Fisked. “Ray” over at Restore the Vision has been going through Mike Griffin’s recent email, point by point (just keep scrolling). A suggestion — “Next” and “Previous” links in each post to allow readers to find them all after finding one. Clark Lindsey (who tipped me off to this) has individual links to points one through five. Here’s the one for point six, which is the most extensive.
[Tuesday morning update]
The fisking is now complete. He’s got eleven posts, and the eleventh one contains links to the previous ones (though it would still be nice to be able to navigate from one to the next and back). The tenth one, on the merits of propellant depots versus heavy lift, seems the most devastating to me:
In fact, heavy lift appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Who needs heavy lift? Apparently not NASA science, the communications satellite industry, DOD, intelligence agencies, NOAA, etc. It seems that the main reason NASA would develop heavy lift is to avoid addressing the real goals of the VSE (science, security, and economic benefits in the context of commercial and international participation).
It is difficult to understand how such an approach can offer an economically favorable alternative. The Ares-5 offers the lowest cost-per-pound for payload to orbit of any presently known heavy-lift launch vehicle design. The mass-specific cost of payload to orbit nearly always improves with increasing launch vehicle scale.
Griffin is saying Ares-5 is the cheapest because it’s the biggest. That’s an absurd law – why not build a rocket 1,000 times bigger at 10,000 times the cost then? The per-kg cost will be miniscule! I think Griffin’s law of scale is easily violated when you consider the possibility of smaller, mass-produced rockets. Exploration, with its serious payload mass requirements, could provide the market for such mass-produced rockets.
Griffin’s scale rule of thumb also ignores development costs. After all, it will be a long time before those tens of billions of dollars of Ares-5 (and related Ares-1) development efforts are amortized, at a maximum flight rate of 2 per year. We already have the EELVs and are already building Falcon 9 and Taurus 2 anyway, so their development cost for a job like fuel launch for exploration is $0. When you consider Ares-5 costs, you also have to consider the possibility that the development effort will fail, and all development costs will be wasted … or the development effort will succeed, but the operations will be so expensive that they are canceled as happened with Apollo, and again the development costs will be wasted.
Is Mike Griffin really as fundamentally ignorant of economics and accounting as his arguments would indicate? This seems to be a prevailing fallacy of heavy-lift proponents — that the only economies of scale come from vehicle size, completely ignoring flight rate, which has a much more profound effect on launch costs, particularly when amortizing a high development cost. As Ray points out, the tens of billions of development cost will never be amortized at the trivial flight rate that a heavy lifter will fly. It makes sense to look at marginal costs for a vehicle whose development costs are sunk, but we are making decisions about how to spend future dollars. And of course, even if the marginal costs are low (as they are with the Shuttle) the average costs remain high, with an expensive fixed infrastructure and low flight rate. Constellation isn’t an improvement over the Shuttle in any significant way other than (possibly) crew safety, and in many ways it’s a step backwards, since it has much less capability.
Mike has it exactly backwards. Depots are not a solution in search of a problem, clever though the phrase might sound. Ray points out the many problems that they solve. It is the costly romance of heavy lift, that some cannot relinquish despite the fact that it has trapped us in LEO for decades, that needs justification.
[Bumped]
Griffin is overstating things but I can see his point. Ariane 5 launches more commercial payloads to GEO than the rest of the launchers combined. Atlas V and Delta 4 were build on DoD money. Most of the times there is an Atlas or Delta launch it is launching some NRO or other DoD payload. It seems like there are more commercial Proton launches than Atlas or Delta launches…
But the truth is Ariane 5 was built on government funds as well…
It doesn’t seem all that absurd to me, at least at the level of a general statement.
Certainly it is much more cost-effective to ship large quantities of freight on trains or in semi-trailers than in the back of a Prius, or even a pickup truck.
The real question is (or perhaps should be) when do you need a semi-trailer, and when do you need a pickup truck? Or even a small person-carrying vehicle with almost no cargo capacity?
A heavy-lift booster is not per se a bad idea, but depends on transportation requirements.
Note there is an upper limit to the size of things carried on trucks, trains and even large ships. Beyond some limit it makes sense to assemble in place.
Even large cranes etc are assembled in place. Clearly the build it whole vs assemble in place trade off is different depending on where your going.
We may eventually have heavy launch resupplying the propellant depots, but super tankers were not the first ship built, or even the first tanker built.
It makes little sense to develop a new launch vehicle if it’s going to be used only twice a year.
Let me rephrase that: it makes no sense whatsoever to do that.
Heavy lift always would have required increases to a budget that wasn’t going to budge. He still seems to be in cloudkookooland when it comes to this. A medium lift, fuel depot solution of the kind proposed by more than one group prior to ESAS would have been flexible enough to survive budget decreases. Hopefully that’s where we are heading, now.
The only way that anyone could consider Ares V to be the cheapest launcher $/kg is to throw out it’s development costs (and even more damning, tacking on the development costs of the Ares I that would have kept Cx busy while waiting for the Longfellow to be born. ) and at the same time ignore flight rates as well. I know Griffin is much smarter than this. He should just clam up and let the world move on.
If you already own a pick up truck, it makes little sense to purchase a moving van to switch apartments. You can do several trips for the cost of the down payment. Even coast to coast including the value of your time. Now if you can lease the same van for just the one use, then you have a different arguement.
Mike is wanting to compare fuel economy and driver hours per ton and not count the down payment and CDL qualification. Anything can be proved if you select only the data that agrees with you.
>…Constellation isn’t an improvement over the Shuttle in any significant
> way other than (possibly) crew safety, ===
I gather its expected to be much LESS safe then Shuttle, with possibly twice the fatality rate.
>== and in many ways it’s a step backwards, since it has much less capability.==
Oh HELL yeah! To go back to a crappy expensive, capsule on booster – fully expendable – system now a days — as a replacement for the partly reusable shuttles?? And spend MORE money to do it?!!
Its unconscionable.
Godzilla –
Yep. Ariane V was built with government funds. And Arianespace is now making a profit, partly because there are several different boosters available. And despite the bureaucratic hoops is has to fly through, being connected with a pan-European institution.
Is there any reason, other than the dislike of the USA for Europe, why Arianespace is not contracted to lift payloads to ISS? If it is because of dislike for Europe, why is NASA using Russian boosters despite the fact that Russia is much more of an international rival than Europe is?
It couldn’t be because America wants to strangle human presence in space in its cradle, could it?
Sorry. One more point; heavy launch with (relatively) unreliable boosters makes perfect sense, if the cost of losing the occasional payload is less than the safety measures that avoiding that loss would be. Which means that for structural members and propellant, such a “big dumb booster” makes sense.
Fit the vehicle to the job!
>… One more point; heavy launch with (relatively) unreliable boosters
> makes perfect sense, if the cost of losing the occasional payload is
> less than the safety measures that avoiding that loss would be. Which
> means that for structural members and propellant, such a “big
> dumb booster” makes sense.
Except, the dumb boosters are no less safe then the “high end” “man rated” boosters.
I’m a bit confused about how former NASA Administrator Griffin can quote Ares-V specifics, such as: “The Ares-5 offers the lowest cost-per-pound for payload to orbit of any presently known heavy-lift launch vehicle design.” in the same speech that he derides other “paper rockets” (or paper reactors in his analogy). It seems a bit hypocritical to me.
Kelly – Exactly my point. The heavy lift boosters currently being proposed are going to be designed and built to very high standards of reliability. How about going from 99% reliable to perhaps 95% at half the cost, for cheap payloads? Of course, this means that the launching system has to be either cheap or resistant to FAE fireballs or both, as well.
A heavy-lift booster is not per se a bad idea, but depends on transportation requirements.
At this point in the development of manned spaceflight HLVs are a bad idea because unlike depots they do not generate the flight rate that is needed to drive down the cost of launching humans into space. More affordable manned access to space will lead to more demand, thus setting in motion a virtuous cycle of greater launch volumes and lower costs. Even if HLVs were cheaper (and I doubt that given that payloads are the most expensive bit) it would be a wise investment to use depots. Or in-flight refueling. Any kind of in-flight refueling.