Space and Science BS Thread

A little inside baseball...

Bechtel spent more than the original $383 million dollars, and had not welded a single thing. All the money was spent on "design".

Of course, they went back to NASA for more money.

It seems a lot of these contract companies just latch on to NASA and assume it's a cash cow.

 

Can you imagine if the Apollo Program had livestream and all the sort???
https://x.com/contactlight69/status/1828498409101156803?s=46

 

Most of the dry mass of the SLS stack is the SRBs. Each weighs 730T for a total of 1460T. Meanwhile the core stage weighs 88T, EUS weighs 14T, and Orion+ESM (dry) about 16T.

There's a reason why they can move around Super Heavy (200T) on a couple of SMPTs while the full stack of SLS needs special infrastructure.

 

That’s some heft. Is there any reason it HAS to be done this way or could the SRB’s be attached at the pad using a fixed tower and pad instead? It’s a really old method and seems to have outgrown its usefulness. Fine up to a point but this seems an overreach for this particular tactic. Even without catching mechazilla seems to be an obviously better assembly/launch method since the crawler portion alone is so much cheaper, more versatile, and, dare I say it, nimble. Spacex is continuing its upgrades to the Bays to enhance the accessibility and working environment but none of those upgrades get exposed to the launch environment the way the mobile launcher/assembly towers are. The parts that need to be robust can be and those that don’t aren’t. The whole ML thing doesn’t add up and the expense is just another reason to move on to something else.

 

Overly simplified: does this not boil down to constituents vs private company?

 

The TL;DR is that SLS S1 is a H2, shuttle derived core that /needs/ high thrust boosters to get into orbit. And the designated high thrust boosters are solids. Technically SLS is more of a sustainer (lit on the pad at low thrust, throttle up after booster jettison) than a true S1. NASA's mandate is to 'use as much of Shuttle as possible' after all, in it's SLS design. But that drives a lot of decisions downstream. If you're stuck with SMEs in a cluster, you can replace the SRBs with say, (kerolox) F9s in some sort of frankenrocket configuration, but that's a ton of reengineering. If you don't, well, if you need more pad thrust (which it did), you end up going from 4 segment SRBs to 5 segment, which means a beefier launch/transport mount. As for 'attach at the pad', well if you look at the relative weight, even a single SRB is 4x the mass of the SLS core stack, and 3x the mass of a superheavy. Plus then you'll need a much, much beefier pad hoist, and NASA would insist weather protected.

That's my interpretation, anyway.

 

https://x.com/spacex/status/1828616363071676482?s=46
https://x.com/rookisaacman/status/1828618387972317557?s=46

Could someone without a Twitter account let me know if that ‘Show more’ link works for you?

 

Space is hard:
https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1828703758928273645?s=46
https://x.com/spacex/status/1828705304177234126?s=46

It was the I4 booster. The scale is always a bit of a shock when people are standing right there:

 

The Show More link worked for me.

 

Fatigue in the landing legs/crush cores maybe? Was at about 8mph at landing.

23rd *landing* on that booster, yeesh.

 

https://x.com/wapodavenport/status/1828953528087318798?s=46

Don’t expect Polaris Dawn to go anytime soon.

 

You’ve gotta be kidding.

 

If you look closely, the hydraulic ram on the back right leg (from the camera's view) snapped or came apart in the middle. That caused the front right to have more weight/stress and it buckled and fell over to that side.

NSF will have a video out later today about it.

 

Sounds about right, I didn't go frame by frame but looked consistent, everything else is just 'fall over go boom' really. Just seems silly to ground launches when it's the recovery that failed, it's in SpX's best interest to recover safely anyway, just don't issue permits for RTLS until the cause analysis is done and remedial actions taken. And literally every other rocket except Electron 'fails to land safely'...

 

SpaceX moves to some other country?

 

Mars perhaps?

 

Nah, not gonna happen. Just a pain in the arse for them, though.

 

Will be interesting to see if it makes it intact..
https://x.com/sciguyspace/status/1829279952447082827?s=46

 

Yeah considering how well they’ve executed other software patches recently.