Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), whom you might remember took on the Vision for Space Exploration this past summer, now has a new target: Air Force space policy. In a press release today, CAGW takes issue with plans for the formation of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture to manufacture EELVs and sell them to the government. In the eyes of the organization, the Air Force is “propping up failing ventures with lucrative long-term contracts, forcing taxpayers to fund the EELV boondoggle for years to come” by endorsing the formation of the ULA and awarding it contracts for a new round of EELV launches.
CAGW is correct that there are some concerns about the competitiveness of the EELV contracting process should the formation of the ULA be approved by the Federal Trade Commission. However, even without the ULA the Air Force had dropped broad hints that it would adopt a “leader-follower” approach to future EELV contact awards, ensuring that even without a 50-50 split between the two companies, the “losing” bidder would still receive a substantial share of the launches awarded. This is all rooted in the Air Force’s desire for “assured access to space” by having two different launch vehicle families available. (Under the ULA both the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 would continue to be produced, although manufacturing would be consolidated at Boeing’s Alabama plant.) So this problem really has more to do with the assured access strategy rather than the ULA itself, something that the CAGW press release glosses over.
The CAGW concludes that to “keep the U.S. space launching industry competitive, the Air Force should do whatever it can to open the field to new competitors.” That, of course, is easier said than done: about the only company that is reasonable able and interested in competing with the EELVs for the foreseeable future is SpaceX and its newly-announced Falcon 9. However, the Falcon 9 is still a few years away from entering service, and the company has yet to launch any rocket, let alone anything approaching EELV-class in performance.
Update 10/21 11 am: As one person alludes to in the comments, SpaceX filed a lawsuit on Thursday in a bid to block the ULA, according to the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. There hasn’t been an official reaction yet from Boeing, Lockheed, or the Air Force.
Does CAGW have any real following? The Norquistian bathtub drowners seem to be on the defensive lately…
“The Air Force is propping up failing ventures with lucrative long-term contracts, forcing taxpayers to fund the EELV boondoggle for years to come. To keep the U.S. space launching industry competitive, the Air Force should do whatever it can to open the field to new competitors,” Schatz concluded.
As Jeff Foust said, this is easier said than done.
What Jeff should have added is that the EELV’s most fundamental trouble is lack of demand for EELV launches. The DoD and NRO have launched fewer EELV’s than expected during the 1990’s. ( Jeff, can you find a chart showing years by year Atlas d Delta launches? )
If the EELV’s are uneconomic, just think about the costs of NASA’s two proposed Shuttle-derived missiles, given that the number of yearly launches of these is likely to be small — and that these two notionally Shuttle-derived vehicles are really quite different missiles, which will require separate, bespoke launch pads. You say the costs of Shuttle components are already sunk? Well, the same is largely true for the EELV’s.
Economy is an important reason why the EELV’s also need to be combined with whatever launch missiles NASA hopes to have after the Shuttle is retired. Just forget about that Shuttle-derived stuff, especially those unsafe, pollution-spewing Solid Rocket Boosters.
Keep the downselected EELV modular, so that we have a family of missiles appropriate for different payload sizes.
On a parallel track, develop a new technology, fully reusable launch platform suitable for putting a small four seat spacecraft into low Earth orbit. If the new spaceship is ready before the reusable launcher, have a plan B to launch the manned spacecraft on an EELV or inside a Shuttle cargo bay.
As a sop to the Thiokal/Michoud/SSME crowd and because we have to keep flying something, keep sending up Shuttle missions until another Orbiter is lost or the new spacecraft is ready.
If the Shuttles last long enough, consider using Earth orbit rendezvous of one Orbiter carrying the four seat spacecraft and one EELV carrying a departure stage/third stage/space tug to accomplish a lunar expedition. The Shuttle Orbiters are already “man-rated” — that’s the angle here.
There you have NASA’s sensible, logical, and inevitable manned space program for the next ten years or so.
P.S.: Let’s not forget to develop nuclear thermal engines for a Mars expedition. Much healthier and more fun to make the Earth-Mars voyage in closer to eight weeks than eight months.
The Shuttle Orbiters are already “man-rated” — that’s the angle here.
Except they’re not.
Except they’re not.
Explain that, please.
To return to some important points:
Accept that there has to be some sort of compromise on finishing the International Space Station. Do the following:
(1) Promise no more than eight more manned Shuttle deliveries of large ISS modules, plus one Hubble mission for the three remaining Orbiters. If present trends continue, NASA will be lucky to get nine more Shuttle trips done by the end of 2010, anyway.
(2) Explore other ways to finish the ISS on a stretched-out schedule using a space tug plus EELV’s and/or unmanned Shuttles. Shuttle-C would be useful only if it could lift more than one ISS structural module at a time.
(3) The space tug is a high priority item. It will have a lot of commonality with a departure stage/third stage to be used for lunar missions, assuming Earth orbit rendezvous of two missile launches to stage the lunar mission. Note that this “departure stage” is part of the current NASA plan.
(4) Downselect Atlas, Delta, and Shuttle-derived missiles into one modular family of missiles appropriate for medium to heavy launches.
(5) Start work on a new spacecraft. I suggest something smaller, safer, and more capable than the the proposed Steroid capsule … perhaps a four seat lifting body.
(6) Recognize that there cannot be a long gap or hiatus in manned American space flight, or else Congress and the general public might start to feel that life goes on just fine without manned American spaceflights. If necessary, eke out Shuttle operations even farther to keep the pause from becoming too long. That is, eke out Shuttle flgihts even longer if there are flyable Shuttle Orbiters remaining after nine more missions.
This is another thing that bothers me about NASA’s current plan. It seems that there will be a long gap in all US manned spaceflight from late 2010 to 2015 or so. That gap is too long to bear psychologically.
(6) Make plans for a lower-budget return to the Moon before 2018. Don’t keep this secret, but don’t overhype it as the Grand Vision either.
Definitely not manrated. STS lacks an abort capability for the vast majority of its flight regime.
Please define abort capability. Does it include being able to throttle off, turn off, and shut down all rocket motors?
In today’s LA Times their is an article about Elon Musk taking on the ULA for being a monopoly. It seems the right thing to do. Elon is willing to joust with the big boys before all his possible Government business is locked up. But would the commercial launch industry be better served by keeping their rival in a cozy, singular poisition until their product is ready for the market. I sincerely hope that when Space X brings Falcon 9 to the market it helps to foster more competition and it brings down the government owned Ariane, ULA and Russian product.
Elon showed his true colors when he attacked Kistler’s data sharing agreement with NASA. He doesn’t want competition, he wants a monopoly with his company in charge.
I don’t really blame him — he’s spent a lot of money on SpaceX and obviously he wants to make it back. But having SpaceX be the only new launch company is not necessarily in our interests, either as a country or as advocates for space commerce.
— Donald
It seems to me that all Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing is asking for the opportunity to compete for government launch contracts. Here is a link to Musk’s testimony to congress where he discusses his motives for challenging the NASA Kistler contract. The data sharing agreement was a 250 million dollar contract that was issued to Kistler without any competition for the contract.
First, Sam Hoffman is off the mark. The people who would like to drown the government in the bathtub are still very powerful in Washington. They are in a defensive stance only because they are succeeding. And obviously NASA is in that bathtub along with the rest.
Second, CAGW has a point. Both the United Space Alliance and the United Launch Alliance are the space-industrial complex at its worst. That the Air Force read the writing on the wall ahead of time doesn’t make it any better. Eisenhower’s famous warning is dead.
Explain that, please.
What’s to explain? It does not meet NASA’s own established criteria for man rating (which demonstrates the pointlessness of the phrase). As another poster pointed out, it has no abort capability for the first two minutes of flight, and very little immediately after SRB separation, until later in the trajectory.
Robert: I don’t dispute that Mr. Musk was probably within his rights — and, in fact, I have a great deal of admoration for what he has accomplished. However, the net effect was to remove any near-term competition other than the Pegasus. Mr. Musk undoubtedly knew that was the likely outcome. Likewise, Mr. Musk has taken on a number of Air Force contracts that I do not believe were competatively awarded and probably amount to little more than hidden development subsidies.
In some ways, Kistler was a more interesting vehicle, and given a chance it may have done more to reduce costs than the relatively conventional rockets Mr. Musk is building. Whatever the rights and wrongs, we are now likely never to know.
— Donald
On another topic, I just read an interesting passage demonstrating why automated missions, and particularly remote sensing, cannot be relied upon for accurate science. From NASA’s Apollo results site: Only after the Apollo 17 mission when the absolute age of the samples could be measured was it realized that the DMD [Dark Mantle Deposit] was not as young as previously thought. It turns out the DMDs are composed of very fine-grained volcanic beads and the unconsolidated nature of the deposit allows small impact craters to degrade very rapidly. This is why older DMDs can have fewer craters than other geologic units that are younger.
It pays to go and look. It double pays to get absolute age measurements.
— Donald
Only after the Apollo 17 mission when the absolute age of the samples could be measured was it realized that the DMD [Dark Mantle Deposit] was not as young as previously thought.
Doanld, I fail to see how that is an argument for manned lunar exploration instead of remotely commanded, umanned prospecting. Your example tends to demonstrate the limits of human poke-it-and-eyball-it methods. The human explorers in your example did not realize what they had in hand — literally in gloved hand.
A robotic, remotely commanded explorer might have done as well or better at a lower cost.
“The human explorers in your example did not realize what they had in hand — literally in gloved hand.
A robotic, remotely commanded explorer might have done as well or better at a lower cost.”
Maybe, if all you want to do is find out what the lunar dirt is made of. But if you want to use the lunar dirt to make something….
“Maybe, if all you want to do is find out what the lunar dirt is made of. But if you want to use the lunar dirt to make something….”
….You’d use a teleoperated bobcat.
The point with Apollo-17 is that large, diverse samples were obtained by intelligent collectors in in a known context in real-time. That has been achieved nowhere else, including on the moon. Sure, some of that can be automated, but is the cost _really_ less than sending a crew? Asif’s comparison of Apollos 11 and 12 with the cost and results of the Soviet Luna efforts suggests that the answer to this question, at the very least, is not a simple black-or-white no.
Nobody really knows, but the projected costs of automating the Hubble repair — unlike the moon, a relatively simple and well-understood object with known interfaces — should give robotics advocates pause. As should the repeated failure to _reliably_ automate such apparently simple operations as docking two spacecraft in Earth orbit. If we can’t do it here, why do you think we can do it on the moon, let alone Mars? We are spending huge sums failing to automate relatively simple tasks, when sending an astronaut may cost more up front but, once there, they can do the task quickly, reliably, easily, and repeatedly.
— Donald
As should the repeated failure to _reliably_ automate such apparently simple operations as docking two spacecraft in Earth orbit. If we can’t do it here, why do you think we can do it on the moon, let alone Mars?
Technolgy tends to improve as time goes on. In the old days, all railroad spikes were driven into the wooden ties by hand, but then technology got better and the steam drill ( actually what we would call a steam-powered hammer ) beat John Henry.