The EM-1 Analysis

This is a good overview of the issues involved in deciding to fly crew on the first flight. If they decide to do this, I don’t want to hear a single word about delaying Commercial Crew until it is “safe” enough.

[Update a while later]

Wow, never been a big George Abbey (senior) fan, but he’s calling for cancellation of SLS:

Abbey thinks the architecture of NASA’s future plans should be thoroughly examined and redrawn. It won’t even require a budgetary increase — just a smarter allocation of the currently available funding. For instance, he suggests scrapping the SLS program altogether. There’s too much redundancy in the heavy-lift rocket market — SpaceX is working on their Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin is busy developing the New Glenn booster, and United Launch Alliance is drawing up plans for a Vulcan rocket.

From his lips to Trump’s (and Congress’s) ears.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Another call to end SLS/Orion, over at Scientific American, from Howard Bloom:

If NASA ditched the Space Launch System and the Orion, it would free up three billion dollars a year. That budget could speed the Moon-readiness of Bigelow’s landing vehicles, not to mention SpaceX’s Falcon rockets and could pay for lunar enhancements to manned Dragon 2 capsules. In fact, three billion dollars a year is far greater than what Bigelow and Musk would need. That budget would also allow NASA to bring Jeff Bezos into the race. And it would let NASA refocus its energy on earth-orbit and lunar-surface refueling stations…plus rovers, lunar construction equipment, and devices to turn lunar ice into rocket fuel, drinkable water, and breathable oxygen. Not to mention machines to turn lunar dust and rock into building materials.

This new Moon program could be achieved within NASA’s current budget. In fact, members of the group I run — the Space Development Steering Committee — estimate the total cost of what I’ve described (Moon landings plus a permanent moon base) at ten billion dollars. That’s just three years’ worth of the money currently being funneled into the SLS and the Orion.

At some point, this will become conventional wisdom.

[Update a few minutes later]

Wayne Hale has a prescription for NASA that is politically impossible to fill. I’d note that there’s nothing new about this; many of us observed these problems in the 80s and 90s. It’s what happens to a bureaucracy when what it does is not nationally important, it’s captured by its customers, and Congress can do whatever it wants secure in the knowledge that none of it will affect an election.

21 thoughts on “The EM-1 Analysis”

  1. If NASA wants to remain relevant they might choose a task like terraforming Venus (not mars, it’s already good enough.)

    Venus has a better gravity and atmosphere to work with and making it habitable would be an undeniable success.

    1. …not mars, it’s already good enough

      Well, if you don’t mind having to wear a full environmental suit every time you step outside.

      Believe me, terraforming Mars will be a task plenty big enough for any human civilization.

  2. Actually, there is no rocket system being currently developed that can do what the SLS will do.

    The Vulcan and especially the Falcon heavy won’t be able to place large space habitats into orbit like Bigelow’s Olympus BA-2100 or 8.4 meter in diameter EUS derived habitats (Skylab II).

    That’s why even Elon Musk intends to develop his own– super heavy lift vehicles– that would be even larger than the Boeing/Orbital ATK space launch system.

    1. Actually, there is no rocket system being currently developed that can do what the SLS will do.

      There is none needed.

      The Vulcan and especially the Falcon heavy won’t be able to place large space habitats into orbit like Bigelow’s Olympus BA-2100 or 8.4 meter in diameter EUS derived habitats (Skylab II).

      That isn’t a requirement, either. Made In Space and Firmamentum (and perhaps others) will be assembling habitats in orbit.

      That’s why even Elon Musk intends to develop his own– super heavy lift vehicles– that would be even larger than the Boeing/Orbital ATK space launch system.

      Elon is doing that because he wants to send thousands of people to Mars. A heavy lifter that only flies once every couple years is programmatically insane, both from a cost and reliability standpoint.

    2. Marcel,
      It’s worth noting that a 5.4m diameter rocket like Vulcan could easily be hammerheaded enough to enable 8.4m diameter payloads, if desired. That’s less relative hammerheading than putting a 5.4m diameter fairing on an Atlas/Centaur. If there really are tons of customers for 8.4m diameter payloads, I’m sure ULA could oblige with a bigger fairing.

      The main thing SLS is meant for is funneling billions of dollars of uncompeted money to Boeing, Orbital ATK, and others in the greater Huntsville area.

      ~Jon

      1. The main thing SLS is meant for is funneling billions of dollars of uncompeted money to Boeing, Orbital ATK, and others in the greater Huntsville area.

        Exactly so. Alas.

    3. Actually, there is no rocket system being currently developed that can do what the SLS will do.

      Where will the money to use those capabilities coming from? US Congress has been consistent about capping NASA’s budget over the past forty years at a constant level. And as we’ve seen with the Space Shuttle, having an expensive, high capability launcher means not much gets done with the launcher.

      The Vulcan and especially the Falcon heavy won’t be able to place large space habitats into orbit like Bigelow’s Olympus BA-2100 or 8.4 meter in diameter EUS derived habitats (Skylab II).

      Those SLS applications aren’t valuable to us, particularly since we can reduce the dimensions a little and launch this stuff on rockets that would be an order of magnitude cheaper *and* fly years earlier.

      For example, you could get the same internal volume (500 cubic meters) from Skylab II by launching three Bigelow Sundancer units and chaining them together. And all you’d need are a few launches by rockets in the 20-25 ton range which are quite common and low priced compared to SLS. We could, using existing SLS funding, already have this in space without the need for any fancy rocketry. That’s the sort of opportunity costs we’re looking at here.

      The capability game is noxious since you can always make things larger or smaller. Anything which can only fly on the SLS is made so that it can only fly on the SLS. The far cheaper and ultimately more capable option would be to fit payloads to existing or near future rockets rather than deliberately designing them so that large paper rockets are the only means of deploying them.

      1. Where will the money to use those capabilities coming from?

        Yup, it all comes down to opportunity cost. Robert Zimmerman’s white paper should be good.

    4. *shrug* Now our host makes a real good point: manufacturing in space will need to be our future. But until then…

      If we’re imaging 5- or 7-core Falcons, why not just hammerhead the upper stack? Besides, how much will these habitats mass, anyways? It seems to me that it would basically be an empty tank with some internal bulkheads and some thrusters. What, you’re going to launch it fully loaded with air, supplies, AND passengers?

      I’d be more worried about in-flight stability, and not having it go literally sideways.

    5. Your first sentence is belied by your last. You note SpaceX’s planned monster ITS booster and upper stages. You should also note that these are not just “paper rocket” ideas. The two toughest components to build for ITS are the cryogenic-capable composite LOX tank and the Raptor engine. Initial engineering test versions of both have been fabricated and tested. The ITS is very much in active development.

  3. Terraforming Venus isn’t necessary because it’s already the ideal environment for turkey cooking.

    As for the EM-1 study, just stick Hillary, Obama, Al Gore, and John Kerry on it. Then the mission is a guaranteed success no matter what happens.

  4. I think an SLS-class launcher is still viable for NASA, if they accept that what they already have is an obsolete, non-reusable booster that needs to be redesigned to fly back to the launch site, just like the just-completed SpaceX CRS-10 mission.

    The SRB’s need to be replaced with a cluster of Falcon 9 first stages, which are already proven and already re-usable. They would also provide a big performance boost to the SLS, perhaps compensating for the loss in flying back the core stage, and they would decrease the weight on the crawler transporter because they’re fueled on the pad.

    Reprocessing the Falcon 9 boosters would be something that’s already in process at SpaceX, and even if the SLS flight rate remains very low, the flight rate of the Falcon 9 first stages wouldn’t be, so the launch crew’s booster skills wouldn’t be rusting.

    Re-using the core stage would also free the sustainable flight rate from the core stage’s construction rate, including the RS-25 construction rate.

    Such a configuration, even with reprocessing the four RS-25’s, might allow a higher flight rate than the Space Shuttle.

    1. It would likely need propellant cross-feed to be viable, but a Falcon-super-heavy with 5 or even 7 cores in a cluster would be interesting. First staging event would drop 2 or 4 cores, and leave the Falcon Heavy 3 core configuration to continue on.

      1. SpaceX seems to have abandoned the crossfeed for now if I understand correctly. I also believe the pumping requirements get progressively harder as you add multistage crossfeed, so…

        It *is* a big win, though. Multistage crossfeed is the first thing you learn in Kerbal Space Program for heavy payloads. But then the Kerbal have magic pumps…

      2. How would you design the central core to handle the payload implied by having to use a 7-core cluster? And how do you prevent mid-air collisions when trying to land this many cores?

    2. All excellent points George. Four Falcon 9 1st stages, a pair in place of each SRB, would be the ticket. The Block 5 F9 1st stage is targeted to produce about 1.9 million lbf. 7.6 million lbf from four F9 Block 5 cores is more than the 7.2 million lbf from the 5-segment SRB’s, plus the weight and Isp advantages. There’s your currently unfunded advanced boosters needed to take SLS to Block 2 throw weight.

      Another advantage of an all liquid-propellant SLS architecture would be the ability to do horizontal integration of the launch vehicle as an option to the mandatory vertical integration required by the current SLS architecture. The TEL for such a beast would need to be appreciably bigger and able to lift a lot more than the Falcon Heavy-capable TEL SpaceX recently debuted at LC-39A. Building such a beast might not be cost-effective vs. just going with the existing VAB-mobile-launch-platform-crawler-transporter architecture.

      Given that the main political objective of SLS’s congressional backers is to keep development money coming to Marshall and Boeing for an extended period, there might be some political wiggle room to arrange a reusable VTVL redesign of the SLS core, abandonment of ICPS in favor of the EUS for all missions, including the first, and the ability to have Block 2 throw weight or greater available from day one. Maybe the first SLS mission can be a combined Europa orbiter and lander mission rather than a manned flight. That would allow more time for Orion to be sorted out, especially sourcing for more service-propulsion modules. By yoking SLS and commercial space together, the latter should be able to get on with all the other things it wants to do without constantly watching its six for congressional bogies.

  5. >>That’s why even Elon Musk intends to develop his own– super heavy lift vehicles– that would be even larger than the Boeing/Orbital ATK space launch system.

    >Elon is doing that because he wants to send thousands of people to Mars. A heavy lifter that only flies once every couple years is programmatically insane, both from a cost and reliability standpoint.

    He’s planning to do regular propellant flights with the same lifter in the off season. If he doesn’t want to use a stage that’s been sitting in orbit for two years to head to Mars, he can transfer all the propellant from a different one to a recently tested one.

  6. Messrs Abbey, Hale, Bloom (like our kind host) are entirely correct about all of this: SLS is a waste of money better spent on a program based around commercial super heavy lifters and crew capsules – if we’re serious about getting back lunar space as soon as possible (and accomplishing as much as possible there) on existing budgets.

    But Congressional leaders disagree; they’re so excited about SLS that they’re working on trying to name the first rocket. And we all know why.

    So: despite these pleadings, nothing is likely to happen to trip up SLS until a super heavy lifter is successfully in actual operation, putting big payloads up into orbit (and at demonstrably far lower cost).

    Well, first up is Falcon Heavy this summer, if all goes well. After that comes New Glenn and perhaps Vulcan in 2020.

    So EM-1 will fly (presumably without crew), and the issue won’t get revisited until after the next election in all likelihood. Sad to say.

    And the same is true with Orion. Until everyone can see Starliner and Dragon 2 actually making regular flights (and for vastly less than $1-1.5 billion per flight) up to space and back, it’s going to be too easy for policymakers and the public to avoid evaluating the options.

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