Congress, NASA

The source of the 130-ton SLS provision

One provision in the full-year fiscal year 2011 CR (which the House is scheduled to vote on later today) regarding NASA is language that the Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle “shall have a lift capability not less than 130 tons and which shall have an upper stage and other core elements developed simultaneously.” That’s contrary to the language in the authorization act, which calls for initial development of an SLS that can place 70-100 tons into LEO that would later be upgraded to a 130-ton capacity. NASA administrator Charles Bolden has said on a number of occasions, including Monday’s Senate appropriations hearing, that the SLS would be an “evolving program” to ultimately reach that 130-ton goal.

So how did that 130-ton language get into the FY11 CR? According to the Huntsville Times, it was added by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, at the request of another subcommittee member, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL). Aderholt’s north Alabama district is near, but does not include, the Marshall Space Flight Center, which would be the lead center for the SLS program. “Unfortunately, the signs I see are that NASA is more determined than ever to slow down the heavy-lift vehicle program,” Aderholt wrote in a letter to Wolf quoted in the article. Aderholt said in a later statement that the language reflected a joint effort with Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) and other members of the state’s congressional delegation to provide “a real future for our nation’s space program.”

Requiring NASA to move ahead with immediate development of a 130-ton HLV, with no initial, smaller vehicle first—if, in fact, that is how the provision is interpreted—will only add to NASA’s challenges. Early this year a preliminary NASA report concluded that the agency could not meet the authorization act’s 2016 deadline for putting the SLS into operation under the projected budget profile—and that was for the smaller 70-ton version, not the 130-ton vehicle now being pushed in the appropriations bill.

193 comments to The source of the 130-ton SLS provision

  • Aremis Asling

    This is precisely why we should never engineer by legislation.

  • amightywind

    Aderholt’s concern is if heavy lift is not mandated, it won’t happen at all. Given the track record of the current NASA management, I’d say that is a valid concern.

    Apollo developed 2 vehicles at the same time (Saturn IB and Saturn V). There is no reason why the same cannot be done with the Direct architecture. It is been seven years since the loss of Columbia. Why are we still having these moronic discussions?

  • Coastal Ron

    Thanks for highlighting this Jeff.

    How is NASA supposed to build the SLS EDS with no additional money and no additional schedule?

    But that’s OK for those of us that don’t want Congress to build a franken-launcher in the first place, because this is going to make it all that much easier to identify as a program that is under-funded and WAY behind-schedule from the get-go, and worthy of cancellation.

    For far less money we could be building Nautilus-X, launching it on existing rockets, and going BEO. Apparently the delegation from Alabama is against space exploration, but for pork – what a surprise.

  • Scott Bass

    Good! Bolden has no one to blame but himself, I guess he used the word can’t to many times, I am sure he will still drag his feet and the next administrator will have to struggle to play catch up, can’t wait to see the 130mt starship fly!

  • common sense

    @ amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 1:38 pm

    “Aderholt’s concern is if heavy lift is not mandated, it won’t happen at all.”

    Boy I don’t know how many times you need to be reminded that it will NOT happen at all no matter what UNLESS they provide for a budget commensurate with the task and they will NOT. They could not make Ares 1 with more money and now they will make a HLV with less money and less time??? What magic wand do they use to do that?

    “Apollo developed 2 vehicles at the same time (Saturn IB and Saturn V). ”

    Could it be that NASA had a slightly larger budget then? That the nation was backing the space program then?

    “There is no reason why the same cannot be done with the Direct architecture. ”

    Ah come on. Direct, Sidemount and any SD vehicle will not see the light of day. Too expensive.

    “It is been seven years since the loss of Columbia. Why are we still having these moronic discussions?”

    Because we have to deal with daydreamers like you who have no experience with spacecraft design (your own admission). The same people who care more about “big words” than about smart words. People who think they need a big stick on a pad to go places rather than to actually go places.

    When NASA will yet fail again you can blame Obama or the brand of fairy dust used to get the moronic HLV going.

    Don’t think, act! Right? What’s new?

  • Major Tom

    The contradictions in the Huntsville Times article between what Aderholt, Shelby, and Griffin are trying to do and what’s actually happening to the MSFC workforce would be hilarious if they weren’t so sad:

    “‘It means a real future for our nation’s space program,’ Aderholt said, ‘and thousands of jobs in North Alabama.’…

    “‘The budget deal is a good one for Marshall, for NASA, and for the space community at large,’ agreed former NASA administrator Michael Griffin…

    “[But] The budget deal wasn’t all good news for NASA…

    “Citing an expected $30 million cut from its Center Management and Operations account, Marshall last week ordered belt-tightening that cut another 150-300 support jobs.”

    SLS cost growth in the year-end CR isn’t creating jobs at MSFC. It’s killing them, by the hundreds.

    Griffin is also just making stuff up here:

    “Griffin said wherever America goes next in space, “… we will need heavy-lift launch capability. Study after study has shown that 130 metric tons is the lower useful limit for such a vehicle.”

    That’s simply not true.

    The latest study by Griffin’s own former ESAS lead doesn’t make any such claim. In fact, he argues that any HLV architecture is inherently unaffordable versus budget projections:

    http://images.spaceref.com/news/2011/F9Prop.Depot.pdf

    And even NASA’s own HEFT study and architecture doesn’t recommend anything heavier than 100 tons:

    http://www.nasawatch.com/images/heft.presentation.pdf

    Griffin is either ignorant or lying, neither of which is consistent with being an “eminent scholar” at UAH or anywhere else.

    And this fantasy is especially precious:

    “Aderholt said… ‘This rocket is crucial for any robotic or human missions beyond the International Space Station.'”

    “130 metric tons of lift” is “crucial” for “any robotic” mission after ISS? Really? I’m sure the Mars sample return, Europa Orbiter, and W-FIRST teams will hold up work on their 25-ton or less payloads until that 130-ton SLS is ready circa 2030.

    Great to see such excellent intellectual capital at work in the North Alabama Space Agency.

    Oy vey…

  • common sense

    Alabama… Sweet home Alabama… Shelby… Alabama… Shelby…

    How long do we have to deal with him? But he is losing steam, clearly: Shelby was not upfront with it. It’s a backdoor deal. He clearly did not want to be pounded again on this nonsense, I suppose. If Sen. Shelby was sincere about the whole thing he would shout loud about a budget increase for NASA. Now I would like to see that, I mean really, see how it goes.

  • Rhyolite

    “Unfortunately, the signs I see are that NASA is more determined than ever to slow down the heavy-lift vehicle program,”

    Adding requirements without budget is likely to slow down rather than speed up the program.

  • Major Tom

    “Aderholt’s concern is if heavy lift is not mandated, it won’t happen at all. Given the track record of the current NASA management, I’d say that is a valid concern.”

    What “track record” are they suppossed to have? The current NASA management still doesn’t have a appropriated budget from Congress from which to actually pursue an HLV, of any flavor. What do you expect the NASA Administrator to do until there’s an appropriated budget? Build the SLS in his garage using his grandkids as slave labor?

    “Apollo developed 2 vehicles at the same time (Saturn IB and Saturn V). There is no reason why the same cannot be done with the Direct architecture.”

    There’s three reasons:

    1) Budget. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo budget hit a high that twice as large as NASA’s budget levels today.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG

    2) Cost. The LOX/LH2 engines, SRBs, and foamed ETs on the Shuttle are inherently more expensive than the LOX/Kerosene and ELV structure of the Saturn systems. (The LOX/LH2 upper stages are probably a wash.)

    3) Aderholt, Shelby, and Wolf, following Griffin’s advice, have directed NASA not to do so in the year-end CR.

    “Why are we still having these moronic discussions?”

    Ask your hero Griffin. If the Times article is accurate, he’s the one who pulled Aderholt, Shelby, and Wolf’s strings away from 70-tons and towards 130-tons.

    FWIW…

  • John Malkin

    amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 1:38 pm

    What would have been the cost adjusted for 2010 dollars?
    What is the LEO mass?
    What was the actual development time?
    When was Ares V going to be ready to fly?
    Why couldn’t they develop Ares 5 5 years?

  • Justin Kugler

    We could probably get a 130-ton rocket with the budget Congress is willing to give. We just can’t get it with the technical and programmatic solutions they are mandating.

  • “And the pork-train kept a-rollin’ all night long…” (apologies to Aerosmith)

    Just how long will this travesty keep going? Jobs programs for the NASA District States…”better than paying welfare”, lol. Whatta joke!

    Where’s your TEA! Partiers on this Windy? That’s it, just hot air!

    Empire lovin’ neo-cons by any other name and pork for cost plus contractors!

  • Major Tom

    I have to say that I’m sorry for the DIRECT team. I personally don’t see how Jupiter-130/Jupiter-246 would have been budgetarily sustainable either, but it was a huge improvement over the cost, schedule, and technical complexity of Ares I/V. To see their selfless, hard work go down the drain — not because a better solution came out of an open industry competition — but because a former NASA Administrator is still pulling strings behind the scenes for his unneeded and unrealistic personal favorite, is just awful. Makes me retch. My sympathies.

    FWIW…

  • Coastal Ron

    amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 1:38 pm

    Why are we still having these moronic discussions?

    Because of moronic decisions by some in Congress.

    Care to compare Constellation’s budget with the SLS, and show us how NASA has plenty of budget & time to get the SLS done?

    [cricket’s chirping]

  • amightywind

    2) Cost. The LOX/LH2 engines, SRBs, and foamed ETs on the Shuttle are inherently more expensive than the LOX/Kerosene and ELV structure of the Saturn systems.

    Minor Tom, try to break out of your mind’s mobius loop. The cost difference of LH2/O2 and Kerolox is minimal, especially when we have perfected the cryogenic technology for 40 years. We are already very good at manufacturing tanks and SRB’s. You can make an argument for Kerolox on the first stage. For upper stages your are simply wasting precious mass on anything but LH2/O2. You are obviously more comfortable with childish technology like the F9. Too bad for you, but people like you have wasted enough of our time. America has spent more than 2 years being obstructed by the ravings of the cranks and phony entrepreneurs. We can now judge the results. It is time for the GOP to seize back the space program from incompetents.

    How long do we have to deal with him? But he is losing steam

    Senator Shelby was re-elected to the Senate in 2010. Meet your new boss.

  • amightywind

    Why couldn’t they develop Ares 5 5 years?

    Kind of a swift and severe judgement on a program undergoing normal growing pains. One wonders how JWST or MSL have survived.

    But it isn’t a fair judgement. The leftist saboteurs have used schedule as a fig leaf to cancel a program that interfered with the space fantasies of their cronies.

    May I remind you, that Ares I-X flew successfully. The Ares V baseline was only a couple of years old. Obama killed the program before it really started.

  • Coastal Ron

    amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 3:01 pm

    Obama killed the [Constellation] program before it really started.

    Ignorance is bliss with you.

    It was a bipartisan Congress that agreed Constellation should be killed – remember the President PROPOSES, but the Congress DISPOSES. And rightly so in Constellation’s case.

    Next will be SLS when the GAO comes back with a report stating the obvious – not enough funding, no clear business case, and way behind schedule.

  • common sense

    @ amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    “Senator Shelby was re-elected to the Senate in 2010. Meet your new boss.”

    Dream on my friend. “My” boss? I have no boss.

    @ amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 3:01 pm

    “Kind of a swift and severe judgement on a program undergoing normal growing pains.”

    For someone who does not work this field how do you know the pains were “normal”? Because there was san entire Augustin Committee of space professionals who disagree with you.

    “One wonders how JWST or MSL have survived.”

    Relative importance. Difficult to understand I know but these two missions are far more important to us than Constellation ever was.

    “The leftist saboteurs have used schedule as a fig leaf to cancel a program that interfered with the space fantasies of their cronies.”

    Much better than the other day. Got over the cold?

    “May I remind you, that Ares I-X flew successfully. ”

    Yes you may. May I remind you that it was a Shuttle SRB with no upper stage that accomplished the unbelievable feat of going suborbital for between $500M and $900M? What a feat! The most expensive hobby rocket in the world!

  • Das Boese

    Major Tom wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 2:04 pm

    I’m sure the Mars sample return, Europa Orbiter, and W-FIRST teams will hold up work on their 25-ton or less payloads until that 130-ton SLS is ready circa 2030.

    If their budgets are being looted to pay for SLS… I guess they will.

    I’m not sure if the irony was intentional, but thanks for the chuckle anyway.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi AW –

    “Apollo developed 2 vehicles at the same time (Saturn IB and Saturn V).”

    Actually, S1B preceeded S5 by several years.

    “There is no reason why the same cannot be done with the Direct architecture.”

    No question that there is no reason why Glushko’s teams’ engines from the late 1970s-early 1980s should be state of the art. Except…

    ” It is been seven years since the loss of Columbia. Why are we still having these moronic discussions?”

    Largely because of ATK. They were going to make sure that the successor to the Shuttle was going to use solids. Goldin tried to get them into composites for the X33, ATK couldn’t.

    After Columbia, a simple launch alternative turned into a 5 seg mess.

    NASA could not only not develop Ares 1 and Ares 5 at the same time, NASA could not develop Ares 1 alone, as that would take the Almighty, to change physics and the ensuing engineering realities.

  • Justin Kugler

    No one from commercial space is obstructing anything being done at NASA. That’s just absurd.

    NASA has much the same buying power now, when adjusted for inflation, as it always had. NASA’s resources need to be focused on pushing back the frontier, as Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson says, not building services that can be provided elsewhere.

    The fact that Constellation didn’t even have an orbital test flight after six years and billions of dollars spent proves that the monolithic architecture approach isn’t the way to go.

  • Ironically, what NASA presented to the Congress was the 130 ton configuration — with the upper stage and the two 5 segment SRBs– which they said couldn’t be built with current funding and not the 70 ton core stage without the upper stage with the current 4-segment SRBs. Now it looks like NASA is going to be forced to build what they themselves presented to Congress!

    Since the administration really doesn’t want an operational heavy lift vehicle by 2017 but the Congress does, it should be interesting to see what the HLV is actually used for after Obama is out of office. With Bigelow planning individual space stations as large as 100 tonnes with twice the volume of the current ISS, NASA’s SLS may end up being a highly sought after launch vehicle by private industry.

  • Chris

    @a Mighty Wind:
    what a volatile mix of partisanship, paranoia and obtuseness.
    May I remind you that Ares I-X was a (4 segmented booster) with a dummy second stage. So after 5 years all they could do was put a fake top on an existing SRB. Oh and it damaged the tower and failed to properly deploy it parachutes..
    and it was projected to cost a $1billion a launch! I’m not sure the current administration is making all the right calls, but that turkey had to die.

  • Bill Hensley

    Obama killed the program before it really started.

    If that were true it just makes all the more sense to have killed it. They had already spent $9 billion. And it was just barely started???

  • Justin Kugler

    If NASA can’t afford SLS, what makes you think private industry can?

  • Ferris Valyn

    Chris

    You can remind him of that, all you want

    Whether he actually pays attention, well…..

  • Robert G. Oler

    This is wonderful!

    The heavy lift notion continues to die dragged down by idiots trying to protect jobs that are long gone…in the meantime SpaceX and Boeing are getting ready to (gasp) fly cargo and people…by the 2014 time frame.

    Life is good in space policy Robert G. Oler

  • SpaceColonizer

    (previously posting as James T, and previously posting hungover)

    Well… I recently started to find myself in a weird place on this issue. I realized that if an HLV was to be built at all it probably makes more sense to go straight to the 130 ton version anyway. Here’s my reasoning, as far as my understanding of the situation can take me (if I need to be enlightened, please do).

    Let’s assume the SLS is going to get built, and using it to transport crew or cargo to the ISS is so overkill that it won’t even be considered (or at least for the sake of this discussion I won’t “count” those are real payloads). Then regardless of the initially available configuration, 70 ton or 130 ton, there is no payload currently budgeted and scheduled to launch that requires said configurations! So I think that begs the question: what is the more efficient course of action?

    a) Build a 70 ton rocket without a payload(s) to use it, THEN build a payload(s) for it at the same time you work on the upgrades for the 130 ton configuration. By the time you have the payload(s) ready to go, the 130 ton configuration is at least half done, and you still don’t have a payload(s) for THAT.

    b) Build a 70 ton rocket simultaneously with a payload(s) for it (not currently budgeted), which pushes back the completion date. Then you have stuff to use the 70 ton with while you simultaneously develop the upgrades for 130 ton and the payload for it (again, causing an extended ETA).

    c) Build a 130 ton rocket without a payload(s) to use it, THEN build a payload(s) for it (to be budgeted later).

    d) Build a 130 ton rocket simultaneously with the payload(s) for it (not currently budgeted).

    Between THESE options I would have to say building the payloads simultaneously with the launch vehicles is always the better choice. Why have a launch vehicle sitting around while you have nothing to use it with? Building the 130 ton simultaneously with the payload(s) for it makes the most practical sense to me because you’ll get that end product sooner, and I don’t see the need to spend money on the 70 ton payloads JUST so that the 70 ton configuration has something to do while we wait for that end product.

    And my opinion still is that we shouldn’t build the SLS at all, but if we are going to build it than we might as well go straight for the 130ton. Problem with that is that there is no budget for the payload right now and there is no way that they could possibly both be completed by the end of this decade, let alone 2016.

    The reason the space porkers don’t want to budget a launch vehicle simultaneously with a payload to use it is because they KNOW that this will push the program completion back far enough that it will be canceled prematurely because of rapidly expanding commercial capabilities. And they KNOW that if they let there be a first step of 70 tons, that will end up being the last step anyways. Same reason they demand the vehicle be completed long before they know it can: get more money NOW because you know the free ride IS coming to an end.

    If this incident is any indication of other BS happening in the budget compromise, then dare I say….. SHUT IT DOWN!!! (note: that last bit was not meant to be taken as a factual statement, TY Jon Kyl)

  • E.P. Grondine

    As I pointed out previously, ATK and its supporters will always be able to out maneuver the Administration in the legislative process, as they are single issue, while the President has to see to the welfare of the nation. Thus there is always a critical piece of legislation to which very specific instructions can be added.

    Fundamentally, Griffin wanted a 130 ton launcher for his Mars architecture.. He wanted to unite the political forces, and to make any later change from his architecture impossible.

    The old African saying is when elephants fight, ants get crushed. Unfortuntately, all of this ends up affecting impactor detection, and iIts not going to be ants that get crushed.

    I don’t think we’ll be hearing much from Japan about space for a while.

  • Disembodied Spirit

    “that turkey had to die.”

    But unfortunately, as all the world can plainly see, Mike the headless chicken still lives on, and is still running around aimlessly chasing vain glory, at the cost of yet another $10 billion dollars in five years, not counting the last two.

  • Aberwys

    The engineering by legislation is just human nature at play.

    NASA won’t let go.

    Never mind that the number of pilots signing up to Virgin Galactic’s job call will likely surpass the number of applicants to the astronaut corps….

    http://careers.virgin.com/search/1921/

  • SpaceColonizer

    Justin Kugler wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 3:56 pm

    “If NASA can’t afford SLS, what makes you think private industry can?”

    Because cost-plus legacy contracts don’t encourage the reduction of costs, and in fact have gotten to the point that they encourage the hiring of more voters. Also, like so many elements of the government, there are levels of bureaucracy that get piled up higher every time something goes wrong. In the private sector when something goes wrong, people get fired. And the point of using the private sector is to have multiple services. If one company fails so hard that they go under, there are others to take its place. When NASA fails, exploration programs shut down for years while the aforementioned increased bureaucracy tries to figure out how to proceed. By using competitive fixed price contracts, we place the burden of failure on those companies that don’t have the right stuff while we are free to benefit from the success of the other companies.

  • SpaceColonizer

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    “I don’t think we’ll be hearing much from Japan about space for a while.”

    http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110413-japanese-space-commitment-strong.html

  • pat bahn

    Without doing the numbers, it seems a Shuttle-C could be banged out with about 75 tons to orbit. As the 5 Segment SRB is mostly qualified, you could use that and RS-68 engines. Then push the cargo to orbit using a Block DM.

    With a little luck, you may be able to get to around 100 Tons.

    That’s a lot of cargo, you could reuse the Shuttle Infrastructure,
    Keep ATK employed, and keep using the basic workforce.

    You would lose jobs from the Orbiter program, but you would be in a reasonable place politically and technically.

    I don’t believe you can do 130 tons,

  • Of course these porkers don’t say what they’ll do with their 130-ton lifter once they have it. Put in the front yard, perhaps.

  • Vladislaw

    “May I remind you, that Ares I-X flew successfully”

    It burned and destroyed part of the launch pad, the mock upper stage bent and almost broke off in flight, the parachutes failed and part of the casing were caved in beyond repair on hitting the ocean.

    You call that a successful flight?

    Then were ranting endlessly that SpaceX’s first test flight (launched on their own dime) was a total failure because the mock payload, which actually reached orbit, was “spinning out of control”.

    nothing like a nice double standard to try and make your case.

  • Coastal Ron

    Mike Griffin is still stirring up trouble for this nation, and unfortunately his whispering in the Alabama delegations ears is having tragicomical implications. To wit:

    Michael Griffin said “Study after study has shown that 130 metric tons is the lower useful limit for such a vehicle.”

    Unfortunately he told the Congress to build a 130 ton NON-METRIC launcher, which is smaller than what he says is the “lower useful limit for such a vehicle.”

    So now NASA has to build a mega-launcher that is too small to be useful? What a goofball Griffin is, not to mention the Congressional members that listen to him.

  • amightywind

    in the meantime SpaceX and Boeing are getting ready to (gasp) fly cargo and people…by the 2014 time

    Oler, do the math. SpaceX has made 2 F9 test launches in one year, and those had significant problems. They can’t do better than make one unmanned docking to ISS this year. Musk has already seemingly begun an internal transition to compete for Air Force launches. There is no announced schedule for developing a manned capability at all. You hurt what little credibility you have by pulling dates OOYA. If by 2014 SpaceX has made several deliveries to ISS, they will have succeeded – if you call perpetuating that absurd monstrosity succeeding.

    If SpaceX gets involved with a private venture involving Bigelow or Boeing, more power to them. But even then, the unfunded CST-100 is a much more likely to fly than a manned Dragon.

    was a total failure because the mock payload, which actually reached orbit, was “spinning out of control”.

    Oiy. By any rational definition of the phrase, the first F9 second stage did that. The second stage developed a rate that was not compensated for by the control system, hence ‘spinning out of control’. They were very fortunate that the rate wasn’t lethal.

    Mike Griffin is still stirring up trouble for this nation

    Mike Griffin is a patriot and is highly influential. I look forward to his return to NASA, as power recedes from the Bolsheviks.

  • Shouldn’t Alabama’s welfare funding come out of Health and Human Services and not NASA?

  • Jim Hillhouse

    Aderholt is right. If you don’t put the penalty of lawyering up to the folks running NASA and White House space policy into the Appropriations, they’d see SLS and the MPCV slow-rolled to death in favor of their cause.

    As I noted many months ago, fight Congress and you unite it. Defy it, as then-Sec. Def. Dick Cheney tried to do over the V-22, and you can face the very real possibility of legal consequences.

    The war over preserving our nation’s HSF program is very nearly over. It is fast getting time for those whose arguments did not win the day to follow their own advice given so heartily in the Winter of 2010, which was to unite together and work for a fully funded space program.

    I hope that soon individuals who have spent so much time trying to bring down the national human space flight program will support the new program of record.

  • Justin Kugler

    SpaceColonizer, you misunderstand me. I know perfectly well why we want to go to commercially-sourced launch services. I was questioning the suggestion that private industry would buy rides on SLS.

  • “Requiring NASA to move ahead with immediate development of a 130-ton HLV, with no initial, smaller vehicle first—if, in fact, that is how the provision is interpreted—will only add to NASA’s challenges.”

    Doug Cook said that it is, and has to, be designed from day 1 around a goal of 130 mT to LEO. That should not preclude an early test flights without an upper stage, or using 4 segment SRB or recycled RS-25 SSMEs.

    MSFC has alread prepared to begin testing of the J-2X as a consequence of the Ares I development work, so they don’t want to put that on the shelf and forget about it for several few years.

    The real concern is that the WH is willing to go to any length, no matter how dishonest or unethical, in order to totally scrap all NASA HLV capability in order to justify giving SpaceX and other newspace companies the needed billions and years that they would require to build less expensive HLVs.

    However, Congress is not about to go along with that. They are willing to let SpaceX prove that they can safely transport cargo to the ISS. They are willig to let them try to safely transport crew. If Musk can live up to half of his promises, he has a promising future.

    But just because proven shuttle compoents are not “NEW” technology is no reason to discard them. We scrapped a great HLV 40 years ago, the Saturn V. That set NASA back by decades…Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!

  • Bennett

    SpaceColonizer wrote “Same reason they demand the vehicle be completed long before they know it can: get more money NOW because you know the free ride IS coming to an end.”

    Hey man, you give them WAY too much credit. Their collective vision extends only as far as their campaign coffers, and their direction is dictated by ATK.

    It’s simple, and expected. Whores do what whores do.

  • “It burned and destroyed part of the launch pad, the mock upper stage bent and almost broke off in flight, the parachutes failed and part of the casing were caved in beyond repair on hitting the ocean. ”

    Double standards, you complain?

    Did you complain when Elon Musk’s reusable first stage totally disintegrated upon reentry?

    The upper stage arguemnt does not hold water because it had no propulsion and hence no guidance. It’s trajectory was never under NASA’s control. The test was strictly of the first stage.

    And the parachute problem was identified and fixable.

    The Ares I design did have a few real design/performance issues, but not any of the ones that you mention.

  • tps

    Nelson Bridwell wrote: We scrapped a great HLV 40 years ago, the Saturn V. That set NASA back by decades…Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!

    We scrapped it because we could not afford it and we had no use for it. Any of the AAP shots were canceled by congress and Johnson, not Nixon. If heavy lift is so essential then why didn’t the Russians keep on with the N1? They were within a couple of launches of getting the bugs worked out.

  • I say let the baby have his bottle.. they’re not important anymore.

  • Egad

    > The real concern is that the WH is willing to go to any length, no matter how dishonest or unethical, in order to totally scrap all NASA HLV capability in order to justify giving SpaceX and other newspace companies the needed billions and years that they would require to build less expensive HLVs.

    Who in the WH are you talking about? The President? The Vice-President? The WH Chief of Staff? The President’s Science Adviser? Some crucially positioned staffer(s)? To repeat the Butch Cassidy question, “Who are those guys?”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIie9OosnEM

  • tps

    windy says:

    Oler, do the math. SpaceX has made 2 F9 test launches in one year, and those had significant problems. They can’t do better than make one unmanned docking to ISS this year. Musk has already seemingly begun an internal transition to compete for Air Force launches. There is no announced schedule for developing a manned capability at all. You hurt what little credibility you have by pulling dates OOYA. If by 2014 SpaceX has made several deliveries to ISS, they will have succeeded – if you call perpetuating that absurd monstrosity succeeding.

    Falcon Heavy is no more of an absurd monstrosity that your beloved Ares I was. Or the shuttle for that matter. Oh and you must not have heard that SpaceX got the contract to replenish the Iridium constellation.

    If SpaceX gets involved with a private venture involving Bigelow or Boeing, more power to them. But even then, the unfunded CST-100 is a much more likely to fly than a manned Dragon.

    Its got a better chance then any son of Orion.

    Oiy. By any rational definition of the phrase, the first F9 second stage did that. The second stage developed a rate that was not compensated for by the control system, hence ‘spinning out of control’. They were very fortunate that the rate wasn’t lethal.

    Cite the evidence that the 2nd flight had problems that were even close to be dangerious or lethal.

    Mike Griffin is a patriot and is highly influential. I look forward to his return to NASA, as power recedes from the Bolsheviks.

    Patriot he may by but a troublemaker he is. And influential? Perhaps he has the ears of a couple of people but he is no more returning to NASA then George Abbey is.

    I’ve never figured why you despise SpaceX so much.

  • Coastal Ron

    Jim Hillhouse wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    The war over preserving our nation’s HSF program is very nearly over.

    Actually our nation’s HSF program was saved by Congress when they cancelled Constellation and extended the ISS until at least 2020, while also confirming it’s roll as our national laboratory in space. And in support of the ISS, they are relying on commercial and partner support for crew & cargo, not SLS/MPCV.

    But maybe you confuse the SLS with HSF, and if so, then please name the HSF programs & funding that it will support?

    [crickets chirping]

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 6:30 pm

    Doug Cook said that it is, and has to, be designed from day 1 around a goal of 130 mT to LEO.

    Well duh, that’s what the NASA Authorization act said.

    But there is a big difference between (quoting the act):

    (A) The initial capability of the core elements, without an upper stage, of lifting payloads weighing between 70 tons and 100 tons into low-Earth orbit

    and

    (B) The capability to carry an integrated upper Earth departure stage bringing the total lift capability of the Space Launch System to 130 tons or more.

    And part of that difference is money and time. Did Congress give NASA more of either in order to add the EDS? NASA contractors don’t work for free, and the SLS has been under-funded since it was proposed.

    The SLS has always been about spending money, not HSF, so under-funding it is not a big deal as long as the money they do have flows. This is Congress we’re talking about, and keeping money flowing is what they are elected to do.

    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!

    Indeed, shame on you for wanting money spent on something that has no funded purpose other than to provide jobs. Don’t go to any Tea Party rallies with creds like that…

  • 2552

    “Requiring NASA to move ahead with immediate development of a 130-ton HLV, with no initial, smaller vehicle first—if, in fact, that is how the provision is interpreted—will only add to NASA’s challenges.”

    According to 51D Mascot (Senate staff member Jeff Bingham) on the NSF forums, the language does not require a 130 ton HLV by 2016, and does not contradict the idea of an evolvable HLV with an eventual 130 ton goal, due to the word “initial” in previous proposed versions of the language being removed from this version:

    http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=22991.msg723673#msg723673

    http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=22991.msg724226#msg724226

  • John Kavanagh

    North Alabama Space Agency wins the day with earmarks. Glad Boehner is making such a strong push to save money in the Federal budget while his Alabaman friends lead such colossal waste.

  • Bennett

    @2552

    Thanks for the links and the (relatively good) news!

  • nasand beyond

    Nelson said:

    “Requiring NASA to move ahead with immediate development of a 130-ton HLV, with no initial, smaller vehicle first…will only add to NASA’s challenges.” – If that were a real argument, wouldn’t 260-ton be twice the challenge?

    “The real concern is that the WH is willing to go to any length…in order to totally scrap all NASA HLV capability….” – The ill-conceived and ill-developed Ares (especially Ares I) program was doomed well before the putrid package was dropped in his lap for a proper dispatch.

    “…in order to justify giving SpaceX and other newspace companies the needed billions and years that they would require to build less expensive HLVs” – You’re mixing motives. CxP wasn’t killed by, or for, commercial-space. It is possible to keep both, kill just one, or kill both. It was never either/or.

    “We scrapped a great HLV 40 years ago..” – That much is true. The same ISS could possible have been assembled with some variation of Saturn V (fewer stages, less or different engines, etc) instead of the Shuttle, but a down-sized Saturn (C3/C4) would have been plenty sufficient, same as a 70-ton HLV will be just shy to too big today.

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 6:46 pm

    Did you complain when Elon Musk’s reusable first stage totally disintegrated upon reentry?

    There is a difference between a goal and a necessity – recovery of the Falcon 9 1st stage is a goal, as is later reuse, but it doesn’t stop them from putting payload into LEO for a price far less than their competition.

    The Ares I design did have a few real design/performance issues, but not any of the ones that you mention.

    If you look at things from a money perspective, everything is a lot clearer. For instance, Ares I duplicated the capabilities of Delta IV Heavy, and for a far greater cost ($30B+ R&D vs $1.3B to human rate DIVH).

    Why? Because the reason for Ares I to exist was to foot a substantial amount of the funding for Ares V. It didn’t make economic sense to build it just for putting Orion into space. That is just part of the money hocus-pocus that Michael Griffin was doing on Constellation, and that he’s trying to do with SLS.

    Commercial is more market based, and depends on market demand for the need to build something. For commercial cargo the CRS program supports the ISS with supplies and downmass capabilities, and it’s demand will extend out with the lifetime of the ISS. In time we should see other providers added in addition to OSC and SpaceX.

    Commercial crew has funded demand starting in mid-2016 when the contract with Soyuz runs out, and NASA will be looking for American alternatives to support the ISS.

    What funded demand exists for the SLS?

    Come on – simple question. Why can’t anyone answer it?

  • amightywind

    I’ve never figured why you despise SpaceX so much.

    I dunno. I remember watching the first Falcon 1 launches and was disappointed that they did not succeed. Somewhere between then and 2009 SpaceX went from being an honest company you could cheer for to just another of the democrat cronies in business angling for an unfair government handout. Being a fan of Elon Musk is about the same as being a fan of Jeff Immelt. The idea of handing the manned space program to SpaceX was ludicrous. I honestly don’t believe that they have a better idea with their launch architecture. They aren’t competing on ideas or proven capability. Once hitched to Obama and SpaceX became unredeemable.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 6:46 pm

    “Did you complain when Elon Musk’s reusable first stage totally disintegrated upon reentry? ”

    no because recovering the first stage had zero impact (one way or the other) on the ability of the vehicle to put a payload into orbit.

    “The upper stage arguemnt (sic) does not hold water because it had no propulsion and hence no guidance.”

    not really no Separation dynamics cost Musk one of his test flights and apparently NASA has no clue about the dynamics of an Ares stage sep.

    “The real concern is that the WH is willing to go to any length, no matter how dishonest or unethical, in order to totally scrap all NASA HLV capability in order to justify giving SpaceX and other newspace companies the needed billions and years that they would require to build less expensive HLVs.”

    If that is what is happening GOOD PLAN. We had an HLV that was to expensive to operate so it had to go…SLS would be in the same boat. Clearly SpaceX and others can do more on less then NASA can…see Boeing and its capsule…

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    “Oler, do the math. SpaceX has made 2 F9 test launches in one year, ”

    that is two more then Ares has done and on far less money. Your point is what? Robert G. Oler

  • “The same ISS could possible have been assembled with some variation of Saturn V (fewer stages, less or different engines, etc) instead of the Shuttle”

    http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html

    “Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars.

    Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.”


  • “If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon. This essay on “the next 50 years” would be quite different than the one I am offering here. I think most of us will agree that it would have been a better one.”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 9:40 pm

    Griffin..three points

    First his numbers are not realistic. None of them are. There is no real data that Ares was going to be a 6000 person then the shuttle was going to fly once a week. I am still sort of in shock that the 6000 number is something that was “the target”.

    Second his numbers are way to high for sustainability. For six crewed launches of Apollo hardware he is clearly working at an “average” of 1 billion or so a launch. We are about there right now on the shuttle…last year I think we had three shuttle launches and if you “do the math” just on a total shuttle cost vrs number of missions thats about 1 billion a year…and Griffin himself labels the shuttle as unaffordable.

    Third, there is no political support for this…none. There is no political support for continuing the shuttle nor for saving Cx, nor for building a heavy lift based on Shuttle systems. There is no political support for 6 billion dollar a year for maybe small double digits humans all working for NASA to do things in space…

    But all this is really strange…since Griffin is the one who ignored current hardware (EELV’s) to go off and spend money for many decades on nothing but developing launch vehicles…all of which were expensive to operate.

    It is typical Mike G…a lot of hot air Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 9:40 pm

    “The same ISS could possible have been assembled with some variation of Saturn V (fewer stages, less or different engines, etc) instead of the Shuttle”

    …..

    one more point. A HLV would have built a very very different station. That could be good or bad…but it would not be the same ISS…it would not have been affordable on the budget that Mike rolls out…funding peaks would have had to occur to get all the modules ready.

    As I said its Mike G hot air Robert G. Oler

  • Blackjax

    tps wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 7:10 pm
    “I’ve never figured why you despise SpaceX so much.”

    Actually, I can help with that, have a look at the following:

    Wikipedia Definition of a Troll
    NY Times Article: Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt
    thecountryshrink.com Article: On the Psychology of Trolls

    Actually, the thing I’ve never understood is why people spend so much time responding to his/her posts as though they actually merited attention or effort. There is a difference between someone who genuinely holds a controversial opinion and a troll. We all benefit from a vibrant debate with the former, but rising to the bait of the latter just generates noise for people to sift through. Don’t feed the trolls.

  • pathfinder_01

    Nelson on small problem the shuttle program never cost 4.8 billion a year. More like 2-3 billion a year. NASA could not afford the Saturn V. If anything what might have happened was Apollo on Titan III. It can not afford SLS now.

  • pathfinder_01

    Also only about 30% -50% of NASA’s budget goes to HSF. The rest goes to aircraft R/D and unmanned science.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    ” amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
    I’ve never figured why you despise SpaceX so much.

    I dunno… Once hitched to Obama and SpaceX became unredeemable.”

    Normally I ignore what you have to say. That’s a bit unfair actually ’cause I do skim it and occassionally you manage some coherent sentences however your last statement concerning Obama and SpaceX has me puzzled. Where and when did this occur and in what way?” Surely you aren’t just referring to the visit to the pad? There’s got to be something else but for the life of me, I can’t see the connection!!

  • Major Tom

    “Second his numbers are way to high for sustainability. For six crewed launches of Apollo hardware he is clearly working at an “average” of 1 billion or so a launch. We are about there right now on the shuttle…last year I think we had three shuttle launches and if you “do the math” just on a total shuttle cost vrs number of missions thats about 1 billion a year…and Griffin himself labels the shuttle as unaffordable.”

    Actually, the historical average over the long-run of the Shuttle program is $1.5 billion per flight if development is amortized (and $1.2 billion if not) per this latest, independent analysis:

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7341/full/472038d.html

    FWIW…

  • DCSCA

    @amightywind wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
    Apollo developed 2 vehicles at the same time (Saturn IB and Saturn V).

    Not quite, Windy. The early Saturns (1 and 1B), were cluster rockets- their first srages little more than eight Redstones bundled together around a Jupiter fuel tank. S-V stands apart in terms of development.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Thanks for the coverage, Jeff.

    As I pointed out earlier, ATK will always be able to outmaneuver the President in the legislative process, by simply tacking on their desires to necessary legislation.

    Today’s news is just a case in point; there’s been decades of similar maneuvering, which is likely why the SSME and Glushko’s engines from the later 1970’s early 1980’s are still state of the art.

    RGO, your point about the weakness of political support for manned spaceflight is very well taken. Griffin does not understand that there was not sufficient “demand” to continue Apollo and manned flight to the Moon even at the Saturn/Apollo level of cost.

    People tend to think of Apollo as a Moon program, forgetting that when Apollo was started, Mars was thought to be like the Earth.

    In 1964 most of mankind learned that Mars is not like the Earth, though some people are very slow learners. They tend to inhabit space bbs’s.

    The Shuttle was supposed to lower launch costs, and it failed in that magnificently.

    Now many people will point to ISS, and say “But it just goes round in circles”. Others point to the Moon and say “Been there, done that.”. Others will point to Mars, talking about “Man’s need to explore” or “a New Frontier”. Like I said before, some people are very slow learners.

    The game changer for manned space is impact, and in particular cometary impact, though most still don’t realize this or understand it. At the risk of being repetitive, some people are very slow learners; for that matter some people will go to extreme lengths to defend their stupidity.

    It is interesting to read about the ancient Japanese inscriptions which held tsunami warnings I don’t think we’ll be hearing much news about Japan’s space program for a bit. I’ve been working with Native American warnings myself.

    The saying goes, when elephants fight, ants get crushed. But ultimately the ants win. Always.

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 9:40 pm

    The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure.

    Going to the Moon was for political reasons, and once done, it then lacked a sustainable way to keep going. At least the Shuttle was an attempt to move beyond 100% disposable architectures, and though it came nowhere close to it’s cost objectives, it taught us a bunch of things to do & not to do for future systems. Continuing Apollo would not have done the same.

  • Fred Willett

    If NASA is forced to go on and develop a 130t launcher then NASA will become increasingly marginalised as a force in space.
    SpaceX and Orbital will be supplying ISS.
    Boeing and SpaceX and perhaps others will be providing commercial crew.
    Bigelow will be putting his private space stations in orbit by the middle of the decade. (And it’s worth noting that the crew capacity of Space Station Alpha is 12. Compare this with ISS.)
    And to top it off SpaceX will be launching 53t heavy lift at a fraction of the cost of the still imaginary Senate Launch System.
    The sad thing is that NASA need not be marginalised. If they could be allowed to develop something useful like Nautilus X…
    Oh well

  • common sense

    @ Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 9:42 pm

    “Could Have, Would Have, Should Have”.

  • common sense

    @ Blackjax wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    At some point any one can become a troll to some one else. I actually enjoy all the nonsense amightywind spouts. It is on occasion inspired in his (her?) nutty kind of way. You need to take what he says at the umpteenth degree or you risk mental breakdown. I wonder if it comes naturally to him or if he needs some inspirational medication. He is fun(ny) nonetheless.

    Can you imagine this forum without amightywind? He’s like the morning coffee at work that has overheated a million times. You know it gives you a heartburn every time yet you still go for it.

  • common sense

    “The war over preserving our nation’s HSF program is very nearly over. ”

    “Mike Griffin is a patriot and is highly influential. I look forward to his return to NASA, as power recedes from the Bolsheviks.”

    I have for some time now believed these sentences might be coming from the same person… Dunno. What d’y’all say?

  • NASA Fan

    What is more interesting to me is that there are probably many senior executives , SES’er at HQ, who totally disagree with the need for a 130T SLS; but will dutifully go about their work. If you truly believe your boss is an idiot, and wants you to spend a good chunk of your career on something that in the end is a big waste of your time and talents, wouldn’t you up and leave?

  • I have for some time now believed these sentences might be coming from the same person… Dunno. What d’y’all say?

    IMO it is, but then again, that’s just me.

    As for the issue at hand, whether the final HLV specification is 70 mT, 130 mT, or just plain tons, there’s no way it’s going to be built by the 2016 deadline and according to Major Tom, already running 20% over budget.

    Just good money thrown to the wind to support another jobs program to pay cost-plus contracts until it gets canceled. And then the process starts all over again with nothing to show for it except partisan political theater.

    Hoo-effin’-ray for American Exeptionalism. :P

  • Das Boese

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 14th, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    The game changer for manned space is impact, and in particular cometary impact, though most still don’t realize this or understand it.

    Please, then, help me understand how manned spaceflight is in any way relevant to impact avoidance? Can you point out any specific references?

  • Nasand Beyon

    @Robert O.
    Actually I (Nasand) made the “some-saturn-variant vs shuttle for the ISS” statement, but that’s okay. The ISS could very well have looked different (bigger modules, etc), but it didn’t need to. A down-sized Saturn could have built the exact same station – but my train-of-thought is academic, save for the point that even derived architecture, then as now, makes way-better sense in mission-appropriate combinations (plus I never cared for the Shuttle). 130T is .ludicrous. 70T only a little less so..

  • nasand beyond

    @Robert O.
    Actually I (Nasand) was who made the “saturn-variant-vs-shuttle for the ISS” statement. Yes, Saturn could have contributed to a different station (larger modules, etc) but it didn’t have to. A down-sized Saturn could have built the exact same station. Which is all academic save for the point that derived architecture is fine if it is mission-appropriate in size – which a down-sized Saturn could have been. Mostly I was trying to say that, then as now, there is no point in mega-hlv’s. 130T is ludicrous. 70T only less so (plus I never cared for the Shuttle).

  • amightywind

    Normally I ignore what you have to say.

    I wish I a nickel for every time one of you pompous yahoos say this. You’ll comment anyway, right?

    That’s a bit unfair actually ’cause I do skim it and occassionally you manage some coherent sentences however your last statement concerning Obama and SpaceX has me puzzled.

    If you don’t think that Musk is on Obama’s short list of friends then you are obtuse, which you indeed are.

    There is a difference between someone who genuinely holds a controversial opinion and a troll.

    How tiresome. It is the same everywhere. The leftist’s first instinct is to shut down an opposing opinion rather than argue with it. Another netcop. My NASA views are the same of majority of the House and Senate.

  • Blackjax wrote:

    Actually, the thing I’ve never understood is why people spend so much time responding to his/her posts as though they actually merited attention or effort.

    I’m with you 100% on this and have said the same many times, but some people just can’t resist taking the bait. Anytime I see the screen names of the regular trolls, I just scroll right by without even reading the post. That’s the best way to deal with a troll.

    As for the #1 troll, I’ve suggested in the past that it’s actually performance art, someone who believes the exact opposite but writes these screeds as a joke. Think Archie Bunker, a right-wing bigot, portrayed by Carroll O’Conner, a proud liberal.

  • ThatNASAEngineer@KSC

    Much of the back and forth commentary here about the space launch system, the earlier rendition as the Constellation project, Space-X and so on seems to assume, often without saying, that choices are made without regard to the situations at hand. So we have commentary about who killed Constellation, or who is trying to kill commercial, or heavy and so on. I can offer a few insights from the trenches, one being that choices have more to do with choosing how to react to an ever changing environment, rather than acting in isolation as much of the discussion here seems to imply. If you’re thinking what’s the best rocket for this or that, the answer to some question, in isolation, then your answer is not even wrong.

    The budget is the biggest environmental factor in human spaceflight decision making. One does not just decide to spend more, without someone else having to decide they are fine with spending less – a fantasy. Constellation tried that, emphasizing the “S” for Space in NASA, to the detriment of science, aeronautics and any R&D for space systems. Even transportation to low Earth orbit finds itself in such situations competing for funding with their own customers, the very payloads they would carry being non-transportation, exploration elements, such as a habitat or planetary surface lander. All sorts of dysfunction can occur when resources are extremely limited relative to ever increasing goals and desires.

    We have a space station. There are many ways to continue to support that space station. Once you decide on Shuttle, or some commercial approach, or some new heavy lift system, or some existing launchers, the matter has always been how much money is left over and what are you going to do with it? Inevitably, and I’ve had this discussion many times, some will say the space station was a bad move, or we need to get out of that. In many a conversation I lose people back on the part about the budget being what it is, with people waxing sadly about how leadership or circumstance got us into some mess (where we have such a constraint). How if we had real money and real leadership, yada, yada – well you know where that goes from there. These conversations don’t ever provide a single useful thing to do and make pondering ones belly button look like time well spent. At their best such conversations might provide some context. At their worse they are merely annoying.

    So back to the matter of having a space station, deciding how to support it, and how are we going to use the remaining human spaceflight funding. I am seeing where the space launch system and shuttle-derived heavy lift advocates continue to have a hard time making headway with whatever money they are allotted from what is left over (after station) under any scenario. For one, as transportation, performance driven organizations, any amount of funding, be it a billion more or a billion less, above or below some baseline, will be turned into rocket vs. payload. That’s assuming past behavior bears out.

    Along the way, should a new space launch system make headway in definition of both the rocket and some stable view on the funding available, it will as a project still have another dysfunctional behavior unless stopped at the top. That is the tendency to think that as a project gets bigger and bigger, any problems can be solved by stealing money from someone else. This makes the problems more likely to surface, as there is a belief the bail-out will come. So a large rocket program, if it behaves like prior ones, will go after the R&D, the commercial, science, and aeronautics monies at any chance they get. That’s after they have defunded their own customers, the payloads, that are exploration elements (like space exploration vehicles, landers, etc).

    That’s not to say this dynamic doesn’t stabilize. The stable point of SLS, R&D, and commercial systems in our future may not be a good one if all of these together leave no room, that is no budget, for useful things like making Earth departure stages, habitats or surface landers. This just begs the battle on, as I’m sure that years from now once the forward outlook shows that we forgot both money for the payloads, oh and for actually launching these things at any useful rate, the parties will just go at it again in a new state of turmoil.

    Change is difficult. Can you imagine how difficult it must have been for people in many industries to see the birth of disruption around the corner? Perhaps there were some main-framers at IBM who saw the trend with personal computers. Had they put in 20 years? Were they glad to be right upon retirement? Had they just bought a house, moved to Armonk and had a kid? The US faces another period of disruption today, as it has many times in the past, but like the PC and IBM, it’s the kind of disruption that comes of change, not from some conspiracy or agenda of the few. Although many of the commenter’s here seem to get carried away at times placing blame on someone (anyone will do).

    Demographics (of an aging populace, of shifting ethnicity, of urban vs. rural), a growing world demand for energy (and all that means for oil, coal, currency, the dollar or other energy sources), and the dynamic power-relationships of governments, huge multi-national corporations, the financial sector and voter blocks will define the environment NASA has to live in. NASA leadership can set the house straight to avoid certain dysfunctional behavior, and to think about what will place the agency on its best possible footing years down the road. Even within the constraints of doing what congress AND the Whitehouse want there is tremendous latitude for “how”. Whatever form NASA’s reaction takes, it can’t be defined around a single project, and even less a single vehicle, to the detriment of how it all fits together. At some point someone has to say “this be SLS” and don’t come back for more money or more time or I’ll find someone who gets the message. And the same for commercial…and R&D…and science and so on. At the same time, each party has to be told there are future initiatives – don’t dare create a system thinking money tomorrow will build those other things that make your system relevant. If you can’t do it, again, project and program managers – leadership must be ready to say we’ll find someone who will.

  • Ferris Valyn

    ThatNASAEngineer@KSC

    There is a lot of truth in what you say. And to put it bluntly, this is the part that really frustrates me

    In many a conversation I lose people back on the part about the budget being what it is, with people waxing sadly about how leadership or circumstance got us into some mess (where we have such a constraint). How if we had real money and real leadership, yada, yada – well you know where that goes from there. These conversations don’t ever provide a single useful thing to do and make pondering ones belly button look like time well spent. At their best such conversations might provide some context. At their worse they are merely annoying.

    This attitude is shared by so many people associated with space – they lament the fact that there isn’t more money, and it becomes a lot of grumbling, and it comes off that they feel NASA is entitled to having a larger budget.

    As an example, in Wayne Hale’s original blog post, he talked about how after they were told how much money they had for BEO, they knew they wouldn’t have enough. I posed the question – lets assume you had the ear of the president, and you could change any aspect of the plan, except the budget numbers, what would you propose? And his response was

    There is more money, it is a matter of priorities. Americans spend more money on pet food than on space exploration (etc., etc., etc).

    It feels like there can’t even be a discussion about the fact that we have the budget we have, we need to learn to live in it. Its always “why aren’t we getting more money? We deserve more money”

    I think part of it comes back to a fundamental issue that has never been dealt with. Some time ago, I listened to a lecture from Dr. Lennard Fisk, and he said something to the effect that NASA was an agency designed for a much larger budget (2-3X more) – and he didn’t mean that as a complaint, but as a historical fact, because in the 60s, when NASA was being built, they built its operating procedures & culture around budget levels they had. And the US has never dealt with that, and downsized NASA accordingly, in part because its going to be a very unpleasant conversation (for example, one aspect that needs to be discussed is whether it actually makes sense to have 10 NASA centers spread all over the country).

    And until we have such a conversation, we’ll still face these issues

  • ThatNASAEngineer@KSC: Can you summarize your point in 25 words or less???

    Let’s hope that they did not assign you to write the human rating requirements document, or else SpaceX’s goose is cooked! ;-)

  • mr. mark

    If any of you were just noticing Spacex just got the go ahead for competing launches with ULA. Spacex is continuing to move forward. Shotwell just mentioned that Spacex’s launch manifest is now 50% commercial, 40% NASA and 10% international orders.

  • mr. mark

    Sorry, US Airforce orders vs. ULA

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DB, all –

    How does impact change the politics of space? And why does it affect manned space programs?

    If you can’t answer the “Why?” question clearly and simply, you certainly can’t answer the “Why doesn’t mannee spaceflight get more money?” question.

    The fact is that adequate impactor detection systems will have to be space based.

    The cheapest place to do that is the surface of the Moon. (See the CAPS studies.)

    Once you understand that the bulk of the impact hazard comes from comets and dead comet fragments instead of from asteroids, then the answers drop into place.

    In any case, as we’ve already seen, the launch market has a new demand for its services. A very necessary demand.

  • amightywind

    Not quite, Windy. The early Saturns (1 and 1B), were cluster rockets- their first srages little more than eight Redstones bundled together around a Jupiter fuel tank. S-V stands apart in terms of development.

    Thanks for the design history, which I already understand fully. (Read NASA Publication ‘Stages to Saturn’ for a good technical history of Apollo.) They were developed concurrently. They share the S-IVB stage.

  • Coastal Ron

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    The cheapest place to do that is the surface of the Moon.

    You keep saying that, but many of us don’t understand why that is, and we’re not going to read a bunch of CAPS studies. Can you summarize?

    The reason being is that it’s far easier to put up satellites into GEO or BEO locations, and since you don’t have to spend the money to put them on the Moon and maintain them, that money can go towards even better warning systems (faster evolution of systems).

    Besides, if you’re waiting for the full amount of funding to put an observation outpost on the Moon, you could be waiting a long time. Whereas satellites can be put up far quicker, and more of them for less cost.

    Where’s the advantage?

  • common sense

    @ Ferris Valyn wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 10:47 am

    “As an example, in Wayne Hale’s original blog post, he talked about how after they were told how much money they had for BEO, they knew they wouldn’t have enough. I posed the question – lets assume you had the ear of the president, and you could change any aspect of the plan, except the budget numbers, what would you propose? And his response was

    There is more money, it is a matter of priorities. Americans spend more money on pet food than on space exploration (etc., etc., etc).”

    Wow. That is a pretty sad answer but a good reflection of the sense of entitlement. Well I have an answer for Wayne if he reads this. Americans love their pets and not necessarily NASA as much as their pets. They also love pizza and beer and burgers. Are they supposed to change what they enjoy so that you and I have a space budget??? Good luck with that argument to them.

    Unbelievable.

  • I’m not buying the “it’s just pork” thing.

    Sure it may smell like Shelby’s bacon cologne, and Aderholt said it meant “thousands of jobs” for North Alabama, but does it? The added lift requirement adds an upper stage, which gets done at a prime anyway. That doesn’t sound like thousands of North Alabama jobs, it just sounds like defensive politics…

    More:
    http://nasaengineer.com/?p=2227

  • Robert G. Oler

    ThatNASAEngineer@KSC wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 9:30 am

    Ferris Valyn wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 10:47 am

    interesting comments…and thoughtful, but there is a larger point that I think is missed or perhaps not precisely clear.

    The problem with NASA (and a whole lot of other technical programs run by private enterprise sort of to speak for the federal government) is that in the end there is no goal that the project has to accomplish, other then the project itself.

    Cx (and SLS and station and certainly shuttle) are really no different then F-35 and the Seawolf sub and the Presidential helicopter replacement and….they are projects which cannot meet any of their real goals including cost…and in most of them cost is really just left as “the open end”…ie there is no real management on them.

    This is actually a phenomenon that has started since the 1980’s. The US military bought and had developed vehicles like the F-4 Phantom and F-14 (and even the AEGIS cruiser system) that all more or less met cost, were built in a reasonable period of time (compared to legacy systems), and most importantly came close to actual performance. I would bet you money that Apollo more or less met cost estimates…and certainly performed to specs and was completed “on time”.

    What we have today are projects that are never measured for the value of their accomplishments vrs their cost but simply to continue…we have arrived at Ike’s military industrial complex…

    until we fix that we will always be doomed to third rate government lead programs…all this from a nation that had a government lead program to build say the Ike highway system Robert G. Oler

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 2:23 pm

    I think the programs you state may have been on cost on time also because then there was a much more fierce competition in aerospace with many more players.

    Today we have a quasi monopoly. If you don’t want LMT then you get BA and conversely. The next tier two might be NGC and Raytheon. But that’s about it. Once you have a monopoly you dictate everything, including price, cost and schedule. It seems a lot of people are missing that point.

  • “But all this is really strange…since Griffin is the one who ignored current hardware (EELV’s) to go off and spend money for many decades on nothing but developing launch vehicles…all of which were expensive to operate.”

    The EELVs that you refer to (Atlas V, and Delta IV) will no longer exist in a few years, thanks to the efforts of Mr Musk…They are barely viable now, and the lower costs offerd by SpaceX will be the stake driven throught the heart…

    And they would require 5-10 launches per BEO mission, resulting in very large costs… Short term, there might be a cost advantage to using them, but long term, over several decades, those EELVs would be unaffordable…

  • reader

    Shelby was not upfront with it. It’s a backdoor deal. He clearly did not want to be pounded again on this nonsense, I suppose.

    That clearly did not work.

  • @Jim Hillhouse
    “I hope that soon individuals who have spent so much time trying to bring down the national human space flight program will support the new program of record.”

    The sheer hypocrisy of this statement is stunning. The only side that has the potential to impeding HSF in the US is the one you are on. We’re going to be wasting billions on the SLS that NASA instead could use to develop and build Nautilus X, a true interplanetary spaceship that would never have to land on Earth. It could send a large crew of astronauts on deep space exploration because commercial launchers can get them to the large spacecraft cheaply and those same launchers could loft fuel to it as well.
    See:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2kkT4sskmM8
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kgcTq952z0&p=80CD8D7827FD146E
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE47rb0moTg&p=80CD8D7827FD146E

    But notice I said your side is “impeding” human space flight, not killing it. When SLS reaches its inevitable conclusion due to cost overruns, some people will have had jobs for a few years and that will be the only beneficial outcome because there will be no functioning launcher after the project is canceled. We could have had BOTH commercial crew to ISS and deep space exploration by humans with the money that will have been wasted. But short term jobs for the area of Texas that you live in, Alabama, Utah and Florida are more important to certain politicians than that long term goal for the nation. Because of the SLS shortsightedness, true spacefaring will have to wait years longer than it really had to.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DB, all –

    Once you understand that comets and dead comet fragments, and not asteroids, form the bulk of the impact hazard, the question becomes “How do you find them early enough to do anything?”

    What you can do depends on how early you find them, the earlier the better.

    The summary: What CAPS gives is 6 months more time to react to Long Period Comets, an increase from about 18 months now. What CAPS provides in terms of dead comet fragments is a way to pick them up early enough to prevent them from hitting, and it is the only reliable means of doing so.

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    Short term, there might be a cost advantage to using them (Atlas & Delta), but long term, over several decades, those EELVs would be unaffordable.

    Two things:

    1. You keep assuming that the SLS will be in full use, and so far there are no funded programs for it, nor any programs that are even being seriously talked about. There is no demonstrated demand for the SLS or HLV’s in general. if you know of any, please do tell.

    2. The cost advantage of even Delta IV Heavy is huge compared to the SLS, and you would need to use the SLS for decades before Delta IV Heavy would be comparatively more expensive. However that simple statement neglects the lower funding stream that would be needed for Delta IV Heavy exploration, and the much higher funding stream needed for the SLS. So in times of tight budgets, you are more likely to afford Delta IV Heavy type exploration than SLS type.

    And of course now with Falcon Heavy becoming available in the mix (2X capacity, 1/3 the price), the rational saying that Delta IV Heavy is too small and costs too much goes away, although I would certainly support a 60/40 type contract spread for launches so that the industry as a whole is supported. I don’t even care who gets the 60%.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    I wrote:
    “But all this is really strange…since Griffin is the one who ignored current hardware (EELV’s) to go off and spend money for many decades on nothing but developing launch vehicles…all of which were expensive to operate.”

    you replied:
    “The EELVs that you refer to (Atlas V, and Delta IV) will no longer exist in a few years, thanks to the efforts of Mr Musk…They are barely viable now, and the lower costs offerd by SpaceX will be the stake driven throught (sic) the heart…”

    OK I dont see your point nor how that helps the case for a HLV.

    First, time is not static. At the time that Mr. Griffin made the decision(s) (and really I would like to know the real reasons for them, there are some that we dont know yet) to build his two “rockets” (I refer to them as Turkey’s)…the EELV’s were already flying, Mike had at one point talked about using them…and the cost of modifying them for both cargo and crew was far less then the 10-12 billion that was going to be spent on Ares 1 AND they would have been flying some time ago with both people and cargo.

    The decision to build rockets and then the effort to build them being done badly…has probably been the key to ending NASA as it is known today. Had Griffin used the EELV’s it would not have been that hard to have moved the payloads to another cheaper launcher (had one come along) and the fact that the EELV’s were flying more SHOULD have brought down their unit cost….but more important at least from an “agency as we know it” standpoint there would have been the preservation based on flying hardware…now there is not.

    Second…as noted EELV payloads could easily move to another launcher if that launcher was cheaper…If SpaceX is going (as I suspect) to at least compete with the two EELV’s (and yes it might drive them out of business…that is the American way) then it will equally compete with a Shuttle HLV.

    There is no way to believe that a shuttle derived HLV will fly for under 1 billion a launch. But say a miracle occurs and it flies for say 1/2 billion a launch…that is FIVE Falcon9H’s.

    There are not currently nor are there payloads in planning that require 70 or 130 tons of lift at one time…and there are not likely to be those payloads…and even if they are those payloads are going to not be anything but government paid for…and really NASA paid for. Hence the SLS cannot share any cost with anyone else…unlike the Falcon 9H which can ..

    The Falcon 9H can not only share the cost with the Falcon 9…but with other users of the 9H which are likely to at first be other government agencies and eventually commercial…

    So I still dont see any justification for a one of booster that has zero commercial aps.

    Robert G. Oler

  • libs0n

    Bridwell,

    The thing about using commercial launchers, the EELVs, is that it is an open competitive market for NASA demand, and NASA can transition to using lower cost options, SpaceX, as they arise and prove the better option. You are not locked into the EELVS.

    You are locked into a HLV. The HLV is a program with large expensive costs that cannot take advantage of the evolution of the launch market.

    When SpaceX proves the better option, NASA is free to not buy anymore EELVs. It buys from the launch vehicle vendor that offers the best cost to orbit. The EELVs are competed with, as the ascent of SpaceX demonstrates. Not so with HLV.

    You wish to rob from NASA the power of buying a more affordable product should it arise. It must always buy SRB and SSMEs, forever. Your path is the antithesis of competition. It is vendor lock in.

    Also, launch vehicles have high fixed costs to sustain the program, and lower marginal costs for rockets themselves. Using many commercial rockets for a mission will allow you to get the better cost, the marginal cost of further rockets. And the fixed costs are shared by the other users of commercial launch, the DoD, the Comsat business, NASA Science and ISS missions, whereas an in house NASA operated Heavy Lift vehicle will have to bear its extremely high fixed costs alone, and in a low flight rate environment where fixed costs dominate. Over the next few years, NASA’s actual demand for launch will be low, and it will not be forced to buy EELVs if it took the EELV route, but you wish to force NASA to spend 2-3 billion a year on launch anyways.

  • nasand beyond

    I suppose it’d be the acme of foolishness to ponder, but what do you suppose will be ULA’s response to Falcon 9-H? If CST100 is largely Boeing’s answer to Dragon, can we expect an “Ares I-to-Liberty” type EELV transformation? Or will Boeing and Lockheed simply turn on one another, each with a new version of an old product???

  • Das Boese

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    The fact is that adequate impactor detection systems will have to be space based.

    Naturally.

    The cheapest place to do that is the surface of the Moon. (See the CAPS studies.)

    First of all, if you put something on the moon, it’s not “space based”, it’s on the surface of a planetary body. The only difference from an earth-based system is that there’s no atmosphere. Why would you choose that over the much better observation conditions at a Lagrangian point, and how would it be cheaper?

    Once you understand that the bulk of the impact hazard comes from comets and dead comet fragments instead of from asteroids, then the answers drop into place.

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 3:59 pm

    Once you understand that comets and dead comet fragments, and not asteroids, form the bulk of the impact hazard, the question becomes “How do you find them early enough to do anything?”

    What you can do depends on how early you find them, the earlier the better.

    The summary: What CAPS gives is 6 months more time to react to Long Period Comets, an increase from about 18 months now. What CAPS provides in terms of dead comet fragments is a way to pick them up early enough to prevent them from hitting, and it is the only reliable means of doing so.

    You still haven’t explained why manned spaceflight is at all relevant to this problem.

    Or how the study arrives at the conclusion that this thing needs to be on the moon (see above).

  • Das Boese

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    The fact is that adequate impactor detection systems will have to be space based.

    Naturally.

    The cheapest place to do that is the surface of the Moon. (See the CAPS studies.)

    First of all, if you put something on the moon, it’s not “space based”, it’s on the surface of a planetary body. The only difference from an earth-based system is that there’s no atmosphere. Why would you choose that over the much better observation conditions at a Lagrangian point, and how would it be cheaper?

    Once you understand that the bulk of the impact hazard comes from comets and dead comet fragments instead of from asteroids, then the answers drop into place.

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 3:59 pm

    Once you understand that comets and dead comet fragments, and not asteroids, form the bulk of the impact hazard, the question becomes “How do you find them early enough to do anything?”

    What you can do depends on how early you find them, the earlier the better.

    The summary: What CAPS gives is 6 months more time to react to Long Period Comets, an increase from about 18 months now. What CAPS provides in terms of dead comet fragments is a way to pick them up early enough to prevent them from hitting, and it is the only reliable means of doing so.

    You still haven’t explained why manned spaceflight is at all relevant to this problem.

    Or how the study arrives at the conclusion that this thing needs to be on the moon (see above).

  • common sense

    @ Rick Boozer wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 3:22 pm

    “When SLS reaches its inevitable conclusion due to cost overruns, some people will have had jobs for a few years and that will be the only beneficial outcome because there will be no functioning launcher after the project is canceled. ”

    I wonder if we could get another Blue Ribbon panel right away. Norm Augustine sir are you reading this here? Any back up slides you could freshen up and send over to our friends in Congress. Those who missed what you concluded the first time around.

    What I find really, really sad is that the workforce that Congress is trying so hard so to speak to keep alive is supposedly very smart, high tech. Why oh why don’t they give them something to do that is a bit more challenging then? Something along the lines of developing next generation propulsion systems? Why rehashing 40/50 year old technology. Keep them employed if you have to but give them something to do for our future, not our past! Then again they want to dispute the shuttle museum decision. Maybe we could change the name to the National Museum of Politics, instead of Congress, where the past always comes first before the future.

  • common sense

    And by the way we and they look a lot less stupid if we and they fail at trying something new rather than trying to do something that was done decades ago…

    Is that lost on them too?

  • Coastal Ron

    nasand beyond wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    …but what do you suppose will be ULA’s response to Falcon 9-H?

    Good question, and you gotta hope that they are pondering it too. I wonder whether the parents (Boeing & Lockheed Martin) will want to make a substantial investment just to stay in the business, or if they will make a slow exit.

    I for one would rather that they choose to stay in the business, mainly because I don’t like monopolies, even if they are supposedly benevolent.

    The challenge for ULA is going to be shedding touch labor and lowering their pay scales, plus shedding expensive overhead. In short, they are going to have to change from being a government contractor to a commercial one, and that will be a challenge.

  • Robert G. Oler

    http://nasawatch.com/archives/2011/04/craig-steidle-w.html#comments

    Look for the comments by Jim Muncy…they are quite good Robert G. Oler

  • DocM

    If SpaceX pulls off FH and keeps prices low a lot of providers have decisions to make. Aviation Week is saying that China is already “confounded” by them….

    http://web02.aviationweek.com/aw/mstory.do?id=news/asd/2011/04/15/11.xml&channel=space&headline=China%20Great%20Wall%20Confounded%20By%20SpaceX%20Prices

  • “I suppose it’d be the acme of foolishness to ponder, but what do you suppose will be ULA’s response to Falcon 9-H?”

    The word on the street is that ULA will be forced to raise prices in response to market share lost to SpaceX.

    I am beginning to see SpaceX as another United States Steel/Microsoft and Musk as another Andrew Carnegie/Bill Gates. I don’t see how anyone is going to be able to compete with him in the orbital launch business, considering the enormous startup-costs, limited markets, and uncertainties.

  • Wayne Hale tells it like it is to a bunch of MIT students, a few years ago:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB0pyYTs2mw

  • Coastal, how about neither. Everyone has read this article: http://spacenews.com/launch/110414-air-force-nasa-and-nro-ink-agreement-launching-with-spacex.html but they all seem to come away from it with a happy feeling for some reason. Yes, it’s great that the Air Force is saying they will go with the cheaper provider.. it’s great that SpaceX is that provider and it means payloads for the Falcon Heavy.. but *read the rest of the article*.

    They’re saying they will provide *direct subsidies* to ULA to keep them afloat if required. That completely removes any need ULA has to lower their prices, change their practices or otherwise compete.

  • Egad

    I see that Lockheed is still anticipating a 2013 orbital launch for Orion, with crewed operations in 2016. If it succeeds in meeting those goals, SLS will be deprived of even a contingency mission unless someone comes up with one and gets it funded in the next few years.

    http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2011/0415_ss_orion.html

    Lockheed Martin Commends Congressional Action On NASA Spacecraft

    DENVER, April 15th, 2011 — Following months of short-term, stop-gap funding for NASA, Lockheed Martin welcomes final passage of the FY 2011 budget by the Congress, which has been sent forward for President Obama’s signature. As stated by Congressional committee members, continuing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) along with the heavy lift launch vehicle ensures that the United States will continue to be the world’s leader in human space flight.

    Orion was designed from inception to serve as the nation’s next generation spacecraft to safely take humans on a variety of multi-purpose deep space missions throughout our solar system. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act, and now the FY 2011 Appropriations Act, continues Orion on a clear path forward to its first orbital flight in 2013 and crewed operations by 2016.

    Nearly 3,000 people work on the Orion program across the country, of which about 2,200 are employed by Lockheed Martin, its subcontractors and commercial suppliers. In addition, the program contracts with hundreds of small businesses nationwide through its expansive supply chain network.

    BTW, I assume the reason Lockheed reserved a Delta IV H rather than a lesser Delta IV for the 2013 launch is that they intend to fly the complete Orion assembly, service module + capsule + LAS. Anybody know if that’s actually the case?

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Egad,

    It is my understanding that the Orion-on-EELV will be as close to a full, operational Orion as they can manage at the time. One of the mission objectives will be to test the LAS in a nominal flight seperation and disposal.

  • Coastal Ron

    Trent Waddington wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 5:31 am

    They’re saying they will provide *direct subsidies* to ULA to keep them afloat if required. That completely removes any need ULA has to lower their prices, change their practices or otherwise compete.

    That’s what I see as the slow exit, since little by little they will lose market share outside of the U.S. Government market, and soon be completely dependent on the government subsidies. At some point that will not be sustainable, even with government subsidies, and ULA would have to downsize, close or sell.

    That’s not what I would want, but the parents have to make a big decision here.

  • Egad

    > It is my understanding that the Orion-on-EELV will be as close to a full, operational Orion as they can manage at the time.

    Thank you. Are there any identified places where there’s a question about Orion-on-EELV meeting the ISS crew/supply operational requirements? E.g., might the service module not be able to carry sufficient fuel, the Delta IV H launching from the Cape not be able to put sufficient mass into the ISS orbit, etc.?

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 3:01 am

    I don’t see how anyone is going to be able to compete with him in the orbital launch business, considering the enormous startup-costs, limited markets, and uncertainties.

    If you don’t understand how Musk is beating everyone in $/lb, then of course you won’t see how anyone can beat Musk. But someone will, and Musk has shown them the way.

    The company that will displace the SpaceX rocket business will likely be based on RLV (Reusable Launch Vehicle) technology, and likely not recovering/reusing tube rockets, but horizontal landers. I think that is the next big step in $/lb that is likely to happen, and as Musk has shown, $/lb is what the market wants.

    United States Steel/Microsoft and Musk as another Andrew Carnegie/Bill Gates.

    Your examples even prove my point, since neither is the dominate company they once were. U.S. Steel only produces the same amount of steel it did when it was founded over 100 years ago, and Microsoft generates less revenue than Apple.

    The key, as always – innovate or die

  • pathfinder_01

    Egad:
    For crew Delta IV heavy is not man rated but can send Orion to the ISS. For cargo, Orion is not capable of automated rendezvous and docking atm. That capability has been deferred.

  • Robert G. Oler

    nasand beyond wrote @ April 15th, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    “I suppose it’d be the acme of foolishness to ponder, but what do you suppose will be ULA’s response to Falcon 9-H? If CST100 is largely Boeing’s answer to Dragon, can we expect an “Ares I-to-Liberty” type EELV transformation?”

    Thats a good question and the vast majority of responses have been what is the tour de force of this forum…well done. I would just make a few additional comments

    Trent points out some good things about the article in Space News…but in my view the statement by the official is not very thoughtful. IT HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN that SpaceX can meet its cost, but Musk seems confident of that and if he does then two things happen in terms of this discussion…all of which are good.

    The first is that as the “launch bar” comes down (wonder where DAle Gray is?) The US military and other agencies will think of more things to do with space and in space and those things will increase the number of payloads and the variety of them. What has kept spaceflight in the “traditional” mode so far (ie comm and observation satellites and big ones at that) is the cost to launch..if that comes down then not only what but how things are done in spaceflight will change.

    Second as the launch bar comes down more and more of the launch companies and some people who want to get into the launch business (and as the number of payloads go up more will want to) will examine “how SpaceX does it”. That it can be done (cost come down) will mean that there are multiple ways to get there and other people and companies will start trying. While startup cost are high, Musk has not spent all that much money in conventional rocket terms and other people will try. That is the exciting news about groups like Virgin and Armadillo and the lot…they are all trying to solve pieces of the puzzle that have stymied NASA and the traditional manufactors because neither can think outside the box of tradition any more.

    What we dont need anymore are “field freezers”. The shuttle was just that. once it was built, even though it really met none of the design objectives IT HAD TO BE FLOWN and flown for 30 plus years. As time has moved on in every other technological field the shuttle system stayed frozen with 16000 people working on it and aging technology. Worse if one is to look at Cx the methods of how it was done were going to live on another half century or so.

    IF SPACEX makes its cost numbers and if it makes its reliability numbers (some big ifs, but seemingly more manageable by the day) it will point to a completely new day in manufacturing of launch (and space) vehicles that has the potential to revolutionize what happens in space.

    That is one reason I am so puzzled by the opposition to SpaceX and commercial involvement in human spaceflight by some of the folks who do it. Some I can understand. Whittington is just a GOP shill…as someone said to paraphrase “if the GOP supports it Mark W is for it”…the JSC folks are protecting not only their jobs but literally their way of life. What I cannot grasp however are the folks who claim to want a strong secure US industrial manufactoring base…and yet cannot see that the new space people are a key to that.

    Oh well Robert G. Oler

  • Egad

    > For crew Delta IV heavy is not man rated but can send Orion to the ISS. For cargo, Orion is not capable of automated rendezvous and docking atm. That capability has been deferred.

    So when Lockheed says,

    The 2010 NASA Authorization Act, and now the FY 2011 Appropriations Act, continues Orion on a clear path forward to its first orbital flight in 2013 and crewed operations by 2016.

    we could interpret that as meaning that the 2013 Delta IV H flight would demonstrate general capability but not ISS mission readiness. But crewed operations, including cargo delivery to ISS, starting in 2016 would need the SLS, designed from the start to be man rated?

    Is there any information on why the capability for automated rendezvous and docking operations has been deferred?

  • “At some point that will not be sustainable, even with government subsidies, and ULA would have to downsize, close or sell.”

    The operative word will be “close”. Which is ironic, becasue so many NewSpace supporters who are Musk cheerleaders have been clamoring for NASA to pretend that they do not need heavy lift and hitch their wagon to those EELVs that will cease to exist by 2015. The future is not so easy to predict, especially for those only equipped with simple answers. (Yes, just about everything else is also ironic, agreed!)

    My wild guess is that there will be no other US orbital launch providers. China, Russia, and France will continue on for security reasons, but they will loose market share, which is not bad news for the US $$$. Musk will eventually work on greater reusability, but after the IPO his market incentives for lowering prices will be dilluted. His thin-skinned liquid boosters might never master survival of reentry, compared to the heavy, battleship-like ATK SRBs. Consequently, lower cost access to space might end up originating in India or Europe, where there is a government that is willing to fork over the needed $10 billion in up-front R&D.

  • I also think that Musk’s lower costs will be good news for NASA science missions that are strapped for cash, and hostage to high ULA costs. The lower costs will also slightly increase the size of the commercial sat market, although the payloads are so expensive that even if launches were free, the growth potential is quite limited.

    Clearly, Musk really will need to master reliability of his engines. I think that he can, and will.

    And I changed my mind. If I had to compete with SpaceX on a limited budget, the approach that I would follow would be the very simple, very low-tech, very low-cost approach that has been pioneered, but never mastered, that involved using lots of stages, pressure-feed of fuel, rather than pumps, inexpensive low-grade materials on the lower stages, etc. This is probably a low-risk approach that a country like India, China, or Eurpoe could make work. A German group pioneered this approach several years ago, using lots of clustering of identical rockets in the lower stages. The defense establishment managed to shut them down because of concerns that the technology could fall into the wrong hands…

  • Joe

    Egad wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
    “Is there any information on why the capability for automated rendezvous and docking operations has been deferred?”

    Simply lack of money. The automated system requires a lot of lines of code to be written, tested and verified and the funds were not in the budget to do it.

  • Rhyolite

    Regarding SpaceX and the viability of ULA, the US has a policy of having at least two launch vehicles types available to ensure space access for national security payloads.

    If SpaceX successfully cracks the national security market, then the national security will stop guaranteeing a market or both Detla IV and Atlas V. The likely outcome is that one of the two lines will be allowed to be closed. If SpaceX wins the heavy payloads with FH then it will be Delta IV. If not, it will be Atlas.

    At least one EELV will continue in any scenario to meet the US policy goal of not being dependent on a single launch vehicle.

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 1:47 pm

    Consequently, lower cost access to space might end up originating in India or Europe, where there is a government that is willing to fork over the needed $10 billion in up-front R&D.

    Do the math, and you’ll see that anyone that spends $10B to develop a next-generation launcher is not going to be able to compete on price, not unless there is a massive demand for moving mass to orbit. Just to match Falcon Heavy prices, that $10B rocket would have to launch 10,000,000 lbs of payloads at $1,000/lb just to break even with R&D costs. And if they try to price themselves even lower, then they have to launch even more. The math doesn’t work, so the only reason to use this type of plan is for jobs or national pride.

    Instead you have to look at ways to move mass to orbit while lowering the costs by at least half. Unless some kind of magic fuel is developed, I think that can only be done by true RLV’s, and likely they will be winged horizontal landers.

    The other thing you need is demand for lots of mass, and we don’t have that yet, so it could be quite a while before market demand will support a next-generation system.

    …Musk cheerleaders have been clamoring for NASA to pretend that they do not need heavy lift

    No need to pretend. Where is the demand for heavy lift? Show us the funded programs that demand heavy lift?

    [crickets chirping]

    Even SpaceX knows that they’ll be doing multiple payload missions on Falcon Heavy, just like Ariane 5 does quite often. For the commercial and DoD/NRO market, it takes a while to adjust to major changes in payload capabilities, and it remains to be seen whether they even NEED bigger payloads.

    But everyone can underutilize Falcon Heavy because the price is so attractive, and that’s what’s going to drive customers to them – the price, not the payload size.

  • pathfinder_01

    Nelson, to my knowledge EELV will not cease in 2015. There are plans to replace them with fly back boosters in the 2020ies but no firm end date (unlike the shuttle). EELV have other uses more important uses and will be maintained until there is a replacement. Meaning unlike NASA which shut down the shuttle before Ares 1 was ready enough to carry crew in the short run the military will pay to have assured access to space. If the Military were unable to replace it’ spy satellites and other stuff for two years we would be in a world of hurt and our soil and the lives of our troops would be endangered. If NASA is unable to get to the moon for two year or LEO for two year no big whop (until the ISS that is).

    Also propelant depots don’t care what size of booster that you use….oversized earth depature stages do.

  • pathfinder_01

    “we could interpret that as meaning that the 2013 Delta IV H flight would demonstrate general capability but not ISS mission readiness. But crewed operations, including cargo delivery to ISS, starting in 2016 would need the SLS, designed from the start to be man rated?”

    Basically yes. Unless Delta IVH gets man rated and there are no plans to do that at the moment since no commercial crew craft will use Delta both due to cost and due to the fact that it is harder to man rate than Atlas. Atlas’s Russian engines were left overs from energia and were designed to carry people from the start.

    The emergency detection system that ULA created will work on both rockets however. Unless Orion gets the programming needed to operate autonomously then no cargo will be carried since caring the cargo will require crew (unlike Dragon, Cygnus, ATM,HTV, or Progress).

    If you get rid of some weight on Orion Atlas V heavy might work but there are concerns with putting 21MT of weight on that rocket(might not support it. Atlas is being man rated for commercial crew).

    SLS being a 130 lifter will require that you put around 109MT of ballast (or other weight) to do an LEO mission since the capsule is only 21MT.Although if it is like Saturn and only uses two stages (like for Skylab) then the amount of dead weight needed drops to 49MT if two stages can lift 70. Either way it is a very inefficient way to get crew or cargo to the ISS.
    \
    Note the commercial crew capsules all plan to use Atlas V402(about 12.5MT to LEO) or Falcon 9 both of which are cheaper and lift and cost less than Delta IV heavy and SLS. Commercial cargo plans to use Falcon 9 and Taurus II again both cheaper and smaller than the two previous ones. To quote nun sense “Oh, The biggest ain’t the best”.

  • Lets assume it will be the Delta IV. Because of the price difference, ULA will probably not get any launches, and just have a token Delta IV or two in mothball status as a backup, should SpaceX facilites get destroyed in a tsunami… Effectively, ULA will have closed it’s doors…

  • pathfinder_01

    If you can launch a token Delta IV heavy then the capacity remains to ramp up production and the miltary or NASA could provide plenty of token launches. In fact ULA was willing to lower it to 300M a launch if NASA would buy 6 launches a year for Orion. It would be subsidized but it would exsit. Unlike say the Saturn V which had no other users or the Saturn I which lost its other user to Titian III.

  • pathfinder_01

    Also you really can’t mothball rockets unless they have been designed to be stored that way. Some parts have a limited life span and you need trained crews and launch pads to operate them and you need the ability to replace them since it could take 2 or more years for Space X to get that abilty back up if it were down. The Milatary would probably not be happy with that solution.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 1:47 pm

    ” Consequently, lower cost access to space might end up originating in India or Europe, where there is a government that is willing to fork over the needed $10 billion in up-front R&D.”

    there is no data that this is how that will work out nor that 10 billion is needed for R&D.

    If Musk has truly succeeded in lowering cost by the number he claims (and again we need to see that in actuality) then he has made a significant, a darn large reduction in the cost without the vaunted 10 billion R&D of a government program.

    I would argue, with a lot of historical data behind me that the notion of a government R&D project in space technology to lower cost is the El Dorado that has been chased by space enthusiast for a long time…and is not needed. Cx spend 10 billion dollars and has nothing to show for it..X-33 did nothing…

    What is needed in my view is a market that drives lower cost. If there is a market, some company in America will find a way to meet it. thats the cycle that took aviation from two guys on the beach to well where it is today…and has worked in every other technical arena so far.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    Because of the price difference, ULA will probably not get any launches, and just have a token Delta IV or two in mothball status as a backup…

    A launch company is more than just the rocket hardware – it’s also in the personnel that make things work, so you can’t just put a rocket in storage (and the company) and then pull it out and launch it whenever you want. Not with that size of rocket.

    If the U.S. decides that it’s in it’s best interests to have more than one launch provider, then it will need to provide enough funding for two or more. This happens all the time, so it’s not something new, just the dollar amounts involved.

    …should SpaceX facilites get destroyed in a tsunami…

    Their L.A. manufacturing facilities are at 313 ft above sea level, so if a tsunami reaches them, then we’ll have more to worry about than putting payloads into orbit.

    What if a hurricane hits Decatur AL? Same concern, and one that’s more likely.

    Hey, you come up with that list of funded SLS payloads yet? ;-)

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 4:58 pm

    “X-33 did nothing…”

    Well at least X-33 was pushing the envelope. While CxP was pushing… themselves. There is a subtle difference.

  • Das Boese

    Coastal Ron wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 3:38 pm

    Interesting how nobody is thinking of the Russians, who have done interesting, if somewhat unusual, work on RLV development.

    The ultimate plan for the evolution of Energia called for a development of the Zenit boosters towards flyback capability with folding wings. Of course Energia is dead and Zenit belongs to Ukraine now, but the flyback concept is still alive and kicking, now as an evolution variant of the new Angara launcher.

  • common sense

    “…should SpaceX facilites get destroyed in a tsunami…”

    I have a comment about this kind of remark but it would most likely be moderated. Pathetic.

  • SpaceColonizer

    When SpaceX proves that the prices they’ve advertised are possible, the floodgates of private investment will open for the entire launch industry. It won’t be long before there is another viable competitor. And in a funny way, the only price they really need to compete with is the Delta/Altas prices. If a minimum of two suppliers is all that are required, then as soon as someone else besides SpaceX beats those prices then we’re headed on the right track. Are there any programs like CCDev in the DoD budget? If not, there should be. The same cost saving benefits apply to both agencies.

  • Egad

    Thank y’all for the interesting replies on Delta-Orion-SLS possibilities.

    Changing topics a little, I’ve been struck by SpaceX’ Merlin I-D production goals — I’m reminded of Khruschev’s “rockets like sausages” line. Question: If SpaceX really does meet those goals and achieve low unit costs, could they, other considerations like ITAR assumed satisfied, sell engines to other rocket makers?

    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/04/spacex-falcon-heavy-tag-team-share-20-launches-year/

  • Coastal Ron

    Das Boese wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 5:38 pm

    Interesting how nobody is thinking of the Russians, who have done interesting, if somewhat unusual, work on RLV development.

    Good point. A SpaceX com competitor could come from anywhere.

    Maybe Reaction Engines Skylon will be it?

  • Robert G. Oler

    SpaceColonizer wrote @ April 16th, 2011 at 6:10 pm

    “When SpaceX proves that the prices they’ve advertised are possible, the floodgates of private investment will open for the entire launch industry”

    yeap you understand free enterprise completely. (grin)

    Robert G. Oler

  • SpaceColonizer

    @Oler

    I’m a little confused… was that sarcasm? Because I was pretty much agreeing with YOUR viewpoint on the situation. If not, sorry for the needlessly defensive post.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DB –

    The restraints are electrical power, computer power, communication power, pointing abilities, and servicing versus replacement costs.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DocM –

    “If SpaceX pulls off FH and keeps prices low a lot of providers have decisions to make. Aviation Week is saying that China is already “confounded” by them….

    http://web02.aviationweek.com/aw/mstory.do?id=news/asd/2011/04/15/11.

    Well, that is good news. No doubt China has sufficient internal demand to keep moving forward right now, and into the next 10 years. My guess is that China won’t chase SpaceX, but instead go the fly-back route, and that they certainly won’t chase 130 ton lift.

    But that is just a guess, as the question is whether reliable multiple use fly back engines can be developed, and how much they will cost.

    Another guess: If SpaceX succeeds, then it is likely that ULA will stop Delta to work on Atlas.

    Finally, we come to the “Why?” question for manned space flight.

    Last guess: manned Mars flight can not answer this question, at least for a good while.
    Only CAPS can.

  • byeman

    There are sure a lot of idiotic statements on this thread. For example, Spacex will be the demise of the EELV’s

  • Martijn Meijering

    For example, Spacex will be the demise of the EELV’s

    How much of a threat do you think they are to Arianespace?

  • Egad

    > and that they [China] certainly won’t chase 130 ton lift.

    I suspect that that’s right, but it doesn’t stop them from dreaming a bit:

    http://www.china.org.cn/china/NPC_CPPCC_2011/2011-03/04/content_22052721.htm

    China planning rocket for manned moon landing
    Xinhua, March 4, 2011

    China is studying the feasibility of designing a powerful carrier rocket for making a manned moon landing and exploring deep space, Liang Xiaohong, vice head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, told Xinhua Thursday.

    The rocket is envisaged to have a payload of 130 tonnes, five times larger than that of China’s current largest rocket, said Liang, who is attending the annual session of National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body.

    [snippe]

  • Robert G. Oler

    byeman wrote @ April 17th, 2011 at 11:47 am

    IF SpaceX makes its cost and reliability numbers those will have some effect/affect on the EELV program. Military budgets (as well as the non military military agencies) are going to decline..and if SpaceX can do as advertised the agencies which are the teats for the EELV program will have their milk dry up.

    Now I dont know that SpaceX will do as advertised (I hope and have some confidence that they will) but if they do…then all the legacy launch providers in and out of this country are going to see a new day. It will not only be SpaceX but it will be the rush of people and companies that come in to compete with them

    Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    ” It will not only be SpaceX but it will be the rush of people and companies that come in to compete with them”

    It really depends on the profit margins of SpaceX, if they are producing just an industry standard profit, capital will not come flooding in. A ground breaking company has to be generating extra normal profits before you see that actual flood of capital. Although Musk says they are in the black, being a private company we are not actually seeing what they are. After he does the IPO next year we will get to see a better picture of what those margins are.

    I believe that Virgin is going to see better margins than SpaceX. I believe it will be sub orbital market that is going to see more intitial competition, because of lower capital requirements, lower insurance rates(?) and regulations(?).

    It will, in my opinion, hinge on destinations. As long as it is just ISS it will not generate the investor excitment that a commercial destination is going to bring. So when Bigelow puts up the first fully commercial station and SpaceX is selling seats to it we will start seeing that venture capital come flooding in. I have a feeling Bigelow is going to have some really great margins if he is doing a leasing business which will allow any 2nd or 3rd tier country have a full up space program.

  • Das Boese

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 17th, 2011 at 2:14 am

    The restraints are electrical power, computer power, communication power, pointing abilities, and servicing versus replacement costs.

    A little verbosity goes a long way towards allowing people to understand your point, E.P.

    Because right now I don’t know what the hell you’re saying or what this has to do with the issues I pointed out.

  • Some people rightfull ask if SpaceX is successfully lowering costs, why can’t other american companies step in and accomplish the same, resulting in more competition, and continued lower costs?

    The problem is that SpaceX has taken just about all the easy, low-risk measures to cut their costs (inhouse engine and electronics to cut out the middleman, a minimal number of employees working for rock-bottom wages, clustering large numbers of small rockets to avoid any development costs, using a “free” NASA engine design to eliminate development costs). They do not have any technology advantages over anyone else. A Falcon 9 works exactly the same way as an Atlas V.

    For anyone else to survive in a fight against SpaceX, they need to find a way to do orbital launches even cheaper than SpaceX. Otherwise, SpaceX will temporarily drop their launch costs enought to cause losses for any potential startups.

    Any totally new technology (space elevators, electromagnetic cannons, … would be very expensive and high risk). Likewise, a 100% reusable spacecraft would be very expensive. Development of the Skylon would cost around 15 billion and take 10 years. That is a long time to run a business with massive losses and no income, let alone any profits.

    Burt Rutan pointed out that the reason for the failure of the Concorde SST was that there was no American SST, so the lack of competition provided no incentive to lower costs…

  • If I wanted to compete with SpaceX, and did not have a massive government subsidy (China, Russia, France), the route that I would take would be something like OTRAG, a German attempt to lower launch costs throught the mass production of very simple, clustered rocket modules that use gas pressure feed rather than turbine fuel pumps.

    http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/otrag.htm

    I think that something like this would be relatively inexpensive to develop and could also be fairly low-risk.

    It looks like it is being pursued by Interorbital Systems, which is located out in Mojave, near Scaled Composites…

    http://www.interorbital.com/Neptune%20Modular%20Page_1.htm

    If I were NASA and wanted to invest in “game-changing” technology, this is one concept that could significantly reduce launch costs and could begin to open the door to space tourism much more so than a $50 million Falcon 9.

  • ‎”The $ 200 million spiral development and test program took 40 years, went through more than 1000 versions, included over 6000 static tests firings with total burning time approaching one million seconds, and achieved 14 suborbital test flights. The CRPU was human-rated and had a confidence level higher than 6-sigma.”

    “Kayser’s activities made the great powers nervous. The USSR and France were not interested in Germany achieving an indigenous long-range rocket activity. American rocket makers were not interested in having a low-cost competitor. A propaganda campaign began, alleging OTRAG was a cover for German and South African nuclear cruise missile development. Crude Soviet-source disinformation was eagerly picked up and given credibility by the American mainstream media. The government of the Congo was pressured by the Russians to withdraw permission to use the site. OTRAG left the country in April 1979.

    Soviet president Brezhnev and French president Giscard d’Estaing applied further heavy political pressure on the German government to completely cancel the project. After a total investment of $ 150 million, OTRAG had to terminate production in Germany. Tooling and materials were relocated to a new combination assembly and launch site in a remote area of the Sahara Desert, in Libya.”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 17th, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    “a minimal number of employees working for rock-bottom wages,”

    that is partial disinformation. SpaceX does have a “minimal” number of employees but the rock bottom wages? I cannot speak for the entire employee roster…but I do have two data points that say you are wrong.

    First they have drawn fairly high brow talent. Some of the “names” of course are obvious, but I now know four people who have taken positions at SpaceX and while we have not talked dollars and cents, they are being compensated at industry level.

    Second in my travels I attended several seminars out on the West coast that had to do with various satellite/rocket aspects and the scuttle butt there was not that SpaceX was paying “the low dime”.

    they are a start up so doubtless there is some “when we make money” sort of gamble (I’ve taken that one myself) and all, but Musk is not known as a low baller in all his other industries. I dont work for SpaceX or have any real connection to them but unless you have evidence then dont pass speculation as facts.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 17th, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    …a minimal number of [SpaceX] employees working for rock-bottom wages

    Maybe you haven’t worked for a startup, but the wages are typically not “rock bottom”, but “market competitive”. However, the employees SpaceX is hiring are not your average employees either, since SpaceX has the market buzz to attract the best and the brightest, and living in L.A. (near the beach) is not bad for those in their twenties or thirties. SpaceX is, in a very small way, probably recreating the sense of excitement that our forefathers experienced on the Apollo program.

    Likewise, a 100% reusable spacecraft would be very expensive.

    I think what SpaceX has shown is that development doesn’t have to be as expensive as gold-plated multi-purpose government designs. If you focus on a minimum viable product, one that has known growth options, then I think it’s within the ability of a number of established companies. I think the trick is discerning what the core features should be, and what your growth path will be.

    For instance, SpaceX started with Falcon 1, which was a relatively inexpensive way to prove out most of their design, manufacturing and launch processes, then scaled up to Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy is an evolution of Falcon 9, which uses the most of the same designs and tooling.

    Burt Rutan pointed out that the reason for the failure of the Concorde SST was that there was no American SST, so the lack of competition provided no incentive to lower costs…

    I think Burt Rutan is a smart guy. However I’m not sure of the context you’re pulling this from, so I’ll just say that I disagree with what you’ve quoted.

    I say that because the problem with the Concorde was that the market for expensive mach 2 transportation was not very big, especially with the progressively more comfortable Boeing and Airbus offerings. The limitation of routes exacerbated the problem, as well as the high operating costs. The Concorde was a high-end offering, in a world where high-end is very fungible, especially at the prices they were charging.

    Could an American SST have competed? Because of the apparent market size (i.e. lack of demand for the Concorde at full price), an American SST would have had to have offered a significantly lower price, and I don’t know if that was achievable in the 70’s while still offering mach 2 service. Maybe mach 1.5 would have been the sweet spot of the market? Hard to tell, but premium priced services are hard to predict, since the rely partially on great marketing, not necessarily how quickly the service is.

    That’s why it’s easier to succeed when you target the largest part of a market, especially when you have a significant price advantage – it’s easier to find customers since there are more of them. That’s what SpaceX did, and that’s what the next SpaceX needs to do.

  • Bennett

    Robert wrote “First they have drawn fairly high brow talent. “

    I like the interview Mr. Musk gave following the FH presentation. He was asked about SpaceX’s hiring policies.

    He said:  “There’s the Army, and then there are the Special Forces. SpaceX is the Special Forces of the industry.”

    Special Forces do not come cheap, but they’re worth every penny.
     
     

    Robert, BTW, how’s your daughter doing? Almost 1yo, no?

  • “I dont work for SpaceX or have any real connection to them but unless you have evidence then dont pass speculation as facts.”

    I have read that one of his motivations for hiring such young talent is that he does not need to pay as much as the experienced engineers. If true, this is not entirely outside of the norm. But like you, my information is second-hand, at best, and, no doubt, there are at least a few exceptions, such as the trophy ex-astronauts ;-)

  • When I worked for Intel Technology Development, the same group where Jeff Greason used to work, we always, ALWAYS only hired new college grads. The stated reason was that they are cheaper and have more energy than those with experience. To hire someone who had any industry experience you had to have a very compelling reason. They were called RCGs for recent college grads…

  • libs0n

    Bridwell,

    If NASA purchased large quantities of propellant for a fuel depot, that large market would create a business case for the development of new space access concepts, like Otrag, whereas in the absence of such a market, there is no such business case.

    This has already happened.

    NASA had need for ISS resupply with the shutdown of the Space Shuttle and competed some development money for the creation of resupply services for its demand, that it then planned to procure the services of. This demand provided a business case for SpaceX to establish themselves and see them through their attempts to better the state of space access.

    If NASA has instead continued the Space Shuttle, or built their own in house resupply option, then there would not be such a market for SpaceX’s services, and the business case for SpaceX would not have been there, perhaps to the point where their attempts to better the state of space access would not be viable.

    There is no business case for the development of radical low cost space access systems like you propose, since the existing market is a few handfuls of expensive comsats to GEO a year. The only thing on the horizon that could change that would be to harness the demand of NASA for propellant for space exploration, which would also benefit NASA as well by increasing the scope of what it can accomplish, but that window of opportunity to advance space access would be closed with the handing over of a monopoly on NASA’s exploration demand to an in house legacy parts Heavy Lift Vehicle.

    That is how NASA would help stimulate the development of lower cost space access, whether it be Otrag or some other method, by pulling it into existence to go after its business. By being a customer for launch services, and expanding the market to where more competition occurs because there’s a bigger prize to obtain. But if all of NASA’s money goes toward paying for its own launch vehicle, then that opportunity is lost, just as it has been lost for the past 40 years with NASA operating the Shuttle to service its demand, rather than using that demand to advance the state of space access through competitive servicing of its needs.

    You have ideas on how lower cost space access is feasible. Please reconcile that with wanting to lock NASA into a high cost launch model, for the next several decades, and losing the opportunity to harness the productive potential of NASA’s launch services demand.

  • “There is no business case for the development of radical low cost space access systems like you propose, since the existing market is a few handfuls of expensive comsats to GEO a year.”

    I certainly agree with that statement.

    The problem that I see is that in order to genuinely begin to open up a significantly larger market like orbital tourism the costs need to go down by a factor of at least 10x below what Musk must charge. And thus far, NONE of the CCDev work has involved any cost reduction of the expendable booster. Just about everyone is focused upon capsules, which is missing the point.

    And I understand how fuel depots could appear to be a possible market to spur lowered costs. I personally don’t like the idea because:
    (1) It is sacrificing real manned space exploration for a high-risk promise, a blunder that we already made with the shuttle.
    (2) The operational challenges of filling and extracting fuel from the depot are an extra non-trivial set of hoopes that NASA would need to jump throught in order to accomplish anything.

    I have no problem with an expensive HLV development effort, as long as it produces something that is very functional, and that NASA can continue to use, decades into the future. If you will need to haul massive amounts of lumber for years, going out and investing in a large truck could be a wise investment, rather than trying to shuffle freight around with a fleet of little pickups that you already have.

  • byeman

    a. CCDev is for crew and has nothing to do with depots or reducing launch costs

    b. There is no need to haul massive amounts of lumber at once.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DB, CR, all –

    The key to handling the impact hazard is early warning.
    The earliest warning you can get is not with passive optical systems,
    but rather active detectors.

    Does that clear it up any for you?

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi CR –

    For some reason I am pretty satisfied with the final legislation.

    Cnngress wants HLV, and in their thinking the preliminary architectures and payload definitions can be worked on while HLV is developed with payload construction to begin later.

    The choices facing them were:
    1) USA – good chance of working, high cost
    2) ULA – needs to get US built engines, full RD license rights?
    3) SpaceX – Cheap, but can it work reliably? – only 2 launches so far

    They decided the nation could afford to keep all three paths open, and in competition.

    If the third stage is needed to 130 tons, then work on liquid engines continues.

    In the meantime, payload systems continue to be tested and developed on ISS.

  • Vladislaw

    If Musk is running the dot com model he might have offered lower wages up front but offered stock options to make up for it. I can’t imagine he won’t raise a billion when he goes public.

  • Coastal Ron

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 12:13 pm

    The earliest warning you can get is not with passive optical systems,
    but rather active detectors.

    Does that clear it up any for you?

    No, because you said that only place you can do that is on the Moon, and we have been asking “why only on the Moon?”

    We already have fleets of satellites in GEO, and quite a few of them are active optical system – just pointed at the Earth. We can use existing capabilities to build fleets of satellites to scan the skies, and the money & time we save by NOT putting the sensors on the Moon will mean quicker and better coverage.

  • Coastal Ron

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 12:26 pm

    The choices facing them were:
    1) USA – good chance of working, high cost
    2) ULA – needs to get US built engines, full RD license rights?
    3) SpaceX – Cheap, but can it work reliably? – only 2 launches so far

    You posted this on the “NASA: $18.5 billion in full-year CR” thread too, so I won’t repeat my response there. I will add the following:

    1) USA – post Shuttle, no funded need, just a jobs program
    2) ULA – not even part of this NASA budget debate
    3) SpaceX – Griffin brought them in after they won an open competition, and the ISS is depending on them (and OSC) to stay functional – don’t confuse existing contracts (ISS cargo) with potential future work (ISS crew)

    You and others confuse the issues of the SLS and commercial crew.

    There is a funded need for ISS support, and because Congress wants it fully utilized through at least 2020, they need to free up funds so that NASA can get American companies ready to take over from Russia for crew.

    Congress needs to identify what the need for the SLS truly is, and if that need is not starting this decade, then they need to let NASA push out the completion date of the SLS – or cancel it if we truly don’t need it for more than a decade.

    If Congress wants a jobs program, then call it a jobs program, but don’t call it the NASA Space Launch System.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 11:18 am

    “I have no problem with an expensive HLV development effort, as long as it produces something that is very functional, and that NASA can continue to use, decades into the future. ”

    you might not but everyone who wants a national space future that is better and different then the last 30 years SHOULD.

    Your post screams “entitlement”.

    “NASA can continue to use, decades into the future”…NASA has used the space shuttle system for about three decades…its cost are horrendous almost 250 BILLION dollars…and year after year they have found things to do with it, things that have no value related to the cost, simply because they were “entitled” to fly it…”we are going to fly” the system so we have to find something to do with it.

    An “Expensive HLV” development will by definition develop an HLV that is expensive to use…and that means that the only use for it will be NASA and so that means that a lot of tax dollars will just like in the shuttle system have to go to finding things for that “HLV” to do.

    As it stands right now if NASA could somehow find a way to develop a 130 ton HLV they would then have to find 130 ton Payloads to put on it…

    You dont seem to understand what has made spaceflight for humans expensive…It isnt the technology nor is it the areana…clearly it IS NASA. 16000 people on the shuttle, Griffin hoping for 6000 people on Ares1 all in an era when 600 people should be the goal…NASA is spending enormous amounts of cash on “trivial” things.

    How do you justify that the cost of Orion have gone up to 1/2 YES 1/2 the R&D cost of the new Ford Class Aircraft carrier? How do you justify that NASA has spent more in the shuttle era then the US Navy has in the same period of time…acquiring a fleet of nuclear aircraft carriers?

    How do you justify support for Cx when the program to date has cost more then the ENTIRE GEMINI program did?

    The reason for all of this is not that spaceflight for humans all of a sudden got “hard” it is that NASA grew incompetent. Understand that and you have learned a lot

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Bennett wrote @ April 17th, 2011 at 9:46 pm

    “Robert, BTW, how’s your daughter doing? Almost 1yo, no?”

    Lorelei is doing well thank you. She is just over 1, walking and running and understands (when she wants to ) a lot of what we talk to her about…and she is desperately trying to talk back.

    One reason Musk hires RCG is that he doesnt want people who are infected with the “way” NASA and other aerospace firms do things. You need people who are open to new ways and have new ideas.

    Thanks for asking..see our facebook page for lots of pictures. Robert G. Oler

  • And I understand how fuel depots could appear to be a possible market to spur lowered costs. I personally don’t like the idea because:
    (1) It is sacrificing real manned space exploration for a high-risk promise, a blunder that we already made with the shuttle.
    (2) The operational challenges of filling and extracting fuel from the depot are an extra non-trivial set of hoopes that NASA would need to jump throught in order to accomplish anything.

    If propellant depots are high risk, then opening space to humanity is high risk, because, unlike heavy lift, we cannot do it without them.

  • Egad

    > The key to handling the impact hazard is early warning.

    > The earliest warning you can get is not with passive optical systems,
    but rather active detectors.

    I just know I shouldn’t get involved in this, but…

    As I understand it, your principal concern is long-period comets dropping in from the Kuiper Belt and beyond. If so, what kind of active detectors do you have in mind?

  • Ferris Valyn

    Let me jump in with a few points

    Nelson Bridwell

    NONE of the CCDev work has involved any cost reduction of the expendable booster. Just about everyone is focused upon capsules, which is missing the point.

    Ok, byeman already pointed out an important point, and that is that CCDev is not a program that attacks the problem of cheap access, at least not directly – it does indirectly though, and in an important way. Let me go back to an earlier comment from you

    The problem that I see is that in order to genuinely begin to open up a significantly larger market like orbital tourism the costs need to go down

    To open up a significantly larger market, a company must actually see an existing market. And this is a major problem – right now, the ONE thing that practically everyone agrees on is that we can say that the market for human to LEO transportation is non-zero, and most likely positive. What we can’t agree on is the actual value of that market – it could be 1 dollar per year or it could be a trillion dollars a year – we lack a LOT of data points to go beyond the reasonable guess viewpoint.

    Therefore, to return to that second statement, “in order to open up a significantly larger market”, we first have to have a viable market. Commercial Crew in general, and CCDev to a lesser extent, is the issue of market development – it is helping to create multiple viable entries into a market place and then preparing to follow it up with some customers (who would be similar to how private customers would act)

    Thus – don’t look CCDev, or even Commercial Crew to directly attack the issue of cheap access via technology development.

    As for the HLV vs fuel depots – Thats a religious issue for you that I’ll leave for others to discuss

  • Martijn Meijering

    If propellant depots are high risk, then opening space to humanity is high risk, because, unlike heavy lift, we cannot do it without them.

    You should know better than this Rand. What we need is cheap lift, not propellant depots per se.

  • Martijn Meijering

    @Nelson:

    The problem that I see is that in order to genuinely begin to open up a significantly larger market like orbital tourism the costs need to go down by a factor of at least 10x below what Musk must charge.

    Then we share the same goal, something that wasn’t apparent to me.

    (1) It is sacrificing real manned space exploration for a high-risk promise, a blunder that we already made with the shuttle.

    A far as I can tell we risk absolutely nothing and get to do both exploration and RLV R&D sooner. We can do exploration with existing EELV Heavies combined with storable propellant transfer. Both are mature and highly reliable capabilities. The same combination is also enough to get commercial RLV R&D funded.

    (2) The operational challenges of filling and extracting fuel from the depot are an extra non-trivial set of hoopes that NASA would need to jump throught in order to accomplish anything.

    Initially there would be no need to extract propellant from a separate depot. A refuelable spacecraft (one-way transfer only) would be enough and it could serve as its own makeshift depot.

    Offloading the propellant would make the spacecraft light enough to be launch on an EELV Medium and light enough to be transported to L1/L2 with a Centaur, which can itself be launched on an EELV Heavy. Offloading the spacecraft instead of the EDS has the added advantage that hypergolics are much more suitable for spacecraft than for an EDS.

    The spacecraft could easily be based on the Orion SM + avionics, thus taking a threat to commercial space and turning it into an ally and taking something that is a dead end for NASA and turning it into something that would have a bright future.

  • @Oler
    Re: Bridwell

    No use explaining the situation to him no matter how logical the reasoning and no matter how valid your positions, because he does NOT want to get it. It’s a matter of blind hero worship of the old way of doing things. You can not dissuade someone from their religion. For him anything that goes against his preconceived beliefs can not be true simply because it doesn’t match those preconceived beliefs, empirical evidence be damned.

  • “Initially there would be no need to extract propellant from a separate depot. A refuelable spacecraft (one-way transfer only) would be enough and it could serve as its own makeshift depot.”

    For BEO, I prefer the mid-air-refueling model where we could, for instance, put additional fuel in lunar orbit so that the landers could be used over and over again. This refueling module could be part of the original HLV-launched mission, or follow-up resupply services, months later, using commercial services. But a large fuel depot in low Earth orbit does not appear to be particularly helpful for a misison that is already halfway to Mars.

    As far as arguments that the HLV needs to have commercial usage, that is like demanding that the US Army First Armored Division should abandon the M1 Abrams because it is too expensive ($4.3M) and instead be outfitted with Toyota pickups, like the Talaban.

  • What we need is cheap lift, not propellant depots per se.

    We need both. Propellant depots aren’t a sufficient condition, but they’re certainly a necessary one. To think we’ll open the frontier without them is like saying we’d build transcontinental highways without gas stations.

  • Robert G. Oler

    For all those who say the Commercial stuff is “crony capitalism”

    the funding pushed out would not have funded Ares 1 for a month or so…

    Robert G. Oler

    from NASA Watch

    “”NASA has awarded four Space Act Agreements in the second round of the agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev2) effort. Each company will receive between $22 million and $92.3 million to advance commercial crew space transportation system concepts and mature the design and development of elements of their systems, such as launch vehicles and spacecraft. The selectees for CCDev2 awards are:

    — Blue Origin, Kent, Wash., $22 million
    — Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, Colo., $80 million
    — Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Hawthorne, Calif., $75 million
    — The Boeing Company, Houston, $92.3 million”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 4:18 pm

    “As far as arguments that the HLV needs to have commercial usage, that is like demanding that the US Army First Armored Division should abandon the M1 Abrams because it is too expensive ($4.3M) and instead be outfitted with Toyota pickups, like the Talaban.”

    the examples get more ridiculous in terms of supporting heavy lift. This is about the most absurd I have seen. On a few levels

    The M-1 has almost no combat effectiveness against the Taliban. (or Talaban…there are two spellings). They take a lot of fuel to support and for it you get well something that is almost useless. That is why the M-1’s are coming home (or are home) and not so much in the field anymore.

    Second, where the M-1’s are valuable would have been against comparable armor being used in a armor role. If there was a role for the HLV then we would need one…but so far no one has figured out a single role that an HLV can do that the EELV or SpaceX platforms wont do.

    I know of no one planning a 130 MT payload or building one. Do you?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Major Tom

    “As far as arguments that the HLV needs to have commercial usage, that is like demanding that the US Army First Armored Division should abandon the M1 Abrams because it is too expensive ($4.3M) and instead be outfitted with Toyota pickups, like the Talaban.”

    This has got to be one of the most idiotic arguments I’ve seen on this forum. A Toyota and an Abrams are designed to do two different things: transport stuff and destroy stuff, respectively.

    All launch vehicles are designed to do one thing: transport stuff. It’s just a question of sizing, building, and operating that transport as efficiently as possible.

    If launch vehicles were designed to destroy things, then they’d be ICBMs. And that job is filled. We don’t need a 130-ton HLV to lob nukes just like we don’t need an Abrams to move plywood or groceries.

    Oy vey…

  • Martijn Meijering

    We need both. Propellant depots aren’t a sufficient condition, but they’re certainly a necessary one.

    If we had a Delta Clipper today, but no depots we would have opened up space. Maybe not the whole solar system, but certainly LEO.

    To think we’ll open the frontier without them is like saying we’d build transcontinental highways without gas stations.

    To open the frontier, “all” we need to do is to make LEO accessible to private individuals, or maybe just corporations who can make a profit from sending employees into orbit. To settle the solar system, we probably do need depots and we would nearly certainly be stupid not to, which is not the same thing.

    But more importantly, as I argued in my reply to Nelson, we don’t need depots immediately, a refuelable spacecraft with one way transfer only would suffice. And that could happen much more quickly.

    Now you might say it’s a matter of semantics whether that qualifies as a depot or not. I’d call it a spacecraft doing double duty as a makeshift depot, since it would be mainly a spacecraft, not mainly a depot. But perhaps you’d call it a depot.

    In any event, the difference between a storable propellant refuelable spacecraft that can both do missions and serve as a consumer of payloads for tiny commercial RLV and a fully fledged cryogenic depot (even just the first generation incremental concepts we both know and love) that cannot fulfil missions by itself is much more than mere semantics.

    It’s ironic that I should be making this argument in a discussion with you of all people. You are the one who taught me (through Jon Goff) the importance of cheap lift and the importance of a large and fiercely competitive propellant market to achieve cheap lift. I don’t know anyone who has been a more forceful proponent of this than you.

  • Martijn Meijering

    For BEO, I prefer the mid-air-refueling model where we could, for instance, put additional fuel in lunar orbit so that the landers could be used over and over again.

    So do I, but L1/L2 is preferable to lunar orbit for a whole range of reasons. Lunar orbit wouldn’t be a disaster, but L1/L2 is a much more strategic location.

    This refueling module could be part of the original HLV-launched mission, or follow-up resupply services, months later, using commercial services.

    What do you mean, the original HLV-launched mission? You don’t need an HLV to do this, two EELV class launches would do + however many commercial resupply flights you needed. It looks as if you are still trying to justify an HLV.

    But a large fuel depot in low Earth orbit does not appear to be particularly helpful for a misison that is already halfway to Mars.

    It is doubtful we will ever need a large depot in LEO. Again L1/L2 is the more strategic destination. LEO would only need relatively small transit depots to allow very small RLVs to drop off their cargo so they don’t have to be launched all the way to L1/L2 in one go. And since L1/L2 is such a strategic high energy location you probably wouldn’t need large depots there either, unless perhaps you wanted to use a multi-thousand tonne Nautilus behemoth to Mars.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi CR –

    “No, because you said that only place you can do that is on the Moon, and we have been asking “why only on the Moon?””

    I just said less expensive and more capable there.

    “We already have fleets of satellites in GEO, and quite a few of them are active optical system – just pointed at the Earth.”

    I don’t know of any Lidar systems in GEO. Are you sure about that?
    In any case, the other item always is the capabilities and size of the system required.

    I’ll take a look at your response on HLVs over at the other topic, then reply here.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi CR –

    “Until Congress can prove that they need heavy lift (i.e. payloads greater than 25 tons & 4.5m diameter), the SLS is a pork project, nothing more.”

    My first order estimate is that the minimum CAPS payloads well exceed those numbers.

    While 50 tons might be entirely adequate for some flights, 70 tons makes it easier and safer. Some flights would be well under 50 tons.

    You also mention the use of free space satellites for impactor detection. Same thing there.

    And the same thing for dealing with impactors headed our way.

    One other thing there appears to be consesnus on: ATK’s 5 segs don’t have a specific defense defense requirement. Now can ATK/Astrium commercially compete the Liberty? I don’t think so, but that is just my estimate based on company statements.

    Thus It would also appear that the final legislation left 2 good firms active in the medium-medium heavy launch market, fulfilling DoD needs there: ULA and SpaceX.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Rick Boozer wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    true enough, but I have found that when people say the things the shuttle forever crowd is spouting if they are said reasonably (ie they sound good) then if they are not opposed someone who doesn’t care much can actually start believing the nonsense.

    I have mostly given up on Wind and the other trolls and only engage there for brief times when something really strange comes out (and that “plateau is a pretty entertaining one”…but some of the shuttle forever crowd need to be engaged to stop the falsehoods from becoming “reality”

    Robert G. Oler

  • Das Boese

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 12:13 pm

    The key to handling the impact hazard is early warning.

    Duh.

    The earliest warning you can get is not with passive optical systems,
    but rather active detectors.

    Well no shit, to track the class of objects you claim to be such a serious threat, you’ll need a fairly sensitive infrared sensor. For which the thermal environment on the moon sucks, not to mention the even more obvious disadvantages of having half the field of view blocked out by a horizon and being at the bottom of a gravity well.

    Does that clear it up any for you?

    No. No, it doesn’t. It answers none of the questions I raised.
    These non-answers are getting really tiresome. Unless you start contributing something of substance, you will not be taken seriously.

    Egad wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 1:59 pm

    As I understand it, your principal concern is long-period comets dropping in from the Kuiper Belt and beyond. If so, what kind of active detectors do you have in mind?

    It’s probably rude to answer for him, but I don’t care…
    he seems to be afraid of dead comet cores with a such a low albedo that they’re not easily detectable by optical systems. Best way to find them is observation in the infrared, which can’t be done well from earth for obvious reasons.
    I don’t find his scenario very plausible in any case though, due to Jupiter’s massive gravitational influence, which -if I remember the general consensus correctly- should serve to make such encounters exceedingly unlikely. I’m also not aware of any geological evidence that this is a serious threat, unlike asteroids.
    He keeps talking about this CAPS study, but hasn’t so far bothered to post a link or even summarize it in his own words. A quick google search leads to things like “Child Anxiety Prevention Study”, the “Center for AIDS Prevention Studies”, both no doubt far more worthy of attention than E.P. and his killer comets that can only be prevented by HSF to the moon using SHLVs.

  • I don’t wish to follow the M1 analogy too far. The point is that just because something is good enought for LEO commercial space does not mean that it will be sufficient, let alone preferable, for BEO manned space exploration. That is a no-brainer, and I know from you all have something between your ears, whether or not you agree.

    It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient…orders of magnitude more efficient than any HLV. And then SpaceX announces the F9H, which has a lower cost per payload pound to LEO than the F9. And now I am hearing all those armchair PhDs and MBAs saying that it is now OK to be up to 50mT …

    It almost looks to me like you guys just happend to like Mr Musk, and anything he does is OK in your book. If, hypothetically, he was a lemming, I fear that one or two of you might almost be tempted to follow suit ;-)

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi egad –

    Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread… but then nearly everyone working in the field thinks that its going to take another hit before anything is done. Kind of like hurricanes and tsunami’s.

    Me, I’m foolish enough to think that people are not that dumb, but we’ll see.

    “As I understand it, your principal concern is long-period comets dropping in from the Kuiper Belt and beyond.”

    That, and SMALL DEAD COMET FRAGMENTS. The asteroids seem to be detectable, including C class, as their orbits bring them around several times before impact, but getting better coverage there would be an additional benefit

    A summary of recent impacts in the Americas may be found in my book “Man and Impact in the Americas”.

    By the way, Earth based detection and minimal IR is a non-trivial cost: it is estimated it will cost $1 B over the next 20 years, and we’re looking at at at least one launch/sat as a minimum requirement. Say $500 M, more likely more. That’s what JPL put in their report to the Congress, the one that Griffin and Weiler sat on

    Detection is going to be a continuing problem for as long as man lives on the Earth.

    ” If so, what kind of active detectors do you have in mind?”

    See NASA Langley’s CAPS reports. As I mentioned before, I disagree with Langley’s architecture for building them, as it strikes me that using lunar orbit would be cheaper.

  • pathfinder_01

    “I don’t wish to follow the M1 analogy too far. The point is that just because something is good enough for LEO commercial space does not mean that it will be sufficient, let alone preferable, for BEO manned space exploration. That is a no-brainer, and I know from you all have something between your ears, whether or not you agree.”

    Perhaps but in theory it is the spacecraft and not the rockets that are the problem. What a HLV does is reduce the number of flights needed to lift hardware. The problem is we need Spacecraft not HLV. The issuse is that there is plenty of money in the NASA budget for spacecraft, but if you blow it all on an HLV you may get nowhere.

    “It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient…orders of magnitude more efficient than any HLV. And then SpaceX announces the F9H, which has a lower cost per payload pound to LEO than the F9. And now I am hearing all those armchair PhDs and MBAs saying that it is now OK to be up to 50mT …”

    FH cost more per launch than Falcon 9. If you have a 10 ton spacecraft it would be foolish to buy a FH9 heavy(unless you get some sort of ride share thing going).

    The problem I have with HLV isn’t so much the capacity it is who creates it and how is it is created. Monolithic boosters like Saturn V and most likely SLS are a bad idea. They have no other users. Space X can keep the capacity to launch the FH9 because it shares many parts with the falcon 9. They can control their costs because they don’t need a totally separate workforce like Saturn and Shuttle and the FH is not going to be a NASA only rocket.

    SLS is foolish becuase congress wishes it to be capable of sending crew to the ISS. Serving the ISS does not take an HLV and should not be the role of an HLV.SLS has congress dictating to NASA what capacity the HLV should be. What if 50 tons to LEO were much cheaper to develop and Operate than 130MT? Delta for isntance can be upgraded to 50MT…demanding 70MT or 130MT may be adding a lot of cost without much benifit.

    “It almost looks to me like you guys just happend to like Mr Musk, and anything he does is OK in your book. If, hypothetically, he was a lemming, I fear that one or two of you might almost be tempted to follow suit ”

    I am more partial to boeing,ULA ect and with investments we could have 2 launchers capable of lifting 50MT for less than the cost of 1 launcher that lifts 130MT and it would cost NASA less per year. Oh and I still think prop depots are a smart idea that allows missions to not be limited by the size of the HLV.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 7:20 pm

    “I don’t wish to follow the M1 analogy too far.”

    to follow it at all is goofy and not a comparison that has any validity. There is a reason for the US government to have assets which are unique to a particular mission that it needs done; but if that is the case then the mission itself is what should bear scrutiny FIRST and then the hardware being capable of accomplishing that mission is next.

    At best the Shuttle launch system or derivative people are starting to remind me of the folks who kept advocating larger and larger battleships…after 7 Dec 1941.

    But the problem is that there is no mission AT ALL for an HLV, particularly an HLV that is enormously expensive…and which the US government cannot afford to develop or even fly. Whittington is reduced on his web site to the American patriotism argument NUTS

    “It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient…” where?

    If Musk Falcon9 did not lower the cost per pound to launch or the development cost were exorbitant…then there would be some head scratching, at least by me. But neither apparently is correct unlike a SLS HLV.

    How does a vehicle which will cost a billion a launch in your viewpoint justify itself when there are far cheaper alternatives?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Ferris Valyn

    Nelson Bridwell

    First, I would challenge the notion that Falcon 9 is a small rocket (or the Atlas V, or Delta IV)

    Second – the issue, IMHO, isn’t about HLVs vs non-HLVs. The biggest issue are market segmentation vs market growth. Fundementally, (which I think you’ve mentioned before) we need to grow the markets for launch vehicles. The reason like propellant depots is they are inherently a market creator – fuel can be fairly launcher agnostic. Or, on another side – multi-core based HLVs don’t bother me, because they increase the utilization of existing rockets, and don’t produce specialized, highly expensive systems (assuming Elon can back up his numbers, he’s talking about producing 40 cores a year – that would have to producing some interesting results). And no, I don’t just limit this to Falcon 9 – I have no problem with Atlas V Phase 1 or 2, or Delta IV growth (provided we aren’t talking about something highly specialized)

    Alternatively, if you produce a vehicle that has no payloads, that means you are using money to develop something that doesn’t have a purpose to fly (IE Senate Launch System) or you are creating a rocket to launch something that doesn’t need a new rocket (Ares I) you are increasing market segmentation or at least decreasing the market growth. These are bad things

    When it comes to things like HLVs, prop depots, and other tech/vehicle development

  • pathfinder_01

    Anyway if you wanted to do BEO you could do this without developing any new rockets. A Delta IV heavy could lift Orion to LEO, another lifts an Centaur or other earth departure stage. That is enough to send Orion to L1/L2. With automated docking you could send a lander ahead that way too and it would cost less than developing a HLV rocker, Capulse and Lander.

    I could buy a car to drive myself to the airport or I can rent a car, or I can use public transport. Using public transport is much cheaper than buying a car. Renting a car is cheaper than buying a car.

    The only reason why it makes any sense for me to own a car is becuase I intend to use it a lot and use it for task that public transit is not as well suited.

    If I only drove 4-6 times a year like the shuttle flies or the 2 trips to the moon that Apollo did it makes no sense to own a completely separate system. The fixed costs of running said system will eat any savings from having your own system.

  • Coastal Ron

    Nelson Bridwell wrote @ April 18th, 2011 at 7:20 pm

    It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient.

    I haven’t heard that claim. What I have heard & stated is that mega-launchers that Congress & NASA want to build don’t come close to being cost effective unless you have to put up lots of mass (over 20M lbs), and if there is that much mass needed, then commercial companies would do it better and cheaper.

    And then SpaceX announces the F9H, which has a lower cost per payload pound to LEO than the F9.

    Which like all privately funded business ideas, could be just what the market will need, or not. But the great thing is that the U.S. Taxpayer doesn’t have to pay for it’s failure, and it can benefit from it’s success. Capitalism at it’s best.

    The SLS on the other hand only makes sense if there is a huge funded need for it, and so far there is ZERO.

    You know, some in Congress have this idea that because NASA has always launched it’s own stuff on the Shuttle, that that is the way it should always be.

    But consider this. When Apollo first started, there was no significant commercial launch industry, nor was there much of one in the 70’s when the Shuttle was conceived and built.

    Today though we have a plethora of launch capability, both within the U.S. and with our political allies. If the U.S. needs to put mass into orbit, there is plenty of excess capacity available today to do it, and more that can be added in a couple of years by expanding existing facilities.

    Without a defined and long-term need, the SLS is not needed. The Falcon Heavy may not even be needed, but like I said, if it fails, then the taxpayer doesn’t have to pay. With the SLS, it will be a $20B+ failure.

  • Major Tom

    “It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient…orders of magnitude more efficient than any HLV. And then SpaceX announces the F9H, which has a lower cost per payload pound to LEO than the F9. And now I am hearing all those armchair PhDs and MBAs saying that it is now OK to be up to 50mT …”

    Who has said this? Specifically? Quote? Reference?

    Don’t lie.

    I and other folks have stated several times in this forum that for NASA, it makes no sense to spend limited taxpayer dollars on a special-purpose HLV until absolutely necessary. Existing, underutilized LVs whose costs have already been paid for should be maximized first and limited development dollars should go into new in-space propellant management and storage capabilities first.

    But the F9H is being paid for by SpaceX and its investors, not NASA or the taxpayer. It’s up to their corporate leadership to determine what markets they want to go after, what capabilities those markets require, and whether it makes sense to invest in those capabilities. If they think a lighter weight and highly efficient HLV is the best way to knock out the Delta IV Heavy and undercut the overall market for Ariane V, Proton, and EELVs, then that’s their decision.

    I hope NASA, Congress, and the White House are smart enough to leverage the F9H instead of wasting my taxpayer dollars on a duplicative HLV when private industry plans to pays for this one. But aside from that, SpaceX’s decision to fund F9H has nothing to do with NASA or my taxpayer dollars.

    “That is a no-brainer, and I know from you all have something between your ears, whether or not you agree… It almost looks to me like you guys just happend to like Mr Musk, and anything he does is OK in your book. If, hypothetically, he was a lemming, I fear that one or two of you might almost be tempted to follow suit”

    I fear you can’t make a post without repeating lies, insulting other posters, and calling them names.

    Take your crap elsewhere.

    Cripes…

  • Major Tom

    Ugh…

    spacenews.com/commentaries/110418-misplaced-priorities-congress.html

    FWIW…

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DB –

    “he seems to be afraid”

    “Afraid” is not exactly the right word, “extremely concerned” would be much much better.

    “of dead comet cores with a such a low albedo that they’re not easily detectable by optical systems. Best way to find them is observation in the infrared, which can’t be done well from earth for obvious reasons.”

    Its “comet fragments”, not “comet cores”, and those and Long Period Comets, and Moon based instruments provide another 6 months to deal with a LPC inbound our way, not to mention much better detection of all of the smaller stuff.

    “if I remember the general consensus correctly- should serve to make such encounters exceedingly unlikely.”

    You got theories, and then you got facts.
    When the two diverge it is time for a new theory.

    “I’m also not aware of any geological evidence that this is a serious threat, unlike asteroids.”

    Well, you’ll have to do some reading then.

    I also hope you can find NASA’s CAPS studies online.

    Sorry for not providing you with a hole bunch of handy dandy easy links, but I didn’t see your post earlier, its late, and I’m going to have some dinner and then sleep

    While my guess is that to do so for you would be futile, others here might benefit. On the other hand, they might already be smart enough to use search engines.

    E.P. Grondine
    Man and Impact in the Americas

  • Martijn Meijering

    It is funny how I heard people claim that only small rockets are efficient…orders of magnitude more efficient than any HLV

    No, the claim isn’t small vs large, it is reusable vs expendable. RLVs could be an order of magnitude more efficient than expendables. Smallness only has to do with lower development costs making it easier to get funding and and smaller size making it easier to get a very high flight rate, which is also required to achieve drastically lower costs. Small RLVs are going to be economically viable much earlier than large ones and they would be good enough to allow significant commercial manned spaceflight and large scale government funded exploration.

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