
NASA will pay $146M for each SLS rocket engine - elsewhen
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-staggering-146-million-for-each-sls-rocket-engine/
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tectonic
Tim Dodd just released an excellent (and long) video comparing the costs of
SLS with Falcon Heavy and (eventually, maybe) Starship.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY&feature=youtu.be)

SLS will cost upwards of a billion per launch. Compare that to $90 million for
a reusable Falcon Heavy launch or ~$150 million for a disposable one.

~~~
bostik
Kind of off-topic, but trying to watch that video brought this to mind:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243)

~~~
autonoshitbox
Tim can repeat himself often, but he's not bad at what he does. His content is
admittedly designed for children.

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pfdietz
The purpose of the space program isn't to explore space, it's to consume
federal funds, accruing influence and kickback contributions to the
politicians who arrange it.

It's important you understand this primary purpose if you want to understand
what happens at NASA.

If you are a space program supporter who is okay with the situation as long as
NASA is getting money, then you are the reason they can get away with this.
Thanks a lot.

~~~
PostOnce
it's also a high quality job creation program that employs 17K at NASA and who
knows how many at contractors

it's also a military capability

it's also saved who knows how many lives with weather satellites and ambulance
GPS and satphone rescues

it's also a meteor warning program

it's also a global warming monitoring program

it also begets companies like spacex and capabilities like GPS for all and
inspires people to pursue science

sure there's fat, but we're employing highly skilled domestic tech and science
people with that fat, would it be better if we left all those tax dollars to
be spent on iphones and Starbucks? or the prison industrial complex? NASA and
NOAA and the NIH and any pure science agency is super defensible

~~~
the_pwner224
We can spend all the taxpayer money on creating 17k highly skilled jobs that
actually do something.

NASA does some useful stuff, but we could be doing much more useful stuff with
the same money, while still having 17k+ jobs and good military technology and
weather satellites etc.

~~~
Traster
Can we though? Or have we demonstrated over time that any suitably large
program sustained over a suitably long time will innevitably need to account
for the enormous incentive there is to exploit that funding. What do you
propoes to do? Ask the defence companies if they would stop exploiting the
government contracts that only exist because of their lobbying in the first
place?

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etrabroline
> The core stage is structurally similar to the Space Shuttle external
> tank,[24][25] and initial flights will use modified RS-25D engines left over
> from the Space Shuttle program.[26] Later flights will switch to a cheaper
> version of the engine not intended for reuse.[27]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System)

So they reused as much of the space shuttle as possible, down to using left
over engines. Developing a new engine from scratch using a new fuel (methane)
like SpaceX did would have been a very risky proposition. Like NASA, Blue
Origin and ULA both did much more conventional things and have launch costs
multiple times those of SpaceX. The relative cost of NASA's more conservative
design decisions is more a testament to Space X's remarkable success with the
Raptor engine than NASA being somehow incompetent.

~~~
valuearb
Each Merlin Engine costs $1M.

A Raptor is expected to cost less than $1M each.

Blue Origins BE-4 is priced at $8M each.

So how did conservative NASA get cheaper RS-25 engines for only $147M each?

~~~
etrabroline
Those numbers are not measuring the same thing. Those are the marginal cost
per engine. What did it cost Space X to develop the design, and what did it
cost them to build the production facilities? The price NASA is paying is for
delivery, not the cost to produces one more after billions have been sunk.
Also, how many do they plan to produce? NASA probably only needs a few dozen
RS-25s for the life of SLS, so probably not worth the billions Space X spent
developing a new engine.

~~~
valuearb
The Merlin was developed for the Falcon 1, at a total cost of $90M (including
the rocket itself; and Kestrel engine for 2nd stage).

It was enhanced for Falcon 9, which has a total development cost of $300M for
the first versions, including rocket, tanks, second stage, Merlin Vacuum.

The RS-25 was developed in the 70s for the Shuttle, and had a quoted cost of
$47M at end of Shuttle life. This is literally the cost to make a few more
after all design and testing was done. NASA has spent over $15B developing the
SLS, why are they paying three times more for these engines?

~~~
etrabroline
Because they shutdown the production lines capable of making them for $47
million over a decade ago, and it costs a lot of money to recreate them and
get the tooling and personnel needed. It's also the single most expensive
rocket ever. It was designed to be the best, economics were ignored because
they had the budget to do everything optimally. In terms of basic specs, RS-25
is comparable to Raptor with superior specific impulse, and is a highly proven
45 year old design. Reliability is really the most important stat, given the
cost of the payload and other parts of the rocket. Obviously Space X spent a
lot of time thinking about economics, with great results, but going for the
expensive but sure bet option made a ton of sense for SLS.

Merlin is much simpler and smaller and not really comparable to the other two.

The RS-25 got new life with SLS, I would expect future NASA craft to use Space
X engines.

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bpodgursky
I feel like we'd all be better off if the federal government just cut an
equivalent no-strings-attached check to Alabama in perpetuity, cancelled the
SLS, and freed up all the rocket scientists to build something useful.

They could probably even do it in Alabama! SpaceX could open a local branch
and mop up the talent. The current "waste money on the SLS for political
reasons" just feels like the worst of all possible worlds.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
I feel we are better closing down instagram/<useless app>, and using freed up
computer scientists to build something usefull.

~~~
testrun
I don't think you understand the difference between public and private money

~~~
ClumsyPilot
I don't think you understand that entire industry sectors would not exist
without Nasa. There would be no GPS, no Google-maps, and you wouldn't know
when a hurricane is coming.

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tomohawk
Richard Feynman was pulled in to investigate the space shuttle challenger
disaster. He refused to sign the report unless his findings were included.
They were eventually included as an appendix, which is well worth reading.

There is a section on the main engines (you can search down to the SSME
section)

[https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...](https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-
commission/Appendix-F.txt)

~~~
avian
> Thus, it is not unreasonable to guess there may be at least one surprise in
> the next 250,000 seconds, a probability of 1/500 per engine per mission.

It's interesting to read this in the context of the STS-93 incident [1] where
a broken SSME injector came close to causing a mission abort. Was this
Feynman's "one more surprise"? He was writing this report 70 missions before
it happened in 1999.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93)

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_ph_
Of course, the answer to why it is done, is the money flowing into many states
involved in the production. Jobs are something every politician likes to
create. And it is part of an economy, that the state spends some amount of the
tax dollars to support a wide range and healthy economy. But for that, the
jobs need to do something useful. Just overpaying for rocket engine is the
quite opposite. The same amount of money could be spent to create jobs which
have a longtime value and as a consequence create more jobs. Even if it was
just used to accellerate the whole project by not wasting effort on something
which can be bought at a fraction. Like in having the funds to make a real
moon station, instead of creating a rocket, which goes to the moon once or
twice and then gets cancelled because at those costs, you cannot afford a moon
station.

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voz_
I don't understand - what is the motivation here? The article is a little
short, and it gives good insight into just how expensive this is (compared to
other similarly classed potential space purchases). However, what I am failing
to grasp is... why? Why spend so much when these other options are available?
Surely not ignorance. Is it malice? corruption? Someone's ego?

~~~
Joeri
This is a jobs program which happens to produce rockets. The rockets are not
the key objective, the jobs are.

~~~
golergka
Playing devil's advocate here: wouldn't "preserve institutional knowledge
about building rockets" also be it's goal?

~~~
KorematsuFred
> preserve institutional knowledge about building rockets

No it would be "preserve institutional knowledge about building OUTDATED
rockets"

If you are a tech company are you going to run your own outdated servers at
10x the cost because you would like to preserve institutional knowledge about
running outdated hardware ?

Your argument would be correct if the cost difference was not that huge, the
fact that it is so huge indicated that the tech they are using is very very
outdated. No point in preserving anything about it.

~~~
ethbro
The cloud hardware metaphor is a good one.

Preserving _knowledge_ is easy and cheap.

Preserving _capability_ (that is to say, people and companies with knowledge
and ability to use it) is not.

To use the metaphor, a huge part of the military procurement budget is
dedicated to continue building, deploying, and operating on-prem servers.

Not because it's more efficient, but because at an international level, having
a cloud provider (or in this case Russia or China) tell you "No" when you ask
to renew or expand, is unacceptable.

Unlike tech, machine shops filled with trained people can't be provisioned
with a click...

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ShorsHammer
Compared to $1m for a reusable Raptor that has more power at sea level.

There really should be painful monetary and career consequences for the people
who makes these insane decisions. The reality is it doesn't matter a bit and
they'll retire with a wall full of accolades.

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robomartin
Space isn’t easy. Going to the moon is significantly harder than LEO. I don’t
think one can claim functional and performance equivalence between SLS to FH.

[https://youtu.be/Y81vx__JngY](https://youtu.be/Y81vx__JngY)

Now, if the argument is: Why go to the moon? Well, that’s a different
conversation.

~~~
chroma
Jim Bridenstine sounds like a competent guy, but the fact is that NASA as an
organization is no longer competent. They can't build rockets anymore. SLS has
been a complete failure. The program was announced in 2011. The plan was to
make an expendable vehicle based on existing RS-25 engines, existing SRBs, and
the existing Space Shuttle external tank. This idea of reusing all of these
systems was based on the previous Constellation project. Over the past decade
NASA has spent $15 billion on SLS and they have yet to launch. Falcon Heavy
went from a concept in 2011 to launching Elon Musk's car into interplanetary
space in 2018. The development cost for Falcon Heavy was around $500 million.
That is 30x cheaper and almost twice as fast.

Orion has also been in development for over a decade and has cost $16 billion.
Current estimates put the total development cost at $23 billion.

If you add up the development costs of Constellation, SLS, and Orion, I am
sure it would be close to $50 billion. That's for an expendable launch system
that costs $1 billion per launch. For the price of a single SLS launch, you
could develop Falcon Heavy and launch 5 of them. Obviously Falcon Heavy
doesn't have all the capabilities of SLS, but SLS is vaporware. And by the
time SLS is working it will have to compete with Starship. It seems totally
insane to continue this program considering that in the best case, we will
have a launch system that is 10x more expensive than its competitor.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Firstly, this money is a pittance compared to the costs of development of
F-22, which produced a habdfull of planes and thats it.

Second, the decision to use existing shuttle conoonebts was made basically by
congress/ lobbyists. Congress gets insane amount of control over nasa, and can
fund or de- fund individual projects. As a result, nasa has to tailor them to
something congress will like and approve. This miopic managenent probably
results in what weve got

~~~
greedo
A) Whataboutism B) The program cost for the F-22 was 67B. It produced more
than "a habdfull of planes", it produced 187. The reason it ended up costing
so much (per aircraft) is the development cost had to be spread across fewer
airframes than planned. Truncating the purchase to 187 is perhaps one of the
greatest military acquisition mistakes in my lifetime.

