"These are very bespoke components," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said Tuesday, describing each SLS as its own unique vehicle to learn and understand.
Sad that NASA has learned little from the shuttle program vision, not to mention SpaceX's ruthless – and successful – fixation on repeatability.
by tghuverd
6 Comments
“No way to prevent this” says the only rocket where this regularly happens.
I called NASA sad (pathetic) in another post and got downvoted into oblivion. Now a report of how sad (pathetic) it is for them to continue to repeat mistakes and it will probably be praised.
Your point on the R-35s is completely valid but you can’t compare SLS with spaceX though. As much as political pressured that SLS development was, a fail-fast design approach would have killed it on inception. However liquid hydrogen is a completely different monster compared methane/kerosene, which is why starship decided not to even remotely consider it.
Apparently hydrogen was a pain for the Space Shuttle as well. [This article](https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-nasa-rediscovers-the-perils-of-liquid-hydrogen/) says it scrubbed on average once per mission. So if NASA could never fix it for the Space Shuttle, it isn’t surprising that they couldn’t fix it for the SLS.
how do you fix it on the moon?
if its hard enough to manage hydrogen here how harder it going to be with gloves on?
Ariane 5 has a hydrolox first stage, is their reliability as impacted as on SLS or as it was on STS?