…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.
Heheh, this a funny situation. Googaw and Brad are urging me to consider starting with storable propellant transfer as at least a precursor, with cryogenic propellant transfer as an optional upgrade. As Rand and other regulars can testify I’m not prone to advocating cryogenics where storables will do. It does seem I’m not able to communicate as effectively as I would like to, neither with opponents nor with supporters of the idea. 🙂
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.
Your argument is almost identical to my own argument against starting with cryogenics. Of course it’s not the depots themselves I’m after, it’s first commercial propellant flights, then cheaper access to space, then commercial development of space, most likely in the form of orbital sightseeing. If NASA is going to do exploration, then this would be a golden opportunity to stimulate R&D that will lead to cheaper access to space. This is much more likely to be successful than a rerun of SLI and VentureStar. The other consideration is that without high flight rates, the market will not invest in cheaper access to space. It is just too risky and expensive, the business case does not close.
In other words, NASA exploration could be a golden opportunity to open up space. To be sure, there are other ways, such as slowly upgrading commercial suborbital hops and those will happen independently of NASA. But propellant launches could accelerate all this enormously. Why not seize this opportunity when it presents itself? This dual use of propellant (stimulating the launch industry and fueling spacecraft) doesn’t cost a penny extra. That’s the advantage of this approach over Pournelle’s idea of buying sand in orbit.
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.
That’s why I’m advocating starting with just a refuelable spacecraft that can double as a makeshift depot and starting with storable propellants. You would still want to use cryogenic propulsion to get to L1/L2 and further, but you can do that without propellant transfer initially. The spacecraft is the only piece of hardware that NASA would have to develop or preferably procure. If it wants to do exploration it needs one anyway. If they start with the spacecraft they could start doing missions far earlier than if they start with a launch vehicle or even an EDS. Once they had the spacecraft, they would have to start using it and to start buying propellant for it. The best way to do this might be both in LEO and at L1/L2, combined with buying propellant transfer services between the two. The market will then take care of developing a transport infrastructure from Earth to LEO and from LEO to L1/L2. It may involve RLV, cheap expendables, partially reusable hybrids, SEP tugs, cryo depots, maybe a small HLV like EELV Phase 1. It’s fun to speculate what would happen and what would be best, but it would be market forces that decide what happens.
OK, time for a quick comm check:
Do you agree there’s a difference between 1) advocating exploration to jump start commercial development of space and 2) being neutral about this but insisting that if it’s done at all it should at least be done in such a way that it benefits commercial development of space?
Martijn Meijering:
Do you agree there’s a difference between 1) advocating exploration to jump start commercial development of space and 2) being neutral about this but insisting that if it’s done at all it should at least be done in such a way that it benefits commercial development of space?
Sure, but there’s a third position that’s often even better, (3) opposing space programs that waste taxpayer money, that take money or attention away from more valuable projects, or both of these. The fact is that NASA has spent hundreds of billions of dollars with the rationale of jump-starting space commerce, and since some success in the 1960s in jump-starting unmanned commerce there is very little commerce to show for it. The same arguments for NASA to build operational depots now are the same ones I heard that ended in throwing vast sums down the ratholes of Shuttle and ISS. The DoD has a much better track record (GPS, recon satellites/Google Earth) because they do useful things on about the scale and in about the way that real commerce is interested in.
Do you agree that NASA should be doing just NACA- or ARPA-style R&D for depots, and leave all design, construction, and operation of any actual infrastructure to private businesses with primarily commercial customers?
To which I’d add DoD as a customer, since they also do useful and properly scaled things, but I exclude oversized and gold-plated NASA astronaut missions as useful customers for our purposes. The oversizing and gold-plating used for astronaut “infrastructure” (e.g. ISS, Shuttle) or exploration (e.g. Constellation or related VSE spectulars) are far out of the range and scale and affordability useful to commerce.
My rationale for favoring some depot R&D different from yours. I don’t buy the Rube Goldberg theory of stimulating RLV markets, but I do see depots in some fashion (the exact specs of which in terms of propellants, orbits, and so on which we cannot currently predict) playing a role in increasing the flexibility of DoD and commercial operations in the future, and eventually also becoming an essential part of the ISRU infrastructure. And there’s nothing useful, as opposed to symbolic, in sending astronauts anywhere beyond LEO until we are doing ISRU. So I’m in favor of depot R&D for its probable long-term benefits, but it is extremely premature to start planning it as “infrastructure” or counting on it to open up a speculative chain of hypothetical technologies and markets.
Do you agree that NASA should be doing just NACA- or ARPA-style R&D for depots, and leave all design, construction, and operation of any actual infrastructure to private businesses with primarily commercial customers?
Yes, with two caveats.
Firstly I don’t think it is crucial that NASA should stay out of the spacecraft business. As long as they don’t build launchers, crew return vehicles, full depots and habs it’s fine with me. Preferably pretty much everything NASA does would be subcontracted, the way ESA does it, but not all of it is crucial.
Secondly I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for NASA to be in the exploration business, provided it seeks maximum synergy with science, commercial development of space and other plausible endeavours that could have synergy with exploration. I’m not arguing for spending taxpayers’ money on it, just arguing for the synergy should the exploration be decided upon anyway. In this case it would be fine if private industry operated infrastructure like depots that would be mostly used by NASA.
This is no different than what’s currently planned for crew rotation services. Hopefully Bigelow and others will eventually be much larger customers of these services, but for the near future it will be mostly NASA. What would be important is that this infrastructure should be available to commercial users as well. Of course, for a depot the main initial benefit to commercial space would be to sell propellant to a depot, not to buy it.
We clearly disagree on the importance of depots. For me they have three reasons: jump starting commercial development of space, being able to do exploration even if there is no funding for an HLV, and giving flexibility, in that order of importance. Since you do not believe in the first reason, it seems logical you don’t see depots as urgent. In that case I would agree they ought to be mostly a focus for research.
We have to do depots, but isn’t focusing on them missing something? Shouldn’t we do fuel transfer first? I imagine it to be quite tricky in zero g with solid tanks. Once you have fuel transfer you’ve opened up your options considerable and depots are a natural follow up.