Falcon isn't really comparable to the SLS, but yes the SLS is awful cost wise. Starship will almost surely be between one and two orders of magnitude cheaper per launch vs SLS.

A rational return to the moon program that had to choose between Falcon and SLS would choose Falcon.

If the primary goal is sustainable payloads to the moon. I think Congress considers this a secondary goal over funding and jobs being directed at their states.

> funding and jobs being directed at their states.

This is more important than it seems on the surface and is often a good thing.

You want to train and preserve local expertise with heavy industries.

That ensures generations of successful companies rejuvenating your economy as opposed to relying on federal handouts.

It completely fails as a justification for SLS, though. It's preserving nonsense that needs to die, instead of pushing the actually successful part of commercial space.

How do you recon Spacex has managed to recruit several thousand US citizens with the proper expertise?

These people don’t grow on trees(/classrooms).

Surprisingly NASA, or ULA, couldn't recruit those very same citizens.

I think you’re missing the point.

NASA and ULA like programs trained and built expert training to create those citizens.

Being able to recruit them is a non-goal.

The missing is all yours :) . The citizens aren't the goal, the space achievements are. And that's where NASA and ULA were left in the past.

The only goal of any democratically elected government program is: improved citizens.

It is in the definition: “for the people”.

It's a good thing during down times. But now is not down times. Experienced, qualified space & rocket engineers are in high demand. Employing them to do useless make-work means they aren't available to work on rockets and space systems that will actually be useful in the future.

If you could predict good times and downtimes accurately, you’d be a multi-billionaire.

These people enjoy a cushy revolving door between several private and public sector aerospace jobs.

Who said anything about predicting? Reacting would be just fine.

You’d probably have to figure out on orbit manufacturing, then, so I don’t think that is at all clear.

On-orbit assembly, the demonstration of which was the single actual real accomplishment of the Space Station program. And yet NASA just threw that in the garbage.

If we can't do something as simple as assemble modules in space, exactly what sort of future do you imagine is waiting for us in space?

Maybe they used that experience decide that it would be cheaper to just build a huge rocket? The ISS also had the benefit of the shuttle, while US flights to LEO were in turmoil when the SLS was funded. It also wasn’t clear in hindsight how completely and utterly inept Boeing was and how effective SpaceX was going to be.

It's grossly more expensive the way they are doing it. They were originally going to use smaller commercial launchers until Senator Shelby and others held a political knife to their throats.

SLS has absolutely no redeeming features. You're sunk deep in Stockholm Syndrome if you're still defending it.

It's ironic that Musks two big successes were funded by the Obama administration against vehement Republican objections. Shelby repeatedly tried to kill Space-X and without the $400million DOE loan Tesla would never have been able to start production - and without the electric car tax credit - it never would have been able to sell.

Falcon rockets can't get to the moon. You need a lot more fuel to do that. That's why SLS and Starship are both being developed.

SLS is needed only because they were not allowed to adopt on-orbit propellant transfer. With rockets like the Falcons, propellant (which is most of the mass needed to get something to the moon) is launched in smaller quantities and accumulated.

What sort of future in space do those advocating SLS imagine for us if moving a liquid from one tank to another is too challenging?

One where we just launch one rocket instead of building a giant orbital bomb slowly (accumulating fuel) and transferring all those explosives through a complex series of difficult rendezvous maneuvers? One rocket is risky enough.

There's a huge amount of extra risk involved in that sort of idea, which is why NASA isn't doing it, which can just be avoided with SLS and Starship.

It's actually less risky. Most of the launches are of propellant, which is completely replaceable. Reliability of a launcher is achieved by using it many many times, exposing all the gotchas. SLS will launch so infrequently it will be extremely risky.

And you didn't answer my question, so I will answer it for you. If simply transferring a liquid from one tank to another is too risky, then there is no future in space. No activities of any significance could ever be done there. With that established, we can shut down the human space program and lose nothing of value.

There is plenty of future in space by limiting propellant transfers to times when they are absolutely necessary. We can do them today, and have been able to for 30 years, and yet we rarely do, and never for the volumes of fuel you are proposing.

There's no reason to have humans on board while transferring fuel, the risk to human life from this "giant orbital bomb" (ridiculous fear mongering) is nonexistent. Anyway, the whole thing is a pointless waste of time and money. The only non-pork reason to return to the Moon is to blunt the impact of the PRC doing the same (should that happen.)

A “giant orbital bomb” is part of the Lunar Starship plan. Starship will launch tankers

> Starship HLS requires in-orbit propellant transfer in its mission profile. Prior to the launch of the HLS vehicle from Earth, a Starship variant configured as a propellant depot would be launched into an Earth orbit and then partially or fully filled by between four and fourteen Starship tanker flights carrying propellant. The Starship HLS vehicle would then launch and rendezvous with the already-loaded propellant depot and refuel before transiting from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

I’m a little confused why you call it a giant orbital bomb. It wouldn’t be particularly giant. Four reusable flights could only bring 600T of propellant to LEO. A single starship is fueled with 4600T of propellant, or 18400T of propellant to get that 600T into LEO. I would argue the starship itself is a much more giant bomb with all sorts of fire and stress and chances to explode. 600T of fuel exploding in orbit might not even be visible. But there’s been a number of tests of in orbit refueling and it doesn’t seem much more complex than, say, docking with a space station and transferring bags of mostly water without damaging them.

One giant rocket would also be a "bomb", and it would have to take a more dangerous path.

Docking isn't a safety risk.

Falcon Heavy is capable of going to the Moon or even Mars.

Technically so is falcon 9, but they can’t return and they have to be totally dry with no cargo, and definitely not a terrarium full of humans. Falcon heavy is even capable of going to Pluto. But it wouldn’t be a very interesting mission. More interesting would be launching unmanned probes.

Regardless, the plan is to use starships to build a LEO refueling platform and bring propellant for a lunar lander brought to orbit via a starship. Such a platform could also be used for Mars. It’s a much smarter move than trying to bring everything from earth in a single shot. And I can vouch for the sanity of the plan - I have almost 600 hours on KSP which makes me a bit of an expert ;-)

In 1990's Dan Goldin, the NASA administrator at the time, was looking for ways to return to the Moon for cheap. One of the least expensive variants which was presented included launching multiple Protons and assembling lunar exeditionary complexes on LEO. The quoted number at that time was $1 billion to put boots on regolith again.

Falcon-9 is about as capable in terms of payload as Proton. And even without inflation the launch price is comparable. So, Falcon-9 is quite capable to get people on the Moon. It isn't really considered because there are other options and some additional requirements.

That plan was rejected for the reasons I stated in a sibling comment.

Completely terrible reasons. There is no good justification for SLS.

“HUMAN LUNAR RETURN X-PROJECTS APPROACH” (a Briefing to the Administrator, NASA Johnson Space Center, November 1995)

https://space.nss.org/lunar-base-studies-1996-human-lunar-re...

hey avmich, thnx 4 the memories ;)

And NASA will probably be very happy to use such a cheap system once they are convinced it meets their reliability standards. The point of SLS IMO is to keep a backup option if SpaceX has some horrific, unpredicted setback or design problem.

Surely people understand redundancy in aerospace right?

You are giving members of congress way too much credit. They don't care about the moon one bit, SLS is just a jobs program

A jobs program just for their districts. A key distinction.

The Military Industrial Complex has entered the chat...

It’s more a subsidy to defense contractors

The point of SLS is pork, full stop.

And yet only one of SLS and Starship has reached orbit.

And yet the point of SLS is pork, full stop. That is reached orbit, surprisingly, is less than relevant.

Wow fantastic, great measure. One has been in development 4x as long and cost 10x as much. And has a 100x operating cost.

SLS is about maintaining the ability of the US to build rocket engines like the RS-25 and those massive SRBs. The Government is worried about waking up some morning and China has leapfrogged us to the Moon and it'll take 20 years for us to institutionally remember how to get back there. And SpaceX has not yet demonstrated the ability to land humans on the Moon while NASA has. They're making sure that we can definitely still use big dumb stupid expensive technology to get there. If Starship works they may wind up pivoting away from SLS in the future, but then SpaceX will also get to take its pick up the remains of that program and their engineers (if they aren't already benefiting from a lot of cross-pollination).

NASA has a rocket capable of delivering a lander to the Moon, but no lander to deliver.

Let's unpack that:

> SLS is about maintaining the ability of the US to build rocket engines like the RS-25 and those massive SRBs

...but why? They're expensive and bad. Maybe the US SHOULD forget about them.

> The Government is worried about waking up some morning and China has leapfrogged us to the Moon and it'll take 20 years for us to institutionally remember how to get back there.

The SLS was indeed created back when this sounded reasonable. But it no longer does. The US can go to the moon now. They just have to pay SpaceX to do it, and failing that, Rocket Lab. But asking Boeing to do it is pretty guaranteed to be a bad idea.

> And SpaceX has not yet demonstrated the ability to land humans on the Moon while NASA has.

Boeing has demonstrated a willingness to not live up to its former glory though. And let's be honest here, this is not NASA vs SpaceX. This is Boeing vs SpaceX. That's the main contractor doing the vast majority of the work. Boeing, as you might remember, STILL haven't shown then can get humans to the ISS anymore! We are still waiting for Starliner to come online.

> They're making sure that we can definitely still use big dumb stupid expensive technology to get there.

I guess...

> If Starship works they may wind up pivoting away from SLS in the future

We can only hope! But again, Falcon Heavy exists NOW.

Starship is still entirely unproven.

There's a possible world where the cut corners and the Dear Moon mission winds up with the vehicle burning up on reentry or slamming itself into the ground, killing Tim Dodd and everyone on board, with the resultant investigation looking something like OceanGate.

SLS is big, dumb and stupid and has a LES and a capsule that lands via parachutes. If SpaceX fails as a company after some accident like that, the SLS will just continue to plod along.

Yes, Starship is unproven. But Falcon Heavy is very real.

> If SpaceX fails as a company after some accident like [starship failing and killing people], the SLS will just continue to plod along.

Well.. yes. But note also that if SLS crashes and kills a bunch of astronauts it will certainly plod along too. That's what the Shuttle did. The difference being one of NASA/Boeing and SpaceX are accountable for killing astronauts, while the other is not.

You are just paratoing pork politicians claims. They dont give shit about these capabilities other then its from their state.

Gigant SRB are dead technology, totally useless. RS-25 is engine that should be retiered and has no future.

So your theory of techonpgical progrss is to spend huge amount of money into legacy technology rather then actually building new technology.

The reason the US will beat China is the Raptor, not the RS-25.

What you advocate works 100% against what you want to achieve.

And just FYI the shuttle stack never lead us to the moon. In fact its terrible for this task.

Part of those expenses are probably building starlink and starship r&d. I suspect F9 no longer has significant r&d expenses.

I wonder if your NASA figure also includes first launch, that may include r&d?! Because for a single launch, when you substract r&d or even spread out across all planned launches - can't be that high...

I'm just for comparing apples to apples not apples to oranges.

Brief, if almost 4-year-old article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-t...

The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

> The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

There is a much more official and up to date figure:

> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.

https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-22-003.pdf

From what I understand, that number does include ground systems.

For what it's worth, NASA leadership continues to contest this value, although they refuse to publicly give their own value.

To be fair to you, the $4.1B figure does not ignore development costs. I don't think there's an agreed upon way to include them, so everyone just mentions them separately. And they are quite... large.

And that's while reusing as many shuttle components as possible, including the motors and the SRBs.

Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away

> Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away

I know a lot of people want to get them into museums, but I suspect that every museum that really wants one already has one. And I'd suggest to you that it's much more dignified that they go out as part of a rocket launch than slowly decaying in a warehouse somewhere.

I overheard some high-temperature semiconductor guys ("how do you build chips that work on venus / in engine blades / etc") at a NASA facility talking about budgets in a way that suggested a substantial part of their funding came from the launch vehicle budget.

I don't have good intuition for how much of the bloat comes from a top-heavy organization, from grifting contractors, and from good old fashion boondoggles -- but I'd like to add to this pile of possibilities the possibility the categories are poorly drawn and that "things which NASA should be doing but shouldn't be classified under launch vehicles" are nevertheless classified under launch vehicles.

"High-temperature semiconductor" sounds like an xkcd panel.

> some pretty-reasonable estimates put the total cost of NASA's "Space Launch System" at ~$5B per individual launch.

SLS is bad, but it's not quite that bad.

A full launch of SLS + Orion is ~4.1B. A launch of SLS without Orion (a theoretical cargo mission) is "just" ~$2.8B.

The SLS is designed to reach political goals, not financial targets.

Yep. Nicknamed the "Senate Launch System" for very good reason.

FWIW, here's a fairly deep (and charitable) article on the SLS by Eric Berger -

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/the-sls-rocket-is-th...

It's ridiculous what amounts of money these ventures can siphon away in the US. See Uber, AirBNB, etc. I'm not saying they don't pay off, but these businesses literally choke most international competition.

There are probably 1-2 countries in the world that can afford to keep running a business with losses at around $1bn per year.

$1b loss in the space industry is probably the smallest loss for any business in said industry in history. Every launch of the space shuttle was a few billion used up. There has been no completion here, because before SpaceX everyone else was launching 100M-1B+ of rocket that was never reused and other than the payload was a write off. It is always financed by government because there is typically a much larger generalized payoff for the nation state involved regarding capabilities.

Yeah, I'm not talking strictly about SpaceX. I don't know if I have the exact name, but I'm quite sure that one of the big unicorns, probably Uber, was running for several years with multi-billion dollar losses.

Again, that's utterly unthinkable for Mercedes or Renault or Mitsubish or Samsung or...

They'd just go under because the rest of the world still has economic gravity, i.e. everything must come down in case of no profits.

This thread is about SpaceX. If you want to complain about Uber, go find an Uber thread.

> Every launch of the space shuttle was a few billion used up.

Almost all of that money was dumped back into the same economy from which it was collected, albeit inefficiently, so it didn't really disappear. They "used up" a few million dollars worth of material each time.

The damage to the economy was not as bad as you suggest. However the opportunity cost was massive. Decades wasted on a dead-end program. A staggering number of engineer careers essentially wasted, and now they're doing it again with SLS.

I think many governments with state industry routinely run massive deficits in those state industries, and as an extension, state funded industries. Space is such an industry.

You can't compare falcon to SLS because Falcon cannot do what SLS does.

You can't compare SpaceX's figures to NASA because NASA has many, many more reporting obligations than SpaceX.

Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs. What numbers we have for them are PR releases. Meanwhile, NASA's budgets are public and comprehensive, and they have legal parameters on what they have to include in their statements about costs that SpaceX does not have.

> Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs.

Not really relevant.

The correct metric to make the comparison on is the fully amortized cost to the government per launch. The government doesn't pay for SpaceX's facilities or development - all of those costs are rolled into the launch price. But that's not true of SLS.

It is not possible to do a fair comparison of launch costs between Falcon 9 and other platforms without knowing the true cost of Falcon 9 launches.

> It is not possible to do a fair comparison of launch costs between Falcon 9 and other platforms without knowing the true cost of Falcon 9 launches.

I don't know why you're so obsessed with cost. The only thing that matters when it comes to commercial providers is price. And SpaceX, (as far as I can tell) stands alone among the medium-heavy lift providers by providing a price directly on their website.

Of course, for government launches the government typically wants extra services, which does boost the prices different levels for different missions (I think the Europa Clipper mission is particularly expensive for example). But all of those missions are competitively bid, and SpaceX tends to be the low price bidder, so those extra fees seem like they're probably pretty reasonable.

Price is not a good metric here you can subsidize your pricing to hell if you have budget. Elon loves to do this btw.

The headline is that SpaceX is profitable, so they're not pricing below cost.

They still operate at a loss?

Profit is the result of all operations, not just launches. For instance, starlink is a SpaceX company. Starlink is reported to be responsible for up to 40% of SpaceX's revenue.

https://spacenews.com/starlink-may-account-for-up-to-40-of-s...

Irrelevant. Hollywood accounting works because a film studio can, by shifting expenses to a particular film from elsewhere in the company, always claim that the film is unprofitable; the overall revenue and profit/loss for the studio is unaffected.

The documents WSJ viewed are for SpaceX as a whole, not "SpaceX's launcher division". Even if the launcher division charged the Starlink division 9000 megazillion dollars per launch, that would be exactly balanced by the Starlink division having to book 9000 megazillion dollars of expense per launch.

Again, according to the documents WSJ viewed, SpaceX overall has achieved profitability. That's a major accomplishment given it being by far the lowest-cost launch provider in the world.

> Irrelevant. Hollywood accounting works because (...)

I don't think you understood what I wrote. GP claimed "SpaceX is profitable, so they're not pricing below cost", but the bulk of SpaceX's revenue can be attributed to the company owner transferring his money around.

Your comment is so far off it reads as something outputted by a poor machine learning model.

> I don't think you understood what I wrote. GP claimed "SpaceX is profitable, so they're not pricing below cost", but the bulk of SpaceX's revenue can be attributed to the company owner transferring his money around.

My point is that even if SpaceX books Starlink launches as revenue,[1] it would still have to be accounted for as an expense on Starlink's side, so SpaceX's overall bottom line would not change. If SpaceX's confidential internal financials show that SpaceX has achieved profitability then, yes, that indicates that SpaceX is not pricing its launches below cost.

>Your comment is so far off it reads as something outputted by a poor machine learning model.

Sorry, not my fault that you can't comprehend the fact that revenue can't come out of nowhere. It has to always be balanced by expense, and this isn't some magic way for Musk to generate "fake profits".

[1] A fairly common business practice, in and of itself. When an Apple employee receives a new Apple computer for use at work, that computer is booked as revenue for Apple; after all, Apple is acting as a customer for a product, albeit its own. The division that employee works for in turns records the price of that computer as an expense. The revenue amount is going to be lower than what an outside customer would pay—basically, Apple as seller will charge Apple as customer zero markup—but some revenue will be recorded all the same.

> Price is not a good metric here you can subsidize your pricing to hell if you have budget.

1. As far as I know, no one has presented any evidence that SpaceX sells Falcon 9/H launches for less than cost. ArianeSpace used to really talk up this point, but even they've mostly given up.

2. I'm not really sure why it matters. If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal.

> Elon loves to do this btw.

Really? I thought Tesla was known for it's high margins? I don't think any of Elon's other businesses are public.

> If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal.

At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?

> At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?

1. Are you suggesting that SpaceX will bankrupt Japan (HIII), India (GSLV/PSLV), and Europe (Ariane 6)? That seems unlikely to me.

2. There's very little evidence that SpaceX will jack up prices when they're a monopoly. I mean, they're a defacto monopoly right now with ULA transitioning to Vulcan, and ArianeGroup transitioning to Ariane 6. And their prices haven't budged.

3. The DoD (as part of NSSL) and NASA work very hard to split large contracts between multiple launch providers - effectively ensuring that there is no monopoly in US medium-heavy launch providers.

Nonsense. Complete and uther nonsesens. Anybody who spends even 5 min realizes this is wrong. ULA isnt going away, no-matter how cheap SpaceX is. Arianespace wont go away. China, Russia, India and Japan wont go away. BlueOrigin wont go away.

If anything SpaceX has lead to an explosive increase in competition.

> If SpaceX can sell for less than cost (...)

This can and is considered predatory pricing, which is a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

You're correct, we don't have evidence that SpaceX is pricing below cost, because we have no idea what Falcon 9 launches actually cost, because SpaceX refuses to tell us.

And every expert who has analyised it or thought about it know its nonsense. SpaceX has told us, but you simple believe them.

SpaceX has shown these numbers to investors and have received money on good valuation. If not even there core buissness was profitable why would anybody invest in Starship?

The argument that SpaceX subsudizes their launch prices is just a nonsense argument that doesnt hold up to study.

We know that SpaceX told us that the incremental cost for a Falcon 9 launch is around $28M. So clearly they're not priced below cost.

What margins are you talking about? You think selling model 3 is a high margin business.

That’s not the only relevant number because we know what tech has been over the past 2 decades. It’s been an effort to build non competitive monopolized markets. That’s what Uber is, that’s what the delivery services are, that’s what AirBNB is, that’s what Square is, etc.

These companies will lose billions for years with this single intention.

The true cost minus the listed price adjusted for years of interest and extremely high VCreturns are all useful numbers to know because that adjusted by a risk multiple will tell you how much wealth the investors are expecting the monopolization to transfer from the taxpayer to their pockets.

Your comment leads me to believe that you know very little about the rocket business.

1. SpaceX will never have a monopoly over launch because it's competing with lots of governments who will never give up their rocket programs. ArianeGroup, Japan/Mitsubishi, Russia, China, and India all have active launch programs (although Russia and China are isolated right now).

2. There are a truly stupid number of startups trying to compete for a slice of the launch pie. Most of them are in the small-lift launch segment for some reason, even though it's probably impossible to run a profitable rocket launch business in that segment of the market. But there are enough companies that aspire to launch larger rockets that SpaceX needs to be on its toes.

Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity are probably the main future competitors to SpaceX. And both Rocket Lab and Relativity have talked up prices that are equal to or lower than what SpaceX is currently offering.

3. The DoD and NASA are actively working to prevent SpaceX from forming a monopoly in the US market.

Only US, Russia and China have capabilities to launch rocket with human. With both Russia and China isolated there is only US left.

> I don't know why you're so obsessed with cost.

This whole discussion is centered around cost. The only argument presented in favor of paying SpaceX for launches is launch cost.

If it wasn't for costx why would an org like NASA even consider delegating a critical part of their mission to a third party?

Cost is more important than price in the long run because it tells us whether SpaceX has made genuine efficiency and technology developments that allow their prices to be long-term viable. Any one can sell a service at a loss, but you eventually run out of VC or saudi bucks to make up the difference, and then you have to jack your prices up again.

Anybody who spends even 10min actually thinking about this topic realizes that the idea that SpaceX subsudizes Falcon 9 launches to get price below cost is complete nonsense.

Its just a convieniant attack on SpaceX because they are private. It has no bases in reality.

That depends on if the costs rise significantly after competitors are eliminated from the market a la Amazon.

> Not really relevant.

I disagree. The whole theme of these corporate worship sessions is to praise how efficient they are, and how inefficient everything in comparison.

Claiming that these corporations are free to lie and omit expenses from their reporting to appear efficient goes directly against their supposed superiority.

> The correct metric to make the comparison on is the fully amortized cost to the government per launch.

Not really. The goal is to assess if a government institution meets it's goals in a fiscally responsible and efficient way.

The main goal of NASA is to "Expand human knowledge through new scientific discoveries." This involves all aspects of rocket science. The likes of SpaceX were only possible because NASA invested in research which SpaceX took advantage to design its production services.

Another goal of NASA is to "Address national challenges and catalyze economic growth." This also covers creating and funding demand for skilled high-tech professionals in places where there would otherwise be none. This also contributes to create opportunities in a workforce to support and develop highly specialized and experienced engineers, the likes of which can then transfer their knowledge and experience to the likes of SpaceX. Take, for example, SpaceX's own Gwynne Shotwell, who started her career in aerospace by working in government contracts for the Space Shuttle.

It's perfectly ok to argue that a government can and should buy services from private companies. It's awfully disingenuous to misrepresent both the private companies' offerings and alleged efficiency and the actual roles and responsibilities of government institutions like NASA.

At time of writing, it's the opposite: Falcon is launching humans into space on a regular basis, something SLS has entirely failed to do to date.

SLS hasn't yet been asked to launch a human.

He says, implying that this is the only thing stopping that from happening.

Is SLS even certified to carry people into space yet?

> Is SLS even certified to carry people into space yet?

It better be because Artemis-II will have people aboard Orion.

Only because SLS has so far failed to qualify to launch a human.

SLS was on the schedule to launch humans several years ago. However, failing to qualify means that NASA can NOT ask them to launch a human

Unless the Congress makes an act to force them ignore the certification status of SLS.

From Wikipedia:

> The SLS was created by an act of Congress in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, Public Law 111–267, in which NASA was directed to create a system for launching payloads and crew into space that would replace the capabilities lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.

SLS was "asked" 13 years ago to launch humans, and we are still waiting for that to happen.

my search says falcon has launches humans twice. Am i mistaken? that doesnt qualify as "regular basis"

It has been the only way for the US to launch humans from the US since 2020.

10 flights with humans so far and more planned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2

Crew-1 to Crew-6, DM-2, Inspiration 4, Axiom 1, Axiom 2

10 missions

A crewed mission to the ISS every 6 months plus a handful of commercials.

Your numbers are way off.

And Crew-7 is about to take off in a week or so.

thanks, thats what i get for asking bing instead of looking myself

Ah the penalty of dated LLM models

Crew-1 and Crew-2 happened before September 2021.

technically bing should have access to this regardless because it can access the internet (despite its training cutoff date) but its my fault for not digging deeper and trusting its output

Also for saying "my research". Saying "bing says" would have been just as bad.

i said my "search" not "my research"

Indeed i misread

Next time just skip Bing and post the wrong answer. You'll get corrected with exactly what you're looking for.

I think this was an xkcd.

(Ward) Cunningham's Law. You might be thinking of the classic "Someone is wrong on the internet!" xkcd.

They have fundamentally different purposes, and so soundbite comparisons between them are meaningless.

The article isn't based on information SpaceX released. The WSJ got their hands on internal financial documents.

That's naive. Such leaks are typically planned PR. I expect it is leading to another round of fund raising. They are described as a money incinerator that has already run through the alphabet of rounds. They want to counter that without putting anything on the record because... well, you can guess why.

61 launches is quite a lot. The SLS can do about 100 tons to LEO, a standard F9 can do 22 tons albeit with a much smaller fairing.

So in total if you split your vehicle up and assemble it in orbit you can launch one that's almost 5x the size for the same price. Maybe more like 3x + extra engineering overhead costs for the orbital assembly, but still much more bang for the buck. The lunar gateway is planned to be a station anyway so those costs will have to be paid regardless.

>Falcon cannot do what SLS does.

Thus far, SLS has only done once what Falcon does on the regular: Launch a payload into orbit

You can easily compare what SpaceX charges for a launch. Wikipedia says Falcon Heavy expendible is 63 tons to LEO and $155M. SLS is supposedly 95 tons to LEO and 2 Billion.

Of course the Falcon can be compared to the SLS. Both are vehicles designed to take things into space for crying out loud!

The figures are easy to compare as well. Just include these factors in your comparison! Even if we don't know exactly what those factors are, we can make a ballpark estimate the total difference and add that as a percentage to spaceX's final figure.

The idea that things can't be compared because they are different is nonsense. When things are different is the only time comparisons are meaningful to make!

>Both are vehicles designed to take things into space for crying out loud!

They have quite different fairing capacities, in a playfield that does not scale linearly.

It is like saying that the Boeing 737 is cheaper than the 777, and we can compare them because they were both designed to fly people in the sky.

You can compare a 737 to 777 and if the 777 per person were 10x more expensive then airlines wouldnt use 777. Not sure why this is hard do unterstand.

Because things in space do not scale linearly, and sending 10x smaller sats is not the same as 1x 10 times larger sat. Some missions require larger fairing/lifting capacities.

In other news it cost me $1500 to do a year of grocery shopping trips while it cost $1500 for one transatlantic return trip holiday.

Apples to oranges comparison. 400km to low earth orbit is not compatible to a 384400km trip to another gravity well.

Distance is almost completely irrelevant for comparing launch vehicles.

Also, Falcon 9 has delivered multiple payloads to lunar orbit. Examples are ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, SpaceIL's Beresheet, and South Korea's Danuri. In interplanetary space, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was launched on a Falcon 9.

Beresheet: 1,300 lbs

Danuri: 1,495 lbs

Hakuto-R: 2,200 lbs

DART: 1,340 lbs

Artemis 2: 112,000 lbs

Even by your examples there remains a 10,000% to 5,000% fold scale difference.

It takes 9400 km/s of delta-v to get to LEO, but only 3260 km/s of delta-v to get from LEO to Lunar Intercept Orbit.

That ~$5billion per launch includes a lot of amortized R&D and other costs that you are not counting in the 61 successful Falcon launches. It may be that the Falcon launchers are significantly cheaper, but the accounting methods are too different to just compare numbers.

No, it's the other way around.

SpaceX's yearly spending would include the 61 flights, but also literally thousands of satellites, presumably a huge number of commercial dishes, their human flight overheads, their Starship development program including ground support and production and testing of about a hundred Raptor engines, their sales and outreach, their specific contract work like HLS, and their mug business by the side.

If you were to amortize SLS's total dev costs (incl. Orion and SLS-specific ground support but excluding Constellation) over its reasonably expected lifetime flights, you'll be lucky as heck to get <$10B/flight, though of course we don't know how that adds up and so report the much smaller marginal numbers instead.

Your right that figure isn’t accounting for the $23.8 billion cost of the program so far. That $5billion per launch figure is based on an optimistic number of SLS launches which haven’t happened yet.

SLS and Orion are dead ends. I wish them well and I am huge space geek but that program is just a gigantic waste. I wish we could take that budget and use it for unmanned missions or public/private space station partnerships with some of the new space companies.

$5B (2023: $4.7B) is actually the current yearly run rate for SLS+Orion+EGS. Thus, $5B is what the marginal launch cost would be if SLS was launching yearly, excluding $54B to-date costs of the three. Even NASA's official projections (which are always optimistic) don't show yearly launches, but if unreasonably optimistic numbers still make the point, why quibble over the details?