Comment by tsimionescu
2 days ago
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
Starship is irrelevant. SLS was dumb already in 2011 when Starship doesn't exist. Its a dumb system and was never the right system. NASA own analysis showed that.
People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.
Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.
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> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.
If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?
And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?
I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.
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Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
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Is it clear how many SLS launches would be needed to subsume Starship's part of the mission?
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You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.
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We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.
I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.
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True but we know for a fact that it doesn't consume 4-5 billion $ a year for the last 15 years like SLS/Orion because SpaceX couldn't afford that. If you actually do some basic math and look at SpaceX revenue and so on, you can make some pretty decent guesses. And SpaceX is analyzed in detail by lots of people.
Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.
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I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.
SLS has flown once. What are you talking about?
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> the capabilities are so far mostly just talk
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, things like delivering a real payload or orbiting the earth.
Yes they've reflown a caught rocket, and they've soft landed in the ocean. I can do those things with a paper airplane.
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Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?
And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?
I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.
Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.
If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime
They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.
One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.
Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?
This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.
The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.
You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.
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> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.
This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.
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Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.
Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.
And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.
> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.
Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.
You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.
The biggest problem right now with Starship is the heatshield problem. If it's a one and done flight it's actually still worth it but full re-use without solving the heat shield problem is not actually possible (right now). It turns out slamming into Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocity or higher is one of those things that pretty much every material we've thrown at the problem has had problems being used forever. We need to do experimental flights in order to provide more data to materials folks working on this. Honestly I respect the hell out of anyone working on this problem because it's the next big tech hurdle we need besides landing a booster. And this one is still not solved.
I would agree. The heatshield is tricky. But they have shown they can survive without parts of the heatshield. But its a problem for rapid re-usability.
That said, I think Starship architecture can be useful even if this issue is not fully solved.
Starship can be much, much cheaper then SLS even if they throw away the upper stage.
Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.
NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.
All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.