NASA IS LOSING THE RACE TO BUILD A BETTER ROCKET
An emerging class of powerful rockets is supposed to start flying in the next couple of years. They’re known as heavy-lift launch vehicles. These rockets are capable of getting a whole lot of stuff into space at once — and everyone seems to be making one. SpaceX has been promising that its Falcon Heavy, a larger variant of the Falcon 9 rocket, will fly for the first time this summer. The United Launch Alliance is working on a brand-new vehicle called the Vulcan that’s supposed to fly in 2019. And spaceflight company Blue Origin is the latest to throw its hat in the ring, recently claiming its next big rocket, the New Glenn, will be able to deliver 100,000 pounds of cargo — and eventually people — to lower Earth orbit.
At the same time, NASA is developing a monster rocket of its own; it’s called the Space Launch System, and it’s being touted as the most powerful rocket ever created. Similar in shape and size to the Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System, or SLS, will be capable of carrying between 150,000 and 290,000 pounds to lower Earth orbit (or up to the weight of nine school buses). In capability, the vehicle dwarfs the other rockets the private space industry is working on.
But when it comes to comparing rockets, bigger isn’t necessarily always better. The SLS may dwarf the other commercial rockets in capability, but in other key areas, the giant vehicle falls short. For one thing, it’s expensive to launch — around $1 billion per mission. And it’s not going to launch very often either, probably only once or twice a year. Some experts argue that it’s these numbers we should use to measure a rocket’s merit: not how much it can carry, but how much it costs and how frequently the vehicle is expected to launch. If those are the standards, then the SLS isn’t necessarily the best vehicle to pull off ambitious goals in space.
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If we ever want to send people to the Moon or Mars, NASA needs to get the most value for its money, especially when it comes to actual launches. NASA’s budget is already pretty limited at roughly $19 billion a year, or about 0.5 percent of the overall federal budget. And that funding isn’t expected to dramatically increase anytime soon. Meanwhile, NASA estimates that a crewed mission to Mars could cost upwards of $400 billion over the next 30 years, and advisors to the space agency have suggested that NASA look for ways to cut those costs. The new batch of smaller but efficient commercial rockets presents a possible way to do that.
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