Casey Handmer writes that the entire Falcon 9 program cost less than what subcontrctors are paid to refurbish just a single SLS engine, and calls the program fraud.
F6Collections on
SLS is. I thing more than a jobs program. It’s unbelievable it hasn’t been canceled.
SoulBonfire on
If I did not know better, I would say ChatGPT was used to design SLS back in the day.
OlympusMons94 on
**And Orion**
Never forget that Orion is at least as bad as SLS–I would say worse. There is so much awful about Orion, Handmer doesn’t even get to covering all the ways it is so bad. To add, for example: sample return.
Apollo missions brought back up to 110.5 kg (Apollo 17) of rocks per mission. Unfortunately, despite the extra crew capacity, mass, and volume, sample return on Orion appears to [have been an afterthought](https://spacenews.com/artemis-missions-face-sample-return-crunch/), not addressed until late in development. There is no dedicated space, and the allocated mass has been established as only 100 kg. The fine print is that the 100 kg includes the mass of the containers, which is non-trivial. NASA is supposedly working toward [increasing that to 160 kg](https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1666457692397883396) on later Artemis missions. Early requirements for the HLS specified a minimum of 26 kg of samples and 9 kg for containers. So scaling that 26/35 ratio up, Orion’s real sample capacity is currently at most ~74 kg, and might someday surpass Apollo 17 by a few kilograms.
Also, that’s just for nomal rocks. What if we want to bring back a sample of ice from a permanently shadowed crater, or just preserve biological samples from the crew or experiments? Some kind of deep freezer/cryogenic container would be necessary (and, yes, NASA has been looking into developing such containers for Artemis). That would eat even more into the allocated „sample“ mass.
It is absurd that we have such huge landers under development, but are stuck with the comparatively tiny (yet paradoxically overweight) Orion as a bottleneck.
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Casey Handmer writes that the entire Falcon 9 program cost less than what subcontrctors are paid to refurbish just a single SLS engine, and calls the program fraud.
SLS is. I thing more than a jobs program. It’s unbelievable it hasn’t been canceled.
If I did not know better, I would say ChatGPT was used to design SLS back in the day.
**And Orion**
Never forget that Orion is at least as bad as SLS–I would say worse. There is so much awful about Orion, Handmer doesn’t even get to covering all the ways it is so bad. To add, for example: sample return.
Apollo missions brought back up to 110.5 kg (Apollo 17) of rocks per mission. Unfortunately, despite the extra crew capacity, mass, and volume, sample return on Orion appears to [have been an afterthought](https://spacenews.com/artemis-missions-face-sample-return-crunch/), not addressed until late in development. There is no dedicated space, and the allocated mass has been established as only 100 kg. The fine print is that the 100 kg includes the mass of the containers, which is non-trivial. NASA is supposedly working toward [increasing that to 160 kg](https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1666457692397883396) on later Artemis missions. Early requirements for the HLS specified a minimum of 26 kg of samples and 9 kg for containers. So scaling that 26/35 ratio up, Orion’s real sample capacity is currently at most ~74 kg, and might someday surpass Apollo 17 by a few kilograms.
Also, that’s just for nomal rocks. What if we want to bring back a sample of ice from a permanently shadowed crater, or just preserve biological samples from the crew or experiments? Some kind of deep freezer/cryogenic container would be necessary (and, yes, NASA has been looking into developing such containers for Artemis). That would eat even more into the allocated „sample“ mass.
It is absurd that we have such huge landers under development, but are stuck with the comparatively tiny (yet paradoxically overweight) Orion as a bottleneck.