MichSpace

My Name is Chris Bellant and I am a first year Ph.D. Student in Aerospace Engineering. I am not much of a blogger but I have been jumping out of my skin since the official announcement of the space Launch System a few days ago. The SLS is to be a Shuttle-Derived heavy launch vehicle that will be capable of delivering around 130 mT into LEO. It is claimed that the SLS will be both affordable and sustainable. I don’t see how either claim is true. The development cost is estimated to be 30 to 60 Billion dollars, depending on your source, and the first launch of the SLS in the final 130 mT configuration is to be no sooner than 2030. From what I have read NASA is expecting to get one or two launches a year for about 15 years. That is two to three billion dollars per launch just in development cost. It will cost at least another half billion dollars to build each one. Assuming an optimistic averaged cost of 2.5 billion dollars per launch, the cost to put 130 mT in LEO 20 years from now would be about $20,000/kg. I am a little confused why this is affordable, or even acceptable to do anything other than laugh at. The question I really want answered is why don’t we just use Space-X’s Falcon Heavy to put these payloads up? It will put 53 mT into LEO at a cost of $2,000/kg. It is also projected to have its first launch in about 2 years. The falcon heavy compared to the SLS will have 1/10th of the development time and 1/10th of the cost. Because the payloads are being sent up on two or three different rockets there would be a little added complexity but I believe the final cost would still be at least a factor 5-7 less than using SLS and we could start missions in a few years instead of a few decades.

I have only been able to find one other article that points out the obvious and long list of flaws with the SLS, and that was by Rick Tumlinson. I realize that several small issues were not addressed here but I would love to hear other’s thoughts on this. Leave a comment on this post or email me directly at bellanck@umich.edu.