Wow isn’t that a cherry to put on top of the 30 billion dollar disposable rocket. According to the independant Booz Allen it will be a lot more than that and there is nothing on the current horizon that shows the costs doing nothing but going up.

Now .. spending 60-70 BILLION when ALL the domestic aerospace companies came in under 8 billion …

Oh well, back to your point:
Chris Castro wrote:
“Is the SLS a big waste of money?—–Ultimately NO”

When America could have fully funded 10 seperate companies to produce a heavy lift for the same price as what we are paying for the SLS then ulitmately the whole exercise was an illustration of insanity on a bun which will ultimately never survive the next administration.

The fallacy here is that only NASA knows which options are technically credible, and NASA is heavily steeped in the humans-go-to-space mode. That’s just how NASA employees are built. That means that every option will be predicated on launching humans to some destination. Even the science programs which, after all, in the minds of many people, are largely done so someday we can launch humans to those destinations! Early universe? No sweat. We just need a REALLY big rocket.

But the basic question is more fundamental. What is the role of humans in space, and what national purposes can they serve there? Are there other ways those purposes can be served? NASA won’t bite on that at all. They won’t touch it. I have no bias about human spaceflight. I think it’s exciting, fun, and stimulating. But someone has to get down to the brass tacks of establishing what the real value of human spaceflight is to the nation. Does excitement, fun, and stimulation constitute that value? Once that question is answered by consensus, then one can start coming up with options that aren’t stuck with the premise that, at root, it’s all about launching humans, but about what needs to be accomplished.

This gets back to the purpose of NASA. The Space Act, of course, isn’t bound by that humans-go-to-space premise. But really and truly, the Space Act hardly guides NASA these days. The Space Act is a reason for NASA’s being. That reason being at hand, the agency is free to do lots of other stuff.

“I’m afraid asking NASA what it wants to do won’t help either. The answer will inevitably be “Everything! And cost be damned!””

I agree.

Ideally a set of options should be developed, with each having a set of short-term and long-term objectives. NASA should then be used to help evaluate and cost out each option, and then they should be presented to “the powers that be” to decide which, if any, will be funded.

As to who should develop the proposed plans, my choice would be through an open competition that teams up academia with the private sector. I wouldn’t want service providers to be exclusive though, since things like launch providers should be assumed to be available to all.

My $0.02

Very true. Actually, I think the science community was desperately imagining a situation as with HST and Shuttle, where SMD didn’t pay for Shuttle launch costs. That was a marvelous deal for SMD. The illusion is that, sure, HEOMD will pay for our uber-HLV launch vehicles, because they want someone (anyone!) to use them. That’s the kind of fantasy that is being lived out these days at NASA.

In fact, even a science payload that would fill a uber-HLV would be so profoundly expensive it might happen once a decade anyway. Hardly a way to encourage frequent use.

I’m afraid asking NASA what it wants to do won’t help either. The answer will inevitably be “Everything! And cost be damned!”

“If we had an uber-HLV that was a cost-effective launcher, that would be marvelous for many things.”

Yes, it would be marvelous. But we don’t one of those, all we have is the unneeded and extremely expensive SLS.

But let’s say that an “uber-HLV that was a cost-effective launcher” did magically show up. If it’s driven by some sort of “demand”, whether it’s commercial, government, or a combination of both, then that’s great, that would be supply and demand in balance.

However if some entity built an “uber-HLV that was a cost-effective launcher”, and there was no demand for it’s services, then that’s not good either. There would be too much supply. SpaceX is seeing this right now with the Falcon Heavy, since compared to the Falcon 9 orders that came in years before it became operational, the Falcon Heavy only has a couple of orders.

Of course SpaceX has designed the Falcon Heavy to be 99% compatible with the Falcon 9, so they don’t need a lot of orders to be profitable on that product offering. They can show the market that the supply is there long-term, and the market can have a chance to test out whether they want to go with bigger payloads.

If you view these issues through the lense of Supply & Demand, then I think it’s pretty easy to see when something looks like it isn’t a good idea (i.e. the SLS).

Too bad there is no money in SMD for anything that might use an Ares V, or other heavy lifter.

SMD is not lacking for ideas. They are lacking money. The Headless Chicken is also walking the halls of SMD……

Let’s be careful here. If we had an uber-HLV that was a cost-effective launcher, that would be marvelous for many things. I can think of loads of missions that would be enabled. The science community had lots of good ideas about how to use an Ares V, for example, disregarding the fact that SMD would have to do some reverse mortgaging to buy an Ares V. But what makes a mission a waste of money is not that it could use an SLS, but that an SLS is the only way to fulfill the HLV it might need. In particular, missions that are ginned up wholly in order to use an SLS are the most suspect, ARM being a prominent example.

In fact, with proper investments in propulsion technology and a spirit of commercialization (aka Falcon 9H), the prospect of relatively economical HLVs is not far-fetched. So let’s keep our eye on those missions that might need an uber-HLV, but let’s not be stupid enough to try to pull them off in the near term with an SLS.

Not to worry. The Shuttle was trying to address NASA and Department of Defense and commercial users…and proved too expensive and fragile for all of them.

However, the DoD has no interest in SLS. They neither have nor anticipate payloads that need that capacity. The commercial sector has no interest in SLS. They neither have nor anticipate payloads that need that capacity, with the possible exception of Bigelow Aerospace’s largest module. (And what is a fair price for an SLS launch if you did want to buy one? And I mean an honest, at least break-even price. Anything less is a government subsidy.)

It should be built as a humans-to-Moon vehicle, specifically; and only subsequent to that goal being acheived, should it be assigned anything deviating from that. (Like when the Saturn 5 launched Skylab, in 1973.)”

So, a launcher that already has only one possible customer (who is already fishing hard for uses for it), should be required to use it for just one possible set of missions that may or may not ever be funded, at some unknown time in the future? Economies of scale dictate that the fewer of these you make (and presumably use), the (even) higher the unit cost of each one is going to be, and the less practice and proficiency the launch crews are going to have.

Also. what to you think the difference would be between a ‘Mars-only’ launcher, and an ‘anything that will fit on top of it’ launcher? Be thankful that there was a use for the Saturn V that launched Skylab. The rocket doesn’t care what its payload is, and without Skylab, it would merely have become yet a third lawn ornament at some other NASA center like its two sisters, once Apollo 18-20 were cancelled. You should be looking/hoping for more uses and justifications for this beast, not less.

“By the way, it’s good to see that some of you all, are coming to the same conclusion——that the proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission is a total bunk & waste of valuable rocket power & engineering ability!”

Since the ARM was an excuse by Senator Nelson to find a use for the SLS, it was clear from the moment they announced it that it was not worth taxpayer funding. If you would have been reading the comments in Space Politics about this, you would have known this long ago.

You’re just now realizing that those of us that think the SLS is a waste of taxpayer money also think that missions that use the SLS are also wastes of money?

Weird.