Brian Berger has apparently gotten an early look at the Aldridge Commission report, now scheduled to be publicly released Wednesday.

It has some encouraging things, but there are also some areas of concern.

It says that NASA should rely on the private sector for transportation to LEO, which is good, but it also excludes human transportation from that, which is an implicit go-ahead for the Crew Exploration Vehicle on an expensive expendable. I find this program almost as economically senseless as the Orbital Space Plane was, if envisioned as a Shuttle replacement (a role that many are urging for it), but apparently there's too much political pressure to build such a thing to kill it off completely.

I think that NASA is setting itself up for embarrassment a decade from now when their vaunted "Crew Exploration Vehicle" ends up costing hundreds of millions of dollars per flight while there are regular space tourism flights to orbit costing a couple of orders of magnitude less. By giving NASA permission to ignore the private sector for passenger services, the commission is simply putting off further the day that it will become a reality.

The other concern is this:

The commission also identified 17 enabling technologies needed to accomplish the exploration goals. These include an affordable heavy lift capability, advanced power and propulsion, automated spacecraft rendezvous and docking capability, high bandwidth communications, closed loop life supports systems, better spacesuits for astronauts and others.

"Affordable heavy lift capability" is not a technology, and its certainly not an enabling one. At best, to the degree that it's a technology at all, it's an enhancing one. "Enabling" implies that we can't do without it. I absolutely reject the notion that it is essential, and if we believe that it is, it will simply hold us back in schedule while we wait for it to appear, and we will miss a lot of opportunities for innovation.

This heavy-lift fetish is going to be (or at least should be) one of the major space policy debate issues, because it is a hingepoint for the direction of our near-term future.

If we do have ultra-low cost space tourism flights to orbit, couldn't NASA just buy a few hundred of those and therefore acquire affordable heavy lift capability.

That's not what's meant by heavy-lift capability. They mean putting up a lot of payload in a single launch.

I agree that putting "Heavy Lift" (as defined as: NASA get to build a massive new rocket) as a requirement for Project Constellation is 'senseless'.

Private industry already has a glut of launch capacity. NASA has the opportunity to design Constellation (and CEV) to work within the generous (20 tonne to LEO) capacity of the existing rockets. Spending new money on booster design is wasteful when that money could be paying for spacecraft and missions. (With the caveat that minor sums spent on enhancing the relability or capacity of existing boosters would be reasonable)

Assembly in orbit (or on the lunar surface) does add some complexity, compared to a single spacecraft assembled on earth. However, the benefits of not spending additional moneys on a new booster more than outweigh the engineering issues of assembly.

As many others have pointed out, docking together spacecraft to form a greater system is a tried and true technic. This forms the basis for using existing launchers to assemble a mission of any needed size. Examples include the docking used for LOR in Apollo, and the assembly of Mir and ISS.

Changing gears a bit in this mesasge, this is really a political discussion, not a technical one. Scraping a heavy lift requirement means that the existing organization supporting the shuttle, including Mortan Thiokol can be liquidated. While I am sure that many of those personel can be rehired to perform new tasks, there will be no net savings if they are all rehired. It may not make sense to rehire them all from a project point of view. This is a huge political problem. It is my opinion that this is the primary reason that NASA is not able to reorient itself effectively to manage Project Constellation effectively.

Forgive me for being a heretic, but the best thing NASA could have done (and by now, won't do) is re-engineer the shuttle to fix known problems. And get back into Space. Call it Shuttle-B or Shuttle-C.

Fix the wingroot problem and fix the speedbrake problem, and whatever else has been identified, and get going.

This introspective long hiatus whenever something goes wrong is killing us.

There are certain things a capsule can do better and we need to produce and fly a capsule to do those things. There are certain things a winged shuttle can do better and we need that capability too.

Lets stop putting all our eggs in one basket. We should know better and it's up to us to educate Congress into knowing better too.

Rich

If anyone has ever hauled anything around in a pickup truck the he should know that you can never have too large of a truck. There is no reason to not have a heavy and heavier and heavier still lift capacity as long as you don't let it become a show stopper for the main objectives i.e. moon base and mars trip et al.

Rich, the only thing a winged shuttle is good for is landing on a runway and keeping pilots in the astronaut corps.

If anyone has ever hauled anything around in a pickup truck the he should know that you can never have too large of a truck. There is no reason to not have a heavy and heavier and heavier still lift capacity as long as you don't let it become a show stopper for the main objectives i.e. moon base and mars trip et al.

You can have too large of a truck if you can't afford a large truck. Surely you wouldn't rent a semi to move a couch.

Jardinero1, and yet that is the way Burt Rutan has chosen to go with SpaceShipOne. Call his design the MG (remember those?) with wings.

The truck with wings idea as executed isn't perfect yet, but the concept is still valid. A vehicle with a long cargo bay that you can fit loads of differents sizes and masses into.

A capsule will be whittled down in the design stage by Congress until it contains only the room needed for whatever load is pending at that time.

And yes, ya gotta keep the pilots union sweet, otherwise Ham the Chimp could still be "flying" missions for NASA.

Rich

Rand,
"you wouldn't rent a semi to move a couch" - If I owned a semi I would and if I had to I could move a whole house with it. You have more options if you have more capacity. As for "afford", what you can afford with an annual gov't budget of $1.4 trillion dollars is a political question not an economic one. Besides, bigger does not always mean more expensive. Surely you have seen the various Truax designs at astronautix.com

Rich,
Burt Rutan put wings on his rocket because that's all he knows how to do. He will never go orbital under the paradigm he has chosen. The development costs for a winged orbital vehicle are prohibitive even for the deep pockets that he has access too.
I have never heard a compelling reason to put wings on an orbital vehicle that justifies the additional costs and technical headaches involved. Why should spacehips have wings and land on runways? Should airplanes land on railroad tracks? Should cars float in rivers? Should trains go on the freeway. Should ocean liners also be submarines. It's a non sequitur.

Jardinero1, I understand your argument, but disagree about Burt Rutan. He is no dummy. If it made more sense to him to use a capsule in this venture, he most probably would. What seems to be driving his design is a desire to actually try the piggyback launch technique unstead of just talking about it.

No, he won't go orbital. He doesn't have to go to orbit to achieve his goals. If after examining the data he has collected it makes sense, he or someone else will start designing an orbital ship. There are other interested deep pockets out there too, like Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos to name two.

Looking at aviation as precedence, we haven't even reached the barnstorming phase. When we have enough traffic to build people and freight haulers into companies like our airlines, precise destinations will be required. It does not include landing in a randomly selected farmers field as a destination option. And that, my friend will require either wings or a very costly and very polluting backing down on a flame like the old SF movies of the fifties.

Rich

Rich,
Don't get me wrong, I think Burt is an aeronautical and marketing genius but he only does things that "fly".
I am still waiting for a compelling technical reason to put wings on a spacecraft. By compelling, I mean in terms of benefits that outweigh the costs of the additional dead weight on the craft and added strain on the vehicle during boost to orbit. There are many interesting, passive and potentially less cumbersome ways to land a craft, rotors, airbags, parachutes, parasails to name a few.

We may wind up agreeing to disagree here, as the only true answer will come with time.

If we discuss this further, we should do it off-blog, as we've wasted enough of Rand's bandwidth already.

E-mail me at the addy below if you wish to continue.

Rich