Skipjack wrote:Seen it before. Pathetically shallow strawman analysis.
LOL
Well, it is! What else can I say, without spending hours dissecting it?
Lost me at "Senate Launch System". Use of that epithet is discouraged on NSF because of its inaccuracy and inflammatory effect.
I think the name Senate Launch System is deadly accurate to the point. It was demanded by certain senators turned rocket engineers after all.
Except that you are entirely mistaken. SLS is a NASA design with NASA cost estimates, and it always has been. Did it escape your notice that the FCA-escalated cost NASA gave BAH was
identical to the value in the Authorization Act? Most people at NASA and their contractors seem to want SLS, too, despite what the OMB would have you believe.
Okay, so it looks like you've mistaken highly biased satire for a dispassionate and objective analysis.
Actually I have not based my opinion on his videos.
But you seem to have thought they would enlighten "people like" me. You seem blind to their flaws.
I'm saying you're going off the deep end based on a faulty data set.
Wrong assumption
It's not an assumption; it's an observation based on evidence.
Just to give you an idea, the $38B wasn't a cost estimate at all
So what is the cost estimate?
It's in that article you linked. $10B to core IOC, plus $1.5B FCA (paying civil servants and whatnot, which would happen anyway), for a total of $11.5B. That includes upper stage work to PDR, and it also seems to include manrating a stretched DHCUS...
Orion is $6B plus $700M FCA, and the 21st Century Spaceport work is $2B plus $400M FCA.
It is notable that BAH said the estimates were reliable for a 3-5 year budget planning window, and the estimates above only go for 6 years. So the odds of them being catastrophically optimistic are rather low.
Adding an upper stage tends to be estimated in the $4B range. Of course, if you're operating the system at the same time, you will have spent more than that in total by the time the US is done, but that's not a development cost.
That $38B was a budget availability scenario over 20 years (and a pretty pessimistic one at that), and has nothing to do with the numbers BAH saw.
No arguments until he gets to SLS/Orion, where he completely misses the point
The point of it being what exactly?
To go BEO. ISS support is a backup mission that hopefully will never be executed.
You wouldn't know that from the Congressional rhetoric, but there it is...
the unsupported assertion that "it cannot be below $1B" is essentially an outright falsehood,
The semi reusable shuttle cost over a billion per launch. The SLS is not reusable. How is it supposed to cost less?
1) No Orbiter. You should know this by now.
There are also ways to further reduce the cost of an SD system by a large fraction, perhaps as high as 40%, by going more hands-off and 'commercial' in operations. Indications are that some of this sort of thing may have made it into NASA's estimates, being the stuff BAH were complaining didn't have historical precedent...
2) Your number includes amortized development costs. His number explicitly did not - he said it would double if that were included, which piles on two more unstated, unjustified assumptions. Not to mention that the scenario being what it is (an additional use of a system that exists anyway for a different purpose), even including fixed costs isn't really fair.
You know, it seems to me that in your opinion everyone is wrong but you.
Really? You've never heard anyone else who agrees with me? You need to get out more. Or visit NSF more; there are a lot of them there...
The BAH is wrong
I never said that. You've misinterpreted what they said; that's all.
The Augustine commission is wrong
They made some errors, yes - slapping margins on margins and such... but what has the Augustine Commission got to do with any of my points?
even NASA is wrong
I'm not disagreeing with NASA this time. Keep up.
NASA is all for SLS, as far as I can tell. Including General Bolden. Of course you've fallen for the White House and OMB's FUD campaign, so you wouldn't know that...
only you and your porking friends in congress are right.
You must have missed the part where I agreed that they've been spinning this to the point of egregious misrepresentation. Also, I don't believe this is the best technical/fiscal solution, especially with that 130-ton requirement, which Congress seems happy to have NASA misinterpret as 130 tonnes... Also, I don't approve of the way NASA's budget is treated; I admit that this is how it works, but I don't like it.
But more importantly, "friends"? "Porking" friends yet? Just FYI, I'm a Canadian aerospace engineering Ph.D. student with no stake in SLS; in fact no ties whatsoever to NASA or indeed anyone in the United States, in which I have never so much as set foot. I am an outside observer who has formed an opinion based on data.
I used to dislike Shuttle for the same reasons you do. What changed my mind? Data. Certainly it should have been replaced long ago. But in the absence of a better alternative, it's not nearly as bad as you make out. And this was a particularly stupid time to end it - no replacement, you see, and a space station that could suddenly need it... I'm just glad we got STS-135 off, or we'd be in real trouble...
Not that that has anything to do with my lamenting the brain drain...
