They’re commemorating the Apollo anniversary with a new map feature.

[Update a few minutes later, chuckling]

Be sure to zoom in all the way.

Jon Goff argues against heavy lift (one of my hobby horses as well, as long-time readers are aware, and as today’s Apollo anniversary piece hints at).

[Update at 2:05 PM EDT]

Mark Whittington takes issue with us:

There are technical arguments, one suspects, for doing it either way. But the real sticking point, it seems to me, is the idea that using heavy lift is insufficiently commercial, that it’s just another bad old, big government, dead end way of doing things.

No, that’s not the sticking point. The sticking point, as was explained at length in Jon’s post, but which Mark didn’t seem to have read, is that it’s uneconomical, and makes for an extremely fragile infrastructure. If we’re dependent on a single launch system type to get to the moon, and we make that vehicle so large that we’re putting all of our mission eggs in a single basket, then a stand down of the vehicle fleet (as we’ve seen occur twice with Shuttle now, each time for over two and a half years) stands down your capability to get to the Moon, and any single launch failure adds up to a loss of not only the launch vehicle, but billions of dollars worth of expensive hardware. Putting things up in smaller pieces, with multiple vehicle types, lends much more resiliency to the infrastructure, and any given launch accident (as is inevitable) will result in much less loss. In addition, launching smaller things more often is much more efficient in terms of operational economies of scale, and utilizing work forces.

This has nothing to do with government versus commercial, per se. It has to do with affordability, and sustainability, characteristics upon which the VSE is supposed to place a high value.

The commercial space sector right now is building on Burt Rutan’s achievement to build suborbital space ships to give the well heeled and adventurous thrill rides.

Really? Is that all it’s doing? What are Elon Musk and Bob Bigelow up to, then?

[Update at 3:40 PM EDT]

Well, we’ve got quite the debate going in the comments section.

Let me respond to this comment in the main post, because it contains many of the myths and bad assumptions that characterize the debate.

“In addition, launching smaller things more often is much more efficient in terms of operational economies of scale, and utilizing work forces.”

The problem with this debate is that there are a lot of assertions and no good evidence. I’ve not seen any detailed cost analyses of the HLLV vs. multiple ELV options.

Well, I wasn’t comparing HLLV to multiple ELVs (which are almost as bad from a cost standpoint, though more resilient)–I was describing space transports. But in any event, that should be remedied soon. George William Herbert has written a lengthy paper on this subject that is undergoing review right now by me and others smarter than me, and should be published soon, either at The Space Review, or here (if he’d like).

The anti-HLLV crowd claims that all kinds of money can be saved, while handwaving aside the fact that putting things up in lots of little pieces creates additional costs in terms of operational mass, R&D, and technical restrictions.

We’re not “handwaving” it aside.

For instance, put one big piece up and you don’t have to waste extra mass on docking collars and associated equipment. Put it up in five smaller pieces and each of those pieces has to carry equipment to enable it to be hooked together. That could include docking collars, extra rendezvous and maneuvering equipment and fuel, and other things. Plus, now you have to do the payload integration in orbit rather than on the ground, where it is easier. Run a data network through your spacecraft and if it is in multiple pieces, you have to connect every piece up to that data network. Ditto for power.

Many of these problems go away with a space-based orbital tug. As far as general overhead, the costs of this can be estimated, and this is an issue that George’s paper will address.

Also, putting it up in lots of little pieces requires new R&D. For instance, nobody has done on-orbit refueling yet, let alone refueling involving large amounts of fuel and/or LOX. I’m not saying that this is impossible to do, but it _has not been done._ So if your approach requires it, then you have to develop that capability and that means expending R&D dollars. (So those who claim that you don’t have to spend R&D dollars on developing a new launch vehicle have just created a requirement for the R&D to be spent on something else entirely.)

Well, actually, the Russians have demonstrated orbital fueling–it’s just a matter of scaling it up. It hasn’t been demonstrated for cryos yet, but that could be done at the ISS (something more useful than almost anything that it’s done so far).

But the point is that no matter what we do, it’s going to require R&D. The question is how we spend that R&D. I would prefer to spend it in directions that give us more flexibility, more resiliency, and in ways that develop more of the technologies that will be necessary for us to become truly spacefaring (e.g., orbital assembly, orbital fueling, routine rendezvous and EVA, etc), rather than on a new large vehicle that will lead to a fragile and inflexible infrastructure.

Then there are other costs. If you are going to do on-orbit refueling over a substantial period of time, then cryos are out. So you lose that ISP and you drive on-orbit mass up.

You can store cryos in an orbital depot for an indefinite period of time, through good insulation and active refrigeration.

Also, how fast can you launch? Are there enough launch pads free to support the program without impacting other customers like comsats?

How fast you can launch depends on how intelligently you design your launch vehicles, and what kind of turnaround time they have, and whether or not they require “pads” (e.g., Pegasus doesn’t, nor will any vehicle designed by Rutan), and whether or not you’ll have to launch out of the Cape.

If you plan on substantial on-orbit assembly, it may take many months of orbital operations simply to get your vehicle built. What kind of costs are associated with that? Do we really want to assemble each lunar mission like we are currently assembling the ISS?

No, we want to do it much smarter than that. And ISS is much more complicated than the kinds of things we’re proposing.

And then there’s the fact that the industrial base to support payload preparation is finite. Are you really going to be able to hire and train enough people to have perhaps a dozen payloads in preparation for launch simultaneously?

I’m sorry, but this is simply an absurd question. We live in a nation of three hundred million people. The notion that we couldn’t hire people to operate a well-designed system (one that’s optimized for cost, rather than maximizing jobs in Brevard County) is ludicrous. And it’s ludicrous even if we do it the NASA way.

Right now rockets fail at a (best) rate of 1-2%. Multiply that number by the number of launches you want to conduct and you have increased the chances that something blows up on its way to orbit. If the rocket that blows up is the same one that you also employ to carry your people, the rocket will be grounded until the problem is found and fixed. So all that hardware hangs in orbit until the program is resumed.

That’s the failure rate for expendable systems (which the Shuttle counts as, since it’s the expendable components of it that have caused its problems). The failure rate for a well-designed space transport would be much lower, because you’d eliminate the infant mortality problems caused by the fact that for expendables, each flight is a first flight. You’ll get more reliability through better statistical process control as your activity level goes up, something impossible when you only launch a few times a year.

And when you start to consider human Mars missions, the idea of doing it as small missions really looks impossible. The requirements for a human Mars mission are about 500 metric tons in earth orbit. It is not realistic to think about doing that in 10-20 metric ton increments.

Most of that mass is propellant, which can be delivered in whatever size increments you want. This argument is like saying it’s not realistic to build a house unless you develop a truck that can carry the entire thing to the building site. Simply saying that something is “unrealistic,” with no support, is an uncompelling argument. It’s less a sign of realism than a failure of imagination and innovation. The sixties are over. Get over it.

Speaking of our celebratory ceremony and the Apollo XI anniversary, you can hear the radio show that Bill Simon and I did Monday night here.

Thirty-six years ago today, John F. Kennedy’s goal of sending a man to the moon, and returning him safely to the earth within the decade, achieved a key milestone, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gently set their lunar excursion module (named “Eagle”) on to the rocky, and dusty, surface of the moon. They had yet to “return safely to the earth,” but they would, a few days later.

Unfortunately, while many at the time believed that this was just the beginning of many such explorations, ones that would establish bases on the moon, and send humans beyond, to Mars and perhaps other places (the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had been released the year before, featuring a rotating space station in low earth orbit, a Pan Am space transport to reach it, a lunar base, and manned mission to Jupiter all occurring in that seemingly distant year), the program was already ending. The goal had never really been to open up space, so much as to win a race against the Soviets, to demonstrate our technological superiority, as a proxy battle in the Cold War between democracy and totalitarianism (sadly, it wasn’t viewed as a war between capitalism and socialism, else we might have taken a more promising approach). But with the knowledge that we were winning that race, and the budget pressures of Johnson’s Great Society and the Vietnam war, the decision had been made years before to end procurement of long lead items necessary to advance much beyond a few trips to the lunar surface.

Only six missions would actually be successfully performed (Apollo XIII didn’t get to the moon), with the last one just three-and-a-half years later, in December of 1972. Some of the leftover hardware would go toward the Skylab program in 1974, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, whose thirtieth anniversary occurred just a few days ago. After that, there were no flights into space by Americans until 1981, when the first Shuttle flight occurred–a six-year hiatus.

It’s become common wisdom now that the Shuttle was a mistake, and indeed it was, but not for the reasons that many think. And unfortunately, so was Saturn, in that it didn’t provide an affordable or sustainable means of opening up space. But we’re misreading the lessons of that past, because we view Apollo as successful, and the reason for that success as Saturn, so many today want to turn their back on the Shuttle, and return to what they view as a proven method–putting capsules up on large expendable launch vehicles.

While it is past time to retire the Shuttle, it’s a profound logical error to attempt to extrapolate to a general class (reusable space transports) from a single flawed example, and somehow conclude that they are intrinsically a bad idea. Shuttle was a good idea in concept (a reusable vehicle, flown often), but it failed in execution, because we weren’t willing to spend the money in its development that would have been necessary in order to make it fully reusable, or operable.

And while it did achieve Kennedy’s (narrow) goal, in terms of opening up space Apollo was in fact a failure, and replicating its approach with modern hardware is likely to be as well, because throwing away launch vehicles is an intrinsically bad way to perform large-scale space activities, and to become a spacefaring nation, and no number of design concepts will get around that fact. Until we learn the true lessons of history, our government space program will continue to disappoint those of us who desire great things from it, and who want to go ourselves.

Fortunately, though, unlike the 1960s, we can now see a means by which we can do so without having to hope for bureaucrats to make the right decisions as to how to spend taxpayer money. Before too many more Apollo XI anniversaries roll by, I suspect that there will be many non-NASA personnel on the moon, visiting it with their own money, for their own purposes. And they won’t be getting there in little capsules on large vehicles, that are thrown away after a single use.

But for all that, it was still a monumental achievement, and one of the greatest events in the history of the universe. Go celebrate it properly tonight.