Between Clipper and this, we’ve arrived at an inflection for SLS - it’s a dead program walking. The Senator from Alabama, Sen. Shelby is set to retire. And so it has become politically viable to sunset SLS.
I predict that the program will end after Artemis flies and they have a plan in place for the jobs it creates
It would really help if Boeing and ULA could score some wins. They're having trouble competing on price, schedule, and quality. We need more than one healthy launch provider to maintain competition.
I predict that Bezos is prepping to buy ULA if the Vulcan proves to be a success. It's the natural growth option for Blue Origin to buy their way into an orbital vehicle.
Blue Origin is making slow but steady progress on New Glenn, which is about as capable as Falcon Heavy and has a reusable first stage. First flight could be next year.
If they bought ULA it would be for the established cont(r)acts , but it would feel like an odd lateral move after investing so much money and effort into to their own vehicle, and a non reusable one at that.
ULA s next rocket also uses the engine developed by BO for New Glenn, but is also not reusable apart from an optional future possibility of catching the engines with a helicopter.
There's a lot more to ULA than just assembling old-space rockets. There are people there with the experience in designing, testing and launching rockets and all the equipment required to support them. There's also the real estate already zoned for rocket manufacturing.
I don't know much about New Glen or what Blue Origin is doing. Do they have a working rocket (New Glen) or is it still under design? I know Blue Origin was launching a rocket called New Shepard at one point, did they ever get anywhere with that? I was under the impression Blue Origin was more like a Virgin Galactic type of company.
Blue Origin built a massive rocket factory, and a massive rocket engine factory. It's hard to overstate just how much bigger the company is than Virgin Galactic, they have spent billions on infrastructure alone. Blue's payroll for a quarter is probably much more than the total investment into Virgin Galactic to date.
However, because Blue doesn't release a lot to the press about things they have that are not flying yet, and because they've had a lot of delays with their engines, pushing the whole project back, there is very little in visible results. It's sort of a running joke among rocket watchers that tomorrow Blue is going to open the doors, roll out a massive rocket and launch it into orbit. It's just that it's always tomorrow, not today.
Given how Bezos is willing to keep investing into Blue, someday that tomorrow will come.
>Given how Bezos is willing to keep investing into Blue, someday that tomorrow will come.
I hope Blue Origin succeeds, but Jeff’s investment and attention by no means guarantees success. The Fire Phone was a similarly enormous, exorbitantly-expensive, and secretive project that ultimately failed utterly. In that case, from my perspective as someone who was there, it was Bezos’s fixation on a particular solution (3D display, hand tracking) and refusal to consider or solicit contrary feedback that doomed the product. I worry about a similar outcome for Blue Origin. I hope I’m wrong.
I am not very well informed on these things, but is it comparable?
The Fire Phone seems to have lived a pretty short life from launch to death (it was announced in 2014 and canceled in 2015). Even accounting for a few years of development, it seems a different scale from BO, which has been running for 20 years.
I suppose at some point if they continue there will be a rocket. Just wonder how relevant it will be when SpaceX has already landed a Starship on Mars. I really wish them some success but I'm of the opinion at this point that Blue Origin is just a play around company and am surprised NASA even considers or takes them seriously.
They're having more results shipping engines at the moment than whole vehicles -- their BE-4 engines are projected for use on both New Glenn and ULA's somewhat smaller Vulcan, and they've shipped a couple of non-flight-rated engines to ULA which have been fitted to a pathfinder Vulcan stage which is being used to test launch-pad setup and equipment.
New Shepard's first passenger flight may be this year -- but they've been saying that for a while. As for New Glenn, they've built an enormous factory to manufacture it, but aside from the first-stage engines, they're keeping further progress to themselves, for the moment.
No sorry it wont. The Vulcan only requires 2 engines and will have very low launch rate. That is nowhere near enough money to finance what Blue is spending.
Blue Origin business model now and for years to come is selling Amazon stock.
I'm really hoping Blue Origin succeeds, but they're going to have some difficulty if they roll out a Falcon Heavy competitor at about the same time SpaceX gets Starship into production.
Of course, disposable launch providers will be even worse off.
It was my understanding that ULA was a joint alliance rather than an individual company? Isn't it comprised of Boeing and Lockheed Martin among others? Wouldn't Bezos have to buy it from them?
ULA is a 50-50 joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, yes.
So if Blue Origin wants to buy ULA, it has to negotiate with both Boeing and Lockheed Martin to be able to do it.
I have no idea if Boeing and Lockheed Martin would be interested in selling. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have their own space businesses separate from ULA, and likely view part-owning ULA as having some synergies with their own space businesses, and selling ULA to Bezos could threaten those synergies. OTOH, as they say, everyone has their price, and Bezos has enough money to pay just about anybody's.
Eventually ULA could be so far behind in technology that its worth would be scrap value minus workforce disposal (whoever buys them would have to either stomach continued wages or the political impact of mass layoffs). And Boeing/Lockheed Martin can't be entirely unaware of it, negotiations shouldn't be that hard.
Infusing the existing org with a state of the art rocket/rocket development process has many failure modes (the new becoming "infected" with the stagnant mindset), but it could also work quite well, pairing the "cowboys" who know how to land a rocket stage with skilled "regulation jockeys".
But BO has a much better chance of succeeding without ULA than ULA has without BO and in this situation entering in an alliance of equals would just be silly. The icing on the cake is that the failure mode (stagnancy infection) would also be far more likely in arm alliance of equals.
> Infusing the existing org with a state of the art rocket/rocket development process has many failure modes (the new becoming "infected" with the stagnant mindset)
It is funny saying that ULA might infect BO with a "stagnant mindset", given how little BO has actually delivered so far. BO had a two year head start over SpaceX, but in the same time that SpX has had over 100 successful orbital missions, BO hasn't made it to orbit once. In fact, thus far BO's only paying customer appears to be ULA – BO is supplying rocket engines to ULA's new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Vulcan Centaur is supposed to have its maiden launch by the end of this year; I wouldn't be surprised if it slips to next – but still, for all we know, Vulcan Centaur might make it to orbit before New Glenn does.
BO feels like a Bezos project thats just doing it because Elon is. I don’t think Bezos is really invested in it, more like “yeah I have a rocket company.” credits, at least that is the vibe of it.
So Boeing and LM should be wise to maybe invest or partner up with BO in this scenario. Could be interesting. But ULA still got some good contracts from the military afaik. On the short term they aren’t going anywhere.
That's incredibly unlikely. Blue Origin has spend a huge amount of money already to develop their own orbital rocket. The build a huge rocket factory and a huge engine factory.
They have their own control rooms and the own launch pads.
The literally just spend the last 3 year rebuilding everything ULA already has from the ground up.
All of that would be incredibly stupid if they would want to buy ULA.
So he doesn't have quite enough to buy both outright. On the other hand, both are diversified aerospace companies. If he just wanted their space parts, who knows...
I would suggest that many people commenting in this thread are not allowing for the dynamic if/when Taikonauts walk on the surface of the Moon. That would likely change everything.
For All Mankind is an interesting fictional take on a parallel situation. The series itself is good, but the first fifteen minutes of the first episode are stunning (to me as an American).
Unlikely. It's not going to be that much of qualitative difference, some 50+ years after Apollo, so the question would be "who's Moon base is more impressive". Just some new boots on the Moon wouldn't be enough.
Of course if China will manage to put a kind of a permanent base on the Moon, even some years after USA, that will be quite noteworthy.
I agree, right now the US has been talking about going back to the moon for years and put out a whole series of timelines that have slipped by. If the Chinese made concrete progress towards doing it, I think that would really focus minds in the US. The Boomer generation beat the Soviets, can the current generation beat the Chinese?
Boomer generation started in 1946, they didn't leave college until 1968. It was the previous generation that built NASA and landed on the moon.
Boomers were the ones who stopped the space program and turned it into a jobs program.
Gen X graduated at the end of the 80s and brought new energy into the 90s to build the first dot com and the internet economy, and people like Musk and Beck are the ones shaking up the space industry.
Boomers were involved in Viking and Voyager, but their main contribution to space was the Shuttle and the ISS.
As my Chinese coworkers would say, it's an even bigger waste of money. Given the delta-v costs of landing on the moon, putting a base there, landing personnel and resupply would be enormously expensive. If China wants to spend percentages of their GDP building a moon base, sure, why not?
Even with a heavy payload re-useable rocket like Starship, it'll still be really difficult. Alternatively, the US will build out serious orbital infrastructure and a mars base within the decade.
I believe we have to maintain this by law. Which, of course, means throwing money at whoever stands in the #2 spot, even if their product costs ten times more than #1. This means they have to keep throwing money at the likes of Boeing (which is likely one of the things that's helping keep them alive).
Until they can violate this mandate and stop burning cash like it is rocket fuel these inefficient programs and companies are going to keep doing what they do. No incentive to improve when the fitness function always outputs 100% regardless of what you do.
SpaceX could voluntarily split into two arms-length competing companies, neither of which are as competitive as SpaceX today (because each only has half the resources), but both are more competitive than ULA.
Doing so would reveal that Boeing is supported not only because it's worth having at least 2 launch providers, but because politicians friends have investments there...
That would be interesting and maybe not even unprecedented after the Texas vs Florida build off with starship. It might be hard to replicate the leadership team though.
That SLS program was terrible was clear before it started. It actually lost NASA own internal evaluation by a large margin but because of how the requirements from congress were designed, NASA couldn't not do it.
But while people love to talk about the Shelby thing, its overrated. Congress in general love SLS, its not about Shelby. House Democrats actually pushed for even more SLS budget then the Republican Senate.
Its just a terrible design for a rocket, terrible executed at an absurd price. Everybody involved should be fired and the contractors shouldn't get a new large contract until they prove successful at smaller contracts.
It consumes a perverse amount of NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing programs that NASA has.
I think it's the sunk cost fallacy. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, even if it couldn't have been predicted when they made the initial decision. It goes double for politicians who not only lose face, but lose political capital as well.
SLS stopped making sense years ago. They need to cut their losses now.
SLS is such a strange beast. So many weird things about it. Its design looks like someone tried to literally combine a Saturn V and the Space Shuttle: in an alternate universe, it might be the design we got in the 70s instead of the Shuttle. They're using rockets that were used on previous shuttle launches for the first few planned missions -- and instead of reusing then, they're dumping them.
It just doesn't feel like....an advancement. It's not something that can get the general public excited about space.
Not just SLS. The whole notion of a "Lunar Gateway" makes even less sense. Like, absolutely none at all.
Its original purpose seems to have been a place SLS would be able to get to, and then SLS would have the purpose of getting to it, in the same weird way that the ISS was a place the Shuttle could get to, and the Shuttle was needed to resupply ISS. Until it wasn't; and now the ISS has no purpose or value. Don't need SLS to get to ISS, so make a "Gateway" that does.
Make no mistake, a "Lunar Gateway" is much worse than completely useless. If you want to go to the moon, go to the moon. If you want to go to Mars or an asteroid, go there. Stopping at lunar orbit, effectively halfway, just costs a huge amount of extra fuel to stop and then start again.
"Stopping at lunar orbit, effectively halfway, just costs a huge amount of extra fuel to stop and then start again. "
Wait, what? The standard "go straight to the moon" mission plan (e.g. Apollo 11) has a required point where you are at a lunar orbit. There's no extra fuel cost to "stop" there; as you're spending fuel to slow down between lunar insertion and lunar landing, at some speed you inevitably are in a lunar orbit and can spend some time there at no fuel cost.
The "Lunar Gateway" is not planned to be in an orbit that would be optimal for any particular, expected lunar landing site, nor as rendesvous for a launch from the lunar surface. IOW, a different staging orbit would be better for any given descent and rendesvous. Stopping at a "gateway" first, too, costs more.
The only useful place for a "gateway" would be in low Earth orbit, with minimal cost to deliver fuel to, and useful for any destination except highly-inclined Earth orbit. Its value there is a result of the radically different character of Earth-launch vs. deep-space transport vehicles, being the natural point to transition between the two. Getting between Earth orbit and lunar orbit is, relatively, trivial, even for a crewed mission in an all-fired hurry.
Finally, the moon is a very specialized destination. There is no value in going or being there, beyond curiosity. Everything of practical interest or value is elsewhere, and a "Lunar Gateway" is useless for those.
I think this is in general how NASA often operates. Dr. Robert Zubrin has made the same criticism multiple times. Missions are invented in order to provide rationale for previous decisions, instead of it being the other way around.
If they want to target an emerging market they should figure out how to get a lot of fuel to orbit cheaply. Starship is going to need a lot of tanker launches and they’d probably pay for extra capacity if it was there.
It seems to me that like any system, the go to Mars plan will benefit from modularity. That’s what the Gateway might offer - multiple paths to Mars are possible.
A "lunar gateway" is much worse than useless for getting to Mars.
A side trip from low Earth orbit to the gateway takes nearly the same delta-V as to Mars. But unless you are willing to take weeks getting to the gateway, you use up most of a Mars transfer delta-V to stop there, and as much delta-V again to get to your transfer orbit to Mars. In other words, LEO-to-gateway-to-Mars takes almost 3x the delta-V of going directly from LEO to Mars.
I play a lot of Kerbal Space Program. It saves a LOT of fuel and mechanical complexity to break up space missions into specialized components. Engines that are able to perform well in atmosphere do not perform well in space, or vice-versa.
So Having a launch vehicle that does a rendevous with a LEO space station, then transfer the astronauts to a vehicle that is optimized just for the function of shuttling back and forth between an Earth space station and a Lunar space station, then have them board another craft that is optimized for landing on the Moon and taking off again, using minimal fuel because it doesn't need to carry the weight of the other components..
It makes designing a mission a lot more complex but at the savings of a lot of components and fuel, makes a lot more reusable components as well. Then when you add the ability to refuel in orbit by capturing asteroids, it really pays off.
Apollo used specialised vehicles too, you don’t need gateway stations for that. Conversely using a gateway station means you cannot choose optimal orbits and timings for your mission, you have to use the pre-established orbits and timings whether it suits you or not.
Suppose I want to send a mission to land on the moon at a site not on the orbital plane of the gateway station. For an all in one mission this is no problem, I can match my Earth launch plane and transfer plane to line up with the destination. With a gateway station the lander has to do two plane change burns, on on landing and again on ascent back to the gateway. If you play KSP you know just how expensive plane change manoeuvres can be.
ISU is a great opportunity for sure, but we don’t have it yet. That would be a great reason for building a way station and a great reason for going to it on other missions. But without that reason what’s the point?
Isn't this more or less the "container ship" metaphor? Forcing everything into containers means the ship carries overhead weight and some unused space, but that overhead is offset by the standardization of everything else in the logistics process.
A plane change can be expensive, but if there's a space station that can supply all the required fuel, who cares?
Any argument of standardization efficiency applies overwhelmingly moreso for a low Earth orbit transfer station. The only reason even to talk about a lunar station is politics: a lunar station seems more exotic, and lunar orbit is easier to get to than the surface.
Once the Gateway is up and running, the PPE element will provide power (in the 60-kilowatt), high-speed communications, attitude control, and Solar-Electric Propulsion (SEP) capabilities. This will allow it to alter its lunar orbit as needed, giving crews greater access to the lunar surface than was ever possible with conventional missions.
So instead of launching the vehicle into whatever plane you need for a specific mission, they’re going to do a plane change manoeuvre for the entire station for each mission?
If it takes no fuel (from being solar-electric powered), and can be accomplished in parallel while the spacecraft on Earth is prepared, why not? Sounds reasonable to me.
Plane changes always require fuel. Solar-electric propulsion, in particular, requires fuel. Its high specific impulse means that it needs less fuel, but also would take many months for a small change of orbital plane.
It uses energy from the sun to turn xenon gas into plasma and shoot it into space. This makes it use 10 times less propellant than conventional systems.
The xenon gas is the propellant. This still comes from the earth so it's far from free. It's just more efficient.
It's not something that can get the general public excited about space
Space is like a sports team: the public gets excited when there are wins. The public is excited about SpaceX because of the company's many wins. All ULA needs to do is post some wins to generate excitement.
While you are not wrong, that doesn't feel entirely true. Every single time I watch some version of the 2 Falcons landing back on earth [1], I get chills and have a tear or two in my eyes. It feels right, it feels like progress and it is awe inspiring. Not that I don't have an immense amount of admiration and respect for everything that has come before and was achieved in the past. But it feels like time to move forward with newer designs, ideas and technology. Especially when SpaceX, BO and others are achieving success with these new ideas and showing that we can take that next step forward.
But saving jobs by itself doesn't bring much benefits. Maybe if you're going to use that experience in a soon to come follow-up project... which with NASA could be very much not guaranteed.
Graft and corruption make sense to politicians. They don't make sense to the country as a whole. Public Choice Theory offers explanations, not justifications.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but was taking a less cynical perspective. I was talking about the “self licking ice cream cone” in that politicians will protect their constituents interest whether it makes sense for the country or not.
I predict that the program will end after Artemis flies and they have a plan in place for the jobs it creates