The Wall Street Journal reports today that the White House is concerned that NASA’s exploration plans may not be affordable over the long haul. Specifically, the concern within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is whether Congress would be willing to spend as much as $62 billion through 2025 to develop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) spacecraft, and related systems needed by the middle of the next decade to support a human mission to a near Earth asteroid as directed by the president last year. The key paragraph from the Journal article, citing an August 19 NASA budget analysis obtained by the paper:
Based on priorities already adopted by Congress—then adjusting for projected inflation and accelerated development efforts—the document indicates it could cost as much as $57 billion to deploy and use the proposed systems through 2025. Upgrading launch facilities and building additional spacecraft to allow astronauts to land on the moon or an asteroid, the document indicates, could boost the total to $62.5 billion.
Assuming this is spread out over 14 years (fiscal years 2012 through 2025), that works out to an average of about $4.5 billion a year, although doubtless with some peaks well above that average during various stages of development. Assuming that NASA’s budget remains flat for the foreseeable future at around $17-18 billion (an assumption that could be overly optimistic given the growing pressures to cut discretionary spending), that would be about a quarter of NASA’s annual budget, and could pose challenges to fit in among ISS, science, technology, and other spending.
What might be causing the most sticker shock, though, are the projected mission costs, according to the report: “Based on the various levels of federal investment sketched out in the August NASA budget document, each projected flight of the new rocket could entail between $6 billion and $10 billion in overall development and related costs.” The article adds that, according to “some government officials”, the president is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks on what program he’ll request funding for in 2012 and beyond.
This is the wrong time in the history of the republic for:
a) discussing the purpose of HSF
b) the costs associated with implementing a HSF Program (COTS or otherwise)
c) new program starts.
NASA HSF is dead; deficit hawks are going to slam NASA/HSF and they’ll have the votes to kill ObamaSpace.
Left in the wake of this will be ‘nothing’…well maybe endless R&D
How do you go from $57 to $62.5B, and for that $5.5B increment, get “upgrading launch facilities and building additional spacecraft to allow astronauts to land on the moon or an asteroid”? For example, how do you squeeze an astronaut lunar lander capability into that $5.5B increment?
The lunar or asteroid capability seems like an additional capability, but the upgraded launch facilities sound like something that should be part of the baseline costs if they’re needed to launch the new rocket. Why would those “additional” costs be lumped together?
“the president is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks on what program he’ll request funding for in 2012 and beyond.”
Can I help with that?
Cut the SLS.
Obviously, fund more science missions, robotic precursor missions, aeronautics, ISS use and capabilities, space technology development and demonstrations, commercial crew, and additional commercial service purchases (tugs, micro reentry vehicles, more cargo, etc).
Lori’s 4 part plan
1.Kill the existing effort – CxP
2.Remove the work force – Massive layoffs
3.Make the price to high – unrealistic costs
4.Surrender leadership in human space flight
Some much for hope and change
Well….. If you put all arguments aside on whethe we should b going tv SLS route in the first place….. It seems obvious that congress and the Joe house need to bite the bullet and go on the accelerate path….. Twice the money but 35 billiIon for nothing vs 62 billIion for a functional exploration program seems like a no brainer to me……. I should also point out hat it is all h can k LNG that has gotten us in to this situation in the first place…. Pick a program and fund it already….
I sill think th 35b option should not even be on the table
Charlie Bolden told Congress in January the SLS would be more expensive and take longer than they budgeted. They told Charlie they knew more about it than he did, and to go back to the drawing board.
So Charlie got an independent analysis from Booz Allen Hamilton which affirmed SLS will cost much more than Congress has budgeted.
Congress reacted by demanding Charlie build the SLS anyway. Never mind that they’ve never specified a mission or a destination for SLS.
For Congress, it’s never been about a purpose for SLS. It’s been about preserving jobs in their districts. They couldn’t care less if it ever flies. Constellation 2.0.
This current Congress is an embarrassment to the people of the United States. But then the people elected them, so the voters get what they deserve.
Affordable over the long haul? That’s funny considering we spend $4 billion on that great black hole of funding, the ISS. For what, to trace endless circles around the planet marooned with our enemies? Of course the OMB and NASA leadership don’t want to build the SLS. They are Obama appointees! ISS has to come down. Hopefully the ineptitude of post shuttle planning will do the job for us.
I just can’t see SLS surviving this financial Tsunami. It’s going to be cancelled. It’s just a question of when.
This current Congress is an embarrassment to the people of the United States. But then the people elected them, so the voters get what they deserve.
All too true Stephen, so we deserve the likes of Shelby; http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767.html
You know what? These guys will get what they want too. SLS = Red State Jobs Program.
It’s pointless to discuss this without Pasztor’s document.
NASA HSF is dead; deficit hawks are going to slam NASA/HSF and they’ll have the votes to kill ObamaSpace.
The herd mentality of this country bothers me. The malaise has crept to everyone, even those who are supposed NASA fans. Oh, well. I have made a lot of money in the stock market because of the herd.
It is easy to get wrapped up in the the black cloud that is this administration. But, to paraphrase former Vice President Spiro Agnew, “lets ignore these nattering nabobs of negativism.” Launch day will come again.
@Tom
“2.Remove the work force – Massive layoffs”
Should be:
“2. Remove superfluous manpower that increases the cost of spaceflight.”
“3.Make the price to high – unrealistic costs
Should read:
“3. Lower the cost of spaceflight using fixed-priced commercial contracts.”
“4.Surrender leadership in human space flight.”
B.S. That’s crazy. Garver is as passionate about human spaceflight as anyone I’ve ever seen. If you had bothered to watch the New Space Conference coverage and heard her speak you would know that. As I said before, you SLS huggers behave as if Garver is an old time movie villain who is finger twisting a handle bar mustache and saying “Moooooo Ah! Hah! Hah! What can I do to destroy U.S. human sspaceflight!” Grow up.
Instead it is the Senate Launch Vehicle and the More Politically(or Porkishly) Correct Vehicle that has the potential of preventing American predominance of space in the 21st Century.
There FTFY,
Stephen wrote “But then the people elected them, so the voters get what they deserve.”
The problem with this is that the biggest NASA porkers are long time incumbents, with massive campaign coffers. Of course one follows the other.
Personally, I think this whole SLS fiasco is a prime example of why term limits is a good idea.
Bolden/NASA assumed costs of 28-38 billion and had Booz Allen look at the numbers. Booz Allen confirms the numbers are in line for the next 4-5 years, they could have come back and said NASA was way off but they didn’t.
That gives SLS the go-ahead, uh oh Boss, they said we estimated correctly, what now? How can we still kill SLS?
Let’s make up a new number now and change our 28-38 billion figure and tell everyone it will cost 50-60 billion, jeez, we should have used that figure the 1st time!!!
No one will figure out we’re just making these numbers up will they? Of course not…
@Scott Bass
“Twice the money but 35 billiIon for nothing vs 62 billIion for a functional exploration program seems like a no brainer to me.”
Yep, you’re right from the standpoint that it is a “no brainer” given that anyone who can seriously say that obviously does not have their brain engaged when they say it.
Get this through your head. The new debt ceiling legislation that is NOW enacted into law requires budget cuts across the board to all agencies. The $62 billion will not be there! As I am continually pointing out, the laws of economics are as inescapable as the laws of physics. A violation of either can keep a spaceflight system from being enacted. Yeah there is enough money to start work on SLS for several years, but it can’t be finished because of fiscal realities. Thus, there will never be a “functional” exploration program if we go the SLS route. Do you know the meaning of the word “oxymoron”?
tom wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Some much for hope and change”
This is the Senates work, not the administrations. The Senate designed the unneeded SLS, and independent outside auditors are telling everyone that NASA isn’t high-balling their estimate (to refute one of your other claims), but LOW-BALLING their estimates.
This whole situation gets solved by canceling the SLS and fully funding CCDev and Nautilus-X. We’ll get more people in space faster, for less money, and we’ll be doing far more than supporting a rocket to nowhere.
@John
“Booz Allen confirms the numbers are in line for the next 4-5 years, they could have come back and said NASA was way off but they didn’t.”
You’re twisting the meaning of the Booz-Allen results. Yes, they said the numbers were inline for 4-5 years. But they were talking about the $38 billion over-all NASA cost estimate, NOT the budgeted money proposed by Congress for the entire program (which is FAR less than $38 billion). Also, Booz-Allen said that after the initial 4 to 5 years that even that cost estimate was overly “optimistic”, that is, even $38 billion for the whole program is likely too low.
“although doubtless with some peaks well above that average during various stages of development.”
The problem is you cannot run the program without the peaks and if the budget remains flat NASA will have to move money from within to support the program. There is no such thing as a program in spacecraft or aircraft development ithout peaks.
The trick is to address the peaks with the budget you have. If it is $3B/yr then the peaks MUST be contained inside the $3B. If you try something else you get Constellation and hence failure.
Why is it so difficult to understand? Still hoping the money fairy will come and give the cash to this nonsense?
Looks like Shuttle was a bargain.
I think the entire cost situation is inflated by people wanting to increase their take, their control, and the sizes and numbers of people in their organizations. The bigger the organization, the longer it takes and he more complicated it becomes.
Shuttle was far more expensive operationally than it needed to be. Through several organizational changes, consolidated contracts, duplication of effort between NASA and contractors, it kept getting more expensive, not less. Remember, Shuttle was designed, developed, and initially flown for about $1.25 B each year, but by the end of the program was costing $3.5 B each year while it was doing a lot less; no more development and manufacture and a lot fewer missions.
Maybe what is needed is a reboot from a zero-base starting point. Kill the existing organizations and most of the existing management and bring in some competent, experienced, educated people to lead (something we’ve not seen in many years) and rebuild the capabilities in a new organizational scheme. Most of the existing NASA managers cannot be believed; they are tainted by their past.
It is my humble opinion that the “fiscal chickens have come home to roost”. There is absolutely no accountability on the 7th floor for a $51 BILLION dollar spike in the cost of SLS in less than two years. I think we all want human space flight in the United States. What people are beginning to realize is that we must do it in an affordable fashion.
The free market could build an SLS class vehicle for much less, and NASA could still develop payloads. We know that companies have the know how to do it, it is a question of removing the bureaucracy and red tape to allow them to do so.
It is my humble opinion that Americans riding on CST-100s via Atlas Vs is American HSF.
It is my humble opinion that Americans riding Dragon Riders via Falcon 9s is American HSF
It is my humble opinion that Americans riding on Dream Chasers via Atlas Vs is American HSF
It is EVEN my opinion that Americans riding on MPCV via Delta IV Heavies is American HSF… too!
We need accountability and fiscal responsibility in Washington right now. This $62 billion dollar figure will surely go north. How long before the rocket design costs more than the ISS?
Now is not the time for politics and preserving the status quo. Now is the time to remake our space program utilizing NASA and the free market to achieve things that other countries can only dream about. We have the capability. We even have the money. We just have to limit the power of government to regulate the free market and we will have American HSF.
Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space
We’ll get more people in space faster, for less money, and we’ll be doing far more than supporting a rocket to nowhere.
But we’ll still not be doing much to advance cheap lift. More than nothing, but not much.
tom wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Lori’s 4 part plan
1.Kill the existing effort – CxP
2.Remove the work force – Massive layoffs
3.Make the price to high – unrealistic costs
4.Surrender leadership in human space flight ”
well you got three out of four and that is better then Whittington or Wind do on their best days.
One has to kill the existing programs and people that have been stifling progress before new “sprouts” can emerge. If we dont do that then we will surrender leadership in human spaceflight.
there are of course individual tragedies here…but those are happening everywhere in the US thanks to bad economic policies under Bush and now Obama ….and why should the folks who do things that are completely useless be exempt RGO
@ Rick Boozer wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 10:27 am
“Yes, they said the numbers were inline for 4-5 years.”
And they said the Basis of Estimates (BOEs) were not documented and not traceable. This means that the cost are based on nothing. There is no basis of estimates. As I said before it can be $38B but it can also be $50B and considering what we read now it is not going to be $16B for sure!!!
And yes everything is optimistic. It is not a NASA feature. When it comes to budget every manager will come with the optimistic number lest they do not get the budget. Better to have the approval and get going and then ask for excuses later. Anyone in this business knows that!
Stephen C. Smith wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 8:43 am
“This current Congress is an embarrassment to the people of the United States. But then the people elected them, so the voters get what they deserve.”
no more accurate words have been typed (or spoken take your pick) I would go a little farther and say that the current political class in DC including the last two administration is an embarrassment to the people of the US…and the rest of your sentence applies.
Oddly enough the one exception to this is space policy. Charlie is making a real (and I believe successful) move to “vector change” the direction of federal dollars in human spaceflight toward both a more sustainable path…and one which will make changes in our future. This is BTW the penultimate step in killing SLS…now Congress has to have its own death panel, which is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey would be proud RGO
kayawanee wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 9:01 am
I just can’t see SLS surviving this financial Tsunami. It’s going to be cancelled. It’s just a question of when….
soon We are in the final days of the NASA industrial complex RGO
Looks like the same administration that did not blink at a $900 billion stimulus and will shortly propose spending $300 billion more is setting up space exploration to be cancelled. Mike Griffin was right. There will be no serious effort before there is a new president.
This is btw the penultimate step in killing a government program…have some independent group price it out of reach. The reality here of course is that the price is probably understated. And that to me is stunning. But we are entering a new world in a lot of ways as the old passes away. Just hang on its going to be bumpy
RGO
Correction. In my post at 9:22 am, I meant to say “Commercial Space Conference” instead of “New Space Conference”
As a kid I was fascinated by the moon landings. The shuttle and ISS continued to be of great interest to me in my adult years. Simply put, it allowed me to dream. Now a days, it is just plain depressing. I believe the dialogue we are reading here will be the same ten years from now with absolutely no forward motion on HSF. We know how to do HSF, but we no longer have the will to do it. It truly is a shame. Accuse me of being the skeptic, but I see no reason to be optimistic. Someone give me a REAL reason to be optimistic and I will be pleasantly surprised. I just don’t see it.
@ Just Plain Joe wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 11:41 am
“Someone give me a REAL reason to be optimistic and I will be pleasantly surprised. I just don’t see it.”
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110418-nasa-announces-ccdev-awards.html
Do you see it now?
“As I said before it can be $38B but it can also be $50B and considering what we read now it is not going to be $16B for sure!!!
And that is what I meant when I stated,
“Also, Booz-Allen said that after the initial 4 to 5 years that even that cost estimate was overly “optimisticâ€, that is, even $38 billion for the whole program is likely too low.”
@Mark Whittington
“Looks like the same administration that did not blink at a $900 billion stimulus and will shortly propose spending $300 billion more is setting up space exploration to be cancelled. Mike Griffin was right. There will be no serious effort before there is a new president.”
Not having read the particulars of the President’s job proposal, I cannot say whether I’m for or against it. But I will say this, at least it will be a jobs program that is honestly called a jobs program, and not a jobs program masquerading as a serious effort to build an HLV that will not be finished and, thus, would ultimately kill U.S. manned spaceflight if it is allowed to continue.
Mark Whittington wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 11:12 am
“Looks like the same administration that did not blink at a $900 billion stimulus and will shortly propose spending $300 billion more is setting up space exploration to be cancelled.”
but the definition you and Mike the nut have of “space exploration” is a large government program that keeps mindless idiots at NASA and the blood suckers at the contractors employed doing nothing but planning and stuyding and pretending to build…and doesnt explore a darn thing.
Big government Whittington
RGO
Mark Whittington wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 11:12 am
The Senate budgeted $16B for the SLS as a jobs program, and now it’s become $60B for a rocket we don’t need. In what world is that smart?
I’ve never heard an SLS supporter talk about all the missions that are lined up waiting for the SLS. Oh they talk about the “wonderful things we could do” with an HLV, but no one can point to the support in Congress to build and operate those missions.
The SLS is a huge mistake, and it keeps us from going out and exploring space.
Congress still actually needs to pass an FY12 budget. Very curious to see if all these budget leaks cause the pro-SLS bloc on the Hill to finally start breaking when it comes time to appropriate money.
“The Senate budgeted $16B for the SLS as a jobs program, and now it’s become $60B for a rocket we don’t need. In what world is that smart?”
In a world where that means $44B more is going to be spent in your district but you don’t give a damn about actually accomplishing anything.
But I will say this, at least it will be a jobs program that is honestly called a jobs program, and not a jobs program masquerading as a serious effort to build an HLV
It is being called a’ jobs program’ because it cannot be called a ‘stimulus program’. Obama has forever besmirched the word. In the same way ‘liberal’ has become ‘progressive’. I wouldn’t worry though. His proposals (if he writes one) won’t go anywhere in the House. You would think Obama would back a big government program like SLS. The reason he doesn’t is rocket engineers aren’t his core constituents, not on the Rednect Riviera of the Space Coast. There are a lot more votes pimping poverty.
@ablastofhotair
“It is being called a’ jobs program’ because it cannot be called a ‘stimulus program’
Ah, you mean in the same way the SLS is called an “HLV program”, but is actually a “jobs program”. Your hot air blasting is showing its true hypocritical colors as strong as ever.
In the very first hearing on Constellation, in January of 2004, no less than John McCain said, in his opening remarks, that the Constellation budget was vastly understated, that it would cost between $70B and $400B, that there was no way the Republican congress would find the money it really needed, and that it was likely to leave the US with no way to access the ISS.
http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2010/11/after-bush-cancelled-space-shuttle.html
Recently Jay Penn of the Aerospace Corp presented a major study done for the DOD that shows that beyond a tiny handful of billionaire tourists there are simply no customers, government or private, who can afford to continue to pay the cost of human spaceflight with expendable launch systems. Consequently DOD is already investing heavily in flyback booster technology.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/news/beyondnextgen_prt.htm
Initiating the Constellation program was the most disastrous decision ever made in the US space program. How could people who would never pay for it with their own tax dollars pull cost figures out of the air and imagine somebody else would pay? How could armchair engineers who wouldn’t know RCC from FSRI throw away 30 years of struggle and sacrifice?
We need to jettison the useless wreckage wreckage,(SLS/MPCV) as quick as we can, and start over, patiently, on a small scale, with unmanned reusables, and maybe take just enough tax dollars to keep SpaceX and Boeing flying twice a year to ISS to keep our hopes up.
Oh, and in the meantime the US government should make the ISS available for tourists as the Russians did; at least that will give us a little business income.
Mark Whittington wrote:
“Looks like the same administration that did not blink at a $900 billion stimulus and will shortly propose spending $300 billion more is setting up space exploration to be cancelled”
About 1/3 of the money “spent” on the stimulus was tax cuts. Are you ready to “unspend” your tax cuts and have them hiked?
and start over, patiently, on a small scale, with unmanned reusables,
There’s no reason for NASA to be involved with that. It would be good if they were forbidden to do so ever again. Transport and other infrastructure is a job for the market. NASA needs to provide demand and funding (courtesy of the US taxpayer) and not much more.
In the very first hearing on Constellation, in January of 2004, no less than John McCain said, in his opening remarks
The left loves to site McCain. He says nutty things yet still (for reasons I don’t understand) calls himself a Republican. He is a political corpse. Ignore him.
Are you ready to “unspend†your tax cuts and have them hiked?
Do you not realize that you will increase revenues if you cut taxes. Wouldn’t be nice to lower them far enough to find the Laffer optimum? The left would have more money hand out. I cannot fathom why it feels so good to you to seize someone else’s wealth and restrain economic growth.
Consequently DOD is already investing heavily in flyback booster technology.
They are planning for the eventual end of the EELV program in 20 years. Can you imagine that? Long range planning. You newspace hobbiest tinkerers see no further than the pieces of junk on the shelf.
The basic question is whether or not spending $68 billion on a lunar SLS program is economically sustainable over the next 15 years.
President Obama inherited a $8.4 billion a year budget related to manned spaceflight (Space Shuttle, ISS, and Constellation). That’s $84 billion over 10 years and $126 billion over 15 years. So even if you add the $3 billion a year ISS program which should really be terminated after 2015, IMO, that still leaves you with an extra $13 billion. But NASA would save an extra $43 billion in total if the ISS were terminated after 2015.
So there’s plenty of money without have to raise the NASA budget!
Alex wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Congress still actually needs to pass an FY12 budget. Very curious to see if all these budget leaks cause the pro-SLS bloc on the Hill to finally start breaking when it comes time to appropriate money.
That’s one of the problems. The appropriators don’t really care about the space/science committees goals. They have their own agenda. The problem is that space congress members in general don’t have a lot of power when it comes to money. Our government is special interest driven for better or worse and money is handed out accordingly. One reason I would like to decentralize a lot of federal functions and send them to the states. Unfortunately the transition would be very painful.
The top five special interest can move up and down depending on the party in power. Note that 3 and 4 have international components.
1. AARP (Social Security)
2. AFL-CIO
3. Energy (Oil)
4. Money (Banks/Insurance)
5. Pharmaceuticals see also Insurance #4
.
.
.
450. something Aerospace companies
.
.
511. Commercial Space (They are the backup oh wait I guess SLS is backup now or …)
.
.
862. Alternative Energy (I think they are a lower priority but wishful thinking)
.
.
1356 Space Advocate Orgs (they aren’t on the bottom because space is cool)
4998 Rich Americans (10 million assets plus [Windy?])
4999 Middle Class (Me)
5000 Poor and homeless
–
(I’m betting Capitalizim will trump the craziness)
Actually the rumored high estimate was approximately $63 billion, so NASA would actually save between $18 to $48 billion over the next 15 years with the SLS lunar program.
vulture4 wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
“we can, and start over, patiently, on a small scale, with unmanned reusables,”
Martijn Meijering wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
“There’s no reason for NASA to be involved with that. It would be good if they were forbidden to do so ever again. Transport and other infrastructure is a job for the market. NASA needs to provide demand and funding (courtesy of the US taxpayer) and not much more.”
Though the posters appear to be disagreeing, I am not sure these ideas are that inconsistent with each other. NASA can stimulate a lot of launch vehicle development by setting up a propellant market to supply BEO missions. It can also provide seed money in the form of purchase agreements and milestone payments to companies that put forward innovative launch technologies. $38B in SLS development money can seed a lot of different ideas and $2B/yr in operating costs can pay for a lot of propellant.
NASA Fan wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 6:36 am
“NASA HSF is dead;…”
Not dead, but decidely dormant for a time through the Age of Austerity and these budget projections with their grandiose plans simply won’t fly in this era. Unless, of course, NASA scuttles the unprofitable science projects and pitches HSF as a valued investment, returning tangible gains for the economy along with the ‘Cernan intangibles’ which deliver value as well.
Hardly a coincidence that NASA released enhanced LRO images of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites yesterday, too. A few news directors took the bait as it made for good TV and the grainy imagery managed to make both NBC and CBS national newscasts along with several cable news outlets. No doubt the pixilated images of footprints and flags, rover tracks and assorted lunar litter, backpacks and LM descent stages were a curiosity, literally frozen in time from four decades past, to post-Apollo era viewers, not unlike ghostrly images of the long lost Titanic from one of Ballard’s undersea probes.
@amightywind wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 9:21 am
“But, to paraphrase former Vice President Spiro Agnew, “lets ignore these nattering nabobs of negativism.†Launch day will come again.”
Launch days and Spiro. Hmmmmm…
You really know how to pick’em, Windy– and that’s not a reference to stocks. 42 years ago, the soon to be disgraced VP Spiro Agnew, who headed Nixon’s ‘space council’, stood in the firing room at KSC within an hour of Apollo 11’s ‘launch day’ on July 16, 1969 and while addressing the launch team on their success, called for a manned mission to Mars by the end of the century. That went well, didn’t it, Windy. He then reiterated it to a national television audience in a one-on-one interview w/CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite. Spiro was wrong again- twice in the same day, like a broken Spiro Agnew watch.
A few years later, the corrupt Agnew resigned in disgrace and admitted to ‘no- contest’ in a bribe scandal unrelated to Watergate.
Windy wrote:
“Do you not realize that you will increase revenues if you cut taxes. Wouldn’t be nice to lower them far enough to find the Laffer optimum? “
If you actually did your homework you would have known that when the President Bush tax cuts where run through the Laffer model it predicted that it would not raise revenues like it did under President Reagan.
https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/blog/2010/08/30/crusr-awards-contracts/
Are you guys aware of that? Small steps, reusable. NASA “should not be doing it”. NASA *is* doing it.
Of course if we could get rid of SLS/MPCV AND keep the budget within so much more could be done. But SLS and MPCV will go and probably most of its budget too. This is not the case of canceling one program to fund another one. It is the case of cutting budget. The money will go with the programs.
Just watch.
Marcel F. Williams wrote:
“The basic question is whether or not spending $68 billion on a lunar SLS program is economically sustainable over the next 15 years.”
Actually, the basic question is whether or not spending 2.5 billion on SpaceX, 5.5 billion on Lockheed Martin and 7 billion for the Boeing heavy lifts would be better. We would have 3 heavy lift rockets and 53 billion left over for hardware.
@ Marcel Williams
“Actually the rumored high estimate was approximately $63 billion, so NASA would actually save between $18 to $48 billion over the next 15 years with the SLS lunar program.”
As I earlier pointed out to Scott Bass:
“Get this through your head. The new debt ceiling legislation that is NOW enacted into law requires budget cuts across the board to all agencies. The $63 billion will not be there! As I am continually pointing out, the laws of economics are as inescapable as the laws of physics. A violation of either can keep a spaceflight system from being enacted. Yeah there is enough money to start work on SLS for several years, but it can’t be finished because of fiscal realities. Thus, there will never be a “functional†exploration program if we go the SLS route. Do you know the meaning of the word “oxymoronâ€?”
The Debt Ceiling Law ensures that neither $63 billion nor your calculated $84 billion will be available for SLS or anything else at NASA, period. It’s enacted. It exists. Get your head out of the clouds (or should I say, down from Planet Marcel).
@Rhyolite:
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 2:43 pm
“The basic question is whether or not spending $68 billion on a lunar SLS program is economically sustainable over the next 15 years.”
No, that $68B only covers building the SLS, which would be the equivalent to the Ares V of the Constellation program. You would still need the Constellation equivalent of Ares I, Orion (MPCV would need even more money), an Earth Departure Stage, and the Lunar Lander. And all that gets you is flags and footprints, not a sustained presence.
A sustained presence on the Moon is likely to be far more that the $100B we spent for the ISS, which is our sustained presence in LEO. The Moon being 1,000 times further away would suffer from the same support and logistic issues that the ISS does, but be far more expensive and far more tenuous.
Anyone think they could support a 6-person crew on the Moon for $3B/year? It would cost that much just to launch two SLS flights, not including the payloads.
The world does need dreamers Marcel, but when it comes to spending taxpayer money, we need realistic plans, not fantasy. Your plan is fantasy.
Vulture4: “we can, and start over, patiently, on a small scale, with unmanned reusables,â€
Martijn Meijering: “NASA needs to provide demand and funding (courtesy of the US taxpayer) and not much more.”
Rhyolite: “I am not sure these ideas are that inconsistent with each other.”
Vulture4: Yes, exactly. Boeing, SpaceX, Orbital and others are entirely capable of building and fling such vehicles, but they cannot make the investment with corporate funds because the development period is much too long. The first generation must be technology demonstraiton prototypes, not operational vehicles. Trying to jump directly to an operational vehicle was the primary flaw in the Shuttle program. Like orbital flight itself, RLV development is best done in stages.
they cannot make the investment with corporate funds because the development period is much too long.
Companies can work in stages too, see XCOR, Masten, Virgin Galactic etc. In fact, companies pretty much *have to*. As for corporate funds: if NASA establishes the demand the corporate funds will follow. Look at how much private investment and energy the Ansari X Prize was able to attract. Imagine how much a $1B/yr propellant launch program would attract.
You really know how to pick’em, Windy
I never post without introducing layers of irony or sarcasm for the close readers. Glad you picked up on it.
vulture4 wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
“The first generation must be technology demonstraiton prototypes, not operational vehicles. Trying to jump directly to an operational vehicle was the primary flaw in the Shuttle program.”
I see a big difference. The Shuttle was a “Do Everything” design (crew, cargo, payloads, servicing, laboratory, etc.), whereas the current crop of crew vehicles are targeted at doing one thing – getting crew to/from LEO.
With the Shuttle “Do Everything” design, it could do everything, but it could nothing low cost, and no amount of volume could change that.
By contrast, since the commercial crew providers have focused on just one source of demand, they should be able to lower the cost of getting crew to orbit by up to a factor of 10X over the Shuttle. And since they can carry more people per trip than the Soyuz, they can open up new opportunities that the Soyuz and Shuttle couldn’t.
One example I think will happen is related to how NASA would purchase seats for passage to the ISS on a commercial crew vehicle. They might just buy seats individually, but I think it’s more likely that they will buy a whole flight.
Once a 7-passenger commercial crew vehicle is at the ISS for lifeboat duty, the next 7-passenger vehicle could bring up seven passengers – two or three that are staying on the ISS, and the rest are short-term visitors (like the Shuttle would do). They could be technicians that fly up to fix ISS equipment, or engineers working on the next generation of equipment. Or they could be people that NASA sends up for other reasons, like someone from the press, or a politician.
SpaceX has been stating that they think their price for a Dragon crew flight would be $140M (the $20M/seat Musk quotes), so buying the whole flight makes sense, since NASA would be getting free flights for the temporary visitors. That opens up the possibility for a lot more demand, especially from the other ISS partners. Japan could buy one whole Dragon flight for $140M, and not only rotate one shift of ISS crew, but do a week of extra experiments in their Kibo science module.
The other ISS partners could do the same, and it’s still somewhat of a bargain even if Boeing charges $240M for their CST-100/Atlas V combo (my guess on price).
In short, by focusing on one type of service (crew to LEO), the commercial providers can build an operational vehicle that can be successful.
As I read most of the argument here it makes me think of nothing so much as a 19th century group arguing over the importance of the horseshoe industry just as Duryea started putt putting down the road.
The State space program has been dead for years. It has been on the best life support that lovers of that sort of program could scrape out of Congress, but the corpse smelled and Lori and most of us knew it.
I cannot take anyone seriously who disregards what SpaceX and others are doing, nor can I take someone seriously who is willing to argue for a rocket that will fly every year or so at a cost that is more astronomical than its destination… and refuse to consider just giving SpaceX $2B fixed price, payment on performance only to deliver a rocket that is cheaper per unit, cheaper to fly and could be ready in a couple of years.
I just shake my head in disbelief at all you folks out there stuck in the past.
@Common Sense
“But SLS and MPCV will go and probably most of its budget too. This is not the case of canceling one program to fund another one. It is the case of cutting budget. The money will go with the programs.
Just watch.”
I reached that same conclusion long ago. I have just been hoping I’m too pessimistic and it won’t be quite that bad. But no matter what, it’s going to be bad and the axe is going to fall hard.
@ Rick Boozer wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
“I reached that same conclusion long ago.”
Yep about 2004 when VSE came out, I knew it was the last chance for a big NASA Moon program. And that if it failed we could all kiss bye bye HSF. At that time commercial space was in its infancy so to speak. Fortunately commercial space now is a rebellious teenager while the old HSF groupies are turning senile. So there is a lot of emotions but SLS cannot go ahead. Nor can MPCV. So the programs will get the axe. In other times some of that money might have gone to other programs. In a time when some idiot thinks it worth shutting down a NASA center I believe the money will just be gone and the contractors with it. I think that the civil servants will first be safe but not necessarily for much longer since other idiots want to be able to fire them just like any industry except it is not any other industry it is government – so far.
So yes the money, mostly, will be gone. Part of it? Idiots who think they can build a rocket by mandate rather than science and engineering and sound finance.
Whatever…
Well, it looks like ATK finally managed to kill DIRECT, and triage of the aerospace tech base has begun. Congratulations to ATK’s visionary management team. Romney’s calling for 5% accross the board discressionary cuts, and that includes them.
I don’t know if I can agree with this estimate’s outyear numbers, partciularly those from 2022-2025
In other news, discussions of the international manned Moon base project 2025-on continue.
From what I was told today, I think the Senate is going to call the bluff.
What will they do when the Senate sends a check!
tom wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 7:32 pm
“From what I was told today”
What were you told?
“I think the Senate is going to call the bluff.”
It’s not NASA saying it’s going to be that expensive, it’s an outside consultant that says the NASA is low-balling it’s estimates. What’s to bluff? That it will be LESS expensive? When has that ever happened on something this big & complicated?
“What will they do when the Senate sends a check!”
The only check the Senate can send is an unsigned one, since the House has to propose it, and then the House has to approve it. The House is not in the mood to INCREASE spending on anything, especially something that has little support outside of a few NASA centers. And especially something that can be viewed as a “rocket to nowhere”.
Senate doesn’t write the check, the House does, and the Pres signs it. You might get a few years but the whole enchilada? Not a chance.
tom wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 7:32 pm
From what I was told today, I think the Senate is going to call the bluff…
whoever told you that is an idiot…or is on the Congressional super committee and I doubt that. Nothing is going to happen until the Super committee either comes up with budget numbers or flounders…
Robert G. Oler
tom wrote:
“What will they do when the Senate sends a check!”
They will spend it on labor to keep everyone standing around for a year or two. We know that hardware is not the point.
“Fortunately commercial space now is a rebellious teenager while the old HSF groupies are turning senile.”
haha, this sums it up well. can’t wait for sls to get cancelled. we know it’s going to happen, might as well get it over with now. this whole thing is getting tiresome.
“How expensive is too expensive for NASA’s exploration plans?”
We, as a Nation, do not know the true costs of exploration so it’s hard to determine that.
If we, as a Nation, opened up exploration to fair, open, competitive bidding with fixed price, milestone based, SAA’s and collected some numbers we could then do an honest appraisal of what we can actually afford to do.
Vladislaw wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 4:02 pm
@Vladislaw
“Actually, the basic question is whether or not spending 2.5 billion on SpaceX, 5.5 billion on Lockheed Martin and 7 billion for the Boeing heavy lifts would be better. We would have 3 heavy lift rockets and 53 billion left over for hardware.”
Space X is an amateur rocket company whose launch vehicles have no reliable launch history relative to those produced by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And Space X has absolutely no experience in building LOX/LH2 upper stage rockets.
So Space X needs more than just a couple of space launches to prove the reliability of their latest launch vehicles. They need to show several years of launch reliability in order to be taken seriously by NASA and the DOD.
@Rick Boozer
“The Debt Ceiling Law ensures that neither $63 billion nor your calculated $84 billion will be available for SLS or anything else at NASA, period. It’s enacted. It exists. Get your head out of the clouds (or should I say, down from Planet Marcel).”
Sorry but the idea that not spending $63 billion over 15 years would have any significant impact in reducing a $14 trillion debt is just silly:-)
Titanically inefficient Medicare and Medicaid expenditures plus enormous military spending on unnecessary foreign wars and unnecessary foreign bases is what’s increasing the debt– not NASA!
@Coastal Ron
“Anyone think they could support a 6-person crew on the Moon for $3B/year? It would cost that much just to launch two SLS flights, not including the payloads.
The world does need dreamers Marcel, but when it comes to spending taxpayer money, we need realistic plans, not fantasy. Your plan is fantasy.”
Actually, you probably could support a 6 person crew on the Moon for $3 billion a year if their based utilized lunar resources which should be at least 100 times cheaper than shipping water, carbon, and nitrogen resources from Earth.
But President Obama inherited an $8.4 billion a year manned spaceflight budget from George Bush– not $3 billion. And Congress was willing to increase that budget by an additional $3 billion a year if Obama actually had a plan.
“haha, this sums it up well. can’t wait for sls to get cancelled. we know it’s going to happen, might as well get it over with now. this whole thing is getting tiresome.”
Amen, josh. Amen.
Just Plain Joe wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 11:41 am
…, but I see no reason to be optimistic. Someone give me a REAL reason to be optimistic and I will be pleasantly surprised. I just don’t see it.
Economics.
Economics doesn’t need a reason.
Individuals may have reasons. Businesses may or may not. Economics doesn’t.
Economics is just the sum of human activity. The sum of all the money flows around the country and the world. So the flow of money pushes the economy along. Sometimes inspite of what people do. And the flow of money is into space. A flow that is gradually building to a flood.
The space economy is around the $300B mark and it is growing at a rate above the rest of the economy. The space economy is growing by more that the amount of NASA’s entire budger every year ($17-18B).
This is not the government(s) injecting tax dollars into space companies. It is not defence spending on military satellites. Though obviously governments continute to be a small (and shrinking) part of the space economy. It’s real growth in real space related industries.
Over time this growth will carry us to Mars and beyond.
Be patient little grasshopper.
“As I read most of the argument here it makes me think of nothing so much as a 19th century group arguing over the importance of the horseshoe industry just as Duryea started putt putting down the road.”
I would say that SLS is like trying to build a supercomputer in the 19th century by scaling up a Babbage machine. Sure, you could do it – that’s the grist for steampunk fiction – but it wouldn’t really produce practical or cost effective device.
SLS is not a practical or cost effective. We are never going to do any serious BEO manned exploration if it cost a billion dollars per astronaut to go anywhere. We will get there faster and go farther if we invest in better launch technologies rather than a 1970’s HLV.
“The article adds that, according to “some government officialsâ€, the president is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks on what program he’ll request funding for in 2012 and beyond.”
Well, if he dovetails it as an element of the larger, general comprehensive jobs program, it would put a lot of skilled people back to work in key primary states.
Fortunately commercial space now is a rebellious teenager while the old HSF groupies are turning senile.
Nerdspace is the 2000’s whale song music, its leg warmers, its pet rock. The wealth of the leftist crony pantheon bankrolling it will soon be exhausted.
62 billion over 14 years is not a budget buster….quite doable…..if your going to make a valid argument you probably should be talking instead about how that will most likely balloon in to a 100+ billion for a robust program.
anyway you missed the whole point…..being that 38 billion is such a waste of funds simply because it is not enough to do anything. The higher dollar amounts might still be food for fight but at least it is true that funded properly the sls can be a robust program that will advance human exploration.
this was not an argument on whether we should sls or not….this was about how we should proceed should sls continue to be funded. I think it will be simply because the money will dry up completely with out it…..you are all fooling yourselves if you think for a minute even 38 billion will be reshuffled to the other space programs if sls get cancelled….it will simply move to another agency altogether. You know its true
Josh: “can’t wait for sls to get cancelled. we know it’s going to happen, might as well get it over with now”
Somebody tell NASA. Much of JSC and KSC think the only reason Constellation/SLS/MPCV is over budget, behind schedule, and lacks any meaningful strategic mission is that Obama wants to destroy the space program because he knows that they are all Republicans. Anything Obama proposes is rejected out of hand.
Maybe they didn’t hear John McCain say that Constellation would cost between $70B and $400B, far more than the $12B the Bush administration had budgeted, and that there was no way Congress could come up with the difference.
SpaceX is doing things in a new way, moving quickly and with purpose. I would ask our friends within NASA to forget politics for a moment and remember the dreams we once had.
“Space X is an amateur rocket company whose launch vehicles have no reliable launch history relative to those produced by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin.”
Actually Marcel, you (like many of us here, including yours truly) are an amateur space pundit while SpaceX is a profitable company with a number of successful orbital launches under its belt and a healthy launch manifest. And they managed to do that for less money than NASA’s cost models say is possible, as verified by a NASA audit. There’s a word for that: impressive.
I would ask our friends within NASA to forget politics for a moment and remember the dreams we once had.
I’m afraid those dreams have changed from “we want to have a meaningful space program” to “we want to be employed by a space program”.
vulture4 wrote:
Maybe they didn’t hear John McCain say that Constellation would cost between $70B and $400B, far more than the $12B the Bush administration had budgeted, and that there was no way Congress could come up with the difference.
He also said, “A vision without a strategy is just an illusion.”
His opening remarks tell it all and can be watched at:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SpaceIn
Scott Bass wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 9:07 am
“I think it will be simply because the money will dry up completely with out it”
If given the choice between funding SLS to the full $62B (and likely more given the guaranteed contract overruns) or cutting the SLS money from the NASA budget, I’d vote for canceling the SLS.
SLS supporters seems to believe one or more of the following:
A. That if the SLS is built then Congress will be forced to increase NASA’s budget to pay for programs to fully utilize the SLS. A lot of these people are “Moon First” types.
B. That Congress will automatically increase the SLS budget because of the old adage “in for a penny, in for a pound”, in that the extra $20-40B needed to build the SLS won’t make a dent in deficit reduction, so they might as well spend it. I’m sure this is how they run their personal finances.
C. That a really big rocket is necessary, and all it will take is the amount it takes to build the SLS. These people have no clue how that locks in extremely high development and operating costs into any mission that are slated to use the SLS.
My reasoning for wanting to cancel the SLS, even if NASA doesn’t get to keep that money in it’s budget, is for two reasons:
1. While the SLS is being developed all NASA HSF beyond the ISS will be on hold waiting for the SLS. This includes the budgets for building payloads for the SLS, since the SLS will require every penny it can get just to keep going. And it will run over it’s projected budget, multiple times if history is a guide, and that extra money will further postpone any uses for the SLS.
2. Without the SLS to distract NASA, it can focus on lower cost exploration attempts. These would use existing rockets, which is what most of us advocate for anyways, and it may involve public-private partnerships. Though slow going, it will likely yield more exploration quicker than waiting 1-2 decades for the SLS and it’s first full-up payload mission.
If NASA gets to keep part of the budget when the SLS is cancelled, that will just be bonus.
In summary, there is no downside to killing the SLS program. Except, of course, for the squealing of porkers in Congress.
vulture4 wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 9:29 am
SpaceX is doing things in a new way, moving quickly and with purpose. I would ask our friends within NASA to forget politics for a moment and remember the dreams we once had.
At least not everyone at NASA is stuck in the past since COTS, CCDev and CRS are all NASA programs. They are showing that HSF can be done at current unmanned prices. Unmanned will benefit from these programs too.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ September 7th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Space X is an amateur rocket company whose launch vehicles have no reliable launch history relative to those produced by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And Space X has absolutely no experience in building LOX/LH2 upper stage rockets.
They don’t have “institutional knowledge†but they have engineers that have experience with these systems. Also institutional knowledge and baggage can slow innovation. Just ask the auto industry.
I’m afraid those dreams have changed from “we want to have a meaningful space program†to “we want to be employed by a space programâ€.
The cynical words of a Euro-agitator.
…SpaceX is a profitable…
I guess your understanding of the word profitable and mine are different. How can a company be profitable if it never launched a payload for a paying customer before? Is taking government handouts for no services profitable? Yes, SpaceX has a launch manifest. Bottom feeding customers, mostly. And the launches are comfortably off in the future where SpaceX likes ‘em.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 8:49 am
“Nerdspace is the 2000′s whale song music, its leg warmers, its pet rock. The wealth of the leftist crony pantheon bankrolling it will soon be exhausted.”
Ah finally some real deal amightywind mumbo jumbo. I started to think you were just becoming like any other SLS hugger. I am glad that all those days in engineering still serve you well. Man, “the leftist crony pantheon”, not bad at all. What is the source of inspiration?
BTW how do you explain the wealth of these guys? Are they capitalists? Or just parasitizing the government?
Hi AW, Marcel –
I separate SpaceX from other “new space” firms for good reasons, and have for a long time.
As far as manned vehicles goes, Klipr was the best I’ve seen , but then you have the not invented here bias, and the licensing problems. Perhaps China will license the design from RKA, if the wing locking mechanism is perfectly reliable.
There are other US space companies besides ATK.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 10:54 am
“How can a company be profitable if it never launched a payload for a paying customer before?”
I don’t know you may want to ask Malaysia if they got the launch for free. Or maybe F1 is not a big enough rocket to qualify as a commercial launch in your eyes? Come on now, I, and I am sure others too, much prefer the “leftist crony pantheon” thing. Just leave the facts to the adults in this debate.
http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon/005/index.html
BTW how do you explain the wealth of these guys? Are they capitalists? Or just parasitizing the government?
They were capitalists who wisely cashed out of the dotcom bubble. Can’t fault ‘em for that. Some, like Mark Cuban, bought jets and sports teams. Others, like Jeff Bezos, bought billion dollar holes in the desert. But hey, I guess that’s no worse than Larry Elison who prefers to sink yachts. The best of them was Paul Allen who bought both the sports team and the prototypical nerdspace company in Scaled Composites. Owning a rocket company is now expected of the top Silicon Valley entrepreneur, like driving a Ferrari, or wearing a black mock turtleneck. The problem with these folks is they’ve made their fantasies our risk by grabbing money from Obama.
amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 10:54 am
How can a company be profitable if it never launched a payload for a paying customer before?
1. They have launched paying customer payloads other than US government.
2. Customer buying something this expensive pay something before they get the service since SpaceX doesn’t want to build a rocket for someone that not going to use it. There is also lead time between order and rocket.
I guess some engineers have business savvy and some do not.
“That’s funny considering we spend $4 billion on that great black hole of funding, the ISS.”
The entire ISS effort, including O&M, research, and crew/cargo transport, was only $2.3B in the FY10 budget.
Don’t make stuff up.
“Is taking government handouts for no services profitable?”
The SAAs under COTS and CCDev are payment on delivery. They are not “handouts” for “no services”.
Don’t make stuff up.
“Yes, SpaceX has a launch manifest. Bottom feeding customers, mostly.”
Since when are SES, an international operator of 40+ GEO birds, or Iridium, the operator of the largest LEO constellation, or Orbcomm, the leader in space-based asset tracking/management/control, “bottom feeders”?
Don’t make stuff up.
Ugh…
Klipr was the best I’ve seen , but then you have the not invented here bias,
It is the best you’ve seen on paper you mean. The project hasn’t gone anywhere. It is small. Dreamcatcher seems the more refined design to my eye in that class of vehicle. Of course, the US is the only nation with experience with manned orbital space planes.
1. They have launched paying customer payloads…
2. Customer buying something this expensive pay
The question was not about SpaceX business plan. It was whether they were profitable. And that remains an absurd assertion.
amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 11:40 am
“Paul Allen who bought both the sports team and the prototypical nerdspace company in Scaled Composites.”
Paul Allen didn’t buy Scaled Composites, he partnered with them.
“The problem with these folks is they’ve made their fantasies our risk by grabbing money from Obama.”
SpaceX received their largest government contracts from the Bush/Griffin administration, not Obama/Bolden. But I guess that wouldn’t fit your anti-Obama narrative, so you ignore it.
It’s amazing how much you can be wrong in just a few short words. Your lack of attention to details makes me hope that you take public transportation to work, and have a someone that manages your finances.
Iridium, the operator of the largest LEO constellation
Umm, bought for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy. Iridium operated those assets profitably. But their business model from a capital cost standpoint is worse than it was in the late 1990’s. It remains to be seen if they can replace the network. It is much the same with Orbcomm. It is awfully difficult to compete with terrestrial wireless. QED.
@Martijn Meijering
“Actually Marcel, you (like many of us here, including yours truly) are an amateur space pundit while SpaceX is a profitable company with a number of successful orbital launches under its belt and a healthy launch manifest. And they managed to do that for less money than NASA’s cost models say is possible, as verified by a NASA audit. There’s a word for that: impressive.”
Boeing and Lockheed have had 44 successful launches of the Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles with only two failures.
NASA’s Space Shuttle program had 133 successful flights and two crew killing failures.
Space X has had just 4 successful launches and three failures: the Falcon 1 had two launch successes and three failures and the Falcon 9 has had only two successful launches.
So I wouldn’t exactly call that “a number of successful launches under its belt” unless you want to say that Space X also has a number of failures under its belt!
Space X needs to stop bragging about what they could do in the future and stop talking about trips to Mars and– start actually putting people and payloads reliably and routinely into orbit. And Space X wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars invested in space technology over the past 60 years.
Wind wrote:
“The best of them was Paul Allen who bought both the sports team and the prototypical nerdspace company in Scaled Composites.”
Paul Allen bought Scaled Composites? When did this happen? Northrop Grumman Completes Acquisition of Scaled Composites
I bet this is news to Northrup.
Marcel F. Williams wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 1:46 pm
“And Space X wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars invested in space technology over the past 60 years.”
NASA wouldn’t either.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
“It is the best you’ve seen on paper you mean. The project hasn’t gone anywhere. It is small. Dreamcatcher seems the more refined design to my eye in that class of vehicle. Of course, the US is the only nation with experience with manned orbital space planes.”
There you go again. Making engineering judgement on things you don’t quite understand.
Dreamchaser, not Dreamcatcher, is based upon the HL-20 which was based on reverse engineered from the Soviet BOR-4 spaceplane. The design was so good that NASA wanted to go with it. And of course the BOR-4 was designed in the 70s/80s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceDev_Dream_Chaser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4
Kliper on the other hand is a far more advanced spacecraft that potentially had deep space capability.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/kliper.html
Now of course NASA will not go for Kliper. Too many people know of it unlike the HL-20/BOR-4 connection. NASA did not want to consider a capsule looking like a Soyuz even though arguably much safer than an Apollo shape. Idiocy knows no bound here on Earth or in the heavens.
Kliper on the other hand is a far more advanced spacecraft that potentially had deep space capability.
Deep space? LOL! It is tiny, even by Russian standards. Deep space on a Russian rocket and spacecraft is 250mi and that is where it is going to stay, if they are lucky.
Paul Allen didn’t buy Scaled Composites, he partnered with them.
Excuse me for implying that it did. Doesn’t change my thesis. All software nerds that have cashed out $ billion from their startups are convinced they are equally great rocket engineers. Some give their narcissism free reign. Oops, I forgot about Bill Gates involvement with Teledesic.
NASA did not want to consider a capsule looking like a Soyuz even though arguably much safer than an Apollo shape
How do you figure? A simple cone has greater hypersonic lift, less heating, and greater stability than a truncated cone. Simple physics. I consider the Soyuz (and Shen Zhou, which must mean Soyuz in Chinese), to be rather unnatural designs. Whenever I see the Orion spacecraft on the upper left of this page I think of how harmonious and American that design is.
Your lack of attention to details makes me hope that you take public transportation to work, and have a someone that manages your finances.
It is not lack of attention to detail so much as haste in refuting so many misguided statements. I ride a full sized Chevy Yukon to work, alone. I am morally opposed to public transportation.
“It is tiny, even by Russian standards.”
Who said the crew would necessarily travel in Kliper for deep space. handling the reentry velocity is essentially what made it deep space capable. Just like Orion. Anyone who thinks they might make it to Mars in a capsule even a big one should start deep psychological treatment. 1 to 2 years in a capsule??? Please.
“How do you figure?”
I ran the analysis and trade studies.
“A simple cone has greater hypersonic lift, less heating, and greater stability than a truncated cone. ”
No the supposedly greater L/D comes at an unachievable angle of attack because of packaging and improper CG location. Further, high angle of attack potentially heats up the sidewall and outs a premium on TPS hence mass. Apollo never achieved their high angle of attack and they had other tricks up their sleeve for CG location such as canted heat shield. At fly-able angle of attack Soyuz is not that bad in L/D. L/D requirement is not that high for a capsule. Lift vector control is more important. Entry trajectory like skip helps more. An Apollo shape has two stable trimmed angle of attack. One heat shield forward as you’d like the other apex forward which is a big problem. Soyuz only has one stable trimmed angle of attack heat shield forward as we recently saw when the vehicle started head first and turned back properly thereby saving the astronauts. A ball like sidewall helps on land-landing since in case of a problem it can role. A cone will break if it tilts on the sidewall… And so on and so forth.
amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
“It is not lack of attention to detail so much as haste in refuting so many misguided statements.”
You cause more problems than you solve when you do things in haste, and one can only hope that you don’t program the way you blog.
What products are you working on – just so I know what to avoid…
amightywind wrote:
“Deep space? LOL! It is tiny, even by Russian standards.”
You have to actually read links and find out what is actually stated.
“Propulsion and habitation module
The original design of the Kliper spacecraft included a special detachable habitation and service module mounted behind the reentry glider. In its turn, the module would consist of two structural sections: a habitation module,”
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/kliper.html
It included a habitat module so Kliper only had to be as big as needed for the crew to reach orbit and return.
Mars in a capsule even a big one should start deep psychological treatment. 1 to 2 years in a capsule???
Nobody is going to Mars in anything other than craft with a centrifuge section. Nothing else makes sense.
No the supposedly greater L/D … A cone will break if it tilts on the sidewall
Nice diatribe, no conclusion. The supposed ‘cone break’ is mitigated by a water landing, and I think it is a faux risk. There is nothing inherently structurally stronger about a truncated cone. I have always wondered why some folks are so opposed to water landing. Is it more convenient to land in Utah or 5 miles off the coast of the Cape?
What products are you working on – just so I know what to avoid
Might be too late. My contributions are everywhere, though maybe not in lethal concentration. Embraer, Gulfstream, Cessna avionics, many communications satellites, including TDRS, Galaxy, certain pacemakers, cardiac catheter robotics, dialysis machines…
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
“The supposed ‘cone break’ is mitigated by a water landing, and I think it is a faux risk.”
Water landing was contingency landing for the CEV. Land landing was primary. Due diligence ever? http://www.astronautix.com/craft/cevcm.htm Someday, some year (?), you will gain credibility just not now.
“Is it more convenient to land in Utah or 5 miles off the coast of the Cape?”
Go ask JSC.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
“Nobody is going to Mars in anything other than craft with a centrifuge section. Nothing else makes sense.”
Are you saying NASA should invest in technology?
Where is the centrifuge of yours being budgeted? Just curious.
So I wouldn’t exactly call that “a number of successful launches under its belt†unless you want to say that Space X also has a number of failures under its belt!
I wasn’t disputing the fact that ULA has much longer track record than SpaceX, in fact I’ve pointed that out many times myself. I was disputing your claim that SpaceX is an amateur company.
““Nobody is going to Mars in anything other than craft with a centrifuge section. Nothing else makes sense.—
Sounds like Nautilus X.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Lear my friend. Learn. I am happy to help you a little. But you’ll have to make better effort than what you do.
Okay here goes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry
“Apollo Command/Service Module used a spherical section forebody heatshield with a converging conical afterbody. It flew a lifting entry with a hypersonic trim angle of attack of −27° (0° is blunt-end first) to yield an average L/D (lift-to-drag ratio) of 0.368.[6]”
http://www.braeunig.us/space/specs/soyuz.htm
“L/D hypersonic: 0.25-0.30″
And then there is this:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4220/p156.htm
L/D for a capsule is not a primary parameter. If you want L/D you have to go with lifting bodies. L/D is not a major requirement for capsule landing.
Soyuz monostability here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZJm_i3GS4r4C&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=soyuz+shape+monostability&source=bl&ots=we7tWU3oCr&sig=–9DHQ0uVvhsnvnoJ_Lsw3gkHec&hl=en&ei=KjppTs2BJcO1sQLzh72BDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=soyuz%20shape%20monostability&f=false
Rolling on land:
“Nonetheless Kelly and the others appeared to be in good shape as they were extracted from their capsule, which rolled onto its side after landing.”
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/space/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3A04ce340e-4b63-4d23-9695-d49ab661f385Post%3Ac1f5636c-a860-4708-ae7a-a00130880669
Sounds like Nautilus X.
Here is your implicit reasoning. A credible Mars spacecraft must have a spun section. The Nautilus X powerpoint has a spun section. Therefore Nautilus X is a credible Mars spacecraft. Feel foolish now, don’t you.
Rolling on land:
The Russians have a severe width constraint. We do not. It is that simple. You are defending a horribly compromised design.
Lear my friend. Learn.
If you think you have something to teach you will have to do better than cite Wikipedia.
@ablastofhotair
“Therefore Nautilus X is a credible Mars spacecraft. Feel foolish now, don’t you.”
No I don’t. If you had been paying attention to my comments, you would know that I am in agreement with you on this one. One of the few times you were not spouting hot air, and then you immediately revert to usual form.
P.S. I know of no other seriously proposed spun section spacecraft (powerpoint or otherwise) that has been put forward of late. BTW, Nautilus-X was the result of a NASA study and did not have its specifications laid out by Senators, so I do at least give it little more credibility.
Just to make sure you understand (because irony is often lost on you), when I said “I am in agreement with you on this one.” I was talking about the need for spin gravity on interplanetary flight, not Nautilus-X. Though from what I have read, it’s specs appear technically sound.
Just to make sure you understand (because irony is often lost on you), when I said “I am in agreement with you on this one.
I encourage you to seek favor with me, but you won’t do it by pumping Nautilus X. There is a little problem with that concept, namely propulsion. Oh, I know, it will use fuel depots
The government contracting system that gives the bid to the lowest bidder even if they can’t do the job or can’t do it at the bid price is complete crap. It works the same from big ticket items like building space vehicles and telescopes to contracting out floor cleaning. Someone needs to assess these bidders and keep them inside of a realistic bidding process.
NASA HSF promises to be highly inspirational.
“If we can terminate the manned space program, why can’t we terminate…?”
Just what the republic needs at this point.
@ablastofhotair
“There is a little problem with that concept, namely propulsion.”
Something called VASIMR, a functioning protype of which is slated to be taken to the ISS and used for station position keeping while it is being tested. The idea is to scale it up and studies have shown as long as you stick to the inner solar system, a large enough solar cell array should be adequate to supply the required electrical power to the drive. The xenon fuel would be consumed at relatively low rates because of the extremely high exhaust velocity and give accelerations higher than a typical ion engine but lower than chemical propulsion, but the acceleration can be sustained for a much longer time resulting in a Mars trip in 39 days.
Oh one more thing about Nautilus X, it or any other vehicle that stayed in space would require a fuel depot. Also my memory misfired as far as the fuel for VASIMR is concerned: it would be argon, not xenon.
Oh one more thing about Nautilus X, it or any other vehicle that stayed in space would require a fuel depot.
Initially, it (or its propulsion unit) could be the depot.
Something called VASIMR, a functioning protype of which is slated to be taken to the ISS and used for station position keeping while it is being tested.
VASIMR will likely require a fusion reactor, so don’t hold your breath. But amightywind is wrong anyway since chemical propulsion (even with storable propellant) would do. NEP will no doubt work eventually too, but it will require a lot of work. Thr trouble with all these technologies is that they could consume funding for decades while nothing is being done in the mean time on the most pressing issue and only real obstacle to commercial development of space: cheap lift.
First things first, let’s not waste time and money on unnecessary nice to haves now: HLVs, cryogenic depots, fusion reactors, bioregenerative life support etc. Let’s explore, let’s provide a large and fiercely competitive propellant launch market and then let market forces sort out R&D and infrastructure.
@ amightywind wrote @ September 8th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
“If you think you have something to teach you will have to do better than cite Wikipedia.”
Do you really think I am going to run an AIAA or other scientific journal search just for you? You can’t afford my services so do your own due diligence and learn. I am here to help, not to teach.
Martijn Meijering wrote @ September 9th, 2011 at 10:54 am
“But amightywind is wrong anyway since chemical propulsion (even with storable propellant) would do.”
Agreed (on both counts). The easiest thing to do is to use chemical engines that get fuel from a tanker or depot. That allows us to get out there fast and start doing things, which is most important. Improvements in fuel and propulsion can come later.
“The trouble with all these technologies is that they could consume funding for decades while nothing is being done in the mean time on the most pressing issue and only real obstacle to commercial development of space: cheap lift.”
I think these types of questions can be answered pretty easily when you use cost as a constraint. How much exploration hardware can you get into lunar orbit for $1B? or 5B? Mission designs have to start being forced to reuse previous mission elements where possible, since only by lowering mission costs will we be able to do more in space.
VASIMR will likely require a fusion reactor, so don’t hold your breath
Yes, a nuclear reactor of some sort will be required unless the number of watts per kg per square meter of solar cells reaches a point where you can have an extremely large array with 10% or more quantum efficiency in the weightlessness of space because of the low mass per square area. In other words, if a solar power satellite becomes practical, so will VASIMR with solar cells.
Repost with corrected HTML
“VASIMR will likely require a fusion reactor, so don’t hold your breath”
Yes, a nuclear reactor of some sort will be required unless the number of watts per kg per square meter of solar cells reaches a point where you can have an extremely large array with 10% or more quantum efficiency with relatively small total collector mass in the weightlessness of space because of the low mass per square area. In other words, if a solar power satellite becomes practical, so will VASIMR with solar cells.
How much exploration hardware can you get into lunar orbit for $1B? or 5B?
That’s an interesting yardstick and there are some more like it. You could vary the destination and measure hardware in LEO, on the lunar surface, in Mars orbit. Or you could vary the payload and count people or tonnes of propellant. You could then let the market optimise the infrastructure required for the chosen payload to the chosen destination. Or you could count tonnes of lunar propellant produced or the price of transporting a tonne of payload to a chosen destination.
The choices strongly affect the result, so you would have to weigh the options against each other in the light of your goals.
Unsurprisingly, my choice would be a weighted sum of tonnes of propellant to LEO and L1/L2, where propellant that is transferred in space gets more weight. I think this is a decent proxy for measuring the effect on the emergence of cheap lift beforehand. Price would be an even better indication, but you only know that afterwards.
The advantage of counting propellant instead of hardware is that hardware is expensive whereas propellant isn’t and propellant contributes towards cheap lift while hardware doesn’t. And cheap lift has a dramatic impact on all the goals people have (exploration, commercial development of space, moon, Mars) whereas other hardware has more specific uses (Mars only, Moon only etc). I believe cheap lift is both necessary and sufficient to get to a point where market forces will lead us to a spacefaring civilisation.
I would therefore optimise any program to maximise the prospects of cheap lift as soon as possible, possibly at the expense of restricting destinations by not spending money yet on technologies that will only apply to destinations beyond LEO or only to manned missions, only to surface missions etc.
Others might want to maximise within an additional set of constraints (beyond LEO within ten years, the moon within fifteen, unmanned asteroid missions within five years etc) or might want to optimise another criterion (lunar ISRU as soon as possible, humans on Mars as soon as possible). Such choices are not inherently unreasonable (while SLS for its own sake would be), but I do think there are serious arguments in favour of focussing on cheap lift specifically.
> Now of course NASA will not go for Kliper.
Neither the Russians. The project has been cancelled. Do you think that the X-37 may be the forerunner of a smaller Shuttle or, if you prefer, the American Kliper? Make it a bit larger and pack a crew of three or four in it.
Martijn Meijering wrote @ September 9th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
“The choices strongly affect the result, so you would have to weigh the options against each other in the light of your goals.”
You’re right. I guess my question was more thought provoking as opposed to a specific challenge, so I’m open to what the hardware/mission would be.
Since it’s current, we could propose what the FISO study just came out with, and have a competition to put a 6-person station at EML-1. I don’t know if they stated it, but I would want 3-month crew rotations, and it would need to be staffed for one year.
That would drive a lot of demand for capsules and fuel, not to mention launches in general. I wonder how much (little) it would take?
@ Halfwit wrote @ September 9th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
X-37 will not make it into a NASA vehicle. It’s DOD now. If so much of a classified paper clip touched it the whole thing is classified. It was a contender for OSP though.
And it cannot be a Kliper. It only is for LEO operations.
“Do you think that the X-37 may be the forerunner of a smaller Shuttle or, if you prefer, the American Kliper? Make it a bit larger and pack a crew of three or four in it.”
Doubtful. It doesn’t scale well — the interior volume doesn’t go up fast enough to fit a sizable crew in before the vehicle exceeds launch constraints. HL-20 variant designs do better.
FWIW…
“Do you think that the X-37 may be the forerunner of a smaller Shuttle or, if you prefer, the American Kliper? Make it a bit larger and pack a crew of three or four in it.”
Why not just buy tickets on Dream Chaser and save the tax payer.
abreakingwind drooled:
I am morally opposed to public transportation.
Except when it’s space transportation, in which case you seem immorally opposed to any other kind.
Despite many pictures of it doing so, the Dream Chaser cannot land on a runway at anything approaching a realistic flight weight because it has an insufficient lift to drag ratio. It is just a very expensive capsule that is, compared to the Apollo shape, less stable and heavier for what it carries. The lifting body program was a failure.
The lifting body concept was a solution to the belief, in the early 60’s, that no leading edge could tolerate entry heat. This belief was proven false, but because of its sleek appearance the lack of anyone at NASA that still understands lift, drag, and the cost of rebuilding a large vehicle after a parachute recovery (i.e. SRBs), the lifting body has persisted like a bad penny.
The X-37 can, and has, landed on a runway, because it has wings. The X-37 scales excellently and was the basis for the Boeing winged Orbital Space Plane proposal before NASA decided that reusability didn’t matter. Anybody who thinks a lifting body can be scaled should try landing a 100-ton version (with or without a parachute) and then reflying it, if you can find the pieces. Anybody who thinks you can’t land a 100-ton winged spaceplane should think about, what was it called? Oh yes, the Shuttle.
I am really tired of seeing reports from an agency that has aeronautics in its name referring to the OSC Prometheus, the Boeing Orbital Space Plane, the X-37, or the SpaceShip 1 and 2 as lifting bodies. They are all winged entry vehicles. And for a reusable vehicle the operational cost of runway landing is far lower than the cost of parachute recovery. If our knowledge of aerodynamics and aerospace operations has deteriorated to the extent that we do not know the difference, we might as well all go home.
Wings and fuselage do such different jobs that one shape cannot do both well. In a pinch you can do without the fuselage. But if you don’t have wings, you can’t fly.
@ vulture4 wrote @ September 10th, 2011 at 2:48 pm
Sorry but you’re not making any sense. You are blinded by your love for Shuttle. Shuttle is a lifting body. It only has wings to land on a runway. Nobody is contemplating the landing of a 100 ton lifting body.
Please stop this nonsense. It is embarrassing.
@vulture4
According to NASA’s Commercial Crew website, Dream Chaser is supposed to land on a runway.
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/partners/sierranevada/index.html
Also, if it can’t land on a runway, why is it equipped with runway landing gear?
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Photos/060622/060622_spaceship_hmed_11a.jpg&imgrefurl=http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/09/28/4985.aspx&h=301&w=468&sz=107&tbnid=nLVu3t2htYqbQM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=140&prev=/search%3Fq%3Ddream%2Bchaser%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=dream+chaser&docid=Lv4wTefkbVWVAM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VQVtTuz7KMmCtgejv_G-BQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDQQ9QEwAg&dur=169
common sense wrote @ September 10th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
“Shuttle is a lifting body. It only has wings to land on a runway. Nobody is contemplating the landing of a 100 ton lifting body. Please stop this nonsense. It is embarrassing.”
If you would like an intelligent conversation, I would be happy to have one.
A “lifting body” is an aerospace vehicle that does not have wings, generating lift from airfow around the fuselage alone. I have been well acquainted with the concept since its genesis in the 60’s. I remember one of the first NASA presentations explaining the rational for this path. It was not supported by any meaningful trade study or aerodynamic analysis. In later years the HL-20, X-38 and similar concepts have been subjected to more careful aerodynamic analysis and some small changes made, but the basic constraint of not utilizing conventional planar airfoils has been retained.
Another poster had claimed the X-37 “does not scale” and that the HL-20 was a superior design. No one in this group has presented any evidence to support either of these points. No one has presented evidence that any lifting body can achieve an L/D at touchdown of greater than 4 or any runway landing, unpowered, at a realistic mass for a returning spacecraft.
The lifting body program began in the 60’s and was based on the premise that an entry vehicle could be constructed that could land on a runway without wings, The NASA lifting bodies all had rounded bottoms and relatively flat upper surfaces. I saw a NASA presentation that explained the theory behind this; a cone flying horizontally would have equal pressures on top and bottom. By removing the top half of the cone only the upward force on the bottom would remain. Of course this made no sense aerodynamically since the torques on the vehicle in the presentation were unbalanced, but that was long before CFD.
The final craft in the lifting body program, the Martin X-24B, was an Air Force design with small horizontal delta wings. The central fuselage completely inverted the NASA approach, with a completely flat bottom and a fuselage longitudinal cross-section not far from the classic “Clark Y” profile. The Shuttle has full conventional delta wings, both to allow for runway landing and to meet the DOD requirement for sufficient crossrange to land at the launch site after a single polar orbit.
@ Rick Boozer wrote @ September 11th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Hey Rick how’s this mountain retreat of yours going? Getting addicted to this I see…
Any how. vulture4 has been spouting nonsense for some time now. Too bad because I used to like his lines about Shuttle. But when he gets carried away into the Shuttle netherworld it becomes an embarrassment.
After all these years of investigations at NASA LaRC and SNC those people could not figure the Dreamchaser can, or not, land on a runway? Really? Not counting the BOR-4 predecessor.
Anyway I guess we’ll see if the thing can or not land on a runway… Soon hopefully.
@ vulture4 wrote @ September 11th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
“A “lifting body†is an aerospace vehicle that does not have wings, generating lift from airfow around the fuselage alone.”
No it is not. A lifting body is a vehicle that derives most of its lift from the fuselage. And that’s it. Nothing more nothing less. If you take a Shuttle and look at its hypersonic lift, it is derived by its planform area. Wings have very little to do. Unlike most wings they have a flat bottom so to alleviate the heating. And that is it.
“No one has presented evidence that any lifting body can achieve an L/D at touchdown of greater than 4 or any runway landing, unpowered, at a realistic mass for a returning spacecraft.”
This is a very different statement. Most lifting body do indeed land at very high speed, just like Shuttle. And it is indeed very difficult if not impossible to land. However, I haven’t looked at the HL-20 aero and therefore will reserve my statement. Only that the vehicle has been analyzed for ever at NASA LaRC and at SNC. Why would NASA fund such a vehicle when they claim they can do even though they might not??? The vehicle mostly is a NASA developed vehicle nowadays. So unless and until I see the aero contradicting the fact it can land on a runway I will believe it can. Note that the vertical control surfaces are not really vertical so they might very well provide the necessary lift. It is nothing like a Shuttle in terms of mass and that might help too. As for X-37, I have no idea if it would scale up to a crew vehicle. I think yes since Boeing proposed it for OSP. BUT I don’t know if you can launch it as easily as the actual X-37. Yes it has wings, mostly what appears to be Shuttle like wings (save a lot of analysis on the various problem of shock-shock interaction and the likes).
The requirements on the bottom of the vehicles are driven by heating, not aerodynamics. We are not talking F-16 here, only a vehicle that can handle reentry and go somewhere to land.
Indeed a lifting body with parachutes, to me, makes a lot more sense. You can then have a lightweight vehicle that can sustain possibly high heating. Kliper has something to it. The BO biconic too. I wish I could tell you other story but I can’t.
“The final craft in the lifting body program, the Martin X-24B, was an Air Force design with small horizontal delta wings. ”
The sharp leading edge would be a killer on reentry.
Yes Shuttle has wings for some L/D, not all L/D. You could design a lifting body without wings with the same hypersonic L/D which is the one that counts for down/cross-range. The wings are only for runway landing and that is a fact. You could land a lifting body with parachutes/parafoil as demoed by the X-38.
X-38 was a very good idea. It got killed by nonsense. May not have been the best idea but heck it beat the heck of a lot of other concepts.
Shuttle is a lifting body at hypersonic speed where it counts. Tell you what. A capsule at an angle of attack is a lifting body just the same.
Did anyone see the X-38 landing on a runway after its drop test?
Wait, here it is:
http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/rlvs/rlv-images/X-38_on_chute.jpg
Here’s an actual photo of the HL-20 on wheels:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/HL20_mockup.jpeg/750px-HL20_mockup.jpeg
Wait a minute – it’s just a mockup made out of fiberglass by some college students. The HL-20 has never flown. But the nicely finished mockup played a significant role in its selection for the Crew Return Vehicle; it conveyed a sense of realism.
Seriously, both the NASA lifting bodies (none of which weighed even 3 metric tons at touchdown, while Dream Chaser is closer to 9MT) and the Shuttle land unpowered at around 200mph. It can be done, but there is very little margin. No one who has seen it done would say it should be tried with even less margin. Dream Chaser, if it lands on a runway, would be much heavier than any lifting body that has done so unpowered. That means it will have to be going much faster. Most of the Sierra Nevada documents are ambiguous on the point. Can you find _any_ document that says “The Dream Chaser will definitely not land with a parachute.”? While an Israeli F-15 did land after shearing off a wing when it collided with another aircraft during training, it was at nearly full power at touchdown.
I have noticed that the canted tail surfaces on the Dream Chaser seem a little flatter than those on the HL-20. Maybe they will flatten it out and add a small forward wing to get a little more lift. Everybody learns from experience. But one thing that experience teaches is that we should never make things harder than we have to. Aircraft always need as much lift as they can get, within the constraints of mass and drag. The tradeoff between wing-fuselage and lifting-body configuration should not be taken lightly, and should not be made based on intuition, appearance, tradition, or the challenge of doing something the hard way.
vulture 4
X-38 was not designed to land on a runway. It was designed to land on near a flat area like a lakebed. It also was a very differnt kind of craft. It is smaller than the HL-20 designed to fit in the shuttlle’s payload bay.
HL-20 and Dreamcahser were both designed to land on a standard runway. They were not intended as emergancy escape craft but as crew transport. HL-20 could fit in the shuttle’s payload bay, but only with wings folded. It was designed to be launched by an expendable.
The lifitngbodies X-24, M2, and HL10 landed on a runway.
@ vulture4 wrote @ September 11th, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Really I am not sure what point you’re trying to make. One day we’re looking at a 100 ton lifting body the day after it only is 9 ton. So what?
Why are you implying the SNC is taking landing matters lightly? Any evidence of that?
As I said earlier. Embarrassing. This is turning into a train wreck for your credibility. Sorry. You are putting forth all those allegations without one shred of evidence! Get a grip!
SNC, just like SpaceX and the others, is a private entity. They owe their technical design justifications to who ever is funding them. And if the SOW for NASA CCDev does not ask for landing characteristics then they don’t have to tell anyone outside their investors.
Do you really think these people below don’t know what they’re doing?
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/04/19/anatomy-ccdev-bid-dream-chaser/
Here:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/08/nasa-ccdev-2-partners-reveals-progress-milestones/
“SNC are receiving unpublished amounts of money from their $80m award pot, following each successful completion of their 19 milestones, the latter of which is listed as the Free Flight Test, which will be a piloted Flight test from carrier aircraft to characterize handling qualities and approach and landing.”
@Common Sense
“Hey Rick how’s this mountain retreat of yours going? Getting addicted to this I see…”
Had to come home just a few hours early because there were a couple of papers I discovered that I needed to download off of the internet for my PhD research and I couldn’t do any more work until I had them.
Anyway, I saw Vulture4’s comment and it was quick to answer, so what the heck. Had to do something while the papers were downloading.
“Another poster had claimed the X-37 ‘does not scale’ and that the HL-20 was a superior design. No one in this group has presented any evidence to support either of these points.”
To be clear, I said that X-37 does not scale _well_, especially in comparison to HL-20, not that X-37 does not scale, period. Specifically, I said that:
“It doesn’t scale well — the interior volume doesn’t go up fast enough to fit a sizable crew in before the vehicle exceeds launch constraints. HL-20 variant designs do better.”
To be more specific, X-37B launched on an Atlas V 501. That’s a 5-meter fairing variant of the Atlas V, the largest launch shroud around. Per this and other pix, the X-37B’s wings are already at the limits of that launch shroud:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boeing_X-37B_inside_payload_fairing_before_launch.jpg
You’re not going to be able to launch a sizable crew on the X-37 without going to a much larger and unproven fairing (or bet on the come with a non-existent launch vehicle like Falcon Heavy).
And when folks talk about using an X-37-type vehicle in a manned role, it’s limited to crew down only, usually in an emergency role. Here’s one example, and it comes from an X-37 proponent:
http://www.spacenews.com/commentaries/100823-civilian-role-x37b.html
“No one has presented evidence that any lifting body can achieve an L/D at touchdown of greater than 4 or any runway landing, unpowered, at a realistic mass for a returning spacecraft.”
There’s a whole slew of tests that show otherwise, but even if this was true, there are ways around it. For example, very simple, small retrorockets could provide additional lift while the last couple hundred km/h are bled off during final approach and landing. That’s especially true in these days of precision vertical landers like Armadillo and Masten. It’s not a showstopper, unlike a requirement for a non-existent fairing, payload shroud, and/or bigger launcher.
I’m not knocking X-37. I hope we see (or at least milspace-types see) a lot more of it. But X-37 was never designed with crew in mind while HL-20 was. And, not surprisingly, the challenges to getting X-37 crewed are bigger than those on HL-20.
FWIW…