'It's a challenge, and if we didn't have a challenge a lot of people wouldn't be working for NASA,' he says. 'The technology of this thing, to get it to fly, is not our biggest challenge right now. Doing things in a new, more efficient way to enable exploration is our challenge.'
NASA's first heavy-lift rocket in four decades, SLS is a throwback to the von Braun era of big, brawny boosters. It is necessary to go to Mars.
'Big is not bad,' May says. 'If you really want to colonize somewhere you're going to need to send a lot of stuff over there. We humans are very needy. Just think about the water, or just the t-shirts. A lot of little things is not the way to do it.'
But outside the space agency there are many who say NASA would in fact do better to rely on privately developed rockets which, although smaller, cost far less and would free up NASA's budget to build the things needed for actual missions closer to Earth, in and around the moon. Mars, they argue, simply isn't affordable in the near future, and trying to get there will bankrupt the space agency.
'NASA does much better as a center of expertise in new technology than a provider of trucking services,' said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR, which is building a reusable spacecraft.
Marshall is, without question, feeling the heat of the private sector. SpaceX already delivers cargo to the International Space Station, and the company's founder, Elon Musk, says his proposed Falcon 9 Heavy rocket should ready by next year. If successful, Musk's rocket would lift 53 metric tons to orbit, nearly as much as the 70 tons of the SLS's initial configuration. Musk's rocket will fly for a small fraction of the cost of the SLS, and has cost American taxpayers nothing to develop.
Yet the Falcon 9 Heavy is no sure bet, and though he's diplomatic, May can't resist taking a shot at it.
The SpaceX rocket's development has been shrouded in secrecy, and arguably it's more complex than the SLS. The NASA rocket has just four main engines, but Musk's heavy-lift rocket straps together three of his Falcon 9 rockets, and each of those rockets is powered by nine smaller engines.
Complexity is the enemy of rocketry, because the more complex a system is, the more ways in which it can fail. So proponents of the SLS point out that only four big engines need to be lit for its launch, whereas the Falcon Heavy needs 27.
May recalls a rocket the Russians developed in the 1960s, the N1, to compete with the Saturn V. It had 30 engines, and all four attempts to launch it failed, often in spectacular explosions.
NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, an ardent proponent of the SLS, is not above sniping at SpaceX either.
'Let's be very honest,' Bolden said in an interview. 'We don't have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It's on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.'
The comment was telling of Bolden's bias, considering that Musk's Falcon 9 Heavy could in fact make its first flight in less than a year, but SLS won't be ready to fly until the end of 2017.
All the same, Bolden is correct about the SLS. NASA's rocket has moved beyond the drawing board.
Driving a golf cart through NASA's rocket building factory, the Michoud Assembly Facility in southern Louisiana, Rick Navarro says, 'Look around. This is a real rocket. It's not a Power Point rocket.'
Entities 0 Name: SLS Count: 9 1 Name: NASA Count: 9 2 Name: Musk Count: 3 3 Name: Bolden Count: 3 4 Name: SpaceX Count: 2 5 Name: Elon Musk Count: 1 6 Name: Charles Bolden Count: 1 7 Name: XCOR Count: 1 8 Name: Marshall Count: 1 9 Name: Mars Count: 1 10 Name: American Count: 1 11 Name: Braun Count: 1 12 Name: Rick Navarro Count: 1 13 Name: moon Count: 1 14 Name: Falcon Heavy Count: 1 15 Name: Michoud Assembly Facility Count: 1 16 Name: Jeff Greason Count: 1 17 Name: Falcon Count: 1 18 Name: Saturn Count: 1 19 Name: Louisiana Count: 1 20 Name: Earth Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1pUN5hb Title: Of bucks and Buck Rogers Description: WHEN the Space Shuttle made its final flight in 2011, America was left without the ability to fly people into space. American astronauts wanting to go to the...
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