The good news about SLS is that it’s not burning fracked natural gas like Elon’s rockets… it’s burning Hydrogen that was produced from fracked natural gas. It’s not green now, but it has the potential to be in the future. Cryogenic H2 requires some expense compared to cheap-and-dirty methylox.
The other advantage of SLS is that these rockets are owned by the people, not private companies. If we want an equitable future in space, we need NASA rockets. Right now the SLS is that rocket.
It doesn’t have potential. It’s possible, but not practical. Using hydrogen for transport is snake oil - there are plenty of other industrial uses that should have much higher priority.
In order to meet the global industrial demand with green hydrogen, we would need to dedicate 3x the global renewable generation capacity from 2019 entirely to hydrogen production. That simply isn’t going to happen - and that’s just trying to deal with demand where there are no other options but hydrogen. If you start adding transport the demand will sky rocket. This is great for those in the business of selling hydrogen, terrible for everyone else.
Hydrogen is also an incredibly inefficient fuel, both in terms of burning it and in terms of energy cost to produce.
Methane is also not exclusively extracted through fracking. You’re minimising the negatives of hydrogen and sensationalising the competition.
The other advantage of SLS is that these rockets are owned by the people, not private companies.
Yes because Boeing are totally a company for the people, they never take advantage of government contracts and always stay within budget.
Say what you will about SpaceX and the issues with the private sector and publicly traded businesses, SpaceX have revolutionised the rocket industry and driven costs down.
I mean, we’re talking about hydrogen for rockets here which is an absolutely tiny portion of global fuel consumption, wether or not we should be using it for anything else and the costs and scale of doing so is neither here nor there. ( Personally I think hydrogen powered cars are dumb)
In the context of rocket science hydrogen is just a better fuel in absolute terms. It is ~25% more efficient than methane. It’s less dense and thus needs larger tanks, but due to the square cube law that matters less and less the larger the rocket is, so on particularly large rockets like those going to the moon, hydrogen is just flat out better and leads to smaller less costly rockets if done properly.
The problem is that Boeing has been holding nasa hostage and extracting ransom, I don’t think nasa should be reliant on private companies for it’s rockets, they should have a internal department that develops and builds boosters in a similar way to how JPL works with probes and rovers. It would be costly upfront for sure, but would save money in the long run since it would prevent private companies from exploiting public interests in the future.
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