…that we can build human outposts on the moon. Some useful thoughts from Richard Mains.
As he notes, we’re putting the cart before the horse when we insist on an architecture, right now, that can get us back to the moon, or anywhere beyond LEO. We cannot even get into LEO cost effectively (that’s what all the space policy fuss has really been about for the past five years), and until we solve that problem, it is crazy talk to think about lunar bases. Again this mentality is driven by the flawed myths of Apollo, in which we sprinted to the moon, bypassing LEO because we didn’t have time, and then abandoned it because it couldn’t be politically or affordably sustained. (By the way, another bit of historical ignorance on Krauthammer’s part was his worship of JFK as the visionary who led us there, when in fact he had doubts about it early on, was never a big fan of space, and it’s likely that it would have died if he hadn’t). As Richard says, we need to establish a solid foothold in LEO before we can think about the best way to go beyond it, and that means developing truly routine and affordable access to it. That’s the fundamental basis of the Space Access Society, because Henry Vanderbilt and others realized long ago that until we can afford to get into orbit, it’s pointless to dream about points beyond.
Right after the Columbia was lost, I wrote a piece along this theme:
I’ve written before about the fragility and brittleness of our space transportation infrastructure. I was referring to the systems that get us into space, and the ground systems that support them.
But we have an even bigger problem, that was highlighted by the loss of the Columbia on Saturday. Our orbital infrastructure isn’t just fragile–it’s essentially nonexistent, with the exception of a single space station at a high inclination, which was utterly unreachable by the Columbia on that mission.
Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had if they’d known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.
As it was, even if they’d known that the ship couldn’t safely enter, there was nothing they could do. And in fact, the knowledge that there were no solutions may have subtly influenced their assessment that there wasn’t a problem.
The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.
NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.
Constellation did nothing toward that end. It in fact completely ignored the requirement, repeating Apollo with another unsustainable sprint across the wilds. The new policy holds some promise, finally, of addressing it.
This all makes my heart go pitter pat. “We choose…to create a commercial space taxi service in this decade and…do nothing else.” Inspiration for the ages.
This all makes my heart go pitter pat. “We choose…to create a commercial space taxi service in this decade and…do nothing else.” Inspiration for the ages.
This almost sounds like something that would come out of your oft mentioned Internet Rocketeers’ Club community. Speaking of “inspiration” when things don’t go your way and you have no good reason to expect they would.
OTOH, poor little ol’ me was dreadfully uninspired by the Ares I and the harm it did and would continue to do to commercial space flight in the US. The possibility that it might cease to exist in the US budget as it does in reality, brings a spring to my step.
Look, I’m as concerned as the next guy about the absence of a real plan and some of the iffy stuff (like not having an idea what the numbers would be until two days before) associated with this administration’s treatment of NASA and space exploration. But this 2010 budget request is an improvement over where we were with Ares.
As you may recall, Ares I on paper exceeded the Delta IV Heavy. It had to lift a capsule that conveniently weighed about 20% more than the Delta IV Heavy could lift, which along with the Atlas V Heavy would have been just fine as manned space vehicles. Now we find that Ares I didn’t have the performance or safety that was advertised, that the ESAS was heavily biased towards choosing the Ares I, and we’re many years behind on our manned space program and a HLV (assuming it’s even a good idea to have) because the past administration chose Ares.
Good riddance.
Yeah developing LEO is nice. But how many space stations did the Soviet Union have? Did they ever get out of LEO? Not really. The big ticket item is ISRU. We need to learn how to live out of the fat of the land. Being stranded in LEO is not going to help that much.
I do not even care if exploration is initially done using robotic platforms. We need some way stations. Sure.
However we need to develop infrastructure for depots and refueling depots without bringing the propellants and construction parts all the way from the bottom of the gravity well down in Earth. Which was the point of going to the Moon and NEOs to begin with. Hello NASA LUNOX propaganda. I am talking about you and your friends.
Either we do ISRU or someone needs to invent another propulsion method. Propellantless propulsion would be nice (hah). Electric is interesting but you still need some sort of reaction mass. This would be reasonable if the mass was actually easy to get anywhere. We need to be able to use more kinds of mass or no mass at all. Something with good enough thrust to visit nearby celestial bodies please.
I agree with Karl. Was it that hard to design a capsule that could be launched in an EELV? I mean the Russians can launch Soyuz in something with less payload capacity than even the smallest Atlas V IIRC. Why did they have to make it a monster which required a whole new rocket?
Ares I made no sense. A heavier launch vehicle could make sense IMO but should have been developed from existing EELV parts in order to get economies of scale. Even if it required funding regen RS-68 it would have been fine if changes were rolled back into the main production line.
Tell you what Mark, spend your own damn money on ‘inspiration’, I want value for mine…
Building an infrastructure that allows regular, economic access to LEO will permit an infrastruture that supports operations beyond LEO over time. This is how you get to ISRU, and the rest of the gooides… Sending a few government-certified supermen to the moon every quarter isn’t going to bring us one iota closer to becoming a true spacefaring species, and nothing less than that is a worthy use for the billions that it will cost.
“Tell you what Mark, spend your own damn money on ‘inspiration’, I want value for mine…”
I must agree. If Apollo is an example, ‘inspiration’ will last for about the first three Lunar missions. Commercial aviation and aerospace (and maritume, for that matter) continues to ‘inspire’ a certain class of people even today however, partly because they know there’s a fair chance they can participate directly in it in some manner.
You have a better shot at professional sports than being a government astronaut however. Even less so, post-Shuttle.
@Frank,
Not even three. Apollo 13 was going to be the third lunar landing, and they couldn’t even get airtime for their mid-course announcement until it looked like they were all going to die.
Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had if they’d known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.
This is an incredibly simplistic statement. If STS 107 had gone to the station then the tragedy would not have happened but Columbia could not reach the station with any payload.
In a lower inclination orbit they would have had to have launched to that orbit which would have had to be higher than where they went or they would have rapidly gone out of phase with whatever facility was around.
If they had known about the problem when they got on orbit does anyone seriously think that NASA would have not moved heaven and the EArth to get a rescue shuttle up there? It was possible to do so, but no one really paid much attention to the issue and Columbia was cleared to land with no thought that the RCC was fatally compromised.
So the problem is not that there was no facility, but that the safety process had not identified foam loss as an orbiter threatening condition.
“Columbia could not reach the station with any payload.”
Columbia was slated to go to ISS on STS-118.
You must be a NASA guy.
Columbia was slated to go to ISS on STS-118.
How about less payload than any of the other orbiters. The fact is that STS-107 was a mission that was never going to go to the station and did not have the airlock to do so.
I take back that part about being a NASA guy.
That was uncalled for.
How about walking and chewing gum at the same time? Yes, we need cheap access to LEO. No, we don’t know how to do that – so experiment until we do, or find out “cheap” isn’t.
In the meantime… work on lunar habitats on an experimental scale, so we can do colonisation/development when the economics allow it.
So the problem is not that there was no facility, but that the safety process had not identified foam loss as an orbiter threatening condition.
My understanding is that the safety process had indeed correctly identified foam loss as an orbiter threatening condition to the point that they looked for it on each launch. The problem was that they didn’t have a plan for what to do when it occurred, other than hope.
Ares I on paper exceeded the Delta IV Heavy. It had to lift a capsule that conveniently weighed about 20% more than the Delta IV Heavy could lift
Assuming the Delta existed and Ares was just on paper… it’s gross mismanagement to go for 20% more lift when you can get it done with an existing rocket at a known expense. So you have to make a smaller capsule perhaps and it takes six instead of five launches for the same weight. Obviously no adult was in charge.
“But how many space stations did the Soviet Union have?”
They had one, and were going to allow it to turn into a commercial station and would have provided soyaz flights to it. That would cut off any commercial competion to NASA and it’s ISS plans. I believe it was NASA who strong armed them to deorbit it instead and NASA would use the soyaz for their personal and pay for some of the russian modules to the ISS.
Unless my history is wrong in this area.
“Not even three.”
Correct. I remember how they went through the motions of showing the ‘viewing public’ around the interior of the craft, prior to the fuel cell tank rupture, that no one was really watching. They likely would’ve gotten minimal attention, had they not…had a problem.
But that sort of drama’s not what anyone wants. (and at that time, it only helped revive the ‘manned vs. unmanned’ debate)
We can do lunar bases cost effectively. Put out a fixed-price RFP for $3B for a one-year occupancy US lunar base and see what comes back.
Vladislaw,
With all due respect, the Mir lasted three times its designed life and had reached the point where it just didn’t pay to keep it in orbit. Fortunately Russia found someone who was willing to pay for it to be safely deorbited so it didn’t come down like Skylab.
As expected it seems no one cares that much about space stations. The Soviet Union launched a lot of space stations before Mir. The Salyut program launched nine single module space stations over 11 years. The space station design evolved during this period. Mir was a later design for a multiple-module space station. Russian segment ISS modules were based off components initially designed for the Mir 2 space station.
I guess the US equivalent to Salyut would have been Skylab. But that was a much shorter program and AFAIK only one space station was launched since NASA stupidly canned the Saturn family of launchers. I say stupidly, because had they not dropped expendables based on F-1, J-2, RL-10 engines, Titan IV, Atlas V, Delta IV would not have been necessary at all. Nor would it have been necessary to buy Russian engines to power the Atlas V first stage. Had the F-1 engine actually been used in smaller rockets, the price would have come down gradually. We would not be having this question about super heavy lift either since all the components would still be available off the shelf.
If there is one thing the Russians have demonstrated with Soyuz is that if you keep launching the same rocket and making steady refinements the cost comes down, way down, as time goes by.
Shuttle was an interesting idea, but flawed in many ways. The Apollo-Shuttle gap was also the reason Skylab had to deorbited in the first place, since there was no way to provide station reboost. A sign of things to come with ISS?
Rand
I confess confusion. I know you opposed HLV, ESAS and the Constellation project, but I thought you supported VSE. Are you now saying VSE was always a mistake?
Rand,
While I agree that we don’t yet know how to build lunar bases that will for-sure work, the only way to get to the point where we know how to build a lunar base will be to try in an environment where failure is not just an option but an assumed part of the process. I don’t think that we per se have to wait until we have low-cost access to space before we can start figuring things out, and for a long time I’ve thought that there are some potential ways where attacking the problem from both ends could speed things up substantially compared to attacking it from just one end or the other.
For instance, cryo propellant depots are one of the single best early markets from RLVs, but in order to justify their existence, you probably need beyond LEO transportation demand. A very small manned lunar program like what I’ve talked about in my various Light Scout or Lunar One Way to Stay ideas combined with a focus on in-space infrastructure and investment into some critical RLV technologies (like reusable TPS for instance) might actually get us there quicker than attacking the problems in series.
But that’s just my $.02, and more importantly, I don’t have a huge amount of faith in NASA being able to carry out a “low cost minimalist manned lunar program” in anything resembling a cost-effective manner.
~Jon
I called this a long time ago. Ares was the logical conclusion to NASA as a one-stop shop for launch design/operation/payload. Eventually there had to arise a program so utterly bloated by political considerations and managerial incompetence that the agency would eat its own lunch. It was a spectacularly successful failure.
Are you now saying VSE was always a mistake?
No, but I am pointing out that attempting to carry it out without developing affordable access to orbit, and an orbital infrastructure to support it was. Certainly repeating Apollo, even on “steroids,” was a mistake.
For instance, cryo propellant depots are one of the single best early markets from RLVs, but in order to justify their existence, you probably need beyond LEO transportation demand.
Yes, and that means you need a spacecraft and missions for it. That is actually more crucial than the depots themselves, since with in-flight refueling the spacecraft itself can double as a makeshift depot. That gets one of the two spacecraft off the critical path and off the budget. And perhaps out of the hands of our friends at MSFC.
Note that beyond LEO doesn’t necessarily mean beyond GEO. There are plenty of interesting things to do anywhere from LEO all the way up to and including GEO: radiation research, endurance tests, test flights, simulated Mars/NEO missions, orbital repairs, shuttling between the ISS and a man-tended free flyer, refueling GEO sats. All these are even manned missions and are sensible preparations for real exploration.
All that could be done with a refuelable lander precursor. It could be cryogenic, but it doesn’t have to be. This would be much more useful than doing missions with a capsule on a wet-launched EDS but without propellant transfer, both because it supports much more exciting (yet safer) missions and more importantly because it would consume lots of propellant.
Activities that consume propellant also don’t have to be manned. Another thing you could do is to have refuelable NEO probes loitering at L1/L2 awaiting discovery of a nearby NEO. With 3.2km/s lopped of the delta-v, with a much larger propellant load than you could ever achieve without propellant transfer and with an operational responsiveness that cannot be beaten with launch straight from the Earth this could be a winner.
Plenty of NEOs of many different types and sizes too, so this could consume lots of propellant and provide lots of scientific data. If nothing else, stick a transponder on a couple of NEOs. Note that these would qualify as robotic precursor missions.
You could do something similar with unmanned moon missions, perhaps telerobotic ones like JSC’s Project M. Launch the lander on an EELV and refuel it at L1/L2. You could land much more payload this way. This would be more exciting, but also more expensive than the NEO missions.
Launching sand or even horse piss would be another option, but that wouldn’t provide value. I say let’s find an application that will 1) provide real value and 2) consume lots of propellant and do so 3) as soon as possible and 4) as cheaply as possible and 5) with as little risk as possible. That requires a spacecraft and a mission. Soon.
Let’s drop the unnecessary constraints: insisting on a full depot instead of in-flight refueling, and insisting on cryogenics. Those have been taken care of with the cryo depot research that’s already being planned. Let’s focus only on the stuff that matters for RLVs or cheap expendables.
Done right, this demand for propellant in LEO and at L1/L2, coupled with demand for propellant transport services between the two could lead ULA to develop EELV Phase 1 and cryogenic depots on their own dime. How’s that for a market driven approach?
Equating Constellation with the VSE is kinda strange for this site.
I absolutely hate the idea of searching for justifications for propellant depots. There’s already a lot of intelligent people who have recognized the “simplifications” that propellant depot advocates have tried to pass off as reality. For example, whereas some reasonable people have suggested that cryogenic propellant transfer be experimented with on the ISS, others have advocated that the ISS could be used as a depot for vehicles bound for the Moon. Of course, if you wanna burn fuel for little gain, changing orbital inclination will do it.
I absolutely hate the idea of searching for justifications for propellant depots.
Why? Using depots is an excellent way to jump start RLVs or cheap expendables, which in turn will be an enormous help to opening up space. If you have to launch the propellant anyway, why not do it this way? It doesn’t cost you any extra money and it gives a lot of additional benefit.
Changing the inclination of the ISS is a red herring. It’s a solution to a non-problem.
“No, but I am pointing out that attempting to carry it out without developing affordable access to orbit, and an orbital infrastructure to support it was.”
So indefinite deferral of NASA manned missions beyond LEO is now fine? And exactly what qualifies as affordable access to orbit? Does the Obama plan really qualify?
I’m not trying to be petty, I’m just surprised at your enthusiasm for the Obama NASA plan, a plan which seems like a very mixed bag to me. Much good, but much bad too.
It looks to me like the Obama plan is — endlessly spend money on deep space R&D without ever spending money on an actual manned deep space mission. And most of that endless spending is on HLV to boot! Despite the happy talk from Bolden and Garver, the new plan sounds to me like a retreat to the Clinton years of nothing but LEO ops.
Should anyone believe that a clean sheet design NASA HLV will fly sometime between 2020 and 2030, as Bolden claims? And even if it is true, wouldn’t that project just end up another dead end for NASA while squandering perhaps more than two decades of time? I don’t see much hope at the end of that tunnel.
So indefinite deferral of NASA manned missions beyond LEO is now fine?
If there’s going to be no attempt to lower costs, yes. It’s a huge waste of money until we do.
And exactly what qualifies as affordable access to orbit? Does the Obama plan really qualify?
It at least has the potential to do so. Constellation never did.
Godzilla:
The big ticket item is ISRU.
I couldn’t agree more, but the problem is that NASA and its contractors don’t do ISRU. They’re aerospace engineers, not mining engineers. ISRU instead of rockets means lost jobs for NASA aerospace engineers and hiring a bunch of new unknown people to doing something that NASA managers have no clue about. Try selling that to Senator Shelby and see what clever insults he can make up about moon miners.
Let me get this straight: we need NASA to wisely disburse tens of billions of federal funds borrowed from the Chinese in order to (1) send astronauts to the moon (or wherever, just as long as it’s not boring old LEO) in order to (2) development a nonexistent market for on-orbit cryogenic propellants, in order to (3) develop a nonexistent technology and market for cryo propellant depots, in order to (4) develop a hypothetical market for orbital RLVs. Rube Goldberg would be proud!
Nothing about whether or why real commercial space (satellites) or the military would pay for propellants they can’t use in orbit, or the preposterously compliciated depots to store them, instead of sticking with storables or evolving to electric propulsion. It’s NASA to the moon or bust!
And they’d gosh darn well better be *cryogenic* propellants, so that NASA doesn’t look so bad when they spend billions making things that don’t work as advertised. After all nobody else has made it work either. None of that Defense Department heresy about how storable propellants actually make more sense for, you know, storing propellants. No irreligious thoughts from the depot deniers about how electric propulsion may soon end up making more sense for almost everything deep space cryo propellants are speculated to be used for. Nope, it’s cryo or bust, full speed ahead on the taxpayers’ (or Chinese creditors’) billions.
Constellation was far better planned and far less of a temptation to boondoggle than this. (No, I don’t support Constellation).
Googaw,
I agree with most of your comments, and I don’t understand why you are so strongly opposed to the idea of using depots to jump start commercial development of space. I’m also not sure if you are reacting specifically to my earlier comments. Are you?
The argument only says that if there is going to be exploration at all, then the simple device of using propellant depots to stimulate the launch market is likely to lead to the development of launch vehicles that will enable the most promising fully commercial activity in LEO, namely orbital sightseeing. This leaves open the question of whether we should do exploration at all.
Do you think there is a shorter way to RLVs or other forms of affordable access to space or do you think there is a more promising initial market than sightseeing? Personally I don’t think a rerun of SLI and VentureStar is likely to be more successful this time round.
On the issue of cryogenics: they probably do not require fantastically complicated technology at all. Have you read some of Jon Goff’s recent articles on this? And for the record, I’m strongly in favour of using noncryogenic propellants, provided this is restricted to landers, probes, satellites and the like, not EDSs, later augmented by and perhaps ultimately replaced by cryogenics. I believe this would be a way to get nearly all of the benefits that proponents of commercial development of space want much sooner. Sadly, I find myself in a very small minority on this, for whatever reason depot proponents do not seem willing to address the issue substantively. Which is their right of course.
I may be missing some sort of point here; but is storing cryogenics in tanks in orbit actually all that difficult?
The only significant source of heat that might induce boil-off in such tanks is the Sun. (Maybe the radiant heat from Earth could cause problems with deep cryogenics like liquid hydrogen – my physics is too rusty to work that one out.)
So the way to stop boil-off is that extremely sophisticated piece of technology known as a sunshade. A few hundred square metres of reflective Mylar would suffice. If not exposed to solar radiation, such tanks would then be exposed to temperatures of approximately 3K – the CMB would then be essentially the only heat input.
Depends on how long you want to store it, what propellant we’re talking about and where. Even in the worst case (LH2 in LEO) you could probably afford to store it for weeks. At L1/L2, months to a year, perhaps longer for LOX and methane. Years would be problematic and this is what you would need if you wanted to preposition propellant in Mars orbit by SEP. That would not be the only way to do it of course.
Re: cryo depots
Every space fan seems to have a favorite architecture, which some cling to in Augustine’s immortal phrase, “religiously.” Cryogenic fuel depots seem to fit in this category, especially for advocates of near term lunar missions.
I myself think that fuel depots are an excellent idea, but I agree that cryogenic depots are far from ideal. First off cryogenic depots may be a dead end which sidetracks superior technology such as electric propulsion. And secondly non-cryogenic propellants are easier to make depots practical.
Not because a cryo depot is more complicated, but because systems delivering non-cryo propellant to a depot can be smaller, simpler and cheaper, thereby improving competition and lowering the cost to deliver propellant to the depot. The problem isn’t boil-off losses and storage complications for the depot so much, as it is for the rockets (or guns!) delivering the propellant.
Imagine ammonia propellant NTR propulsion. A non-cryogenic depot system could service such an architecture while preserving a rocket ISP higher than the best current LOX/LH2 rockets. All the advantages of storables and cryo chemical rockets, combined.
So indefinite deferral of NASA manned missions beyond LEO is now fine?
“Indefinite deferral” is a loaded phrase. Constellation had a target of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2020. That date was defined by it was by no means definite — there was significant doubt that NASA would make it. Saying the date for NASA manned missions beyond LEO is now “indefinite” simply means it hasn’t been defined — it could occur earlier or later than 2020.
I’m actually a fan of ammonia NTR for Mars missions. Still, by the time we’re ready to go to Mars, we’re likely to have cryogenic depots too. I’m not happy about putting NTR on the critical path to propellant flights however, since that seems like an unnecessary delay.
Ed
Bolden has said two very interesting things in his interviews: first that HLV is necessary and he hopes it will first fly sometime between 2020 and 2030, and second that international cooperation is necessary for beyond LEO missions. Put those two together and it spells 2030. Maybe.
In political terms, planning for a first mission as far out as 2030 is as good as saying never. I think I was being charitable when I said, “indefinite deferral.”
Martin
Perhaps. But if non-cryogenic depots come first, I think it would an easier path to use ammonia NTR to Mars (or the Moon for that matter) than create a new cryogenic depot infrastructure. The economic and operational advantages of delivering storables instead of cryogenics to LEO depots are strong.
Another point – are “manned missions beyond LEO the only figure of merit”? If so, why?
General Bolden has said he wants to enable hundreds, then thousands of people to visit and live in LEO, while NASA prepares for trips beyond.
Do you see no value in that? Wouldn’t thousands of people living in Earth orbit be a significant accomplishment in itself? Shouldn’t we consider that as part of the equation?
Is enabling a thousand people to live and work in space worth less than landing one astronaut on the Moon by 2020? 5? 10?
Ed
I like the fact that Obama is promoting commercial manned flight to LEO. But that doesn’t blind me to the bad aspects of Obama’s plan.
Obama is trying to have things both ways. Canceling VSE while still claiming to promote manned exploration. It’s all politics. He want’s to cancel exploration while avoiding the political price of that. His administration doesn’t have the honesty of proclaiming that LEO is where NASA should focus and that beyond LEO exploration is premature for the foreseeable future.
Bolden has said two very interesting things in his interviews: first that HLV is necessary and he hopes it will first fly sometime between 2020 and 2030
Not exactly. He said he *believes* an HLV is necessary — which is why he’s investing in the R&D — and that the decision to build it will be made by one of his successors. That’s not quibbling — those are crucial distinctions.
Bolden is quite properly not putting all his eggs in one basket — whether it’s heavy lift or fuel depots — and it’s obvious that he is open to having his mind changed at some point.
Furthermore, he did *not* say that there would be no manned missions beyond LEO before the HLV is built. It’s easy to imagine a two-stage program that starts will small-scale missions that do not require an HLV.
I’m not saying that’s what Bolden has in mind. I don’t think he has any specific architecture in mind at the moment — and that’s a good thing.
In political terms, planning for a first mission as far out as 2030 is as good as saying never.
Is it better to have a plan that says the first mission will occur in 2020 if you can’t execute it until 2030? Or at all?
Canceling VSE while still claiming to promote manned exploration.
The Bush Vision of Space Exploration does not equal “manned exploration.” We can have one without the other.
His administration doesn’t have the honesty of proclaiming that LEO is where NASA should focus and that beyond LEO exploration is premature for the foreseeable future.
If you’re willing to call a Marine Corps Major General dishonest, you’re a braver man than I am, Brad. I take General Bolden at his word. If he says he’s interested in things like nuclear rocket engines because they will be useful for trips beyond LEO, that’s good enough for me.
Ed
We will just have to agree to disagree.
One thing I find so disturbing is how many people are seeing exactly what they want to see from the most recent Obama NASA budget proposal. Don’t let the administration play you for a sucker the way so many Obama voters were played.
Don’t let the administration play you for a sucker the way so many Obama voters were played.
I was an Obama voter??????
Wow, who knew that “Bob Barr” was a nickname for Barack Obama?
Sigh. I was making an analogy. I was not calling you an Obama voter. Settle down.
Martijn Meijering
Do you think there is a shorter way to RLVs or other forms of affordable access to space?
There are at least two shorter ways:
(1) Evolve the ELV style of launching into RLV by starting to recover the lower stages, probably in mid-air, and progressing from there. It’s an evolutionary approach that can be funded mostly by commercial and DoD satellite launch customers: i.e. with real commerce instead of pretend “commerce” where NASA is the only real customer. This is basically Space-X’s approach with the Falcon series.
(2) Develop full RVs for space tourism a la Virgin Galactic. But per keep the temptation of NASA funding with its man-rating bureaucracy very far away from these people!
Notice that neither of these rely on NASA gold-plated “infrastructure”, bridges-to-nowhere projects like the Shuttle, ISS and Constellation. Indeed, they wisely minimize reliance on NASA at all. Neither rely on the Rube Goldberg idea of NASA building “infrastructure” based on a speculative technology in order to “develop” a hypothetical market in order to provide speculative demand for yet another hypothetical market.
Martijn Meijering:
I’m strongly in favour of using noncryogenic propellants, provided this is restricted to landers, probes, satellites and the like, not EDSs,
What EDS? Who is paying for this EDS? As for military and private customers they should be free to choose whichever propellants they find most useful — it should not be dictated by NASA or space activists. We should be listening to them, not vice versa. (That’s a very important part of real commerce that seems to be lost on most NewSpace activists — listening to the customer. There’s even a whole profession whose job that it is, product management. Y’all should read up on product management).
Commercial space means using space for useful things in the most affordable ways, and that is not something NASA knows how to do very well. So the very worst customer to sign up as customer #1 is NASA. What NASA wants you to do is unlikely to be very useful or affordable to your other customers. Your best customer #1 is a private customer, and second best is DoD as long as it is something that strongly resembles what private customers want. If NASA is your first big customer there is a very high probability that you are not doing real commerce — you are just joining Orbital Sciences in the NASA contractor game. (Orbital Sciences, too, started out with dreams of private commerce for which NASA was only supposed to be seed funding).
If I still haven’t convinced you, at least develop a reasonable R&D plan. As Brad says, a non-cryo depot is far simpler and far lower risk than a cryo depot. (It’s also far more useful for real customers, but forget about that for this paragraph). Separate your concerns. The two main innovations you desire: (1) depots, and (2) on-orbit long-term cryo storage. In R&D terms these are separate concerns and should two completely distinct R&D projects: (1) a depot using storable propellants, and (2) long-term cryogenic storage. Only when the two have been proven to work in space with low-cost unmanned missions, and only if there is a non-NASA market, do you then go to step (3) and combine them. Lumping them all together into a gold-plated “infrastructure” project (and even throwing gold-plated astronauts on top of it all?!) is the formula for the next ISS-style white elephant.
[Bolden said] HLV is necessary and he hopes it will first fly sometime between 2020 and 2030
What is this HLV good for besides sending Bolden’s astronaut pals on billion-dollar taxpayer-funded joyrides?
This all makes my heart go pitter pat. “We choose…to create a commercial space taxi service in this decade and…do nothing else.” Inspiration for the ages.
How about getting your quotes right for once, Mark? What General Bolden *really* said was, “to make travel to low Earth orbit and beyond more accessible and more affordable. Imagine enabling hundreds, even thousands of people to visit or live in low Earth orbit, while NASA firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizon beyond Earth.”
Yeah, who could possibly be inspired by that? Voyaging to new destinations, like the asteroids, the Lagrange points, the moons of Mars, Venus — worthless! Far better to rerun Apollo every 50 years, because you don’t want America to take risks or try anything new. (Eyeballs rolling.)