I’ve heard there are concerns about the ability of the vehicle to withstand that approach.

By: Guest

Guest — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:48:40 +0000

2020 is not the end of the ISS program commitment. It is simply the last forecast date. The federal budget cycle plans in 6-7 year rolling forecasts so right now the budget is planned for 2020 and next year it will be 2021. There are also international agreements for how long the program is planned to continue. The Russians program manager said within the last day or two that he doesn’t anticipate the program will end anytime close to 2020. He said he does not expect to need a new station for a few years after 2020. There is an ISS de-orbit plan and has been since before the first pieces went into orbit, and I am pretty sure that its done similarly to Mir. You wait til the orbit has descended until its about to go unstable, then you use propulsion whether from Progress, the SM, or other vehicles to further slow the orbital velocity and hasten its demise so it is close to a planned trajectory and aim point. And it is I am pretty sure done as a whole and not in segments.

By: DCSCA

DCSCA — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 04:41:22 +0000

Nevertheless, his comments donâ€™t move the dial one way or the other.

You don’t really have a metric to measure that. And his venues access a broader demographic.

By: DCSCA

DCSCA — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:19:21 +0000

“My personal goal in my career is to do what I can with the opportunities available to bring the resources of the Solar System within our economic sphere and, thus, help humanity develop into a spacefaring species.”

Good perspective, Justin. Of course, humans are already a space-faring species. And given the mere 110 year span time from the start of powered flight– about one and a half human lifetimes on average– humans have moved out pretty far and fast into the 5 billion year old solar system. It may be, for our generation, the moonshot and a few robot probe will be all we’ll see– which is much more than the Keplers, the Gallileos, the Magellans, the Drakes and so on ever saw in their life spans combined.

It’ll happen. It may not be American led, but it will occur– one day.

By: Justin Kugler

Justin Kugler — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:35:42 +0000

There are no plans to deorbit the Station in 2020. That is simply the date at which the current program commitment runs out. Besides, there is not any easy plan to deorbit the Station. If that day comes, it will almost certainly have to be done in segments.