A history. I’d dispute this, though:
“Humans are pretty needy,” Lyles told me. “You’re taking water, you’re taking all of their environmental control systems, and whatever they need on a really long mission. A large, heavy launch vehicle is almost a no-brainer.”
NASA is not alone in this conclusion. During a two-week span last month, private companies SpaceX and Blue Origin both unveiled giant, SLS-scale launchers that will become key parts of their future spaceflight aspirations.
One of these things is not like the others. SpaceX and Blue Origin want to build big rockets because they plan to put thousands of people into space. NASA is doing it because Congress wants to keep thousands employed in the right zip codes (as the article makes clear).
SpaceX and Blue Origin want to build big rockets because they plan to put thousands of people into space.
I’m not sure about Blue Origin but “plan” seems a little generous in the case of SpaceX. Musk’s presentation left me thinking that this was the biggest “build it and they will come” gamble of them all. I hope it succeeds.
It sounded to me like a gamble that could break the market for long-distance spaceflight for the next 50 to 100 years. Such an economic disaster that no one would dare to try it again soon.
You know kinda like Apollo.
And yes private enterprises do these economic disasters on occasion as well.
Time and the market will decide the ultimate fate of the Bezo’s and Musk’s efforts.
I would note that while these rockets are very large compared to today’s rockets, they are designed to be reusable, which is going to use up a very large portion of the effective payload.
Seems to me like a good idea; don’t try to optimize to the minimum payload … give yourself lots of margin
You don’t use a semi when you need a pickup truck.
I don’t really care, as long as he doesn’t do it with my money.
I wouldn’t expect that to happen. Elon said it himself in his presentation that he hopes to have government funding for at least part of this. At best it will be like COTS. At worst it will be some sort of public-private partnership and I sorta expect the latter.
As much as I like his efforts, all his major investments right now are rooted in some kind of government aid in some way or another (Tesla with EV tax rebates, Solar City with feed-in tariffs, SpaceX with COTS and CCDev).
Elon has said that consistently over the years. But many of his fans prefer to believe the imaginary libertarian Elon who exists only in their minds.
But, of course, many of the same people believed the Bush Vision of Space Exploration was not going to be a re-run of Apollo even though Bush explicitly said so in his official speech. And that the goal of Commercial Crew and Cargo was was to create a new commercial space industry, rather than meeting the limited needs of NASA astronauts on ISS, despite numerous statements to the contrary by both NASA and Congress. “NewSpace” seems to run on wishful thinking.
Elan can’t win with certain people. He didn’t write the tax code. If he took ten cents some would claim he’s just sucking the govt. teat. I expect Solar and Tesla are not viable on their own, but SpaceX has enough commercial customers that the govt. money would have been easily replaced just by rearranging their manifest… not to mention, the govt. isn’t just throwing money at them but paying for service at a much lower price than the govt. is paying everyone else for comparable service.
Musk would be an idiot not to take advantage. The cost of being slandered is worth it. I for one don’t have any false view of who Elan is. He is focused on a goal that most others would dissuade him from. There would be no SpaceX and its accomplishments without his vision. It would still exist w/o govt., just a bit but not much different.
“Elan” may have lots of commercial customers for Crew and Cargo, but Elon stopped talking about flying private citizens to ISS some time ago. He also stopped marketing Dragonlab and refused to sell a Dragon capsule to Dennis Tito, for fear of upsetting NASA.
If you’re going to be a fanboy, at least learn how to spell his name.
but Elon stopped talking about flying private citizens to ISS some time ago.
So? Musk’s speaking time is a rare commodity. He can’t be expected to go through a laundry list of items.
Who knows why these things aren’t a thing but they are working on a lot of projects right now. Should they take precedence over reusability? Over Dragon 2? Over the FH? Over launch facilities?
They have so much stuff going on, I am not surprised these things got put on the back burner. Prominent people like Eric Berger are writing months long series about how unfocused the company is because Elon was working on a powerpoint for a conference. What would Berger say if SpaceX was working on these other products that are outside their core function?
Labs and tourism are things that will flow naturally when the Dragon 2, launch facilities, and other destinations exist.
Its a good thing that SpaceX is focusing on core functions. Even what has been done on the ICT is part of their core function, launching things.
Who knows why these things aren’t a thing but they are working on a lot of projects right now.
Anyone who pays attention to what NASA and SpaceX are saying, instead of projecting their own wishes and fantasies onto the company.
That’s super fanboy to you Edward, which I have been since the before SpaceX proved itself to others (I’m still waiting for about eight years of apologies) and you’re going to pick on an occasional typo? You can’t even imagine what I have to overcome to type anything these days (although I’m not yet as bad off as some.)
Just because I don’t focus on Elon’s flaws doesn’t mean I’m not aware of them, but I’m also aware of the unjustified slanders against him.
This world would be less without SpaceX. It has been a ‘forcing function’ for the entire industry. As Elon himself correctly points out, progress isn’t automatic. It doesn’t just happen. It takes effort and risk that other blithering idiots can only slander.
Risk is just that. It takes no risk to take pot shots.
instead of projecting their own wishes and fantasies onto the company.
Seems to be a lot of that going around.
Things change. That they change isn’t a good measure but why change happens and how change is responded to is. Time will tell how things play out.
Not even a little bit? Like a COTS type effort?
There will be plenty of opportunities to find customers/partners prior to the first launch of the ICT by leveraging the FH.
They can seed this new market and nurture a field before they need to harvest.
There was, however, one major change: NASA would not spend five years researching heavy lift engine technology. Instead, it would begin building the rocket right away, using its current workforce and existing shuttle and Constellation technologies. When feasible, the agency was also directed to use or modify existing Constellation contracts, and both the rocket and Orion should be ready for test flights by the end of 2016.
Meh. Smells like disaster. A rocket without an engine. Check. Even ESA knows better than this (or at least used to when they did the Ariane 5).
The Authorization Act is notorious for not only having created SLS, but for dictating design elements right down to payload capabilities: at least 70 tons for the initial version, and 130 after future upgrades.
Committee driven design. Check.
But the alternative was not politically feasible, according to Jeff Bingham, one of two former senate staffers largely credited with drafting the authorization bill. Without a replacement program, the loss of both Constellation and the space shuttle represented a potentially devastating blow to some of NASA’s southern centers, which impact their local economies by billions of dollars.
Don’t worry. Because of your half baked plan all these people will end up unemployed as external competition will be able to do everything better and cheaper. But by then you’ll have retired from office.
I await the master plan by SpaceX and Blue Origin to build rockets without employees. In any case the heavy lift vs fuel depots debate is over. Both won.
Why would they need such a thing? Both companies seem to have a sufficient number of employees to build rockets. SpaceX has about 5000, last I checked.
For now, but once Obamacare fully kicks in how many will be left?
SpaceX is probably one of the few companies with enough margin to afford Obamacare. If it wasn’t, they’d simply move there operation to a more congenial country.
Has Musk ever even hinted he would take his business out of the US?
You might want to Google “ITAR,” Ken.
ITAR may be exactly the reason they move SpaceX to another country. We haven’t become one world government yet and the pushback until we do is likely to get intense.
Even in his latest talk he mentioned that ITAR is a bit of a problem during the Q & A. Push him too far and Elon is just the type to make such a surprise move. Not that I expect it to happen, but I’d sure like to see the faces of some if he did.
The elites are always so sure of themselves right up to the moment when they’re wrong.
Mark, Can you put your crack pipe down long enough to explain that comment?
I await the master plan by SpaceX and Blue Origin to build rockets without employees.
It’s good that we have all these internet experts to tell us what the insurmountable problems are before we start.
The internet experts told us going to Mars is impossible because people can’t live in tin cans and nobody would want to do that anyway; because space radiation will kill you; because humans are a cancer and we don’t want them destroying the pristine Mars ecosystems or oppressing the natives; because zero gee is bad for the human body; colonizing with robots is so much cheaper; because space is hard; because there’s nothing up there – nothing I tell you!; because some other destination is better and we should devote all our efforts to it; etc. It’s amazing how many obvious things Musk has missed!
But until now, we didn’t realize that the problem was no employees. Good we have that all sorted. Musk will no doubt give up once he realizes there are no employees.
In any case the heavy lift vs fuel depots debate is over. Both won.
I can tell you which heavy lift system isn’t going to be a winner: SLS.
If big boosters are such a no-brainer, why did Von Braun’s plan involve many (reusable) smaller boosters? Or did Collier’s completely misunderstand him?
Von Braun’s original plan that is (Marsprojekt). Back then they had limitations in terms of engine performance so he was thinking of V-2 derived tech. The V-2 was incredibly cheaper than later rockets. The main reason was because it was mass produced. IIRC Truax said that mass production alone reduced cost by an order of magnitude.
If you look at his later 1956 proposal it included expendable first and second stages in a three stage rocket and the engines had more thrust.
The Saturn V included much more improved engine tech. AFAIK the later Mars manned mission proposals were supposed to use the Nova rocket. Even later it was supposed to be done using multiple Shuttle flights… But Shuttle didn’t turn out to be as economic as originally expected.
> The V-2 was incredibly cheaper than later rockets. The main reason was because it was mass produced.
And labor costs were low… 🙁
Was he even in charge of the later project designs? I honestly don’t know.
I also remember some of the plans were based on vacuum tube technology, so manned space stations for surveillance was seen as preferable. Not all the “Collier’s plan” was perfect. 🙂
Shuttle flights? I had the impression that NASA traded the Shuttle for giving up on the Mars ambition?
I thought that the “real” Mars rocket engine came from NERVA — nuclear-thermal rocket propulsion using liquid hydrogen propellant. There was even a version of the Saturn V for this — the S-N. S-N replaced the third stage — the LH2-LOX S-IVb — with the NERVA/RIFT/S-N, whatever-you-call-it nuclear third stage. The naming was kind of like Centaur — Centaur once referred to the entire Atlas-with-an-LH2/LOX-upper-stage as well as the upper stage itself.
Generally, successive stages are some smallish fraction of the mass of the prior stage and also smaller in proportion. If you look up the Saturn V stats, the mass closely follows that design rule but the sizes do not. The S-Ic booster accounting for, what, about 75 percent of the mass of the “stack”, has the same diameter of the S-II above it. This is probably the result of using kerosene for the S-Ic and LH2 in the S-II.
The S-N stage also has the same diameter as the base S-Ic stage, and it was long too. This is the result of the nuclear-thermal propulsion system not needing the heavy LOX component, so it needed enormous tank volume to carry as much of the light LH2 propellant that gave it its “kick.” So the entire S-N vehicle would have been this long cylinder, that is, if they hadn’t strapped on some solid rockets to juice up the S-Ic.
The sense I got was when “they” shut down the nuclear-thermal rocket program, and the program made a lot more progress than generally known, that pretty much ended the manned Mars mission for the 20th century.