Thanks for proving my point about cost calculation.  Dont tell me.. you believed the space shuttle cost a billion a launch too.

30 billion.  Apollo was equivalent to 115+ in todays dollars.

Educate me.  Or give me a link.  Tell me how it doesn't cost 2 billion to launch.

If you knew the statistics that he used for that number you wouldn’t quote it.


That’s IF it’s flying multiple times a day over hundreds of uses.

It will cost hundred+ million for a starship orbital launch for a long time and human rating that landing won’t happen for until hundred + successful landings.

It’s a ways off. Love starship. But no. Throw out the 2mil per launch forever.

It wont.
SLS has actual flight hardware with long lead parts for 2 more on the way.  SpaceX has test articles. Youre looking at at least a decade before SpaceX gets anywhere near that projection.

As long as the next person to land on the moon is a member of G.W. Bush's "Religion of Peace", it will all be worth it.

Link please for that cost calculation.

SpaceX crashes a starship, builds and flies a new one in 3 weeks.  Explain how NASA's way is more cost effective.

The earliest we will see human is 2025 right now :(

Stack doesnt cost 2 billion. Its that simple. The physical stack simply does not cost 2 billion dollars and your belief that it does is hilarious.  

Cost of an SLS stack with Orion might be around 700million while the cargo version might be around 500 million.

I predict dead people. Everything new and Vers 1.b

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-the-over-2-billion-cost-of-a-single-sls-launch/

Adding all of this up, the true cost of a Space Launch System mission with Orion on top in the 2020s, including the rocket's development but excluding ground systems and Orion development costs, appears to be in the ballpark of $5 billion per flight.

Id bet a year membership on it. That’s cost to customer not internal spacex cost.

I’m honestly spacex’s biggest fan boy. I just know the market as an amateur fairly well.

A super heavy class rocket has never been done for less than a billion.

There’s no customer payload for it yet and that payload will be in the billions.

A super heavy  class rocket costing 200 mill is a civilizational game changer. Why would they undercut themselves and their competition by 100x? They won’t. Starship will have a lot of R&D cost to pay off.

What part of test hardware are you not understanding?  None of the existing articles SpaceX has are operational pieces.
The core on teh B2 stand is an operational piece.  As are the cores behind it in the queue.

Im sorry youre ignorant to the idea of an "all in one" piece vs "rapid iterative testing"

ULA, BO, NASA, and others are all using the all in one method. One piece, run every test imaginable on it, then send it.  Vs

Build a bunch of pieces, test them, change design like Space X.  One big reason for the hilarious anger at SLS' cost is you dont get to see multiple test articles explode..lol.

About the only possible caveat is that it does suck to see RS-25's get dumped into the ocean.

Lol Eric Berger, your kin folk.

the contract price for an SLS engine is 146 million, they have 4...

A fully expended falcon heavy is 150 Million...

Every RS25 (125miion) costs more than a falcon heavy.

Y’all the videos I posted all go over all this and the cost comparisons.

Ok, NASA has operational pieces.  Why is it costing taxpayers 2 billion a year to develop operational pieces?  Shouldn't they already be developed?

And I understand the difference in testing methodologies.  But you haven't explained to me how NASA's is more cost effective.

White House budget office Russell Vought came up with the cost evaluation (2 billion per launch).

Unless he's my kin folk too.

Who cares they can just take it out of the next stimulus bill.

Debt repayment is so 20th century

I'm tempted to jump back to a space job before the MIC hits lean times again.  However, I ended up getting laid off the last time I tried it, and that still stings

LOL. Senate Launch System, the porkbarrel powered rocket.

TBF to Obama (I know...), Constellation was already fucked before he got elected.  Both the Bush II Administration and Congress had underfunded it for years, and Ares I was probably a fucked design to begin with (for more than one reason).  By the time Obama got into office, they were arguably further away from a new spaceflight system than they were when Constellation started.

The Obama Administration's (and Congress') sin was that, when the Augustine Commission gave them three options, they kitbashed two of them for something that paid the Shuttle Contractors lots of money but didn't supply any real capability to actually go to other planets (hence the rise of the Asteroid Redirect Mission, to give Orion someplace to visit).  It's the Sunk Cost Fallacy dovetailing with Pork for Senators (including the GOP's own Dick Shelby).

In all likelihood, SLS will fly twice (Artemis 1 and 2)....but will be obviously OBE when Starship is operational and man-rated.  This will likely be the last dance of NASA as it's own launch provider, and they'll just buy transport off SpaceX/BO/whoever else.  The advancing capabilities of the private spaceflight companies will likely mean that NASA can shop semi-off the rack for things like landers and habitats, too (rather than paying billions to develop them on their own).  NASA will likely move to designing proof-of-concept prototypes to prove novel technologies/techniques (like they do all the time for aviation), and the commercial sector will run with that.

How many launches did the STS perform before we put humans onboard and hit "LAUNCH"?

Answer: Zero.


I suspect the man-rating of Starship/Superheavy will take a lot less time than some assume.

Under Trump I have no doubt that Artemis would be on the Mon by 2024.

Under Biden with his bosses wanting to own the moon I have my doubts.

We might be able do all the hard research and Biden will give it to the Chinese.

If we assume $15m per Starship launch and 8 refills in LEO in order to reach the moon, for $2 billion Starship could land ~2,000 tonnes on the Lunar surface for $2 billion.

People are going to be very surprised how large and extensive the test program will be. Don't be surprised for it to be flying 100+ times per year only 2-3 years after it's first launch.

When you eliminate the bottleneck of "we need tens of millions of new equipment" to launch again, you can do follow-up tests quick.

Starship obsoletes everything.

"after a few launches" is 2028+

By then Starship will have probably been to orbit 400 times, and for $900m you could launch it 50+ times.

Elon already beat them. The only reason SLS is still going is because they've come too far to quit at this point.

Falcon is cheap enough that they can simultaneously be the cheapest (and most reliable btw) rocket in the world while commanding 50%+ margins per launch. Hell, Falcon 9 is literally launching more tonnage to orbit now than all of the rest of the world's space industry put together!

SpaceX's marginal cost for Falcon 9 is only about $25m, this is how they are able to do Starlink.

SpaceX is spending $400k to launch each of their 260kg satellites.

OneWeb, by comparison (who already went bankrupt once now) is paying ~$60m to throw up 34 at a time.... That's ~$1.8m per satellite, and their satellites are smaller (147kg) and less capable.

You are fucking high if you think any .gov space will crew the ‘crazy Elon’ landing anytime in the next 5 years.

I love Elon. I love spacex. I’ve already been to starbase Texas. Plan on visiting again.

There is no capability to replace Orion/SLS in the next few years.

If you think SpaceX will sit in the corner with an operational Starship they have high confidence in, just because NASA is risk-averse.....you are the one who is smoking glorious herbs.  If NASA literally won't use their system (either because they are risk-averse and want years of flawless operations before letting astronauts take the same risks test pilots take everyday, or because they are trying to protect SLS....or both), SpaceX will very likely hire a few more astronauts and just do it (a demo manned lunar surface mission) themselves.  NASA isn't going to want to explain to Congress why some corpo-nauts beat American Space Heroes to the lunar surface.

We'll see (sort of) where NASA stands on Starship, sometime in the next few weeks.  If Starship HLS gets selected for the HLS award, that's a good sign that NASA thinks SpaceX's timeline is realistic.

15million is ludicrous.

The fuel for Starship only costs $800k....that leaves $14.2m for everything else.

Things change a lot when you aren't throwing away tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware every launch.

That $30 billion number is sheer bullshit. That's what NASA requested for 2010-2014. It only included $125 million for the development of Ares V.

Apollo costs also included building all kinds of infrastructure that we still use today- MAF, Pads 39A and 39B, VAB etc.

Constellation was a bad program.

Oof.

I agree about HLS. NASA needs to bet on their best horse.



You just got to understand. A human rated starship is ludicrous.


Falcon9 has around 95% successful landing in the last two years. That’s so so much simpler and easier than what starship will need.

Starship will need to be 99.9% no joke.

Spacex has no intention of killing astronauts either.

If NASA doesn't use Starship, they'll get to watch as mid-tier countries like Turkey and Brazil pay SpaceX modest sums to do "Flags and footprints" missions to the moon while NASA fucks around on it's Rocket-to-nowhere.

Again, how many successful launches did STS have, before they put John Young and Bob Crippen in the cockpit and lit the fuse, Kerbal-style?  Zero.

I want any hardware that allows us to go plant American flags all over the solar system, and punch aliens in the face.

NASA just a landlord of the Cape with a growing list of tenets

What are you saying?? It’s an entirely different approach. If you think spacex will put humans on the first crew rated ship you will be wrong. If you think SpaceX is for not in “test 1000 times until perfection” mode you are wrong. They are test and blow up mode. Even the F9 landings aren’t reliable enough 6 years later and they NEVER have to go through orbital Re-entry.

The shuttle was an over built glider plane. All it had to do was withstand re entry.


Not a propulsive “Crazy Elon” flip lander that has already failed.

Never saw that before, that’s hilarious.

Attached File

The book kinda sucked.

This went predictably sideways.

I hope we get back to the moon. I have serious doubts that SLS will be the rocket that does it, at least not on the regular. Orion - maybe, but flung by a different launcher.

My guess is that the gateway will be built, the landers will be built, and some kind of as-yet unthought of shuttle will be built to move people from LEO to the gateway. That shuttle very well might be a SpaceX Starship (or fueled by a Starship). Even if you don't think they'll man-rate it anytime soon (and I understand that argument, and don't totally disagree), the idea that a Starship could be shuttling between LEO and the gateway is not farfetched. Personnel can be moved to the ISS (or straight to the shuttle) via Dragon/Falcon 9. That shuttle need never deorbit, or at least need never deorbit with passengers onboard.

The problem with the whole SLS concept is that you don't need to throw everything to the moon in one shot; not when you have cheaper commercial launchers that can do the same thing, and you've already acknowledged that you're going to build Gateway to make it all work. Constellation acknowledged this, launching people on Ares 1 and stuff with Ares V. You just no longer need what SLS has to offer; even without Starship (or New Glenn, Blue Origin may yet have something to say about this) Falcon Heavy can toss everything you need to go to the Moon, and at much less cost, even if you have to use an extra launch for some of the really big loads. Thus, eventually, SLS will be cancelled or retired.

I have a post on SLS/Constellation/SpaceX over in the Starship thread; it's a bajillion words long and I'm not going to copy it here.

One thought experiment to add... Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy's performance to places like Mars or the moon is somewhat limited by the Merlin engines somewhat mediocre specific impulse. This is (fairly) easily solved with a new upper stage. While probably not viable on a reusable Falcon 9; if you expended the center core on a Falcon Heavy; it should be pretty easy to launch something powered by an RL10* and give you much better performance to places outside LEO. (The RL10, while it has great Isp, doesn't have the thrust to do what the upper stage on a F9 does very well. By expending the center core on a FH, you could push that second stage high enough that it doesn't have to). Alternatively, you could make it a 3-stage rocket, though that might mean a new center core on FH. My point is, F9/FH have room to evolve further if Elon had a compelling reason to do it. He doesn't, because he thinks Starship will obsolete F9/FH. But if Starship were to get stuck in development hell or go the way of the Dodo, those options could start to look better.

*-IIRC, SpaceX took some GOV money to sketch out what a Cryogenic upper stage for Falcon 9 would look like, so this might not be as far off as you might think.

Then Starship should be your jam. It's going to be designed to land in all sorts of places.

Add Phalanx and AMRAAM's and you have the Tachi-Rocinate from the Expanse's great great great grandfather.

And we can't have an Artemis thread without music!