https://www.inverse.com/innovation/i...y-july-29-2021
NASA’ big tardy rocket isn’t doomed - but it seem’s kinda doomed
When the NASA space shuttle program ended pretty much a decade ago last week (the final mission was on July 21, 2011), it was hard to think about what would come next, especially if you grew up with the inspiring NASA live footage of the shuttle going to and returning to Earth.
Would a private company make rockets and sell their services to NASA? That kind of thinking might’ve seemed dangerous a decade ago, trusting a privately owned company with the lofty purposes of NASA.
And yet, NASA’s major rocket system to send humans and space science back into the great unknown may be doomed. The Space Launch System, or SLS for short, “would be the most powerful rocket we've ever built,” NASA has proclaimed. The problem is that it’s getting more expensive and further behind schedule.
Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX are getting results with engineering and developing their own rockets.
So, if you’re NASA, you don’t pause the mission progress to wait for your own tardy rocket. You contract with SpaceX. And that could maybe spell doom for SLS. It’s our lead story today. Keep scrolling to read more about it in a story from the new guy,
Jon Kelvey.
https://www.inverse.com/science/spac...ontract-europa
SPACEX: NASA’s Europa deal reveals the tricky politics of space rockets
Hidden within the icy shell of Jupiter’s
moon Europa, there is an ocean — one which may host some form of life. Exploring this watery world is one of NASA’s top priorities for the next decade. That’s why the agency is pouring so much effort into a mission to explore the moon’s oceans — the
Europa Clipper — which will launch in October 2024.
But earlier this month,
NASA announced it is altering the mission in one critical way. The Clipper will launch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket and not atop NASA’s flagship launch vehicle, the Space Launch System.
The decision raises new questions about the future of the Space Launch System, which NASA continues to say is a cornerstone of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon by 2024. It also tells us a lot about the symbiotic relationship between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the agency.…..
That doesn’t mean the SLS won’t fly at all, though. In fact, Forczyk is certain it will.
“SLS has from the beginning been a political rocket,” she says. “A rocket that the Senate had decided that NASA needed to build to keep NASA expertise and contractor jobs in certain key districts.”
So long as powerful political supporters of the SLS, such as
Alabama Senator Richard Shelby and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson are in office, the rocket will continue to be developed — for the time being anyway….
When first announced in 2011, the vision was to make the first uncrewed tests flights with SLS in late 2017. Almost four years after that date, NASA is still in the middle of assembling this
188,000-pound behemoth as of June 2021.
In addition to being behind schedule, the SLS is also projected to be more expensive to operate than the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. SLS launches will run
around $2 billion, while
the reusable Falcon Heavy launches for $90 million a pop.
These differences flow directly from the SLS’s status as a political project rather than a technical solution to the problem of lofting people and cargo into orbit, according to Forcyzk.
NASA states that people and material from all
50 U.S. states will help to build the SLS. This is “because it is politically beneficial to mention how NASA touches all 50 states, but it is not a way to build a cost-effective rocket,” Forcyzk says.
SpaceX and other private launch providers are not so constrained by patriotism and politics.
This is a reminder that NASA is a political organization run by the U.S. government, Forczyk says. But it’s also a science and technology organization.
“[NASA] will choose the rocket that is the best available, assuming that Congress doesn’t interfere otherwise” for the mission at hand, she says. “Which is exactly what [NASA has] just done with the Europa Clipper,” she adds….
WHAT’S NEXT — If all goes according to plan, the Europa Clipper will launch for Europa aboard a Falcon Heavy in October 2024 and reached the Jupiter system by April 2030.
An SLS-powered Clipper, if NASA had gone that route, could have powered the Europa Clipper to Jupiter a little faster, by August 2027, according to
a presentation made by Europa Clipper Project Scientist Robert Pappalardo in 2020.
But the SLS will be sticking to the Artemis program, with Artemis I scheduled to launch an uncrewed Orion space capsule to the Moon, orbit it, and then come back to Earth in November 2021. It will then power the Artemis II and III missions in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Of course, the rocket is still not fully built at the time of writing.
Ultimately, Forczyk believes it would take a lot to keep the SLS rocket from being the one to fly these critical Artemis missions to space — albeit maybe not this year.
“The only thing I can see happening that would kill it would be complete, absolute complete failure,” she says, “and that would be unfortunate because a lot of really good people have worked on the program.”