The SLS is Outdated. Why Does it Exist? 

I'd like to point out that when you make a solid rocket motor longer, you increase its power, not its burn time. burn time is a function of the diameter and geometry of the fuel. thrust is determined by length because it increases the internal surface area of the exposed propellant. yes, it has 25% more fuel, but due to its geometry, it gives more power than duration. In the case of SLS, the motors are lit from the top, and the fire burns down through a central hole. instead of being round, it's star shape I believe, because it has more surface area to burn. if you lit it from the bottom, you would only have the area of a 12' ish circle. by lighting it down the center, you can get infinitely more surface area (if you had a never-ending tube) Fun fact, the SLS boosters have a geometry where they actually "throttle down" and start producing less power as they burn (I'm assuming they either change internal geometry or fuel composition) but this is so that they don't keep pushing harder and harder as they get lighter, leading to extremely excessive maximum aerodynamic loads. they are way more complicated than an end-burning motor like in fireworks also, the reason they, along with so, so much else that is built in this country, are 12 feet wide, is because that is the largest thing you can move on the highways without needing special routing to clear bridges and such. the central core of SLS needs to be moved down the Mississippi river by barge, and around the tip of Florida because it just won't fit on our infrastructure. Edit, if you want to see what an SRB can look like inside, google "solid rocket propellant grain geometry" and you will see plenty of diagrams alongside thrust profile graphs

It makes me quite sad to see the shuttle engines being throw away. Yes, for a fantastic purpose, but sad to see them going away.

"Could the SLS money have been better spent elsewhere? Absolutely." "Would NASA have been given that money if it went elsewhere? Probably not."" That second part is what people miss when they say "SLS money could have funded X commercial launches."

I worked at Rocketdyne when it was still part of Rockwell, and several years after it was bought by Boeing. Then it was sold to Pratt and Whitney, and then sold again to Aerojet. All that should really tell you something. It was the worst companies I've ever worked for, with the lowest average skill level among the engineers, the lowest rate of innovation, and the most incompetent management I've ever seen. So how have they stayed in business so long? Lobbying, and a bunch of stupid stunts to please congress. I remember once, soon after someone in congress complained about the lack of innovation, they made me get up in front of a crowd to accept an award for some stupid invention I had never heard of until I read it off the plaque they gave me. I was completely blind sighted by this. And they gave out plaques to a lot of people that day. Then there was another time when they forced all employees to buy US savings bonds to appease some other member of congress.

I was 10 years old when Armstrong walked on the moon. The real difference, compared to learning about it later, is that when it is live you do not know how it will turn out. Would the ascent stage of the Lunar Module engine fire properly? Would they be stuck on the moon and die there? It was not just an exciting time, but also very tense. During Apollo 13, we did not know if the astronauts would survive. But if you missed it, hopefully you will watch us go to Mars.

Loving the recent space related themes. Would love to see some infrastructure related in the future.

The fact the SLS is ready to go and it’s *checks notes* one and only competitor is not ready to go definitionally demonstrates SLS is not out of date. SLS might not be the future, but is absolutely the present.

I'm surprised this video didn't mention the mobile launch tower fiasco. IIRC it was made by a ton of subcontractors that didn't really communicate with one another, cost a fortune, and won't fit the upcoming more powerful version of SLS so we won't even get much use of it.

The reason the SRBs are not being recovered, is because this does not save much cost for SRBs, where the main cost is putting the fuel in in the correct manner. To recover them, you would need to clean the casing etc., which is basically just a steel tube where the only fancy part is the nozzle. If I recall correctly, recovering the SRBs was approximately as costly as making new ones for Shuttle, though I'm not sure on the exact numbers.

In high school, we went on a field trip to watch one of the shuttle's boosters being tested. (Sideways, strapped to the hill, probably the same hill as in this video). I don't remember the exact noise, but it was certainly an experience I'll never forget.

SLS exists because there is no other vehicle flying today that can do what it does. Once that changes, we can talk about whether SLS should exist.

Here is an interesting comment on the history of SLS, explaining that it wasn't just politics that lead to SLS. It was posted as a comment to the piece "The SLS rocket is the worst thing to happen to NASA-but maybe also the best?" which was written by Eric Berger for Ars Technica. Here it goes: Good article. I think Eric somewhat oversells the angle that Congress and the defense contractors imposed SLS/Orion on NASA. This was very much a two-way street, and although Boeing doesn't deserve any sympathy from anybody, at least one of the other defense contractors had the right idea. It's really important to the history of Ares/SLS to note that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) program came before any of that. Sean O'Keefe was NASA Administrator, and he called for a fly-off competition in which multiple providers would fly an LEO demonstration mission before selecting a single winner. This precluded the use of launch vehicles that didn't exist. Lockheed Martin's CEV proposal was far more innovative than the Northrop/Boeing proposal. They called for a reusable lifting body reentry vehicle with a captive abort system that could be launched on Atlas V. This was their LEO solution. For exploration missions, a pressurized mission module and a long-duration cryogenic propulsion stage (ACES) would be launched on two Atlas V or Delta IV rockets before the crew launch, and the three modules would dock in LEO prior to departure. Wonderful! That's exactly what we should have done! How did it go wrong? Well, Michael Griffin was appointed NASA Administrator, and he thought the fly-off competition was silly. He also didn't like either of proposals because they were different from what he proposed in a whitepaper he authored a year before his appointment. So he canceled the fly-off, declared Lockheed the winner, and issued a gigantic change request transforming their proposal into the Apollo On Steroids we know as Orion. Michael Griffin was the originator of the "1.5-launch architecture" in which a super-heavy Shuttle-derived rocket (Ares V) launches the lunar lander and a medium Shuttle-derived rocket (Ares I) launches the crew vehicle. Griffin argued that ULA's rockets suffered from a lack of commercial demand which would make them more expensive than if NASA developed their own rockets -- if you can believe that. This became NASA's official position as part of the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) he commissioned. And the ESAS report made it easy to cultivate the support of Richard Shelby, Bill Nelson, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and others in Congress. ULA was advocating for distributed launch of commercial vehicles and even using the verboten D-word through 2009, when they published this gem that is still proudly hosted on their website: www.ulalaunch.com/docs/default-source/exploration/affordable-exploration-architecture-2009.pdf This was around the time that Richard Shelby flipped out and said he'd pull the funding if ULA or its parents kept talking about propellant depots. NASA sold Congress on the expensive approach, and when big bad industry suggested there's a better way, Congress told them to shut their filthy mouths. Not long after, SLS was enshrined as the spiritual successor to Ares V, and at that point Boeing really started to dig in their heels to protect their cash cow from potential competition. We could have had Lockheed's modular CEV, and we could have had a depot-based distributed launch architecture from ULA. The "dinosaur" industrial base was not opposed to delivering those solutions. There was a period in time when the big defense contractors were reading the tea leaves, and they were basically told to get their eyes checked and fall in line. So they did. Still doesn't excuse Boeing's poor performance. Nothing does.

I remember being really excited about the Orion Program and the SLS during the Orion test flight in 2012 and completely forgot all about it for the next 10 years. A couple months ago I was like “wait they STILL haven’t launched yet???”

There are several legitimate staring points for Artemis. The concept for a heavy lift vehicle based on Shuttle components dates back before the first Shuttle flight, the concept was being evolved in the 1980s and looked pretty similar to the various legacy programs, without any hardware being flown. In the 1980s such a vehicle would have made perfect sense. By the end of the 1990s software was developed to allow for fly back boosters to be a possibility. By 2000s the shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle concept was essentially redundant, old tech.

“Wake up babe, new Real Engineering upload.”

Yes, the technology is outdated. But guess what? It's the only rocket capable of going to the moon and mars currently.

As one of the folks who lost his job when Constellation was cancelled and finally got it back 8 years later to work on SLS, I appreciate the delicacy with which you handled the subject. Yes, it's a jobs program, but it's also a fantastic rocket. I have to give Jim Bridenstine credit for the name Artemis and for focusing the SLS AND commercial partners on working toward a moon base and a deep space station in NRHO. I'm now working habitation design for both, which is the exciting future we have in store!

The other thing to remember is that many of these parts were already "human rated" whereas ships such as Starship is not and won't be for a while still.

I think you’re missing some very very key aspects regarding the Constellation and Artemis programs, like the fact that even though Artemis (rather sls) has gone 2x over budget at roughly $23B it’s still 10x less than constellation... who’s budget was $230B. On top of that there’s still some political aspects that ‘helped’ shut down constellation and actually helped Artemis.

Its weird - from the stories I've heard about Apollo, it was this major event world wide. By the time of Apollo 11, you had tv series, stuff in newspapers etc...but for Artemis, the first I head of it was news that Artemis 1 was being launched in the local news. And its not like I'm some space pillock - I watched launch and landing of STS-135 live, I've followed SpaceX developing their landing tech, watched the end of Cassini and the landing of Curiosity...how did this program fly under the radar so much? I heard more about the JWST before it launched than Artemis. The other thing that shocks me is I remember the Orion program being cancelled, but, from you're saying, politics basically revived it, and we ended up with another lunar program...by accident??? (If this is correct, it's gotta be one of the most epic accidents ever...)

I know many are on the "why use an expendable rocket?" train, why doesn't NASA use one? NASA did have one in the 1990's, the DC-X Delta Clipper, it was a scaled down technology demonstrator - but the materials science wasn't there yet to make a full scaled version viable as it's dry mass would be too high and NASA would have to choose between Venture Star (similar materials issue) and the Delta Clipper as it couldn't fund both projects. Reusable rockets are still in their infancy, only one rocket company has a reusable orbital class rocket, SpaceX - that's it. And that only consists of the Falcon9 and the Falcon Heavy. What many often overlook as they are caught in the Sci-Fi like spectacle of the boosters landing (which is very, very cool!) is that a sacrifice must be made for reusability - payload mass to orbit. The F9 sacrifices roughly 40-60% of max payload to orbit mass to RTLS or drone ship landing as it needs that fuel for landing and to cover the mass of the landing hardware (legs, etc). This is great if you aren't launching anything that heavy and/ or it's only going to low Earth orbit. If you want to go beyond low Earth orbit though, you need a lot more speed, which means a lot more fuel to be used for that acceleration making a reusable rocket a lot less useful - it becomes the wrong tool for the job. Enter Starship - Starship aims to be a heavy lift reusable vehicle and SpaceX has a plan to get around the limits of the F9/ FH for going beyond low Earth orbit while still being reusable. But it too is making an alternate sacrifice; mission complexity. Starship won't be able to go to the Moon with a full payload in a single launch - it will require 4-5 additional launches to refuel the first one on orbit so that one can continue on to the Moon. So for a single Starship to go to the Moon, that's 5-6 total launches, that's 33 engine ignitions per Heavy Booster and 9 per Starship - that's 210 - 252 engine ignitions just for low Earth orbit! And to go to Mars, it's 9-10+ launches to send one Starship! That is a lot of potential areas of failure. Add to that, orbital refueling at the scale required for Starship to successfully go to the Mun or beyond has never been attempted, moving 100 tons of fuel from one Starship to another (x5!) is a huge deal, you can't just start a pump - pumps on Earth require gravity to function, so the docked Starships will need to have a small force of acceleration to the docked craft during the length of fuel transfer. This all adds up to a ginormous amount of mission complexity compared to SLS - which can go to the Moon in a single launch and only requiring a fraction of the number of engine ignitions and no massive on orbit refueling. So when you look at from this perspective, SLS makes a lot more sense. I hope SpaceX pulls it all off, I really do - but that's a lot that can potentially go wrong. Being a private company, they can have it go wrong and try again without it being a political and public relations disaster, if NASA were to try that and something went wrong - well, we likely wouldn't be going back to the Moon.

I would like to add a few notes: 1). launch costs satellites and cargo have gone down, But not a massive amount. There's more competition which is helping a lot. 2). A human rated launch vehicle requires more testing and validation than an uncrewed launch vehicle. This adds both time and development costs. 3). The amount of energy needed to launch a crewed vehicle into orbit is higher than satellites because a crewed vehicle weighs more than modern satellites or probes. So, the cost is higher. 4). The amount of energy to launch a crewed vehicle to and from the moon is many orders of magnitude greater than going to LEO. So, launch costs and development costs would be higher still. 5). AS of today, there is no private sector equal, in terms of capabilities, to SLS. Yes, there are other vehicles "in-development" but there is nothing operational to compare the cost or development time of SLS against. To be clear: I do agree that the U.S. government has "F" this whole thing up. But wanted to point out these important differences between SLS vs "current" private sector vehicle capabilities. The private sector will take over SLS "eventually" but it won't be soon.

One of my earliest memories is watching the Apollo 11 crew step onto the moon. I was 2 years old, and the image of my family sitting around the dinner table, and watching that event on our black and white TV, is stuck in my head forever.

This video turned into a lame joke on the 16.11.2022

Don't get sentimental about the shuttle. That was a disaster in itself that should be left behind. The Saturn V is objectively better if there were no commercial options.

You are quite right about those shuttle engines and boosters. Experiencing a nighttime shuttle launch was one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever experienced.

that was the most emotional transition to an ad I have seen yet

In 2004, when the decision was made to retire the space shuttle and begin work on a successor, the argument could legitimately be made that the fastest, most economical, path back to space was a shuttle derived booster utilizing many of the already-in-production components of the shuttle stack. Newer, better, technology, could be developed for subsequent generations of space technology. But almost two decades and tens of billions of dollars, later, both of these rationale have been shot. The SLS now serves only to burden our space program with unsustainable costs, and bind it to backwards technology produced by corrupt and inefficient legacy contractors...

Completely agree with your take. I made a similar argument yesterday while discussing SLS/Artemis with a coworker. I'm obviously extremely excited to see the return of super heavy launch vehicles and moon missions, but it is very disappointing as full expendability seems like such a step backwards technologically.

21st Century NASA going to the moon, is like NETFLIX announcing they bought the rights to your favorite entertainment franchise. You are like "Oh God, please cancel this now!". Get ready for a season of a high budget spectacle everyone will hate, full of waman, POC, rainbow flags, but on the moon instead on your flat screen😆.

I’m so excited that Artemis has fully come to fruition (potentially speaking) as I’m completing my aerospace degree. The fact I could some day work on projects that are for direct purposes on the lunar surface is so exciting. I hope the next president doesn’t cancel Artemis because it is doing critical work that no private industry would do: setting up infrastructure to invite more companies to do business. That is what the public sector should be for. This is space being done right.

I feel like everyone is talking shit about SLS to be cool and safe in their predictions. If it fails they can say I told you so, if it works they can say they were pleasantly surprised.

I still believe that the Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever built. The fact it was designed and built without CAD is amazing to me. When I read about the SLS, it just doesn't have the same vibe as the Saturn V does. I understand we as a species we went to the moon already and accomplished such amazing scientific research, but the SLS doesn't feel the same.

Thank you for this. I was so confused as to why they seemed to be reusing an old design.

It’s like saying a WWII rifle is outdated. It’ll still do the job it was designed to do!

I am in awe of this thing as you said...but I am also fearful. I REALLY want this test to go well, but with all the mistakes and errors found during the wet-dress rehearsals, I fear they will encounter new problems during the actual launch I am not a rocket engineer by any means, but seeing NASA scraping parts together and flying them does 'hurt' a little bit. Fingers crossed for a successful launch, journey AND splashdown of this beast

Finally someone answering the question I have been asking myself for the past 2 years

Saying it's outdated by comparing it with a technology that doesn't work properly yet, doesn't make it for me. I think NASA engineers would have made reusable parts if they think it would have been worth the cost of a more complex design (testing, safety, longer timeline, etc..). Using components that have been used before is great because you know what their issues are. It's safer. So far they only planned to use it 5 times. It is not obvious to me that it would have been cheaper to make it a reusable rocket. Maybe the next one will be fully reusable and used many times, it's not for us to decide.

it exists because its flying now when starship still hasn't. sometimes good enough tech is good enough. We'll get to use starship when its ready but it won't be soon.

If SLS is outdated, what do you think Soyuz should be called? ;) Soyuz is basically R7 ballistic missile variant with updated engine design from 1950's. It's been in wide use to this day.

it's not outdated, it's realistic, unlike starship

Obsolete since day 1...

I'm 59 years old and I remember the Apollo Program and the moon landings. Astronauts were my childhood heroes. I am happy and thrilled for the opportunity God has given me to live this far and see this scientific odyssey resumed. Awesome video. Amazing job. Greetings from Brazil.

The rocket feels almost like a homage to the space shuttle and saturn V programs. NASA is closing the chapter with a show and passing the torch in the progress.

During the USA manned space flight days, Lockheed was blacklisted after the agena failure. Then came Hubble, what a mess. Lockheed has alway had some crippling flaws in their products. Now Orion sits on top, made by Lockheed who has never built a manned capsule, what could go wrong.

All this and flat earthers still going brrr

Nostalgia for a time you were born too late to experience is called "parastalgia," and it's a really cool concept.

I grew up through all of that. I'm 68 years old. I got to meet some amazing people and ended up working Shuttles ET project from start to finish and then was part of the Orion capsule design team. I somehow survived till retirement and am loving it. I'll be watching tomorrow with chills as always.

SpaceX has not yet made launching cheaper, they are just creative with their bookkeeping.

the one thing SLS brings over SpaceX is that theoretically it can launch substantially wider payloads which is more of a constraint than people realize, and Gateway almost requires it

I was lucky enough as a 6th grader to witness the final launch of the space shuttle program in 2011. I remember seeing it and hoping to grow up and watch people go back to the moon!

It sounds to me that Obama misjudged the cutoff: better to say the Constellation would be the last of its kind before NASA's funding and attention shifted to projects no one else could do. Keep the existing jobs, keep the expensive-by-design project in motion, and use the duration of the project to plan a full transition. That means figuring out what institutional knowledge they will need and how to maintain it, as well as giving professionals whose skills NASA no longer needs a heads up to look elsewhere for jobs.

This is why I like watching "For All Mankind" as we look at an alternate history if NASA was given a top priority in budget.

My guess is that it's reliable? I mean same with aviation - why are we still using 50 year old technology? Cause we've failed so much with it, that we now know how not to fail anymore... even though there are probably much cheaper and efficient alternatives. Reliability & safety > Costs & innovation.

Personal incredulity doesn't make a good argument.

SLS can lift a LOT more mass than even the best reusable rocket.

I watched the Moon landings live on television. It was magic. Huge headlines in the newspapers. People all over the world glued to their television sets. It wasn't an American achievement- it was a human achievement.

I was fortunate to be standing on a causeway between Merritt Island and Cocoa Beach July 16, 1969 to watch Apollo 11 lift off on its mission to land on the moon. Hopefully I will once again be able to be at the Cape when Artemis lifts off with astronauts bound for a lunar landing.

Space X has not "drastically reduced the cost of launch".. That is a complete myth, so try not to perpetuate it. Per launch Space x costs us substantially more than the shuttle.

I think the main thing is rocket development and new technologies is going much faster than it ever had. When this was conceived, there was no thought into landing boosters and other things that are happening now. This design was state of the art at the time which included what was already available.

The Australian movie ‘The Dish’ is also an amazing look into how the pictures made it to the surface via a satellite dish in country NSW, AU.

I love it when people act like Space X is this completely separate thing when it is entirely dependent on organizations like NASA not only in terms of infrastructure like launch pads and stuff but in terms of all the technology and innovation made by space programs in the past half century.

Well, I lived it. When the Apollo 8 circled around the moon, I wrote an essay on that in school. I remember very well that people landed on the moon. My parents thought it was such a historical event that I was allowed to stay up. I was playing with my toy cars when the Apollo 13 crew landed - and I asked my parents why they didn't go into "the caravan" (yes, children speak the truth). But my attention span was short. The later Apollo missions didn't catch my attention anymore. I'd seen those so many times before. It was time for something else. Nothing much caught my attention until the space shuttle - a plane going into space. Now that was some real space opera stuff! Until it became clear it actually was just a truck - one without a proper destination until the ISS. Actually, I can't say I get very enthusiastic when I see this thing. Is that all they could come up with after 50 years have gone by? That's not what Werner von Braun promised 70 odd years ago.

Could you do a video on the Airbus A350 and compare it to the Boeing 787, as well as the problems both carbon fiber planes are facing?

I watched the Saturn moon shots on TV. I watched some shuttle launches. They were great. However, technology and design should be allowed to develop. Could you imagine if the planes of WW2 were forced to look like the planes of WW1?? Well, Artemis looks TOO MUCH like the bastard child of Saturn and Shuttle. I knew it borrowed concepts, but I was surprised to learn it borrowed actual parts. That's insane.

I was glued to the TV during the Moon landing. About 16 years ago, my 6 year old daughter and I met Buzz Alden. He took the time to tell my daughter about his trip to the Moon. I was absolutely awestruck . I still am.

I'm okay with how Artemis came about. There's a lot of institutional knowledge that would have been lost if all those jobs had been lost, and it would have had severe long-term effects on the US's space aspirations and its ability to carry out future missions.

I should point out Elon Musk is lying about how cheap launching rockets are. Other private vendors are also not citing cost breakdowns anywhere close to comparable to what a NASA budget shows. Look at the ISS resupply missions, or when any of these companies launch for the DoD. Their costs "magically" balloon as they take on the more stringent requirements for higher quality government work that also includes manned flight. Sorry, but a cheap Starlink does not equal a GPS or spy sat in terms of tolerance. Also deep space exploration isn't commercially viable. Neither are companies like SpaceX which use government funds to develop/test thier technologies. At this point I'm convinced a proper public sector company could smash private space companies, but we force NASA to use the private vendors rather than build thier own space components. Even the SLS or heritage rockets like the space shuttle or Saturn V were built by a conglomerate of private manufacturers. Given the above, I call you're BS on this. None of your source show that private companeis could complete a complicated manned program like SLS, or even fly anywhere close to the $$ amount. You bassically just go on a rant compalining about how expensive SLS with no other way to compare or demonstrate that anybody else could do it better/cheaper (because they can't).

Yes, its cool. But its nowhere near as cool as the new technology NASA could have developed with $23 billion.

SLS is NOT Outdated as title suggests. Advancing booster technology is dreamy, expensive and often inaffordable. The tolerance for risk is very low. No one will support invitations for financing more disasters. In the modern era with competitors, inflating costs is as realistic as raising the price of salt - clients flock to the competitor no matter how much you advertise.

Love your videos, any recommendations on books to learn about aerospace engineering?

"democratic system" bro youre talking about US, there is no democracy left if the winner can define the size of votingregoins for its own advantage... XD or define judges which are totally judging for politics and not for rights...

This thing is going to the moon, Musks kooky thing can’t orbit.

turns out cobbling a rocket together from sts technology is actually harder than just building a rocket from scratch

Its also worth thinking about that with commercial rockets possibly taking over future endevours, due to the sheer value proposition that NASA can't match by design, the SLS may very well be NASA's last big rocket project. This could be NASA's final hurrah in rocketry. So yes its over budget, delayed and plagued with issues, but can we not just apprieciate the epic symbol that the SLS is? NASA may not actually make the rockets they use in the future, but my word is their last one gonna be spectacular.

it just did an exemplary job of safely delivering Orion into orbit

I look forward to seeing the rocket launch. It really is frustrating how primitive and expensive the government system is for massive projects. I don't have an answer other than avoid monopolies, encourage competition and award success but discourage companies (like the ones involved in SLS) from pretending they are the only option, as they abuse their absolute power every time.

Reel engineering: with the progress happening in the commercial space industry... also RE: shows the most dangerous and badly design rocket on the market right now

So there is nothing wrong with the rocket other than the cost of development?

SLS actually is proven to work where as SpaceX is still only trying to get there , much hype there.

NASA and its programs generate almost 3 times its budget in economic output. It supports over 300k jobs every year. For every dollar we put into science and technology, we get much more in return.

It exists because the RS-25 engines and SRBs have launched successfully 134 times. Critcize Shuttle all you want, fine. But no other American rocket motors and engines have sent nearly as many human missions to orbit. And while they were overdesigned for LEO, they're about the right size for sending a crew capsule to lunar orbit and back. It's easy to play armchair engineer and argue NASA should have spent the past decade investing in a methalox first stage instead. But it's not Congress's job (or even NASA's) to build space infrastructure specifically for large-scale LEO internet or lunar manufacturing. The goal is to build vehicles that are tailored to NASA's needs for missions of 4 astronauts (and the activities 4 astronauts can do over a few weeks to 2 months initially), which only need to fly 1 or 2 times a year. That low flight rate might be seen as a step backwards from ISS and Shuttle, but people forget that NASA launched 4 Saturn Vs between Dec 1968 and Dec 1969. Guess what? That pace wasn't sustainable. Apollo 13 famously exploded and NASA only launched 2 Apollo missions per year in '71 and '72. 1 or 2 SLS launches a year form a reliable backbone for human lunar missions. Anything beyond that with commercial rockets is icing on the cake. By the way, NASA partnered with Armadillo Aerospace on the small methalox Morpheus VTOL lander starting in 2012. They were researching methane for small reusable vehicles when SpaceX and Blue Origin were in their infancy. But Eric Berger isn't writing Ars Technica pieces about it, so most folks forget it happened.

You can have a 100% reusable rocket and that's fine but the thing is this thing can launch payloads faster to the outer solar system. Therefore it's not outdated yet.

Thank you for this! I've been asking the same questions about the SLS boosters. "Politics" seems like a pretty solid answer. I'm very excited for the launch, I live on the Space Coast and have heard stories about how powerful the rockets from decades-past were, how you can hear the rocket and feel the rumble from miles away compared to the smaller/more modern SpaceX rockets that frequently go up. In the end, efficient and low cost options will win out so we may not see these types of rockets in the future, there's really no telling.

It's a basic design made of existing parts. The 4 RS-25s don't develop enough thrust to get TTW above 1 and take off. The strap ons are effectively cancelling out enough of the weight to allow liftoff rather than adding deltaV. It's exactly the kind of vessel you would make in Kerbal Space Program if you were very short of cash and had to do some orbital missions cheaply.

Something not talked about in this is the safety requirements NASA has post shuttle program. Human rated launchs can not be on rockets when the launch can not be safety aborted at ALL times of the launch. These time when abortsare not possibleare called "black boxes" due to their representation on the abort system flight plan. The Constellation programs Ares I (the one shown testing in the video) had a black box window for the majority of the rockets first stage. This conclusion came from an AirForce study on the rocket, which basically canned the hole project. It can be argued Artemis is coming out at exactly the right time. SpaceXs crewed Falcon 9 is only capable of LEO launches. Starship is a decade or more away from being human rated, and it is also doubtful that Falcon Heavy (which would be required for a moon or mars mission) could be human rated either (regardless of SpaceXs moving all development to Starship-Heavy). There are simply no other options for transporting astronauts to the moon at this time, and no plans from any of the big players in private space to pursue that. It's possible and probable that NASA uses Starship-Heavy in the furute to build out and fuel deep space craft in space, and then using a Crewed Dragon to man it, but that is also at least a decade away.

As someone who is old enough to have watched the Apollo missions on live TV, it has always seemed a tragedy to me that space exploration has been limited to low Earth orbit in the half-century since then. Yes, I know that we have sent probes and robots out further but it's just not the same as sending people for a lot of reasons. Right now SLS is the only thing available to get manned exploration back on track. Is the program inefficient? Funny, that was never a question at the front of people's minds during the all the programs in the 60s that led up to the moon landings. Oh, and about the program existing to just create jobs... the TV I watched the Apollo missions from was in a newly built suburban development (fun fact: that house was on land that used to be the farm I grew up on until then.) One of many Sothern Calif. suburbs that resulted from the boom in the aerospace industry in the 60s.

Please do a video on new experimental propulsion engines . They are some really fascinating concepts out there and I would love hear your take on them . Please

I have experienced Sputnik and the whole saga... it was far far beyond breathtaking... I think that the main reason for going back to huge rockets was that the shuttle was a total failure in its hyped bid to make spaceflight more affordable as well as its flawed design that cost lives of its crews ... Everyone forgets the HUGE cost and percent of the annual budgets that Apollo represented... Continuing the Apollo program was just not viable back then... The present design was made necessary because no one still alive remembers how to make the Saturn 5 main stage engines... they had to be handcrafted tweaked far beyond the existing blueprints and no one remembers how to do that...

Let's mention - It's useless to have a manned flight to the moon. - Ridiculous to think of a base there. - Do I still need to address Mars?

The SLS exists because it was caught in a transition between old and new technology. The program effectively started in 2005 (with the Constellation Project) and made sense at the time: use existing NASA parts to save money, and spread the work around the country to get congress' support. It wasn't until ten years later the public saw for the first time a Spacex reusable rocket land by itself, but even then, such a rocket had a very limited payload. Now that technology has caught up and will probably soon surpass SLS, especially as far as payload (assuming Spacex eventually has a successful Starship launch). There was just no way for NASA to know what Elon would bring to the table when it started Constellation 17 years ago. As soon as this Artemis rocket completes its flight, there's no way NASA will be able to get additional funding to build any more rockets that are not reusable. The writing on the wall was written in 2015.

I watched man land on the moon in school and the shuttle explode at university , then visited the Korolov space museum outside Moscow , so little progress since then , SpaceX crows about reusability but wasn't the shuttle reused ?

This is unfortunately what happens when you don't give nasa enough funding, they had double the inflation adjusted budget towards the end of the 60's.

That sponsor message introduction must be one of the best that I have ever seen

What really cool for me is that I was alive for the last mission to the moon, the first shuttle fight, the last shuttle flight, and now the first Artemis 1. Although we now live in troubled times. I can honestly say that through all of it. It really is a great time to be alive!!! God speed Artemis 1!! Although you don't have anyone board. You carry the hopes and dreams of a country. A country in desperate need of something to bring us together. Be that distant light above all of the struggles . The light that can remind us just how great of a nation we really are. I do understand that this is a global audience. I'm not going to apologize for my patriotism. I'm also well aware that without our allies Artemis wouldn't be going anywhere fast. my apologies for any typing errors 🙁

The problem is SpaceX is no nowhere near getting starship viable, its engines are continuously failing, it can barely land without destroying integral parts of itself. Musk is making everything worse by flaunting environmental regulations in boca chica, promising BS statistics and hype about starships capability. Musk himself said that SpaceX will go bankrupt unless starship can get to full operation by the end of this year, which is not happening and probably wont happen for at least 2/3 years at best.

The SLS is not outdated. It employs the best Cryo fuel engines and the best solid boosters...it is not about technological achievement, nothing could be better other than that except Thermal Nuclear which will never be done by the USA..

They better come with the 4k footage

I love that we are doing more than low Earth orbit, but the SLS just makes me shake my head. It is what you'd expect to see as the 'hero' ship in a sci-fi movie where NASA has to build a ship out of spare parts to save the world before they run out of time.

Once again, amazing video as always. Thank you Brian. P.S: How does a video about the orbital ring sound?