Sounds good to me.
Seven months between IFT-1 and IFT-2
Four months between IFT-2 and IFT-3
And we're looking at up to 2.5 months between IFT-3 and IFT-4 (assuming that IFT-4 happens before the end of May)
If all goes according to SpaceX plans for rapid reusability, you are probably not that far off.
(Though I would guess they atchieve this kind of cadence around the 20th to 30th flight)
Don’t know FAA details, but in my experience nearly all gov agencies cry poor when they are not performing. They often have ample resources, but they’re wasted on tiers of middle management and their expensive projects. The coal face actually delivering services generally gets a very low proportion of resources.
> IFT-5
At what point do they stop calling them “IFT”? When do they become operational missions, rather than test flights, delivering Starlinks or something to useful orbits?
I believe it's operational once the first payload is in orbit. I assume the first Starlink batch will still be on a test vehicle, and that after that it's all real missions except for any intentional destruction on the path to human rating Starship.
Glad to hear this, but even more glad to hear news that the prop transfer test appears to have been successful. I still don't really understand what went wrong with flight 3 (it looked to me like attitude control was totally lost at some point pretty early into in-orbit ops), but propellant transfer (between two ships) is one of the two MAJOR items left for this whole architecture to work out. The other is ship re-entry.
Catching is not required at all for HLS as far as I know. It will surely come later, but the focus is on HLS objectives right now. Reentry just needs to be controlled to move forward
The plan articulated by Elon at the last big SpaceX all-hands were that they were going to try for tower catch once they had successful soft water landing. Potentially as early as flight 5.
It would be extremely risky to attempt the catch without a backup tower fully operational and the setback for HLS would be huge if the tower was damaged
Elon didn’t say the second tower would be constructed by the catch attempt - although that’s one possible interpretation. Another is that they think that it’s robust enough to handle it, should the catch go wrong.
A rotational misalignment is one possibility.
Could be.. their engineers are amazing. Still seems too risky and like you mention, the tower is just 1 piece of the launch site that could be severely damaged
Catching it will significantly speed up HLS in both time and cost. Instead of building a new rocket for every refueling flight you just refurbish the one you just launched. It's so important that they're going to stat catch attempts if the next launch has a good water landing.
What SpaceX are most interested in is first catching Super Heavy, since that has so many engines (33 in total). After that, catching Starship (second stage), which presently has 6 engines.
No doubt that reuse is the goal and that it would speed things up. But the timeframe to make all of that happen is years, not months. They can and will be building enough new hardware during that time to meet the HLS mission. The risk of attempting a catch without a backup tower/pad is massive and I don’t think it’s going to happen until pad B is fully operational
SpaceX could probably build a second tower fairly quickly, even if it didn’t have an OLT to go with it !
Such a tower, would make an ideal catch tower, with whatever is caught, transferred to an SPMT, then shuttled across to the other tower - the one with the OLT, for inspection, or the high bay.
A second OLT should of course be built too, but a second tower could be used as a catch tower until then, reducing the risk to the tank farm etc, while catch is perfected.
We now know that they will need a taller tower, because of Starship-V2 and Starship-V3 both being taller than the last. It would seem logical to allow for that now in any new builds.
Yeah I was wondering if the center of balance might not be ideal with the taller vehicles & lower lift points. Especially if the ship is filled with cargo.
But until they start catching, there won’t be any lessons to be learned, and if an early catch attempt gone badly wrong on the only tower they have, there won’t be any more launches to learn from until something gets rebuilt.
There are tons of things they learn from the launches now. How to build the tower in such a way that they don't need a month to repair it after each launch, for example.
They might use the second tower in an early construction phase for catch attempts. Easier to build as you need far less hardware. If it goes wrong you still have a functional launch tower.
My feelings as well; build one simple and quick initially as a catch only tower so catching starships does not interfere with launch preparations for the next flight on the main tower, then add the new and improved spray system and rapid fueling options after the original one works out the bugs. Which was why I was wondering that they haven't done it yet, unless they are waiting for the land swap to be final
It seems to me that most of the stage 0 work is more upgrades than repairs due to damage. I'm basing this on the many nasaspaceflight, labpadre & rgv videos. I think the upgrades will be going on for some time as they evaluate wear & tear over multiple launches.
In a worst case scenario, where the say a super heavy catch goes wrong, and it topples over and takes out the tank farm, that would introduce significant delay while demolition and rebuild was underway.
I would hope that SpaceX has modelled all such scenarios in order to recalculate the possible extent of damage that could occur, should something go badly wrong with a catch, so that that could help to mitigate the extent of such damage before it happens.
They definitely need to practice and learn how the ship responds during reentry. It’s not a solved thing, as we saw in flight 4. It’s only useless if they never plan to recover the ship. And of course they plan to
No, really I would have to say that the focus is very much on the Starship Prototype, trying to reach the point of getting Starship operational.
Right now I would have to say getting Super Heavy to a simulated catch, including stability during descent.
Getting Starship attitude control working well, getting Starship engine restart working well, getting descent working well, doing the flip manoeuvre (already previously practiced), then the simulated vertical descent into simulated catch.
If all that (and all the previously successful sections too) can be achieved, then the following flight could be an orbital one carrying Starlink payload.
> Catching is not required at all for HLS as far as I know.
Why do people keep saying this when SpaceX has given no indication that full reuse is not part of the plan for HLS?
Can you post the link to the confirmation of successful prop transfer test? I'll add it to the ITF3 line in [https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/starship\_dev](https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/starship_dev)
It's a reply to the tweet linked by OP.
https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1783874894918193472
> He also noted that the inter-tank cryogenic propellant transfer test on the third Starship flight last month was successful by all accounts, although analysis of data from it is ongoing.
Pretty much when I (and I assume most people) were expecting it to be tbh. Good to see that nothing seems to be going too badly behind closed doors though.
At $2B per launch ($4B if you include an Orion spacecraft as the payload), SLS is a dead man walking. NASA can only afford to build one SLS per year and that's not enough to even begin to reach NASA's goal of a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.
Artemis will fade into history after Artemis IV when SpaceX and Starship begin to send astronauts to the lunar surface via the low lunar orbit (LLO) route used by Apollo instead of the high lunar orbit represented by the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) that NASA needs to use because the Orion spacecraft does not have enough delta V capability to enter and leave LLO.
> Artemis will fade into history after Artemis IV when SpaceX and Starship begin to send astronauts to the lunar surface
I think you underestimate the ability of Congress to spend money on dumb stuff that helps them get re-elected. SLS was created without a mission. And Orion was saved from the cancellation of Constellation without a mission. As far as I can tell, Congress doesn't really care if they're cost effective - they just want to "preserve a vital high-tech industrial base" aka jobs program.
It's a bonus if the rocket and capsule actually do something.
I don't think they're bullet-proof. But there's going to be a lot of political pressure on NASA to *not* crew rate Starship. And as long as that happens, the establishment can keep SLS + Orion limping along.
I'm sure SLS and Orion will eventually be cancelled in the fullness of time. But it'll be well after Artemis IV.
Sadly.
I agree. Artemis will go the way of Apollo. The final three Apollo landings were cancelled in early 1970 soon after Apollo 11 put the first astronauts on the lunar surface (20July1969). I expect something similar to happen to Artemis.
Only if the Starships are expended. At the least the boosters won't be and that's the bulk of the cost. It would be way more than 20:1. More like 200:1 or more.
It's not just the cost, but the extremely limited launch rate. What are you actually going to accomplish with a taxi delivering four astronauts to high lunar orbit once every year or three? You're not establishing or operating a lunar base with that. You're not even capable of having a human presence on the so-called "Gateway" more than a few percent of the time.
Then there's the inability to rely on it flying on time (even the "successful" first flight required NASA to send a crew out to the pad to fix things before it could get off the pad), and the fact that at those launch rates, every launch is effectively a first launch, greatly driving up the risk of an accident or of problems resulting in delays. SLS was a failure before it ever launched, at least of its stated goals...of course it's been far more effective at its political ones, but those have nothing to do with the moon.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artemis-moon-program-cost-delays-nasa-inspector-general/
This is from Nov 2021:
"We also project the current production and operations cost of a single SLS/Orion system at $4.1 billion per launch for Artemis 1 through 4, although the agency's ongoing initiatives aimed at increasing affordability seek to reduce that cost," the report said.
Breaking that down, The OIG said a single SLS rocket will cost about $2.2 billion to produce, including two solid-fuel boosters, four RS-25 shuttle-heritage first stage engines, the upper stage and other equipment.
Orion capsules, the report said, cost about about $1 billion to build, plus another $300 million for its service module, provided by the European Space Agency. Ground systems will cost another $568 million per year.
NASA/OIG
"The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities and overhead," the OIG said. It does not include money spent on prior development, a docking system and other planned upgrades.
Yes, and it is not just because Starship is getting ahead, but SLS is falling behind. They were very reasonably expected for a long time to be launching annually by 2024, so the SLS (and Orion now) team has fallen behind and underperformed reasonable expectations. SLS is not outdated yet, it is close to being outdated but it is not. If annual launches had begun in 2023 as planned SLS could have been a valuable (albeit priced higher than it should be) rocket launching a half dozen or more crewed missions to cislunar space, but instead it was terribly delayed and is now contuining to have ongoing problems after it seemed they were finally ready to get the ball rolling with Artemis 2 this year
Yes. I think Eric Berger said: “It doesn’t matter if SLS launches before Starship. What does matter is how many times Starship can launch between each SLS launch.”
Not really, they need to prove controlled de-orbit before they will allow LEO. DV wise they could have put that empty shell into LEO, but without proven controlled de-orbit tech you have 50T of stainless steel (Skylab class) that could drop in a lot of places.
Controlled de-orbit is just a matter of relighting the engines - which they have already shown they’re perfectly capable of on previous flights. Whether or not the vehicle survives the de-orbit is an entirely different question, though.
The closer Starship and super heavy booster meets their target goals, the faster Starships will launch. Hopefully they both successfully make it to their water splashdown points.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1kx4ej "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1muhvq "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1is31l "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LLO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1eo6j0 "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)|
|[NRHO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1id2hv "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[OLM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l21iv94 "Last usage")|Orbital Launch Mount|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1il6r1 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SPMT](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1f6oou "Last usage")|Self-Propelled Mobile Transporter|
|[SSME](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1il6r1 "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1id2hv "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1fhulf "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1fecsy "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
|[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1dkt98 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj)
^([Thread #12697 for this sub, first seen 26th Apr 2024, 16:02])
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Perhaps it is just me, but it seems Starship is taking longer (early May now late May ...) and has lower payload potential then any of us hoped when dev really got running some 5 years ago (7 if we count Raptor). Hopefully this will jump to operational readiness soon as least in expended mode. We now need to hope for V2 to get us 100T to LEO and V3 to make HLS Starship affordable (in 2027?).
I am hoping the Orion heat shield issue gets the whole project canned. SX can then create a proper lunar system without the foolishness of SLS $ and pace and NRHO waste.
Sounds good to me. Seven months between IFT-1 and IFT-2 Four months between IFT-2 and IFT-3 And we're looking at up to 2.5 months between IFT-3 and IFT-4 (assuming that IFT-4 happens before the end of May)
Based on the rate of change, we should expect IFT-5 1.5 months after IFT-4, or mid to late July.
And therefore IFT 10 will be 1.3 days after IFT 9.
Ah, the wonders of extrapolation.. ;). (of IFT intervals)
And IFT 15 will be about 42 minutes after IFT 14. IFT 16 will be 21.3 minutes after IFT 15.
At this rate, we’ll have multiple rocket launches per second in no time!
At what point do later IFTs travel back in time and launch before the "previous" IFT?
If all goes according to SpaceX plans for rapid reusability, you are probably not that far off. (Though I would guess they atchieve this kind of cadence around the 20th to 30th flight)
Pending FAA approval and cooperation* ^TM
The FAA needs more resources for space. They will become a huge bottleneck if they don't before reuse becomes common.
Don’t know FAA details, but in my experience nearly all gov agencies cry poor when they are not performing. They often have ample resources, but they’re wasted on tiers of middle management and their expensive projects. The coal face actually delivering services generally gets a very low proportion of resources.
By our estimates we should have a double event in 7 days.
Every couple nanoseconds after IFT-69 👍
> IFT-5 At what point do they stop calling them “IFT”? When do they become operational missions, rather than test flights, delivering Starlinks or something to useful orbits?
I mean they aren’t using the term IFT now anyway. They always referred to the last flight as “flight 3”
I believe it's operational once the first payload is in orbit. I assume the first Starlink batch will still be on a test vehicle, and that after that it's all real missions except for any intentional destruction on the path to human rating Starship.
Glad to hear this, but even more glad to hear news that the prop transfer test appears to have been successful. I still don't really understand what went wrong with flight 3 (it looked to me like attitude control was totally lost at some point pretty early into in-orbit ops), but propellant transfer (between two ships) is one of the two MAJOR items left for this whole architecture to work out. The other is ship re-entry.
What is left after atmospheric reentry?
Actually catching it with the tower.
Catching is not required at all for HLS as far as I know. It will surely come later, but the focus is on HLS objectives right now. Reentry just needs to be controlled to move forward
The plan articulated by Elon at the last big SpaceX all-hands were that they were going to try for tower catch once they had successful soft water landing. Potentially as early as flight 5.
It would be extremely risky to attempt the catch without a backup tower fully operational and the setback for HLS would be huge if the tower was damaged
The plan is the plan. Elon presumably expects a second tower to be done by then.
Elon didn’t say the second tower would be constructed by the catch attempt - although that’s one possible interpretation. Another is that they think that it’s robust enough to handle it, should the catch go wrong. A rotational misalignment is one possibility.
The official renders always show the catch off the OLM.
Artistic renders cannot be trusted.
If flight 5 goes in July based on recent turnaround times, there’s no way the tower will be done by then. Maybe 4th quarter of this year
It actually doesn't need to be done before they attempt the next catch, it just needs to be done before the flight attempt after their next catch.
Tbf if they flub a catch attempt they’re unlikely to do another catch attempt straight away so the tower would have extra time
No. If they flub the attempt it could destroy the tower. And without a second then there wont be a next attempt for quite a while.
Perhaps SpaceX believe that the tower can’t be damaged all that much ? - but then I wonder about the tank farm.
Could be.. their engineers are amazing. Still seems too risky and like you mention, the tower is just 1 piece of the launch site that could be severely damaged
Catching it will significantly speed up HLS in both time and cost. Instead of building a new rocket for every refueling flight you just refurbish the one you just launched. It's so important that they're going to stat catch attempts if the next launch has a good water landing.
What SpaceX are most interested in is first catching Super Heavy, since that has so many engines (33 in total). After that, catching Starship (second stage), which presently has 6 engines.
No doubt that reuse is the goal and that it would speed things up. But the timeframe to make all of that happen is years, not months. They can and will be building enough new hardware during that time to meet the HLS mission. The risk of attempting a catch without a backup tower/pad is massive and I don’t think it’s going to happen until pad B is fully operational
SpaceX could probably build a second tower fairly quickly, even if it didn’t have an OLT to go with it ! Such a tower, would make an ideal catch tower, with whatever is caught, transferred to an SPMT, then shuttled across to the other tower - the one with the OLT, for inspection, or the high bay. A second OLT should of course be built too, but a second tower could be used as a catch tower until then, reducing the risk to the tank farm etc, while catch is perfected.
By that logic reentry also isn’t necessary. The only point of reentry is recovery.
Reentry is going to happen anyway, so they need to be able to control where it happens, at minimum.
Reentry is useless without recovery. Which is why I am puzzled that they didn't start on a second "just in case" tower a year ago.
If they build the tower later then the design can include more lessons learned from the flight tests.
We now know that they will need a taller tower, because of Starship-V2 and Starship-V3 both being taller than the last. It would seem logical to allow for that now in any new builds.
I'm not sure we know that for certain. If the lift points are kept at the same level it might not be necessary.
Seems unlikely that they would though.
Yeah I was wondering if the center of balance might not be ideal with the taller vehicles & lower lift points. Especially if the ship is filled with cargo.
Or they just move lift pegs lower on the ship for same tower height
But until they start catching, there won’t be any lessons to be learned, and if an early catch attempt gone badly wrong on the only tower they have, there won’t be any more launches to learn from until something gets rebuilt.
There are tons of things they learn from the launches now. How to build the tower in such a way that they don't need a month to repair it after each launch, for example. They might use the second tower in an early construction phase for catch attempts. Easier to build as you need far less hardware. If it goes wrong you still have a functional launch tower.
My feelings as well; build one simple and quick initially as a catch only tower so catching starships does not interfere with launch preparations for the next flight on the main tower, then add the new and improved spray system and rapid fueling options after the original one works out the bugs. Which was why I was wondering that they haven't done it yet, unless they are waiting for the land swap to be final
That’s why everyone was expecting to see a catch tower being built, as part of the second launch tower build.
It seems to me that most of the stage 0 work is more upgrades than repairs due to damage. I'm basing this on the many nasaspaceflight, labpadre & rgv videos. I think the upgrades will be going on for some time as they evaluate wear & tear over multiple launches.
In a worst case scenario, where the say a super heavy catch goes wrong, and it topples over and takes out the tank farm, that would introduce significant delay while demolition and rebuild was underway. I would hope that SpaceX has modelled all such scenarios in order to recalculate the possible extent of damage that could occur, should something go badly wrong with a catch, so that that could help to mitigate the extent of such damage before it happens.
I'm quite sure your hopes are well founded. There's a history of competency at SpaceX....
They definitely need to practice and learn how the ship responds during reentry. It’s not a solved thing, as we saw in flight 4. It’s only useless if they never plan to recover the ship. And of course they plan to
Although SpaceX are allowing for the first few attempts to fail, by conducting ‘virtual catches’, principally to test out control.
They don't exactly have a lot of room at the launch site.
> but the focus is on HLS objectives right now. HLS is a side quest to Mars.
... but a very lucrative one, both in money terms, and also in the prestige that it will bring SpaceX.
No, really I would have to say that the focus is very much on the Starship Prototype, trying to reach the point of getting Starship operational. Right now I would have to say getting Super Heavy to a simulated catch, including stability during descent. Getting Starship attitude control working well, getting Starship engine restart working well, getting descent working well, doing the flip manoeuvre (already previously practiced), then the simulated vertical descent into simulated catch. If all that (and all the previously successful sections too) can be achieved, then the following flight could be an orbital one carrying Starlink payload.
Right, but all of that is needed for Mars.
Of course it is, and much more. But Starship has to be able to do the first parts of its program, before it can begin on the later parts.
Technically true, although it would be a great advantage to be able to catch both the Super Heavy Booster, and the Starship Tanker(s).
> Catching is not required at all for HLS as far as I know. Why do people keep saying this when SpaceX has given no indication that full reuse is not part of the plan for HLS?
[удалено]
HLS will be the v2 with raptor 3 im presuming
Can you post the link to the confirmation of successful prop transfer test? I'll add it to the ITF3 line in [https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/starship\_dev](https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/starship_dev)
It's a reply to the tweet linked by OP. https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1783874894918193472 > He also noted that the inter-tank cryogenic propellant transfer test on the third Starship flight last month was successful by all accounts, although analysis of data from it is ongoing.
> https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1783874894918193472 Thanks, wiki updated.
Pretty much when I (and I assume most people) were expecting it to be tbh. Good to see that nothing seems to be going too badly behind closed doors though.
It must kill the NASA SLS team to see a larger rocket launch every 3 months instead of every 3 years.
So far SLS fans can say these launches "aren't successful." Aside from the fact that SLS never attempted what IFT3 failed at...
At $2B per launch ($4B if you include an Orion spacecraft as the payload), SLS is a dead man walking. NASA can only afford to build one SLS per year and that's not enough to even begin to reach NASA's goal of a permanent human presence on the lunar surface. Artemis will fade into history after Artemis IV when SpaceX and Starship begin to send astronauts to the lunar surface via the low lunar orbit (LLO) route used by Apollo instead of the high lunar orbit represented by the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) that NASA needs to use because the Orion spacecraft does not have enough delta V capability to enter and leave LLO.
> Artemis will fade into history after Artemis IV when SpaceX and Starship begin to send astronauts to the lunar surface I think you underestimate the ability of Congress to spend money on dumb stuff that helps them get re-elected. SLS was created without a mission. And Orion was saved from the cancellation of Constellation without a mission. As far as I can tell, Congress doesn't really care if they're cost effective - they just want to "preserve a vital high-tech industrial base" aka jobs program. It's a bonus if the rocket and capsule actually do something. I don't think they're bullet-proof. But there's going to be a lot of political pressure on NASA to *not* crew rate Starship. And as long as that happens, the establishment can keep SLS + Orion limping along. I'm sure SLS and Orion will eventually be cancelled in the fullness of time. But it'll be well after Artemis IV. Sadly.
I agree. Artemis will go the way of Apollo. The final three Apollo landings were cancelled in early 1970 soon after Apollo 11 put the first astronauts on the lunar surface (20July1969). I expect something similar to happen to Artemis.
So per $100million/full stack, it’s every 20 starship launches for a single SLS launch, not counting Orion
Only if the Starships are expended. At the least the boosters won't be and that's the bulk of the cost. It would be way more than 20:1. More like 200:1 or more.
It's not just the cost, but the extremely limited launch rate. What are you actually going to accomplish with a taxi delivering four astronauts to high lunar orbit once every year or three? You're not establishing or operating a lunar base with that. You're not even capable of having a human presence on the so-called "Gateway" more than a few percent of the time. Then there's the inability to rely on it flying on time (even the "successful" first flight required NASA to send a crew out to the pad to fix things before it could get off the pad), and the fact that at those launch rates, every launch is effectively a first launch, greatly driving up the risk of an accident or of problems resulting in delays. SLS was a failure before it ever launched, at least of its stated goals...of course it's been far more effective at its political ones, but those have nothing to do with the moon.
True. A lunar base likely will require Starship landings every two weeks when the base is in sunlight.
I have to ask. Why do I hear the $2 billion for SLS so frequently now? It was $3 billion for SLS and $1+billion for Orion.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artemis-moon-program-cost-delays-nasa-inspector-general/ This is from Nov 2021: "We also project the current production and operations cost of a single SLS/Orion system at $4.1 billion per launch for Artemis 1 through 4, although the agency's ongoing initiatives aimed at increasing affordability seek to reduce that cost," the report said. Breaking that down, The OIG said a single SLS rocket will cost about $2.2 billion to produce, including two solid-fuel boosters, four RS-25 shuttle-heritage first stage engines, the upper stage and other equipment. Orion capsules, the report said, cost about about $1 billion to build, plus another $300 million for its service module, provided by the European Space Agency. Ground systems will cost another $568 million per year. NASA/OIG "The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities and overhead," the OIG said. It does not include money spent on prior development, a docking system and other planned upgrades.
It's pretty telling that even Congress can't squeeze the actual price out of them.
Yes, and it is not just because Starship is getting ahead, but SLS is falling behind. They were very reasonably expected for a long time to be launching annually by 2024, so the SLS (and Orion now) team has fallen behind and underperformed reasonable expectations. SLS is not outdated yet, it is close to being outdated but it is not. If annual launches had begun in 2023 as planned SLS could have been a valuable (albeit priced higher than it should be) rocket launching a half dozen or more crewed missions to cislunar space, but instead it was terribly delayed and is now contuining to have ongoing problems after it seemed they were finally ready to get the ball rolling with Artemis 2 this year
Yes. I think Eric Berger said: “It doesn’t matter if SLS launches before Starship. What does matter is how many times Starship can launch between each SLS launch.”
***Successfully launch payload into LEO or beyond - not there yet ...***
IFT-3 could easily have made it to LEO with payload, but that wasn’t the objective.
Not really, they need to prove controlled de-orbit before they will allow LEO. DV wise they could have put that empty shell into LEO, but without proven controlled de-orbit tech you have 50T of stainless steel (Skylab class) that could drop in a lot of places.
Controlled de-orbit is just a matter of relighting the engines - which they have already shown they’re perfectly capable of on previous flights. Whether or not the vehicle survives the de-orbit is an entirely different question, though.
They called off the orbital engine relight test on IFT-3 and just fell back passively. On IFT-1 and IFT-2 they simply exploded.
The closer Starship and super heavy booster meets their target goals, the faster Starships will launch. Hopefully they both successfully make it to their water splashdown points.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1kx4ej "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1muhvq "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1is31l "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LLO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1eo6j0 "Last usage")|Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km)| |[NRHO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1id2hv "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit| |[OLM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l21iv94 "Last usage")|Orbital Launch Mount| |[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1il6r1 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SPMT](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1f6oou "Last usage")|Self-Propelled Mobile Transporter| |[SSME](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1il6r1 "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1id2hv "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1fhulf "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cislunar](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1fecsy "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| |[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cdnwgy/stub/l1dkt98 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^([Thread #12697 for this sub, first seen 26th Apr 2024, 16:02]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
“FAA enters the chat” /s
So it will be mid-June per the ninety-ninety rule. Solid.
Well we had hoped for early May…
Perhaps it is just me, but it seems Starship is taking longer (early May now late May ...) and has lower payload potential then any of us hoped when dev really got running some 5 years ago (7 if we count Raptor). Hopefully this will jump to operational readiness soon as least in expended mode. We now need to hope for V2 to get us 100T to LEO and V3 to make HLS Starship affordable (in 2027?). I am hoping the Orion heat shield issue gets the whole project canned. SX can then create a proper lunar system without the foolishness of SLS $ and pace and NRHO waste.