Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on two parallel universes, in which one has orders of magnitude higher costs than the other. As he notes, I too hope that the new administration will reside in the one with the low costs, but if it does, it will be fought tooth and nail by legislators to whom jobs are more important than either taxpayers’ money or progress in space.
[Update a while later]
I see that, amusingly, Mark Whittington is foolishly attempting to lecture his intellectual betters on matters that he doesn’t understand:
If the sole purpose of Ares/Orion was just to get people into low Earth orbit, Clark would certainly have a valid point. But the purpose of Ares/Orion is to get people into Low Earth Orbit in a vehicle (Orion) designed to go to the Moon. Dragon doesn’t have to go to the Moon. (Of course, imagining a Dragon that could do that, with the extra radiation shielding, the extra consumables, and so on would be an interesting thought experiment. Could a Falcon 9 Heavy still loft such a vehicle?).
There is vastly insufficient difference between a vehicle that goes to the moon and one that goes to LEO to justify the cost difference between Orion and Dragon. A lunar mission requires a) additional radiation shielding, b) twice the thickness of the entry heat shield and c) extra consumables (two of which he points out). That doesn’t translate into orders of magnitude in cost difference by any sane cost model. As for “lofting” it, it doesn’t need to be lofted in a single flight. Once you break out of the notion that you have to do everything in a single launch, it becomes easy to build both a spacious crew capsule, and a service module with abundant consumables. But Elon’s BFR follow on would even be able to “loft” it in one go, and I’d be willing to bet that he could get there on a billion dollars or less, extrapolating costs from Falcon 1 and 9 development. Again, this could be done at much less cost (both development and operational) than is currently planned for the Orion/Ares combination. What part of already spent ten billion on Ares without its even having passed a legitimate PDR, while Elon has only spent a small fraction of a billion does Mark not understand?
This is pork, not progress.
[Late afternoon update]
Now Mark says I (in addition to fantasizing that I claimed to be his intellectual better) that breaking up CM and SM would require three launches “in a short time.” No. They would require two launches, one for each system element, and one or many launches for propellant, but none of which, other than the CM launch, would have to occur in “a short time.” Propellant could be stored on orbit for an indefinitely long time with proper depot design, and there is nothing intrinsically in an SM that couldn’t allow weeks or months of on-orbit LEO storage.
I don’t know where this myth comes from. People who want to justify tens of billions for a heavy lifter, I guess.
But the purpose of Ares/Orion is to get people into Low Earth Orbit in a vehicle (Orion) designed to go to the Moon.
Heh, there’s also a vast difference between a vehicle “designed to go to the Moon” and a vehicle that actually goes to the Moon. The problem with an expensive program is that it is more likely to be canceled than one that is less expensive.
“The problem with an expensive program is that it is more likely to be canceled than one that is less expensive.”
In the NASAverse, more expensive programs kill less expensive programs to steal their funding. See Mars Science Laboratory.
I don’t “get it” with the notion that the Orion capsule is “designed to go to the Moon”.
I thought the #1 reason for pushing forward on the Orion was to get manned spaceflight capability back for NASA and to be able to service the ISS? Do you really need a vehicle that is capable of repeating the Apollo 8 mission in order to perform trips to the ISS?
The swiss-army knife attitude is what killed the Space Shuttle and compromised it in so many ways that it can’t be used any more. Designing a vehicle that does all things for all people is going to give you a vehicle that can’t do anything for anybody. Heck, give it sub-marine capabilities so it can explore the oceans of Europa while we are at it, not to mention the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
I really feel for the engineers who are working on this as well. They are putting forward a good solid effort here to build a vehicle, but are getting politics to screw things up in so many ways that their efforts are being wasted. I certainly have no doubt that the engineers working on Orion could come up with a much better vehicle if given a clean sheet and a legitimate mission that needs to be accomplished (servicing the ISS) they could get it built… and done cheaper and sooner than this monster of a spacecraft is getting done.
When Rand starts sounding all arrogant (“intellectual superior indeed!) I know I have hit the mark too closely.
What can I say. Every expert I talk to gets heart burn at the idea of too many multiple launches and dockings having to go off just right in a too short period of time for every mission to succeed.
Launching an Orion on a Falcon 9 Heavy, on the surface at least, would seem to have merit, though. One wonders why no one has seriously suggested it?
the purpose of Ares/Orion is to get people into Low Earth Orbit in a vehicle (Orion) designed to go to the Moon.
This is a great sentence. It really captures the whole problem, doesn’t it?
Launching an Orion on a Falcon 9 Heavy, on the surface at least, would seem to have merit, though. One wonders why no one has seriously suggested it?
Per Rand, there isn’t enough pork in that approach. Any plan that doesn’t have enough fat to find its way back into a Senator’s reelection campaign is a bad plan.
When Rand starts sounding all arrogant (”intellectual superior indeed!) I know I have hit the mark too closely.
I believe that’s a misdiagnosis, Mark. It’s your great distance from the mark, rather than your accuracy, that gets Rand excited. That plus the inverse relationship between your assessment of your knowledge and its actuality.
A lunar mission requires a) additional radiation shielding, b) twice the thickness of the entry heat shield and c) extra consumables (two of which he points out).
The Russians designed a capsule for manned Moon missions (Zond) that weighed 12,500 pounds. Jim Chamberlin designed Gemini L, which weighed just 7,000 pounds.
Gemini came in so light because of clever design. Instead of putting radiation shielding all around the capsule, for example, they just put radiation blankets (similar to those used for dental x-rays) over the pilots.
Clearly, it does not take a 43,000-pound Orion capsule, as Mark thinks. Compared to Zond or Gemini L, the 17,600-pound Dragon seems lavish.
By the way, has Mark ever stopped to consider that sending six astronauts to the Moon in a single capsule is freaking insane?
Any combat pilot knows you don’t undertake a combat mission without a wingman. Any scuba diver, spelunker, etc. knows you don’t go into unexplored territory alone. Columbus wasn’t foolish enough to try crossing the ocean in a single ship. Yet, that’s just what NASA is planning to do. If an Orion capsule runs into trouble, there’s no one around to help.
The safest architecture for sending a six-man mission to the Moon would involve three capsules, each carrying a two-man crew but with room for three crewmen in an emergency. That would provide an inherent rescue capability, and on routine missions, the extra space could be used for cargo.
Such an approach wouldn’t necessarily add to weight or cost. If you used a slightly scaled-up Gemini L, three such capsules would still weigh less than a single Orion. (And the Gemini L approach ought to be considered — if you’re one of the “capsule forever” guys with a built-in bias against reducing the cost of space transportation, cost-effectiveness says you should use the lightest capsule that can do the job.)
That doesn’t translate into orders of magnitude in cost difference by any sane cost model.
Does Mark use a sane cost model? Or any cost model? I have never seen the great self-proclaimed space analyst offer a single numerical analysis to support any of his pontifications.
What can I say. Every expert I talk to gets heart burn at the idea of too many multiple launches and dockings having to go off just right in a too short period of time for every mission to succeed.
What can you say? Good question, Mark. (Although, in English, it’s customary to end questions with question marks, not periods.)
For starters, you could tell us who those anonymous “experts” are.
You’re constantly whining about “anonymous” sources, but you don’t provide any verifiable source for your own claims.
Apart from Robert Oler, what “experts” do you talk to? Where and when do you talk to them? (No one in the space community seems to have met you in person.) What qualifies them as “experts”? Do they have “BAs in History”?
I guess your “experts” never heard of Project Gemini, where they timed multiple launches and docking with pinpoint precision. I guess that never happened, right?
Just like all those airplanes landing and taking off from airports, Air Force bases, and aircraft carriers, within very short periods of time. They don’t exist, either?
And what about the ICBM force and ballistic missile submarines. Obviously, those can’t work because your “experts” say they require “too many multiple launches having to go off just right in a too short period of time for every mission to succeed,” right?
No one in the world can possibly do anything that wasn’t done in the Apollo program — even if it’s something that other people are doing every day!
The assumption that multiple launches are required at near the same time doesn’t hold water although there’s nothing basically wrong with doing that.
Assume a Cislunar vehicle is composed of three parts the first being a central 25ton habitat(BA-330.) It can wait a long time (and be used for other things) before the rest of the ship (motor and lunar lander) needs to be docked with it. It can be provisioned the same way as the I.S.S. It has no need for one big rocket. Docking we know how to do.
Give Elon some experience with orbital fuel transfer and the whole things a done deal (the improvement with each handling of launch procedures should provide some indication of how things can be done.)
I’m assuming the extra heat shield is because of direct re-entry, but if you go into Earth orbit first, doesn’t that requirement go away? Don’t you want to bring the whole ship back to Earth orbit and use it again? I’m supposing this assumes orbital fuel transfer or at least tank swapping.
As for radiation shielding why not a loose fitting jumpsuit with a hood? Which is supplemented by a foot of laminate hull as well as supplies surrounding the crew.
Once SpaceX starts selling tickets to NASA and others; My hope is that free enterprise will kick in and other companies will start to compete. $30b vs. $300m seems like quite an opportunity to me.
I believe $100m for a BA-330 is high, yet it’s still well below the $30b mark.
$30 billion??? That should easily send ten different companies employees and ticket holding passengers to the Moon. The only thing we really seem to be missing now is a reusable lunar lander (one that doesn’t leave half of itself behind and can be refueled in orbit.)
It’s hard to reconcile the ‘can’t be done’ boys with the fact that it is being done (perhaps in slow motion) before our eyes.
Again one wonders if Apollo was never undertaken and US would have went to moon with Gemini options that were on the table.
Still woulda beaten the USSR as after Korolev passing N-1 didnt stand a chance of working, but we would have had an entirely different and more sustainable legacy.
There are blogs where some people want to retire the shuttle ‘because it can’t go to the Moon.’
My response generally was; “Yeah. So?”
They’re anxious to get back to Luna and/or on to Mars (which is essentially a good thing), but they leave behind nothing to get to LEO other than ballistic capsules on (mostly) expendables again.
In a rational universe, the shuttle (or another RLV of similar capacity) would, via multiple launches, put elements in LEO that would be assembled into something that could. It’s not as if it hasn’t been seriously considered before…
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/earccess.htm
The current plan with Orion is to take 4 astronauts to the moon. The 6 passenger version is strictly for going to ISS. It still looks pretty cramped for 4 passengers though.
I think there are many engineers working on Orion that would rather see it launched from Atlas 5 or Falcon 9 (or Ariane 5 or Delta 4).
Orion is shaping up to be a very capable capsule, but it’s not going anywhere if Ares development sucks up all the money.
In my opinion, the decision to pay for lunar vehicle development by drawing down STS and ISS operations was regrettable at best. Why would anyone want to eliminate a currently operational vehicle before a suitable replacement is available? Why would one abandon our one foothold in space before another facility has been built?
At the risk of using a couple of stretched metaphors… Would we think it wise for the Air Force to have started retiring F16’s in order to pay for the development of the F22’s? Should we abandon McMurdo station so we could focus our efforts on building a new outpost at the South Pole?
When Rand starts sounding all arrogant (”intellectual superior indeed!) I know I have hit the mark too closely.
For me to refer to Clark as Mark’s intellectual better is “all arrogant”? You not only missed the mark, you were firing in the opposite direction of it.
The Space News figure is wrong. If you go to NASA’s budget documents, the total amount spent on Constellation to date is $5.9 billion, and that includes Ares I, Orion, and other stuff.
Considering that the budget documents are public, Space News should not have relied on an anonymous source for their figures.
The Space News figure is wrong. If you go to NASA’s budget documents, the total amount spent on Constellation to date is $5.9 billion, and that includes Ares I, Orion, and other stuff.
Oh.
OK.
So NASA has only spent twenty times as much as SpaceX has, while only having view graphs and pseudoPDR, as opposed to hardware flown or through CDR. Yes, that completely changes the point of the post.
“Yes, that completely changes the point of the post.”
Facts matter.
Facts matter.
No, only relevant facts matter. That’s why we have the word “relevant.” Irrelevant facts are called “trivia.”
For your facts to matter, you would have to provide a rational argument to show $5.9 billion is a cost-effective investment.
> I really feel for the engineers who are working on this as well.
> ==
> I certainly have no doubt that the engineers working on Orion
> could come up with a much better vehicle if given a clean sheet ===
Actually they did come up with a better craft. For the life support and cooling a lot of it is cut down and downgraded versions of old upgrade designs for shuttle.
😉
But yes Orion is a mess. In many ways inferior to capsules of the ’60’s. . but compared to Ares I its a jewel.
;/
> This is pork, not progress.
Pork gets voter support come election day.
Hmmmm.
“When Rand starts sounding all arrogant (”intellectual superior indeed!) I know I have hit the mark too closely.”
I’d suggest that the “Mark” you should be looking to “hit” would be to add something useful to the discussion. Personally I’m very much an observer rather than a participant.
But still I’d appreciate it if, amongst all the useful information, you didn’t sprinkle your dreck.