NASA Will Spend $2,941,394,557 On SpaceX's Massive Lunar Starship Lander!!!

hello it's scott bentley here and yesterday the world was taken by surprise when spacex won nasa's human landing system award which um frankly is seems kind of ridiculous especially when you put all three competitors next to each other and you realize that spacex's starship towers like a monolith over the other options we always thought it was a long shot to have this in there and it might be taken as an insurance option but it's the only option that nasa has chosen they're going to get 2.9 billion dollars over the next few years and this is to test develop demonstrate the vehicle now it's not going to cover long-term lunar landing that's coming later but they will in theory be the people to carry the first uh humans from the u.s back to the moon at some point in the next decade so yeah look this caught us by surprise because of the choice but it also caused by surprise because it was suddenly sort of leaked at the last minute and i think what happened was on friday morning there were news stories starting to appear that spacex had won and then washington post suddenly had a copy of nasa's internal document with all the details and suddenly nasa says oh we're gonna have a press conference at 4 pm on a friday who has a press conference at 4 pm on friday someone that's really trying to address something before the weekend so yeah they they have this it was nicely produced i think it was probably coming maybe next week but uh yeah uh spacex won it there was nobody from spacex answering questions at this press conference which led to some interesting problems where they would your people would have very good questions for spacex and they said ask spacex oh they're not here i mean to be fair some of the questions were things like how does starship integrate with sls and that's a question best answered using kerbal space program rather than actual science the source selection statement also showed that the national team consisting of blue origin lockheed martin uh northrop grumman and draper they would have been the second choice and the dianetics lander which i liked for many reasons that would have been the third choice but these were all largely driven by cost the cost was the biggest problem if you remember the previous administration had basically asked for something like three billion dollars to fund the human landing system development program and congress was like well we can't steer this money to our district so we're just going to give you a billion dollars it wasn't even that it might have been less but within that lower budget none of the options that had been submitted were actually could be funded at that level so they worked with nasa worked with the various bidders and got spacex to not change the amount of money they were asking for but to adjust the timeline so the first year could fit within the money that they had available and spacex were the only one that were even remotely in the ballpark so they are pretty much the winners and this is not going to make many people in congress happy i mean like it's an open competition and there's lobbyists from various groups but i don't think spacex have quite the same draw as your lockheed martin northrop grumman blue origin etc there's already been at least one complaint by uh i think was chairman or chairwoman of some committee that does it works on spending basically saying why are you making this critical decision on the human landing system before we have approved the new nasa administrator and deputy administrator and also by the way lost in the news yesterday was that the official nomination for pam melroy as deputy administrator came out so i'm excited for her because she is a legitimate awesome you know astronaut space person uh hopefully will do great things for nasa but yeah with you it's entirely possible that there will be uh appeals and there might be some you know political rummaging but i'm hoping this doesn't mean so much that spacex has a chance of losing this so much that we have a chance to get the funding you would need for a second option because i think dissimilar redundancy is something that is very important when you're trying to do things fast and i will say by the way that the human landing system submission process they were targeting the 2024 landing date that is clearly not going to happen so there is a lot more leeway a lot more wiggle room in this than is otherwise suggested by the um by this source selection so anyway let's let's go back and look at the competitors remember so yeah when it was announced or when the the finalists were showing off everybody thought that the national team had probably the strongest bid because it looked closest to what nasa wanted so the national team blue origin lockheed martin northrop grumman it was a three-stage lander you had the ascent stage which had the humans cabin in it where the people would fly um there was a descent stage that would carry that to the moon and then there was a tug like an orbital element which would carry this stack from the halo orbit at the gateway down to low lunar orbit and then stay in orbit and then when the ascent element returned it would carry the ascent element back to the gateway again so this in many ways matched what nasa was looking for but it didn't win because it turns out that it was very expensive and there were technical issues dynetics they had a radical idea which i really liked because instead of building this thing as a vertical stack they sort of built it sideways where you had this cabin in the middle which would pretty much set all right on the moon so you could actually step out of the airlock and down a couple of steps onto the moon rather than descending this really huge ladder on the side of the national team the national team's lander was 14 meters tall and you know to be fair dynetics lander was that tall if you included the solar panels that stuck upwards but yeah the rocket engines would be on the side and then they would have drop tanks that would be dropped during the descent towards the moon um and anyway and then we finally come to starship we all know what starship looks like it's big in stainless steel with wings this is a slightly different version which has uh it's painted white it has a ring of solar panels a black section around it has none of the fins because there's no air on the moon and you have to actually use rocket engines to slow down but for final landing it had a ring of angled engines about halfway up the rocket and we're not clear what those engines are but the new render shows that there's something like 25 of them so that's far too many for them to be super dracos so this would probably have to be some sort of new thruster that uses methane and liquid oxygen hopefully hopefully um yeah i mean there's other things that are changed in the new starship render now that we've got the winners out there the the legs have been expanded because the landing legs that are currently on the test vehicles obviously those are small and temporary but even when they get towards a production leg design they're still going to have to fit within a sort of narrow envelope so that they can be they can be screened from the aerodynamic effects whereas for the moon they can just have big legs that fall down provide a wider base so these have at least four legs it's kind of hard to tell the geometry doesn't look quite right with big landing pads like you know you know two three meter wide landing pads um the well you know i think these things once they're deployed they might stay deployed with some sort of shock absorber yeah and there's a you know new solar panels on there and new landing thruster designs but there's also some changes to the nose because obviously it's going to have to be docking to other spacecraft so the selection statement it looked hard at all of these pro these proposals i mean you know of course we're looking at starship and many people are trying to criticize it for their various problems or whatever but you're to be fair all the teams have built hardware for this proposal blue origin and dynamics they both have these fantastic mock-ups showing high-fidelity human you know the human factors part of the lander so you can get in and look inside them spacex have built a lot of well flying things that have become scrap things but building stuff that actually flies put them ahead of the curve quite significantly even if they haven't failed to you know demonstrate a proper complete landing cycle but what nasa saw when they looked at starship was they saw a vehicle that wasn't breaking the laws of physics in any way it did it required lots of r d but so did the other competitors and it was just so much larger it had two air locks with independent life support systems which you really expand your survivability envelope also it had a lot of room for expansion and while this wasn't part of this proposal the teams were required to come up with you know for how they would extend their lander and turn it into a more sustainable system and spacex had lots of space to expand and lots of margin everywhere dynamics actually came into the competition with their proposal when it was analyzed by nasa they found that they had negative mass they were carrying negative mass mansion no no i mean like you think negative mass oh that's cool it floats upward no no negative mass margin is bad it means your design is heavier than it should be and you have to somehow cut mass from it rather than having room to grow when you're encountering problems that was like a big negative it got there it was a big part of why dianetics rating went from being acceptable to being marginal um you all the teams had various technologies that were identified as having low technological readiness levels the propulsion systems for the national team in particular there were multiple propulsion systems none of which had been really properly developed at this time spacex at least of course have their raptors and those are actually flying even if they are sometimes involved in giant ruds and incidentally the sn15 we're now starting to see the new generation of raptors coming down to boca chica and there's a number of changes to this design they're not radical but if you look you can see your pipe layouts change some of the manifold designs have been recast so hoping that that will improve their reliability the national team by the way it was noticed that they also had a non-compliant bid which basically said part of the proposal part of the requirements was that the bids had to not have any advance payments for work that would be done in the future they had to be they had to be structured in such a way that they weren't getting a lot of money up front and yeah the national team had this by accident supposedly and nasa would have had to negotiate with them to fix this to make it compliant yeah it's one of these things you only discover when you really start looking hard at things um spacex the one of the concerns with spacex was the fact that refueling this thing is going to take like half a dozen flights to get the tanker filled up in orbit but sort of the upside of that was that all this refueling stuff needed to happen in low earth orbit and that actually you know it worked well for them so they could load up the tanker and if there were problems they would have time to adjust their schedule it was a relatively easy target whereas the other landers all required refueling but their design had the lander sent out to the moon and then in lunar orbit they would be assembled and refueled and that that was of course that needed fewer launches but it wasn't in low earth orbit so that counted you know there was a there was a bit of a wash either way the all of these things are fairly complex compared to building a ginormous saturn v and putting all your stuff onto a single launch um yeah but i think yeah the biggest factor ultimately is that spacex bizarrely despite having this monster lander were the cheapest and that's all they could afford to do and a lot of this is down to spacex already developing it with their own money and with other investors because they have specific tasks in mind not just for starship but for super heavy in general and that counts for a lot it may be reaching high it may be pushing thing at the limits but that's ultimately how this works and you of course this then says well what does that mean for the rest of artemis because this is so much bigger than anything else there it's bigger that if you dock all the parts of the gateway together starship is still going to be bigger than all of that it's going to look a bit ridiculous at some point and you know maybe this just represents a sort of inflection point where nasa is now seeing the wisdom of starship through all the various programs and does want to get involved because they see it as a viable way forwards of course things could go wrong things are we've got several years before this is fully development developed but it's entirely possible we look back and we see this moment as being a critical yeah a critical moment in development of human spaceflight going forwards so in many ways i'm excited by this i've also of course would really like to see a competitor regardless because i think it's good and having more money for the space program is always fantastic and i think it will make the hearings of bill nelson a little more spicy than we were expecting i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 626,574

Rating: 4.9641714 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: GuSM_-Aw5HM

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/introjection]

I wish I could be a fly on the wall in some old space executive meeting rooms right about now...

[u/StarshipSN8]

Wake up babe new Scott Manley video just dropped

[u/QVRedit]

And remember folks, this is the cheapest option.

[u/alien_from_Europa]

Why is the number so specific?

[u/STAG_nation]

I can't imagine such a glaring victory for economical practicality is going to go unpunished by the defense lobby. I would love to hear some of the phone calls our most esteemed eyebrow furrowers are going to get from their lobbyist donors.

[u/SpaceInMyBrain]

That wasn't very sharp reasoning by the Congresswoman. You can be sure Bill Nelson and Pam Melroy were in the loop behind the scenes - if they and the administration wanted the decision to be delayed, it would have been delayed.

[u/the-ugly-potato]

Is that 2 billion? Good god if 2 billion is the cheapest option I dont want to see the tag of most expensive

[u/TheOldSentinel]

Congress: But...we were gonna waste years and billions of dollars. This is unfair!

Elon: Go ahead and waste your money somewhere else. Just stay out of our way, we work for a living here.

[u/Town_Aggravating]

Right on!