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.