Congress, NASA

HLV costs and sidemount options

In its report to Congress earlier this week, NASA concluded that its “Reference Vehicle Design” for a heavy-lift vehicle, using five-segment SRBs and five SSMEs on the external tank based core stage, would not fit into the cost and schedule requirements of the NASA authorization bill. The report, though, did not indicate by how much that proposed design misses the mark, something Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Bill Nelson criticized a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden on Thursday. Just how much would that HLV cost to build?

In a post on his blog at Air & Space magazine, Paul Spudis finds some answers in the form of a preliminary cost and schedule assessment performed by NASA last year. A 100-metric ton HLV like the one mentioned in the NASA report this week, with five-segment SRBs and five SSMEs, would cost $14.9 billion to develop; tacking on an upper stage to increase its lift to 130 metric tons would add $2 billion to the development cost. The 100MT version would be ready by the beginning of 2018, one year past the authorization bill’s deadline, while the 130MT version would not be available until three years after that.

Spudis uses his post to advocate for an alternative concept also studied last year: a shuttle-derived sidemount vehicle. That vehicle could lift 70-100 metric tons, according to the NASA study, but cost only $7.6 billion to develop and be ready by the authorization act’s deadline of the end of 2016. That cost estimate would appear to fit easily within the authorization act’s budget profile as well, which provides $6.9 billion through FY2013. Spudis adds that a sidemount vehicle could be upgraded to meet the ultimate goal of 130 tons through the use of five-segment SRBs, four SSMEs, and an extended tank.

“Curiously, the new NASA Authorization Act of 2010 was remarkably specific about the requirements of a new heavy lift vehicle the agency had been directed to build,” Spudis writes. However, the report language accompanying the bill was also very specific, in such a way that works against a sidemount concept. As noted here back in August, the report accompanying the Senate version of the authorization bill—the version passed by the House and signed into law in the fall—was very specific about the kind of HLV they were looking for: (emphasis added)

The Committee anticipates that in order to meet the specified vehicle capabilities and requirements, the most cost-effective and ‘evolvable’ design concept is likely to follow what is known as an ‘in-line’ vehicle design, with a large center tank structure with attached multiple liquid propulsion engines and, at a minimum, two solid rocket motors composed of at least four segments being attached to the tank structure to form the core, initial stage of the propulsion vehicle. The Committee will closely monitor NASA’s early planning and design efforts to ensure compliance with the intent of this section.

The HEFT concepts included in the NASA report, as well as the Jupiter designs proposed by the DIRECT team, would satisfy that language. A sidemount concept, though, not being inline, would violate that language. Report language does not contain the force of law, but not being responsive to it would likely raise questions among those in Congress who got that section into the report (as noted by the “closely monitor” language in the same section). So what exactly did members who inserted that language in the bill have in mind, if at least the existing NASA HEFT HLV concepts technically satisfy the report language but fall short on cost and schedule?

203 comments to HLV costs and sidemount options

  • Pathfinder_01

    The lower the lift amount the more attractive upgrading the EELV becomes. The idea was to force NASA to build something shuttle derived not give this country an HLV designed with the taxpayer in mind.

  • “A sidemount concept, though, not being inline, would violate that language. Report language does not contain the force of law”

    Exactly. And the answer to that “concern” is simple: Shuttle sidemount gives you an affordable on-schedule HLV; the inline version does not.

  • Since nothing NASA builds ever arrives on cost or on schedule, these estimated numbers are meaningless.

  • Scott Bass

    I remain against side mount, Still would prefer an Ares V type vehicle, other than that they might as well just give all the money to space x, my gut feeling is that group could build a better heavy lift than any of these cost plus contracts will give us. It is kinda sad humor since NASA does not actually build anything, I don’t really see a reason why all these major contracts have to go to Boeing, lockheed etc. I guess I am just saying, eliminate cost plus and then look closely and see who bids on the contract, if lockheed or whoever gave the best bid then fine, let the best company win. SpaceX has definitely proven they have the right stuff…. in my eyes anyway

  • Joe

    If we are going to play “space lawyer” the language says “is likely to follow what is known as an ‘in-line’ vehicle design” (emphasis on “likey).

    If the Side Mount can met the performance characteristics defined in the bill (and I also think that it can meet at least the 70-100 ton initial requirement), I don’t know that Congress is going to “quibble”.

    I think it would be advisable for all of us to take the advise of the Betty Davis character from the old movie “All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”. :)

  • Anne Spudis

    “Letter from Sen. Nelson and Sen. Hutchison to NASA
    Administrator Bolden Regarding Space Launch System / Multi-purpose
    Crew Vehicle” — Jan 13, 2011 [Excerpt] Finally, we would like to
    clarify our intent when stating “to the extent practicable” in the
    Authorization Act, such as the direction to leverage Shuttle and
    Constellation capabilities “to the extent practicable” in
    developing the Space Launch System and the multi-purpose crew
    vehicle. Federal courts have held that the phrase “to the maximum
    extent practicable” imposes “a clear duty on [an] agency to fulfill
    the [relevant] statutory command to the extent that it is feasible
    or possible*’ (Fund for Animals v. Babbitt, 903 F. Supp. 96,107
    (D.D.C. 1995) (noting that the phrase “does not permit an agency
    unbridled discretion”), Further, the Government Accountability
    Office has determined that “where Congress directs that a
    [contracting] preference be given to the greatest extent
    practicable, an agency must either provide the preference or
    articulate a reasoned explanation of why it is impracticable to do
    so” (Ocuto Blacktop & Paving Company, Inc., Opinion B-284 1
    65, March 1,2000 (holding the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to
    demonstrate why providing a contract preference to a local business
    was impracticable)). Thus, in the context of the NASA Authorization
    Act, we believe that those statutorily directed actions to be
    performed by NASA “to the maximum extent practicable” or “to the
    extent practicable,” such as the requirement in Section 302 of the
    law to extend or modify existing contracts, should be carried out,
    unless the agency can demonstrate why they are infeasible or
    impossible to perform. As we noted in a statement yesterday, the
    NASA Authorization Act of 201 0 that we worked so hard to pass last
    year is not an optional, advisory document: it is the law. We
    fought for this legislation because it was the right solution to
    the extraordinary challenge we face. We look forward to continuing
    to work with NASA to ensure the vitality of our Nation’s space
    program. [End Excerpt]
    http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=35805

  • Pathfinder_01

    The law also states evolvable to 130tons with an upper
    stage, side mount tops out around 70-80 tons.

  • Gary Anderson

    I know I’m a dreamer, and one who takes offense regarding
    anti-conservative political discourse. However, my few posts point
    out I’m in favor of a different direction. I am looking at the
    side-by-side photo conceptual idea of a shuttle derived HLV in
    http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1101/14heavylift/ Can’t we have
    the best of both worlds? I’m not a scientist, I am not an engineer.
    For …sakes I failed Trig & Physics so many years ago. But
    heck, 1. can’t we strap 4 five segment solids on the shuttle tank
    five engine idea; 2. Where they intend J-2x goes, can’t we spend
    some money & and a little more time on Chang’s Plasma
    engine down in Costa Rica; 3. add 4x the volume of the Orion crew
    capsule; 4. enlarge a fairing; 5. Put four of these inter-luna,
    deep space dreamers into LEO, and send out a fleet to different
    places at the same time? It can’t be that difficult. How many
    flights do we track at any one time around the world? I’m talking
    4! Gary Anderson Conservative Republican Pro-Obama (Space direction
    only) Dreamer

  • Robert G. Oler

    Paul Spudis wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 8:50 am Shuttle
    sidemount gives you an affordable on-schedule HLV; the inline
    version does not…. you should know better then that. First there
    has not been a SINGLE NASA project in HSF in 30 years that came
    anywhere near cost or budget or time table… But there is nothing
    affordable about a SDV sidemount vehicle. It cost 7-8 billion on
    paper…and then we need a second stage which both lowers the
    amount on orbit and cost more money to develop…and then there are
    the fixed cost of 200-300 million a month that any shuttle derived
    vehicle is going to take as well as unknown launch cost. You either
    have no clue what affordable means or you are being misleading And
    expendable derived 70 ton lifter is affordable. It shares some cost
    with other things…there is nothing affordable about shuttle
    hardware. Robert G. Oler

  • NASA Fan

    @ Joe In “All About Eve”, the older more established
    actress, Betty Davis’s character (NASA), was nearing the end of her
    career, and trying to hang on to the spot light of center stage
    (listening NASA HSF?), while she was being threatened by an up and
    coming younger actress Eve, (Space X) who would kill her mother to
    be star. Funny how life imitates art…

  • Robert G. Oler

    NASA Fan wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 12:22 am Not sure
    why HSF is seen as a way to sustain the lv industry, when the
    ‘mission’ of HSF is so dubious… I would argue that HSF has never
    had a real chance to enter an “innovative” stage…because 1) the
    price point for access has done nothing but go up and 2) what
    humans can do in space is so restrictive right now by NASA and 3)
    the cost of keeping people in space encourages the use of robotics.
    What is so important about SpaceX and Virgin and all the other
    folks is that at least so far they have found a solid engineering
    management scheme that can do things cheaper…and that will in my
    view open the barrier to lowering the price point. A reasonable
    analogy is the South Pole. The centerpiece of this post is the
    goofy idea of a side mount shuttle derived vehicle. This ia an
    attempt to preserve the notion of human space flight run as a
    government venture…it is like trying to keep everything at the
    south pole done by the Navy and done with dog sleds and other ways
    …not incorporating airplanes. Musk and others are the “airplanes”
    to the dog sleeds of NASA…they are innovative methods of lowering
    the price point which then allows more innovative thought into how
    to do things in space…and a reasonable management of risk.
    Nothing government derived does this..only by feeding in the well
    regulated commercial sector can this happen. Paul wants to spend 8
    billiondeveloping another shuttle derived vehicle. That launches A
    LOT OF FALCONS/Delta/Atlas/etc boosters… all Spudis preserves is
    a job program Robert G. Oler

  • Scott Bass

    Question, how much could the Aries v lift without the jx2
    second stage….I have never see a break down, ie could it fly on
    it’s own as a liquid fuel rocket? Capability with 4 segment strap
    ons? Capability with 5 segment strap ons and finally with the jx2 .
    Anyone have a break down on this?

  • Egad

    Once either the in-line or side-mount variants are
    developed, are there estimates of what it will cost to operate them
    (marginal cost per flight plus infrastructure maintenance, whatever
    that might be)?

  • Martijn Meijering

    Shuttle sidemount gives you an affordable on-schedule HLV;

    We don’t need one. We already have launch vehicles.

  • Egad wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 10:53 am

    Once either the in-line or side-mount variants are
    developed, are there estimates of what it will cost to operate them
    (marginal cost per flight plus infrastructure maintenance, whatever
    that might be)?…

    about the same as a space shuttle mission.

    The great claim is that processing the orbiter takes a lot ofman hours and it does…but a Shuttle C (which this is) has just about the same requirements to process what ever payload flies on it…and of course nothing is different with the engines…

    there have never been any serious savings justified on a per mission basis for an uncrewed vehicle. the cost go down per pound because the uncrewed version lifts more payload.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Joe

    NASA Fan wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 10:37 am
    “ Joe In “All About Eve”, the older more established actress, Betty Davis’s character (NASA), was nearing the end of her
    career, and trying to hang on to the spot light of center stage (listening NASA HSF?), while she was being threatened by an up and coming younger actress Eve, (Space X) who would kill her mother tobe star. Funny how life imitates art…”

    Yes, and in the last scene (before Eve has even had her first starring role) an even newer actress (played by Marilyn Monroe) enters the scene and Eve realizes that her own exit was already being planned by her “friends”. One of the reasons I like the movie is that it is a one of a kind mix of “chick flick” and “film noir”.

    You are drastically over analyzing a pun (did you even notice the “smiley face” at the end).

  • amightywind

    Yikes. Have we learned nothing in 30 years? If we aspire to
    develop another vehicle with a 2% catastrophic failure probability,
    then yes, use a side mount design. It is a laughable non-starter.
    Paul Spudis should stick to science and let the engineers develop
    the rockets. Its too bad there are so many prominent voices in the
    science community and so few in engineering.

  • Coastal Ron

    Paul Spudis wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 8:50 am
    Exactly. And the answer to that “concern” is simple:
    Shuttle sidemount gives you an affordable on-schedule HLV; the
    inline version does not.
    ” If we’re talking about
    affordability, then there are even better choices available –
    existing launchers. I’m still waiting to see if you’ll be
    publishing my comments on your Air & Space blog article
    (wrote it last night, not showing yet this morning), but I’ll post
    a portion of what I wrote here. In essence, we don’t have a defined
    mission that requires anything larger than Delta IV Heavy. Congress
    and others may have dreams of something grand, but there is no
    program or money for it. The Side Mount launcher mentioned assumes
    a cost $28.6B for development and 18 missions (their figures),
    which puts up about 4M lb of mass to LEO (equal to 5 ISS). Assuming
    we could afford to build that much payload to send to space, let’s
    look at delivery alternatives: – Delta IV Heavy can put 50,000 lb
    into LEO, and we’ll assume $300M/launch (what ULA quoted for a
    human-rated version, so it’s high), so it would cost $24B, or $4.6B
    less than Side Mount. – Falcon 9 Heavy can put 70,000 lb into LEO,
    and it is advertised for $95M/launch, so it would cost $5.4B, or
    $23.2B less than Side Mount. WOW!!! – For kicks and giggles, let’s
    look at what Elon Musk has proposed for their Falcon XX launcher,
    which would be government funded. He stated he could develop the XX
    for $2.5B, and that it would cost $300M/launch and place 300,000 lb
    in LEO. Instead of $2.5B, let’s say it takes $7.6B, just like Side
    Mount, but because Falcon XX flies for $300M/launch, and puts
    300,000 lb in LEO, it would only cost $11.8B, or $16.8B less than
    Side Mount, and a more capable launcher than Side Mount mass
    & size-wise. Less expensive alternatives to Side Mount
    exist, or available in the same time frame. Since everyone is
    guessing what size launcher we need, we should use existing
    launchers until a clear need is established. Right now Congress is
    funding the SLS for political, not program needs, so their goal is
    to spend money, not for any particular capability. If they were
    concerned about cost, they would be listening to the red flags NASA
    is throwing up, and asking them for alternatives (like Side Mount)
    – but they’re not. Oh, and Paul, will you be publishing my comments
    on your Air & Space article? Lots of facts and figures,
    although they don’t support your narrative… ;-)

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Scott Bass, A five-engine stretched-tank in-line SDLV
    with five-segment RSRMs should be able to lift about 100 metric
    tonnes to LEO but could send it no further. It would be too heavy
    to launch with the shuttle-type 4-segment RSRM. It certainly
    couldn’t launch without boosters of some kind
    and wouldn’t even be able to stand up without them as it hangs from
    the upper booster attachment points rather than resting on the main
    engine thrust structure the way most ELVs do. Oh, and it’s spelt
    Ares-V” as in the god of war, the Hellenic name
    for Mars. NASA has done a study (I think it was part of the HEFT
    report) that actually said that J-2X has an inferior performance
    for crewed planetary missions than clusters of the RL-10B-2 or the
    RL-60. J-2X is something of a relic of Ares-I’s under-performance –
    It needed a hydrolox engine powerful enough to push it through the
    middle atmosphere, something that the EELV’s with their
    longer-lasting core stages do not. Personally, my eye was caught by
    the report’s brief mention of an EELV-heritage vehicle with a
    1.25Mlbf kerolox core engine and an evolved hydrolox upper stage.
    I’d really be interested in knowing more about that project,
    although it’s likely so classified that it’d give the President a
    nose-bleed.

  • Martijn Meijering

    I’m still waiting to see if you’ll be publishing
    my comments on your Air & Space blog article (wrote it last
    night, not showing yet this morning), but I’ll post a portion of
    what I wrote here.
    Heh. In essence, we don’t
    have a defined mission that requires anything larger than Delta IV
    Heavy.
    And if there were such a mission, it could and
    should be redefined so as not to need it.

  • Vladislaw

    Legacy hardware = legacy costs. For the shuttle it was 200
    million a month, lets say they chop some of that for a SDLV and it
    is only 150 million a month. If it takes 7 years to develop ( I
    wouldn’t take that bet) you are looking at 12.6 billion for the
    jobs program. SpaceX will do 125 tons for 3 billion. Either Delta
    or Atlas can be upgraded for about the same money. Why ANYTHING
    shuttle is even being debated is beyond me. And we wonder why
    Russia is launching our astronauts for us. The dumbing down of
    America ‘on steroids’. You can’t make this stuff up, it is right
    out of the movie Idiocracy, at the rate America is going that movie
    will come true.

  • Coastal Ron wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 11:47 am

    Oh I wouldnt hold my breath…Paul does not tolerate dissenting opinions all that well.

    What Spudis wants is a “you have to use it” launcher. If NASA spends XX billion and develops a Shuttle xomething then the notion is “you have to use it”…so the launches are “free” to then we have to have payloads for them.

    Thats the mentality that has plauged NASA ever since they got the shuttle…”we are going to launch X or XX anyway so we have to put something on them”.

    Dog wont hunt anymore

    Robert G. Oler

  • Byeman

    “Have we learned nothing in 30 years? If we aspire to
    develop another vehicle with a 2% catastrophic failure probability,
    then yes, use a side mount design.”

    Obvious, windy does know anything about launch vehicles.
    a. Sidemount is not an orbiter and therefore not subject to the same damage as Columbia. Additionally, Columbia was not a launch vehicle failure.
    b. On the other hand, since sidemount and inline use the same hardware, they have the same reliability.

  • Dennis Berube

    You guys get me, by continually shouting that NASA is a jobs program! I say, what is wrong with people having and keeping jobs? We need jobs here in America, as they all seem to be going overseas and to Mexico. While NASA can be in part a jobs program, we are also learning much about our solar system and Universe. People are working hard to find these things out and of course it will take money. If you worked for NASA would you want your job cut???? I think not! NASA needs to watch where its money goes at a closer level, and attempt to achieve greatness while staying in budget. Stop with the pork talk and the jobs talk, as its seems no one here likes us utilzing the Soyuz to take astronauts into space either. That is giving jobs to Russians. If Delta IV is ready to carry Orion, then fine, If instead Atlas or SpaceX or whomever, lets just get the ball rolling. Somebody has to do it and therefore people must have jobs in their respective lines of work to get it done. I think one problem with regards to cost is that it takes years to complete a project. In the interim cost escalate and so over runs happen. It should be curtailed as much as possible, but I dont think it will be eliminated. With even the military talking of the rising cost for their rockets, does anyone thing Delta IV and Atlas V wont be more in a few years?

  • Dennis Berube

    Just one more thing, is that everyone here, save a few, have all these suggestions for NASA and how it should go this way or that, yet I dont see any one of you showing how to really drop the price of spaceflight down to the thousand dollar a pound level. Everything here is still talking millions of dollars for launching anything larger than a sputnik!

  • Martijn Meijering

    yet I dont see any one of you showing how to really drop the price of spaceflight down to the thousand dollar a pound level

    Explained many times, but you prefer to continue shilling for a jobs program.

  • Scott Bass

    Thanks Ben for the explanation

  • Dennis Berube

    How much is SpaceX paying per pound to launch its Dragon
    spacecraft?

  • Dennis Berube

    Jobs program or not, would you rather see us continue to
    pay other nations to launch our astronauts, and keep THEM working,
    while they benefit from our technologies already learned? If Musk
    can pull it off, Im for it, but he hasnt yet. Until people fly the
    Dragon, we will still fly Soyuz! How much a pound is the cost to
    launch a Dragon? If Dragon can be used in a modified form for deep
    space, Im all for that. However this still hasnt got us far enough
    up that road to stop paying, what is it 50 mil a seat on
    Soyuz!

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 1:31 pm You
    guys get me, by continually shouting that NASA is a jobs program! I
    say, what is wrong with people having and keeping jobs? …. the
    jobs at NASA are supported by the taxpayers…that means that other
    peoples money is being confiscated to support those jobs. This
    implies but no longer in the US means that those jobs should do
    something that “pays back” to the people who support them a value
    that at least equals the cost and maybe exceeds it. A Full
    performance air traffic controller is paid about the same amount
    that a shuttle commander is. (not exactly but close) now you tell
    me which one has demonstrated value to the taxpayers and which one
    does not? That is the main objection…but there are others. Tax
    dollars should be spent efficiently AND should create
    infrastructure that private individuals can access or services
    which change the lives of private individuals. I am a supporter of
    free enterprise regulated by government. To the extent that
    government does things that free enterprise can do, then the only
    reason for that should be an overriding national interest. Sorry
    NASA HSF is ajobs program. Robert G. Oler

  • Rube Goldberg

    I’m not a scientist, I am not an engineer. For
    …sakes I failed Trig & Physics so many years ago. But heck,
    1. can’t we strap 4 five segment solids on the shuttle tank five
    engine idea
    Just offhand because it will destroy the
    crawlers, sink down into the pavement of the crawlerway and fall
    over.

  • Vladislaw

    “You guys get me, by continually shouting that
    NASA is a jobs program! I say, what is wrong with people having and
    keeping jobs? We need jobs here in America,”
    Well if the
    NASA monopoly for human spaceflight transportation is a good thing
    for the Nation and makes the Nation better off, why stop there?
    Let’s have the federal government, with our tax dollars, buy up all
    the trains, planes and ships and over staff them with multiple
    redundent layers of managers. Hell we can solve this unemployment
    problem in no time at all. Lets just create and give unproductive
    jobs to everyone. Maybe, while we are at it, we can also bring back
    the buggy whip manufactureres, they can work side by side with the
    shuttle workers once the shuttle is retired. You just never know
    when they might be needed. The government is not supposed to be a
    jobs mill, that is what we have the private sector for. The
    government should be trying to use the multiplier effect, in
    particular the Fiscal multiplier “In
    economics, the fiscal multiplier is the ratio of a change in
    national income to the change in government spending that causes
    it. More generally, the exogenous spending multiplier is the ratio
    of a change in national income to any autonomous change in spending
    (private investment spending, consumer spending, government
    spending, or spending by foreigners on the country’s exports) that
    causes it. When this multiplier exceeds one, the enhanced effect on
    national income is called the multiplier effect. The mechanism that
    can give rise to a multiplier effect is that an initial incremental
    amount of spending can lead to increased consumption spending,
    increasing income further and hence further increasing consumption,
    etc., resulting in an overall increase in national income greater
    than the initial incremental amount of spending. In other words, an
    initial change in aggregate demand may cause a change in aggregate
    output (and hence the aggregate income that it generates) that is a
    multiple of the initial change.”
    The federal government
    invests 300 million to fund the Dragon for human assess to LEO, it
    leads to six launches per year for a total of 42 passengers paying
    20 million a seat or 840 million in economic activity. Instead, we
    waste how much with the authorization / appropriations / CR /
    Constellation cancelation? 500 million in dead end spending that
    will not give us any multipler effect. Let’s create real jobs for
    new emerging markets, especially in a global market that America is
    uniquely capable of capturing for the 21st century. The XPrize was
    10 million and it generated over 100 million in investment spending
    and is poised to produce over one billion in economic activity.
    This seems to be something Paul Spudis refuses to acknowledge. I
    just wish he would rewrite his 88 billion dollar lunar program and
    allocate 1% – 10% for Xprize competitions.

  • Dennis Berube

    You think a shuttle commander is of no importance to the
    tax payer????? WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW! The shuttle commander should
    make more than the traffic controller, not the same. Who is taking
    a bigger risk to life and limb? You Mr. Oler havent come up with a
    plan for reducing the cost of launch to a thousand a pound either,
    and you are the biggest talker on these post! I know if I had a job
    at NASA, I would feel very lucky and I certainly would not want it
    to end and probably would not have retired at 62, because of the
    importance of what I was doing! I think most people here who voice
    the jobs program issue are jealous cause they dont work for NASA.
    Id be proud to, even being a janitor at NASA. Mr. Oler if you are
    so smart, come up with a plan to help reduce the cost to launch
    back to a thousand a pound, likt the shuttle was originally
    supposed to do! If never did! I dont see it coming from here
    either. NASA needs some great think tanks with minds that can think
    outside the box, if it is ever to be realized. I heard that
    progress toward a space elevator is moving along. Now tha tmight do
    it, but until then we will pay!

  • Dennis Berube

    Spin offs from the space program have been always
    forthcoming, so indirectly the tax payer gets it back. I think here
    the problem is with exploration. Should we spend the money to go
    into deep space or not. Should we stay trapped on a planet that
    will eventually run out of natural supplies to sustain us. It is
    predicted that by 2016, or 2018 the worlds population will reach
    the 9 billion mark! Can our world sustain that by clinging to just
    our planets resources? I think not, and if humanity is to progress
    and expand itself, we MUST move off planet. The only other
    alternative is a doomsday war, which I know I dont want to see.
    Limitless resources await us if we but find away to go and get
    them. At first it will cost plenty, but as our tech. improves, so
    to will our ability to gather those resources for less cost. Going
    just to orbit, doesnt gain us the ground needed to sustain a
    growing 9 billion plus population. Our feable efforts at birth
    control dont work, and unless, as stated before a nuclear war,
    decides the outcome for humanity, we must progress in space. I have
    been through the Vietnam war, and NEVER want to see another. While
    we waste lives and resources in the middle east, it is a joke, as
    we will never win there either.

  • Vladislaw

    Lunar water $1 billion Xprize, the first team that produces
    water from lunar resources. 1st place 500 million 2nd place 300
    million 3rd place 200 million Lunar oxygen $1 billion Xprize, the
    first team that produces oxygen from lunar resources. 1st place 500
    million 2nd place 300 million 3rd place 200 million Lunar hydrogen
    $1 billion Xprize, the first team that produces hydrogen from lunar
    resources. 1st place 500 million 2nd place 300 million 3rd place
    200 million ———— I would be a lot more comfortable spending
    3 billion this way. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer a single dime
    until someone does it.

  • Dennis Berube

    As to the X prize, have any of you won the money?????? I am
    for free enterprise, but I am also for pushing deep space
    exploration along. I agree NASA often gets bogged down in politics,
    which is now adays everyones problem. These things need to be
    corrected, and I believe that can be. I guess you would rather see
    the money going down the middle east hole, with no gains from it
    but death. It is good that NASA is attempting to have competition
    that MAY open up new venues for future studies. However some will
    go the way of the Dodo bird, while others and very few will
    survive. As I stated above, if you brainiacs have a plan for
    reducing cost to orbit approach NASA. I hear nothing but mumbling
    and hot air. No body has mentioned how the military is a jobs
    program either. It certainly is, but I dont hear the condemnation
    of it like that against NASA! What is the problem here?

  • Vladislaw

    “The shuttle commander should make more than the
    traffic controller, not the same. Who is taking a bigger risk to
    life and limb?”
    . So if risk is the issue then how much
    should a G.I. Joe make that is shipping out to
    pipelinestan?

  • Dennis Berube

    One more thing about jobs programs. Why not teach your kids
    at home, and end the public school system, from which I retired?
    Thats a jobs program. We can go on and on. Some cities support
    their fire and rescue too, why not just let eveyone take care of
    themselves? Why dont the politicians stop giving themselve big
    raises evey year, while the little man of Social Security doesnt
    get a raise? That wont happen will it? Not only does NASA help in
    scientific exploration, but too, it pushes our technologies to
    their limits and we progress from this, both socially and
    militarily. If we do not have a strong backing in the engineering
    and science fields we will lose in the end.

  • James T

    As probably the biggest space elevator supporter on this
    blog, I’ll have to admit that it most certainly is NOT “moving
    along” as fast as one might hope. I feel more research dollars
    should be spent on it, but it’ll be quite some time before we can
    get serious on such an endeavor. We’ll still need to be using
    rocket technology until that time (we also of course need rockets
    to launch the deployment satellite and ribbon into orbit)…. I
    just don’t think we need the HLV as quickly as congress wants one.
    I feel strongly that commercial will be ready to taxi our
    astronauts to the ISS before we really have to get upset that we’re
    still paying the Russians to do it, so the only utility for a HLV
    is for as of yet to be clearly defined missions in next
    decade.

  • James T

    @ Dennis um…. you’re way wrong on that population
    estimate. It’ll reach 7 billion by those year. 9 billion is the
    projected population for 2050.

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 2:36 pm You
    think a shuttle commander is of no importance to the tax payer?????
    WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW! The shuttle commander should make more than
    the traffic controller, not the same. Who is taking a bigger risk
    to life and limb?… if risk to life and limb is the metric then
    firefighters, police officers, Marines in Fallujah should get the
    most money…but its not figured that way. And no “spin offs” dont
    pay back the dollars invested in the space program…HSF has been a
    consumer of technology for sometime…not a producer of it. Look
    exploration of deep space is going on. As I type this CAssini is
    teaching us new things about Saturn, Messenger is headed for
    Mercury to rewrite the text books etc… What you mean is human
    exploration of deep space but there is almost no data that says the
    bang for that activity is anywhere near the buck required. Until
    the price comes down, then robotics are just the game going. Sorry.
    Robert G. Oler

  • Pathfinder_01

    The Military serves a vital function. Manned spaceflight
    while important is not as important as that. Even the Military does
    not have as many people active as it did at other times in its
    history(cold war…) and the role of those that are active have
    changed. For instance there are fewer people behind the lines
    serving the front line. In the case of NASA, parts will survive and
    are needed but other parts may have outlived their
    function.

  • Coastal Ron

    Page breaks seem to be acting up again… Dennis Berube
    wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 2:36 pm “ Mr. Oler if you
    are so smart, come up with a plan to help reduce the cost to launch
    back to a thousand a pound, likt the shuttle was originally
    supposed to do!
    ” My input on this is that the $1,000/lb
    cost to LEO for the Shuttle was based on unrealistic math, so using
    that as justification for anything is silly. The real comparison is
    whether launch costs continue to drop, which they are for certain
    fungible classes of payloads (10,000 & 20,000 kg to LEO).
    But if the $1,000/lb to LEO figure is so important to you Dennis,
    then you’ll be pleased to hear that SpaceX is advertising their
    Falcon 9 Heavy for $95M/launch, and with a payload of 70,548 lb to
    LEO, that equals $1,347/lb. Falcon 9 Heavy is a near term
    commercial solution. For a solution that is a little further out,
    Falcon XX was quoted by Musk as costing $300M/launch to put up to
    300,000 lb into LEO, or $1,000/lb. You happy? Compare those SpaceX
    prices to what the Side Mount would cost for launching 70-100mt.
    The NASA Watch chart that Spudis references calls out for Side
    Mount to cost $1.167B/launch (no DDT&E), which would equal
    $7,560/lb for the 70mt version, or $5,292/lb for the 100mt version.
    So the answer is clear, and that is to let the commercial aerospace
    industry compete to deliver the payloads NASA wants put into space.
    And while I admire SpaceX for their cost effective strategies, I
    don’t want to dump one monopoly (NASA) to create another, so I
    would want launch business to continue to be spread around the
    industry to foster competition.

  • Coastal Ron

    Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
    I agree NASA often gets bogged down in politics, which is
    now adays everyones problem. These things need to be corrected, and
    I believe that can be.
    ” It’s a nice goal, but if the
    history of our Republic is any measure, politics has always been
    front and center in Washington, and there is no reason to think
    that human nature (i.e. fighting for your constituents) is going to
    change sometime in the future. Better to put your efforts into more
    achievable goals, like lowering the cost to access space…
    ;-)

  • Dennis Berube

    More on Jobs programs. Shoot America is a jobs program. Look at your highway department. Keep those roads smooth so we can travel at 70 or 80 mph, and use up tons of gas. We dont need super highways do we. We can run on dirt roads. Oh no can t give that up. If Musk can deliver, Im for it, lets watch and see. All the promises can be made in the world, as we have seen with the shuttle but few promote reality. With the inflation spiral do you think Musk will deliver on his thousand lb. promise? Just let the petro supply lines stop and see how much things rise. Already they are talking 5 a gallon within the next few years, and not just for a short period of time either, permantly! Damn how much will rocket and airline fuel cost then? I think Musk is talking hot air too, just as NASA did with the shuttle.

  • Dennis Berube

    The cold war, is over, at least that is what seems to be the talk. I think I covered the idea that our previous cold war enemies, still have their nukes aimed at us. Just as long as we keep paying money to them, they are happy. Look at all the jobs we are supplying China with. Every commodity we pick up is made in China, Korea, or some other place. Keep America paying is the rule of the day. While we do that, China is reducing its sales on important military elements, that are needed in our millitary programs. Damn thats funny, lets give them somemore money. We are borrowing money from them, now how stupid is that? It is time America went its own way, and stop paying for our friends. As I have stated earlier, if a Delta IV or Atlas V can do the jobs, great lets get on with it. Apparently our government feels NASA needs it own rocket. If American jobs are created by it I see nothing wrong with it. It is better than paying China to build our rockets. Shhhhhhhhh, our government might hear that and start down that road. Most of you were yelling for NASA to launch with a Delta or Atlas, instead of a new rocket. Then when the proposal was made to launch an Orion test flight aboard the Delta IV, you all had a bird. Cant satisfy you can they? I think that flight would be of more importance than an extra shuttle flight!

  • The Sidemount is the fastest and cheapest way to develop a heavy lift vehicle. But the inline version has some powerful assets– especially if a simple crew launch vehicle– without SRBs– can be derived from it. Such a vehicle utilized for the emerging space tourism industry could dramatically reduce the cost of the extremely expensive RS-25 rocket engines.

    Can a $20 billion a year NASA budget afford a heavy lift vehicle? Yes. But only if we really use it to conquer and commercialize cis-lunar space.

    HLVs may be the key to giving private commercial companies easy access to all areas of cis-lunar space– including the lunar surface.

    Why?

    With HLVs you can launch massive fuel depots to Earth orbit and to L1. A 100 tonne plus HLV launched fuel depot in Earth orbit combined with a 40 tonne plus fuel depot at L1 would allow a reusable ACES 41 to shuttle people on round trips between LEO and L1 perhaps 5 or 6 times. If the Earth to orbit vehicles also carry significant amounts of extra hydrogen and oxygen that can be transferred to fuel depots then perhaps up to a dozen round trips between LEO and L1 could be possible between just two deployed fuel depots at LEO and L1.

    The Spudis and Lovoie reusable lunar shuttles utilizing lunar fuels could shuttle people between L1 and the lunar surface. So if Space X or the ULA can get wealthy tourist into orbit, reusable ACES 41 cis-lunar shuttles and reusable lunar shuttles could then take them to the lunar surface and eventually back to L1 and back to Earth.

    Eventually, these space fuel depots will begin to be resupplied with fuel resources from the Moon, the asteroids, and maybe even from the moons of Mars. But HLVs would be the principal work horses of fuel depot deployment until that time comes.

    Right now, there are only 100,000 people on the planet who could afford such cis-lunar journeys. But as cost begin to fall, easy access to the lunar surface could eventually be affordable by tens of millions of people by mid-century, which could dramatically reduce the cost of cis-lunar space travel making such trips affordable to even much larger numbers of people.

  • Dennis Berube

    Plus Mr. Oler, please name me an unmanned project that has not had over runs in cost? Look at the up and coming James Webb, the Rovers on Mars, the former Mariner probes to Mars, Lunar unmanned m issions, all ended up costing more than projected. I dont think with SpaceX nor anyone else will cost be what the original estimates indicated, especially if people are in it for profit. Remember that endless inflation spiral, and the decline in natural resources? Above someone was saying Musk could launch for close to a thousand a lb. however estimates I have heard are that 20 mil. a seat is a bit more than a thousand a pound. So please tell me at 20 mil a seat, times seven, which are the projected seats available on Dragon, how that equals a thousand a pound?

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 2:36 pm

    Mr. Oler if you are
    so smart, come up with a plan to help reduce the cost to launch
    back to a thousand a pound, likt the shuttle was originally
    supposed to do! If never did!.

    I’ve pondered your question some while doing some politicing locally and getting a start on some reports I need to write about my trip here…and well the answer is pretty clear.

    I support the Obama policy. I see someone else has given you some numbers (nice job BTW)…but the only way to reduce launch cost is to do three things. First stop supporting dollars spent on programs (like the shuttle or shuttle derived vehicles) whose only successful goal is to raise not lower launch cost…and put government dollars into lift that is aimed at lowering launch cost.

    So for instance Paul S wants a sdv that cost (he claims) 8 billion or so dollars. Thats 8 billion to build a vehicle which wont lower launch cost and its 8 billion to not lift a single thing to orbit.

    So my question to Paul is why not spend that 8 billion at companies who have vehicles which have lowered cost?

    This will hopefully cause them to see the success of their efforts and start the cycle to build more vehicles which continue to lower cost.

    Second we must stop subsidizing efforts that contract not expand the pool of things that are done in space by humans. the task being performed on the space station are illustrative…MORE groups should be allowed to fly for cheaper cost. Right now the cost are staggering. To put a 300 dollar amateur radio transciever on the station was about 1 million dollars in paperwork etc…and the lift was free.

    Third we must regulate commercial ops in a manner consistent with the formation of aviation.

    Cost are not going to come down by some magical government program…but by the development cycle that private industry works.

    Thats the Obama policy and it merits support

    Robert G. Oler

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 4:27 pm

    Plus Mr. Oler, please name me an unmanned project that has not had over runs in cost?..

    yet another reason to not give NASA any more big plate items.

    They literally could not design a “head” for a price and budget.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Gregori

    “Exactly. And the answer to that “concern” is simple: Shuttle sidemount gives you an affordable on-schedule HLV; the inline version does not.”

    What you save up front in costs and schedule, you will lose in the future with sidemount. The sidemount is a terrible inefficient kludge with limited abilities to be upgraded in the future. To make such a lifter useful for Mars missions, you will end up having to redesign the whole bloody thing to be inline!!! Its really just deferring the inevitable and makes no sense. Besides that, its volume is limited compared to inline and its not exactly very safe for putting a crew on.

    Your ideas about “affordability” irk me. There are much cheaper HLV’s than shuttle derived. If the public could vote on it, I don’t think they would feel SD HLV is affordable. People in the space community seem to have an attitude that everybody should pay for their pet project!!!

  • SpaceX posts its pricing publicly at:

    http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php#pricing_and_performance

    Contrast that with a government-funded launch program which will cost … whatever it ends up costing.

  • Dennis Berube

    Mr. Oler, then say take the up and coming James Webb telescope. If NASA was not up to the task, then who should be building it? It will prove of great scientific value is completed, and will open up the Universe as never before for all mankind to witness. Do you think it should not have been built?

  • Dennis Berube

    As to space versus the aircraft industry. Lets face it, it takes alot more effort to reach space then to fly around on hang gliders. People took to the air because it was within our environment, whereas space is not. Building a method to fly proved much less costly than spaceflight, and the methods employed were not as drastic. In space one must carry everything with them. My quote on the thousand a pound, was from the early hopes for the space shuttle days. Sadly the shuttle turned into a monster. I dont downplay the accomplishments achieved by the shuttle, as we have learned much from it, but I think it was a white elephant from its inception. Though presently fiction, I still have hopes for the space elevator concept for lowering cost to orbit. Nano tech, is at the forefront of this endeavor and is another area that must be pushed forward. Do you think the space elevator is worth merit?

  • Fred Willett

    Dennis Berube wrote @
    Complaining about why so many here considered NASA a porkfest;
    Number of people to launch a Shuttle >3000
    Number of people to launch an Atlas or Delta IV around 300
    Number of people to launch a Falcon around 50
    Then, of course this reflects into costs
    Cost per flight of Shuttle $1.2B to $1.9B (over it’s lifetime)
    Cost to launch an Atlas (I hear they’ve just gone up to $180M.
    Cost to launch a Falcon 9 $50M.
    There’s a lot of flexibility in these figures (depending on the time of day).
    But which ever way you look at it the costs of Shuttle are astronomical compared to commercial launchers.
    And as well Shuttle has locked us in LEO for 30 years.
    It’s time to let the shuttle go.
    The problem is that the good politicians want to keep all the shuttle jobs.
    Most HLV designs that have been proposed cost well over the $1B a launch mark.
    Why?
    Because they use shuttle derived parts that keep in place the shuttle derived workforce and, of course, the shuttle derived costs.
    If we want to get beyond LEO we need to reduce costs.
    And that means letting the shuttle workforce go.
    It’s sad.
    But it’s necessary.
    If the politicians manage to force NASA to keep the jobs and costs, then kiss goodbye to any future beyond LEO because at $1B+ a launch there is no money left to actually do anything in space.
    Now think carefully.
    Is that what you really want?

  • James T

    I believe the space elevator has merit, but we shouldn’t hold our breath. And we’ll need an HLV (or something equivalent) to launch the ribbon and deployment equipment anyways. The question is what do we do until then? Do we continue to spend government dollars on HSF? Do we have to spend those dollars NOW or can we wait a few years to see what commercial can offer?

    I say we let commercial compete to lower our launch costs while NASA focuses on the payloads (I.e. robots and sattelites) while also getting a head start on R&D for the tech we need for future human missions and long duration habitation/colonization. We start sending humans again when it’s cheaper, safer and substainable. If we build an HLV now then we force ourselves to use it so that we can justify the cost, and that takes away from the market commercial is competing for.

  • Vladislaw

    “Shoot America is a jobs program. Look at your highway department. Keep those roads smooth so we can travel at 70 or 80 mph, and use up tons of gas. We dont need super highways do we. We can run on dirt roads.”

    The reason we fund road construction, (built and maintained by private enterprise on fix priced bids in almost all cases) is that is provides for safer transportation and a national higher productivity level. We fill the pot holes not so you can drive 80 miles but so your car doesn’t break down causing you to miss work and to cut down on accidents, again that lowers productivity.

    We are a technological nation and our productivity is based on how good our infrastructure is. Look at how well china and india do with their dirt roads. You really believe our Nation could enjoy the productivity gains we have made if 10 million workers get stuck going to work because it rains and the roads are to muddy to drive?

    Again, you are using for your example the fiscal multiplier that I wrote about earlier, we spend money on roads and the return to the Nation is measured in multiples of the amount spent.

    I would like to see the same thing done for space transportation, take it out of the hands of the National monopoly called NASA and have NASA just purchase a competitively bid transportation service to move X tons to point Y in space.

  • Dennis Berube wrote:

    Mr. Oler, then say take the up and coming James Webb telescope. If NASA was not up to the task, then who should be building it? It will prove of great scientific value is completed, and will open up the Universe as never before for all mankind to witness. Do you think it should not have been built?

    What is the government’s incentive to build it on time and on budget? There is none. I’m sure we can all cite many examples of space, defense and other programs that cost a lot more than promised when the program was authorized, and were delayed by years.

    Let’s use Hubble as an example. It was originally supposed to cost $400 million. The final tab was $2.5 billion. It fell years behind schedule, and when it was deployed it turned out the mirror was flawed, which delayed its effective use for years more and raised the cost even more.

    Has Hubble delivered unparalleled research? Indisputably. Did the project go way over budget, fall years behind, and have an embarrassing basic flaw that made NASA a laughingstock? Yes it did.

    The public isn’t going to tolerate this kind of sloppy expensive work any more. The government can’t afford it with trillion-dollar annual deficits into the foreseeable future. NASA and other space programs are low-lying fruit easily pruned should Congress ever get serious about cutting the budget. No one outside a few space groupies will shed a tear if the Webb telescope program gets cancelled.

    Government-funded human spaceflight won’t be far behind if NASA can’t get its act together. STS-133 is just the latest example of what happens with fundamentally flawed 1970s technology as your launch system — and that’s exactly what Congress wants to do with the next vehicle.

    The porkers will continue to fight to keep enough funding coming to their districts to save the jobs for NASA employees and contractors, but they’re in the minority voting-wise. As we see with the current FUBAR, the space subcommittees authorized certain projects but the appropriations committee won’t authorize the money. Since the porkers sit on the space committees, the appropriations committees can whack their pork and each Congressional chamber as a whole will vote to do so with nary a whimper from the public at large.

    Those of us who have a lot of years in politics keep trying to teach the space groupies this fundamental lesson, but they just don’t want to hear it. You better listen soon, because if you don’t there won’t be any government-funded space program left.

  • Frank Glover

    “The shuttle commander should make more than the traffic controller, not the same. Who is taking a bigger risk to life and limb?”

    Perhaps soldiers (and other front-line military people) should be paid as much? After all, no one’s *actively* trying to destroy the Shuttle…

    And many of those Shuttle pilots are ex-military. Some saw combat themselves. They would know.

    Are you suggesting that pay should be because flying the Shuttle is a comparably high-risk activity, in spite of the fact that no one’s shooting at it? Well, why *is* that such a risk to life and limb? Sounds to me like that’s a problem with Shuttle design and performance, not crew pay.

    While there will always be risky things to do in the Universe, am I wrong in thinking that in a rational world, we should have had the surface-to-LEO thing pretty mature, reliable and low-risk now, after a half century of HSF…?

    “Mr. Oler if you are so smart, come up with a plan to help reduce the cost to launch back to a thousand a pound, likt the shuttle was originally supposed to do!”

    You realize, don’t you, that part of the solution to that, is a vehicle that can be flown to space, and return it, turn it around (checkout, new payload, refuel) and fly it again within a low single number of days, not multiple months, with hardly any more support personnel than a large commercial or military aircraft requires to operate? Not the ‘standing army’ overhead of engineers and technicians (and almost nothing in the way of a ‘mission control’ center as we’ve come to think of it) that a Shuttle flight requires?

    A vehicle that could do what you ask, among other things, would fly more often and NEED FEWER PEOPLE TO RUN IT.

    The idea (outside of Congress, at least) is to get certain things done, achieve certain exploratory and technology development goals and do/achieve them efficiently. Not to employ as many people as possible in the process (especially,as has been noted, with other people’s involuntarily given money).

  • pathfinder_01

    ??? They only complaint I heard about Orion on a test flight was from a Texas congressman who was probably more worried about such a flight making SLS look unneeded than anything else. There are people who feel Orion may or may not be necessary but that is about it.

    What ticked me off about Orion was the current schedule. It was test flight unmanned in 2013 followed by first manned flight in 2017/2018!For a project that has gone on this long it should be first manned flight no latter than 2016. I suspect this delay is to get SLS on line. The Orion would be LEO capable only till 2020! I can see having some LEO flights but for a project that started in 2005 that wont be ready to fly till 2018 that is way too long.

    My view Orion EELV flights would be a good thing.

  • Matt Wiser

    Orion on EELV would be very good. It proves the ship in LEO, both in stand-alone flights and in trips to ISS.

    Doesn’t a sidemount HLV (if used for crew) go against CAIB’s findings? Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t they reccommend against sidemount for future crew launchers (heavy-lift or otherwise)? I do know they came out strongly in favor of separating crew and cargo-which Constellation intended to do. And how would a LES work on a sidemount, anyway? The sidemount reminds me of what the current shuttle program director (Shanahan?) proposed to the Augustine commission, though he had no numbers, estimated performance data, etc. He had a very similar proposal-cargo vehicle (a super-Shuttle-C, essentially), and a crew variant with Orion, but still not on top of the ET-which CAIB didn’t like.

  • Rhyolite

    “The shuttle commander should make more than the traffic controller, not the same. Who is taking a bigger risk to life and limb?”

    Shuttle commander is a glory job. Even if the pay was $1 per year, they could easily find enough qualified people willing to fill the slots – there are more than enough qualified people who have working spouses or are independently wealthy.

    Moreover, shuttle astronauts tend to get very lucrative positions in industry after leaving so they would probably still end up better off than an air traffic controller.

    Remember, going into space is something people are willing to pay millions to do so drawing a salary of any size is gravy.

  • pathfinder_01

    A side mount with crew suffers from having the same flaw as the shuttle (crew vehicle subject to debris strike). It also presents a more difficult escape scenario for the crew escape system.

    In terms of cost most estimates put the side mount has being more expensive per flight than an inline due to having to construct the cargo container (which basically is a disposable Orbiter).

    Another question is with commercial crew and the ISS is does Orion need to be manned for each flight? In theory you could launch it unmanned and board it there if that would present any cost or schedule savings. To make any sense this would have to take place on ISS crew rotations and I know the launch windows could make this tricky but it is an interesting thought.

    Also another option would be to launch Orion on the heavy version of the same rocket (Atlas) selected for commercial crew using the same pads. In theory this could save having to man rate and build pad access for SLS.SLS only needs to be man rate able to my knowledge rather than man rated.

    A final savings is If you had a departure stage that could be kept in space then the stage could be launched months ahead of the crew reducing the pressure and the staffing needed for a two launch scenario and allowing you to get the most out of your cargo rocket.

  • Rhyolite

    Frank Glover wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 8:02 pm

    “A vehicle that could do what you ask, among other things, would fly more often and NEED FEWER PEOPLE TO RUN IT”

    All of which points to flying smaller vehicles (with smaller standing armies) more frequently (to amortize the development cost and overhead).

    HLVs are a dead end.

  • BeancounterFromDownunder

    Orion won’t happen. Dragon already has more capability and has flown in the cargo configuration. NASA’s spent $4.5 billion on Orion which is just a capsule and it hasn’t yet flown.
    SpaceX have spent less than a billion (including gov’t funding) on their entire company including manufacturing plant, testing facilities, headquarters, 2 launch vehicles that have actually reached orbit and a capsule capable of transporting crew.
    Orion is another NASA joke where requirements kept changing and the price just kept going up. My prediction – SpaceX Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 will end up transporting crew to and from leo, not Orion.

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 15th, 2011 at 6:18 pm

    As to space versus the aircraft industry. Lets face it, it takes alot more effort to reach space then to fly around on hang gliders. People took to the air because it was within our environment, whereas space is not…..

    two points here…this and the road issue that you bring up.

    The above paragraph shows a very immature understanding of technology and how various points in human development apply it.

    “Cutting edge technology” is never easy for any culture and one generations cutting edge technology is no more or less difficult then another generations cutting edge technology.

    To say (for instance) the “F-35 fighter is the most complex plane ever built” is a true statement but it was also true in the time that “The B-29 was the most complex plane ever built”. Compared to the F-35 the B-29 looks simple, but compared to the B-17 the B-29 is light years ahead.

    It is the height of engineering (and cultural) arrogance to say “our projects are more difficult then the last generations projects”. And you have fallen into that trap.

    The effort by the Wright brothers compares quite favorably with the effort to conquer space. They had to invent the entire package…and not a large margin separated them from success and failure (I dont recall exact numbers but the propeller could not have been much less efficient or they would not have flown.)

    There is nothing in terms of complexity from the “previous effort” that separates a Essex class carrier from CVn(X).. What is different is that the political equation has changed. In WW2 and as late as procurement of the F14/15 series of airplanes the PROJECTS HAD TO WORK or management both in and out of government was held accountable. Teething problems were OK, but the projects had to be donewell. This is not true today.

    Jeff Hanely floundered at Ares. There was nothing “done well” about that project and yet he just hung on day after day violating the basic foundations of engineering management (if you would like examples I am happy to give). He is incompetent.

    As for roads. The interstate highway system is not well understood by most people. The main reason Ike started the system was that the folks who had tooled up in WW2 to build the tanks and other vehicles of the war, had no place to sell their products to. The cars going into WW2 were not really capable of very long distance driving…the ones coming out of WW2 were..and there were not really good roads for people to drive on.

    The Ike highway system has revolutionized our economy.

    Lessons over

    Robert G. Oler

  • BeancounterFromDownunder wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 5:04 am
    My prediction – SpaceX Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 will end up transporting crew to and from leo, not Orion….

    I concur…we are past the era of NASA designing “lift to space”. we might be past the era of NASA designing human spacevehicles (at least for a bit).

    There is a history where this could have been different. It is now clear why Griffin had to go….he couldnt adapt to changing circumstances as the US economic situation deteriorated…and as the flunkies like Hanley at the JSC just floundered.

    It is bad enough that Jeff Hanley could not figure out that the Cx program, particularly Ares was simply falling off the horizon…only when the end is clearly in sight does he start asking (and this is according to his memo) some basic questions like “Is it cost effective to recover the first stage?”

    You wonder if Hanley ever had the thought” wow this thing might just be pricing itself out of the market” or some subordinate went to him and said “what are we going to do when a new administration comes in and finds the price on this thing spiraling out of control?” or even something as basic as “the price on this thing is spiraling out of control”.

    And you wonder if Thunderhead Jeff ever went to Manager Mike and said “gee Mike what are we going to do if the next administration (who ever that is) doesnt want to spend the extra 3 billion a year we are going to need?”

    My guess is that the goofy people running the program never really even thought along those lines. Much less Mike Griffin…and that alone should have had him out the door.

    All these people live in the “NASA is special” bubble so much that before long they start to think it. So it is easy to look at 4.5 billion dollars and counting for an Orion and say “wow thats OK”.

    Isnt Hanley on the Webb now? Where is Linda H…they should all be working as Greeters at the Wall Mart on El Dorado..but they are not.

    Robert G. Oler

  • NASA Fan

    @ Robert,

    Yes, Mr. Hanley is now working on JWST. Not sure where Ms. Hamm is.

  • Dennis Berube

    What will happen if China lands men on the Moon. Will we simply say, well great, but we have already done that? Perhaps instead we will be standing there with our fingers up our butts. Just maybe future space travelers will be the Chinese people instead of American. Maybe they will venture out into the solar system with no fear and colonize other worlds first. Could happen. Maybe they will represent us should contact with advance civilizations take place, as we Americans sit home and watch it on our Chinese made HD tvs. China is up and coming, and just perhaps they will hold the future, and not America. Think about it!

  • Vladislaw

    “My guess is that the goofy people running the program never really even thought along those lines. Much less Mike Griffin…and that alone should have had him out the door.”

    I don’t think Mike Griffin was operating in a vacumn, he had to have been given assurances by someone, people like Shelby?

  • Byeman

    It is idiotic and complete fantasy for any vehicle developed by NASA to be used commercially. Not to mention it would be against the commercial space act. So, the core of any inline vehicle is not, will not and can not be used for tourist flights.

  • Gregori

    “Dennis Berube wrote @
    Complaining about why so many here considered NASA a porkfest;
    Number of people to launch a Shuttle >3000
    Number of people to launch an Atlas or Delta IV around 300
    Number of people to launch a Falcon around 50
    Then, of course this reflects into costs
    Cost per flight of Shuttle $1.2B to $1.9B (over it’s lifetime)
    Cost to launch an Atlas (I hear they’ve just gone up to $180M.
    Cost to launch a Falcon 9 $50M.”

    This is ultimate example of moving the goal posts in an argument. Its also comparing apples and oranges. The shuttle is an expensive system no doubt, and there may be better systems but that’s no reason for using dishonest arguments.

    If the shuttle is flown often, like it has for the construction of ISS, its cost per flight is more like $450 Million. Without having to deal orbiter maintenance, A HLV based on that hardware will be able to be flown more often and closer to schedule. $450 million is not too far off the cost of a Delta IV Heavy.

    Atlas and Delta IV launches look cheaper because that’s the launch price without a payload. STS carries an orbiter that weighs around 100 tonnes, can reenter the atmosphere intact and function as a temporary space station whilst transporting 7 people and keeping them alive. If Delta or Atlas had to carry a vehicle with the amazing capabilities of the shuttle, their costs would shoot up. Even with a simple capsule, their costs will be much more than the base cost of the launcher.

    Atlas and Falcon 9 have NOWHERE near the capabilities of the shuttle. I would not rely on the claims from SpaceX that the Falcon 9 will cost $50 million at all. Since the company has started up, the prices have went up and up and up and the amount of people its has employed has also went up and up.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am not hugging the shuttle. I think it should be retired because its unsafe and there are better vehicles that will lead us out of LEO. None of them will be very cheap, but they will work. A Shuttle Derived HLV could be made fly for $450 million if launched often enough. Elon Musk reckons he can create a HLV that lift 150 tonnes to LEO for $300 Million per flight. There are also Atlas Phase II and III and some evolutions of Delta IV that are interesting proposals.

  • Pathfinder_01

    Orion is back up to commercal crew and at the schedules I have seen for both Orion won’t beat any of them to orbit esp. if it is tied to SLS. Orion’s only hope for survival is in BEO spaceflight since only none of the commercal crew craft has BEO ability except maybe Dragon(and even then it just has an heat sheild). Orion in theory is more advaced in that particular catagory. It might beat CST100 unmanned to Orbit by months but it wont beat CST100 manned.

    Dragon is going to be adapted for human spaceflight NASA or no NASA. CST100 is being done by boeing and NASA gave Dreamchaser a good boost on round 1. The probability of Orion servincing the ISS is very low esp. as it is more expensive per unit than almost all commercal craft and non reusable.

  • Dennis Berube wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 9:49 am

    What will happen if China lands men on the Moon. Will we simply say, well great, but we have already done that? Perhaps instead we will be standing there with our fingers up our butts. Just maybe future space travelers will be the Chinese people instead of American. Maybe they will venture out into the solar system with no fear and colonize other worlds first. Could happen…..

    yes and the “could happen” mentality got us into Iraq, Afghanistan and some really bad economic policy.

    “Could happen” is a paralyze in terms of the discussion of what is likely or should happen. No one gets on a plane and says “It could crash” because the odds are so low…and the odds of all you are postulating are near zero.

    The Chinese are about as likely to land men on the Moon in the next decade or two as Saddam was to attack the US or distribute things to The Base or anything aggressive. There is no evidence that the Chinese are building any infrastructure to do what you claim..

    And what if they do land men on the Moon? What would that change. Not a thing. They cannot conquer the Moon, they are no more in a position to use its resources then we are…it would be a stunt and so far they have not gone in for those.

    The Chinese are more likely to colonize Africa, and they are doing that in terms of using its resources then they are trying to mine lunar water, which would cost far far more then it is worth.

    Deal in realities. Deal in what is possible not what “could happen”.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Pathfinder_01

    Gregori the shuttle itself is a reusable (or refurbish able) payload. Its engines are the most expensive of any rocket which isn’t a big problem because they are reusable but in the context of an HLV where they are disposable that is a problem (cost!). The shuttle vs. a disposable rocket is the difference between throwing out silverware and throwing out a plastic fork. The shuttle and its parts were chosen with different ideas in mind 30 years ago and trying to turn them into a cost effective HLV is like trying to turn lead into gold.

    In addition let’s be realistic about the flight rate of an HLV. Even in the 60ies the Saturn V never flew 4 missions a year and usually only did 2. That was NASA with a bigger budget than now. We will be lucky if the HLV flies once a year!

    BEO human spaceflight (which is about the only valid reason for an HLV) is more expensive than LEO spaceflight because of all the extra stuff you need. A LEO spaceflight rate is not a good mesure.

    You dont just need a simple capsule like CST100 or Soyuz both of which only can support a crew for 48 hours and 4 days respectively. You need something more capable (and expensive) like Apollo (14 days) or Orion (21 days). You also need lenders or hobs and earth departure stages and all of that is often disposable.

    This leads to much bigger payload costs preflight than a shuttle or a space station flight . Hence an HLV will not fly 4 times a year if NASA is the only customer and there are no others atm.

  • Vladislaw wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 9:52 am

    I don’t think Mike Griffin was operating in a vacumn, he had to have been given assurances by someone, people like Shelby?….

    I dont know what assurances he thought he had…but I doubt he had any from the Obama campaign, and I am pretty sure he had none from the McCain campaign.

    The trick for Griffin was that he had to satisfy a transition team that he could either get the program back on track or that there was some reason to tolerate it being badly off track.

    He could not have believed, or he was more stupid then I think, that the transition was going to happen and he could convince everyone at the teams that “everything is fine at NASA and particularly HSF”.

    The odd thing for this discussion is that my “thinking” along these lines is that Griffin thought the same thing that Lori Garver thought oh in say the late 90’s.

    I cannot remember the year…but Rich lurks here and he was still in Houston…when Rich and I had a conversation with Lori about a piece we had written…it was one of the many pieces we have had published arguing for what more or less is happening now.

    I dont want to misquote her and cannot quote her directly…but her line was something like “You cannot really believe that Congress is going to cancel a major program like the shuttle or station without a replacement that preserves the jobs”. She basically scoffed at the notion of private spaceflight and using the then emerging EELV’s for lift.

    The best guess I can come up with is that Griffin shared that notion, which must of made the transition fascinating.

    From everyone who I have talked with, and this includes a major lobbiest on the Hill (who both Mark and Rich have met) who lobbies for aerospace companies…NASA and Cx just priced themselves out of the market.

    To me that shows how tone deaf political Griffin is…and the thunderheads who were running Cx.

    Robert G. Oler

  • NASA Fan wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 8:49 am

    @ Robert,

    Yes, Mr. Hanley is now working on JWST. Not sure where Ms. Hamm is.

    ….

    it is good they have their g job…otherwise most other places basic competence is required.

    I still remember Hamm going “we didnt mean to do it”.

    check

    Robert G. Oler

  • Dennis Berube wrote:

    What will happen if China lands men on the Moon. Will we simply say, well great, but we have already done that? Perhaps instead we will be standing there with our fingers up our butts. Just maybe future space travelers will be the Chinese people instead of American. Maybe they will venture out into the solar system with no fear and colonize other worlds first. Could happen.

    What if the Death Star shows up and blows the Earth to smithereens?

    Who cares if China goes to the Moon. We did over 40 years ago. China currently has no crewed Moon program. They are working on a space station. If they go to the Moon, rah-rah for them, but they won’t be there until at least 2030 and it will have zero impact on daily life here on Planet Earth. The Moon has no strategic military value, and nothing that will impact global economics. So if they want to go get some Moon rocks, let them.

    It’s funny how people try to scare us with China. Why not go for it and say Iran or North Korea?

  • Vladislaw

    For those that think commercial aerospace companies are not competant enough to design a safe system and only NASA can protect our astronauts enough, it is time to look at something else.

    I don’t believe astronauts should be able to ride bicycles that are not designed, developed and built, at cost plus, by NASA.

    “Space station veteran Timothy Kopra, scheduled for launch Feb. 24 aboard the shuttle Discovery, was injured in a bicycle accident Saturday, a NASA official said. The injury was not life threatening and the NASA official, citing medical privacy issues, provided no additional details. But multiple sources said Kopra may have broken his hip, raising the prospect of a significant impact to the already-delayed mission.”
    http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts133/110115kopra/

    This is a sad day for America and this tragedy could have been prevented if only NASA had a monopoly on bicycle building for the entire nation, then and only then can we keep our astronauts safe. The idea that we allow an astronaut to actually ride a dangerous vehicle like a bicycle that is not designed and built by NASA is a travesty.

  • Dennis Berube

    Just surmizing, what would cost estimates be to upgrade say theCST100, or Dragon for deep space operations? Would the cost still be under Orion? What would the upgrades curtail in the process?

  • Frank Glover

    “What will happen if China lands men on the Moon. Will we simply say, well great, but we have already done that?”

    A possibility. That the Russians accomplished so much, so early, was a shock in part because we perceived them as backwards. We have no such perceptions with respect to China. It just wouldn’t be that much of a surprise. No one was terribly startled when they did LEO on their own. It’s true that some won’t care, but I’m old enough to remember that some didn’t care when *we* reached the Moon.

    And much will depend on *how* they supposedly accomplish this. If it’s in an Apollo/Constellation-like manner, with single or dual-launch missions requiring consuming an HLV every time (and like the N-1, China could never develop/test such a thing in total secret, any more than a new naval ship design. We’d know it was coming), just to get a couple people to the surface and back a few times a year…they won’t be able to sustain that kind of architecture any more than the US could. Certainly there would be no continuing presence there. In that scenario…I still won’t worry.

    If they learn from the debate they see going on here, develop space stations (which they do clearly want…no one there is ‘tired’ of LEO), develop orbital assembly and refueling capability…*then* I’d worry…

    “Just maybe future space travelers will be the Chinese people instead of American. Maybe they will venture out into the solar system with no fear and colonize other worlds first. Could happen.”

    And what’s the rest of the world doing, in this scenario? The Russians who *still* have better space capability than China at this time? ESA? Others? Even nations whom we don’t think of as ‘space powers,’ who might simply be buying commercially available technology from the US for whatever research, commercial or exploratory purpose they may have? (Canada and Bigelow are working something out, for an early example)

    Could happen. Plenty of room out there for everyone.

    “Maybe they will represent us should contact with advance civilizations take place, as we Americans sit home and watch it on our Chinese made HD tvs”

    Barely getting out into the inner solar system isn’t exactly meeting someone from another star halfway…

    And ANY nation (especially one that can manufacture HDTV) can do radio SETI, if that’s what you mean.

  • Scott Bass

    If my math is correct Spacex could put me in orbit for only 434000 today ;) just need a Russian space suit and oxygen tank off eBay ;)

  • Pathfinder_01

    cst100 no plans to upgrade.

    Dragon would likley be cheaper than Orion due to the fact that Dragon can spread its costs over more models(Dragon Cargo, Lab, LEO version…ect). Likely less than Orion but no estimate.

    Orion on the other hand while closer to BEO flight still needs some work from what I have read. Under current plans BEO Orion won’t exsist till 2020(I think the delay is due to trying to build SLS without enough funds and trying not to spook the horses(putting Orion on EELV for the test got the concern of congress….. and in a bad way).

  • Ferris Valyn

    Just surmizing, what would cost estimates be to upgrade say theCST100, or Dragon for deep space operations? Would the cost still be under Orion? What would the upgrades curtail in the process?

    Mr. Berube, why would you upgrade something as small as a CST-100 or a Dragon for Deep Space operations?

    You don’t get a lot of room, for that.

    You wanna do deep space operations, you go up to LEO in a Dragon or CST-100 – dock it with a Bigelow Habitat, and then go to your deep-space destination.

  • Scott Bass

    I don’t think anyone would be scared with china on the moon while we were still arguing about Americas program, but it would be kinda sad…. The only analogy that comes to mind is how the great nation of spain came here, but then another great nation colonized it. But then America might look quite different today if Spain had gone full steam ahead with more settlements here…….in the future countries will claim certain parts of the moon as there own, especially as discoveries are made that will make some resources valuable, I realize their is alot of science fiction in these statements but if you can imagine a scenario then it becomes possible. If China set up a moon base, chances are we will not set up next to them and so the moon will naturally be devided up as nations develop their space programs.

  • Stephen C. Smith wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 10:41 am

    The Chinese should scare us, but not for some imagined lunar goal.

    Other then the lead star of Peacemaker, the folks who have had the “most hand” in moving the Sudan situation forward…are the Chinese. (there are my own personal opinions and represent nothing other then that). The Chinese have read history and they see how the US sustained its rise to global power after WW2…and recognize that it was not as a military but rather an economic machine….that could toss its economic mass around and achieve goals that other countries had done with their military.

    The Chinese have through economic pressure caused the “north” in Sudan to “make nice” and as a result are engineering (at least so far) a relatively peaceful split between the North and South…both of whom have either oil or seaports…and that is how they are going to keep the oil flowing…at not a lot of cost.

    The US meanwhile has spent trillions on goofy adventures in places like Iraq,….which lets be honest were all about the last administrations attempt to ensure the flow of oil…and we have almost nothing to show for it.

    The PRC is watching a great power exhaust itself and its economy all the while segmenting the most important parts of its economy to them…and leveraging almost every generation for the next 100 years in terms of debt…chew up our military…

    and some goofy people come along and say “we have to spend more money to go back to the Moon”.

    There is no case for sending people to the Moon that has anything worth the value near cost.

    The US had about two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union to figure out “a new world order” where we learned how to deal with issues absent military force…the Clinton years were almost just ignoring the situation and Bush came in and went the exact wrong way.

    Now we are stuck..and going back to the Moon paid for by debt to the PRC does not fix it.

    Spudis and Whittington and others can bang on that drum all they want…but in the end they cannot answer a simple question.

    what do we get that is worth the cost.

    and so it ends

    Robert G. Oler

  • Another day, another Falcon….

    There was a project called “Falcon” back in the 1990’s at JSC with the goal of building a shuttle mission simulator which would operate with 10 percent of the staffing of the existing one as well as increased flexibility, less down time, easier configuration, etc. I worked on it.

    It was canceled, although on schedule and budget and ready to begin configuring a test cockpit, when the person in charge of the current SMS discovered if we succeeded, he would only have a staff 10 percent of what he had up until then, and in a bureaucracy, staff size is (perceived) power.

    Nothing changes.

  • amightywind

    The Chinese have through economic pressure caused the “north” in Sudan to “make nice” and as a result are engineering (at least so far) a relatively peaceful split between the North and South

    A pretty fanciful viewpoint, and how profoundly wrong. Every machine and grenade used by the Janjaweed is Chinese made. They are the arms supplier of the Arab north and are indirectly responsible for millions of deaths. Sudan is splitting because, despite the carnage and repression, the Arabs simply cannot achieve victory over the non-Arab indigenous population. It is due to exhaustion, not an Arab change of heart encouraged by the Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese are one of the least moral regimes on the planet – an economic cyclops interested in resource extraction and acting exclusively in its own economic interest. They reflexively oppose insurgency all over the planet because in it they see the demise of their own empire.

  • DCSCA

    Sidemounts are a dead end for American space efforts given the history of shuttle. Congress won’t go for it. Americans always like to complicate issues and are reactive, not proactive, to changing times.

    Getting Orion up and flying atop EELVs is the ‘immediate’ future of the HSF program. A HLV design will be cost-effective by way of a no frill, throw away design and ‘mass production’ — mass being 12/year. For Americans, cranking out one a month on a ten/twenty-year contract, subject to 5 year reviews, is a good start. A HLV design of brute force simplicity– something American aerospace planners have always balked at– always designing Caddys, never a Chevy. The objective is to get you there, not fly you there in style. And without any solid rockets as a base elements of the design. Liquids are the way to go– clusters are the way to go in this era given the state of the technology and costs involved.

    @Byeman wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 9:57 am
    NASA will ‘shut-up’ and do as it’s told through the Age of Austerity. The agency can be dissolved with the stroke of a pen or saved by being tucked under the protective wing of the DoD as an asset necessary for ‘nat’l security.’ .

  • DCSCA

    @Scott Bass wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 11:49 am

    “… just need a Russian space suit and oxygen tank off eBay.”
    That’s probably where Musk is shopping for SpaceX’s ECS– and, of course, he’ll purchase it using PayPal.

  • common sense

    @ Dennis Berube wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 11:29 am

    “Just surmizing, what would cost estimates be to upgrade say theCST100, or Dragon for deep space operations? Would the cost still be under Orion? What would the upgrades curtail in the process?”

    Not that much and most certainly a lot less than Orion. Basically, make sure the TPS works and the navigation works. Everything else is pretty much the same, provided the vehicles were designed for the kind of loads you’d get on reentry from the Moon. But if you have a flying LEO vehicle that happens to be a capsule you happen to be almost lunar. Then you need a transfer stage to the Moon of some sort. That is if you want something a la Apollo. And you do not need to send a 7-crew to the Moon if you say send only 3 or 4 you just made for a lot of “free” space. that you can use for additional life support system, etc. If you want a lander then…

    Be prepared for a big surprise some time sooner or later.

    To be continued.

  • Vladislaw wrote:

    This is a sad day for America and this tragedy could have been prevented if only NASA had a monopoly on bicycle building for the entire nation, then and only then can we keep our astronauts safe. The idea that we allow an astronaut to actually ride a dangerous vehicle like a bicycle that is not designed and built by NASA is a travesty.

    I heard the engineers’ design had training wheels, but a member of the Senate Bicycle Subcommittee dictated his own design which replaced training wheels with a horn because the horn maker was in his state.

  • Vladislaw

    “If China set up a moon base, chances are we will not set up next to them and so the moon will naturally be devided up as nations develop their space programs.”

    Actually the moon is already being divided up. Every piece of hardware that drops or is placed on Luna is still protected by the outer space treaty. With the recent missions by India, Japan, China along with the US and Russia there is a lot of “historical sites” that have national rights associated with the hardware, I imagine that there will be a bit of ground around them that will go with the site. Now with the Google Lunar Prize I think there will be a whole bunch more sites that will need “protecting”.

  • Dave C

    I don’t have an issue with a jobs program, if NASA can deliver. Unfortunately, one of the most frustrating things about NASA HSF at this very pivotal point is that almost all of the senior managers are skilled Operations folks. The Operations phase occurs after all the major design and development of the vehicle is complete (you are just tweaking things after that). These guys have very little (or no) hands on experience building space flight hardware; and their expertise does not translate well into managing hardware development.

    This year the Shuttle is retiring, leaving NASA with a glut of senior operations folks who will need high profile jobs. So regardless of which design NASA selects, the probability is high that another egotistical (I can do anything) Ops guy will get his chance to fail at managing the development of a program.

    So in response to Mr. Berube, working in NASA HSF is not so fun when thousands of people are being laid off, because an Ops guy couldn’t manage his development program (in the real world people would have been fired for failing so visibly). And then there is the current leadership void that allows groups that should be working together to crawl over each other in an attempt to get their version of the next generation rocket selected. It is all about empire preservation, and not about what is in the best interest of NASA or the country. So I would do some research before I believed the Sidemount story…you’ll probably find an Ops guy at the core.

  • Das Boese

    ” amightywind wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 1:16 pm “

    You are of course aware that nothing you wrote contradicts Mr. Oler’s statement? To the contrary, “Every machine and grenade used by the Janjaweed is Chinese made.” would, if it were true, support his point of view rather nicely.

    The only reason to be afraid of China is that if they don’t figure out a way to deal with the looming demographic changes, internal tensions, environmental and human rights issues the country will be torn apart. Then we get another former-USSR-type conflict zone, complete with all those fun things like danger of nuclear proliferation, ethnic tensions, genocide and a fertile breeding ground for organized crime and terrorism.

  • Vladislaw

    DCSCA wrote:

    “The objective is to get you there, not fly you there in style.”

    Really? When did that become official space policy? I thought it was to protect the worker/contractor/contributor base in every district.

  • David Dex

    @pathfinder wrote, “Even in the 60ies the Saturn V never flew 4 missions a year and usually only did 2″ Actually NASA did do four. In 1969: Apollo’s 9, 10, 11 and 12. Add in Apollo 8 and they managed 5 in a 12 month period. Not saying it was sustainable, but it was accomplished.

  • Vladislaw

    Robert G. Oler wrote

    “The best guess I can come up with is that Griffin shared that notion, which must of made the transition fascinating.”

    If you remember the transition was pretty fascinating, if you recall the statement Mike Griffin made to Lori Garver at the NASA library:

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/13/672438/-NASAs-Griffin-denies-tension-with-Obamas-transition-team-
    “Tensions were on public display last week at the NASA library, as overheard by guests at a book party.

    According to people who were present, Logsdon, a space historian, told a group of about 50 people he had just learned that President John F. Kennedy’s transition team had completely ignored NASA.

    Griffin responded, in a loud voice, “I wish the Obama team would come and talk to me.”

    Alan Ladwig, a transition-team member who was at the party with Garver, shouted out: “Well, we’re here now, Mike.”

    Soon after, Garver and Griffin engaged in what witnesses said was an animated conversation. Some overheard parts of it.

    “Mike, I don’t understand what the problem is. We are just trying to look under the hood,” Garver said.

    “If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar,” Griffin replied. “Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.” ”

    Today Dr. Griffin denied those charges”

    I guess Mike didn’t like people looking under the hood because they would have found it didn’t have a motor.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    DCSCA wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
    @Scott Bass wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 11:49 am

    “… just need a Russian space suit and oxygen tank off eBay.”
    That’s probably where Musk is shopping for SpaceX’s ECS– and, of course, he’ll purchase it using PayPal.

    Yes, he won’t have to pay cost-plus and they’ll work just fine. LOL

  • Matt Wiser

    Which means, if Pathfinder 01 is correct, then a crew-launch sidemount would be DOA. They’d be flying in the face of CAIB from the get-go.

    Orion on EELV (Atlas V or Delta IV Heavy) is very likely as an intirim until the heavy-lifter (whichever one is chosen) is ready. Just do what Ed Crawley said in his youtube video (from the “Space Summit” at the Cape on 15 Apr of last year-yeah, preaching to the choir instead of a real summit…). Build it, test it, fly it, and start going places. Boots on the ground will follow in due course.

  • Coastal Ron

    For those that popped over to read the Spudis article at Air & Space that is part of this blog topic, I think you’ll find an interesting contrast in what viewpoints are allowed in the comments section (see comments #25 & 27).

    Though Jeff Foust (our gracious host) probably has different goals for this blog than Spudis does for his, he certainly allows a wide range of viewpoints. I don’t know if we’re living up to his hopes & dreams, but I certainly appreciate the information & forum he provides. Thanks Jeff!

  • Byeman

    The agency can be dissolved with the stroke of a pen or saved by being tucked under the protective wing of the DoD as an asset necessary for ‘nat’l security.’ .

    Neither are true. It would take an act of Congress, which is more than a stroke of pen, with presidential approval.

    DCSCA is a broken record, repeating the same inane blather.

  • DCSCA

    @Vladislaw wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 7:28 pm

    April 12, 1961.

  • Pathfinder_01

    Common sense, here are some more:

    You would also need a more beefy propusion system than for LEO for high delta V maneuvers like breaking into and out of lunar orbit or course corrections. CST100 and Dragon are short on this count atm. Orion is closer to this goal atm.

    You would need ability to handle long duration flight CST100 is short here but dragon in can be kept in LEO for up to two years unmanned in the dragon lab version. You might have some issues with thermal control but LEO can be harsher than deep space in this area. You do need a bit more radiation shielding but you won’t be traveling for months in a capsule. A capsule would either drop you off at a deep space station, take you to a waiting deep space craft, or take(or carry) a lander for lunar activity or return you to earth. It could never be the craft that supports crews for weeks or months at a time.

    One of the more interesting changes with the creation of commercial crew and the ISS(or other station) is if your capsule needs to support crewed launch or not. There are very practical reasons to put the crew on the BEO capsule for launch but it is no longer a must do item and could buy you some advantages. Or if you had a commercial capsule it could be possible to drop off some crew at a space station (with a lifeboat), dock with a waiting EDS and go on to a BEO mission.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ common sense,

    Actually you would need to do some more work than that. A BEO version of a commercial crewed spacecraft would at least require the following:

    1) Increased thermal and ionising radiation protection;
    2) Longer range communications (possibly including a steerable high-gain antenna);
    3) Increased consumables for the life-support system;
    4) More storage space for crew consumables;
    5) Deep space propulsion system for orbital insertion burns.

    None of these things are impossible. My gut tells me that the Dragon was designed from the outset to be upgradable to this standard, as those who follow my posts on NASASpaceflight.com on commercial BEO will know.

    What would all this cost? Cost is, of course, proportionate to work needed. At the very least, you’re budgeting for some kind of service module and modifications to the command module. Then there is the issue of the launch vehicle.

    Overall, I’d say that a BEO Dragon and the Falcon-9 Heavy/Raptor launcher could be available by 2020 if there was some kind of promise of a paying mission waiting for it. I also think that it would probably cost noticably less than Orion, but still very much more than Mr. Musk’s very optimistic projections. Most of these savings would probably come from the fact that SpaceX’s internal processes are less bureaucratic than NASA’s. Additionally, SpaceX would not be hampered by the need to find enough work in the project to distribute around multiple major field centres, which seems to be a serious problem that NASA has to cope with.

    What about room inside the Dragon? The Dragon is actually a lot larger inside than people appreciate – larger than the Apollo. So, a crew of four on a lunar flyby or orbiter mission would be cramped but not necessarily uncomfortable. It enjoys a more efficient internal geometry than Orion and CST-100, thus more of its pressurised volume is habitable. That said, a long-duration mission (> 2 weeks) would still need a mission module of some kind, perhaps a BA-180 Sundancer or maybe even a BEO-rigged DragonLab as a Soyuz-style orbital module, simply because of the storage space needed for consumables.

    A BEO version of CST-100, which was designed from the outset as a short-haul LEO taxi, would be a very different prospect and I suspect that it would consequently cost a lot more to design and build. I also imagine that Boeing’s internal processes might be a little less smooth-moving than those of SpaceX.

    In any case, the key component in such a project would be to have an anchor tenant. This might be several things including a NASA EML space-lab requiring commercial resupply or even a Bigelow Lagrange “Space Hotel”. No anchor tenant, no serious development or at least not on a quick time scale.

  • Das Boese wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 7:05 pm

    thank you for your post.

    If on the scale of “who has the worst domestic problems” I had to pick either the PRC or the US…without taking a breath, I would pick the US.

    The chief product of globalization has been that “the haves” have gotten more and the “have nots” have become larger. This has been “OK” so far in most countries because in places like Vietnam and other countries even the “have nots” have seen their “boat” rise a bit. It certainly has been true in China…

    Globalization has seen the rise of very wealthy people and groups (including the PLA) in China and while the have nots have gotten larger in terms of people…the basic living level of almost everyone in China has over the last 40 years gotten higher.

    So while there are lots of tensions along ethnic lines and some among those who long for a more open government…they are supressed by the notion of most of the people that they are living better then their parents and even their parents are living better then their parents.

    This is not so in the US. Not only are the “well off” getting more well off, but the middle class is actually shrinking as people on the lower end of it fall off into the “have nots”…and the lot of the have nots is mostly getting worse.

    Jobs are moving overseas, the jobs that once fueled the middle class…and the jobs that remain are more and more fueled by aspects of the economy. I noticed over the weekend that Larry sommers who has been one of the people prsent atthe demise of the middle class noted that one sector that is increasing is “health care”…but this is only a function of the population aging and will only continue to rise as long as people have jobs where they can afford health care… They are all service jobs, they dont produce real wealth.

    One of the reasons that space policy should favor things like SpaceX and Virgin is that these are “real jobs” that are producing real things that hopefully can by the use of that product create real wealth.

    The people who work at these places are “real middle class”

    Who knows what products, if any come from a lower priced access to space, and it is completely possible that there are none…but we will never found out of there are any as long as we have a HSF whose sole function is to do things which are completely disconnected from the American economy. Or are completely dependent on it.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Vladislaw wrote @ January 16th, 2011 at 8:43 pm

    I guess Mike didn’t like people looking under the hood because they would have found it didn’t have a motor….

    lol…literally no motor…

    which to me makes his tenure just simply amazing.

    There is a memo that Hanley writes as the program is collapsing where he basically says “lets see if it is cheaper to expend the Ares first stage or recover it” something like that.

    this simply indicates a lack of basic engineering management competency…those questions should have had answers long before process got to any hardware.

    And yet Griffin put up with that. Which of course means he is incompetent as a manager.

    A guess (and its just that) given Griffin’s background…is that somewhere early in the “go back to the Moon” effort there was a meeting or some “off line” conversations or something where basically the drill became that the “go back to the Moon” effort was not sustainable in political support if it didnt have all the players that shuttle had.

    When The Hammer is in the Slammer (with apologies to the Rev hmm hmm Jackson) aka when Tom DeLay is doing time and has no real reason to not tell the truth..it would be interesting to me to ask him what he got for that one year where he got the funding for Cx…I will bet dollars that somewhere during that period “the fix was in”. I dont know that and the dates might not even work…but at somepoint in my view Griffin got the word that all the players had to be at the table…and the design went along those lines.

    That doesnt explain why Griffin tolerated such idiots as Hanley or the substandard performance…unless (and it is quite possible) that Hanley is about the best NASA has now in terms of project managers.

    Everything that has happened was predictable…one reason on this forum I predicted that the thing would ball up…

    There is no ability at NASA to manage risk vrs reward…I doubt truth be told that the Apollo LES was effective throughout the range it was claimed…but people like Webb knew how to take calculated risk and all one has to do is watch the Orion LES development to know that the situation is out of control.

    It is to bad that no one had a recording device in all those closed door meetings between Garver and the transition team andMike…wow to quote Data from Star Trek “the petty bickering” would be great.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Regarding SpaceX Dragon crew capacity, all you need to know is on their site at:

    http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php

    “Supports up to 7 passengers in Crew configuration.”

    And …

    “To ensure a rapid transition from cargo to crew capability, the cargo and crew configurations of Dragon are almost identical, with the exception of the crew escape system, the life support system and onboard controls that allow the crew to take over control from the flight computer when needed. This focus on commonality minimizes the design effort and simplifies the human rating process, allowing systems critical to Dragon crew safety and ISS safety to be fully tested on uncrewed demonstration flights.”

    There’s an illustration near the bottom of the page of Dragon in both crew and cargo configuration.

  • Martijn Meijering

    (see comments #25 & 27)

    Interesting. Disappointing, but interesting.

  • amightywind

    If you remember the transition was pretty fascinating, if you recall the statement Mike Griffin made to Lori Garver at the NASA library:

    I wouldn’t be so quick to celebrate Garver’s political hatchet job. Who would have thought that this would be the highlight of her disastrous tenure? Mike Griffin ran a solid development program and developed Orion and launched Ares I-X as promised. Garver, and her poodle Bolden were quite the skeptics. But judge their results. In two years of their leadership and NASA policy lies in absolute ruins. The Whitehouse has lost control of NASA. It has never been in worse shape. If you didn’t like Mike Griffin’s design, I’m sure you’ll love the Senate’s!

  • Robert G. Oler

    One other point — who says that there’s “no payload” for a HLV? For one thing, a 70 mT HLV could deliver a year’s supplies to the ISS in one fell swoop.

    Comment by Paul D. Spudis — January 16, 2011 @ 6:12 pm

    ………………………………………..

    this is a cut and paste from Paul’s own blog and to me it demonstrates how weak his argument is.

    Delivering one years worth of supplies to ISS is not a real mission. There is no way that ISS could deal with “one years” worth of supplies at one time, unless what came up with the supplies was a module that was designed to handle those one years worth of supplies while they are being used..and no such module exist. …there is no real way to dock such a long module to the station…and doing it all “at one time” would negate the notion of variable resupply (ie figuring out what you need for an entire year is to quote the Brits “tiresome”).

    Worse that is the only payload Paul comes up with, so we are going to spend 10 billion or so to get a booster that cost some large number to fly…when there are vehicles NOW that can fly the entire mass of payload for FAR LESS PRICE.

    Paul operates under the notion (which he claims he does not agree with) that things are going to be done anyway by Congress so he feels free to come up with things for them to do that have almost no economics to them.

    Sorry Paul…YOu are one heck of a geologist. Space policy and based on your somewhat self aggrandizing comments to Coastal Ron space politics are two venues that you are not very good at.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Robert Oler,

    The ‘scuttlebutt’ version of the story of the Ares Launch System is that it was cooked up during a lunch meeting between Dr. Griffin and Dr. Scott Horowitz, who was then an ATK lobbyist. ATK wanted in on the MLV business and Griffin saw a synergy between the Stick and his dream to build the largest and most powerful LV of all time (the ESAS Ares-V). It just turned out that these plans also were in line with the political objectives of the space state Congresspersons, who wanted the Shuttle infrstructure chain to remain in place, as far as possible, with the next-generation launcher. They had already effectively fired Dr. Griffin’s predecessor and some of his advisors for daring to suggest an EELV/EELV-heritage system for OSP.

    Based on this, you can see where the problems begain. Ares-I, due to its’ inability to launch anything but an Orion spacecraft needed to work to justify the enormous lifting capability of the Ares-V. If NASA were instead working on a more mid-range SDLV (in the 50-100t IMLEO range), then the justification for later building Ares-V collapses under minimal scruitiny. All justifications for Ares-I and the concept of “Crew-only/Cargo-only” dual launch only make sense when you work backwards from the concept of “We need to be able to justify a super-heavy lift cargo launcher”.

    So, Ares-I had to work. There had to be an aneamic crew-only launcher to justify an enormous cargo-only launcher that would be needed if NASA HSF was to achieve anything at all beyond LEO. Jeff Hanley, et al, were hired, not on the basis of managerial or engineering ability but their ability to keep the project rolling along whilst identifying and excising any and all opposition to it. It didn’t matter if Ares-I was successful. It didn’t even need to fly. All that was needed was for Ares-I to last long enough to form the programmatic and technological seed-bed (with 5-seg and J-2X) of Ares-V.

    I’m pretty sure that Dr. Griffin never expected Ares-I to have the problems that it suffered (which, in retrospect, were entirely predictable and raise questions about his “greatest rocket engiener of his generation” tag). However, I’m pretty sure that he honestly believed that NASA could just drown these issues in money.

    In my darkest moments, I wonder if Dr. Griffin even cared if Ares-I and Ares-V would even fly operationally. Towards the end, NASA were talking openly about cancelling Ares-I in favour of immediately starting work on Ares-V (and this was the final gargantuan 10m-diameter, 6 core engine, ESRM-5.5 version, not the ESAS A-252SH). That was apparently Dr. Griffin’s Plan B – That if Ares-I became politically unsustainable, Ares-V, his assumed ticket to astronautical engineering immortality, should be pushed forward as quickly as possible. Ares-I was thus sacrificed to Dr. Griffin’s dream and I wonder if even Ares-V required anything other than one successful test launch as “the most powerful LV ever” for it to achieve its creator’s objectives.

    So, in some ways, we see that NASA, or at least the faction in NASA still loyal to his vision, is still running Griffin Plan-B – Build some kind of super-heavy launch vehicle with a solid-augmented hydrolox core, irrespective of whether there is anything for which it is needed. They are still claiming with a straight face that it is the only option available, even if some now admit that the agency can’t actually afford to build it. It took until 2010 for Ares-I’s engineering and budget issues to prove fatal. I wonder how much longer it will take for Ares-V’s budget and schedule issues to do the same?

    Please don’t take this as purely a bash at Dr. Griffin. There are certain individuals in both houses of Congress that ought to lower their heads in shame at how the objectives of certain lobbyists and companies in their districts have so totally distorted NASA’s activities and, frankly, inflicted a decade-long gap on NASA HSF operations. Just consdier this: If NASA had been allowed to develop something like OSP and fly it on an EELV, we might be looking at no gap, either crew or cargo, to the ISS. If they had not insisted on an SDLV, then the temptation at that long-ago lunch meeting would have been greatly reduced.

  • Martijn Meijering

    For one thing, a 70 mT HLV could deliver a year’s supplies to the ISS in one fell swoop.

    Uh-uh, the guy is launch vehicle agnostic…

  • Anne Spudis

    @ readers

    re Oler’s January 17th, 2011 at 9:19 am comment.

    I will merely post Paul Spudis’s reply to “Larry” for clarity. You can go to the link to read more comments and quotes free of re-design by Robert G. Oler.

    28. Larry,

    From what I read, part of Obama’s controversial proposal last year was for NASA to develop technologies that could be useful to go anywhere instead of just to the moon.

    You shouldn’t believe everything you read. Spending money on “technology development” without some guiding mission objective is to fund a widget factory or hobby shop. NASA’s track record on that front is quite poor.

    What is the justification for spending over $10 billion to build a booster that has no payload, therefore no possible mission?

    I’m not going to defend the Congressional action because I am not in complete agreement with it. However, I can understand it. Let me suggest one possible justification: Congress thought that the Shuttle fabrication and launch capability was important for a variety of reasons of national economic and technical significance. Abrupt cancellation of the Constellation program left NASA with no capabilities along those lines. Requiring them to build an HLV — something that the “new direction” claims to want eventually anyway — was a way to preserve this capability before it was irretrievably destroyed.

    Not saying I think about it this way — only that it is not unreasonable to think about it this way. Reasonable people may differ.

    One other point — who says that there’s “no payload” for a HLV? For one thing, a 70 mT HLV could deliver a year’s supplies to the ISS in one fell swoop.

    Comment by Paul D. Spudis — January 16, 2011 @ 6:12 pm

    http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2011/01/heft-lies-and-videotape/#comments

  • Coastal Ron

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 9:42 am

    Please don’t take this as purely a bash at Dr. Griffin.

    It was a failure of the system as a whole. The creators of Ares-I/V (Griffin, Congress, contractors, et al) had different motivations than the needs of the goals they were to support.

    We’re repeating the same problem with SLS, where political decisions are made without the benefit of non-biased reviews. This recent NASA report to Congress is just the first to point out that Congress writing things on paper doesn’t mean that they will work in real life.

    The only hope I see to help us avoid another Ares I debacle is that the HLV study coming from industry will provide enough uproar over cost to change the Shuttle-derived mandates in the NASA Authorization Act. Unless that happens, no one is going anywhere for a long time…

  • Vladislaw

    Robert G. Oler wrote:

    “One other point — who says that there’s “no payload” for a HLV? For one thing, a 70 mT HLV could deliver a year’s supplies to the ISS in one fell swoop.

    Comment by Paul D. Spudis — January 16, 2011 @ 6:12 pm”

    Ah … where is the down cargo capability? Nothing comes down… ever?

  • richard schumacher

    Time and money are running out. Gary Hudson’s concept is rapidly becoming the only way of meeting Congress’ requirements for schedule, budget, and re-use of at least some Shuttle components:
    http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/a_single_stage_to_orbit_thought_experiment.shtml
    It also provides a path for future developments such as flyback boosters and recovery of assets from orbit.

    But it would be better overall for the HLV notion to simply die, because it’s mostly pork and there’s no need for it. As many have pointed out HLV would starve the development of a more efficient operational model using less expensive more reliable launchers, in-orbit assembly, refueling and servicing capabilities, and so on.

  • If NASA had been allowed to develop something like OSP and fly it on an EELV, we might be looking at no gap, either crew or cargo…

    I think that is what the every-man public is wondering…why didn’t NASA just build a more advanced space-plane, even a crew only model.

    But as we see now, gerrymandered partisan machine politics and campaign contributions have forever ruined NASA.

    And no amount of finger-pointing matters; the neolibs point at the neocons and vice-versa.

    In the meantime, taxpayer money is flushed down the crapper.

  • common sense

    Re: Lunar Dragon/CST-100

    Well you people just expanded on what I wrote, there is no contradiction. The fact remains it is a much shorter leap from these vehicles (especially Dragon since it is actually flying, DCSCA? Couldn’t help…) that it is to expect Orion to ever be ready. Orion will not make it to the Moon it does not fly nor does it have the budget to fly. The fact remain that no matter what the cost if I dare say so myself Dragon (and possibly CST-100) will fly to the Moon with few changes. A cargo Dragon with appropriate transfer stage could most likely do it now which would bring tons of useful info for a crewed version. Then who will pay for the transfer stage?…

    So I’ll say it again. Be ready for a big surprise sooner… or later.

    As for Sidemount. I am not sure how often we have to go through this. SDV are not ever going to be. Period, with a big P. We ought to collect all that wasted energy and recharge batteries with it, it would help the effects of Global Warming.

    Oh well…

  • “abreakingwind” hallucinated:

    Garver, and her poodle Bolden were quite the skeptics.

    If only Bolden were Garver’s poodle.

  • amightywind

    I think that is what the every-man public is wondering…why didn’t NASA just build a more advanced space-plane, even a crew only model.

    The reasoning behind ‘Apollo on Steroids’ was that a capsule shape supported higher entry speeds and had improved safety margins over a winged vehicle. That reasoning is still a timeless truth.

    But as we see now, gerrymandered partisan machine politics and campaign contributions have forever ruined NASA.

    No. A reckless and naive President at odds with his own party on space issues have harmed NASA. This is nothing that a move back to conservatism won’t fix – back to the days when NASA developed rockets and supported a nascent commercial effort. NASA will be restored when credible leadership is installed.

  • Coastal Ron

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 9:19 am

    Paul operates under the notion (which he claims he does not agree with) that things are going to be done anyway by Congress so he feels free to come up with things for them to do that have almost no economics to them.

    In response to:

    Anne Spudis channelling Paul wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 11:05 am

    One other point — who says that there’s “no payload” for a HLV? For one thing, a 70 mT HLV could deliver a year’s supplies to the ISS in one fell swoop.

    So the Spudis plan is to use already funded government launchers to push aside the competitive private marketplace and our international partners so NASA has a payload for a launcher that otherwise doesn’t have a payload. And all of that regardless of the needs of the ISS or the cost effectiveness of the mission.

    One has to wonder what Paul Spudis really wants – lunar exploration or huge government-run launchers? Can’t have both.

  • G. Crane

    Interesting costs were quoted on this thread, picked up from various sources. Nevertheless, necessary for any proposed vehicle configuration is the availability of a proven propulsion system, manufactured in the US, or the proven potential for a given supplier to be able to develop one. Let us examine the booster engine status, at present time:
    – SSME: existing proven engine, man-rated, re-usable, LOX-LH2. Supplier: PW Rocketdyne. Developed fully in house under NASA contract. Powers the shuttle. Status: in production.

    – RS-68: existing proven engine, expendable, LOX-LH2. Supplier: PW Rocketdyne. Developed in cooperation with MHI, AF/NASA contract. Powers the Delta IV’s. Status: in production.

    – Merlin-1C: existing proven engine, expendable, LOX-RP. Supplier Space-X. Developed based on NASA Fastrac engine, turbopumps developed by Barber-Nichols, presently manufactured entirely by Space-X. Powers the Falcon-1/9. Status: in production.

    – RS-180: existing proven engine, expendable, LOX-RP. Supplier PW Rocketdyne. Developed and manufactured in Russia. Cost of adapting and mfg in the USA unknown but high. Powers Atlas V. Status: in production.

    – AJ-26: existing un-proven engine, expendable, LOX-RP. Supplier Aerojet. Developed and manufactured in Russia. Status: out of production. NOTE: Aerojet has about 40 of them. Will power Orbital’s Taurus II. If flights will be successful and there is business for more than 40 engines, AJ has the option to i) adapt the blueprints and mfg in the USA – cost unknown, or restart production in Russia.

    – SRB, existing proven engine, expendable, solid propellant. Supplier Aerojet. Powers the shuttle. Status: in production.

    I assume most of the participants know these facts, but I find it useful to list these items. There are only three credible existing liquid propellant boosters: the SSME, RS-68 and clusters of Merlin-1C’s. Obviously some of the costs quoted are based on paper rockets and paper engines. Since Space-X is an ambitious 9 year old firm, they will be capable of developing a large engine, however, the costs quoted are only a guess as the path to develop a complex rocket booster are paved with risk known and unknown.

  • G. Crane

    Correction:

    SRB’s are supplied by ATK.

  • Vladislaw

    Anne Spudis wrote:

    “28. Larry,

    From what I read, part of Obama’s controversial proposal last year was for NASA to .

    You shouldn’t believe everything you read. Spending money on “technology development” without some guiding mission objective is to fund a widget factory or hobby shop.”

    It is amazing that you write the answer to the question and then say there isn’t an answer:

    “develop technologies that could be useful to go anywhere instead of just to the moon”

    Go anywhere and not locking yourself into an one stop only architecture like Luna only. Why is that ssooo hard to understand?

    It was a technology program designed to give the next President and NASA the tools in the tool kit that would be needed for sustainable exploration. Aerocapture return, inspace refueling, reusable EDS, closed loop life support, Fuel depots, inflatable habitat, advanced power and propulsion.

    “Abrupt cancellation of the Constellation program left NASA with no capabilities along those lines.”

    The problem was there wasn’t any capabilty with Constellation. The Ares I and Orion were not going to fly until 2017-2018 and the ISS was going to be deorbited at the end of 2015. So when the Ares I/Orion actually DID fly, it would be flying in circles until the heavy lift Ares V was completed in 2028. That means the Orion would be Launched into LEO for 10 years, flying in circles with no space station. Even then in 2028 there was no EDS or Lunar lander, which was projected to be completed by 2032-2035.

    For anyone to argue that Constellation was giving NASA capability anytime soon is disingenous.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 9:42 am

    Great post and it is as good an explanation as any as to the thinking of the people involved.

    “The ‘scuttlebutt’ version of the story of the Ares Launch System is that it was cooked up during a lunch meeting between Dr. Griffin and Dr. Scott Horowitz, who was then an ATK lobbyist. ATK wanted in on the MLV business and Griffin saw a synergy between the Stick and his dream to build the largest and most powerful LV of all time (the ESAS Ares-V).”

    I think your entire post is great but this part in my view is the salient “knuckle” as we say. What I think killed any effort (the spiral notion) of EELV development with a sort of capsule on it…was the notion that ATK had to be in the business…

    See had they just gone with the EELV that is where it would have ended. There would have been some sort of capsule (or something a spaceplane who knows) on top of the EELV and in my view NASA would have never gotten the money to go on with the lunar effort.

    Bush was term limited and as he went out the door (even without the economy collapsing) the effort to go to the Moon was going to ratchet up a lot of money (we have not even seen the cost of the lander yet) and in the end the new administration whoever it was would have balked.

    So ATK in my view had to get in on the “shuttle replacement” because that was I think they thought 1) the only game in town and 2) the lever for maybe some day a really big lifter. Because as it was planned if I recall correctly the second stage was going to use an air startable SSME (before that proved “hard”).

    If the solids are in use and the SSME then I bet the argument somewhere was “was a tank”…that can be cracked up relatively easily, particularly since the tank for Ares V was quite different from the tank on shuttle.

    BUT it seems to me that one of the early misjudgments that Griffin made was 1) there was going to be more money or 2) NASA could talk the politicians out of abandoning the space station as a government “thing”…NASA enjoyed building the space station but operating it has proved less then “entertaining” particularly since there are those pesky international partners who seem to think (Particularly the Russians) that they are equal…

    going back to the Moon was going to be “All American ” (as one turd kept telling me “Team USA”) and of course it didnt fly for a bit so thats the best program of all at NASA (ie one that plans a lot).

    I suspect that Griffin thought that either he could talk (particularly a REpublican President) into a change of effort on the station or maybe more money…My guess is that by the time the GOP was in the tank and a GOP outcome in 08 looked “less” all the major decisions had already been made.

    I also concur that Griffin was probably surprised at how hard it was to make “the stick” work. of course most of these are predictable…but the folks at ATK can sing a good song and if you were to go talk to the contractor lobbiest for the F-35 they will easily convince you that “only a few problems easily solved” remain.

    Perhaps the biggest goof of Griffin is what I call “the Whittington”…he actually thought that Bush and his “vision” were something that the American people as a whole cared for.You talk to the true believers and they really believe that the American people are all flashed about the end of “the vision”…that people really want to see Americans “strolling on the Moon” again…its all Apollo love for them (and a bit of Bush love) and they just cant seem to see reality.

    In the end Griffin has ended up killing the “Apollo NASA” more then he can ever imagine or I guess allow himself to ever believe. He is about the most tone deaf politically Administrator in my lifetime. It is truly amazing how goofy he is

    Robert G. Oler

  • Dennis Berube

    I thought they were working on a SSTO vehicle with the X-33 and follow on larger concept. They dropped that, sighting something to do with the carbon fuel tanks leaking, but the company wanted to use aluminum first, then solve the carbon tnak problems. At least sometlhing like that.

  • This is nothing that a move back to conservatism won’t fix – back to the days when NASA developed rockets and supported a nascent commercial effort.

    LOL, do you actually believe the tripe you write? A return to conservatism? You mean like Bu$h neocommunism? Sure, borrow more money from our “enemy” (You and Whittington seem to think so) China to build SLS/CxP-lite! ROTFLLMAO!!!

    Windy, you’re a hoot!

  • Martijn Meijering

    to change the Shuttle-derived mandates in the NASA Authorization Act

    better yet, to remove the HLV mandate, better yet, the government rocket mandate.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Oh

    this is what I wrote:

    “NASA could talk the politicians out of abandoning the space station as a government “thing”…”

    should be “NASA could talk the politicians into abandoning….”

    the editor regrets the error

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Today, SpaceX CEO and CTO Elon Musk posted the following blog on SpaceX.com, explaining our proposal for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) initiative, started in 2009 to develop private sector human spaceflight capabilities.

    You can read the blog below or online at: http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

    Watch the video: http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=58

    UPDATES

    January 17th, 2011

    ……

    got this in my email.

    from the email update and the video and rumors it looks like SpaceX is pushing ahead on their own with a crewed DRagon sensing how the winds are going.

    Anyone who thinks Orion is ever going to fly as a capsule is just wishing. Maybe the avionics will evolve somewhere but the days of NASA designing something in the APollo mode…are over.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    In some late-breaking news, Aerojet are planning to sue NASA/USG to force them to recompete the SRB contract for SLS.

    AFAIK, this means either:

    1) Aerojet are trying to steal the segmented solids business away from ATK or;

    2) Aerojet have reason to believe that SDLV is going to fall to the wayside in favour of EELV/EELV-Derived HLV, in which case their solids are actually slightly better than ATK’s equivalent GEMs.

    Right now, Aerojet doesn’t get much from the SLS pie. This might just be them trying to steal away some of ATK’s business or it could be a foreshadowing of a major change in the whole SLS plan.

  • Greyroger

    Sidemount always made sense, even in the 80’s. As a cargo version it does not threaten the commercial crew cult very much. And with 358 billion being laid out for fighter planes that don’t work very well, crying about the cost seems absurd.

  • DCSCA

    @common sense wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
    (especially Dragon since it is actually flying, DCSCA?} SpaceX has flown NOBODY. It could be a gem or a deathtrap. Apparently you’re privvy to post-flight analysis of data on systems performance, survivability and operational parameters of Dragon’s ECS. Please share w/t class and let us know the date of their first attempt to fly a crewed craft as investors worldwide await. After all, it’s only common sense.

  • DCSCA

    @ Byeman wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 12:12 am
    Understand your concern- in that ‘New NASA’ you’d be ‘non-essential personnel’ before the ink dried, particularly advocating sidemount options for HSF. It is a politically dead option. Get that resume ready. @Rand Simberg wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 12:19 pm “If only Bolden were Garver’s poodle.” Yeah, then they can both go take a walk. @Oler- Your a lobbyist who gets paid by the word, aren’t you. No matter how hard you try to persuade otherwise, 1+1=2, not 11.

  • The reasoning behind ‘Apollo on Steroids’ was that a capsule shape supported higher entry speeds and had improved safety margins over a winged vehicle. That reasoning is still a timeless truth.

    Most folks could care less about going back to the Moon and view capsules as a return to the past. An upgraded winged vehicle would’ve gained more popular support in the mainstream crowd. Perception is everything.

  • G. Crane

    @Ben-Russell Gough
    From spacenews.com my understanding is that AJ wants to bid for SSME components as well, do I misread?

  • G. Crane

    AJ’s move indicates the industry anticipated that round two between NASA-Congress on SD

  • Sidemount always made sense, even in the 80′s. As a cargo version it does not threaten the commercial crew cult very much. And with 358 billion being laid out for fighter planes that don’t work very well, crying about the cost seems absurd.

    I’ll worry about NASA wasting money, and let people who worry about the Pentagon wasting theirs do that. The notion that because money is being wasted in one area of the government, we shouldn’t care if it is in another, is what’s absurd.

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 5:07 pm

    It’s so easy to get you going… Then you did not hear about the fromage delivery man who flew in with the cheese?

  • G. Crane

    - continued from the previous post ..
    … Heavy Lift will lead to actually NASA being forced to execute the project. In the present environment, every piece of the pie counts.

    In such case, where does Space-X stand?

  • common sense

    @dad2059 wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 5:44 pm

    “Most folks could care less about going back to the Moon”

    Yep

    ” and view capsules as a return to the past.”

    I don’t think so. They view going to the Moon juste like Apollo as a return to the past.

    “An upgraded winged vehicle would’ve gained more popular support in the mainstream crowd. Perception is everything.”

    I don’t think so. What would gain popular support is their participation in the space program where they could be flying in a capsule or anything. That is what gets VG so popular. VG has always been about putting “regular” people on orbit, much more so than SpaceX. But if SpaceX says tomorrow they’ll fly people paying in the $100Ks instead of the $10Ms you will see how popular they will get. Capsule or no capsule.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Greyroger wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 4:29 pm

    Sidemount always made sense, even in the 80′s. As a cargo version it does not threaten the commercial crew cult very much. And with 358 billion being laid out for fighter planes that don’t work very well, crying about the cost seems absurd…………………..

    no on all counts well except one.

    Sidemount did make sense in the 80’s when one was looking at a government planned, controlled, and funded program to execute a space station ….but that window has closed.

    it doesnt make any sense at all today. There is as Paul Spudis even admits with his fanciful notion of a “one years worth of resupply” or something like that mission…no mission for it.

    Wasted money is wasted money. The Pentagon waste a lot of money and that should be stopped..but the money NASA is wasting is in proportion to its budget…much larger.

    An excuse for anything (at least to this conservative) is not “everyone else is doing it”.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 4:06 pm

    In some late-breaking news, Aerojet are planning to sue NASA/USG to force them to recompete the SRB contract for SLS. ..

    this is the next shoe to drop and where Nelson and KBH’s letter to Bolden goes under water.

    Before long the other “rocket guys” are going to start demanding that the entire heavy lift thing be competed commercially not just another NASA foul up…

    As I have said for sometime here…slowly but surely Charlie Bolden is winning and the anti free enterprise people are not.

    Robert G. Oler

  • But if SpaceX says tomorrow they’ll fly people paying in the $100Ks instead of the $10Ms you will see how popular they will get. Capsule or no capsule.

    That might be the case, eventually. But that’s doubtful in the near-term. But if you truly look around the Web and read comments on various sites, you would see that one main question is why NASA never developed a more advanced space plane, not why we’re not going to the Moon, except for a small group.

  • Coastal Ron

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 4:05 pm

    from the email update and the video and rumors it looks like SpaceX is pushing ahead on their own with a crewed DRagon sensing how the winds are going.

    I guess the question would be “what do they have to lose” by promoting an alternative to government-run launch systems? From the perspective of the incoming class of Republicans, here is a company that does what it says, does it for less, and is doing it in America – what’s not to love?

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 4:06 pm

    This might just be them trying to steal away some of ATK’s business or it could be a foreshadowing of a major change in the whole SLS plan.

    I heard they might be doing this, and I think it’s great.

    What we have here, along with SpaceX pushing their Dragon for crew, and even Boeing with their CST-100 effort, is the potential for a huge market shake up for space launch related products and services. And this is exactly what the future of space exploration needs, which is a lot of interest in driving down the costs for getting mass to space.

    Now we just need the politicians (Nelson, Shelby, et al) to agree that it’s time to reevaluate the notion that NASA has to build launchers.

    In my vision of the not-so-distant future, the only vehicles that NASA should be concerned with owning & operating are those that operate outside the atmosphere of Earth. Everything else should be contracted transportation.

    And for those that think national security is a big reason for NASA to operate their own launchers, remember that the U.S. already operates other modes of transportation where the government utilizes commercial assets when needed (CRAF & MSC). Moving passengers or cargo to LEO (or anywhere else) doesn’t have to be any different.

    My $0.02

  • DCSCA

    @common sense wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
    ROFLMAO Easier, it seems, than SpaceX– of which it seems you need constant reminding, has flown NOBODY.

  • DCSCA

    @commonsense- You’ve been able to pick up a package of ‘vaccum-packed’ cheese at a grocery store as well as most corner convenience stores for decades. Yes, Space-X certainly knows how to conmpete with 7-11.
    @Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
    “The cargo version of the Dragon spacecraft will be capable of carrying crew with only three key modifications: a launch abort system, environmental controls and seats.” – Emperor Musk. Uh-huh. So as currently configured, Dragon a ‘deathtrap.’ Commonsense suggests looking for an ECS on eBay, fella. Thank you for playing.

  • Bennett

    common sense wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 6:47 pm

    Good one! The froth almost drips from the comments.

    I thought the new CCDev video was on par with just about everything they release, well worth watching. There are some really good comments over on Clark’s blog about the integrated LES and future powered landing.

  • amightywind

    I guess the question would be “what do they have to lose” by promoting an alternative to government-run launch systems?

    They will promote it for sure. I think their chances of being funded have come and gone. If there were a business case for manned ISS transportation SpaceX would have already developed a manned Dragon beyond the familiar power point of ‘seven crash dummys in a bucket’. The fact is ISS is one major failure from forced abandonment. We’ve already seen major problems with the solar array drives, the ammonia cooling system, and attitude gyros. The occurance of such failures can be expected to increase with time. Just when we lose the shuttle and the ability to effectively respond. If you remember how dicey the last few years of Mir were (the thing was a carnival of danger!), one would be shy investing in this facility several years out.

  • Das Boese

    dad2059 wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 5:44 pm

    Most folks could care less about going back to the Moon and view capsules as a return to the past. An upgraded winged vehicle would’ve gained more popular support in the mainstream crowd. Perception is everything.

    I’d argue the opposite. These days, a Space Shuttle landing isn’t terribly interesting to many folks outside the space community (and probably within as well). After all, unless something goes terribly wrong, it’s just like any other boring airplane landing.

    People only think of capsules as outdated technology because, well, until last year there hasn’t been a new capsule design in over 40 years! How would people know what to expect from a modern reusable capsule like Dragon?

    I really hope SpaceX follows through with their pusher-LAS/powered descent plans, because that’d be a great way to show the capabilities of a modern design.

    Imagine a Dragon ship coming down under rocket power and landing with pinpoint accuracy. For most people that’ll be something right out of a science fiction movie, quite a lot more impressive than the Orbiter’s relatively mundane landings.

    I believe I already wrote somewhere else, if such a system is ever perfected, there is in principle nothing that’d preclude it from being adapted to land on other places than Earth.

  • Das Boese

    Forgot my emoticon on that last sentence. There you go.

    ;)

  • Matt Wiser

    SDLV will in all likelihood (if that’s pursued per Congressional dictate), be inline. Sidemount for crew? Forget it.

    Once the final budget is done, that money going to CxP gets diverted to HLV and other exploration work. Why the delay? Issues unrelated to space: namely a budget stuffed with earmarks that the GOP in the Senate refused to support.

    Leave Musk and the rest of the commercial sector out of exploration at the present time. Their business is transportation to LEO, support (if on-orbit refueling proves practical), and eventual exploitation. The politics won’t allow anything else at the present time. NASA contracting out exploration? Not bloody likely, IMHO.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    SpaceX was always going to build a Dragon Crew. The only difference any government funding would make was to shorten the gap, ie. the time it would take to do it.
    Boeing on the other hand, always claimed that they needed the gov’t funding to make their business case.
    As I posted before, while NASA HSF thrashes around, SpaceX and to a lesser degree Boeing have positioned themselves in the catbird seat.
    Prediction: they’ll get the majority of the CCDev Rd2 money.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    I’ll say one thing about SpaceX: They’re ambitious. Of course, who ever go anywhere in the space biz by aiming low? The inclusion of landing struts and LAS motors that can double as braking motors mean that Crewed Dragon will have a starting land recovery capability (although, I’d be genuinely surprised if that precision landing at NMSP capability happens before 2020). As DCSCA correctly points out, it is now a matter of turning the CGI into reality. Life support and engine development aren’t that much of a major leap.

    FWIW, I’m sticking with my prediction of the first Crewed Dragon flight happening by 2015. I also predict that the first ISS crew rotation, maybe even a long-duration stay to carry out the CRV mission, occuring before the end of 2016.

  • Martijn Meijering

    The politics won’t allow anything else at the present time.

    Or so you hope.

  • Dennis Berube

    Thats a pretty far out vid, the Dragon landing on rockets. I truly hope they succeed in their efforts. Certainly a complex system to land within Earths environment on rockets. I guess that system would be used for both launch excape and if the launch goes according to plan, then a firing to return to Earth and finally the landing. My question is where is all the fuel coming from????

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Dennis Berube,

    The LAS/landing motors will be hypergolic and will use the same fuel system as the RCS thrusters. Dragon carries over 1000kg of fuel, so it isn’t that big a stretch to use some of it for other purposes.

  • byeman

    “Understand your concern- in that ‘New NASA’ you’d be ‘non-essential personnel’ before the ink dried, particularly advocating sidemount options for HSF. ”

    Wrong again. I am bullet proof for many reasons.

  • Bennett

    Certainly a complex system to land within Earths environment on rockets

    Uh… how soon we forget The Delta Clipper?

  • pathfinder_01

    DCSA, I wouldn’t look on ebay but Paragon might have a nice ECS system for Dragon or just about any other spacecraft:

    <a href="http://www.parabolicarc.com/2010/12/04/paragon-completes-milestone-ccdev-life-support-project/&quot;

  • richard schumacher

    The cause of that DCX failure (failure of ground crew to connect landing gear hydraulics) was on par with forgetting to pack the parachutes in an Orion. It says nothing about the utility of vertical landing.

  • I really hope SpaceX follows through with their pusher-LAS/powered descent plans, because that’d be a great way to show the capabilities of a modern design.

    As do I. Pusher-LAS/powered descent is a very doable upgrade to capsule technology and if Elon plays the media right, the public would jump on the “oh-so cool” bandwagon.

    But winged vehicles are still cool and that is the public perception. Perhaps SpaceX will have a chance to change that.

  • Joe

    Bennett wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 8:21 am
    “Certainly a complex system to land within Earths environment on rockets
    Uh… how soon we forget The Delta Clipper?”

    The DCX used four cryogenic (Hydrogen/Oxygen) RL-105A Engines. These were developed from the venerable Rl-10 developed in the 1950’s. The RL-105A’s were capable of being throttled in a wide range (working from memory the low end was down as low as 10%) in order to achieve the vertical landing.

    If Space X is planning on developing engines (cryogenic/non-cryogenic, solid/liquid?) and integrating them into the Dragon capsule (using them as the launch escape system as well) I wish them luck (no sarcasm intended). It would certainly be an ambitious goal. The Russian were considering such a system for their Soyuz replacement, but according to recent reports have returned to using parachutes.

  • Joe

    richard schumacher wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 9:12 am
    “The cause of that DCX failure (failure of ground crew to connect landing gear hydraulics) was on par with forgetting to pack the parachutes in an Orion. It says nothing about the utility of vertical landing.”

    Absolutely correct. The DC-X flew succesully numerous times prior to the accident. I had the pleasure of attending one of the successful test flights.

  • BeancounterFromDownunder

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 5:24 am

    Life support has been developed and is being used in space right now eg. Shuttle, ISS, and Bigelow is human-loop Sundancer. SpaceX has one in their Dragon cargo vehicle as they’ll be taking live cargo to and from the ISS. All that’s required is enhancement. They have also already designed and developed 3 engines including the Draco hypogolic motor so no stretch whatsoever for them to do another.
    So, please check facts and think before posting.
    My bet is that they’ll get the CCDev Rd2 funding and have a crew version in operating in space by 2014 in time to service Bigelow’s Sundancer module. More potential crew business for them there than the ISS.

  • Martijn Meijering

    (cryogenic/non-cryogenic, solid/liquid?)

    They will use hypergolics, to be able to share the propellant with the Dracos.

  • Coastal Ron

    amightywind wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 9:40 pm

    We’ve already seen major problems with the solar array drives, the ammonia cooling system, and attitude gyros. The occurance of such failures can be expected to increase with time.

    If you’re too scared to venture out into the harsh realm of space, then so be it. But the ISS is our proving ground right now for what works, and yes, what doesn’t. And what you forgot to say about each of those issues, is that they were fixed. Life goes on in LEO.

    Besides, where would you rather have a systems breakdown on a new piece of equipment? 238 miles away, or 238,000?

    I know you want to magically jump to the Moon, but if you think every system is going to work perfectly on a lunar mission, you are living in cloud cuckoo land.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Beancounter,

    Thank you, I knew all these facts.

    I also know that SpaceX is still learning its craft and does not have NASA’s effectively bottomless pit of money. I also strongly suspect that they will have at least one “learning opportunity” along the way. I stick with 2015 for flight tests and 2016 for operation missions as the latest we’re likely to see this happen. If they beat that date, I will be pleasantly surprised and will raise a cheer.

    Please don’t try to copy MT’s and Robert Oler’s snark. You don’t have the delivery to pull it off.

  • common sense

    @dad2059 wrote @ January 17th, 2011 at 7:21 pm

    “That might be the case, eventually.”

    It will

    “But that’s doubtful in the near-term.”

    Agreed but you have to start somewhere.

    “But if you truly look around the Web and read comments on various sites, you would see that one main question is why NASA never developed a more advanced space plane, not why we’re not going to the Moon, except for a small group.”

    I am not sure what you mean by “if you truly look around the Web”. Do you mean regular people or space fans? “More advanced” is not related to the shape of the vehicle, not only related. There are advances that include avionics for example that you will not see outside. Other advances include operations. Now I will grant you that it is not obvious by only looking at the vehicle. If you were to use wings so that the shape looks “advanced” you will lose a lot of the other advanced capabilities. Further assume that SpaceX can land Dragon with systems like DC-X. From afar it will look like old tech but from up close or in flight it will look really advanced. There are two competing perceptions, that of NASA and that of SpaceX. What SpaceX is doing is far more advanced than what NASA was trying to do especially in regards to their means. However Orion was more advanced then Apollo…

    Anyway…

  • common sense

    @Beancounter from Downunder wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:43 am

    “Boeing on the other hand, always claimed that they needed the gov’t funding to make their business case.”

    Don’t believe all you read. Boeing has enough resources to do it. Of course they would like the government to foot the bill. I believe that the CCDev program manager even said they would still love a cost-plus contract, who wouldn’t? Boeing Space/Military is set up to handle cost plus. Now Boeing has all it takes to actually get CST-100 going even more so than LMT has for Orion and more so even than SpaceX. Boeing may lack the will though. Also, one reason Boeing might not do it on its own cash is because their managers may not believe there is enough of a market. Otherwise as for any commercial products they deliver they can do it: It’d be easy for them to go check how Boeing Commercial Airplanes go about it and get some of their managers to help them out.

    Oh well…

  • G. Crane

    By operating in space, the ISS in inherently at risk at all times. A couple of fragments of space junk can create considerable damage. But what are the contract terms for Space-X and Orbital Sciences, they’re paid for fixed a number of supply trips to the ISS? What happens is the ISS is forced into decommission earlier than the completion of the supply launches?

  • Dennis Berube

    The only thing here I am getting a bit worried about for commercial enterprises, is what will happen when an accident occurs? Will the free enterprise system that ispushing for access to space be styfiled or not allowed to progress do to a failure, when our government gets involved? if we are ever to homestead space, as I would call it, there must be freedom to progress, even with accidents. If the government gets to involved after an accident, then it may short circuit the whole idea of a free space market! Lets hope not!

  • I am not sure what you mean by “if you truly look around the Web”. Do you mean regular people or space fans? “More advanced” is not related to the shape of the vehicle, not only related.

    I was speaking of mainstream media on the Web, not only space advocacy sites and as I said, the mainstream public perceives winged vehicles as more advanced, I wasn’t speaking for myself; Most folks could care less about going back to the Moon and view capsules as a return to the past.

    Most folks = mainstream public.

    Hey, I like SpaceX’s advanced Dragon concept and I would hazard a guess that’s why Elon suggested it would be more “capable” than Orion.

    SpaceX has a chance to alter the memestream to suggest to the public that capsules can be “high-tech.”

  • Coastal Ron

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 11:57 am

    . I stick with 2015 for flight tests and 2016 for operation missions as the latest we’re likely to see this happen.

    I would agree with your assessment, and I think the vertical landing stuff SpaceX is showing is not intended to show near-term direction, but where they will evolve to at some future point.

    If you take into light Musk’s comments after the December Dragon flight, then I think what we’re seeing is his small efforts to reset the various expectations for space related hardware.

    For instance, one would think that if you’re competing against a dozen other companies for a potential HLV contract, that you wouldn’t announce your design and pricing ahead of time. But I think that is Musk’s way of forcing the other companies to submit lower priced entries, since they know what SpaceX will be submitting. This will also further highlight the difference between the hugely expensive Congress designed SLS and commercial space, which hopefully will force Congress to back down on their plans and rely on commercial space. Which benefits SpaceX.

    As I’ve said before, 2011 is going to be an interesting year…

  • common sense

    @Dennis Berube wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:16 pm

    “The only thing here I am getting a bit worried about for commercial enterprises, is what will happen when an accident occurs?”

    What happens when a 747 goes down? A cruise ship sinks? Cars crash? You’ll have an NTSB investigation relayed to the FAA with recommendations. FAA will suggest their owns. Commercials will integrate the required mods.

    “Will the free enterprise system that ispushing for access to space be styfiled or not allowed to progress do to a failure, when our government gets involved?”

    If our government does not want to fly commercials then they will not fly. So?

    “if we are ever to homestead space, as I would call it, there must be freedom to progress, even with accidents. If the government gets to involved after an accident, then it may short circuit the whole idea of a free space market! Lets hope not!”

    The government will intervene as it should, using NTSB and FAA. See above.

    An accident for a commercial company is NOT the end of everything if they can recover. If they cannot then c’est la vie.

  • common sense

    @dad2059 wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:22 pm

    Well I think it is “our” job to educate the public as to what is, or not, advanced. I’ll give you an example, only my opinion. Concorde was a very advanced aircraft, Mach 2.00, early FBW. However was it more or less advanced than A-320 that did away with the third crew? An A-320 looks a lot like a 737 though. I will submit that the A-320 was far more advanced than the Concorde. Concorde looked cool, still does, went real fast but it went real fast almost nowhere. And if tomorrow someone was to make a Mach 2.00 or faster airliner it would most likely suffer the same fate, for similar and also different reasons. Quiet supersonic would not help much in that case. A hypersonic airliner would be even worse.

    In any case. Some advances have value and can be exploited (e.g. commercial crew to ISS, DCSCA?) and some don’t (lunar base).

    Tough world we live in ;)

  • Bennett

    @richard schumacher @joe

    Dang, I forgot that the video shows the DCX tipping over after (as you note) a technical blunder. I posted the link to remind everyone that big stuff can land under rocket power.

    I was going to post a Masten or Armadillo video but didn’t want the warts to say “small stuff is easy, let’s see a big one land”.

    But of course NONE of it is easy, it takes hard work and more hard work and serious skull sweat. Which NewSpace (Boeing included) have in great quantities.

  • common sense

    @ Coastal Ron wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:45 pm

    “As I’ve said before, 2011 is going to be an interesting year…”

    Yeah, but I think 2009 (http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html) in the end will get the prize of most interesting year when “it” all started and possibly “ended”.

  • BeancounterFromDownunder

    common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 12:18 pm

    Boeing have to look to their shareholders and yes, perhaps they don’t see the market or perhaps the risk level is too high for their organisation. I’d punt on an inadequate project internal ROI without gov’t funding.

  • BeancounterFromDownunder

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 11:57 am
    @ Beancounter,

    Thank you, I knew all these facts.

    You’re welcome!

  • Robert G. Oler

    common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 2:38 pm

    @dad2059 wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 1:22 pm

    Well I think it is “our” job to educate the public as to what is, or not, advanced. ..

    good post.

    In my view the public doesnt care what is or is not advanced…they really dont know what makes a 737800 better then a 737100 and dont give a squat. What they care about is the technology sufficient to help “them” in their daily lives make their leisure, business and other efforts more efficient.

    What the public sees with human spaceflight right now is an effort that matters them not a thing. And they would see that with some astronauts “strolling on the Moon” in the future.

    Right now human spaceflight doesnt even offer “entertainment”. You can only spin the other astronaut so many times or do the water bubble thing or whatever a few times and they say “gee Avatar was better” and move on.

    If Dragon or Boeing’s thing or whatever can open up human spaceflight to where something anything is done that the public looks at and either sees or gets the word that “this has value” then they wont care what humans go and come to orbit in.

    There are two or three nasty legacies from the Apollo era that just seem to dog efforts in space…and one of them is that the public has to be entertained. Thats true so only as long as there is nothing else that is being done that that really changes the world equation.

    NASA tries of course. Poor old Rob N just keeps panting about things happening at 17500 mph.. but its a dog that stopped hunting a long time ago.

    Robert G. Oler

  • DCSCA

    @common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
    =yawn= space exploitation is not space exploration.

  • Coastal Ron

    common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 2:41 pm

    Yeah, but I think 2009 in the end will get the prize of most interesting year when “it” all started and possibly “ended”.

    Yep, 2009 was the inflection point.

    What comes next should shake up (and shake out) the traditional aerospace industry, and like all good shake outs (versus bad ones), it should result in better products & services at lower price points.

    The traditional aerospace companies that have enjoyed their time at the government feeding trough are trying to decide how they are going to compete with so many new entrants, especially the lower cost ones. This drama will take a couple of years to unfold, but the overall results could be the space renascence that we’ve been waiting for.

    My $0.02

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 4:19 pm

    “=yawn= space exploitation is not space exploration.”

    Why you even took the bait is beyond me! But it made me “laugh”.

    Thanks.

    :)

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 3:57 pm

    If you read recent posts at nasawatch for example (http://nasawatch.com/archives/2011/01/space-and-the-g.html) about NASA and education you will see how the “in-crowd” disparage the public at large. It is very disheartening to read things about the public would not understand hence we don’t need them to have a say. This strategy has reached its limits and the public will have a say. Saying nothing is the same as saying something, the consequences can be as devastating (Iraq, Afghanistan). The public allowed “us” to play with about $10B/yr without much oversight. The problem occurred when “we” chose to ask for more without a good reason.

    The “public” is not “dumb” but “it” is not technologically literate and it does not need to be. However, the public can make the difference between some thing that helps their daily life and some thing else. HSF is in the “else” category, reserved for an elite few, so far.

    Some of them may, hopefully will, understand that the “exploitation” of space (DCSCA, another time?) will offer them, possibly, resources that “exploration” will never do. Much more so than “advances” they do not understand, nor do they need to. Advances are means to an end, not an end onto themselves, and they come in many different flavors.

  • Vladislaw

    Robert G. Oler wrote:

    “Right now human spaceflight doesnt even offer “entertainment”. You can only spin the other astronaut so many times or do the water bubble thing or whatever a few times and they say “gee Avatar was better” and move on.”

    I agree, unless you spin the astronaut, then bodyslam him, catch him on the rebound and crash him into the walls it really won’t sell, but *All Star Space Wrestling* would.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    Time moves on. NASA is still stalled and SpaceX are getting a bit more press regarding their Dragon Crew effort and the associated costs.
    And the Shuttle mission STS-133 still hasn’t launched.

  • Matt Wiser

    I’ll agree with Ben: Space X is certainly ambitious-have to give ‘em credit for that. But ambition can get out of control, and bring things down to a more…realistic level. They will have at least one (maybe more) “learning event” before all is said and done. And hopefully no one gets hurt or worse as a result-but that comes with this territory.

    HLV can have more than one customer besides NASA: DOD and the intelligence community have a need to lift big things into orbit-LEO and GEO. Get their input on what their requirements are before settling on a final design.

  • DCSCA

    common sense wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 6:17 pm
    As the 80-plus history of modern rocketry shows, the ‘advances’ you champion have been made by government funded and managed space programs, under many guises, for geopolitical ends, not for financial interests. For profit, free-enterprised efforts have never lead the way in this field and in the wealthy Western nations, it was, in fact, starved for funding and any investment for advance reactive rather than pro-active; a follow along, cashing in where it could. It’s a fools errand to believe anything close to ‘Reaganomics’ is going to fuel the expansion of the human experience out into the cosmos.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Vladislaw wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 8:23 pm

    I agree, unless you spin the astronaut, then bodyslam him, catch him on the rebound and crash him into the walls it really won’t sell, but *All Star Space Wrestling* would….

    and the loser goes out the airlock.the winners get big belt buckles…..the women are in sports bras and high heels…LOL

    as one teenager told me “Avatar was better effects”.

    (and I really found avatar quite well ordinary…but moving on)

    Robert G. Oler

  • Byeman

    “HLV can have more than one customer besides NASA: DOD and the intelligence community have a need to lift big things into orbit-LEO and GEO. Get their input on what their requirements are before settling on a final design.

    No, they have no requirements for an HLV.

  • common sense

    @ Matt Wiser wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    “But ambition can get out of control, and bring things down to a more…realistic level.”

    Just like Constellation did.

    “They will have at least one (maybe more) “learning event” before all is said and done. And hopefully no one gets hurt or worse as a result-but that comes with this territory.”

    What kind of comment is that? This is all you have to offer to fellow engineers who work damn hard to make HSF stay alive in the US? Pathetic.

    “HLV can have more than one customer besides NASA: DOD and the intelligence community have a need to lift big things into orbit-LEO and GEO. Get their input on what their requirements are before settling on a final design.”

    Nonsense, if they did they would have requirements out via an RFI, RFP etc.

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ January 19th, 2011 at 12:20 am

    “As the 80-plus history of modern rocketry shows, the ‘advances’ you champion have been made by government funded and managed space programs, under many guises, for geopolitical ends, not for financial interests.”

    What are the advances I actually champion here? Re-read for comprehension my comments.

    “For profit, free-enterprised efforts have never lead the way in this field and in the wealthy Western nations, it was, in fact, starved for funding and any investment for advance reactive rather than pro-active; a follow along, cashing in where it could.”

    I am not even sure this makes sense. You’ll have to expand a bit on your “reasoning” here…

    “It’s a fools errand to believe anything close to ‘Reaganomics’ is going to fuel the expansion of the human experience out into the cosmos.”

    What the heck does Reagan have to do with any of this? Just because I support commercial exploitation of space does not mean I support Reagan’s economics. Nor does it mean that for anyone with ideas similar as mine.

    Oh well…

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ January 18th, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    HLV can have more than one customer besides NASA: DOD and the intelligence community have a need to lift big things into orbit-LEO and GEO. Get their input on what their requirements are before settling on a final design.

    The DoD and intelligence communities already use Delta IV Heavy for their needs, and if they have a couple of near-term and far less expensive options (compared to the SLS) if they want to put something bigger into space.

    For LEO, Atlas V Heavy is 30 months away from launch after getting a customer order, and it will put 28% more mass (64,820 vs 49,470 lb) into LEO than Delta IV Heavy.

    For GTO, Falcon 9 Heavy, which is advertised for $95M/launch, can put almost 50% more mass up than Delta IV Heavy (28,860 vs 42,990 lb).

    Neither Atlas V Heavy nor the far less expensive Falcon 9 Heavy have any customer demand. If there was customer demand for these bigger launchers, then one could make the argument that the trend for ever bigger payloads will continue. But as of now that trend does not exist, and the biggest near-term launchers are not needed.

    Congress and others saying there is a need for an HLV does not mean that there is a true need, only a perceived one. Hard to pay the bills with perceived money…

  • vluture4

    Just to clarify the cost argument, the Shuttle overhead is high, but in one case where a mission (tethered satellite) was reflown, the additional cost was less than $100 million. If the Shuttle was still flying, the Sidemount would be minimal in cost. Augustine said as much in the Senate hearings, in fact he said the Shuttle could continue to fly!! But incredibly, this option doesn’t appear in his famous report. But if Shuttle is canceled (a bad decision originally made by Bush, based on Griffin’s advice, which apparently became inevitable before the 2008 election but was later blamed on Obama) then all the Shuttle infrastructure would have to be paid for by Suttle-C and the sidemount concept would be completely untenable, just like Constellation.

  • DCSCA

    common sense wrote @ January 19th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
    Space exploitation is not space exploration. Commercial exploitation of space has a limited market in this era and not attractive to deep-pocketed investors who expect a profitable ROI. That’s why governments fund space projects in this era and will continue to do so. As WC.Fields once quipped- never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.

  • Coastal Ron

    vluture4 wrote @ January 19th, 2011 at 3:19 pm

    the Shuttle overhead is high, but in one case where a mission (tethered satellite) was reflown, the additional cost was less than $100 million.

    You’re talking marginal costs of course, which are on top of the $200M/month fixed costs that the program needed to run.

    It’s hard to get any firm cost estimates for what Side Mount would need, but the Ares I numbers that Space Policy Online found last year provide some insight. They dug up NASA testimony where it was stated Ares I would need $781M/year for fixed costs, and $138M/flight (marginal cost).

    http://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=817:how-much-would-ares-i-cost&catid=67:news&Itemid=27

    Ares I was a single SRM without a 1st stage LOX/LH2 tank, whereas Side Mount is essentially the Shuttle with the orbiter replaced with a cargo pod.

    While the Shuttle program was going full speed, the costs for the two SRM’s (not yet assembled into SRB’s) were $34.3M each, or $68.6M for the flight set. The ET was costing $173M/unit, which likely rolls up the unit cost (what’s shown on the DD250) plus compensation for operating and maintaining the government owned Michoud facility. That equals $241.6M/flight, but is predicated on full-up production, not start-up or low-rate.

    It’s also interesting to see that NASA was estimating that the Ares I fixed costs would be about 1/3 that of the Shuttle. I would imagine that the Side Mount would require a higher fixed cost that Ares I, since there is more assembly/complexity required.

    Bottom line is that compared to existing launchers, Side Mount won’t be cost effective unless you have a need for lots of mass in orbit, and I don’t see a program that Congress is ready to fund that provides that need.

  • Matt Wiser

    DCSCA: Thanks for pointing that out: there are some out there who seem to think that Commercial can do it all. They can’t. Exploration will be a government operation for the foreseeable future, and when it comes time for exploitation, that’s the private sector’s role. Though the private sector will be able to offer their products (launch vehicles, crew capsules, designs for approprate landers for Moon and Mars) to the government, it will be government that operates those systems, not the private sector. Now, if on-orbit refueling proves to be practical, then there is an opportunity for the private sector to support exploration activities, by restocking any depots in LEO or at an L-point under contract. But going to new places or revisiting old ones? That’s NASA’s (or ESA, JAXA, Russians, ChiComs). And all this talk of NEO first goes out the window if credible intelligence suggests a ChiCom human lunar mission is on their agenda-especially with this Congress (House under GOP control).

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ January 19th, 2011 at 11:57 pm

    …there are some out there who seem to think that Commercial can do it all.

    This is a false argument. I don’t know anyone that states commercial space will have the desire (or the resources) to do leading edge exploration.

    The only time commercial will be pushing out ahead of NASA is when there is money to be made in exploiting the resources outside of Earth. But that will be so far in the future that it’s not relevant to what’s going on today.

    I don’t know why, but some people think the discussion about NASA and commercial space has a binary outcome – it doesn’t. What commercial space does best is the routine, and what NASA does best is the unknown/unproven. Both are needed for the future.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    Purely FWIW: Commercial may not instigate exploration. However, if it offers the tools to carry it out, others may choose to do so and fund the necessary work.

  • Steven Rappolee

    Paul Spudis is correct on the side mount issue, it is a near term solution to a congressional requirement.
    I see side mount as cargo only,commercial crew on Atlas and Orion on Delta IV heavy might increase production rates on EELV.If there is a need for a second stage on a HLV, then ELV or a second side mount
    if there is money a second commercial crew should go to a new space launcher
    Pual Spudis should except the moon as a secondary goal in a flexible path, spiral development, there will be no money for landers at first.
    any HLV second stage should share commonalty with fuel depot and EELV stages

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