From Carolyn Porco.
No, we don’t need “big” rockets. We need affordable rockets.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The perennial question: why do reporters (even science and technology reporters) think that scientists are a good source for technology policy advice?
Just got an email from Elon:
The static fire took place on Saturday [20 Sep 2008, CA time], as expected, and no major issues came up. However, after a detailed analysis of data, we decided to replace a component in the 2nd stage engine LOX supply line. There is a good chance we would be ok flying as is, but we are being extremely cautious.
This adds a few extra days to the schedule, so the updated launch window estimate is now Sept 28th through Oct 1st [CA time].
So if they hold to that schedule, the fourth Falcon 1 launch attempt could be early next week.
I just discovered, via the latest Carnival of Space, that Bruce Cordell and some other folks have started a web-site/blog devoted to space and space colonization, called Twenty-First Century Waves.
There’s a new Falcon on the launch pad (not a permalink). Here’s hoping for a successful flight this week.
Ben Bova has a piece in the Naples News that could have been written thirty years ago. In fact, it’s exactly like stuff that he (and I) wrote thirty years ago. The only difference is that I have experienced the past thirty years, whereas he seems to be stuck in a seventies time warp, and I’ve gotten a lot more sober about the prospects for a lot of the orbital activities that were always just around the corner, and probably always will be:
An orbital habitat needn’t be a retirement center, though. Space offers some interesting advantages for manufacturing metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, electronics components and other products. For example, in zero-gravity it’s much easier to mix liquids.
Think of mixing a salad dressing. On Earth, no matter how hard you stir, the heavier elements sink to the bottom of the bowl. In zero G there are no heavier elements: they’re all weightless. And you don’t even need a bowl! Liquids form spherical shapes, whether they’re droplets of water or industrial-sized balls of molten metals.
Metallurgists have predicted that it should be possible in orbit to produce steel alloys that are much stronger, yet much lighter, than any alloys produced on Earth. This is because the molten elements can mix much more thoroughly, and gaseous impurities in the mix can percolate out and into space.
Imagine automobiles built of orbital steel. They’d be much stronger than ordinary cars, yet lighter and more fuel-efficient. There’s a market to aim for.
Moreover, in space you get energy practically for free. Sunlight can be focused with mirrors to produce furnace-hot temperatures. Or electricity, from solarvoltaic cells. Without spending a penny for fuel.
The clean, “containerless” environment of orbital space could allow production of ultrapure pharmaceuticals and electronics components, among other things.
Orbital facilities, then, would probably consist of zero-G sections where manufacturing work is done, and low-G areas where people live.
There would also be a good deal of scientific research done in orbital facilities. For one thing, an orbiting habitat would be an ideal place to conduct long-term studies of how the human body reacts to prolonged living in low gravity. Industrial researchers will seek new ways to utilize the low gravity, clean environment and free energy to produce new products, preferably products that cannot be manufactured on Earth, with its heavy gravity, germ-laden environment and high energy costs.
Cars made of “orbital steel”?
Please.
But I guess there’s always a fresh market for this kind of overhyped boosterism. I think that it actively hurts the cause of space activism, because people in the know know how unrealistic a lot of it is, and it just hurts the credibility of proponents like Ben Bova.
Is the ISS itself causing the Soyuz entry failures?
…the Soyuz used to fly long duration missions to the space station flawlessly for years. So what changed in the last two flights? Some bad parts out of the same lot?
A unique confluence of circumstances being investigated appears to be at fault. The space station has grown in size considerably since those first early long duration flights that the Soyuz so flawlessly serviced. It is a bit larger now with all the new modules the Emperor has sent aloft for our friends. As such it makes quite a target for training gangly military officers on ground based radars around the world. It has also become quite a source of electromagnetic energy itself, with all the radios and such from all the international partners blasting their messages back to the homelands.
Did you hear the recent news about cell phones in your pocket causing your little reproductive agents to slow down or become ineffective? The same thing may be at work when the cacophony of EMI on the space station envelops the Soyuz separation pyros and causes them to become inert.
If true, it raises some interesting issues. Is there something intrinsic in the Soyuz design, or pyro design, that causes this effect? Or is it a problem for pyros on any lifeboat that we put up there? Do they need to make it possible to change them out on orbit (if this capability isn’t already there), and keep them in a shielded box until they have to go home? Of course, this would slow things down in an emergency, if they had to get away immediately.
The problem of a space station lifeboat is a much tougher one than people realize (which is why I’ve always opposed it, at least if such a thing is defined as a device that gets you all the way to earth if there’s a problem on the station). You simply can’t trust hardware that has been sitting dormant for months in the space environment to work reliably when you need it to (at least not at our current level of experience with space operations).
This is also the reason that we couldn’t use an Orbiter for a lifeboat, even if we had enough of them that taking one out of the processing flow wouldn’t have a severe impact on turnaround times. We can’t know for sure if it can survive six months on orbit, even with power and support from the ISS, and have the reliability needed to safely come home.
That’s why I’ve always advocated a robust space transportation infrastructure that is always being exercised (e.g., multiple co-orbiting facilities with different purposes, and space tugs/crew modules for transit from one to the other). It provides redundancy, and reliability, and obviates the need to abandon a single space station to take people all the way back to earth in the event of a problem.
The NASA OIG says that NASA hasn’t provided a good basis of estimate for its costs for its Constellation budget requests.
I’m sure that this is nothing new, given what a perennial mess the agency’s books are always in, with incompatible accounting systems, different and arcane ways of bookkeeping at different centers/directorates, etc.
But here’s what’s interesting to me. This story is about justifying the costs of building Ares/Orion et al so that they can get their requested budget from OMB and Congress. But that’s not the only reason that we need to have a good basis of estimate.
Ever since Mike Griffin came in, he, Steve Cook and others have told us that they (meaning Doug Stanley) did a trade study, comparing EELVs and other options to developing Ares in order to accomplish the Vision for Space Exploration. A key, in fact crucial element of any such trade would have to include…estimated costs.
We have been told over and over again that they did the trade, but as far as I know, we’ve never been provided with the actual study–only its “results.” We have no information on the basis of estimate, the assumptions that went into it, etc. If NASA can’t come up with them now that’s it’s an ongoing program, why should we trust the results of the earlier study that determined the direction of that program when it was much less mature, with its implications for many billions of dollars in the future, and the effectiveness in carrying out the national goals? Why haven’t we been allowed to see the numbers?
I think that the new resident of the White House, regardless of party, should set up an independent assessment of the situation, complete with a demand for the data.
NASA Spaceflight has an interesting report on the status of the study.
It sounds about right to me. Retire Atlantis and make it a parts queen or a launch-on-need vehicle, and fly the other two vehicles once each per year. But at that low a flight rate, I wonder if the processing teams lose their “edge” and start to screw up? There’s an optimal flight rate for both cost and safety. Too fast and you make mistakes because of the rush, but too slow, and you get out of practice. And of course each flight would cost over two billion bucks, assuming that it costs four billion a year to keep the program going.
And as noted numerous times in the past, this doesn’t solve the problem of leaving US crew on the station. They still need a lifeboat of some sort. They discuss this as a “COTS-D Minus”:
…several companies have noted the ability to make available a lifeboat vehicle from 2012 (names and details currently embargoed due to ongoing discussions).
Clearly, one of those companies has to be SpaceX.
But this idea seems to never die:
‘There is some interest now in developing this (RCO) into a full mission capability, thus enabling unmanned shuttles to launch, dock to ISS, undock and land in 2011 and beyond.’
‘While that’s an interesting idea and would be a fun development project, we are working to understand the level of effort the program desires for this study.’
It’s not an “interesting idea.” It’s a monumentally dumb idea. There is little point in flying Shuttle without crew. The ability to fly crew is its primary feature. It’s far too expensive to operate to act as a cargo vehicle. If the point of the idea is to not risk crew, then we have no business in space.
Frequent commenter Mike Puckett is wondering (via email) how Mark Whittington is doing in Houston, because he hasn’t posted in over four days (at the time of this posting, the link is Mark’s most recent post).
I’m a little concerned as well, but for now I assume that he’s just lost power and can’t post. Fortunately, the storm was not as bad as feared, and we haven’t heard of massive casualties.
It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:
Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.
The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.
Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.
‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.
One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).
During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.
This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.
This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.