...without heavy lift. Jon Goff lays out a potential lunar architecture. I don't think that a lunar orbit is practical for the depot, though, if you want to have any-time access from the lunar surface. I think that, even with the time and velocity penalty, EML1 is a better location.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:26 AMFirst, over at the Gray Lady, he has an editorial on NASA's cost-overrun culture:
...the Mars Science Laboratory is only the latest symptom of a NASA culture that has lost control of spending. The cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the storied Hubble, has increased from initial estimates near $1 billion to almost $5 billion. NASA's next two weather satellites, built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have now inflated to over $3.5 billion each! The list goes on: N.P.P., S.D.O., LISA Pathfinder, Constellation and more. You don't have to know what the abbreviations and acronyms mean to get it: Our space program is running inefficiently, and without sufficient regard to cost performance. In NASA's science directorate alone, an internal accounting in 2007 found over $5 billion in increases since 2003.
As Allen Thompson points out in comments over at Space Politics, one could simply substitute names and nyms of (black) programs here, and write exactly the same piece about NRO. But I'm not sure that I'd agree with Dr. Stern's characterization that it is a NASA culture that has "lost control of spending." Was there ever any golden age in which the NASA culture had control of spending? After all, the agency was born in the panic of the Cold War, and developed a cost-(plus)-is-no-object mentality from its very beginning. The operative saying during Apollo was "waste anything but time." Sure, there have been occasional instances of programs coming in under schedule and within budget, but as Dr. Stern points out, the managers of those programs are often punished by having their programs slashed to cover overruns.
No, there is not now, and never has been a cost-conscious culture at NASA, for all the reasons that he describes. And this is the biggest one:
Congress should turn from the self-serving protection of local NASA jobs to an ethic of responsible government that delivers results.
Yes, it should. Well said. And with all the hope and change in the air, I'm sure that this will be the year that it finally happens.
OK, you can all stop laughing now. My sides hurt, too.
Unfortunately, that is not going to happen until space accomplishments become much more nationally important than they currently are, from a political standpoint. For most on the Hill, the NASA budget is first and foremost a jobs program for their states or districts. We can't even control this kind of pork barrelery on the Defense budget (including NRO), which is actually a real federal responsibility, with lives at stake if we fail. Why should we think that we can fix it for civil space? Only when we are no longer reliant on federal budgets will we start to make serious progress, and get more efficiency in the program.
Speaking of which, Dr. Stern also has a piece in The Space Review on how NASA can make itself more relevant to the populace and its representatives in DC:
The coming new year presents an opportunity to reemphasize the immediate societal and economic returns NASA generates, so that no one asks, "How do space efforts make a tangible difference in my life?"
The new administration could accomplish this by combining NASA's space exploration portfolio with new and innovative initiatives that address hazards to society, make new applications of space, and foster new industries.Such new initiatives should include dramatically amplifying our capability to monitor the changing Earth in every form, from climate change to land use to the mitigation of natural disasters. Such an effort should also accelerate much needed innovation in aircraft and airspace system technologies that would save fuel, save travelers time, and regain American leadership in the commercial aerospace sector. And it should take greater responsibility for mitigating the potential hazards associated with solar storms and asteroid impacts.
So, too, a more relevant NASA should be charged to ignite the entrepreneurial human suborbital and orbital spaceflight industry. This nascent commercial enterprise promises to revolutionize how humans use spaceflight and how spaceflight benefits the private sector economy as fundamentally as the advent of satellites affected the communications industry.
As he notes, this needn't mean a larger NASA budget--just a better-spent one. I particularly like the last graf above, obviously. I don't agree, though, that it is NASA's job to monitor the earth. It's an important job, but it's not really in NASA's existing charter, and I fear that if it takes on this responsibility, it will further dilute the efforts on where its focus should be, which is looking outward, not down. It should be left to the agency that is actually responsible for such things (or at least part of them, and expanding its purview wouldn't be as much of a stretch)--NOAA. If, for administrative reasons, NOAA is viewed as incapable of developing earth-sensing birds (though they couldn't do much worse than NASA and NRO have recently), NASA could still manage this activity as a "contractor," but it shouldn't come out of their budget--it should be funded by Commerce.
Anyway, I think that we could do a lot worse than Dr. Stern as the next NASA administrator. We certainly done a lot worse.
[Early afternoon update]
The NYT piece is being discussed at NASAWatch, where John Mankins has a useful comment.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 AMMark Whittington continues (embarrassingly) to do self-therapy on line about his imaginary "Internet Rocketeers Club."
I guess it's cheaper than a real therapist. Though it doesn't seem to be working, as the uncited delusions about this non-existent and nebulous organization persist.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 PMTalk at NASA about "human rating" an Ares V?
The decision to undertake the study reverses a major decision NASA took after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent accident investigation, that crew and cargo would be launched on separate vehicles. The Ares I, with its solid rocket booster first-stage and the new upper stage powered by the J-2X engine, was selected to orbit the Orion crew exploration vehicle.
That decision never made as much sense as everyone thought it did. It was one of the false lessons "learned" from Shuttle. And, as always, it raises the issue of what "human rating" really means. Generally, given the way the requirements often end up getting waived for NASA's own vehicles, but not for other players, like the "Visiting Vehicle" rules for ISS, it's simply an arbitrary barrier to entry for commercial providers.
[Monday morning update]
I should clarify that this discussion is about launch only. For in-space operations, it does make sense to separate passengers from cargo, and it probably makes sense to have robotic freighters as well, due to the long trip times and lack of need to handle emergencies with crew.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:33 AMAs Clark notes, this isn't directly related to space transportation regulation, but you can see it coming:
The proposed regulation, titled the Large Aircraft Security Program, would require owners of those aircraft to obtain permission from TSA to operate their own personal aircraft every time they carry passengers. Additionally, all flight crews would be required to undergo fingerprinting and a background check, all passengers would have to be vetted against the government's terrorist watch lists, and numerous security requirements would be imposed on airports serving these "large" aircraft. EAA adamantly opposes this regulation and urges all members to respond to TSA...
"...We thank the TSA for agreeing with the many industry group and EAA members' requests for an extension, providing an additional two months to study and react to the proposal," said Doug Macnair, EAA vice president of government relations. "This proposal would be an unprecedented restriction on the freedom of movement for private U.S. citizens. It would also, for the first time, require governmental review and authority before a person could operate his/her own personal transportation conveyance.
First they came after the private aircraft pilots, and I said nothing, because I wasn't a private aircraft pilot.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:13 AMIrene Klotz has an interview with the (hopefully) outgoing NASA administrator:
I would be willing to continue on as administrator under the right circumstances. The circumstances include a recognition of the fact that two successive Congresses -- one Republician and one Democrat -- have strongly endorsed, hugely endorsed, the path NASA is on: Finish the station, retire the shuttle, return to the moon, establish a base on the moon, look outward to the near-Earth asteroids and on to Mars. That's the path we're on. I think it's the right path.
I think for 35 years since the Nixon administration we've been on the wrong path. It took the loss of Columbia and Admiral Gehman's (Columbia Accident Investigation Board) report highlighting the strategic issues to get us on the right path. We're there. I personally will not be party to taking us off that path. Someone else may wish to, but I do not.
What Dr. Griffin doesn't understand is that, in his disastrous architecture choices, and decision to waste money developing a new unneeded launch system, it is he himself who has taken us off that path.
I also have to say that I think that this particular criticism by Keith Cowing is (as is often the case) over the top and ridiculous. It's perfectly clear what he meant--that with all of the other problems facing the country right now, Shuttle retirement per se isn't going to be a top priority. But it is an issue that will no doubt be dealt with by the transition team.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 AMRob Coppinger says that they are in fact, a fantasy (though he doesn't explain why they require "unobtainium").
Clark Lindsey ably responds. I think that there are several problems with Rob's thesis, but don't have the time to get into it right now. I will agree with him that there is no current market for them. I hope, though, that (by the same standard) he would agree that there was no market for launch vehicles in 1956. So I fail to see the point.
[Late morning update]
Jon Goff dissects Rob's piece more thoroughly.
As for Jon's question about when he started thinking about depots, it may have been at Space Access in (I think) 2005, when I gave an impromptu talk on the subject, as a result of my work with Dallas and Boeing on CE&R (work that was completely ignored/rejected when Mike Griffin came in and canned Craig Steidle).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AMFrom Henry Spencer:
In its early years, the only form of manned space exploration it favoured was an (international) Mars expedition. All other ideas that involved humans in space were counterproductive and undesirable, to hear the Planetary Society tell it.
This obsession with Mars was a bad idea then, and it's a bad idea now. However, some of the reasons advanced against it strike me as poor - sufficiently poor that they weaken attempts to argue for a more systematic and balanced space effort.An exclusive focus on Mars does have one thing going for it. If you believe that any resumption of manned space exploration will inevitably end the way Apollo did, with follow-on programmes cancelled and flight-ready hardware consigned to museums as soon as the programme's first objective is met, then choosing the most interesting single destination makes sense.
However . . . haven't we learned anything from doing that once? To me, it makes far more sense to try to build a programme that won't crash and burn as soon as it scores its first goal. That means systematically building capabilities and infrastructure, and doing first things first even if they aren't the most exciting parts.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to have the societal patience necessary to do the unexciting parts, at least if the government is paying for it. Which is why we have to get private industry going ASAP.
[Early afternoon update]
I mentioned yesterday that Paul Spudis wasn't impressed with Lou Friedman's thoughts. He's similarly unimpressed with The Planetary Society's new roadmap.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Jeff Plescia has been leaving this message in comments at various places (I've seen it at NASA Watch and Space Politics]
As a participant in the workshop sponsored by the Planetary Society at Stanford University in February, 2008, I feel obliged to make some comments with respect to what is said in portions of the Planetary Society document "Beyond the Moon A New Roadmap for Human Space Exploration."
Page 5 contains the statement:
"Among the conclusions of this group is that 'the purpose of sustained human exploration is to go to Mars and beyond,' and that a series of intermediate destinations, each with its own intrinsic value, should be established as steps toward that goal. The consensus statements and viewpoints expressed by this group of experts form the basis for the principles and recommendations contained in this document."This statement is a blatant and intentionally dishonest misrepresentation of the recommendations and sentiments of the group.
We had extensive discussions about what the conclusion of the workshop might be. While the conclusion reported in the Roadmap was clearly the predisposition of several members of the group, particularly the organizers, it was definitively and clearly not the consensus of the group as a whole. In fact, when these words (or words to the same effect) were suggested, the group clearly indicated to the organizers that they should not be used because they were inaccurate. However, the organizers chose to ignore the group's wishes at the end of the workshop, at the International Astronautical Congress and in the Roadmap in portraying the results of the workshop. This has occurred despite the fact that members of the group pointed out after the workshop press release that such statements were inappropriate and incorrect.
For what it's worth. Thanks, Lou.
Maybe it's like the climate change "consensus," from which many scientists are now running.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AMOne of the astronauts lost a toolbag during EVA servicing:
Piper noticed that one of the two grease guns in her bag had exploded, spreading the dark, dry grease all over her camera and gloves. The grease, called Braycote, is a durable, non-flamable lubricant tough enough to handle the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space. It is needed to lubricate the cranky joint which has been grinding for more than a year.
In the midst of trying to clean up the mess, the bag of tools floated away from her. Views from a camera mounted on her helmet show it drifting slowly off towards the back of the station, some 200 miles above the earth."Oh, great," she exclaimed in frustration.
I assume that by "exploded" they just mean "escaped under pressure," and not literally a supersonic combustion.
A truly spacefaring nation would have a routine means of going and retrieving something like this. Instead, it becomes one more piece of space junk to track until it eventually enters the atmosphere, probably months or years from now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:24 PM...to be the public's representative for space exploration?
As Paul Spudis (who I recently discovered has a blog or two) notes in comments over there, it's a deadly combination of insufferable arrogance and unsurpassed ignorance. Though I think he gives Lou too much credit when he calls it an accomplishment. It comes naturally to him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AMIs that really the loss-of-crew probability for an ISS trip with Ares/Orion?
I could buy that number for a lunar mission, but if that's just for a crew changeout, they seem to be managing to spend billions on a new launch vehicle that is less safe than Shuttle.
How could it be? As one of the commenters speculates over there, they may have pulled a lot of redundancy out to save weight when they ran out of margin on both the launcher and the capsule. Also, as I think I've mentioned before, it may be that they've figured out that the Launch Abort System actually adds more risk than it removes, given the dozens of hazards it introduces, over half of which can happen on an otherwise nominal mission.
Anyway, if true, it's just one more reason to abort this monstrosity now, before it wastes any more time or money.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:44 AMRob Coppinger has some suggestions to the Obama administration for NASA policy. I agree that Ares I should be mercy killed ASAP, but I disagree that we need an Ares anything else. We need to stop focusing on heavy lift and start developing the capability to store propellant on orbit, which will allow us to launch escape missions of arbitrarily large mass.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:51 AMWhich in fact I'll probably be offering in the next days and weeks, since I actually know several of them quite well.
If you want to know how to get the VSE back on track, you could do a lot worse than to simply go back and reread the Aldridge Commission Report. Mike Griffin doesn't seem to have done so, or if he did, he largely ignored its recommendations, with the one exception being developing a heavy lifter (which was the one main thing that the commission got wrong).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:58 AMJack Schmitt has resigned from The Planetary Society over their destinational dispute. As I noted the other day, to argue about destinations at all is to miss the point.
I agree with most of his points, other than the need for heavy lift. And I absolutely agree that making it an international venture would be the kiss of death, at least in terms of meeting schedules or making it affordable, other than setting up propellant depots that can take deliveries from a wide range of sources, including international and commercial. But the Mars hardware and expeditions should be national in nature. We need competition, not "cooperation."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:36 AMAlan Boyle has a good roundup of the current state of play, with lots of links. As I've noted before, people who merely argue about destinations are missing the point.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 AMI was thinking about driving up to watch it (who knows how many night launches are remaining?) but couldn't work up the gumption for it. Patricia was up in Orlando yesterday, and could have stayed later, but I would have had to drive up and meet her somewhere, and then we'd have come back separately, and gotten in late. But I did see it from the house (first time I've ever done that). Now I know where the trajectory is, and where to look the next time, if it's clear. But I doubt if I'd see anything past SRB burnout in the daytime. Even at night, the main engines were pretty dim from 150 miles away. Though, of course, it was also heading northeast, away from us.
Jonathan Gewirtz took a shot of it from downtown Miami (which is actually a couple hundred miles away, being fifty miles or so south of me). The Hubble flight should be a better view, since it will launch due east.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AM"...I know how to fail. Just pick the wrong people, and you are doomed."
Yes, at this point, I'd say you're a poster boy for that bit of acquired wisdom.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM...but...the Moon is to Mars as the Canary Islands were to the Americas.
Discuss.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PMNot for me, but for Jon Goff (though John Hare has been picking up the slack with a lot of out-of-the-box technical posts). Two words: shock diamonds.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:21 PMWith a new administration coming in, there's a lot of speculation about potential shifts in civil space policy, ranging from whether or not Mike Griffin will stay on as administrator, and if so, who will replace him, to whether or not we have the right architecture to achieve the outgoing president's Vision for Space Exploration, or even whether the VSE itself is still valid. Yesterday, the Planetary Society seemed to convert itself to the Mars Society, with its statement that we should bypass the moon, so now we can't even decide what the goal is.
I'm having a sense of deja vu, because we're rerunning the debate we have every few years over space policy, and as always, we are arguing from a set of assumptions that are assumed to be shared, but in many cases are not. I find that the longer I blog, the harder it is for me to come up with new things to say, particularly about space policy. Almost five years ago (jeez, how the time flies--was it really that long ago that we celebrated the Wright Centenary?), I wrote a piece in frustration on this subject. Sadly, nothing has really changed. A vision isn't a destination. I'll replay the golden oldie, because I think that it might be useful to guide the current debate, assuming anyone of consequence reads it.
Jason Bates has an article on the current state of space policy development. As usual, it shows a space policy establishment mired in old Cold-War myths, blinkered in its view of the possibilities.NASA needs a vision that includes a specific destination. That much a panel of space advocates who gathered in Washington today to celebrate the 100th anniversary of powered flight could agree on. There is less consensus about what that destination should be.Well, if I'd been on that panel, the agreement would have been less than unanimous. I agree that NASA needs a vision, but I think that the focus on destination is distracting us from developing one, if for no other reason than it's probably not going to be possible to get agreement on it.
As the article clearly shows, some, like Paul Spudis, think we should go back to the moon, and others, like Bub Zubrin, will settle for no less than Mars, and consider our sister orb a useless distraction from the true (in his mind) goal. We are never going to resolve this fundamental, irreconciliable difference, as long as the argument is about destinations.
In addition, we need to change the language in which we discuss such things. Dr. Spudis is quoted as saying:
"For the first time in the agency's history there is no new human spaceflight mission in the pipeline. There is nothing beyond" the international space station."Fred Singer of NOAA says:
The effort will prepare humans for more ambitious missions in the future, Singer said. "We need an overarching goal," he said. "We need something with unique science content, not a publicity stunt."Gary Martin, NASA's space architect declares:
NASA's new strategy would use Mars, for example, as the first step to future missions rather than as a destination in itself, Martin said. Robotic explorers will be trailblazers that can lay the groundwork for deeper space exploration, he said."...human spaceflight mission..."
"...unique science..."
"...space exploration..."
This is the language of yesteryear. This debate could have occurred, and in fact did occur, in the early 1970s, as Apollo wound down. There's nothing new here, and no reason to think that the output from it will result in affordable or sustainable space activities.
They say that we need a vision with a destination, but it's clear from this window into the process that, to them, the destination is the vision. It's not about why are we doing it (that's taken as a given--for "science" and "exploration"), nor is it about how we're doing it (e.g., giving NASA multi-gigabucks for a "mission" versus putting incentives into place for other agencies or private entities to do whatever "it" is)--it's all seemingly about the narrow topic of where we'll send NASA next with our billions of taxpayer dollars, as the scientists gather data while we sit at home and watch on teevee.
On the other hand, unlike the people quoted in the article, the science writer Timothy Ferris is starting to get it, as is Sir Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal, though both individuals are motivated foremost by space science.
At first glance, the Ferris op-ed seems just another plea for a return to the moon, but it goes beyond "missions" and science, and discusses the possibility of practical returns from such a venture. Moreover, this little paragraph indicates a little more "vision," than the one from the usual suspects above:
As such sugarplum visions of potential profits suggest, the long-term success of a lunar habitation will depend on the involvement of private enterprise, or what Harrison H. Schmitt, an Apollo astronaut, calls "a business-and-investor-based approach to a return to the Moon to stay." The important thing about involving entrepreneurs and oil-rig-grade roughnecks is that they can take personal and financial risks that are unacceptable, as a matter of national pride, when all the explorers are astronauts wearing national flags on their sleeves.
One reason aviation progressed so rapidly, going from the Wright brothers to supersonic jets in only 44 years, is that individuals got involved ? it wasn't just governments. Charles A. Lindbergh didn't risk his neck in 1927 purely for personal gratification: he was after the $25,000 Orteig Prize, offered by Raymond Orteig, a New York hotelier, for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Had Lindbergh failed, his demise, though tragic, would have been viewed as a daredevil's acknowledged jeopardy, not a national catastrophe. Settling the Moon or Mars may at times mean taking greater risks than the 2 percent fatality rate that shuttle astronauts now face.Sir Martin's comments are similar:
The American public's reaction to the shuttle's safety record - two disasters in 113 flights - suggests that it is unacceptable for tax-funded projects to expose civilians even to a 2% risk. The first explorers venturing towards Mars would confront, and would surely willingly accept, far higher risks than this. But they will never get the chance to go until costs come down to the level when the enterprise could be bankrolled by private consortia.
Future expeditions to the moon and beyond will only be politically and financially feasible if they are cut-price ventures, spearheaded by individuals who accept that they may never return. The Columbia disaster should motivate Nasa to set new goals for manned space flight - to collaborate with private groups to develop a more cost-effective and inspiring programme than we've had for the past 30 years.Yes, somehow we've got to break out of this national mentality that the loss of astronauts is always unacceptable, or we'll never make any progress in space. The handwringing and inappropriate mourning of the Columbia astronauts, almost eleven months ago, showed that the nation hasn't yet grown up when it comes to space. Had we taken such an attitude with aviation, or seafaring, we wouldn't have an aviation industry today, and in fact, we'd not even have settled the Americas. To venture is to risk, and the first step of a new vision for our nation is the acceptance of that fact. But I think that Mr. Ferris is right--it won't be possible as long as we continue to send national astronauts on a voyeuristic program of "exploration"--it will have to await the emergence of the private sector, and I don't see anything in the "vision" discussions that either recognizes this, or is developing policy to help enable and implement it.
There's really only one way to resolve this disparity of visions, and that's to come up with a vision that can encompass all of them, and more, because the people who are interested in uses of space beside and beyond "science," and "exploration," and "missions," are apparently still being forced to sit on the sidelines, at least to judge by the Space.com article.
Here's my vision.
I have a vision of hundreds of flights of privately-operated vehicles going to and from low earth orbit every year, reducing the costs of doing so to tens of dollars per pound. Much of their cargo is people who are visiting orbital resorts, or even cruise ships around the moon, but the important things is that it will be people paying to deliver cargo, or themselves, to space, for their own purposes, regardless of what NASA's "vision" is.
At that price, the Mars Society can raise the money (perhaps jointly with the National Geographic Society and the Planetary Society) to send their own expedition off to Mars. Dr. Spudis and others of like mind can raise the funds to establish lunar bases, or even hotels, and start to learn how to operate there and start tapping its resources. Still others may decide to go off and visit an asteroid, perhaps even take a contract from the government to divert its path, should it be a dangerous one for earthly inhabitants.
My vision for space is a vast array of people doing things there, for a variety of reasons far beyond science and "exploration." The barrier to this is the cost of access, and the barrier to bringing down the cost of access is not, despite pronouncements to the contrary by government officials, a lack of technology. It's a lack of activity. When we come up with a space policy that addresses that, I'll consider it visionary. Until then, it's just more of the same myopia that got us into the current mess, and sending a few astronauts off to the Moon, or Mars, for billions of dollars, isn't going to get us out of it any more than does three astronauts circling the earth in a multi-decabillion space station.
There's no lack of destinations. What we continue to lack is true vision.
All that is old is new again.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PMThat's the recommendation of the Planetary Society.
I don't necessarily have a problem with deferring the Moon, since NASA seems determined to go to the moon in the most cost-ineffective and unsustainable manner possible. What chaps my drawers is deferring the development of critical infrastructure essential to affordable access to LEO and beyond.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PMGeorge Abbey as NASA administrator? If that were to happen, it would be one of the worst effects of the Obama win, at least for those who care about our future in space.
[Update early afternoon]
Here was my take on the Abbey/Lane paper at the time it was first published, over three years ago:
I'm reading the space policy paper by (former JSC Director George) Abbey and (former Clinton Science Advisor Neal) Lane.It gets off on the wrong foot, in my opinion, right in the preface:
Space exploration on the scale envisioned in the president's plan is by necessity a cooperative international venture.I know that this is an article of faith with many, but simply stating it doesn't make it an incontrovertible fact. In reality, this is a political decision. If it became important to the nation to become spacefaring, and seriously move out into space, there's no reason that we couldn't afford to do it ourselves. The amount of money that we spend on space is a trivially small part of the discretionary budget, and even smaller part of the total federal budget, and a drop in the bucket when looking at the GDP. Even ignoring the fact that we could be getting much more for our money if relieved of political constraints, we could easily double the current budget.
The statement also ignores the fact that international cooperation in fact tends to increase costs, and there's little good evidence that it even saves money. It's something that we tend to do simply for the sake of international cooperation, and we actually pay a price for it.
Neither the president's plan nor the prevailing thrust of existing U.S. space policies encourages the type of international partnerships that are needed. Indeed there is much about U.S. space policy and plans--particularly those pertaining to the possible deployment of weapons in space--that even our closest allies find objectionable.While I don't favor doing things just because other countries find them objectionable (with the exception of France), this issue should not be driving our space policy, as I pointed out almost exactly three years ago. What the authors think is a bug, I consider a feature.
In the introduction itself, I found this an interesting misdiagnosis:
In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced a plan to return humans to the Moon by 2020, suggesting that this time U.S. astronauts would make the journey as a part of an international partnership. However, the recent history of the U.S. space program--the tragic Columbia accident, a squeezing of the NASA budget over many years, the cancellation of the Hubble Space Telescope upgrade mission, a go-it-alone approach to space activities, the near demise of the U.S. satellite industry due to U.S. policy on export controls, and international concern about U.S. intentions regarding the military use of space--points to serious obstacles that stand in the way of moving forward.Again, they state this as though it was obviously true (and perhaps it is, to them). But they don't actually explain how any of these things present obstacles to returning to the moon. The loss of Columbia was actually, despite the tragedy to the friends and families of the lost astronauts, a blessing, to the degree that it forced the nation to take a realistic reassessment of the Shuttle program. We aren't going to use Shuttle to go back to the moon, so how can they argue that its loss is an obstacle to that goal?
Similarly, how does squeezing of past NASA budgets prevent future intelligent spending in furtherance of the president's goal? While lamentable if it doesn't occur, repairing Hubble was not going to make any contribution to the Vision for Space Exploration. And while the state of the satellite industry is troubling, again, there's no direct connection between this and human exploration. I've already dealt with the spuriousness of the complaints about international cooperation. In short, this statement is simply a lot of unsubstantiated air, but it probably sounds good to policy makers who haven't given it much thought.
They sum it up here:
U.S. policy makers must confront four looming barriers that threaten continued U.S. leadership in space: export regulations that stifle the growth of the commercial space industry, the projected shortfall in the U.S. science and engineering workforce, inadequate planning for robust scientific advancement in NASA, and an erosion of international cooperation in space.There are some barriers to carrying out the president's vision, but so far, with the exception of the export-control issue, these aren't them, and they don't seem to have identified any of the other actual ones.
From there, they go on to give a brief history of the space program, with its supposed benefits to the nation. They then go on to laud the international nature of it. When I got to this sentence, I was struck by the irony:
The International Space Station best portrays the international character of space today.If that's true, it should be taken as a loud and clear warning that we should be running as far, and and as fast, from "international cooperation" as we possibly can.
The largest cooperative scientific and technological program in history, the space station draws on the resources and technical capabilities of nations around the world. It has brought the two Cold War adversaries together to work for a common cause, and arguably has done more to further understanding and cooperation between the two nations than many comparable programs.What they don't note is that it is years behind schedule, billions over budget, and still accomplishes little of value to actually advancing us in space, other than continuing to keep many people employed at Mr. Abbey's former center, and other places. But, hey...it promotes international cooperation, so that's all right. Right?
The piece goes on to describe the four "barriers," of which only one (export control) really is. While it's troubling that not as many native-born are getting advanced science and engineering degrees as there used to be, there will be no shortage of engineers, since the foreign born will more than pick up the slack. It's perhaps a relevant public policy issue, but it's not a "barrier" to our sending people back to the moon.
The most tendentious "barrier" is what the authors claim is inadequate planning and budgets for the vision:
President George W. Bush's NASA Plan, which echoed that of President George H. W. Bush over a decade before, is bold by any measure. It is also incomplete and unrealistic. It is incomplete, in part, because it raises serious questions about the future commitment of the United States to astronomy and to planetary, earth, and space science. It is unrealistic from the perspectives of cost, timetable, and technological capability. It raises expectations that are not matched by the Administration's commitments. Indeed, pursuit of the NASA Plan, as formulated, is likely to result in substantial harm to the U.S. space program.Even if one buys their premise--that expectations don't match commitments, that all depends on what means by the "U.S. space program," doesn't it? They seem (like many space policy analysts) to be hung up on science, as though that's the raison d'être of the program. Leaving that aside, they (disingenuously, in my opinion) attempt to back up this statement:
The first part of the NASA Plan, as proposed, was to be funded by adding $1 billion to the NASA budget over five years, and reallocating $11 billion from within the NASA budget during the same time frame. These amounts were within the annual 5 percent increase the current Administration planned to add to the NASA base budget (approximately $15 billion) starting in fiscal year 2005. This budget, however, was very small in comparison to the cost of going to the Moon with the Apollo program. The cost of the Apollo program was approximately $25 billion in 1960 dollars or $125 billion in 2004 dollars, and the objectives of the NASA Plan are, in many ways, no less challenging.This is a very misleading comparison, for two reasons.
First, as the president himself said, this is not a race, but a vision. Apollo was a race. Money was essentially no object, as long as we beat the Soviets to the moon. The vision will be budget constrained. NASA's (and Mike Griffin's) challenge is to accomplish those few milestones that were laid out in the president's plan within those constraints. It will cost that much, and no more, by definition.
Second, simply stating that the goals of the plan are no less challenging than Apollo doesn't make it so. While the goal of establishing a permanent lunar presence is more of a challenge, it's not that much more of one, and we know much more about the moon now than we did in 1961, and we have much more technology in hand, and experience in development than we did then. In short, any comparison between what Apollo cost and what the vision will cost is utterly spurious. The only way to get an estimate for the latter is to define how it will be done, and then do parametric costing, using 21st-century cost-estimating relationships, on the systems so defined (a process which is occurring, and is one not informed in any way by Apollo budgets).
The U.S. Congress has made clear with its NASA appropriation for fiscal year 2005 that it has serious questions about the NASA Plan.No surprise there. But that's merely a reflection of specific items (i.e., pork for their districts) that were cut, and says nothing in particular about the overall ability of NASA to achieve the plan with the budget. In fact, an annual appropriation is just that--it provides no insight whatsoever into what Congress might think is required in the out years, when the real budgetary issues would emerge, if they do at all.
Overall, this section strikes me as less a serious policy discussion than a political slap at the administration, by one of the first high-level NASA officials to be canned by it, and by a disgruntled physicist (and science advisor from the previous administration) unhappy that science is not the be-all of the program.
I've glanced through the rest of the thing, but I think I've covered the major flaws in it already. What's actually most notable to me is that they completely ignore the potential for private passenger flight, and commercial space in general (other than bemoaning the impact to the satellite industry of export restrictions). Given how badly they've misdiagnosed the problems, their prescriptions have little value. In terms of providing a basis for administration policy, my own recommendation is that it be simply filed away--in a circular receptacle.
I see little reason to revise that review today. George Abbey shouldn't be allowed anywhere near space policy (though perhaps, at seventy six years of age, it's not something that he wants, or could handle at this point). It certainly wouldn't be change we can believe in. Or change at all.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AMJeff Foust has some thoughts about issues facing the new administration. It may in fact be an opportunity to undo the damage in the 1990s when Congress arbitrarily put space hardware on the munitions list. Duncan Hunter won't be in a position to stop it now, being firmly in the minority.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AMThe other day I pointed out a report on the general military acquisition problems. Today at The Space Review, Dwayne Day discusses the military space problem in particular. As he notes, Pentagon space makes NASA look like a model of efficiency. NASA at least has the excuse that what it does isn't really important. The same is not true of our defense systems, but the bureaucracy and porkmeisters act as though it is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AMSenator Nelson is urging Barack Obama to keep Mike Griffin on:
"He called Lori Garver and said that until they had a surefire choice, they should continue with Griffin. And he thinks Griffin is doing a good job," said Bryan Gulley, a Nelson spokesman. Gulley would not say who Nelson would support if or when Obama picks a new NASA administrator.
Well, obviously, you don't want to leave the post vacant, or put in a loser. But it should be a high priority to find a good replacement for him, not to mention come up with a new policy (the two will no doubt go together). The Ares/Orion debacle is entirely Mike Griffin's baby at this point. I know that if I were named the new administrator, I'd can Ares, ramp up COTS and COTS D, and get started on R&T, and then (not much later) RDT&E for a propellant depot, and let ULA, SpaceX and others worry about earth to orbit. With a prop depot, the weight margins on Orion and Altair become essentially unlimited, so I'd start designs over from there.
But for many reasons, I'm not going to be named administrator. I just hope that whoever is has their head screwed on right.
Oh, and I should also add (as I commented over at Bobby Block's site) that people who should know better (like Senators who have actually flown in space) seem to continue to ignore the reality that extending Shuttle doesn't give us independence from the Russians, because the Shuttle can't act as an ISS lifeboat. All it does is cost billions more while putting crew at high risk. Until they get Dragon or Orion, or something else, we are going to have to continue buying Soyuz if we want to continue to have US astronauts at ISS.
[Saturday morning update]
There's more discussion on this topic over at Space Politics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:05 PMOne of my ongoing themes is that space is not politically important. Apparently the incoming administration agrees. It isn't mentioned anywhere at the transition web site. I poked around in "Technology," "Energy and the Environment," and couldn't find anything about civil space, or NASA. The only discussion of space that I could find was under "Defense":
Ensure Freedom of Space: An Obama-Biden administration will restore American leadership on space issues, seeking a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites. He will thoroughly assess possible threats to U.S. space assets and the best options, military and diplomatic, for countering them, establishing contingency plans to ensure that U.S. forces can maintain or duplicate access to information from space assets and accelerating programs to harden U.S. satellites against attack.
A "worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites" would be unenforceable--it's pie in the sky. And there's no way to "harden U.S. satellites against attack" unless we come up with much lower costs to orbit. Does the new administration consider Operationally Responsive Space to be part of the solution? And will they take it seriously?
In any event, space policy in general seems to be a tabula rasa, other than campaign promises, so maybe there's an opportunity to write some and get it added to the site.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AMThat's what Jeff Foust says to do about Oberstar.
I agree with everything Jeff wrote, except for the part about his likely interest in this issue. I'm pretty sure that he hasn't forgotten it, even if he has given up on it for now on the Hill.
And as I noted in comments over there, I don't think that it's "panicking" to attempt to nip a problem in the bud. It's a lot easier to put the kibosh on it now than it would be after he was formally selected and announced. Clark Lindsey seems to share my view.
I would also note that I didn't mean to imply that I thought this meant anything at all about an Obama administration's general attitude toward commercial space. I doubt if whoever is considering Oberstar is even aware of the issue.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AMAn interesting find over at Jon Goff's place.
I've been advocating space tugs for (depressingly) over a quarter of a century. I wrote an internal memo at Rockwell on the subject in 1982 that proposed one as a means to enhance payload on the Shuttle to station, and allow higher station altitudes (reducing reboost requirements and providing more power). NASA wasn't interested. I hope that Jon is right that their time is finally coming.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:16 PMMore space transition news. This could be a horrific disaster:
Potential Secretary of Transportation: James Oberstar, member of the House of Representatives since 1975.
Oberstar overseeing the FAA would mean safety regulation on the commercial spaceflight industry that would strangle it in the cradle. If they have any influence, Lori, George and Alan need to work as hard as they can to get a different candidate.
[Update early evening]
Clark Lindsey has more thoughts.
[Update a while later]
A commenter suggests that Bill Richardson, who has spent a lot of effort as governor on getting a commercial spaceport in his state, won't be happy about this (at least if he understands the implications). He could be a key leverage point with the incoming administration.
[Late evening update]
Alan Boyle is following up on the story.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:00 AMNormally, the selection of a NASA administrator is low priority in a presidential transition, because (as I point out often) space is not very important, politically. That may be different this year, though. The GAO has identified Shuttle retirement as an urgent transition issue.
Which brings up an interesting point. In addition to the snow princess, who are "Hefferen, Ladwig, Whitesides, and Monje"? I know that "Ladwig" is Alan and "Whitesides" is George, but I've never heard of the other two.
I will also say that I am somewhat reassured by the involvement of Lori, Alan and George in the transition, if they are, because they all understand the importance of commercial solutions. I would also add that if President-elect Obama wants to (at least for bipartisan appearance' sake) appoint some token Republicans, NASA would be a good ostensibly non-political place to do it. I wonder what Alan Stern's political affiliation is?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AMI have never thought of Lori Garver as a snow princess.
Will she be the next administrator, though?
I also have to say that I found this comment disturbing:
Seems highly likely Orion will become ISS only for now.
Let's sincerely hope not. That would be a major blow to commercial services. Better to just end it, and ramp up COTS.
[Afternoon update]
She's married, with kids. Shouldn't she be the Snow Queen (not to be confused with the Ice Queen)?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:39 AMJeff Foust has a post on some key races, though he talks about how they will affect "space." I think we'll do fine in space, regardless of election outcomes. It's NASA, and NASA human spaceflight supporters who should be worried.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AMJohn Hare has some thoughts on boxes, and thinking in or out of them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:48 AMThere's a good article over at NASA Spaceflight on the lift-off drift problem of the Ares 1.
Safe, simple, soon. Scam.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More at the Orlando Sentinel, on the Congressional Budget Office finding that the vehicle can't hit its IOC date without billions more. And there will still be a gap.
Billions of dollars to develop a new vehicle we don't need, when we could have been flying something by 2010 or 2011 with Steidle's original plan.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:25 AMThey're developing a magnetic shield to protect space travelers from radiation. This is a critical technology for a spacefaring civilization.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 AMA commercial comsat is being retired after thirty-two years. The original design life was five. Space hardware tends to be overdesigned, but I wonder how they had enough propellant to go that long?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:59 AMThe Orion spacecraft program was reviewed with the wrong configuration. There's more here:
So an older, immature design of the Orion capsule is brought up for review and passes muster, when it fact it lacks many of the features a flight worthy capsule would have (e.g., a weight that would be liftable, a means of landing that won't kill the occupants) along with several that a real vehicle wouldn't have (e.g., extra amounts of hot water for BroomHilda's cauldron).
That's not the way the process is supposed to work.Unfortunately, the IG's office, not known for their brilliance or their ethics, took the ESMD Viceroy's non-concurrence with their findings and said, "ok, so sorry to have bothered you," and moved on.
Can't anyone here play this game? How much longer before this misbegotten program augers in?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:22 AMClark Lindsey points out the inherent problem:
I've certainly always believed that NASA can get anything to fly with enough time and billions of dollars. The issue is cost-effectiveness. This vehicle, which is obsolete for the 20th century much less the 21st, is simply not going to pay off in terms of making space exploration cheaper or safer.
Ignoring its gigantic price tag for the moment, if Ares I were just one of several competing commercial rocket vehicle projects funded in a COTS type of program, I have no doubt that NASA would have been canceled it long ago just on technical grounds and missed milestones. Unfortunately, when a large project is developed internally, it becomes virtually impossible to stop, especially in a case like this where the top management is so deeply invested in it. The next administration might take another look at Ares but unfortunately the battle for Florida votes has left both candidates committed to it as a jobs program. Such is how a promising vision for space exploration finds itself hung by a boondoggle.
While I agree, I have to say that the last sentence sounds painful. And at least psychically, it is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:09 PMHenry Spencer has some useful thoughts (as always) on Armadillo's accomplishment, and failure.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 PMThe Space Review is up (a little late--it's usually available first thing Monday morning, but Jeff is probably recovering from his trip to New Mexico), and it has a couple interesting articles. The first one describes the benefits of amateur efforts toward space settlement. The second one is a relook at the economics of O"Neill's Island One space habitat. It's nonsensical, because the author doesn't understand much about the economics of space launch. Let's start with this:
O'Neill's expectations about launch costs (like those of other 1970s-era prophets of space development) proved to be highly optimistic, even given the disagreement about how these are to be calculated. A $10,000 a pound ($22,000 per kilogram) Earth-to-LEO price, almost twenty-five times the estimate O'Neill worked with, is considered the reasonable optimum now.
Considered so by whom? Not by ULA. Not by the Russians. Not by SpaceX. The only launch vehicle that has launch costs that high is the Shuttle, and that's because it flies so seldom that its per-flight cost is on the order of a billion dollars. In a due-east launch, it can get close to sixty thousand pounds to LEO, and if it cost six hundred million per flight (as it did before Columbia, when the flight rate was higher), that would be about ten thousand bucks a pound. But to call this "optimum" is lunacy. Other existing launchers are going for a couple thousand a pound (the Russians are less based on price, but its not clear what their costs are, and if they're making money). SpaceX is projecting its price for Falcon 9 to be about forty million, to deliver almost thirty thousand pounds to LEO, so that's a little over a thousand per pound. And that's without reusing any hardware.
But even these are hardly "optimum." The true price drops will come from high flight rates of fully-reusable space transports, and there's no physical reason that these couldn't deliver payload for on the order of a hundred dollars per pound or less.
Of course we aren't going to build HLVs for space colonies, as Gerry O'Neill proposed. If it happens, it will happen when the price does come down, as a result of other markets. But if the point is that Island One is unaffordable at current launch costs, it's a trivial one--most intelligent observers realize that. But it's ridiculous to think that lower launch costs can't be achieved, or even that his stated number has any basis in reality.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:22 PMClark Lindsey is back from New Mexico, and has a roundup of links about the Lunar Landing Challenge.
Jeff Foust also has a couple video interviews, with Ken Davidian and John Carmack.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AMWell, here's the latest in the Perils of Ares I--it might sideswipe the gantry as it launches:
The issue is known as "liftoff drift." Ignition of the rocket's solid-fuel motor makes it "jump" sideways on the pad, and a southeast breeze stronger than 12.7 mph would be enough to push the 309-foot-tall ship into its launch tower.
Worst case, the impact would destroy the rocket. But even if that doesn't happen, flames from the rocket would scorch the tower, leading to huge repair costs."We were told by a person directly involved [in looking at the problem] that as they incorporate more variables into the liftoff-drift-curve model, the worse the curve becomes," said one NASA contractor, who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to discuss Ares.
"I get the impression that things are quickly going from bad to worse to unrecoverable."
But all is not lost:
NASA says it can solve -- or limit -- the problem by repositioning and redesigning the launchpad.
Sure. No problem. Just reposition and redesign the launch pad. Simple, safe, soon.
NASA officials are now looking at ways to speed up the development of Ares and are reluctant to discuss specific problems. But they insist none is insurmountable.
Of course they do.
"There are always issues that crop up when you are developing a new rocket and many opinions about how to deal with them," said Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation program, which includes Ares, the first new U.S. rocket in 35 years."We have a lot of data and understanding of what it's going to take to build this."
Yes, they have so much data and understanding that they don't find out about this until after their fake Preliminary Design Review. And (just a guess), I'm betting that if I look at the original budget and development schedule, "repositioning and redesigning the launch pad" isn't even in or on it.
Look, obviously, if you pick a lousy design, you can eventually make it fly, given enough time and money. But in the process, it may end up bearing little resemblance to the original concept, and if it's neither simple (which it won't be with all of the kludges that they'll have to put on it to make up for its deficiencies), safe (no one really knows what the probability of loss of crew is, since they still haven't finally even nailed down the launch abort system design) or soon, then the nation has been sold a pig in a poke. And there's no budget line item for the lipstick either, though NASA has been attempting to tart it up as best they can.
As Einstein once said, a clever man solves a problem--a wise man avoids it. Since Mike Griffin came in, NASA has been too clever by half. Given the budget environment we'll have next year, it's hard to see how this unsustainable schedule and budgetary atrocity survives in anything resembling its current form.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:57 AMArmadillo's attempt at Level Two (a million dollar purse) starts in a few minutes. Webcast is here.
[Update]
Well, there was a problem. There was a hard start, and the vehicle fell over on its side. Not clear how recoverable it is.
[Afternoon update]
That's it for this year. They aren't going to make another attempt today. Clark Lindsey has the story.
That leaves most of the money still on the table, but at least Armadillo didn't go home empty handed this time.
[Update an hour or so later]
Jeff Foust has a picture of the burned-through nozzle that resulted from the lean fuel mixture.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 AMFirst attempts start in an hour and a half. Clark Lindsey is heading out to the site at the Las Cruces Airport. Wish I were there.
Good luck to all the contestants.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here's the webcast.
[Update about 10:30 AM EDT]
If you're watching the webcast (or even if not), it's about four to five minutes from Armadillo's first attempt.
[Update a few minutes later]
They had a successful first flight, except it ran short. They didn't make it to ninety seconds. The judges just gave permission for two more legs within this window, but they have only forty-five minutes left, which includes getting back to the departure point with the vehicle.
[Update a few minutes later]
They're about to make another attempt at the first successful leg. They're cleared for flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
They just had a first successful 90-second flight. They have fifteen minutes left before their FAA window closes (though they have longer to get back to the staging area). It's going to be a tight turnaround.
[Update at 11:30 AM EDT]
Too tight a window. They're detanking. Level One remains unwon. There are three or four windows left. TrueZero will make the next attempt later today.
[A little before 2 PM EDT]
TrueZero is about to make their attempt. This will be interesting--it's the first time they've ever flown the vehicle untethered...
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, it was interesting. Brief, but interesting. It ascended to altitude, but when it started its translation, it keeled over and dove to the ground, making a little smoking hole in the desert. There's a small fire, no one was hurt, and the vehicle is lying on its side and vented. Fire department on the way. Do they have other vehicles, or was that their shot?
This is why you do full flight tests. They had no experience with untethered flight. They just got some.
[Update at 4 PM EDT]
Armadillo is going to make their second attempt of the day in half an hour. If they don't make it, they'll have at least two more shots tomorrow. Barring a disaster, they should be able to go home with some prize money this year, but there will still be some on the table for next year.
[Update at quarter to five Eastern]
Well, this will be controversial. The judges have allowed them to just do the return flight, picking up where they left off this morning, because they weren't given the time earlier that the prize allowed, due to the unrelated FAA restriction. While one can understand the sentiment, technically they are not doing what the prize requires in terms of turnaround, and if they win today under the rule waiver, I fear that many will think it tainted.
[Update while listening to all the speechifying]
Clark has the story on what happened with TrueZer0. As noted they had one vehicle, and it was totaled.
[Update after the flight]
Well, they just had a successful flight. If they get back to the staging area in half an hour, they'll have one first place for Level One, $350K. Congratulations to the Amadillo team.
[Evening update
Clark Lindsey reports that tomorrow could be exciting for Armadillo and the crowd:
This will be the first time they have done the tip and translation with a full 3 minute fuel load on Pixel. Always a chance it will come crashing down like TrueZer0 but with 1500 lbs of propellants
Again, like last year, I can't understand why they haven't done a full dress rehearsal.
Over at Samizdata, Jonathan Pearce wonders if freedom seekers will be heading the other way after the election:
Occasionally, whenever one of us Samizdata scribes writes about events in the UK, such as loss of civil liberties, or the latest financial disasters perpetrated by the government, or crime, or whatnot, there is sometimes a comment from an expatriate writer, or US citizen in particular, suggesting that we moaners should pack our bags, cancel the mail and come on over to America. Like Brian Micklethwait of this parish, I occasionally find such comments a bit annoying; it is not as if the situation in Jefferson's Republic is particularly great just now, although a lot depends on where you live (Texas is very different from say, Vermont or for that matter, Colorado).
But considering what might happen if Obama wins the White House and the Dems increase or retain their hold on Congress, I also wonder whether we might encounter the example of enterprising Americans coming to Britain, not the other way round. The dollar is rising against the pound, so any assets that are transferred from the US to Britain go further. Taxes are likely to rise quite a bit if The One gets in, although they are likely to rise in the UK too to pay for the enormous increase in public debt, even if the Tories win the next election in 2010.
For a number of reasons stated over there, it seems unlikely, but this comment stood out:
I think the general message here should be that the whole western world is on the same trajectory, and shopping around for liberty is going to be ultimately futile. In a sense, we all need to be "liberty patriots" and do our best in our own countries to reverse the rot, because wherever you flee to, it's happening there too, if at a different pace or in in slightly different ways. The anti-liberty movement is operating in every nation, and trans and supra-nationally, and everywhere it is winning. There is nowhere to run.
Well, as I've long noted on this blog, that's what space programs are for.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:43 AMFrom the Chair Force Engineer.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:06 PMClark Lindsey has his first report up, on this morning's session on suborbital vehicles. Jeff Foust has a report on one of the talks as well, from Virgin Galactic.
[Thursday afternoon update]
Lots more over at Clark's place. Just keep scrolling. It's not a permalink, but I assume that he'll put together a page of links to the posts when he gets back next week.
(Bumped from yesterday)
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:26 PMI've attended this event the past two years, but couldn't make it this year, for lack of time, funds and justification. I also was demotivated by the cancellation of the Lunar Landing Challenge (which was recently reinstated), which was held in conjunction with it.
I'd actually like to go now, and I could afford it now, but I'm busy, and a last-minute ticket would have been pricy. But Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust are attending, and will no doubt be providing updates over the next couple days.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:15 AMMike Griffin says that criticism of NASA hurts its morale:
Griffin said critics in the media and on anonymous Internet blogs can "chip away" at the agency by questioning the motives and ethics of engineers designing the new rockets.
Briefing charts used by NASA managers sometimes show up on Web sites without the proper context, he said, and opponents of the agency's plans to replace the space shuttle with two new rockets have wrongly accused NASA managers of incompetence and worse.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't think that I've ever questioned anyone's motives or ethics. I do question their engineering and political judgment, and fortunately (for now) we live in a country in which I am free to do so. Clark Lindsey has more thoughts:
...just thinking about the Ares monstrosities hurts MY morale...I can't think of anything more depressing than seeing a one chance in a generation opportunity to build a practical space transportation infrastructure squandered on a repeat of Apollo that consists of nothing but hyper-expensive throwaway systems.
Ditto. It's a tragedy.
[Update a few minutes later]
There's more over at NASAWatch:
"...it is incumbent upon us to be able to explain how a decision was reached, why a particular technical approach was chosen, or why a contract was awarded to one bidder instead of another."
It is indeed. You've never really done that with the Ares/ESAS decisions. You just send Steve Cook out to say "we've done the trade study--trust us."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:35 AMJohn Hare discusses a concept for dumping propellant from a launcher to a LEO depot in a single orbit.
As I note in comments there, I don't see any need for such a requirement. Once you're in orbit, there's not really that big a rush to come back. The depot has to be in a high enough orbit that it doesn't decay rapidly, so the only cost of staying longer is crew consumables (if there is a crew). Power would presumably come from the depot itself while mated.
But it's not only an unnecessary requirement, it's an impossible one, other than in equatorial orbits (unless you want to wait a very long time for opportunities). Any orbit with significant inclination has a narrow launch window (at least from a given launch site--an air-launched system would have more flexibility). The likelihood that, when you get into the right orbit plane, the station will be waiting for you precisely where it needs to be to rendezvous in a single orbit it exceedingly small. That's why it takes a couple days for Soyuz or Shuttle to rendezvous with ISS. They launch into the right orbit plane, but they have to spend several orbits catching up with it. And the faster they do it, the more propellant it costs.
As I note parenthetically above, though, you can get there directly if you have an air-launched system with significant range for the aircraft (e.g., Quickreach).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AMIf this is true, don't expect to see White Knight II flights as soon as Sir Richard promises.
These delays come from his misguided belief that Burt was God.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AMThe new littoral ship that Lockheed Martin is building for the Navy is four percent overweight:
The Navy and Lockheed already have a plan to remove nearly all the additional weight from the ship over a period of about six months once the new ship, which is named Freedom, gets to Norfolk, Virginia, in December, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.
As I said, margin, margin, margin. If you miss your weight target by that much on a launch system, it's bye-bye payload. In this case, it simply puts the ship at risk in combat.
As the emailer who sent this to me asks, "I wonder if Lockheed will remove excess weight from Orion at no additional cost."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:46 AMUnreasonable Rocket has dropped out of next week's competition. Congratulations for all of the progress and accomplishment, regardless. And the lesson here is one that NASA seems to have forgotten--the three rules of rocket design: margin, margin, margin.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:56 AMJohn Hare has an interesting post (if you're into launch vehicle design issues). The myth of the air breather persists but, as John notes, if air is free, why does the service station charge more for it than gas?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AMThis, coming from Jim Abrahamson, is pretty disappointing:
James A. Abrahamson, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and the chairman of the NAC's Exploration Committee, praised the Constellation program to the Council at its quarterly meeting in Cocoa Beach, calling it the best program for the agency given its tight budget and schedule.
"The NAC is confident that the current plan is viable and represents a well-considered approach given the constraints on budget, schedule and achievable technology," he said.
I agree with this comment (and I have a pretty good guess as to who made it):
One Washington-based space policy consultant said: "The NAC's endorsement of Ares I reminds me of the so-called independent rating firms that kept saying that Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG were just fine."
Yeah, I don't think that the NAC is all that "independent." By its nature, it tends to consist of space industry insiders drinking their own bathwater. Looking over the Exploration Committee, it doesn't strike me that any of the members are space transportation experts (and no, you don't become one by being an astronaut, as proven by Horowitz...). But I thought that Abrahamson was smarter than that.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AMPopular Mechanics has the top ten world changing technologies, with video, including the Mars Phoenix lander.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:47 AMJohn Jurist writes (or at least implies) that there's just too much competition in the suborbital market:
An approach I favor is forming a university consortium analogous to those that design, build, and operate large cooperative research assets, such as telescopes and particle colliders. That consortium could develop a suborbital RLV or even a nanosat launcher to be used by consortium members for academic projects. Since the consortium would design and develop the vehicles, participating universities would be more likely to use them for student research under some type of cost-sharing arrangement with federal granting agencies.Dr. Steve Harrington proposed something a bit different recently:
If you took all the money invested in alt.space projects in the last 20 years, and invested in one project, it could succeed. More underfunded projects are not what we need. The solution is for an investment and industry group to develop a business plan and get a consortium to build a vehicle. There is a lot of talent, and many people willing to work for reduced wages and invest some of their own company's capital. Whether it is a sounding rocket, suborbital tourist vehicle or an orbit capable rocket, the final concept and go/no go decision should be made by accountants, not engineers or dreamers (Ref. 8).I would concur with Dr. Harrington's final remark except I would expand the decision making group to include management and business experts nominated by the consortium members with whatever technical input they needed.
Yes, good idea. After all, we all know that it's a waste of resources to have (for example) two grocery stores within a few blocks of each other. They could dramatically reduce overhead and reduce costs and prices if they would just close one of the stores and combine forces. In order to assure continued premium customer service, they could just assemble a board of accountants, and finest management and business experts to ensure that the needs of the people are met.
In the case of the RLV development, the consortium could hire the best technical experts, and spend the appropriate amount of money up front, on trade studies and analyses, to make sure that they are designing just the right vehicle for the market, since it will be a significant investment, and the consortium will only have enough money to do one vehicle development. They will also have to make sure that it satisfies the requirements of all the users, since it will be the only available vehicle. This will further increase the up-front analysis and development costs, and it may possibly result in higher operational costs as well, but what can be done? It's too inefficient to have more than one competing system. As John's analysis points out, we simply can't afford it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:49 AMJeff Patterson conquers the solar system.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:50 PMI have heard rumors for months that Jim Benson had had a stroke. Apparently, it was a different problem, though whether a better or worse one is hard to say. In any event, he lost the battle, as will we all, ultimately.
I may have further thoughts later (de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that), but for now, my condolences to Susan and his children.
[Saturday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has several other links on the story.
Whatever else his legacy will be, he showed that a savvy businessman can start a successful commercial publicly traded space company from scratch (though admittedly, much of the growth was via acquisition).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:18 PMTom Jones, on the asteroid threat.
We really need to get moving on that spacefaring civilization thing. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen under current NASA management.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PMI don't know, and haven't watched the video myself, but some Chinese bloggers think so:
Two seconds into the video from CCTV, bubble-like objects rose from the hatch as it sprung open. At 5 min 49 second, a bubble attached to the astronaut's helmet. At 6 min 42 seconds, bubbles swiftly came out of the cabin. On the left corner of the video, bubbles gushed out at an angle at 7 min 17 seconds into the video.
A blogger, who is a physicist, commented in a Chinese Epoch Times article that, assuming the operation was conducted in the water, the bubbles rose faster than they would have if the water was not propelled using a wave-blower. Wave blowers are commonly used in underwater space-training exercises to simulate the weightlessness of space.
It wouldn't shock me.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 AMThough not a new space blog. Occasional commenter John Hare is now rocket blogging over at Selenian Boondocks (which has a new URL and look).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:31 AMApparently not yet, but as far as my usage of it is concerned, it's on life support. As the article points out, it doesn't help that ISPs don't support it properly. I gave up on AT&T once I realized that they'd outsourced it, and basically didn't care whether it worked for their customers or not, and use GigaNews now.
Anyway, my biggest use of Usenet is sci.space.*, but I've cut way back on my participation there, because the signal/noise ratio has gotten so low, with many of the best long-time members of the newsgroups having gone to greener pastures (for example, Henry Spencer hasn't posted there in many moons, which is a little ironic, considering that whenever I used to point out that Usenet was dying, he would reply that people have been predicting the death of Usenet for decades). It's mostly loonytunes now, like Brad Guth and Ian Parker, and the Elifritz troll, with little substantive space policy discussion. I do think that the center of gravity of serious space discussion has shifted to the web, regardless of whatever else is still happening with NNTP.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AMThomas James has some space-related thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AMJeff Foust has a roundup.
And as I note over there in comments, the Kennedy myth persists:
"Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space..."
Not even then...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AMWe're going to be hit by an asteroid tonight. The angle is such that it will just be a spectacular fireball. But it's nice that we're finally getting to a position from which we can predict these things. The next step is to be able to prevent them, if necessary. Too bad that almost nothing that NASA is doing is contributing to that, at least with the manned spaceflight program.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:21 PMOn p.38 of this presentation, there's a breakdown of the contributions to the cost of Space Solar Power (SSP). Not surprisingly, the installation is more than half of the cost and another 20% is manufacturing cost of the solar array.
If we extract out the solar generation from SSP and instead of an antenna, have a passive microwave reflector, we can potentially get the cost of the reflector down to less than $1 billion. Let's say it's a flat spinning <8 gram per square meter perforated mylar single-mission heavy payload to GEO straw man.
If we spend $1 billion on a ground-based microwave antenna and another $1 billion on a rectenna, we have a 1 GW system that can function as transmission for a 40-year straight-line cost of 1.5 cents/kwh which is about 30% of the cost of SSP per watt with the viable scale of capital needed much smaller. (If you need a VC return, the price must be closer to ten cents per kwh.) The reflector would not be at capacity so additional transmission can be achieved for 2/3 of that. 1 GW beaming for $3 billion would be a pretty satisfying proof of concept.
There's plenty of power on the ground to beam to space that's cheap so the proof of concept can be economically viable at this scale. At Hawaii's buy price of more than $0.30/kwh and New Mexico's sell price of less than $0.10/kwh it would pay for itself pretty fast.
Space power beaming would therefore be shown to be economically viable without the space generation and thus be valuable as a proof of concept for transmission alone.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:53 AMThere's going to be a press conference at 11:30 this morning to announce his return visit to ISS. Jeff Foust plans to live blog it.
[Afternoon update]
Here is the site for the live blogging. Unfortunately, he seems to be blogging it in lorem ipsum, and I've never learned to read that language. Maybe he'll have an English version up later.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AMThe Obama campaign seems to have gotten way out front of the McCain campaign on space. The problem is that, like its domestic policy in general, McCain doesn't seem to have a coherent policy with regard to civil space. He's going to freeze discretionary, which includes NASA, and whether NASA will be exempt seems to depend on which campaign aide you ask. And regardless of how much money is spent, the campaign is equally vague on how it is spent, and what the near-term and long-term goals of the expenditure are. On top of that, the McCain campaign has lumped in the new Obama proposal to increase the NASA budget by two billion with a lot of so-called liberal spending proposals. As Jeff Foust notes, it's a little mind blowing, politically.
Obama, after having gotten off on the wrong foot with the initial idiotic proposal to delay Constellation to provide funds for education, seems to have actually gotten inside McCain's OODA loop on this issue. The McCain campaign really needs a smart political adviser in this area (as Obama apparently has now with Lori Garver, who seems to successfully jumped ship from Hillary's campaign), but there's no evidence that they've come up with one yet.
Of course, it's not an issue on which the election will hang, probably not even in Florida.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here's a little more at NASA Watch. It seems to be a disconnect between the McCain campaign and the RNC. Which, of course, doesn't make it any better, or excuse it.
[Another update a few minutes later]
Well, this would seem to clarify the McCain position:
Perhaps more important were McCain's remarks on Wednesday that only the Pentagon and veterans would see a budget increase in his administration because of the high price the proposed economic bail out. Everything else - including, presumably, NASA -- will be frozen or cut. Several space advocates in Florida and Washington DC expect the worst.
As I said, it isn't clear that space will be a key issue, even in Florida. But if the McCain campaign position is that the budget is going to be frozen, they should at least put forth a description of how they expect, and will require, NASA's priorities to change to accommodate it. So far, there's zero evidence that they've even given the matter any thought.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AMAlan Boyle has come up with a new set of science-project-based monetary units to get our heads around the costs of the bailout.
This sort of thing provides support for the politically naive argument for more money for one's pet project, e.g., "we could do seven Apollos for the cost of one Iraq war--surely we can afford at least one." But federal budget dollars aren't fungible, and the political importance of various choices isn't necessarily consistent, either, due to the vagaries of how these decisions are made. Note also that, at the time, getting to the moon in a hurry was important for reasons having little or nothing do to with space. It's unreasonable to expect those particular political stars to align again.
Not to mention the fact that because we were in a hurry, we chose an architecture and path that was economically and politically unsustainable. Just as NASA's current path is, which is no surprise, considering that they chose to recapitulate Apollo, rather than building an incremental affordable infrastructure that would provide the basis for true spacefaring.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AMWhile I mentioned it in my Pajamas piece on Wednesday, I neglected to mention yesterday that it was the 51st Sputnik anniversary. More currently, and relevantly, it was the fourth anniversary of the winning of the X-Prize. Jeff Foust has some thoughts on the seeming lack of progress since then.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:34 PMMy smart, funny (and only slightly crazy) buddy from engineering school, Lynne Wainfan, has decided to torment the world with a new blog. The current top post relates her adventures in wing walking. She also has an iPhone review. But read all.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 AMHeh.
[From Bruce Webster, via email]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 AMThe workshop is over, and I'm heading down to Boca. More thoughts on space solar power later.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:20 PMHere's where I'll be picking up from yesterday, and blogging today's session, as I get time.
The first speaker this morning is Jay Penn of Aerospace (again) talking about laser power beaming demonstrators. He's describing the same apps as yesterday for the military, but also talking about space-to-space beaming for other spacecraft. Reviewing yesterday's talk with concept that can put 2.5 MW into the grid per satellite. Two solar panels, two laser transmitter panels on a deployable backbone. Providing more of a description of the "halo" orbits than yesterday, but I still don't understand it from an orbital mechanics standpoint. I'll have to read the paper or talk to Jay later.
He's showing several charts that demonstrate how inserting technology into the laser system can dramatically increase the power available per EELV flight (not sure how relevant this is, other than as a benchmark, because it's very unlikely that an economically viable system is going to go up on EELVs). Also shows that you don't save much money by scaling down the system to smaller power levels--R&D dominates the costs. His bottom line is that we could do a 125kW demonstrator on an EELV, that could scale up to 200kW with technology insertion. Laser appears to be the only practical means to provide acceptable small spot beams from GEO. Laswers have 10,000 times smaller spot for the same range and aperture compared to microwaves. In response to a question, he notes that the individual lasers are not phased, and they don't need to be. There is a question about maintenance/repair. They hadn't looked in detail but a quick look suggested that degradation wasn't a major issue. he makes one other point--the system was self-lifting from LEO to GEO using ion propulsion, to save mass.
Now another talk by Jordin Kare, on laser diode power beaming. Talking about the NASA beamed power Centennial Challenge. While it's about elevator climbers, it is essentially a contest to build a beamed-power system. Prize has almost been won, but not quite, and is now at $500K. None of the teams are using lasers. Laser-Motive (his company) was formed to develop laser power beaming technology, but the current focus is on winning the prize. Their concept uses a fixed set of laser diodes and optics, with a steering mirror below the climber. Operating on a shoestring. They are estimating 10% efficiency, but actually getting more like 13%. They have eight kW of laser power to deliver a kilowatt to the climber. Got good price on "seconds" for the lasers (a little less than $10/watt so about $80K) Didn't care about beam profile, as long as they got the power on target. Didn't do custom optics--used float-glass and amateur telescope mirrors, with old HP stepper motors to drive them. Lasers share (more expensive) parabolic mirrors. Bought some 50% efficiency cells that can operate at ten suns, with help from Boeing. Unfortunately they had some final integration issues (smoking a power supply) that prevented them from winning, but no on else won either.
The 2008 contest is a kilometer climb up a rope hung from a helicopter (the faster the climb, the more the money)--lasers are the only option. DILAS is offering to build a custom system ($35,000 for 2.5kW), and will set a new radiance standard. Can go to much more range with bigger optics and more power. deliver tens of kilowatts at tens of kilometers with this technology.
Laser-Motive is ready to build these kinds of systems tomorrow. Could be used for ground to aircraft or ground vehicles of mirrors on aerostats, or air to ground to simulate space-to-ground. ISS to ground is also a possibility. Next steps: higher radiance, coherent systems (e.g., fiber lasers), lightweight low-cost optics, and then operational systems.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AMOK, it's after lunch, and we're about to watch a video about what the Army hopes it will be doing in space in the year 2035. We're being told it's not classified in any way. Nor does it discuss cost or difficulty of what we're about to see...
It seems to be a CGI movie depicting rapid redeployments of advanced satellites (using something that looks a lot like QuickReach). It shows convoy routes planning a "virtual corrider." Mobile user ground stations are deflecting attempts at GPS jamming. A "near-space platform" geolocates a terrorist unit. Noncombatants are identified, the house is surrounded, and the perps captured. The space vehicles depicted are dirty and gritty like the tanks. Like Serenity, in fact. Showing overhead imaging for battle damage assessment. "Understand First." "Act First." In other words, get inside their OODA loop.
Pretty cool.
Anyway, Jay Penn is up now, describing five different powersat concepts that Aerospace has been working on. This was work done for Joe Howell at Marshall and John Mankins at NASA. It consisted of a lot of system/subsystem level trades for comparisons and as inputs to technology roadmaps.
Showing several different concepts, the most different of which is called a "Halo", which has a central transmitter surrounded by what seem to be mirrors for light concentration. But he's going too fast for me to follow. A flurry of charts showing trade analyses and relative costs.
Some of these concepts imply flight rates of 5000/year. Notes that 40% of the global economy is energy. The best costs they could get to for kW-hrs was about eight cents, which isn't bad. One of their concepts is a laser system that is very scalable (480 satellites for 1.2 GW). It uses a layered approach, with pump-laser diodes, microoptics, and a radiator on the back. Output beam is about a thousand nanometer wavelength. He thinks it the most promising architecture of those considered.
Now Paul Jaffe is reporting on a study on space-based power that was performed by the Navy Research Lab. In the beginning, they encountered a lot of skepticism within the lab. Their approach was to look at it in the context of providing Navy/Marine power needs. Study looked at military applications only. They supported the AFRL requirements workshop in July, and are working with NASA on the ISS demo.
They had three findings. First, the concepts are technically feasible, they seem relevant to military needs, and safe power beaming is restricted to large immobile sites. Wireless power transfer is necessary for SBSP, but it's a research area in its own right. No consensus among experts as to best concept. Economics and political priorities will be important, but this wasn't examined by NRL.
They also found that NRL has some key capabilities in many of the technologies (I'm shocked, shocked...).
The third was that different operational scenarios will require different technologies. Large-area applications can use microwave, but applications requiring higher power density will need lasers. Delivery of energy directly to individual end users, vehicles or small widely-scattered nodes isn't currently practical.
They recommended continued NRL funding, but got the impression when they briefed the director that he still considers other energy areas more promising until more of the risk is retired.
A question from the audience brings up the point that DoE seems to be missing in action, considering that they're supposed to be interesting in, you know...energy. There needs to be more of an outreach from other agencies to them to get them involved, particularly if DoE is supposed to be putting together new positions for an incoming administrations.
Another speaker from NRL, Michael Brown, follows with a talk on space structures issues. We have a long way to go from seventy meters (the current longest structure) to kilometeres in scale. Showing examples of ultralight space deployable beams.
Sorry, my eyes are glazing over (also a little sleepy after lunch). Structural analysis is not my bag. Showing concepts for trusses. Showing concepts for automated orbital assembly.
A break, a break, my kingdom for a break...
[Update after the break]
I'm not paying much attention to the current talk which is about wireless power in a deployed base in environment. The speaker said, perfectly deadpan (and he was probably quite serious), "we can't introduce anything into a war environment that is unsafe."
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room."
Jordin Kare (formerly of Livermore) is giving a talk on various space applications for lasers, some in space, some ground based with space relays. Optics are cheap, don't generate much heat, don't weigh much, none of which are the case for lasers, so keep lasers on the ground and put the optics in space.
Thinks that GEO is still the best place, for relay optics so that no tracking of moving satellites is necessary. Also less gravity gradient. But GEO implies big optics. He prefers diffractive optics, using thin sheets of materials with vacuum vapor deposition of metals to make a fresnel lens. It is insensitive to out-of-plane displacements, while mirrors are orders of magnitude more so. They can be lightweight, rolled up, folded. Shows a five-meter example made of panes of glass built at Livermore a few years ago. he thinks that a twenty-meter lens can fit on a Delta IV. Thinks that he could get by with six tons in GEO with relay system as opposed to thirty tons if the laser is place in orbit. Notes that NASA has looked at a similar system with a relay in L1 for powering a lunar surface base from the earth. Talking about using such systems to power electric propulsion vehicles, so they don't have to carry the mass of their power supply, both for earth orbit and earth escape missions. Agrees with Jay Penn on approach of using laser modules, if you really want the lasers themselves in orbit.
[Friday morning update]
I've continue here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AMLive, from the space solar power conference in sunny Lake Buena Vista, FL, under the ever-watchful eye of Mickey.
I have power, I have wireless, I've had my proteinless continental breakfast, which seems to be riguer at these aerospace conferences, and I'm ready to blog. Session overview will start in a few minutes.
[A few minutes later]
Omar Mendoza of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is keynoting. He is head of a new energy and environment office. One of the things that they're working is biofuel from algae, but they see space-based power as a potential breakthrough technology for meeting military power requirements in an environmentally friendly way. Purpose of this conference is to identify technology gaps that must be filled to make it a reality.
Anticipate that early next year the incumbent president will be asking what the military is doing in the way of energy, and they want to have a roadmap ready to present to the new CinC, whoever it is.
Lt. Colonel Ed Tovar of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab now giving a history of the recent activities, including the space power studies performed last year by the National Space Security Office, and the interest that it seems to have aroused. Has gotten interest from environmental groups, energy companies, utilities, Congress, etc. Idea of tying energy to aerospace technology seems appealing. He tells people that this is something that justifies the exercise of due diligence to determine its potential. Talked about introducing John Mankins with a smart guy at NSSO, and had them get into a numbers battle over lift requirements, and that is the kind of activity that he wants to see continue. Two major thrusts: initiation/continuation of studies (much deeper and broader than NSSO report) and develop a roadmap for a demonstration strategy (space-space, LEO to ground, eventually from GEO). Terrestrial power beaming already happening as shown by the Hawaii test. Idea is to generate power in a permissive environment, and provide it in a "less permissive" environment. Wants to use structure and power available at ISS to do in-space demos, and has talked to people at NASA Ames and JSC about coming up with plans for a wireless power transmission demo at ISS.
Notes that Hawaii experiment didn't just demonstrate technology, but they flew aircraft through the beam to characterize it, determine environmental effects, density, efficiency, etc. See it as a form of "soft power" that can help avert conflicts in the twenty-first century. He wants to make this technology a "comma" in the national debate, when energy companies and presidential candidates talk about energy options. "wind, solar, biofuels,...energy from space."
Joe Howell of Marshall coming up next to talk about NASA's technology roadmap.
Oops. Nope. Neil Huber of Concurrent Technology Corporation (CTC) is giving a summary presentation of military requirements, based on a workshop in July. They gathed power requirements for military units at various levels (person, squad, deployed unit, base, etc.), and determining that 3-5 MW is a prevailing military need. Purpose of this workshop is to come up with a rough roadmap.
They also have intangible requirements (strengthen intel, protect critical bases of ops, etc.) Of eight of these, six of them could be satisfied by power from space.
SSP could support the joint force attributes required by strategy if energy can be provided to the force at relevant levels. Could be a game-changing capability. It would be nice not to have to carry batteries, or deploy diesel generators and their fuel.
Space-centric beamed power could provide stability of operations (no concern about having a fuel convoy intercepted and disrupt ops). Nice to be able to quickly redeploy power from one area to another. Could have been very useful after Katrina or Ike, or after the tsunami.
Services had an official requirement to reduce fossil fuel use, and this could play into that. Many DoD bases dependent on fragile and vulnerable commercial power infrastructure--this could make them more independent and robust. 2005 Energy Policy Act mandates that DoD installations transition to green technologies. needs vary from 3kW for a person to 9 MW for a brigade (varies among services). Giving a few examples. Watts for a soldier with his equipment, with heavy batteries, ranging up to 80 MW dedicated to propulsion for a destroyer. ONR testing 35 MW superconducting electric motor.
Air Force has more a better understanding of their requirements, but can't really keep up with the slides (this will be available later, probably on line). Notes that Marines have a very high AA battery requirement. Bottom line: could reduce deployment footprint and logistic footprint (reduced fuel convoying, which is also a dangerous activity). Could provide more stable, enhanced operations at all levels. 3-5 MW seems to be near-term critical number.
In Q&A, Colonel Paul Damphousse is relating experience from Iraq, where it was more dangerous to be on the road than in the air, and pointed out how nice it would have been to put down spot beams in remote areas rather than convoy fuel. In response to a question, Huber notes that fuel in the field can cost anywhere from $50 to $200 per gallon, after shipping it to the front (particularly by air). Makes this a much more attractive market for a high-cost (at least technology) like this.
OK, now Joe Howell is speaking about the NASA technology roadmap. His talk is based on work done in the last ten years (mostly from 1998-2002). Showing slide of classic reference SPS/Rectenna system from the 1970s DoE/NASA studies. Required huge launch capacity. Showing very complicated chart of complexity of all the factors that go into whether or not SPS makes sense. Topic seems to come up every fifteen years or so. Now showing potential requirement to get CO2 reduced--need 40 TW of carbon-neutral power generation to reduce and stabilize at twice pre-industrial levels. When "peak fossil fuels" will occur remains without consensus--how much energy R&D needed for insurance policy?
Now getting back to more recent studies. Still have rectenna farms and large structures in orbit, but much more thin-film concentrators, lighter structures. Showing X33/VentureStar as transportation paradigm of the era. Also showing hypersonic vehicles, two-stage reusables, smaller systems with high launch rates. Studies were based on $200/kg launch costs. Still couldn't close business model at that cost. Showing modular solar-electric concept to transport large space systems to GEO.
He has an eye chart of the technology areas that have to be advanced. Next chart focuses on state of near-term PV technologies--stretched-lens array, thin films, etc. Also showing solar concentrators that have actually flown in space (Deep Space 1). Need a much higher pointing accuracy for these types of systems, which makes the rest of the system more of a technical challenge.
Getting into microwave beam safety issues now (earlier had related the honeybee studies performed back in the seventies and eighties). Has the classic power density chart that shows it's not a problem, but people still don't believe it (just like the people who won't live near power lines). Showing roadmap of demos laid out to 2021, but funding dried up about 2003. Has a chart showing growth of spacecraft power requirements over last quarter century--steady increase up to tens of kilowatts. Needs doubling every five and a half years. Describing solar panel architecture trades.
Overall, this strikes me primarily as not a coherent story, or one put together for this meeting--just a lot of pre-existing charts with historical results from various periods. Probably useful for people unfamiliar with the field, though.
Future needs--sandwiched options, collect on the front, beam out the back, 50%+ conversion efficiency. 5 km transmitter 80%+ efficiency, ten GW system, installed cost $2/watt. Need self-assembly, higher strength/weight materials, higher-temp solid-state devices, need to look at lasers as well as microwaves, but as always, need much lower transportation costs.
In other words, nothing new.
Question: how do we map the NASA quick-look study to the military requirements we just heard? 3 MW isn't really practical for microwave systems because they don't work for the wavelength. SPS size wasn't drive by power requirements so much as aperture size. Wouldn't lasers be better, given recent advances in solid-state devices? Howell notes that a LEO demo could be scaled down considerably for microwaves, and that lasers have issues with clouds, etc. Trades still need to be done. He notes that all of the work presented was to address the need for baseload power, and hadn't considered these new military requirements. Bruce Pittman of Ames asking about potential applications for lunar bases. Could they beam from L1 to the lunar surface? Howell notes that Seth Potter (Boeing) will be talking about this later in the meeting. Competition for going into shadowed craters is nuclear. Jay Penn of Aerospace notes that he'll be going into the economics this afternoon, in response to Bruce's question about how close to closure they came.
Taking a ten-minute break now.
[A few minutes later]
Ron Clark of Lockheed Martin giving a talk now titled "Space-based Solar Power Gap Analysis--Solar Dynamic and Hybrid Launch Approach."
Key to SBPS: increase revenues and lower costs (duh...)
Has an alternate solution motivated by premium-priced power applications such as shale extraction, remote locations and forward basing. Whenever senior people are briefed, we can show progress, but they still say "it's still too tough," based on the technology gaps. Have to come up with compelling plan that closes gaps and changes perceptions. Have to raise revenue above the grid (need $0.20/kW-hr). Need launch costs of $500/kg, and need to reduce spacecraft manufacturing costs to $1000/kg.
Identified apps where current technology may be good enough: peak power, industrial power and forward deployment/nationbuilding.
Notes that emphasis to date has been on photovoltaic (I would note that Brayton cycles were considered in the seventies, but they weren't the reference baseline). He thinks it's time to take another look at solar dynamic. Thinks that cost of space hardware is coming down not only due to technology advance (mass/function drops by factor of two every eight years, which translates to reduced costs), but also from economies of scale, which would apply to a system like this. Iridium experience shows that cost can come down a lot, particularly when one works closely with suppliers and reduces supply chain friction. Cost/kg can drop from $100,000/kg for one-off, and a hundredth of that for thousands. Sees launch costs as coming down as well with growing use of reusability.
He's positing a "hybrid" launch system with reusable suborbital first and second stage, that meets with a medium earth orbit (MEO) electrodynamic tether as a skyhook. Reduces ETO delta V to 5.5 km/s. Identifying specific technology gaps associated with these systems. Looking at on-orbit assembly gaps. Not competitive with coal-fired power plants at current technology maturity level. Need system-level demos of specific technologies that would support SSPS assembly.
A lot of work has been done with a Closed Brayton Cycle (for topping, with Rankine for bottoming) that can have 50% net power conversion efficiency. Gaps here consist of long life, weightless operation, radiators, large inflatable collectors, and space-rated alternators. Thermal radiators are a particularly immature technology for this high-temperature application.
Also need efficient DC-RF conversion. Some new solid-state devices may offer very high (~90%?) efficiency. Need to consider orbits other than GEO. Trade and location will be driven by mission need. MEO might be the right answer for some applications. he sees highest technical risk in MEO tether and payload transfer, and on-orbit assembly cost reduction. Thinks that all risks are tractable, w
In questions, Keith Henson notes that shipping assembled satellites to GEO would be pretty hard on them, due to radiation and debris.
Now Mack Henderson from JSC (who I sat across from at dinner last night) is presenting a concept for a space-based solar power demo at ISS. Goal is to use existing hardware to do a demo in 2010. Have been coordinating with a number of organizations, at DoD (NSSO, AF Security Forces, AFRL, Army Research, NRL), DoE, academia, industry (Raytheon, L'Garde, Boeing,LMSSC/MDR/PWR and SAIC) and help from Futron. Still looking for a DoE liaison--they seem to be focused on terrestrial.
Goal is to provide measurable power from space to ground, have it safe, and show that it is scalable, within the budget and schedule. They want to validate efficiencies over several types of paths. Raytheon is working on a system with 6 K-Band traveling wave tube amps. They're expecting to receive power on the ground on the order of 20 milliwatts from 600 watts transmitted, using Goldstone for the receiver, though other options are being considered. Each beaming experiment will last about ten minutes with about a hundred seconds of maximum power. They're foreseeing a 27-month program for about $55M, hoping for a May 2010 demo.
Already a letter of intent from Gary Payton and Bill Gerstenmaier--NASA will do space segment, DoD will do ground, and help with money. Also provide TWTs, use of AFRL facilities and Tyndall, and help with roadmap. NASA fives a Shuttle ride, berth on ISS, money, use of DSN dish at Goldstone, and project engineering, with support from Raytheon and Texas A&M.
Benefits of concept are near-term launch capability, services available at ISS including humans present. Compared to doing a separate satellite on an EELV--would save hundeds of millions. Biggest risk is schedule. Asking for authority to proceed from NASA HQ next week.
Jay Penn is concerned about the low transmission efficiency of the proposed experiment, and suggests a laser for much better power transfer. It really is amazing that you can only get 20 milliwatts from 600 watts using that monster dish at Goldstone. It just shows how important aperture size is at that microwave frequency (2.45 MHz). It is being pointed out that there are already demos of low-power microwave power beaming from space--it's called comsats. It's determined to take this discussion off line.
Question: what will we learn from this demo and how will it help future designs and concepts? The answer wasn't clear.
Colonel Damphousse points out that there is DoD support for this, and he appreciates the comments. We shouldn't be focused on how many milliwatts or microwatts are being transmitted--beam characterization is important to allow us to scale up later demos. It has to be looked at as a first step, because we aren't going to get billions for a 10 MW demo right now.
Bruce Thieman of AFRL is talking now about spacelift costs, and the implications for space solar power. Currently at $4000/lb to LEO, are only going to get to $400/lb with what's currently funded. Current costs are high, vehicles are unreliable, with long call up. Goal is much faster turn around, much higher reliability and lower costs. Everything is currently horrendously expensive (a lot of dispute about his chart that has Shuttle costs at $450M--it's got to be closer to a billion per flight these days). Showing commercial launch systems--SpaceX, ULA, AirLaunch, Microcosm and others, including Kistler--old chart). Even COTS vehicles can't get costs below $1500/lb or so (Taurus 2 calculated to be $2000). EELV is in the $3400-4300 range.
Showing chart that says that reusable lower stage expendable upper stage hits a near-term sweet spot in cutting costs by about half. Still $300-$400/lb. Can't do better until fully reusable, and that needs launch rates of forty or more a year. The reusable first stage is designed for a 48-hour turnaround. Long-term goal for fully reuable systems is four hours. Want to eventually see a thousand flights per airframe.
Talking about suborbital now. Most important thing that they will do is drive up launch rate and learn about operations, and high turnaround rate. They are a very important community. Showing classic chart of that shows energy costs to orbit--translates into a ticket price to orbit of $76 (about 38 cents a pound). Question is how to bring launch rate up. If we can bring satellites down to $300/pound to build, we could build more and launch them more often, and refresh technology more often as opposed to GPS, which is a fifteen-year satellite, mostly driven by launch costs. Have to change the culture of the satellite community, which will require initial drops in launch costs.
Now Richard Fork (UA, Huntsville) is giving a paper called "Adaptive Network for Power and Information in Near-Earth Space."
His challenge was to come up with a way to use lasers for power, but not a weapon. Proposes a "quantum secure" laser-based network to support both power and information transfer from space. Looking into laser-based power and "intelligent cyber-secure adaptive networks." Have to figure out a way to keep people from "hacking" the lasers. Sees it as an enabler for space solar power.
OK, so he's talking about direct solar-laser conversion, and using lasers for launch (ablative). I don't see how it relates to his summary of the talk, though. Has a chart of bullet points, not particularly related to each other, including one on asteroid deflection with lasers, the last one of which is "Main need is for a well managed program.
All is lost.
Time for lunch.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, not quite. Now he's talking about quantum secure links again. Conclusions: need for both microwaves and lasers. Lasers alone offer highly directionsl efficent long-range power delivery. They alone offer a "quantum-secure" info network. And intelligent quantum secure power network can be designed an implemented within time frames of interest.
OK. Whatever.
[Update after lunch]
I've started a new post for the afternoon session.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 AMWell, actually, I'm going to a resort at Disney World to attend a workshop on Space Solar Power. It should be like old home week, though I haven't been involved in the field for fifteen years or so.
We'll see what the interweb situation is up there before I make any promises about blogging for the next couple days.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM...that geeks would do with $700B.
I can tell you that if I had that much money to play with, I can guarantee that, within two decades, asteroids wouldn't be a worry any more. And there would be a tourist resort on the moon.
[Via (where else?) Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AMI have some fiftieth birthday thoughts over at Pajamas Media.
[Early afternoon update]
Well, this is annoying. A screwed-up history from Time magazine:
NASA was actually founded in 1915 and at the time was known as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics -- or NACA. Its job was to keep the nation abreast of the latest developments in the then-nascent technology of powered flight. NACA was established with good intentions but operated mostly as a bureaucratic backwater, a government body that couldn't hope to keep up with a rapidly evolving private industry. In 1957, however, all that changed. That was the year the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first Earth satellite -- and in the process, scared the daylights out of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower acted quickly, dusting off NACA and renaming it NASA -- for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On October 1, 1958, the new agency officially went into business.
No, NASA was not NACA, or "founded in 1915." NACA was a completely different kind of animal. It had nothing to do with space, and it was not an operational organization. It was a basic research outfit, and viewed the aviation industry as its customer, providing data and resources that allowed them to build better airplanes.
Sadly, once it was absorbed into the borg of the new space and aeronautics agency fifty years ago, it lost that focus, and the new entity largely saw itself as the customer, and the space industry as its contractors. Many argue that we need to return to a NACA philosophy for space, but it's extremely misleading and confusing to state that NASA is NACA, and that its history goes back over ninety years. In fact, it is false.
He also doesn't really explain why JSC is in Houston. Yes, Johnson was happy to have the mission control center in Texas, but Texas is a big state, and there are no particular geographical requirements for mission control (unlike, e.g., a launch site). It could as easily have been in Dallas or elsewhere. It was established in Houston because Rice University donated a lot of land for it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:19 AMPlans to set up international efforts to deal with the asteroid threat continue.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:17 AMI just got an email indicating that the Hubble mission has been delayed until February. So they've got two orbiters sitting on the pad, neither of which is configured for an ISS mission. Will they be able to accelerate the next planned one, or does this mean more delays for ISS completion (and Shuttle retirement, assuming that they go ahead with it)?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AMMany continue to disbelieve (with no obvious basis) that there really is a market for people who want to go into space; that it is "just a fad," and that after a while, folks will get bored and the demand will disappear. I of course think that's nonsense, and that word of mouth of the experience will only increase interest in it as more and more people hear about it, and want to try it themselves. Any astronaut will tell you that it was a, if not the peak experience of their lives.
Well, Space Adventures has announced today that Charles Simonyi, who flew with them previously, is going to spend millions do it again.
Man, that first time must have really sucked.
[Update mid morning]
Clark Lindsey has the press release.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:44 AMShubber Ali noticed an omission, that surprises neither of us.
As I continue to point out, space isn't important. Unless it somehow gets kids to study their math and science.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:52 AMJeff Foust has a piece on yesterday's successful launch of the Falcon 1, and contrasts it with the successful landing of the first Chinese EVA mission:
SpaceX is moving on to launching real satellites, starting with RazakSAT, a Malaysian remote sensing satellite scheduled for launch on a Falcon 1 early next year; the first Falcon 9 launch is now planned for the second quarter of 2009. "We look forward to doing a lot of Falcon 1 launches and a lot of Falcon 9 launches and continuously improving until the point where we're the world's leading provider of space launch," Musk said.
Sunday's launch was not the only space milestone in the last week. On Thursday China launched its third manned mission, Shenzhou 7, on a 68-hour mission that featured the first Chinese spacewalk. The launch, EVA, and landing all captured headlines around the world, and has generated far more attention than the SpaceX launch likely will.In the long run, though, it may be the SpaceX launch that is more influential. China is following the same path forged nearly five decades ago by the United States and the former Soviet Union: a government-run human spaceflight program that is as much for national prestige as for anything else. Several other countries, including India, Europe, and Japan, may follow in the next decade and beyond. It's a tried-and-true paradigm, but one that has done little to date to open space for new applications and new audiences.
SpaceX, and other NewSpace ventures like it, carry the promise of dramatically changing the space industry with low-cost orbital and suborbital launch options that open up new and potentially lucrative new markets. That promise, though, has remained just that--a promise, not a reality--since SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize four years ago. Sunday's launch was perhaps the biggest milestone since then in demonstrating what NewSpace can offer.
Clark Lindsey has a lot of links to other commentary.
Apparently, the fourth time was the charm. More thoughts later.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:20 PMIn comments at the previous post on this subject, Karl Hallowell comments:
It's not government's job to suck up risk for a contractor. As I see it, if contractors really were giving their best cost estimates, then they're regularly overestimate prices not consistently underestimate them.
The other commenters who seem to think that designing a brand new UAV, or the first successful hit to kill missile (SRHIT/ERINT/PAC-3, not the dead end HOE), or an autonomous helicopter (all things I've been heavily involved with) is something that can and should be done on a fixed-price contract (after all, one bridge is like any other, right?) . . . it can maybe be done, but only if you're willing to let system development take a lot longer.I don't know who posted this, but it's unrealistic.
Let's give an example of how the real world works in salvaging ships on the high seas:
Salvage work has long been viewed as a form of legal piracy. The insurers of a disabled ship with valuable cargo will offer from 10 to 70 percent of the value of the ship and its cargo to anyone who can save it. If the salvage effort fails, they don't pay a dime. It's a risky business: As ships have gotten bigger and cargo more valuable, the expertise and resources required to mount a salvage effort have steadily increased. When a job went bad in 2004, Titan ended up with little more than the ship's bell as a souvenir. Around the company's headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it's known as the $11.6 million bell.Exactly the scenario where it is claimed that fixed price contracts can't work. Huge risk, lots of uncertainty, time pressure. A similar example is oil well firefighters. As I see it, there's almost no circumstances when government needs to help the contractor with risk. The money, paid when the job is done right, does that. If it's not enough, then nobody takes the contract. Simple as that.
Yes. The reason that cost-plus contracts are preferred by government is that government, by its nature, has an aversion to profit. It's the same sort of economic ignorance that drives things like idiotic "anti-gouging" laws, and it results in the same false economy for the citizens and taxpayers.
The problem isn't that companies are unwilling to bid fixed price on high-tech ventures. The problem is that, in order to do so, they have to build enough profit into the bid to make it worth the risk. But the government views any profit over the standard one in cost-plus contracts (generally less than ten percent) as "obscene," and to allow a company to make more profit than that from a taxpayer-funded project is a "ripoff." So instead, they cap the profit, and reimburse costs, while also having to put into place an onerous oversight process, in terms of cost accounting and periodic customer reviews, that dramatically increases cost to the taxpayer, probably far beyond what they would be if they simply let it out fixed price and ignored the profit. I would argue that instead of the current model of cost-plus, lowest bidder, an acceptance of bid based on the technical merits of the proposal, history and quality of the bidding team, even if the bid cost is higher, will ultimately result in lower costs to the government (and taxpayer).
As I understand it, this is the battle that XCOR (hardly a risk-averse company, at least from a business standpoint) has been waging with NASA for years. XCOR wants to bid fixed price, and accept the risk (and the profits if they can hit their internal cost targets), while NASA wants them to be a cost-plus contractor, with all of the attendant increases in costs, and changes in corporate culture implied by that status.
This is the debate that will have to occur if John McCain wants to make any headway in his stated desire Friday night to get rid of cost-plus contracts. Unfortunately, he's not in a very good philosophical position to argue his case, because he's one of those economic simpletons in Washington who think that making money is ignoble, and that profits are evil, particularly when they're so high as to be "obscene."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:34 AMThere's another Falcon launch attempt scheduled tonight, 4-9 PM PDT. Here's hoping.
SpaceX will be webcasting, as usual. Spaceflight Now will be covering it as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:03 AMWho knows?
Judging by this, we can't rely on anything they tell us about their progress.
China's state news agency published a despatch from the country's three latest astronauts describing their first night in space before they had even left Earth.
Including a fauxtograph.
We didn't fake the moon landings, but given this, it wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese attempt it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:11 AMMike Griffin says that space exploration is crucial to the survival of humanity.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PMI've never been there, but here are some spectacular pics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AMJudging by the comments here, the natives are growing ever more restless at NASA, over the sham PDR they just held:
Is NASA trying to put lipstick on a pig? This one, highly-visible decision on how to report status says more than enough. It is a political gimmick if ever we have seen one. And being an election year, I guess it is de rigeur. How terribly sad...
...I think NASA should get rid of the red category all together, because if anything gets put in that category, it doesn't look good. They might want to get rid of orange also, because that's too close to red. Here is how I think the categories should be arranged.GREEN
GREEN/GREEN
GREEN/LIGHT GREEN
GREEN/TEAL
GREEN/EMERALDNow, don't these colors make you feel good?
It kind of reminds me of Tom Ridge's terror alerts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AMFrom 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?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:52 PMJust 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PMI 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:56 PMThere's a new Falcon on the launch pad (not a permalink). Here's hoping for a successful flight this week.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:55 AMBen 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:29 AMIs 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 AMThe 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:27 AMNASA 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AMFrequent 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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:57 PMIt'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.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PMIs NASA fighting with OMB?
Lots of great comments here, including the fact that Mike Griffin's fear mongering about China is at odds with administration policy. Including this great comment from "red""
it would be a good idea for Griffin to consider what kind of response by NASA would be useful to the U.S. in countering the real military and economic space threats from China. It seems to me that ESAS doesn't help counter these real threats at all.The kinds of capabilities that NASA could encourage, invent, or improve to counter China's ASATs, launchers, and satellites are things like:
- operationally responsive space
- small satellites
- Earth observation satellites
- telecommunications satellites
- economical commercial launch vehicles
- commercial suborbital rockets
- improved education in space-related fields
- space infrastructure (e.g.: commercial space stations, tugs, refueling)It's possible that, if NASA were contributing more in areas like these (through incentives to U.S. commercial space, research, demos, etc), it would find the budget battles easier to win.
No kidding. Especially the last. And Apollo On Steroids makes no contributions to any of these things.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of comments, "anonymous.space" has a description of what NASA's "pat on the back" PDR really means:
This past week, Constellation patted itself on the back for getting Ares I through its first preliminary design review (PDR) but glossed over the fact that Ares I still has to conduct a second PDR next summer to address the unresolved mitigation systems for the first stage thrust oscillation issue, with unknown consequences for the rest of the design. See the asterisk on the pre-board recommendation at the bottom of the last page of this presentation.
The Constellation press release and briefing also made no mention of the recent year-long slip in the Orion PDR to next summer. See NASA Watch, NASA Spaceflight, and Flight Global.So neither the Ares I nor the Orion preliminary design is complete, and one could argue that the Constellation program has been held back a year more than it's been allowed to pass to the next grade.
More worrisome than the PDR slips are the grades that Ares I received in this partial PDR. The pre-board used a green, yellow/green, yellow, yellow/red, and red grading scheme, which can also be depicted as the more familiar A (4.0), B (3.0), C (2.0), D (1.0), and F (0.0) grading scheme. The pre-board provided ten grades against ten different success criteria from NASA's program management handbook. The ten grades had the following distribution:
One "Green" (A, 4.0) grade
Two "Yellow/Green" (B, 3.0) grades
Four "Yellow" (C, 2.0) grades
Three "Yellow/Red" (D, 1.0) grades
No "Red" (F, 0.0) gradesSo seven of Ares I's ten grades were a C or a D. Ares I is NASA's planned primary means of crew launch over the next couple of decades and should define technical excellence. But instead, the project earned a grade point average of 2.1, barely a "gentleman's C" (or a "gentleman's yellow"). See the pre-board grades on pages 3-7 of this presentation.
And even more worrisome than the PDR slips and grades are the areas in which the project is earning its lowest grades. Among areas in which Ares I earned a yellow/red (or D) grade and the accompanying technical problems were:
The preliminary design meets the requirements at an acceptable level of risk:
- Induced environments are high and cause challenges, including pyro shock to avionics and acoustic environments on reaction and roll control systems.- No formal process for control of models and analysis.
- Areas of known failure still need to be worked, including liftoff clearances.
Definition of the technical interfaces is consistent with the overall level of technical maturity and provides an acceptable level of risk:
- Process for producing and resolving issues between Level 2 and Level 3 interface requirement documents and interface control documents is unclear, including the roles and responsibilities of managers and integrators and the approval process for identifying the baseline and making changes to it.
- Numerous known disconnects and "TBDs" in the interface requirement documents, including an eight inch difference between the first stage and ground system and assumption of extended nozzle performance not incorporated in actual first and ground system designs.
See the pre-board grades on pages 4-5 of this presentation.
So, in addition to the unknowns associated with the unresolved thrust oscillation system for Ares I:
- the vehicle's electronics can't survive the shocks induced during stage separation;
- the vehicle's control systems will be shaken apart and unable to keep the rocket flying straight;
- the vehicle is going to hit the ground support structure on liftoff;
- the project is assuming performance from advanced rocket nozzles that don't fit within the vehicle's dimensions;
- the project can't even get the height of the rocket and its ground support to match; and
- there's no good modeling, analytical, or requirements control necessary to resolve any of these issues.
And the real kicker from the press conference was the revelation that Constellation manager Jeff Hanley only has 2,000-3,000 pounds of performance reserve left at the program level and that Ares I manager Steve Cook has no margin left to contribute to unresolved future problems like thrust oscillation impacts to Orion. See, again, NASA Watch.
We know from prior presentations that Orion's mass margin is down to practically zero (286 kilograms or 572 pounds) for ISS missions and is negative (-859 kilograms or -1,718 pounds) for lunar missions. See p. 25, 33, and 37 in this presentation.
When added to Hanley's margins, that means that the entire Ares I/Orion system is down to ~2,500-3,500 pounds of mass margin for the ISS mission and ~300-1,300 pounds of mass margin for the lunar mission. That's between seven and less than one percent mass margin against Orion's 48,000 pound total mass. Typical mass margin at the PDR stage should be on the order of 20-25 percent, about triple the best-case assessment here. Ares I/Orion still has seven years of design and development to go and at best has only one-third of the mass margin it should have at this stage.
Even worse, those Orion mass margins don't account for the mass threats still to be allocated in next year's Orion PDR. In the presentation above, the 90th percentile mass threats for the ISS and lunar missions are separately about 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds. That reduces the total Ares I/Orion mass margin to between -1,700 and 1,500 pounds. That's a negative (negative!) three percent mass margin on the lunar mission and only a positive three percent mass margin on the ISS mission, at least seven times less margin than what the program needs at this point in time.
Instead of worrying about $60 million Soyuz purchases and extending existing Shuttle jobs, Weldon and his staff need to be worrying about the $20 billion Ares I/Orion program and whether it can ever technically close and replace some of those Shuttle jobs.
Some have attempted to excuse this by saying, "well, every big space program has teething issues." True. Two responses.
First, many of them die from them (e.g., X-33).
Second, I don't know of any comparable program that had essentially zero margin at PDR (and I'm not aware of any that required multiple PDRs or "PDR do-overs") that survived them. Perhaps someone more familiar with history can enlighten me.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:00 AMThis screwed up:
After trying unsuccessfully for years to build its own radar satellite, the Pentagon is now turning to its allies for help and has been presented with a plan that would see it buy a clone of Canada's highly successful Radarsat-2 spacecraft.The U.S. Defence Department asked for and received information this week from a number of foreign satellite consortiums on how they could help the Pentagon meet its surveillance needs for the future.
Isn't there anybody here who knows how to play this game?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 PMI'm looking at reporting from what looks like the Sheraton in Clear Lake, and there are reports of furniture with NASA logos floating in the bay. Gotta think that some of the JSC facilities were flooded.
If space were important, we wouldn't have mission control in an area susceptible to floods and hurricanes. The Cape has some geographical reasons for its location, but the only reason that JSC is in Houston is because Johnson wanted it there, and the land was free.
[Update in the afternoon]
Here's more on NASA's fragile infrastructure. The agency's ground facilities are just as non-robust as its space transportation system.
Here is how it seems to work: a hurricane threatens JSC - so NASA shuts off email and other services to a large chunk of the agency. Why? Because NASA deliberately set the system up such that other NASA centers - some of which are thousands of miles away and poised to offer assistance and keep the rest of the agency operating - have their email and other services routed out of JSC - and only JSC (or so it would seem). A few critical users have some service, but everyone else is out of luck for at least 48 hours. Would any self-respecting, profitable, commercial communications company do something as silly as this? No. They'd never stay in business. Only NASA would come up with such a flawed and stupid plan.
That's too harsh. I can imagine the FAA, or DHS doing exactly the same thing.
It's just more of that wise, foresightful government thing.
[Update about 1:30 PM EDT]
Jeff Masters says that Galveston lucked out:
Although Ike caused heavy damage by flooding Galveston with a 12-foot storm surge, the city escaped destruction thanks to its 15.6-foot sea wall (the wall was built 17 feet high, but has since subsided about 2 feet). The surge was able to flow into Galveston Bay and flood the city from behind, but the wall prevented a head-on battering by the surge from the ocean side. Galveston was fortunate that Ike hit the city head-on, rather than just to the south. Ike's highest storm surge occurred about 50 miles to the northeast of Galveston, over a lightly-populated stretch of coast. Galveston was also lucky that Ike did not have another 12-24 hours over water. In the 12 hours prior to landfall, Ike's central pressure dropped 6 mb, and the storm began to rapidly organize and form a new eyewall. If Ike had had another 12-24 hours to complete this process, it would have been a Category 4 hurricane with 135-145 mph winds that likely would have destroyed Galveston. The GFDL model was consistently advertising this possibility, and it wasn't far off the mark. It was not clear to me until late last night that Ike would not destroy Galveston and kill thousands of people. Other hurricane scientists I conversed with yesterday were of the same opinion.
And of course, the lesson that the people who stayed behind will take is not that they were lucky and foolhardy, but that the weather forecasters overhyped the storm, and they'll be even less likely to evacuate the next time. And one of these times their luck will run out, as it did for their ancestors a few generations ago, when thousands were killed by a hurricane in Galveston.
[Update mid afternoon]
Sounds like things could have been a lot worse at NASA, too.
NASA had feared that a storm surge from Galveston Bay would flood some buildings on the 1,600-acre Space Center. Its southeast boundary is near Clear Lake, which is connected to Galveston Bay. However, the water did not rise that high.
Apparently the Guppy hangar at Ellington was destroyed, but it was never much of a hangar--more like a big tent.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AMAn interview with Tom Jones on the subject, over at Popular Mechanics. Note that he doesn't point out that no one ordered Mike Griffin to develop Ares, which is the biggest reason that Orion is delayed and that NASA doesn't have enough funding. He also has too much faith in Orion flying before something else (particularly given the Ares problems). I'm sure we could put up a capsule on an Atlas long before 2014, whether Dragon or something else, if we made it a priority.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:11 AMAs I've noted in the past, we're going to have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. Chair Force Engineer thinks that we're going to bite the bullet and buy more Soyuzs from the Russians:
Besides the reliance on Soyuz, there are myriad other ways in which ISS cannot survive unless the US and Russia cooperate. The various modules are too interconnected, and neither country can operate their contributions to the station without the other country playing along. It's conceivable that Russia could afford to build Soyuz without American money, by selling the American slots to space tourists. But a Russian-led ISS would still require use of American space modules.
America and Russia are left in a situation where it's unlikely that either will abandon the ISS, even though both nations are mired in growing mistrust. If I had to make a bet, I would say that the US and Russia will learn to grin and bear it, operating ISS jointly until 2017. When Congress looks rationally at its options, it will realize that it will have to begrudgingly buy more Soyuz if it still wants to participate in ISS.
Sometimes, I think that expecting Congress to "look rationally at its options" is asking too much. Particularly when it's robbing money from the NASA budget to provide foreign aid to Ethiopia. Sure, why not? It's not like NASA's spending the money very usefully, anyway. It just proves my oft-made point that space isn't politically important.
Anyway, as I said in my Pajamas piece, this is a policy disaster long in the making, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost. It was naive in the extreme at the end of the Cold War to assume that we and Russia would be BFFs and enter into such an inextricable long-term relationship. Now it's like a very dysfunctional marriage that is being held together only out of concern for the children. Without ISS, the divorce would be swift, I suspect.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of apt metaphors, Clark Lindsey has one for the Ares program:
Yellow and red grades notwithstanding, it has always seemed extremely unlikely to me that Ares I would fail to fly when NASA has so many billions of dollars available to spend on it. However, since I believe the whole Ares I/V program to be a stupendous waste, if technical problems did arise that led to its cancellation, I'd consider it a boon for US space development. If the brakes fail and a huge truck starts to careen down a hill, it's a blessing if the thing blows a tire instead and flops over into a ditch with relatively little damage to people and property. Unfortunately, it appears that Ares will keep rolling no matter what.
Actually, I wouldn't necessarily bet on that. There may be "change" coming to NASA next year, regardless of who wins the election.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:06 AMCan they close the gap? It's possible (though it seems unlikely) that they could have a successful Falcon 9 launch before a successful Falcon 1 launch. They don't seem to be letting Falcon 1 problems slow down the Falcon 9 schedule.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PMIt's not very often that I have a new thought about space, but when I do, I should post it here, rather than debuting it at Space Politics, as I did yesterday. Here's a repeat.
In response to a comment by Stephen Metschan that "According to Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, 80% of the life cycle cost of space is in the spacecraft and mission not the launch system," I wrote:
"That's because we haven't been doing human exploration to the moon and Mars for the time period over which he gathered that data. The vast amount of payload delivered to orbit for a spacefaring civilization (at least initially, until we are getting it from extraterrestrial sources) is propellant, which costs almost nothing on earth, but is very expensive in space when it's put up on an expensive launch system. And propellant is almost infinitely divisible, and something that can go up on large vehicles, small vehicles, high-reliability vehicles and low-reliability vehicles. But the important thing about it is that it go up on low-cost vehicles.
I'm always amused by the absurd notion that the mistake we made in the past was mixing crew and cargo.
No.
The real mistake that we made was mixing cargo (which is high value, at least if it's space systems, as opposed to logistics, regardless of whether people are being delivered) and propellant. Once you stop doing that, the rationale for large vehicles goes away completely. It can be done with existing vehicles, or new lower-cost vehicles. But it doesn't need expensive new and large expendable vehicles. And in fact they are counterproductive."
I should expand on this sometime. I think that there's an interesting economic argument for "impedance matching" vehicle costs to payload costs.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:00 AMI was going to have some comments about the administrator's leaked email, but haven't had the time. Fortunately, over in comments at Space politics, "anonymous.space" picks up my slack:
He didn't mean for it to be shown to the outside world, but the revisionism, hypocrisy, and self-adulation in Griffin's email is pretty shocking, even this late into the ESAS/Constellation debacle. It's either that, or he's been lying about his real positions for a long time. Griffin wrote:
"Exactly as I predicted, events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the US to adopt a policy of deliberate dependence on another power for access to the ISS."Griffin never predicted this. Instead, Griffin repeatedly stated that the VSE -- including its 2010 date for Shuttle retirement -- and the accompanying NASA Authorization Act of 2005 provide the nation with its best civil space policy in decades. In fact, Griffin said so as recently as January 2008 in an STA speech:
"I consider this to be the best civil space policy to be enunciated by a president, and the best Authorization Act to be approved by the Congress, since the 1960s."
See here.
In fact, just before becoming NASA Administrator, Griffin even _led_ a study that argued as one of its central conclusions/recommendations that the Space Shuttle could and should be retired after ISS assembly reached the stage of "U.S. Core Complete", certainly no later than 2010.
See here.
If Griffin was really so prescient as to predict the situation that NASA's human space flight programs are in now, then he should have spoken up years ago instead of repeatedly signing onto studies and policies that are flawed according to the argument in his email. In fact, it would have been wrong for him to have lobbied for the job of NASA Administrator to begin with if he really thought that the President's policy was so compromised.
Griffin should resign immediately and apologize if his email reflects what he's actually believed all these years. If not, and his email represents how Griffin has recently changed his views, then Griffin should admit that he was wrong to sign onto the policy, argue that the policy needs to be revised, and resign if it is not revised in a manner that he can support.
Griffin also wrote:
"In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a Shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability"
Griffin is confused about both chronology and causality in this statement. The Shuttle retirement date came first -- as a recommendation about Shuttle operability and certification in the CAIB report and then as policy in the VSE. The replacement for Shuttle (originally CEV in the VSE and then Ares/Orion in ESAS) came second and was supposed to have a schedule that was responsive to that Shuttle retirement date.
In a rational world, a rational NASA Administrator would have picked a rational Shuttle replacement that could be developed rapidly and fielded soon after the 2010 deadline for Shuttle retirement using the available budgetary and technical resources. Instead, Griffin chose an Ares/Orion system that is so technically compromised that it can't complete even its preliminary design review before the end of the Bush II Administration and is so costly that it can't be flown operationally within the available budget until 2015 (and even that date has only a limited chance of being met).
Gemini took less than four years to develop and fly. In the same amount of time, Ares I/Orion will not complete its preliminary design review. That is not rational.
Apollo took seven years to develop and fly (to the Moon). In the same amount of time, Ares I/Orion will still be (at least) three years from flying (to the ISS). That is not rational.
Griffin also wrote:
"We would have been asked to deploy Ares/Orion as early as possible (rather than "not later than 2014″) and we would have been provided the necessary budget to make it so."
Griffin is just making up history with this statement. NASA was never asked to "deploy Ares/Orion" at all. Rather, the VSE directed NASA to develop a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV, which eventually becameOrion), and provided a budget that supported CEV development. The VSE never directed NASA to develop a new launch vehicle that duplicated the nation's military and commercial capabilities with yet another medium- to intermediate-lift launcher (Ares), and the budget never supported such a development. Ares I needlessly busted the VSE budget box from day one, requiring the termination of billions of dollars of ISS research and exploration technology development just to start its design activities.
And why does anyone have to ask Griffin to deploy a Shuttle replacement as early as possible when the VSE gives him the flexibility to develop a replacement anytime before 2014? Is the NASA Administrator really so unambitious and lacking in initiative that, instead of being given a deadline (which he's blown by a year anyway), he also has to be told by the White House to execute a critical replacement program as rapidly as possible?
And then Griffin wrote:
"... for OSTP and OMB, retiring the Shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision."
First, for the head of any federal agency to use the term "jihad" in written reference to the White House offices that set policy for and fund their agency - especially when the same White House has been leading a seven-year war against Islamic extremism - demonstrates such extremely poor judgement that it brings into question whether that agency head is still fit to serve.
Second, the 2010 date for Shuttle retirement was effectively set by the CAIB's expert judgment about and extensive investigation into the vehicle's operational and certification issues. OSTP and OMB (and NASA under the prior Administrator) simply reiterated the 2010 date in the VSE. If Griffin wants to challenge the 2010 Shuttle retirement date, then he needs to challenge the engineering and program management analysis and expertise of the 13-member CAIB and its 32 staff, not OSTP and OMB. OSTP and OMB read and followed the CAIB report on this issue. Apparently Griffin did not and has not.
The only things OSTP and OMB are guilty of is not fulfilling all of the White House's funding commitments to the VSE and not stopping Ares I/Orion at the outset when those projects busted the budget, or later when they ran into insurmountable technical issues and schedule delays that made them programmatically and politically useless.
Griffin also wrote:
"Further, they [OSTP and OMB] actively do not want the ISS to be sustained, and have done everything possible to ensure that it would not be."
For the same NASA Administrator who wiped out billions of dollars of ISS research and who referred to the ISS as a "mistake" in the press to criticize White House offices about their lack of support for the ISS is the height of hypocrisy. See (add http://www):
.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-09-27-nasa-griffin-interview_x.htm):
Griffin needs to stop flailing in the political winds, make up his mind, and stick with a consistent position on the value (or lack thereof) of the ISS.
Finally, and this is a technical nit compared to the issues above, but towards the end, Griffin also wrote:
"The argument that we need to get Shuttle out of the way so that conversion of the VAB/MAF for Constellation can proceed is similarly specious."
This totally misses the point. The VAB and MAF are just really huge shells that NASA can build anything in. It's the launch and rocket test infrastructure (the pads, the mobile launcher platform, and test stands) that the Shuttle and Constellation system share, and which Constellation has to make modifications to, that will interminably slow Constellation development if Shuttle continues to make use of those facilities.
My kingdom for a rational NASA Administrator who reads and follows policy direction, develops programs within their allotted budgets, encourages and listens to independent technical advice, and has the capacity to admit when the current plan is fubar and adjust course in a timely manner.
Maybe in the next administration, regardless of who wins. But don't bet on it. The only area in which I disagree with these comments concerns the Shuttle retirement date. As I noted in a later comment over there:
"...why did they pick 2010? What is magic about that date (particularly when no one really knows what 'certification' means)?
I had always assumed that the CAIB thought that the Shuttle should be retired ASAP, and that if it wasn't, it would have to be 'recertified' for longer life (ignoring the issue that the term was undefined). But ASAP meant no sooner than ISS completion, which (I think even then) was scheduled for 2010 (at least after the Columbia loss and standown). Hence the date (it doesn't hurt that it's a round number).
The Shuttle doesn't suddenly become less safe to fly in 2011, or even 2012. If there is a degradation, it is a gradual one, not a binary condition, and there is no obvious 'knee in the curve.' The date was driven by non-Shuttle considerations, IMO. If someone on the CAIB (e.g., Dr. Day) knows otherwise, I'd be interested to know that."
And if Mike Griffin is now frustrated, and wants to know who to blame, he'll see him the next time he shaves.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AMIrene Klotz is hosting the latest carnival of space, with a different theme.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:44 PM...with Mike Griffin.
Not a lot new here for people who have been following it. And I would have a lot bolder vision for a "perfect world" than simply enough money to fly Shuttle while developing the Paintshaker. And he seems to be ignoring the issue that they share facilities and that mods have to occur (unless he was asking for enough money for new facilities for the new launcher).
And this is a useful point:
Q: When I tell non space people about the gap, the response is almost universally "you're kidding." Why is that?
Griffin: The 'you're kidding' part and the lack of notice, for several years it was something fairly far off in the future. The actual circumstance doesn't even occur in the next president's administration unless that president gets two terms. It certainly wasn't occurring in this president's administration and it doesn't occur in any of the next couple of Congresses, right? Nobody around today was certain to be on scene when the actual consequence occurs. Moreover, I don't think anybody reading about it in the papers ... thought really that it was going to be allowed to come to pass.
A lot of people argue that we need governments to fund things like this because private industry is too short sighted.
Give me a break.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:52 PMIrene Klotz has been won over by Sarah Palin and Ayn Rand. And the former Democrat is going to be following the campaign from a space perspective. Not sure how much she's going to have to report. I doubt that it will be a big issue outside of Florida.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:44 PMI hadn't seen this before. Mike Griffin is claiming that extending Shuttle will dramatically reduce its reliability:
In April this year, he told a Senate panel: "If one were to do as some have suggested and fly the shuttle for an additional five years -- say, two missions a year -- the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew. That's a high risk ..... [one] I would not choose to accept on behalf of our astronauts."
So he's saying that each of those flights has a probability of success of 99.1% (about one in a hundred chance of losing the vehicle). That's the number that, when taken to the tenth power (the number of flights) comes out to a 92% probability of not losing a vehicle. 99% is slightly better than historical record, based on the two losses of Challenger and Columbia, but I would expect after all the money they spent on resolving foam and other issues that they should have a much safer vehicle now (probably the safest it's ever been). Is he assuming some kind of reduction in reliability as the system ages or we can't replace parts over that fiveyear period? I'm curious to know how they came up with it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:13 PMThere's an interesting discussion in comments between Clark Lindsey and Dwayne Day (and others, though those are less interesting) on how much progress we have made in achieving the goals of the new private space industry over at Space Transport News.
Clark tends to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. Dr. Day thinks there are a few drops in the bottom, and they're poisoned.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:57 PMDwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.
One other point of coming convergence--the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We'll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AMThe Ares graveyard, that is. Mark Whittington once again proudly demonstrates his ignorance about space technology. Some would be embarrassed by it, but never Mark.
Now, I'm not adroit at deciphering the somewhat arcane language of NASA documents, though I've read my share of them. But the numbers that Jon quotes is under a column called "Current Analysis" which is to the right of a column called "TPM REQT." That suggests, just drawing on an ability to read the English language, that the numbers quoted are a snapshot in time and do not reflect where the folks working on Constellation expect to be when the Orion and Ares start flying. Therefore not quite as alarming as Rand, Jon, or the mysterious person who calls himself "Anonymous Space" would like to imply.
You're right. You are not adroit (though there's nothing "arcane" about this particular document). Of course it's a "current analysis." That's the only kind of analysis that one can do in the present. When it's redone in the future, that analysis will be the current analysis. And the current analysis says that the LOC/LOM are nowhere near what was originally promised for the vehicle (just as was the case for the Shuttle). There are no obvious ways to improve it--the hazards that lower it to those numbers are essentially intrinsic to the design, and probably not mitigatible within the mass budget. There is also no obvious way to "expect" something different in the future. This reality is almost certainly the reason that the Preliminary Design Review was delayed into next year.
It should also be noted that, despite the mythology about how "safe" the Saturn/CSM were, we were damned lucky to not lose a crew during Apollo. Had we flown a lot more missions, it's almost guaranteed that we would have. Had the oxygen tank that exploded in Apollo XIII occurred on the way back, we would have lost the crew, no matter how innovative and responsive ground control was, no matter how many times Gene Kranz declared that failure was not an option. Sometimes, failure happens. And one of the reasons that space costs so much, the way NASA does it, is that when failure isn't an option, success gets outrageously expensive.
But it gets better:
Putting it another way, it is so of like suggesting that the LOM probability for SpaceX's Falcon 1 will be %100 just because the first three test flights have all failed to achieve orbit.
No, that is not "putting it another way." That is saying something entirely different and utterly irrelevant. If he's attempting to do a Bayesian probability of future Falcon success based on its history, the next flight would have a 75% chance of failure, not a hundred percent. But there's a big difference between making an empirical estimate from past performance, and an analytical estimate based on a probabilistic risk analysis, the latter of which is where the Orion/Ares LOC/LOM numbers come from. Ares hasn't flown yet, so it's absurd to compare it to Falcon's actual record.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AM...and not safe. Nice catch by Jon Goff that no one else seems to have picked up on:
Basically, unless this source is bogus, or I'm completely misreading things, it's saying that even NASA admits that their odds of losing a crew or a mission using the Constellation architecture are far worse then they had originally claimed. In fact, at least for ISS missions, we're talking almost an order of magnitude worse. For ISS, they're claiming a LOC (probability of losing the crew on any given flight) of 1 in 231, with a LOM (loss of mission) of 1 in 19! If I'm reading this right, that means they expect right now that about 5% of missions to the space station will end up not making it to the station. For lunar missions, the LOC number is 1 in 170, and the LOM number is 1 in 9! That means of every multi-billion dollar mission, they've got an almost 11% chance of it being a failure. While some of these numbers have been improving, others have been getting worse.
In other words, it appears that NASA is admitting that the Ares-1 is not going to be any safer than an EELV/EELV derived launcher would've been, and in fact may be less reliable.
I've never drunk the koolaid that Ares/Orion was going to be more safe than Shuttle (or any previous system). Part of the problem is that (particularly with all of the vibration issues) they're being forced to put systems in that introduce new failure modes. The other is that in their determination to have a crew escape system (as I've mentioned before), they are adding hazards on a nominal mission.
There is only one way to get a safe launch system. We have to build vehicles that we can fly repeatedly, develop operational experience, and wring the bugs out of, just as we've done with every other type of transportation to date. When every flight is a first flight that has to fully perform, you're always going to have a high risk of problems. Unfortunately, NASA decided to do Apollo again instead of solve the space transportation problem.
And along those lines, I should say that I fully agree with Jon:
Quite frankly, I'd almost rather see a gap than try filling it with a kludge like keeping the shuttle flying. The fundamental problem is that even though "commercial" companies like Boeing and LM and Orbital (and hopefully SpaceX if they can get their act together) have been providing the majority of US spacelift for the past two decades, there is no commercial supplier of manned orbital spaceflight in the US. That's the bigger problem, IMO than the fact that NASA can't access a space station that it really doesn't have much use for.
I'd rather see more focus on how NASA and DoD can help encourage and grow a strong and thriving commercial spaceflight (manned and unmanned) sector than how NASA can fix its broken internal spaceflight problems. Once the US actually gets to the point where it has a thriving manned orbital spaceflight sector, there won't be any gaps again in the future. A strong commercial spaceflight sector with a weak NASA is still a lot better than a strong NASA and a weak commercial spaceflight sector.
Unfortunately, absent a real crisis, the politics seem determined to not encourage that to happen. And the ISS crisis, if it is perceived as one, is likely to cause a panic that still won't cause it to happen, though it may still result in something better than ESAS (not that we could do much worse).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:11 AMJohn Tierney on lunar and martian property rights.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:57 PMMike Griffin has kicked off a study to consider Shuttle extension for five years.
The problem, not mentioned by the article, is that this doesn't close the gap, unless Ares is abandoned. Shuttle and Ares use the same launch infrastructure, and as long as Shuttle flies, pads and crawler cannot be modified for it. Nor does it allow us to permanently crew the station without Soyuz.
The only real solution (assuming that we want to pay the high costs of continuing Shuttle) is to put a capsule on something else (e.g., Atlas, or Falcon 9 if it ever flies), soon. Maybe Orion, maybe Dragon, maybe something else, but it looks like the Stick is on life support. In fact, as "anonymous.space" says over at Space Politics, it's already dead. It's just that Griffin and others have been doing CPR on the body to keep the coroner from getting to it.
What a fiasco.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:40 PMTraditionally, the veep has had responsibility for space policy, as something to do besides waiting for the president to die and break ties in the Senate.
When it comes to space, she's got no track record at all, but an Alaskan would bring an interesting perspective to free enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AMWayne Hale explains why we should shut down the Shuttle.
Everything he says is true--much of the infrastructure and support contractors for the system are already gone. That's why it will be very expensive to resurrect them to the degree necessary to fly past 2010. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but as I wrote in my PJM piece, we have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. And if we want to keep the option open, and as least costly as possible, we need to stop terminating those suppliers and destroying tooling immediately. It's probably a prudent thing to do, until the next president can make a decision.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AMBut it sounds like a business setback for XCOR:
If the demonstrations in Oshkosh and Burns Flat were meant as a fly-off, the Armadillo team - led by millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack - came away as the winner.
"The Armadillo engine is going to be the primary engine for the Rocket Racing League," Whitelaw told me. He said five more planes will be built using Armadillo's propulsion system, which is a spin-off from Carmack's years-long quest to win the $2 million, NASA-backed Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
It sounds like the Armadillo engine has more thrust, though it's not clear how the T/W compares.
I wonder to what degree XCOR was constrained by a potential desire to maintain some legacy toward the Lynx engine? If they were building an engine purely for the RRL, would it have been a different design and fuel type?
Presumably, the business plan with which they raised their recent institutional investment considered this as a contingency. I'm sure they would have liked continuing business from RRL, though Whitelaw doesn't seem to rule it out for the future.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:54 PMIt just occurs to me that even if we continue to fly the Shuttle through "the gap" that doesn't really solve the problem of actually utilizing the station. We are currently planning on relying on dual Soyuzs (what's the plural of "Soyuz"?) for "lifeboat" capability to allow a six-person crew after completion. If the US is not purchasing Soyuz, we wouldn't be able to leave Americans on board permanently, unless we wanted to risk losing them in emergency. It seems unlikely that this would actually play out politically, but if there were only one Soyuz there while the Shuttle wasn't, it would be a Titanic situation, with only enough escape craft for half the crew. Would the Russians just say, "dos vedanya..."? The OSP was supposed to serve in that function, but it was cancelled when the VSE came along.
What a policy Charlie Foxtrot.
I'll bet that you could find volunteers in the astronaut office, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PMIs ESA getting serious about reusable vehicles? Too bad NASA can't find a clue.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:54 AMRobin Snelson browbeat me into posting this documentary she made about Mojave. Despite that, it's pretty good.
OK, she didn't really browbeat me. She just pointed it out.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 PMJeff Finckenor responds to some of his critics in the comments section:
"He's a whiner who didn't get his way and went to the IG"
Not a terribly polite way to put things, but I suppose it is somewhat accurate. Of course "my way" which I was always advocating was a call to do a technical evaluation to determine what we really needed to do. You know, things like writing requirements, then making selections based on those requirements. Some people would call that good engineering. Some would call it federal law. It never happened. Had it happened then I wouldn't have had any arguments to make and would have been shut down a long time ago. Had it happened and there were real reasons for MSFC and Constellation making the decisions they did, then I could have supported them even if I was less then thrilled. You go to the IG to report waste, fraud and abuse. I was duty bound to report what I saw as both a taxpayer and a government employee. If there wasn't any meat to what I was saying, then the IG would have sent me away. They didn't. Those who want to do the search may also want to look up a letter from Senator Grassley to NASA. It was a very powerful letter and appears to have been soundly ignored. It takes a lot of chutzpah to blow off the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but NASA got away with it.Those who argue with me will trot out an "evaluation" that was done in 2002, except that that evaluation was based on a CM tool ONLY (not CAD management), and it was fatally flawed in how it was performed. And yes, all you're getting here is an opinion, and again my information has been documented and given to the appropriate authorities.
Was I asked to "stop working against management"? I guess that's one way to put it, if I was willing to ignore reality, give up on the vision of what NASA needs to succeed, and toe the party line.
It was wrenching deciding 3 years ago that my job wasn't worth the mess that I was seeing. I had basically decided that a NASA that could make a decision so badly (which is not quite the same thing as a bad decision, though in this case I believe it is the same), and not be able to correct itself was not a good place to work. So I committed to supporting good engineering practice and federal law, knowing that I might be forced out. 3 years later, I have given up, which was again wrenching for me. The politics are too overwhelming, and it is indeed not a good place for me to work.
Go read the whole thing.
All of the comments have to be very disquieting to fans of business as usual at NASA. It's not about CAD. It's about whether this is an institution that, despite the many talented people working for it, is capable of getting us into space in any serious way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 PMAs I noted in my recent PJM piece, if we are going to continue to fly the Shuttle, decisions must be made almost immediately to keep key infrastructure in place, that is due to be dismantled. Several legislators, including the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have sent a letter to the White House urging just such an action. It will be interesting to see the administration response.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:18 PMThere's little new in this piece at the Economist to people who have been following the issue. Well, there is one thing: some signs that the people who have been destroying the industry with this foolish policy may be starting to pay attention.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AM...and a depressing one, of the Vision for Space Exploration. There's a piece missing in the chronology, though. "Safe, Simple, Soon" was not part of the original vision. That was a sales slogan that ATK came up with to promote their particular means of implementing it. As noted, though, it seems to be failing on all three counts.
Note the comment that PDR has slipped into next year.
[Update mid morning PDT]
More on the PDR slip. It's all the way out to next spring.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:31 AM"...and what is the nature of it? An interesting post over at NASA Watch, but the comments are even more interesting. I have some thoughts, and they're related to my earlier thoughts on systems engineering, but I'm curious to see what commenters here think.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:23 PMJeff Foust reports on last week's anniversary get together.
When we finally start flying affordable space transports, future historians will look back in amazement that policy could have been so screwed up for so many decades, and so stubbornly unamenable to being fixed.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:40 PMI've got an update to yesterday's post, in which I discuss the flawed oil rig analogy. I should add that the submarine analogy is equivalently flawed. If we needed a giant and expensive machine to get an assembled submarine underwater, we might very well be tempted to do underwater assembly. But we don't.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:43 AMI've discussed this many times before, but Al Fansome has a useful comment over at Space Politics (scroll way down--it's in the forties):
Other than Bob Zubrin (e.g., the Mars Society), I don't know of any space advocacy organizations who have made super-heavy-lift a priority. The only reason that super-heavy-lift is a priority now is because Mike Griffin came in and made a command decision. He already knew the answer -- ESAS was a facade to justify the decision he had already made.Let me try to give you a serious response to your question.
Have you thought about how all the truly GREAT engineering projects on this planet have been built?
Let me list a few obvious ones.
- The Pyramids
- The Great Wall
- The Empire State Building
- The Hoover Dam (or pick your favorite dam)
- The Eiffel Tower
- The Kremlin
- The U.S. Capitol Building
- The Statue of Liberty
- The Golden Gate BridgeThey all have at least ONE thing in common. The pieces of each & every one of these great engineering projects were transported to the final site in pieces, and then assembled on site.
Great engineering in enabled by low-cost transportation and the ability to assemble the technology on site.
We are KILLING ourselves by not taking the same approach to space.
Next -- think about standard home construction.
1) There are estimated to be more than 100 million homes in America.
http://www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p25-1129.pdf+Number+of+houses+in+United+States&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
Of that number, the estimated number of mobile homes is ~9 million
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/census_2000/001543.htmlIn other words, well over 90%, or over 90 million, of American "homes" (whether in single family dwelling, apartments, condos, etc.) are assembled by the same method that is used to assemble the great engineering projects. This choice is obviously driven by economics (nobody mandated this result.)
SUMMARY: The large majority of Western and Eastern civilization has been built using the approach of cheaply transporting the pieces of the construction project to the site, and then final assembly at that site.
So, why are we ignoring the dominant traditional approach that is used over the entire planet?
Why are we not assuming that the right way to build our space economy, and to develop the space frontier, is to develop & use reusable launch vehicles to transport things to space at very low costs, and then assemble the pieces on-site.
Mike Griffin gave a speech a couple years ago talking about constructing the great cathedrals in Europe. Well, those cathedrals were transported to the final site in millions of pieces, and then assembled.
We continue to treat space differently than earthly endeavors for contingent reasons of history, not rationality or technology. Thus we get the cargo-cult approach of ESAS, in which NASA attempts to replicate Apollo, except without either the associated urgency, or the budget.
[Update on Sunday afternoon]
Since some people seem to imagine that the oil rig is a useful analogy, let me expand on it. It actually is one, but not in a way advantageous to the heavy-lift fetishists.
Yes, it is assembled in port and then towed to its operational location. But this is in no way analogous to assembling on the ground and launching to orbit. This is because of the huge energy barrier between the two. It's no big deal to tow something from one place in the ocean to another--that's a very old technology, and an extensive transportation infrastructure exists with which to do so. Thus, it makes sense to assemble it essentially in the ocean, but near land, to take advantage of the local work force.
But note that what we don't do with oil rigs is assemble them in Colorado, and then build a humungous custom truck (and associated reinforced roads, with clearances) to move it to the shore and put it in the water. But that's essentially what people are proposing in saying that things should be fully assembled on earth, and then launched into space, on a giant rocket that flies just once in a while, at a very high cost (particularly after amortizing the development cost).
In space the oil rig scenario would be analogous to having an existing assembly facility in LEO (that had presumably been bootstrapped up), with a robust low-cost transportation infrastructure to get things to and from earth, and from point to point in space. The "oil rig" (or large telescope facility, or prop depot for use at L1) would be assembled there, and then a space tug would move it to its final destination.
This was in fact part of the original vision for the SSF in the eighties. The "dual truss" configuration was intended to act as an orbital assembly hangar. Unfortunately, we didn't have the transportation infrastructure to support it. But the fact remains that what we need is not heavy lift, but affordable, reliable and frequent lift. Once we get the latter, it will become clear how to best utilize it to accomplish our goals.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PMA woman Down Under has a novel approach to asteroid management: wrapping it in foil.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:11 PMPaul Breed notes in comments that the decision to require permits or waivers for tethered testing didn't originate with AST (though I never claimed it did), but with the FAA chief counsel's office. To me, this is just one more argument for making the office independent of the FAA and report directly to the SecDot, as it did from its inception until the Clinton administration "streamlined" it into the FAA.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:48 AMNASA just lost two hypersonic test vehicles on an untested sounding rocket, built by ATK, the same company that is slated to build the paint shaker first stage for the Ares I. It's not clear whether it was destroyed by the range, or it if just blew up on its own.
Sigh...expendables, and particularly solid expendables. Gotta love the continuing notion of putting things into space on modified munitions.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AMAlan's a great science and tech reporter, but I wish that he'd asked George Nield about this:
We have poured a pad for tethered hover testing at our new location, but there was a recent FAA re-interpretation of the law that absurdly states that testing under a tether, as we have been doing for over eight years, is now considered a suborbital launch, and requires a permit or waiver just as a free flight would. This is retarded and counterproductive in so many ways, and the entire industry is lashing back over it, but it is an issue we have to deal with in the next couple months.
Maybe I will.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:40 PMI hadn't realized that it's about the same age as NASA. I'd thought it went back further than that. For the occasions, Alan Boyle interviews the current head of the space side of the agency, George Nield.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AMSome folks have been criticizing the recent Orion parachute test failure as just one more screwup at NASA that they've been covering up, and made a bigger deal of it than it is, but Henry Spencer has a more nuanced, and correct view:
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test.
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape-system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.But sometimes the test conditions are so unrealistically severe that there's no hope of correct functioning. Unpleasant though the result often looks, this isn't properly considered a failure of the tested system. That seems to have been what happened here.
As I've noted before, requirements verification is where the real cost of a development program comes from, particularly when the only useful verification method is test.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:52 PMNASASpaceFlight has technical details of yesterday's briefing. It still looks nuts to me.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:16 AMXCOR has attracted the funding of an institutional investor. It's not just angels any more.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:52 AMJim Oberg has the story on Iran's failed attempt to launch a satellite.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:38 PMYou know, the more I think about this, the more I think it should always have been a no brainer.
The first rule of wing walking is to not let go of the airplane with one hand until you have a firm new grip with the other. It's pretty simple: don't shut down the Shuttle until you have a replacement in place (and preferably redundantly).
The only reason we're undertaking such a dumb policy is because of the panic after the loss of Columbia causing a desire to end the program ASAP, and an unwillingness to pay what it cost to fund the new development at the same time we were continuing to spend billions annually on keeping the Shuttle going. The notion that we can take the savings from ending the Shuttle to develop the new systems seems appealing, but it essentially guarantees a "gap."
And it's all a result of the fact that space isn't important. Is there any other government activity where we arbitrarily assign a budget number to it, and then demand that its endeavors fit within that budget? But that's the way Congress has always viewed NASA--that there's a certain level of spending that's politically acceptable, and no more. If space were important, we'd do what we did in Apollo--establish a goal, and then provide the funding necessary to achieve it. But it's not, other than for pork and prestige. It's important that we have a space program, but it's not at all important that it accomplish anything of value. Until that attitude changes, we're unlikely to get sensible policy.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:35 AMKeith Cowing has a report on today's telecon to discuss the Ares 1 vibration issue. Apparently they've settled on a solution before they really understand the problem.
[Late afternoon update]
Bobby Block and Todd Halvorson have blog posts up as well. But I think that Halvorson's reporting is a little garbled here:
Gravitation forces on the astronauts will be reduced to 0.25 Gs from around 5 to 6 Gs, the latter of which is about double the force exerted on shuttle crews.
I think that he's confusing the steady-state acceleration resulting from thrust with the vibration acceleration ostensibly being mitigated by the springs and dampers. Also, it's not a "gravitation force." I'm assuming that NASA meant that they can reduce the oscillations on the crew couch from high gees to a quarter of a gee, but that's independent of the gees imposed by thrust. If they're only accelerating at a quarter of a gee, that would result in horrific gravity losses during ascent.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:39 AMWell, now we know what the "space experts" told John McCain yesterday up in Titusville.
As I noted in my piece at PJM, the options aren't very pretty. The lowest risk course is to continue Shuttle past 2010, but to keep this option open, they have to take some immediate actions to keep production open on consumables, such as ETs. As I've noted before, it's ironic that they're shutting the system down just as they've finally wrung most of the bugs out of it. It still remains horrifically expensive, of course, but no more so than Ares/Orion, and it has a lot more capability. I think that the "recertification" issue is a red herring. Just because the CAIB recommended it doesn't mean that it makes any sense, since no one knows what it really means. Nothing magical happens in 2010 that makes it suddenly unsafe to fly. That date was chosen as the earliest one that they could retire and still complete ISS, not on the basis that anything was worn or wearing out. They could just continue to fly, and do periodic inspections.
I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Lafitte recommended an acceleration of Ares. It would be more in his company's interest to just give up on it and use Atlas, but I suspect that would be too politically incorrect to say with reporters around. He has to live with Mike Griffin for at least another few months.
What would I do if I were king? I'd stop buying Soyuz, and keep the Shuttle flying, I'd abandon Ares/Orion, and provide huge incentives to the private sector by establishing prop depots and paying good money for prop delivery. That would require more money than people want to spend, but we'd get a lot more robust transportation infrastructure, ready to go to either the moon or Mars (or other destinations) at a lot lower mission cost than NASA's current plans. It's what we would do if space were really important. But of course, it's not, so we won't.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AMI'd like to know who those "twenty hand-picked space experts" are. Unfortunately, I'll bet that one of them is Walt Cunningham. But at least he won't be the only one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:01 AMI have a piece up at Pajamas Media this morning on the potential effect of Russia's renewed belligerence on the US space program.
I should note that I may have been a little too sanguine about the situation for the current ISS crew. While the RSA astronauts in Expedition 17 weren't born in Russia, it's possible that they are Russians, and sympathetic to Russia, given the way that Russia had colonized the Ukraine and Turkmen Republic and moved populations of Russians in there. It's all really speculation. Only the crew really know what the atmosphere is up there.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:21 AMSpaceDev has announced Scaled Composites has selected them to develop a hybrid motor for SpaceShipTwo in a $15 million contract. The point that SpaceDev was selected (not down-selected) in SpaceShipOne development was 3.25 years before winning the Ansari X-Prize. This is consistent with the duration announced for the development contract for SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor of "through 2012" with work "primarily completed over the next two years". SpaceShipTwo will likely burn rubber getting to suborbital space.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:45 AM...and hope!
Well, not really. The Obama campaign has released its new space policy, and there's not much breaking with the status quo in it. It's basically sticking with the current plan, at least in civil space, but promising (as in all areas) to spend more money. While one suspects that Lori Garver must have played a major role in it, it also reads as though it was written by a committee, or different people wrote different sections, and then it was stitched together, like Frankenstein's monster.
For instance, in one section, it says:
Obama will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities. NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services is a good model of government/industry collaboration.
But later on, in a different section, it says:
Obama will evaluate whether the private sector can safely and effectively fulfill some of NASA's need for lower earth orbit cargo transport.
If COTS is a "good model," why is such an "evaluation" necessary? Isn't it already a given? I also like the notion that Obama himself would do the "evaluation." As if.
It's got the usual kumbaya about international cooperation, of course, which I think has been disastrous on the ISS. There are also implied digs at the Bush administration, about not "politicizing" science (as though Jim Hansen hasn't done that himself) and opposing "weapons" in space. It also discusses more cooperation between NASA and NRO, ignoring the recent rumblings about getting rid of the latter, and the problems with security that would arise in such "cooperation."
Also, interestingly, after Senator Obama called McCain's proposed automotive prize a "gimmick," the new policy now explicitly supports them. So are they no longer "gimmicks"? Or is it just that McCain's idea was (for some unexplained reasons) but Obama's are not?
Overall, my biggest concerns with it are more on the defense side than on the civil space side. This is utopian:
Barack Obama opposes the stationing of weapons in space and the development of anti-satellite weapons. He believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield.
Sorry, but that horse is out of the barn, and there's no way to get it back in. No anti-satellite weapons treaty would be verifiable. It is good to note, though, that the policy recognizes ORS as a means to mitigate the problem. That's the real solution, not agreements and paper.
In any event, it's a big improvement over his previous space policy, which was not a policy at all, but rather an adjunct to his education policy. Now it's time for the McCain campaign to come up with one. I hope that he gets Newt to help him with it, and not Walt Cunningham.
[Mid-morning update]
One of the commenters over at NASA Watch picks up on something that I had missed:
Sen. Obama names COTS and several other programs by name, but not Ares or Constellation. He mentions "the Shuttle's successor systems" without specifying what they might be.
That does give him some options for real change. I also agree that a revival of the space council would be a good idea. I hope that the McCain campaign doesn't oppose this purely because the Obama campaign has picked it up.
[Afternoon update]
One other problem. While it talks about COTS, it has no mention of CATS (or CRATS, or CARATS, or whatever acronym they're using this week for cheap and reliable access to space). It hints at it with COTS and ORS, but it's not set out as an explicit goal. I hope that McCain's policy does.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bobby Block has a report at the Orlando Sentinel space blog.
This part struck me (and didn't surprise me):
Lori Garver, an Obama policy adviser, said last week during a space debate in Colorado that Obama and his staff first thought that the push to go to the moon was "a Bush program and didn't make a lot of sense." But after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, "they recognized the importance of space." Now, she said, Obama truly supports space exploration as an issue and not just as a tool to win votes in Florida.
I'm not sure that Lori helped the campaign here. What does that tell us about the quality and cynicism of policy making in the Obama camp? They opposed it before they were for it because it was George Bush's idea? And does that mean that space policy was just about votes in Florida before this new policy? I know that there are a lot of BDS sufferers who oppose VSE for this reason, and this reason alone, but it's a little disturbing that such (non)thinking was actually driving policy in a major presidential campaign.
George Bush greatly expanded federal involvement in education and expanded Medicare. Are they going to shrink them accordingly? I'd like to think so, but I suspect not.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 AMIt's hard to think of any sitting (or past, for that matter) member of Congress who has done more for commercial space efforts than Dana Rohrabacher. He's been representing his southern California district for many years, so I was a little surprised to hear that he's in a potentially tough reelection battle. But his opponent is currently out-fund-raising him, and it's going to be a generally tough year for Republicans, even those whose seats had previously been secure. So for those of you who want to keep him in Washington for his space efforts (or for other reasons), a fund has been set up to help make that happen.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AMJeff Foust has a report on the debate in Boulder between Lori Garver and Walt Cunningham. As I note in comments, if Senator Obama is now interested in prizes, that would be a change of position from when he criticized Senator McCain's proposal for an automotive prize.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:19 AMIf you want to know why Constellation is such a godawful mess, here's one reason:
NASA JSC Center Director's Systems Engineering Forum Planned Aug. 21
There actually are people out in private industry (like me) who do this stuff for a living, or at least would, if NASA would give them a contract. But instead of putting out a SETA or some other support contract for systems engineering, as Steidle had planned to do, Dr. Griffin simply decided that NASA would do it. This is where it's gotten him. Had he hired a good SE contractor (and listened) the program would likely not be in the kind of trouble it is, either technically or politically. Of course, it would probably look much different, because a proper systems-engineering approach would never have resulted in the Shaft. That was the danger inherent in putting a rocket scientist in charge of the agency. He thought he was smarter than everyone else.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:03 PM...than you were three years ago?
The official IOC for an Ares I crew launch vehicle able to send a crew of six to the International Space Station (ISS) in the Orion crew exploration vehicle is March 2015.
And now that the Russians have shown themselves for what they are in Georgia, isn't it great to be dependent on them for crewed access?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AMIt's that time of year again. They peak tonight (or rather, early tomorrow morning). Be sure to get out of town, though. You won't see any but the very brightest with city lights around.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:47 AMRobert Block is wondering if the Stick is dying. I liked this bit:
In the face of the latest reports of trouble, sources say that NASA leaders are looking at a possible replacement design, including one that would use the shuttle's two four-segment solid rocket boosters, and a liquid engine with four RS-68 engines and no upper stage. While it sounds similar to a rocket called the Jupiter 120 or the Direct 2.0 concept which is being proposed by moonlighting NASA engineers, the sources insist it is not the same.
Yes. I have a literary theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey weren't written by Homer, but by another blind poet with the same name.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AMAlan Boyle interviews the first man to relieve his bladder on the moon, about the Moon, Mars and the Gap. And it's great to see him (and Lois) still going strong. And as he points out, there are a lot of fortieth and fiftieth anniversary news hooks coming up. I hope to take advantage of them as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMHenry Spencer got it right (no big surprise):
The gap between engine cut off and staging was 1.5 seconds - which was fine for the ablatively cooled engine on Flight 2. But on Flight 3, with the regeneratively cooled engine, there was some residual thrust after engine shut down and this caused the first stage to be pushed back toward the second stage after separation and there was a recontact between the stages.
One of the big mistakes that people make in writing requirements is not writing proper verification statements for them. One of my rules, that I came to late in life, is to not allow a requirement to be accepted unless it has an accompanying verification statement (i.e., how you verify that the requirement has been satisfied). If you can't write a verification statement for it, it's not a valid requirement. The other reason is that verification is where most of the cost of a program comes from. Test is very expensive. If you can come up with ways to verify early on that don't require it (inspection, demonstration, analysis), you can control and estimate costs much better.
One of the key elements of a proper verification statement is the environment. It's not enough to say, "Verify, by test, that engine thrust is less than TBD Nt TBD seconds after engine shutdown." It has to be "Verify, by test, in vacuum, that engine thrust is less than TBD Nt TBD seconds after engine shutdown."
AMROC had a similar problem on SET-1 back in 1989, because the propulsion system testing had all taken place in the desert at Edwards, and the actual launch occurred in the humid October weather of Vandenberg, at the coast. The LOX valve iced up. The vehicle ended up catching fire and fell over and burned on the pad. There was no explosion, but it was a launch failure.
This is why systems engineering processes were developed. I'd be curious to know what kind of SE processes SpaceX had in place. And what they'll have in place in the future...
[Late evening update]
Here's the official statement from Elon Musk:
Timing is EverythingPosted by Rand Simberg at 03:49 PM
On August 2nd, Falcon 1 executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. At this point, we are certain as to the origin of the problem. Four methods of analysis - vehicle inertial measurement, chamber pressure, onboard video and a simple physics free body calculation - all give the same answer.The problem arose due to the longer thrust decay transient of our new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine, as compared to the prior flight that used our old Merlin 1A ablatively cooled engine. Unlike the ablative engine, the regen engine had unburned fuel in the cooling channels and manifold that combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust that was just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.
We were aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission.
The question then is why didn't we catch this issue? Unfortunately, the engine chamber pressure is so low for this transient thrust -- only about 10 psi -- that it barely registered on our ground test stand in Texas where ambient pressure is 14.5 psi. However, in vacuum that 10 psi chamber pressure produced enough thrust to cause the first stage to recontact the second stage.
It looks like we may have flight four on the launch pad as soon as next month. The long gap between flight two and three was mainly due to the Merlin 1C regen engine development, but there are no technology upgrades between flight three and four.
Good Things About This Flight
- Merlin 1C and overall first stage performance was excellent
- The stage separation system worked properly, in that all bolts fired and the pneumatic pushers delivered the correct impulse
- Second stage ignited and achieved nominal chamber pressure
- Fairing separated correctly
- We discovered this transient problem on Falcon 1 rather than Falcon 9
- Rocket stages were integrated, rolled out and launched in seven days
- Neither the near miss potential failures of flight two nor any new ones
were present
The only untested portion of flight is whether or not we have solved the main problem of flight two, where the control system coupled with the slosh modes of the liquid oxygen tank. Given the addition of slosh baffles and significant improvements to the control logic, I feel confident that this will not be an issue for the upcoming flight four.
Elon
If you pre-order at Amazon, you can get a copy of his latest
[Wednesday morning update]
Sorry, I misread the Amazon email. It's a savings of $8.48, not a price. Still a good deal, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:40 PM...for life on Mars. Actually, there are a lot of people who should hope that we don't find life on Mars, if we ever want to colonize it ourselves.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:14 PMAbout SpaceX:
If the problem is confirmed to be a simple and easily fixed design flaw, they may not launch again "tomorrow" but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was another flight within a couple of months.
...Lost in the hubbub over the flight failure was the fact that once again they were able to do a quick resumption of the launch procedure after a hot-fire abort. This sort of robustness in the launch operations and the use of small crews are crucial factors in lowering the cost of launch.And as noted, the new Merlin apparently performed well. Had it not, that would have been a real setback for both Falcon 1 and 9.
[Update after lunch, Pacific Time]
Henry Spencer has more thoughts, with some history.
It seems quite likely that it was caused by the new engine--that's the only thing that changed between the last flight and this one, and Henry points out a couple potential plausible scenarios for that.
That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the engine--it just means that the overall vehicle design and operations have to account for the new characteristics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:52 AM
Ken Murphy has a bunch of reviews of solar fiction for kids.
Hook 'em while they're young.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:21 AMClark has a round up of links.
It was a little strange, and sad, descending into the LA basin yesterday. I had a left window seat, and I looked down at the old Rockwell/North American (and back during the war, Vultee) plant in Downey, which had been abandoned back in the nineties, and saw that Building 6 appeared to be no longer there. A lot of history in manned spaceflight took place there, but now there's almost no manned space activities left in southern California at all. Not in Downey, not in Huntington Beach, not in Seal Beach. It's all been moved to Houston, and Huntsville.
Except, except. A minute or two later, on final descent into LAX, I saw Hawthorne Airport just off the left wing, and quite prominent was the new SpaceX facility, which had previously been used to build jumbo jet wings.
So perhaps, despite the indifference of local and state politicians, the era of manned spaceflight in LA isn't quite yet over. And of course, Mojave remains ascendant.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AMIt's looking like there was a second-stage problem, either separation, or ignition (or both, since one could cause the other).
As I said last night, this is obviously a disappointment to the SpaceX team. Particularly since they had previously had a flight where this wasn't a problem, so in a sense it was two steps forward, one step back. I think that at this point, almost anyone is going to be pretty leery of putting a payload on the vehicle until it's had at least one successful flight. Is it the end? Despite what Elon said a long time ago about three strikes, it's hard to see it now. He's fully invested now, both financially and (I would imagine) emotionally, and he's not going to come this far just to give up, particularly when tantalized by his previous almost-success on the second flight.
They'll go through the telemetry, figure out as best they can what happened, and try again, and hopefully soon. In a sense, as someone noted in comments in the earlier post, Falcon 1 is really a test program for the bigger vehicles, though they should get an operational small launcher out of it as well.
As always, this points up the problem with expendable vehicles. They are very expensive to flight test, so you can't afford to do very many, and every flight is a first flight, so you can't wring bugs out of a vehicle with incremental testing. And it's a lot harder to figure out what went wrong because you generally don't get much debris to analyze (the first flight that failed off the pad was a rare exception)--you have to dig through electronic entrails. And NASA, of course, in its cargo-cult determination to redo Apollo, is taking exactly the same expensive and unreliable approach.
And just checking now, I see that Clark is having similar thoughts to mine.
Once the problem that caused this failure is determined, I would suggest that SpaceX just bite the bullet and allocate 2 or 3 Falcon I vehicles for test flights and fly them within a relatively short period, say six months.
This would represent a $20M-$30M investment but until the Falcon I is flying reliably, SpaceX will find it very difficult to get any more commercial or government payload contracts and it won't have any chance of getting COTS D (ISS crew transport) funding. The Falcon 9 is a completely different vehicle but the Falcon I is what currently defines the company's ability, or inability, to deliver what it says it can.
Anyway, best of luck to them in the future, but they know that they need more than just luck.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I see that Elon has a statement, which confirms my suspicion above:
There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.
That's the kind of attitude you have to have, even if eventually, you do in fact have to give up. I hope he won't have to.
Also note Clark's comment at the end of the post, that SpaceX is following in the tradition of all expendable staged launch vehicles in its failure modes, though they do seem to be getting the avionics right.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AMAnd the sad thing is that he thinks he's smarter than those of us in the business. Clark Lindsey has a rejoinder in his comments section. I will add that this doesn't inspire confidence in his analysis:
SpaceShipTwo actually will only barely scrape space, eking out a scant 68 vertical miles before succumbing to the gravitational dominance of Earth. The craft musters only about 1/16 the energy needed to reach even low orbit 100 miles up. The space station, reposing 200 miles from the earth's surface, is completely beyond reach.
Attaining such distances requires enormous energy...
No, it's not the distance that's the problem, it's the velocity.
Sigh.
And Jeff Foust has found another idiot who wants it to be made illegal on environmental grounds. And because it's "selfish."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PMFalcon 1 goes up at 4 PM Pacific Time. That's 7 PM for me, and we already have tickets purchased for Dark Knight, so I guess we'll miss it, if it goes on schedule. I'll have to watch the replay.
[Update at 10:30 PM EDT]
Back from the movie, which was very good. Ledger can certainly expect a posthumous Oscar nomination.
There have been launch delays, but they're currently reloading fuel after having drained it (there was apparently concern that it was getting too cold during other delays) and are now expecting a launch at 11 PM EDT (8 PM Pacific), in almost exactly half an hour.
[Update a couple minutes later]
They must plan for an 8:05 liftoff, based on the count I just heard. T-32 and counting at 7:33. Weather is green, though there's some cloud cover.
[Update about ten till the hour]
There must be a delay or something on the web feed, because they're still saying it will be an 8 PM PDT launch, even though their count makes it come out three or four minutes after that. I wonder if there will be a transmission delay on the launch itself of a couple minutes? If so it won't quite be live, but it will be close enough.
[Update shortly after scheduled launch time]
They had a (literally) last-minute abort. The window closes in an hour, and I doubt they can turn it around that fast, since they still have to look at the data to figure out what happened. Better luck tomorrow.
[Update a couple minutes later]
That was fast. Now they're saying they think they may be able to recycle from T-10, so it still may be on tonight.
[10:30 EDT update]
Now they're at T-7 and counting again.
[Update shortly after launch]
Uh oh. Sounds like strike three. The picture was lost at about 35 km altitude and a thousand meters/sec. They announced an "anomaly." That doesn't sound good. The last update on the site was that it was about to enter inertial guidance (not clear what they were doing prior to that). Did something go wrong with an IMU, or some other part of the GN&C?
Fortunately, you're allowed more than three strikes in this game. It has to be a huge disappointment, though, unless the anomaly was merely a loss of signal, and the vehicle's doing all right. The webcast is over, though. I think that I'd assume that the news is bad.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PMI have a new piece up on this week's non-discovery of water on Mars.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:15 AMThey did a full nine-engine static test of the Falcon 9 yesterday. No mention of burn duration, but I assume that it wasn't a simulation of a full ascent. I also assume that they have run individual engines at full duration. If they launch Falcon 1 this weekend or early next week, it will have been a pretty momentous week for New Space, with the WK2 rollout, the rocket racer debut, and the SpaceX achievements.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:18 AMClark Lindsey has the press release from Scaled about last summer's fatal accident. Short version, by my reading: we still don't know what happened and probably never will, so we're just going to be a lot more careful in the future.
I still think that they continue to overestimate the safety of hybrids, and that it wasn't a great choice for propulsion. I suspect that if Burt were starting from scratch now, he'd go with a liquid, but shifting to one at this stage would involve too large of a redesign of the airframe.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 AMJohn Glenn is arguing for an extension of the Shuttle program. I don't really give a rip what he thinks, but a lot of people on the Hill (particularly on the Democrat side) will take him seriously. The problem is that it's not just a matter of coming up with more money. NASA has to do pad modifications at 39 A and B to accommodate the new vehicles, and they can't do that if they continue to fly Shuttle. I suspect that it will also start to get pretty crowded in the VAB if they're doing Ares and Shuttle simultaneously.
Sometimes, I think that the best thing that could happen to American space policy would be a Cat 5 hurricane hitting the Cape, and scraping it clean.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here's more from Robert Block at the Orlando Sentinel. Note the comment about there being no appetite on the Hill for a Shuttle extension.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his legendary prowess at reading miscomprehension. I agree with Jon (though I'm not going to vote for Bob Barr). As I said, probably the most effective (and perhaps necessary) step toward a revitalization of NASA would be a Cat 5 at the Cape. I don't think that anything less can shake the space industrial complex up sufficiently to get any kind of new thinking or direction.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AMColby Cosh thinks that the suborbital space market is overhyped. Clark Lindsey responds.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AMAlan Boyle has another report from Oshkosh (some people get the best gigs).
Griffin downplayed media reports about vibration problems with the Ares 1 rocket, saying that there were "half a dozen means to mitigate that" and that two top strategies would be selected for further study next month. "Let me put it this way: I hope this is the worst problem we have in developing a new system," he said.
Of course he did. That doesn't mean they aren't true. I haven't seen any ways to mitigate it that don't involve a lot more weight and performance penalty on a vehicle that's already out of margins. I too hope that it's the worst problem they have, because if they have any that are worse, the program is in deep, deep kimchi.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AMIs this really as big a deal as NASA is making of it?
Data from recent missions to Mars has been building toward a confirmation of the presence of water ice. However, "this would be the first time we held it in our hands, so to speak," says Bryan DeBates, a senior aerospace education specialist at the Space Foundation. Evidence from other locations in the solar system, including Earth's moon, Saturn's Enceladus moon and Jupiter's Europa moon, have strongly hinted at the presence of water--NASA confirmed a liquid lake on Saturn's Titan moon on Wednesday--but no direct observation of water has been made.
Haven't we been pretty certain for years that there was ice on Mars (and outer planet moons, and comets)? What's the big deal here? If there's a story at all, it seems to me that it's about the amount of water available, not the fact that we have "direct confirmation."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AMOne of the nice things about having a blog is that you can self publish. This is the original piece that I submitted to Popular Mechanics, which inspired them to ask for a "revision" which they then edited to what was actually published. I thought that readers here might appreciate it.
Location, location, location.
Those are the proverbial three rules of real estate. They aren't restricted to terrestrial transactions--location matters a lot, sometimes a lot more, in space.
Recently, Michael Benson, a guest columnist at the Washington Post, proposed that the problem with the International Space Station is that it is in the wrong place. He proposes that it be refitted as an interplanetary spaceship.
It's a novel proposal, and he's in good company--a lot of people are thinking about what to do with the ISS after 2015, for which there is currently no official US policy. The foreign partners and other stakeholders recently met to discuss the issue, though if this particular option was discussed, there is no mention of it in the reporting, or the joint statement they provided after the meeting. There's probably a good reason for that.
Mr. Benson is clearly earnest, but the concept is not as well thought out as he seems to think. The ISS is designed for operations in low earth orbit (LEO), but that is a unique environment, and had trips beyond that been its intended use, both the requirements and the design would have looked very different.
What does NASA think?
I called Mike Curie, in the NASA Public Affairs Office for the ISS, to get the official agency response. It was predictable, concise, and (in my opinion) correct: "We welcome and share Mr. Benson's enthusiasm for the space station program, but the proposal is not feasible."
He suggested that I talk to Tom Jones, four-time Shuttle astronaut (and Pop Mechanics space consultant) for further elaboration, so I did.
The idea has several problems," he told me. "If you do it with chemical propellant, the structure won't be able to take those high thrust levels, particularly the fragile solar panels that were designed for zero gee. Also, the Station isn't designed to operate for long periods of time without resupply of things like food, water, and spare parts for maintenance. You'd have to develop a duplicate interplanetary system just to deliver the supplies and rotate the crew."
"Once out in deep space, the ISS doesn't have the radiation shielding it would need for either lunar operations, or even traversing through the Van Allen belts, particularly if you did it slowly with a low-thrust system, as he suggests."
"The Station is also overdesigned for an interplanetary mission in some ways. It's a laboratory facility designed to rely on frequent resupply and contact with Earth. This is not an operational space vehicle. It's more of a technology test bed, to learn how to do things in space, and take advantage of the near-Earth space environment. It's really better and more cost effective to keep it here and use it for what it was designed."
In fairness, Mr. Benson attempted to anticipate these objections:
It's easy to predict what skeptics both inside and outside NASA will say to this idea. They'll point out that the new Constellation program is already supposed to have at least the beginnings of interplanetary ability. They'll say that the ISS needs to be resupplied too frequently for long missions. They'll worry about the amount of propellant needed to push the ISS's 1,040,000 pounds anywhere -- not to mention bringing them all back.
There are good answers to all these objections.
Well, he has answers, but they don't seem to be very good ones. One wonders if he actually ran any numbers.
How much propellant would it take? Well, to leave LEO and go almost anywhere else, you need to have escape velocity. In orbit, that means adding about forty percent to your current speed of twenty-five thousand ft/sec, or about ten thousand ft/sec. The station weighs on the order of a million pounds. Assuming that you could provide the necessary thrust without snapping off the solar arrays, using liquid oxygen/hydrogen (the most efficient practical propellant combination we have today at a generous specific impulse (Isp) of 480 seconds (not far from theoretical), it would take almost as much propellant as the payload (over 900,000 lbs).
Now that's not necessarily a lot--it would be a couple dozen launches of, say, a Delta IV, which might cost a few billion dollars. But the problem is that all that does is get the ISS out of earth orbit. It doesn't have any way to park in orbit when it gets to the moon or Mars, or even an asteroid encounter. To do that it needs (in Mr. Benson's words) a "drive system and steerage module" (whatever that means) which he hand waves off as "technicalities."
You also need propellant. A lot of it.
That means that we not only have to accelerate the ISS itself out of LEO, but also all of the propellant that it will need at its destination as well, which would likely be many hundreds of thousands of more pounds. So we have to recalculate our escape, and now we need, say, a million pounds of propellant to send with the station to its destination, and another two million to blast the whole lot out of earth orbit. So now we're up to many billions of dollars for the propellant delivery to LEO, even ignoring the "technicalities."
Ah, you say, but he suggested using low-thrust high-Isp ion-propulsion systems, which will require much less propellant.
So he did, but he didn't consider the radiation problem, as Tom Jones noted. You'd fry the crew and the electronics, including solar panels, in short order, even if you're lucky enough not to be hit by a solar flare in all that time.
Considering all the other factors he explained, clearly, the ISS is built for LEO, and it should stay in LEO.
But that raises another question. Is it in the right LEO?
The ISS is in a 52-degree inclination orbit. This location was chosen in 1991, when it was decided to bring the Russians into the program, using some of their modules as the core of the station. At the time (and now) their primary launch site was Baikonur, and that was the lowest inclination to which they could launch from that location. The Shuttle pays a high payload penalty to reach that orbit (the original space station plan was to have it at 28.5 degrees, the same as the Cape's latitude, so they could get there with a due-east launch and maximum payload). In fact, every vehicle that goes to the ISS would deliver more payload if it were in a lower inclination. With Russian plans to start launching Soyuz out of the Arianespace launch site in Kourou, near the equator, they will have the capability to get to almost any inclination, so the old Baikonur constraint will be gone.
It might be worth doing a trade study to see if its inclination could be lowered, using ion propulsion, over a period of months or years, as I suggested several years ago. This would avoid the radiation problems of sending it out of LEO by this technique, because the whole trip would remain in LEO, and in fact the radiation reduces with the inclination. This would not only save money on resupply costs (or rather, provide more payload for the same amount of money, because the cost of the flights is fixed, while their payload can vary), but also perhaps put it in a more desirable location to serve as a way station to beyond LEO. It would also put it to use as the test bed that Tom Jones pointed out that it truly is, proving out long-duration ion thrusters that might allow future vehicles to operate more effectively.
So it might be time to consider a move to a better neighborhood--just not one quite as out of this world as Mr. Benson suggests.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:31 PMAlan Boyle has the story of yesterday's demo in Oshkosh.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:48 AMI have a new piece up over at Popular Mechanics on the future of the space station.
Also, it's the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Space Act, creating NASA.
[2 PM Update]
Here's another rollout story at PM, with a lot of pics. It's the current front page of the on-line version, along with my ISS story.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:23 AMMore on the "flight test" of Ares 1-X, which seems to be mostly for show. Though if it's as risky as indicated here, it may be a more spectacular performance than they count on.
Unfortunately, the same folks who think a flight dynamics test of a four segment SRB with a different propellant, old-style grain design, and inert (that is to say, non-sloshing and stiff) upper pieces is a good idea also thought they could grab a bunch of used equipment (Atlas avionics software, Peacekeeper hardware, etc.), chewing gum, and duct tape (perhaps FEMA is helping the minions) and use it to demonstrate how something "like" ARES-1X might get off the ground after "the gap" has widened to its furthest extent.
And, like all of the shortcuts the Emperor's minions have taken to date, this approach, too, is soon to come back and bite them. The list of critical components going into ARES-1X that are either beyond shelf life or being put to work in an environment for which they were not intended is astounding. And the risks that are being accepted, because of schedule and budget pressures, are equally marvelous.
Hey, it's OK. That's what waivers are for.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AMJeff Foust talked to Burt Rutan at yesterday's rollout.
Rutan confirmed that the investigation was causing "a lot" of design changes for SS2. "We have not worked on SpaceShipTwo in a year," he said, "because there's a possibility that the propulsion system would be markedly different and we'd be building things that we would have to scrap."
So they've essentially lost a year due to the accident. I wonder if they'll finally switch over to a liquid system? It would save them quite a bit in ops costs, I'd think.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here's more on the subject from Rob Coppinger, who interviewed Burt.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:33 AMI agree that nukes aren't necessarily the best way to deal with asteroids, but the notion that NASA is promoting them in order to justify nuclear weapons in space is more than a little nutty.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:58 AMTomorrow, the first demonstration of the rocket racer, in Oshkosh. There's a picture of the taxi test on the front page of the site, but it's not likely to be there for long.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:42 AMWhite Knight Two will be rolled out for the general public today in Mojave. Scaled Employees had a private rollout yesterday.
[Late morning update]
Clark Lindsey has the Virgin press release.
I don't understand why they say that this is environmentally friendly. Compared to what? If they're still going with the hybrid, it presumably burns rubber, and has CO2 as a combustion by-product. What's so friendly about that, compared to, say, LOX/kerosene? Just marketing hype, I guess.
[Update mid afternoon]
Clark Lindsey has a lot more links.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AMThis is the future of space exploration. Which is why we have to stop talking about "exploration" as a justification for humans in space.
[Update in the evening]
Commenter Paul Dietz recommends >Saturn's Children
Ares 1 marches (or staggers) on:
Thrust Oscillation is specifically named in relation to end of the first stage burn of Ares I-X, which requires mitigation - proposed to be in the form of high strength fasteners.
"Preliminary results show lower axial loads and higher lateral loads during thrust oscillation at the end of the FS (First Stage) burn (T+120sec). Proposed mitigation (high strength fasteners in impacted hardware) in work, needs to be presented at ERB (Engineering Review Board).
Afraid it will shake apart? Use bigger screws!
I love this, too.
While beefing up the structure is a mitigation for the hardware, Ares I-X's components are also in the TO firing line, with the most concerning element referencing the Flight Termination System (FTS) - which may require a range waiver due to the potential TO could exceed the components certification, and the threat of vibrating them out of action.
"Requirement - Range Safety: multiple waivers. Lack of dual S&A device. Lack of initiation of LSC at both ends. Lack of "CRD Self-test" capability. Minimum separation of FTS components," added the presentation.
We may massage the thing so hard that we won't be able to blow up the vehicle if something goes wrong (e.g., it starts blasting toward the VAB). Can we have a waiver, please?
NASA's unending ability to waive itself from its own requirements is one of the reasons that the notion of "human rating" is nonsensical.
[Early evening update]
Link to NASA Space Flight was bad before. It's fixed now. I'm kind of surprised that it took all day for someone to point it out. Just more evidence that most people don't follow the links, at least if I post significant excerpts and/or commentary on them.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Rob Coppinger has Ares 1, then and now. That upper stage has really grown. I also hadn't realized that it had a common bulkhead for the tanks. Well, at least it's not hypergolic.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AMClark notes that tomorrow will be a time of remembrance in Mojave.
And one year later, they still don't seem to know for sure what happened. And we haven't heard what's going on with SpaceShipTwo propulsion development, though it won't fly before late next year (at least two years behind the original schedule, with some of that slippage no doubt due to last year's incident).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:00 AMThe "rocks have rights" crowd are worried again about vandalizing space:
Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth's biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he's right, we might find we don't care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.
Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth's natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don't want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon's surface. It's quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.
No, we can't agree. Note that this was in the context of a discussion on "eco issues" on the moon.
Here's the "eco issue" on the moon (and in the rest of the universe, as far as we know right now). There is no "eco" there. There is also no "bio" for our "biophilia" to kick in about. Ecology and biology are about life, something that exists only on earth. It's one thing to want to preserve an ecosystem, but when one simply wants to preserve the entire universe in its current "pristine" state, there's something unsettling and misanthropic going on.
Why is it all right for a meteroid to slam into the lunar surface and leave a crater (which has happened billions of times throughout history, and continues today) which is how the moon got to look the way it is, but a pit for mining is verboten? Would he object to seeing the lights of a lunar city up there? Does he have any idea how far away it is and how much mining one would have to do to see it from earth, even with a telescope?
What is this worship of entropy? What is this loathing of humanity? What is this apparent loathing of life itself?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:47 AMOf course they can, despite this misreading of my exploration piece on Monday. History is replete with them, though there are far fewer of them than men (more now, with more opportunities for them). For instance, the "mountain men" who explored much of the west were, pretty much to a...man, men.
I recently received an email from someone who made an analogy between what I wrote and saying that a "white" boy could be an explorer as long as the school system didn't "blacken" him. I find the analogy completely spurious. Briefly, race is not gender.
This was my point, and one that will no doubt set off a crowd of angry blank slaters who think that gender is purely a social construct charging up the hill to my mansion with pitchforks and torches.
There are such things as masculine and feminine traits. All people have some of both--they are androgynous to one degree or another. We define the two by noting that most men are (by definition) more masculine, and most women are more feminine, and viva la difference. So things that most men do, and few women do, are called masculine, and vice versa for feminine (and of course there is a wide range of things that are neither). When men cook, garden, sew, etc., (as I do, though I don't sew much) they are indulging in their feminine side, and when women explore, go shooting, chainsaw trees, drive Indy cars (among other things) they are being sort of manly. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with either doing either. There's plenty of femininity to Danica Patrick, from what I can see.
There are a number of evolutionary psychological reasons to think that an urge for exploration is more of a male trait, and the Economist piece gives one more. If such an urge is an attention-deficit issue, it's indisputable that (at least as it's currently diagnosed) the preponderance of occurrence of it is in boys. At least, it is they who are being medicated the most for it in the schools. There may be some girls who are being similarly abused who would also be good explorers, but girls can be good explorers even when they act like girls in the classroom, because it's a lot easier for them to act like girls in the classroom (even if they have some male characteristics) because they are, well...girls. They still learn, but aren't having their exploratory urges browbeaten out of them. So to the degree that we are inhibiting budding explorers with a misguided educational system which defines good behavior as feminized behavior, the boys are taking the brunt of it. I could have, when referring to the future Neil Armstrong, said "her," instead of "him," but it would have seemed a little strained in political correctness, not because Neil was a man, but because not that many girls are being diagnosed ADHD and getting Ritalin.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AMWell, actually there are multiple causes, but this is one of them. The launch escape system is very heavy. And it's heavier than it needs to be because of the inherent inefficiency of the engines resulting from the cant outward (necessary to avoid blasting the capsule with the exhaust). Note that each opposed pair are fighting each other with the horizontal components of their thrust, contributing nothing whatsoever to the mission. This is called a cosine loss because the effective amount of vertical thrust is the total thrust times the cosine of the angle they're canted at. Since the lost thrust is the sine of the angle, you need more thrust overall (and hence a heavier engine) to compensate, making a bad problem worse.
People have considered putting the escape motor underneath the capsule for this reason (I think that Mike Griffin even drew a napkin sketch of it--we looked at it in OSP as well), but that complicates jettisoning, since it goes between the capsule and the service module. That would mean that you'd have to carry it all the way to orbit on each mission, and then separate, jettison, and redock with the SM, which carries performance and safety risks in itself. Or if it goes under the service module, then the motor has to be a lot bigger, and then you have to do a CM/SM separation after motor burnout but before rotation for entry. So they stuck with the Apollo tractor configuration, in which the capsule is pulled away in an abort.
The other solution, which would give them a ton (actually, literally tons) of margin would be to get rid of the damned thing. It's only there as a backup in case something goes wrong with the launch vehicle, and then only if specific things go wrong (for instance, a loss of thrust wouldn't require it). The weight and design is driven by the extreme case in which the upper stage is exploding beneath you and you have to try to outrun the flying debris. This is an extremely unlikely failure mode, but politically, they have to have the system there, because no one wants to take the chance that they'll have to testify before Congress that they killed astronauts because they didn't have it. With it, the estimate is a one in five hundred chance of losing a crew. Without it, it's much higher (though there are no doubt many astronauts who would accept the risk regardless, since they're already doing so now on the Shuttle).
Also, as Jon Goff has pointed out in the past, they're putting a lot of effort into safety during ascent, when this is actually one of the lesser hazards of a total lunar mission.
But that's the way that politics drives a government space program, and why it is so horrifically expensive.
[Update a while later]
It just occurs to me that the other case where you need it is an on-pad, or shortly-after-liftoff abort, when there is insufficient altitude for safe chute deployment.
But the thing to keep in mind is that it made a lot more sense in Apollo, because in the early sixties, "our rockets always blew up." The technology is much more mature now, and the failure modes for which it would be needed are much less likely, even in an expendable.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AMOver at Alan Boyle's place. I think that this is a very encouraging development.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AMSorry for the short notice, but I'd forgotten myself. I and my partner in crime in our July 20th space ceremony will be on the radio in half an hour, at The Space Show.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 PM...at Keith's brief "review" of my exploration piece:
The author of this article makes some odd, borderline misogynist, and mostly unsupportable claims (mixed with some valid points) as he rambles along trying to explain why people do or not explore. "Empirically obvious"? - Where's the data to support this?
Where the support for the claim that it is "misogynist," "borderline" or otherwise? Is he claiming that Cristina Hoff Sommers is misogynist?
What is "odd" about my claims?
And as for the data to support my claim, I provided it in the piece. Things for which there is an "innate human urge" are done by most, if not all humans. Most people don't explore.
[Update a few minutes later]
One of the commenters over there gets it:
I didn't see anything misogynist in Simberg's piece - he's just pointing out a potential cost of browbeating and drugging boys into behaving more like girls in school.
Exactly. If my piece was (mis)interpreted to imply that women cannot or should not be explorers, that's absurd, and I would hope obviously so.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PMHere's a nice piece on Mojave at Popular Mechanics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:33 AMHenry Spencer (whose wisdom is finally becoming available on the web, apparently) explains:
An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept, that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. There were several ways to handle the situation, but in my opinion the best was to just forget about Ares I entirely: build Ares V, or something like it, right away and use it for all the launches.
With a big launcher, there would be plenty of margin for weight overruns in development. Using the big launcher for Earth-orbit missions would obviously permit much heavier payloads there. Moreover, the lunar missions would get greater margins too, because they'd be done with two big launches rather than a big one and a little one, so they could weigh almost twice as much.There is also an important pragmatic issue: the biggest threat to NASA's return to the Moon is the possibility that Congress will delay or cancel development funding for Ares V. Doing Ares V right away, and using it for the Earth-orbit missions as well as the ones to the Moon, would have ensured that this crucial element of NASA's plans actually gets built.
Of course, better yet would have been a focus on in-space infrastructure, drawing on ISS assembly experience, to allow us to use existing launchers. That would have also freed up money for earlier development of injection stages and landers, and made lunar missions much more of a fait accompli by now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:48 AMThis (to me) amazing report on the status of the thrust-oscillation problem just has me shaking my head. If accurate, they don't even understand enough about it yet to know which weight-increasing kludge may mitigate it, and by how much. And the vaunted Ares 1-X "test" next year won't provide them with the information they need:
I see no discussion of the new failure modes that could be introduced by the addition of these systems, or their effects on first-stage reliability (which was supposedly the big feature of this approach). For example, if the active system has a failure (and I suspect that a failure of just one of the engines would be a failure, due to asymmetries), the vehicle will get shaken apart. It seems to be single point (unless they can still reach the oscillation-reduction goal with single engine out).
And now they're going to put shock absorbers into the couches to further isolate the crew, which implies that the Orion itself is going to sustain a lot more rockin' and rollin' than the current requirement stipulates. Which in turn implies a heavier vehicle to handle the accelerations and stress.
No one will consider the possibility, apparently, that this is an unclosable design, though such things happen in real life, once one gets outside of Powerpoint world.
With the July status of the engineering efforts showing the issue to be an across the board high "RED" risk to Ares I's development, the mitigation process is likely to continue until at least the end of the decade.
So months more, and billions more, without knowing whether or not the road they're on is a dead end.
[Update a few minutes later]
More depressing news (again, assuming accuracy) here.
[Another update]
The Chinese seem to be having problems, too:
China's English language state owned television channel CCTV9 has revealed the fact that on its past two manned missons the astronauts have experienced physical discomfort from the vibration of the rocket on its ascent
The tv news segment goes on to report that the rocket's chief designer says that changes to the "frequencies" of the engines and the "electrical circuits" have been made to try to eliminate this vibration problem.
Whatever that means. I wonder if it's POGO? And just how much "physical discomfort" was there? Not enough to end the missions, or the crews, apparently.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AMI explore the proposition, over at The Space Review today. Also, editor Jeff Foust has a good writeup on a recent panel discussion on the prospects for government and private spaceflight.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 AMIn a follow-up to the original Orion worship post:
The Saturn V, the biggest thing we've ever launched (just go with me here) weighed in at 6,699,000 lbs, or 3,350 tons, and managed to put a measly 100,000 lbs (50 tons) into lunar orbit.So lets pretend we want to build a classic L5 space colony. How big does it have to be?
Sorry, but we're not going to "go with you there."
This is an inappropriate methodology, and the assumptions here are completely nonsensical. The problem has nothing to do with scaling Saturn Vs, and no one in their right mind ever thought that a "classic L5 space colony" would be built completely out of materials launched from the planet.
There is no good reason that we can't have launch costs of less than a hundred dollars a pound with chemical rockets, and give rides to millions of pounds of passengers and cargo. All that is needed is to make the investment into space transports, and set multiple teams of engineers loose on the problem, something that we have not done to date.
The cargo would be used to bootstrap production facilities for extraterrestrial resources, with high-value/pound payloads (i.e., electronics) coming up from earth. We do not need Orion to build space colonies. We need a lot of other things, but not that.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:48 PMAlan Boyle has a report from this weekend's conference on them. It's unfortunate that it conflicted with NewSpace 2008, in the other Washington. But there are only so many weekends in a year.
[Update a few minutes later]
Alan's report is great, but there sure is an appalling level of ignorance in the comments.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 AM...why can't we kick the fossil fuel habit? Well, we can, but not the way we put a man on the moon, and certainly not within a decade. On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first landing, I explain.
[Afternoon update]
It's interesting to note that the original landing was on a Sunday as well. I don't know how many of the anniversaries have fallen on a Sunday, but I would guess five or so. It's not too late to plan to commemorate the event with a ceremony at dinner tonight, with friends and family. Also, a collection of remembrances here. If you're old enough to remember it yourself, you might want to add one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AMRon Bailey has more from the end-of-the-world conference, on the risks of asteroids, comets, and gamma-ray bursters. As he notes, comets are the biggest problem, because we might not see them until it's too late. That's why we have to have an infrastructure in space that can rapidly respond.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AMClark Lindsey is leaving the conference before the end, but he has a lot more summaries of the sessions, many of which looked quite interesting. As before, just keep scrolling. I assume that some time next week, he'll pull together the individual posts on a single page with permalinks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:03 PMChris Bowers: on why "progressives" should support space programs. There's a lot of typical mythology in the comments section about NASA and the military, and spin-off. We would have had PCs without Apollo, honest. We needed microchips for the missiles, which was at least as big a driver.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM...on the high seas. Though he doesn't discuss it explicitly, Chris Borgen makes another case for why we need to get off the planet.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:35 AMOne of the more annoying things that I find in commentary on space policy is the assumption that there is One True Way to get off the planet, and that working on anything else (particularly chemical rockets) is a waste of time and money. Often it's space elevators, but here's another case in point: an Orion fan (the original Orion, not the current Apollo crew module on steroids):
Nuclear power is still the only thing that's going to allow us to get large amounts of mass into Earth orbit and beyond. Nothing else has enough specific impulse to do the job.
While nuclear-pulse propulsion may be an interesting technology for in-space transportation, where the radiation level is pretty high to start with, it was never going to be used for earth-to-orbit transportation. One does not have to be a luddite to believe this. I'm all in favor of getting access to orbit as low cost as possible, as soon as possible, but I think that the notion of using Orion for this is nuts (and not just for the radiation and atmospheric contamination issues--consider the EMP...). I highly respect Professor Dyson and Jerry Pournelle as well, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some major technical issues in getting such a system practical and operational. If such a system is ever built and tested, it will be built and tested in space, after we've come up with other ways of getting large amounts of mass into orbit, affordably. And I'm quite confident that if and when we do this, it will (at least initially) be with chemical rockets.
Part of the misunderstanding is revealed in the second sentence. The assumption is made that the reason costs of getting into space are high is due to performance, and particularly a specific performance parameter--specific impulse. For those unaware, this is basically a measure of a rocket's fuel economy. The higher the Isp, the less propellant is required to provide a given amount of thrust over a given time period.
But there is no equation in vehicle design or operations that correlates cost with Isp. If Isp were the problem, one would expect propellant costs to be a high percentage of launch costs. But they're not. Typically, propellant costs are on the order of a percent of the total launch costs. Yes, requiring fewer pounds of propellant means that the vehicle can be smaller, which reduces manufacturing and operations costs, but it still doesn't account for the high costs.
Chemical rockets are perfectly adequate for affordable launch--their specific impulse is not a problem. As an example of why there's a lot more to rocket science than Isp, consider that some of the more promising concepts (LOX/hydrocarbon) actually have lower specific impulse than so-called "high performance" propellants (LOX/LH2). Why? Because liquid hydrogen is so fluffy (the opposite of "dense") that the tank sizes get large, increasing vehicle dry mass and atmospheric drag. For instance, the Shuttle external tank carries six pounds of LOX for each pound of hydrogen, but the LOX is all carried in a little tank at the top, and most of the ET that you see contains liquid hydrogen.
As I've noted many times before, there are two key elements to affordable launch using chemical rockets. Fly a lot, and don't throw the vehicle away. Despite the mythology about the Shuttle, we've never actually done this in a program. It seems unlikely that NASA ever will, but fortunately, private enterprise is finally stepping up to the plate.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:01 AMIt looks like Clark Lindsey now has an internet connection, and he's got a lot of posts up with descriptions of the sessions yesterday and today. There are permalinks, but a bunch of them, so for now, just keep scrolling.
So far, I don't see a lot of news coming out of the conference, other than the CATS Coalition announcement.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:24 PM"I wasn't born in America - but I got here as fast as I could."
That's an American.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 PMClark Lindsey apparently had trouble getting an internet connection until now, but he's started blogging the conference. Which I could have attended.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:09 PMA submersible speedboat that can dive to twelve hundred feet. If there's a market for this, at a few million a pop, I'll bet that XCOR will be able so sell a few Lynx's to private owners.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:24 AMHere's the obit at the WaPo for Len Cormier.
As a staffer with the Academy in 1957, Mr. Cormier was in attendance at the International Geophysical Year proceedings when the Soviets surprised the world with the launch of Sputnik.
The event made a tremendous impression on him, his family said. He decided then to pursue better access to space through affordable, reusable space vehicles.
He was an early visionary. Others will have to pick up his torch now.
Fortunately, a lot of other people now recognize the need:
The National Coalition for CATS, working with leading figures across the space community, will collaborate over the next twelve weeks to develop a "National Declaration for Cheap and reliable Access to Space (CATS)." The CEOs of non-profit and for-profit companies will be invited to sign the Declaration, and will deliver this declaration to the next President of the U.S. after the November election.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend NewSpace, which starts tomorrow in Washington, and where this will be announced, due to financial constraints. It will be the first conference I've missed in a while.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AMOn July 16th, 1969, the largest rocket ever built thundered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, delivering three men and the equipment and supplies they would need to land two of them on the moon and return the three of them safely to earth, fulfilling the national goal declared eight years earlier. The anniversary of the landing is this coming Sunday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AMCan anyone at the agency go on the record (with PAO permission) and tell me why they think that sending ISS to the moon is a bad idea? I'm working on a piece (I think it's a bad idea, myself, and have some better ones). Email me at the upper-left email.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 PMMike Griffin again disquisites on the Yellow Peril.
Well, actually he doesn't. Here's all he says (unless there's some elaboration to which the BBC is privy, but we are not):
Speaking to the BBC News website during a visit to London, Dr Griffin said: "Certainly it is possible that if China wants to put people on the Moon, and if it wishes to do so before the United States, it certainly can. As a matter of technical capability, it absolutely can."
What does that mean? If he means that if China made it as much of a priority as we did during Apollo, and if we continue on our own disastrous plans, that they could reverse engineer what we did and put some Taikonauts on the moon before NASA lands astronauts, sure.
But how likely is that? And even if it happened, what's the big deal? We were first on the moon, they were second. Big whoop. There's no way on their current technological trajectory to do it in any sustainable way, and even if they did, there's nothing they could realistically do there that would constitute a threat to us, either in terms of national security, or our own ability to do things there on our own pace.
My take?
It is extremely unlikely--the Chinese are not fools. They know how much it will cost to do a manned lunar mission, and it's not a high priority, particularly when their economy is potentially a house of cards (something not made better by the current energy prices, which will result in either a curtailing of their fuel subsidies, or a decline in economic growth, or both). If and when they are serious about going to the moon, it will be quite obvious, and we'll have plenty of time to do something about it if we think that it's actually a problem.
But Mike apparently thinks that he'll have a better chance of getting increased funding for Apollo on Steroids if he can frighten uninformed people about the Chinese taking over the moon.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:19 PMOrion, already overweight, just got heavier:
"Preliminary estimates show that if this 30-40% [turbulence] heating augmentation heating is applied to the aerothermodynamic database the heat shield mass may increase up to 20%," says an internal NASA report obtained by Flightglobal.
I wonder if, instead of using an ablator, a tile system would be lighter? It would be more maintenance intensive (particularly with water landings), but it wouldn't be as bad as the Shuttle, because many of the tiles would be symmetrical and more mass producible. We were never really allowed to do this trade in Phase B at Northrop Grumman--NASA just told us they were going to supply the TPS.
I'm actually quite surprised at this--I would have thought that they'd have modeling an ablative shield down to a science by now. Apollo was way overdesigned, because they didn't have any experience or good analytical tools to indicate how much shielding they needed. If you look at the heat shield on an Apollo capsule, you can see that it is just slightly charred, with most of it unburned; it could have done a couple more missions without refurbishment or replacement. But based on that experience, we should have been able to predict the optimal weight of an ablator designed to come back from the moon pretty well, and years ago. How did this come up just before PDR?
Anyway, now they have unexpected weight growth in the program at the same time that they have weight and performance problems with the Ares 1. And apparently there are budget problems at LM, as well, if this report is true:
The ORION contractor is overrunning. The minions are out of money. Where can 20-30% more funds be dredged up to cover this miscarriage? You guessed it...the little man.
The minions have let the contractor off the hook for meeting its small business obligations this year. The same obligations that were bid as part of the winning proposal, ostensibly offering a better package than the opposing team, are now null and void. As a result, some of those little companies will start disappearing, lacking jobs and income.
They seem to be achieving the trifecta--failing on performance, schedule and budget. It's a program manager's nightmare.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some further thoughts over at Gravity Loss:
What will the payload landed on the moon be? What propellants are used? What is the Altair's or Orion's mass? And work back from there to TLI mass and ultimately to launch from Earth, all with generous margins. And it has seemed that a certain cycle has formed. First a solution on Ares I is based on some logic linking it to Shuttle hardware, infrastructure or Ares V with common elements, which should save a lot of money and time and keep the workforce etc etc. Somewhat later, rumors about a severe performance shortfall on either launcher start circulating. Then after a while NASA announces a new configuration where the commonality is disrupted. And again forward we go.
Unfortunately, the concepts seemed to be driven more by politics than engineering. That was often the case in Apollo, too. The Manned Spaceflight Center could have remained at Langley, but there were political reasons to move it to Texas. Marshall didn't have to be in Huntsville--they could have moved the rocket team at Redstone to somewhere else (e.g., the Cape, whose location really was driven by geography and not politics). But there were two differences in Apollo. It had essentially unlimited budget, and its success was politically important. Neither applies to the VSE, yet NASA, by Mike Griffin's own admission when he announced the architecture, not only chose to do Apollo over again, but to do it "on steroids."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:28 PMJeff Foust wonders if new government energy initiatives will crowd out space budgets.
Maybe. His piece reminds me of an idea I've had for an essay on why energy independence isn't like landing a man on the moon.
In fact, I had a related comment over at Space Politics this morning, in response to a comment from someone named...Someone...that cost-plus contracts are a proven means of success in space:
I know alt.spacers see cost-plus as some sort of ultimate evil. But recognize its been successful in the past, from the Saturn V to the Pegasus. And the X-33 would likely have been finished and test flown if NASA had used its traditional cost-plus approach instead of the fixed price model they used. If NASA had funded the X-33/VentureStar under the same procurement model as the Shuttle it would be flying today.
To which I responded:
But recognize its been successful in the past, from the Saturn V to the Pegasus.
Only if by "successful," you mean it eventually results in very expensive working hardware. Not to mention that Pegasus was not developed on a cost-plus contract.And the X-33 would likely have been finished and test flown if NASA had used its traditional cost-plus approach instead of the fixed price model they used.
Perhaps. At a cost to the taxpayer of billions. And probably a radically different vehicle than the one originally proposed.
If NASA had funded the X-33/VentureStar under the same procurement model as the Shuttle it would be flying today.
Perhaps. And likely just as big an economic disaster (and perhaps safety one as well) as the Shuttle.
We don't like that form of procurement because historically, in terms of affordable access to space, it has repeatedly been proven not to work.
Anyway, I do need to write that essay. We're not going to get energy independence from government crash programs (though prizes may be useful).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AMNext Sunday will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first human footsteps on another world. As I do every year, I'd like to remind my readers of a ceremony that I and some friends came up with to celebrate it. If you think that this was an important event, worthy of solemn commemoration, gather some friends to do so next Sunday night, and have a nice dinner after reading the ceremony.
Oh, and coincidentally, Friday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Skylab. James Lileks has some thoughts. Next year, it will be the fortieth, and thirtieth anniversaries, respectively, of the two events. It was ironic that our first space station came plunging into the atmosphere almost exactly a decade after the height of our space triumphs in the sixties. The seventies really sucked.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:37 AMThat's what Ferris Valyn wants Barack Obama to do.
It's good advice for John McCain, too. I don't think that it will have any political effect on the election if he does it now, though. Space simply isn't a voting issue for very many people.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:31 PMClark Lindsey has some thoughts on NASA's latest attempt to justify Ares, including the usual red herring about "man rating" (a phrase that I would purge from the vocabulary, had I the power).
...the initial conditions are the real problem. Griffin insisted on absolutely minimizing in-space assembly and avoiding unproven technologies such as propellant depots, even when such technology is close at hand and would tremendously expand space access capabilities for less money. These requirements lead to big and heavy throwaway payloads for the lunar exploration architecture.
I don't know who the maligners of small vehicles are that she refers to in the article but I remember that there was a lot of bias within NASA towards a Shuttle replacement, i.e., a vehicle with similar crew and cargo capability. I've always thought the Shuttle was far too big for a first generation attempt at an RLV. Starting small, learning what works and doesn't work, and growing vehicles over time seems like the sensible development path.Of course, today I don't think NASA should develop vehicles at all. Instead it should do R&D on leading edge technology the way NACA did for aviation and DARPA does today for general aerospace technology. Let Lockheed-Martin, SpaceX, etc. battle to offer the cheapest space access services.
And he is correct, Shuttle was never man rated. Which is one of the reasons why it's disingenuous to claim that the Ares first stage is man rated because it was a Shuttle component (particularly since, with the additional segment, it's become a new motor completely).
I'm a little confused, though, by his citing me, when the link goes to Jon Goff. I think that I have in fact pointed to Mike Griffin's flip flop on the issue, but it's not in any of Clark's links in the piece.
[Update early afternoon]
This was the last time I commented on the man-rating canard, a couple months ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AMI've been running my trap lines with my contacts, but I might as well see if any of my readers know of anything. The blog doesn't pay the bills, and I'm kind of at the end of my financial tether, so if anyone is aware of any jobs out there in the industry, I'd appreciate a tip. I can relocate, but my preference would be either the Denver area or southern California, due to existing housing.
[Update a while later]
For those interested, a brief version of my resume can be found at my personal web site. I'm looking for work in space systems engineering and management, preferably manned space. I could also do temp work, though that's kind of hard for the big companies under the FAR, unless I come in through a job shop, which skims a lot in overhead for no value added.
[Friday afternoon update]
For those suggesting that I try to make a living writing columns, I'm already doing that as much as I can. There's no way that it will pay my bills, even if I did it full time. It just doesn't pay that well. I have to be earning on the order of several tens of dollars an hour to keep ahead of them. The only place I can do that is in the space industry.
I do appreciate all the kind thoughts, though.
[Friday evening update]
Several have commented that I should put a tip jar up. I've had one up for years. Unfortunately, it's not Paypal but Amazon, but I think that you can use any form of payment with it. Is it not appearing in the upper left corner?
Not that I'm asking for handouts, but the thought is appreciated.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:08 PMFerris Valyn has some candidates. Most of them seem implausible to me. The only ones that I can imagine are at all realistic are Patti Grace Smith, Lori Garver and Pete Worden (the latter would certainly shake things up, which is one reason that he almost certainly won't get the job). Certainly Hansen has nothing in his resume that would qualify him--he's a scientist.
Of course, much depends on who the next president is. One likely name not on the list, assuming that McCain wins: Craig Steidle.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:51 AMThere's a piece over at the WaPo today by Marc Kaufman that lays out pretty well the problems that we face in civil space policy, though I think that the international competition aspects are overstated. The pace of all these other activities remains almost as glacial as our own, and until someone develops a transportation breakthrough (and by that I mean a high-flight-rate reusable system, not warp drive or space elevators) none of it presents a serious threat to us. But it points out that the policy apparatus, as I always says, doesn't view space as very important. The beginning of the article, and first two pages, are all about budget constraints, and I was wondering if he would ever get around to mentioning ITAR. Toward the end of the piece, finally, he did. In terms of our losing our dominance in commercial space, this is the number one reasons. It's really been a disaster, and a bi-partisan one.
It's a little out of date, since it mentions that Mike Griffin claims that additional funding could accelerate Constellation by two years, to 2013, because Griffin's own program manager now says that it probably wouldn't.
I disagree with Mike Griffin's comment here:
"We spent many tens of billions of dollars during the Apollo era to purchase a commanding lead in space over all nations on Earth," said NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, who said his agency's budget is down by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1992.
"We've been living off the fruit of that purchase for 40 years and have not . . . chosen to invest at a level that would preserve that commanding lead."
We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on human spaceflight over the past four decades, more than enough to have developed a robust transportation and in-space infrastructure that would have kept us well in the lead. The problem was not how much was spent, but in how it was spent. Jobs were more important than progress. That sadly remains the case today.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:05 AMClark Lindsey has some space-related thoughts in response to T. Boone Pickens' solar energy proposal:
...one major hurdle, among several, with the plan would be the need to build more long distance electric power transmission lines to reach the more populated and more industrialized areas. This will be difficult since people all along the routes will fight having the lines and towers in their backyards.
Occasionally in discussions of Space Based Solar Power, the topic of microwave relay satellites comes up as a way to move power around. For example, in this paper, Reinventing the Solar Power Satellite (2004) Geoffrey Landis talks about using relay sats for distributing power to different parts of the globe from a single Solarsat. So it should be similarly possible for relay satellites to move power from the Midwest to where it's needed.
Yes, this is one of the "tiers" that Peter Glaser proposed in the development of powersats when he first came up with the idea forty (geez, has it really been that long?) years ago. He envisioned that before energy was produced in space, it might be relayed from energy-rich areas that didn't have local demand (such as a large dam in Venezuela or Brazil). He envisioned such relays as passive microwave reflectors, which are currently a major structural challenge in terms of keeping the surface the right shape within a fraction of a wavelength. But at least at GEO, they wouldn't have to move much.
Rather than giant relay sats in GEO, it might be preferable to place a constellation of relatively small ones in LEO since this would allow the beams to be much more narrow. Perhaps the switching techniques developed for Iridium/Globalstar could be built upon. Smaller beams might also lessen NIMBY resistance to transmitter/receiving sites.
Perhaps, but now you have high slew rates on the reflectors, which makes for even more of a challenge. An active phased array system can be steered electronically as it switches from rectenna to rectenna as it orbits. A reflector has to rapidly move the entire structure while maintaining its shape. The higher the orbit the better in this regard, because it won't have to slew as fast. Also, it would make LEO pretty crowded. A medium orbit (a couple kilocklicks) would probably be better, both because it would require slower motion, and would allow more ground rectennas to be seen at a time, while not cluttering up LEO. The slewing problem could be ameliorated by going to an active system, but that means that the satellite must now not only receive and convert the power, but reconvert and rebeam it to the ground, with all the attendant efficiency issues.
Anyway, I suspect that, regardless of size, NIMBY resistance to rectennas will dwarf that of resistance to transmission lines and towers, given that it's a devil they don't know.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AMFrom Jeff Hanley:
Hanley stated his belief that Orion 2's Initial Operational Capability (IOC) test flight to the ISS will "remain" on track for March, 2015 - although the ongoing PMR (Program Management Review) budget review shows the first ISS crew rotation (Orion 4) will take place one year later (March, 2016).
How in the world can someone believe that a program with as many uncertainties--technical, political, budgetary--as this one has can be "on track" for a date seven years out? Particularly considering this:
No specific references are made to ongoing problems that face the Constellation program, such as Thrust Oscillation, mass and performance concerns, etc. Noting only 'key technical challenges' - whilst citing the workforce's 'hard work and dedication' as key to a successful resolution.
OK, so they don't even know if there is a solution within the constraints of the program, let alone what it is, yet he thinks they're on track to a 2015 IOC? Sometimes "hard work" and "dedication" aren't enough. Unfortunately, when one manages cost-plus contracts, it's easy to fall into a Marxist "labor theory of value" mode of thinking.
This would be more credible if he would at least caveat it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hanley says that more money won't close the gap. That's probably right, short of an Apollo-like crash program. You can't get a baby in a month by putting nine women on the job. Some things just take a certain amount of time.
People who complain about this program's schedule forget that Apollo had essentially an unlimited budget, in terms of hitting the schedule. More money could have been poured into it, but it probably would have been wasted, in terms of getting men on the moon any sooner. NASA is not in that position today--they are budget constrained, yet they're taking exactly the same economically unsustainable approach that got us to the moon the first time, and not developing affordable or routine spaceflight capabilities.
Which is something to consider in terms of looking for asteroids. It's not sufficient to find them--we have to find them soon enough to be able to do something about it:
Smaller rocks matter, too. Perhaps nowhere is that so evident as in central Siberia, where 100 years ago last week, something -- presumably a meteoroid, most experts say -- streaked across the sky and exploded at an estimated height of 28,000 feet with a force equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs, leveling some 800 square miles of forest. Simulations by the Sandia National Laboratories showed that object could have been just 90 feet across.
Which is why we have to develop the spacefaring capability now, and not wait until we spot something, at which point it may be too late to do so. And unfortunately, Constellation in its current planned form is not what we need for that job.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AM...is that too many people will think that it's true.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:41 AMThat's the recursive bit of wisdom that Douglas Hofstadter came up with, that goes "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
Jeff Foust has a good example of it today, as he examines the state of the suborbital industry. It looks now like no one is likely to enter commercial service prior to 2010, unless Armadillo can make it. Which brings up a little problem.
When the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) was passed in 2004, the industry got regulatory relief for eight years--until 2012--in which FAA-AST would not regulate the vehicles with respect to passenger safety, as long as there were no accidents involving passenger loss. This was in recognition of the fact that a) the agency didn't really know how to do that and b) if it attempted to do so, the industry might be still born as a result of a costly and time-consuming regulatory overburden. The eight-year period was provided to allow the companies time to develop and test vehicle design and operational concepts, with informed consent of the passengers, that would provide a basis for the development of such regulations as the industry matured (as occurred in the aviation industry in the twenties and thirties). In light of the SS1 flight in fall of that year, there was an expectation that there would be other vehicles flying in another two or three years (as Jeff notes--Virgin was predicting revenue service in 2007), which would have provided a five-year period for this purpose.
But if few, or none are flying until 2010, that leaves only two years before the FAA's regulatory power kicks in, which will be an insufficient amount of time to meet the intended objectives of the original maturing period.
Assuming that the logic still holds (and it certainly does for me, and I assume most of the industry and the Personal Spaceflight Federation) the most sensible thing to do would be to simply extend the period out to, say, 2018. Unfortunately (at least in regard to this issue), the most sensible thing is unlikely to happen.
In 2006, control of the Congress passed to the Democrats, which means that Jim Oberstar of Wisconsin took over as chairman of the relevant committee. He was opposed to the regulatory relief, railing against it as a "tombstone mentality" (whatever that means). He was unmoved by the argument that overregulating now would save passengers, but only at the cost of none of them ever getting to fly. Being in the minority at the time, he lost the battle, but now that he's in charge, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get an extension from him. In fact, even an attempt to do so might result in losing it altogether if the issue is revisited under his jurisdiction.
For those hoping for what would seem to require a miracle--Republicans regaining control of at least the House, this would be one more reason to wish for that, if they're fans of this nascent industry. Either that, or at least hope that Oberstar (and his partner in dumbness, Vic Fazio) moves to a different committee.
[Afternoon update]
Not that it affects the point in any way, but as a commenter points out, I goofed above. Oberstar is from Minnesota. I could have sworn he was a Badger.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 AMOne of the reasons that I don't get involved in arguing the relative merits of ESAS versus Direct (of any version) is that I agree with Clark Lindsey:
I'm no fan of NASA building any new expendable (or just mostly expendable) launcher.
But I also agree with this:
However, if they are going to do that anyway, I think building a single uneconomic new launcher is better than building two.
And I think that Clark is not only justified, but would be doing his readers a service, to delete GM's posts. I've never seen him make a positive contribution to any newsgroup or web site discussion.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:07 PMJust to hold you over in the blogging (sort of) hiatus, here are some gorgeous pictures of earth from orbit.
I can only shake my head at those who say there's no market for views like this, or that no one will want to go, or repeat the experience, once the novelty wears off. It's like saying that no one would ever take a repeat trip to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. The ever-changing planet, with its weather patterns, clouds, light angles, is the ultimate kaleidoscope, and we've just barely begun, haven't even begun, to tap the market for the view.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:20 AMFrank J. has a plan to deal with the asteroids. Sort of.
Here's what we'll do: We'll paint Mars blue. The asteroids will see Mars, think it's us, and hit it instead. It's simple and it will work. So you're asking, "Why not paint Venus? It's the same size and should make a more convincing Earth." That's idiotic. For one thing, it's super-hot there, so how the hell do you plan on painting it? Also, it's further away from the asteroid belt than us, so the asteroids will see the real Earth before seeing the decoy Earth. Painting Venus is a truly idiotic plan. You're disgustingly stupid for even suggesting it. This is why I sometimes think of just giving up blogging because I just can't deal with people as stupid as you are.
I know how he feels. Sort of.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:31 AMThomas James notes some irony in Dwayne Day's piece:
...when one follows the Google search link he does provide, a good number of the results have to do with James Hansen calling for trials of oil executives and others who question the political orthodoxy of global warming...trials whose political nature and predetermined outcome would no doubt have pleased the arguably fascist Roland Freisler.
Not exactly the point that Dr. Day was trying to make, I suspect.
[Previous post here]
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of fascists, Thomas also offers a preview of August in Denver:
...come on..."Students for a Democratic Society"? As if the hippie nostalgia of Recreate 68 wasn't bad enough, we now have someone reanimating that corpse? I thought it was the right that supposedly clung to the faded glories of a distant golden age.
OK, so I guess it won't be another Summer of Love.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AMLike me, Chair Force Engineer isn't backing down, either.
[Update in the late afternoon]
What a pompous ego.
What "job" does Mark Whittington imagine that he has that he fantasizes is being made more difficult by his imaginary "Internet Rocketeers Club"?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AMIt's been a hundred and fifty years since Darwin first presented his thesis. Charles Johnson has some thoughts. I may have some as well, later. Or not.
[A minute or so later]
Well, actually, I do now, in light of Lileks' comments this morning, in which he pointed out the simplistic, stilted views of many across the political spectrum. I'll repeat:
Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe [sic] in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.
Similarly, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a concern about Islamism, and an inability to realize what an evil stupid fascist criminal George Bush is translates to a belief that the world was created by Jehovah six thousand some years ago, complete with dinosaur bones, go right ahead.
Before 911, Charles Johnson was a Democrat, and a jazz musician. Almost seven years ago, he got mugged by reality. That, combined with some scary things that were happening at a mosque near his home in Culver City resulted in a change in emphasis at his web site. Now many of the left wingnuts who read LGF stupidly assume that he's a "right" wingnut. Yet here he is, defending science from places like the Discovery Institute, on a semi-daily basis.
I get the same idiotic treatment, much of the time. I've often had discussions on Usenet whereupon, when I argue that maybe it wasn't necessarily a bad idea to remove Saddam Hussein's boot from the neck of the Iraqi people, and that I don't believe that George Bush personally planted the charges in the Twin Towers, I am told to go back to whatever holler I came from and play with my snakes, and am informed that my belief in a Christian God, and my lack of belief in evolution is just more evidence of my irredeemable stupidity, despite the fact neither religion or science had been on the discussion table.
I then take pleasure in informing them that I am an agnostic and for practical purposes an atheist, and that I am a firm believer in evolutionary theory, it being the best one available to explain the existing body of evidence. Whereupon, I am sometimes called a liar. Really. It's projection, I think.
Same thing often happens here, in fact. I tell people that I'm not a Republican, and have never been, nor am I a conservative, and I'm accused of lying about my true beliefs and political affiliation.
C'est la vie. There's no reasoning with some folks.
In any event, happy birthday to a controversial but powerful (as Dennett
[Late evening update]
Well, Iowahawk has the comment du jour:
I'm a dope-smoking atheist writer for a San Francisco lowbrow culture mag; I also enjoy seeing 7th century genocidal terrorist shitbags getting waterboarded. I really don't see the contradiction.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:09 AM
Alan Boyle has a good round up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AMIt's been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we're still not taking the threat seriously.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:00 PMLike Steve Cooke, Dave King defends ESAS/Ares:
Direct 2.0, the concept in question in the June 23 Times article, falls significantly short of the lunar lander performance requirement for exploration missions as specifically outlined in Constellation Program ground rules. The concept also overshoots the requirements for early missions to the International Space Station in the coming decade. These shortcomings would necessitate rushed development of a more expensive launch system with too little capability in the long run, and would actually increase the gap between space shuttle retirement and development of a new vehicle. Even more importantly, the Ares approach offers a much greater margin of crew safety - paramount to every mission NASA puts into space.
To accomplish the nation's goals in space, we need more than a new rocket. We need a robust, multipurpose space fleet.
Again, this is all simply argument by assertion. Show us the numbers and the assumptions. The notion that Direct 2.0 falls short of the lunar lander performance requirement is pretty funny, considering that Ares 5 does as well. This makes one think that there may be a problem with the requirement. The second paragraph is semantically meaningless. Is he saying that Direct is "a rocket" but that Ares 1 and 5 are a "fleet"? Why is Direct not multi-purpose? In what way is Ares "robust" that Direct is not?
Not that I'm a big Direct fan, of course. A lot of these issues would be solved by simply coming up with an architecture and operating philosophy that allows the use of existing vehicles, something that was clearly never under consideration.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:17 AMDwayne Day is complaining today at The Space Review about my and others' use of the word fascism to describe NASA's human spaceflight program, though he doesn't call me out by name (interestingly, when you do the Google search he suggests, this post doesn't even come up in the top ten, though it's only a link away from some of them).
I'll make two points. First, if he actually read Jonah's "screed" (his word), it isn't obvious from this review. For example, he says that Jonah doesn't criticize conservatives for their own fascist tendencies in the book, but that's patently false. And he seems to fall back on the old leftist paradigm that the epitome, almost definition of fascism were the Nazis and Mussolini's Black Shirts:
Fascist governments do not allow other competitors to exist. The first thing they do when they gain power is to eliminate their opposition at the point of a gun. Usually they started with the primary threat, the communists, then the fascists turned their weapons on less organized and non-political groups, like the Jews and the gypsies. Fascist groups have also reveled in their militaristic attributes such as discipline and uniforms and strength and weaponry. The groups most identified with fascism--the Nazis and the Italian fascists--were paramilitary organizations that sought to enact their goals through force. It is impossible to separate fascist ideology from the methods used to implement it.
Take out the words "communists," "Jews," and "gypsies," and in what way does this not describe Stalin's USSR? Did they not eliminate their opposition at the point of a gun? Did they not have "discipline and uniforms and strength and weaponry" (recall all those May Day parades with the missiles and tanks rolling down the streets, and goose-stepping Soviet troops)? Did they not "enact their goals through force"? Is not the same true of North Korea? Or Cuba?
What Dr. Day is talking about is what fascists do when they actually gain power, but fascism is not just the use of force. It is a set of ideas, to be implemented by whatever means necessary.
My second point, as I wrote in the previous post, is that those ideas are described in Jonah's book, particularly in reference to Apollo.
From the first edition, pages 210-211 (my annotations are in square brackets, and red), "Even Kennedy's nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war...His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman's similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR's martial CCC. Even Kennedy's most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science..."
He went on. Again, the red text is my annotation of his words.
"What made [Kennedy's administration] so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises [We're losing the race to the Soviets! We can't go to sleep by a Russian moon!], national appeals to unity [They are our astronauts! Our nation shall beat the Soviets to the moon!], the celebration of martial values [The astronauts were all military, the best of the best], the blurring of lines between public and private sectors [SETA contracts, anyone? Cost plus? Our version of Soviet design bureaus?], the utilization of the mass media to glamorize the state and its programs [The Life Magazine deal for chronicling a bowdlerized version of the astronauts' lives], invocation of a "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader [von Braun..."Rocket scientists"...not just Kennedy Space Center, but (briefly) Cape Kennedy]."
Obviously, this can go overboard, and Dr. Day has some legitimate complaints. While certainly leftists use the term (as Dr. Day describes) to simply insult anyone who disagrees with them and shut down discussion, and have done so for years, that is not the way that it is being used here, at least not by me. I don't think that it's an insult to call something fascist (though I've certainly been called that enough times myself when that was the clear intent). I am not merely being Seinfeldian when I always append the phrase "not that there's anything wrong with that" to my usage of the word. I really mean it. Hitler gave fascism a bad name. Not to imply, of course, that I think that these are good ideas. Just that they're not intrinsically evil, and many millions of people in this country apparently buy into them, as demonstrated by Obama's campaign success.
In any event, I do think that it is a useful prism through which to view the program for the purposes of analyzing it, and trying to develop a more useful space policy. If we can recognize it for what it is, we stand a much better chance of moving things in a more useful direction, and one more in keeping with traditional American values, and classical liberalism.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:42 AMJon Goff has another installment in his excellent series of tutorials on future space transport concepts. The interesting thing, as he points out, is that one can see a clear development and technological maturation path to these types of affordable systems via operational suborbital vehicles, both horizontal and vertical.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:26 AMA tuned mass vibration damper:
Due to both the immense size of Taipei 101 and the fact that it sits just over 600ft from a major fault line, engineers had no choice but to install one of this size at a cost of $4m. Too heavy to be lifted by crane, the damper was assembled on site and hangs through four floors of the skyscraper. It can reduce the building's movement by up to 40%.
And only 728 tons. Hey, the vehicle's already overweight. What's a little more?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:52 PMI'd sure like to know a lot more about this:
Recently, an attempt at a PDR by ATK was called up short by the minions. Not even a goatee could make you feel warm and fuzzy that day. Having failed in their quest to show some level of design maturity, ATK was not even allowed to finish their presentations and were sent back to the showers to try again. And, oh, by the way, none of the ARES 1 designs at PDR, including the upper stage, include any of the modifications that will be required to turn the bladder basher into a real human space transportation system. That will come later. Makes one wonder why the PDR was scheduled if the design is that immature and missing pieces, don't it?
If true (and there's little reason to think otherwise, despite the happy talk from Jeff Hanley), how long will this farce go on?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:17 AMI just got an email from Pat Kelley:
I received a call from Anne Greenglass to tell me that Len's ashes will be interred at Arlington cemetery with full military honors on September 17. Any of Len's friends and cohorts who are in the Washington area on that date are welcome to come to the service. As we get closer to the date if I have any more information I will pass it along.
He's referring to Len Cormier, who died of cancer a few days ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PM...about space policy
The three say they don't know for certain why the White House has failed to provide the appropriate guidance and funding needed to implement the Vision, "though we suspect it can be explained by Bush not knowing all the facts about what the real impact of NASA's annual budgets has been since the loss of the Columbia in 2003."
I think the problem is less in the funding, and more in the lack of guidance. Once Griffin was hired, the White House apparently decided that it was mission accomplished, and refocused to much more pressing issues, despite the fact that NASA's implementation seems to fly in the face of the original vision and the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission.
And Clark Lindsey gives them a lecture of their own:
These Senators don't seem to know that NASA could have chosen to pursue an innovative low cost approach to space development and lunar exploration rather than choosing a very long and very expensive path to two new vehicles, both of which will be very costly to operate. These Senators apparently don't even know about COTS, the one modest effort taken by the agency towards lower costs for space hardware development and operations.
Well, what most Senators don't know, particularly about space, could fill a small library. Maybe even a large one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AMSorry I didn't mention it yesterday so you could listen live, but hey, the ability to download and listen at your own convenience is one of the features of the Interweb. Last night I did a one-hour interview with Rick Moran on space stuff. Download it here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AMAs usual, Doug Cooke defends ESAS:
The "direct" variation fails to meet NASA's needs on several grounds. It is vastly over-capacity and too costly to service the International Space Station, but worse, its lift capacity would not be enough for NASA to maintain a sustained presence on the moon.
Advocates for the "direct" variation are touting unrealistic development costs and schedules. A fundamental difference is that the Ares I and Orion probability of crew survival is at least two times better than all of the other concepts evaluated, including "direct"-like concepts.
Also as usual, he provides no evidence for his assertions. We are simply supposed to accept them because Doug Cooke says so. Have we ever seen the actual report that came out of the sixty-day study, with a description of methodology and assumptions? I haven't.
I'm not necessarily a big fan of "Direct," but his statement raises more issues than it answers. Why doesn't the "lift capacity allow a sustained presence on the moon" in a way that ESAS does? Why should it be assumed that NASA's new launch system will service space station? I thought that this was what COTS was for? What are the marginal costs of an additional Jupiter launch versus Ares 1?
Give us some numbers, and provide a basis for them, and we might take this seriously.
[Wednesday morning update]
More thoughts and comments at NASA Watch, and from Chair Force Engineer.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:02 PMAnd where is it going, in commercial space?
I have to say, I thought this was pretty funny:
Virgin Galactic has already been watching its back with the EADS suborbital space plane (pictured above), set to make its first flight by 2012. But now there's cash across the pond. "We have invested substantial money into this project," Auque said without citing exact figures. "The problem is that we need to create this market."
I doubt very much that Virgin Galactic is worried that EADS Astrium is going to raise a billion dollars to build a suborbital tourist vehicle. There's a reason that Auque didn't cite "exact" (or even approximate) figures. He expects to do it mostly with someone else's money, if he can find a sucker (like ESA?).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:40 AMA commercial space wiki. I'll have to add it to the blogroll (even though, technically speaking, it's not a blog. But I don't have a wikiroll...).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AMI have a new piece up over at Pajamas Media on space transportation and the Interstate Highway System.
Hey, it was Mike Griffin who made the analogy, not me.
I should also note that while the title is mine, the subheadline is theirs.
[Late afternoon update]
Only Mark Whittington would have the native talent to so misread this piece as to think that I was "expressing astonishment." Of course, it's not the first time that he's fantasized about my views.
[Another update]
Now Mark is fantasizing that I actually want, or expect NASA to build the Interstate to space.
Well, it's totally in character for him.
I sure wish he'd learn to read for comprehension.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AMKeith Cowing thinks that the Coalition for Space Exploration is asking the wrong questions.
If the Coalition for Space Exploration really wants to further the notion of a robust taxpayer-funded program of space exploration - one based on a solid footing of public support - then they need to start paying attention to what their polls actually say and stop trying to skew the results to say something that the numbers do not support. If, however, they want to support space exploration - regardless of how it comes about - then they need to re-examine their motives - and ask different questions.
People might not want to pay more taxes for space exploration, but they might be interested in buying a ticket.
Indeed.
As usual (and perhaps inevitably), an organization ostensibly set up for the purpose of supporting space exploration in general ends up being a NASA cheerleader. That's partly because a lot of the funding for it comes from the space industrial complex. In any event, these polls should always be taken with a grain, if not a whole shaker of salt. They're based on public ignorance, and once again demonstrate that support for the current plans are a mile wide and an inch deep.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMJon Goff has put up the fourth installment of his survey on space transport concepts. As he noted earlier, it could be the basis of a useful textbook on the subject, with a lot more work and analysis (and accompanying graphs and figures). When I was on The Space Show the other day, David got a chat from an aerospace engineering student about when he'd learn how to design low-cost launchers, because he hadn't seen anything about that in any of his course work. This would be the text for such a course.
As Jon notes, TPS is a common thread in making reusable entry vehicles practical and cost effective. The Shuttle tiles are too high maintenance, and risky (as we saw with Columbia). However, a lot of these issues go away if the vehicle "swallows the tank" (as Rockwell and others proposed in their X-33 concepts). No external tank dramatically reduces the risk to damaging the tiles, and containing a hydrogen (or even hydrocarbon, though to a lesser degree) fuel tank makes the vehicle much more "fluffy"* on entry, considerably reducing the heat load. Because of the ET, Shuttle had unique TPS issues that future vehicles are less likely to have to worry about. And also, as Jon notes, XCOR is in the process of building exactly the type of "X-vehicle" that will be useful to start to prove out both trajectory and TPS concepts, something that NASA should have done years ago, and probably would have had it still been NACA.
[Update late afternoon]
Notwithstanding the silly microkerfuffle in comments, I should add that when I came up with the term "fluffy," it didn't occur to me to apply it to a vehicle. I really intended it to apply to something that actually is fluffy (i.e., homogeneously undense, e.g., liquid hydrogen), rather than something that has low average density, but very high local density with vast volumes of low or zero density. We should probably come up with some other word to describe a large empty tank, to distinguish between the homogeneous and heterogeneous cases.
*A word I came up with years ago at Rockwell to mean the opposite of "dense." Others may have come up with it independently.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM...of the Lynx. Rob Coppinger is in Mojave, taking pictures.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:44 AMOver at Rockets and Such.
So, it goes from Ares 5 to Ares 6, and it still doesn't satisfy the mission requirement. And now it has outgrown the MLP.
There's a concept in the development of a space vehicle known as "chasing your tail," in which the need to add something to the vehicle (like adequate structural strength, with margin) results in more weight, which results in the need for bigger or more engines to push it, which results in the need for more propellant capacity to accelerate the added mass, which results in...
And the design won't close.
Now in fact, it is probably possible to get this design to close--bigger vehicles are easier in that regard than small ones. But regardless of the size of the vehicle, mission needs are always going to grow (and they still don't really have solid numbers on the EDS/Altair/cargo requirements). So it won't be able to get the mission concept (one and a half launch) to close, particularly as we move beyond the moon, even if it can be done for the moon.
The rationale for the heavy lifter has always been to avoid the complication of orbital assembly (apparently, the false lesson learned from our success with assembling ISS is that we should throw away all that experience, and take an entirely different approach for VSE). But it's already a "launch and half" mission, needing both Ares 1 and Ares 56, so they're not even avoiding it--they're only minimizing it. And even if the lunar mission doesn't outgrow the Ares 6, it won't be able to do a Mars mission in a single launch. So if we need to learn to do orbital assembly (and long-term propellant storage) anyway, why postpone it? Why not take the savings from not developing an unneeded heavy lifter (and new crew launch vehicle), and invest it in orbital infrastructure, tools and technology to provide a flexible system that can be serviced by a range of launch vehicles, without the single-point failure of Ares? These are the kinds of issues that a new administrator will have to consider next year.
And don't get me started on the Ares 1 problems:
The currently favored mitigation approaches - still undergoing a trade study - for thrust oscillation will add around 500 lbs to Orion for shock mounting on the crew seats and vital components.
So, because the geniuses behind this concept decided to put the crew on top of the world's biggest organ pipe, they'll add a quarter of a ton to an already-overweight vehicle with no margin, so that the astronauts will (might?) be able to survive watching the rest of the capsule being vibrated even more intensely around them.
There is a word for this. It starts with a "k" and ends with "ludge." And then there's this.
Thrust oscillation is now categorized as a 5x4 risk for the upper stage.
I'm not sure which axis is which in that formulation, but it either means that there is a very high likelihood of a catastrophic outcome, or that that it is probable that there will be a near-catastrophic outcome. And no mitigation has yet been found.
They really need to consider going from one and a half launches to (at least) two launches of a single medium-sized vehicle type. Two launches is two launches, it would save them a huge amount of development costs, provide much better economies of scale in operation and production, and get completely around the "stick" idea, which is proving to be a programmatic disaster waiting to happen, if it hasn't already. Let us finally end the cargo cult of Apollo, and develop real infrastructure.
[Late morning update]
Here's more discussion over at NASA Space Flight.
[Update a few minutes later]
In a post from a week ago, Chair Force Engineer has some related thoughts as well, on the wisdom of choosing solids at all:
The solid-liquid trade study is one that couldn't have been adequately analyzed during the 60 days of the ESAS study, and will likely end up as an interesting footnote in the Ares story. The question is whether the Ares story will fall into the genre of historical nonfiction, or fantasy and tragedy. If the latter is true, perhaps liquids were the answer after all. But the decision to not cap the weight of Ares V (even at the expense of payload) is one that taxpayers shouldn't forget if the massive rocket, and its shiny new infrastructure, ever get off the drawing board.
It seems pretty clear (as it did at the time) that the decision to build "the Stick" was pre-ordained, and that the sixty-day study was a rationalization, not a rationale, and that none of the CE&R recommendations were seriously considered. An Administrator Steidle would no doubt want to revisit it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMI just got the sad news from Pat Kelley:
Len took his final journey this morning, passing peacefully. His family is going to have his ashes interred at Arlington cemetery, but I have no schedule. For those who wish to express condolences, you can reach his life partner, Anne Greenglass via email, [email me for the address if you want to do so--rs].
I tried to address this notice to all the people on my list, but I'm sure there are others I may have missed, so please forward this to anyone else you feel would want to know. I do intend to continue trying to get backing for Len's last design (Space Van 2010) as a tribute.Len was a truly unique man, and a rare breed these days. Always the gentleman, honest to a fault, and always ready to give credit where it was due (and sometimes even allowing the unworthy to take credit for his work, for the sake of an important effort). He is unreplaceable, and will be sorely missed.
Ad astra, cum laetitia, Len.
[Previous post here]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AMVery little in this essay is new to people who have been following the arguments in space policy circles for years, but it's useful to pull it all together into one place, and bring it up to date. I and many others have long advocated that we need to resurrect NACA (which was absorbed into NASA half a century ago) and start developing technology that can support private industry, as we did for aviation. With the new private space passenger vehicles now starting to be developed, the time is ripe for it, and Jeff Foust and Charles Miller have made a very powerful case. This should be must reading for both presidential campaigns.
[Update mid morning]
This piece I wrote a few years ago on the centennial of flight seems pertinent.
[Mid-afternoon update]
More commentary over at Jeff's site, Space Politics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 AMJon Goff has an interesting post on a reusable two-stage vehicle concept.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AMIn all of the reports I find on the award of the new suit contract to Oceaneering, I can't find any technical details on it (I suppose a lot of the info for both competitors is embargoed for proprietary reasons). But from the pictures, it looks like a hard suit. Does anyone know? If so, that would be the second revolution. The first, of course, is Ham Standard/Sunstrand finally losing their decades-long monopoly, going back to Apollo. It's nice to see David Clark back in the game as well, after all those decades. I wonder if they'll be using a glove concept based on Peter Homer's?
[Update in the afternoon]
Louise Riofrio has more thoughts. Apparently, though, this wasn't a design competition--it was a competition to see which contractor was more generally qualified to build suits. Process over product...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:46 AMJeff Krukin writes that Europe is leaving NewSpace to the US, out of (among other things) foolish class envy:
the views expressed by European Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen speak volumes about the attitudes of the European political establishment toward entrepreneurial space activity (NewSpace). Referring to public remarks by Guenter, Astrium Chief Executive Francois Auque said, "I was even told that this project was morally blameworthy because it targets an audience of the rich people."
Well, that's why many of our ancestors left Europe.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:13 AMJeff Foust has a tale of two bills. As he notes, the language in the authorization bill is great:
It is further the sense of Congress that United States entrepreneurial space companies have the potential to develop and deliver innovative technology solutions at affordable costs. NASA is encouraged to use United States entrepreneurial space companies to conduct appropriate research and development activities. NASA is further encouraged to seek ways to ensure that firms that rely on fixed-price proposals are not disadvantaged when NASA seeks to procure technology development.
I wonder if the part about fixed-price contracts was in response to pressure from XCOR specifically, or perhaps from the Personal Spaceflight Federation?
Anyway, nice as it sounds, the only bill that really counts is the appropriations bill, which (again as he notes) cuts COTS funding.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:45 AMLouise Riofrio has an interesting idea, but I haven't given it enough thought to have much of an opinion.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PMOr your grandfather's either. Fresh from ISDC, Glenn Reynolds has a piece on the state of the private space industry, over at The Atlantic.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:59 PMIt looks like Boeing had a successful Delta 2 launch (delayed by twenty minutes) today. I guess that since it doesn't need any specific orbit, as is needed for an ISS launch, there was no critical launch window. I went outside to watch, but as usual, saw nothing. The only launch I've ever seen from the house is a Atlas night launch.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:35 AMAlan Boyle has an interview with Paul Allen. This isn't right, though:
Adrian Hunt, the collection's executive director, told me that putting a pilot in the V-1 turned out to be a terrible idea.
"The theory is that you open the cockpit and you jump out just when you're getting close to the target," he said. "There's a slight design fault there. Once you open the cockpit, that's the intake for the rocket - and it tends to suck in things, including people.
"...intake for the rocket"?
It was a pulse jet.
Sorry for the short notice, but I forgot to mention that I'll be on Fast-Forward Radio tonight, in less than an hour. Fortunately (assuming you care) it will be available for download later.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 PMScott Lowther has a blog. Geez, they'll let anyone have one of those things.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:36 PMAs current blog readers know, I've been pretty much of an agnostic as to which candidate would be best for space policy (at least in terms of actually advancing us toward becoming a spacefaring society). But I just saw a very interesting rumor over at Space Politics. The post is about whether McCain likes Mars, and was influenced by reading The Martian Chronicles
But the rumor is in comments, from two separate commenters:
My understanding is that Craig Steidle is formally advising the McCain campaign, and may be determining McCain's NASA policy...
...Admiral Steidle has also adopted an EELV-based approach for Shuttle replacement, albeit with the Orbital Space Plane (OSP). I think it would be very easy for him to embrace an approach using a downsized Orion/CEV on top of an EELV.The Admiral had a very forward focused program that didn't play favorites with any of the NASA centers, particularly Marshall. This ticked off several of the congressional delegations. But I have a feeling that the Alabama contingent may not hold as much sway over the upcoming years.
It's interesting that you brought up the Admiral here. I've heard rumors from several sources that he would be the likely NASA Administrator if McCain is elected. Unlike the current Soviet-style Design Bureau Culture at NASA, Steidle is a believer and practitioner of good old American free enterprise and competition.
Steidle was in charge of the VSE before Mike Griffin came in (O'Keefe was much more hands-off as an administrator, particularly because he wasn't a rocket scientist, and didn't pretend he was). Mike Griffin essentially tore up everything that Steidle was doing by the roots, and instituted his own plan. So while Steidle is hardly perfect, he'll be a big improvement, and get the program back on track as it was when he left, with the loss of three years or so. If this rumor is true, for this reason alone, McCain now looks like a far preferable candidate to Obama, in terms of space. Of course, for me, and many others, space remains a lower-priority issue. But it does provide a reason to vote for McCain (as opposed to against Obama), which I've been having trouble coming up with.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:29 PMThe commentary continues over at Clark Lindsey's place about how long it will/should take to get low-cost access into space. I probably should respond to this one comment, though, since it seems to be advancing a lot of mythology about me and weightless flights.
Rand Simberg is a right wing nutjob, but, he is a true believer in space. He went with Weaver Aerospace to sell Zero-Grav flights to Ron Howard for the Apollo 13 movie. He had the proposal, he had the aircraft, he had a credible charter operator. NASA dove in and gave the flights away for free. Sadly, Simberg then went and did the same deal for "From the Earth to the Moon" and NASA did it to him again.
Well, to start off, of course (and nothing to do with space), but I'm neither "right wing" or a "nutjob." As far as I know.
But to deal with the more substantive statements, this is mostly wrong. I did put in a proposal to Ron Howard's production company for Apollo XIII, and I did have a charterable 727 lined up. Our plan was to palletize the movie set, and use the freight doors to load and unload between shoots, so the airplane could continue to be used for other things. We weren't going to get a special type certificate for it, as Zero-G did (at a cost of millions of dollars and many years), because it was going to be flown on an experimental certificate out of Vegas or Mojave. This was all greased with the local FAA FSDO, with whom we had worked to do T-39 flights for R&D, using Al Hansen's plane in Mojave (he's Burt's next-door neighbor).
But NASA didn't "dive in and and give the flights away for free." NASA originally sent Howard's people to me, and I had a meeting with them in Century City, when they asked me for a proposal. I submitted the proposal, and was told by the executive producer that they were looking it over, but before they were going to make a commitment, they wanted to try if in the K-bird first, to see if filming was practical in that environment. I was suspicious, but there wasn't much I could do. At the same time, they were telling NASA that we couldn't do the job, and that they had fulfilled their obligation to try to find a commercial provider, so now they had to use the KC-135. So they basically lied to both me and JSC. I don't think they got free flights--I believe that JSC was reimbursed some (probably arbitrary, since NASA never knew what the Comet really cost) amount per hour.
Somewhere I actually documented the history for NASA, and sent it to June Edwards (I don't know if she's still with the agency) at Code L (legal office) at HQ, when she had to do some fact finding at the behest of Dana Rohrabacher's office. Unfortunately, I lost it in a hard disk failure a few years ago.
Anyway, NASA was not the villain. We were both lied to by people in Hollywood (I'll give you a minute to express your shock at the very thought of such a thing).
Oh, and as for "From the Earth to the Moon," I never had any involvement in it whatsoever. It was basically a lot of the same people, given that it was a Tom Hanks production, and they just went back to NASA. I saw no point in wasting my time trying to put together another proposal that would be sure to be rejected.
And of course, when Lee Weaver was killed in an auto accident, a couple weeks before 911, that was pretty much the end of any interest I had in getting a weightless flight business going, after almost a decade of struggle, and a lot of debt, with which I'm still burdened.
Peter had money lined up for Zero-G, and I didn't see any way to break in, when it was uncertain how large the market would be. Also, if I'd known what he had to go through to get the special type certificate for the airplane from the FAA, I'd have probably not even attempted it. He might even feel the same way, for all I know, but he's through the tunnel now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AMJon Goff has a truly excellent post on what will be required for space settlements, with useful historical analogies. I've always considered the LDS analogy quite apt, both in terms of types of technologies and infrastructure needed for the emigration, and the motivations. As he notes, unfortunately, the space community often uses unuseful historical analogies and/or fails to recognize where they break down.
But what he describes would be a true "Interstate Highway System" for space, as opposed to what Mike Griffin considers one (Ares/Orion).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AMKen Murphy has the latest Carnival of Space up, with an emphasis on women in space, and a lot of ISDC links.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 AMIt's not bad enough that they are so deficient in creativity that they have to make flicks out of old television shows and comic books. Now they're reduced to remaking stupid schlock that should never have been made the first time. Behold, what the world has been awaiting--a new version of Capricorn One
On a cheerier note, there's apparently a much better (to put it mildly--I shouldn't even be discussing them in the same post) SF movie on the way.
...what I have is a story where businessmen and engineers are the heroes, the protestors are the bad guys, people accept risk willingly and some of them die for it, where they do amazing things and go to astonishing places on their own dime, where nuclear power is good and essential and the motivation is not money or power but freedom and a love of humanity, and where America and all she stands for is a beacon in a darkening world.
It's a crazy bizarro world of science fiction!
Hollywood would never make anything like that.
Good luck, Bill--we'll be looking forward to seeing it, and ignoring the other.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMRelated to yesterday's post, Dwayne Day weighs in at Clark's site over their bet, in the comments. And here's a link to the old Transterrestrial post that documents the wager. I agree with Dr. Day on at least one thing--sushi is preferable to Italian.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AMSeveral years ago (more than I care to think about) we put up a new trellis, and planted a bougainvillea at the entrance to our back yard in southern California. The hope was that the plant would grow to fill in the trellis, providing a beautiful hedge for privacy. Though one of the features of an established bougainvillea is low watering needs, we at first watered it diligently to establish the roots and spur its growth. But it grew slowly, sending out a few tendrils that I attached strategically around the trellis in the hope that it would fill in smoothly and quickly. It took two or three years before it finally blocked the view through the fencing. Now, over a decade later, it grows so vigorously that it has to be trimmed regularly, lest it project thorny branches out into the path where people walk. Despite its slow start, it has a thick trunk, and massive root system, that provides structure and nourishment for now-rapid and unstoppable growth.
It's a truism in technological progress that we are always overoptimistic in the short term. The corollary is that we tend to be pessimistic in the longer term. Both of these effects are a result of the fact that we tend to think linearly, while life, and growth happen more exponentially--very slow at first, and then growing explosively as they climb the curve.
So Jon and Clark shouldn't be discouraged at the frustratingly slow progress so far in suborbital activities, and Clark should and will (barring some miracle out of Armadillo or someone this summer) buy Dwayne Day his Italian dinner with cheer and good grace, and make another bet. It's tragic, of course, that some of those on Jon's list will not live to see the fruit of their labors, who might have had we been able to make better progress. But we can't let that discourage us.
We have just finally, after delays caused much more by false perceptions than technological ability, gotten the plants in the ground, and the irrigation is on them, in the form of ongoing funding. Of course, they're experimental hybrid plants, so it's hard to know their growth rate ahead of time, or which of them will survive the soil or sun of their location. But over time, some will succeed, and grow, slowly at first, but eventually faster, until they are thriving at such a rate that we will marvel at all the people who said that the soil was barren, and that they would never flower, let alone fruit. And we will marvel from far above them, from the top of our garden that reaches up into the sky, and beyond.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMNote: I've bumped this post to the top, with an update. It will stay at the top for a couple days, so if you see it first, continue reading past--I'll still be posting new stuff.
For any of my Huntsville area readers who wish to pay their respects to Darren Spurlock, David Alan Smith of Boeing passes on the following information:
Kelly and her family is planning for a service this Tuesday and Wednesday as shown below:Tuesday, June 3
Berryhill Funeral Home
2035 Memorial Parkway North
Huntsville, AL
Visitation: 12:00 p.m.
Funeral: 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday, June 4
Hermitage Memorial Gardens
535 Shute Lane
Old Hickory, TN
Graveside service and burial: 11:00 a.m.We talked further about those who knew him sharing some remembrances at his service. She and her ministers are very happy to have us do that. Since we don't have much time I offer the following approach. If you will be able to physically attend and want to say something, please tell me and give me an idea of how long you need. If you have something you would like to share at his service but can not come, I will be glad to act as your surrogate. If you have something you would just like Kelly, Ben (6) and James (3) to have I will compile them electronically. I need those items you would like shared Tuesday by COB Monday. As these boys grow older, it will help them know Darren as the man he was.
Kelly's public notice on Darren's death will include the following:
In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Mayfair Church of Christ:
1095 Carl T. Jones Dr.
Huntsville, AL 35802However, she very much appreciated our thought to honor Darren through supporting Ben and James education. So as a "work" friend, if you feel moved you can send her a check in her name with the reference to the "Darren Spurlock Education Fund". She can deposit these in Ben and James college savings accounts.
Kelly Spurlock
[Address deleted because I don't want to blast her home address on the Interweb, the world being the sad place that it is these days in that regard. Anyone interested can contact me at the email address in the upper left corner of the blog, and I'll relay it. Actually, I'd suggest that Kelly establish a trust with a PO Box, and a web page to take donations via Paypal--perhaps someone else can help her with this. --rs]
And finally, I can not stress how much a card, note and/or remembrance means to her. Darren touched many lives. Let us show that as a monument to his life with us. Your support, thoughts and prayers for Kelly and the boys are very much appreciated.
David Alan Smith
Advanced Programs, Exploration Launch Systems
Space Exploration, The Boeing Company
If anyone wants to get hold of David and doesn't have his contact info (which again, I didn't want to display), again, email me.
[Update, per my comment about not wanting to post Kelly's home address]
For those of all called to honor Darren's memory in a way that will positively affect his family's future, we have established the "Darren Spurlock Memorial Education Fund" for his two boys Ben and James via 529 college savings accounts. To contribute to this account you may: Make check payable to: College America.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:49 AMIn memo field: Spurlock Education Fund.
Mail to:First Financial Group
400 Meridian Street, Ste.100
Huntsville, AL 35801
Any contribution you send will divided equally into an account for Ben and account for James. And thank you for honoring a beloved colleague and friend.
I didn't see Len Cormier at Space Access in March, though he has rarely missed one in the past. Now via an email from Pat Kelley, I learned why:
I'm sad to announce that Len Cormier is losing his battle with cancer. I spoke with him today, and he's in a hospice awaiting the end. I've had the privilege of his friendship and professional partnership for over ten years, and I hate to see this come to an end before my goal of at least giving him the satisfaction of seeing a project birthed from his incredible intellect at least get started.
Len is not terribly religious, but I know he would not be offended by good wishes, prayers, or whatever means you may choose to honor him. I will miss him.
I don't know how far from the end it is, and where there's life there's hope, so I won't talk about him in the past tense. But if he doesn't make it, it will be a damned shame. No one living has been talking about affordable access to space, and worked as hard at it as Len, having been an advocate for almost half a century. He was also one of the gentlest men, in the gentleman sense, that I've ever met, always gracious, even in the face of unreasonable criticism and often vituperation.
It's a tragedy that he is leaving us just as the funding dam is starting to break on the kinds of projects that he has been advocating for so long, and that he won't see the results. He should go knowing, though, that he played a significant role in laying the ground work for it, and inspired many who will carry on in his stead. Despite his failure to achieve his audacious goals, I think that he'll be far more than a footnote in the history of astronautics.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another email comment from Rick Jurmain:
Len's a man with dreams too grand for a single lifetime. That's as it should be.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:41 AM
Or, to paraphrase Sunset Boulevard: He is big. It's the space program that got small.It's been an honor to work with Len. I'll remember him.
Alan Boyle has a review of what looks to be an interesting book on SpaceShipOne
Glenn Reynolds has a summary over at Popular Mechanics. Not much new here for people who followed all the blogging, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:59 PMPhil Bowermaster has some thoughts on what I think is actually quite a likely scenario for the first human on Mars. It won't be done by NASA, though, or likely any government space agency. They simply can't afford to take the risk when it's funded by taxpayers, as we've seen when the nation gets unreasonably hysterical over astronaut deaths. It will be a privately funded expedition, which will be able to do so without the intrusion of politics.
And of course, this will be more in the nature of such exploration. After all, the vast majority of polar exploration (e.g., Peary, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) was privately funded. Once we get the cost of access to orbit down, and establish an orbital fueling infrastructure, it will be quite feasible to raise the money for private adventures such as this.
Sadly, NASA is contributing almost nothing to those goals, instead spending billions developing expensive government-owned/operated launch vehicles and capsules that will likely become obsolete before they first fly.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AMWe'd considered driving up, but I read at the Flame Trench that it was the biggest crowd since return to flight (probably because it was a beautiful day, and a Saturday), and we didn't want to fight the throngs and sit in the car all day. I've never been able to see a launch from here in Boca--maybe it's too low on the horizon with all the obstructions (the fact that they launch northerly probably doesn't help), so we watched on television. Looked flawless to me, other than a couple specks flying back along the tank.
I think that if they don't have any more problems for a while, there will be a lot of pressure to close the "gap" by extending the program, now that it looks like NASA has wrung the bugs out of it. Particularly given what a mess Ares/Orion seems to be.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:36 PMI just got some bad news. When I saw this story at NASA Watch, I recognized the name, but hoped that it wasn't the Darren Spurlock with whom I'd worked three years ago on the CE&R studies for NASA, back before Griffin came in and decided to implement his own ESAS architecture. That Darren was at least a decade younger than fifty, and he worked at Boeing. But it seemed unlikely to me that there would be two aerospace engineers in Huntsville with that name.
Sadly (though of course it would be tragedy regardless of which Darren Spurlock died) I just got off the phone with one of his Boeing former colleagues. The paper got the age wrong, and he had left Boeing to work for Marshall only three weeks ago. I never met his wife, but want to extend my condolences to her. I believe he left a young family. I'll be getting info about memorial services, and post them when I get them, for those interested in the Huntsville area.
I didn't know Darren that long--the CE&R study was my only work with him, but he was a good man, a good, smart hard-working engineer, and he worked very hard to come up with and document architectures that would be affordable and sustainable in getting us off the planet, in consonance with the president's Vision for Space Exploration. He was as frustrated as anyone when NASA basically ignored everything we'd done under Steidle to come up with the current...plan. But he moved on, obviously, and must have been looking forward to doing good things at the agency itself. Now, senselessly, a valuable career and valuable life have been cut short.
[Evening update]
This post now comes up numero uno in a search for "Darren Spurlock.
Who knoweth the ways of Google?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:48 PMJon Goff has some thoughts about outsourcing NASA employees to private industry.
It's an interesting concept, and not to discourage him from out-of-the-box thinking, but it has several flaws, more than one of which is almost certainly fatal.
Where would they work? Senator Shelby is not going to countenance a program that ships a Huntsville employee off to Mojave (and there are a lot of NASA employees who don't want to move to Mojave). It's not just the jobs that are important, but where they are. So it may necessitate moving the company to places like Huntsville to take advantage of it, even though it may be a terrible location from most other standpoints (e.g., flight test). In addition, a lot of the jobs that Congress wants to save aren't just NASA civil servants--more, probably many more of them are contractors. How does that work? Does Boeing send you an extern and get reimbursed by NASA? How do you work out proprietary issues (among others)? How do you ensure that they send you the best employees, and not the ones they were going to lay off?
Also, there will be a huge discontinuity with skill matches. The current Shuttle work force, for the most part, knows very little about vehicle development, and what they know about vehicle operations, from the standpoint of a low-cost launch provider, is mostly wrong. Also, while a lot of people work for NASA because they're excited about space, many there do so because they like the civil service protections and pensions. They don't necessarily want to work the long hours often demanded of a startup, and they come from an employment culture that may be quite incompatible with the fixed-price private sector. I won't say any more than that, but this is one of the reasons that the Aldridge Commission's recommendation to convert the NASA centers to FFRDCs went over like a lead blimp.
And how would one qualify to get these "government resources" and how many would you get? As many as you ask for? After all, if the product is free (and contra the paragraph above, desirable) surely demand will exceed supply. How will you allocate the supply. It won't happen on price, obviously, so some other solution will have to be developed. Would a company "bid" for an extern (and would they be able to bid on a specific person, or would they have to take pot luck?) by putting some kind of proposal to demonstrate how worthy their cause and their use of her will be? Who will be the equivalent of a source selection board for such a process? Can the current acquisition regulations even accommodate something like this? I know that this currently occurs for a few individuals, where it is mutually agreed, but I'm not sure that it would work for an entire work force.
Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:13 PMThis post, linked by Glenn from the ISDC, reminds me of this post I wrote when this blog was only four months old. It's not that long, so I'll repeat. It was titled (as shown over in the left sidebar) "Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff":
As a follow up to today's rant over our "allies" in Europe, over at USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has an excellent disquisition on the fundamental differences between Europe and the U.S. They don't, and cannot, understand that the U.S. exists and thrives because it is the UnEurope, that it was built by people who left Europe (and other places) because they wanted freedom.Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:22 AM
I say this not to offer simply a pale imitation of Steven's disquisition (which is the best I could do, at least tonight), but to explain why I spend so much time talking about space policy here. It's not (just) because I'm a space nut, or because I used to do it for a living, and so have some knowledge to disseminate. It's because it's important to me, and it should be important to everyone who is concerned about dynamism and liberty.And the reason that it's important is because there may be a time in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, when the U.S. will no longer be a haven for those who seek sanctuary from oppressive government. The trends over the past several decades are not always encouraging, and as at least a social insurance policy, we may need a new frontier into which freedom can expand.
Half a millenium ago, Europe discovered a New World. Unfortunately for its inhabitants (who had discovered it previously), the Europeans had superior technology and social structures that allowed them to conquer it.
Now, in the last couple hundred years, we have discovered how vast our universe is, and in the last couple decades, we have discovered how rich in resources it is, given will and technology. As did the eastern seaboard of the present U.S. in the late eighteenth century, it offers mankind a fertile petri dish for new societal arrangements and experiments, and ultimately, an isolated frontier from which we will be able to escape from possible future terrestrial disasters, whether of natural or human origin.
If, as many unfortunately in this country seem to wish, freedom is constricted in the U.S., the last earthly abode of true libertarian principles, it may offer an ultimate safety valve for those of us who wish to continue the dream of the founders of this nation, sans slavery or native Americans--we can found it without the flawed circumstances of 1787.
That is why space, and particularly free-enterprise space, is important.
Thanks for discouraging live blogging of space (and other) conferences (not to mention anything else), Keith.
[Saturday morning update]
The lesson here is that you have to be careful to delineate your editorial comments from the reportage (I usually do this with parenths, I think, though I'd have to go back and look at some from the past to be sure--I might use square brackets) when transcribing, because it is easily confused otherwise. But as I said, we shouldn't let things like this discourage us from doing it. This is the first conference like this that I've missed in a while, and I really appreciate what Clark and others are doing. I've always wondered if what I was doing was worthwhile when I live blogged other conferences, and now I know that it definitely is. Well, at least when others do it...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 PMGlenn Reynolds has filed his first report from the ISDC, on the status of the Chinese space program. Or to be more accurate, the status of our knowledge of the Chinese space program.
I'm long on record as being concerned about the Chinese in space, when it comes to the military, and sanguine when it comes to them going to the moon. I remain that way. As Glenn notes, when it comes to manned space, they're simply recapitulating what we did in the sixties, except much more slowly.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:50 PMThis sounds like an interesting session. I hope that Glenn is taking good notes. I'd expect Jeff Foust to post something on Space Politics as well (in addition to an article in The Space Review on Monday).
It may be the first time that representatives from all three campaigns have been on a single dais for this subject. We'll see it they can pin the Obama guy down on how expects to fund education with the space program without throwing a wrench in the works with a delay (and how he addresses the dreaded "Gap"). And why he wants to wait until after the election to have a national dialogue on space.
I know Lori, but I've never heard of the other two.
[Update on Saturday at noon]
Here is Jeff Foust's report, with more to come on Monday. As I would have guessed, the only people up on the issues were the moderator and Lori. I think that it says something about Obama and his campaign that he doesn't have an adviser for this subject (or perhaps science and technology at all).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:51 PMOn entrepreneurial space, from Jeff Greason and Burton Lee.
And Clark has another news item, which is one of those have-to-laugh-so-you-don't-cry things:
After $10B+ in development costs, the Orion crews will land on the ground only by accident: NASA develops airbags for emergency on-shore CEV landings.
Sigh.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:47 PMWell, for guys, anyway.
OK, I recognize Michelle Murray (of FAA-AST) on the left, but who are the other two? Name tags are hidden. As Glenn notes, there are a lot more women (and attractive ones) at space conferences these days (compared to, say, the eighties). I think that has something to do with the excitement of the privatization activities, though the increase in the number of women engineers since then is probably a contributor as well. Not that there aren't roles for other professions in opening up the frontier.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:22 PMClark Lindsey doesn't usually editorialize, but he does in this report:
Cooke:- Powerpoint graphics showing Ares I/V, Orion, Altair
- Factors in selecting architecture include performance end-to-end, risk, development cost, life-cycle cost, schedule, lunar surface systems architecture.
- Implementation according to NASA institutional health and transition from Shuttle, competition in contracts, civil service contractor rules.
- Discusses the studies that justify the Constellation architecture that Griffin had decided on long before he came to NASA as director and long before the studies were done.
- Will get problems like thrust oscillation solved.
- NASA proposes to stay on course through a change in administrations. Surprise, surprise...
Emphasis mine. Are they actually openly admitting that Mike ignored all of the CE&R studies, and just did what he planned to do before he was administrator?
This was amusing:
The Coalition for Space Exploration shows a brand new NASA space exploration promotion video. Gawd. After the last panel I felt like killing myself. No problem. I can watch this video again and die of boredom...
He has some other pretty tart comments as well.
[Early afternoon update]
As Clark notes in comments, that reference to Griffin's plans were his words, not Steve Cooke's.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AMWell, it's actually the latest Carnival of Space, over at the Lifeboat Foundation, but it's pretty Phoenix-centric.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AMUnfortunately, the ISDC in Washington this week coincides with the space tourism conference in Arcachon, France, and space bloggers like Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust (who both live in the DC area) can't cover both. But Rob Coppinger has a lot of posts from Arcachon, with some interesting concepts from European aerospace companies (though it's unclear what the funding prospects are for them). Just keep scrolling.
[Update an hour or so later]
Clark Lindsey has some of the permalinks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:26 AMJeff Foust has some reporting on Will Whitehorn's talk at ISDC yesterday. In this post, he notes that White Knight 2 will roll out on July 28th, presumably in Mojave, and discusses other potential applications than just a first stage for SpaceShipTwo, including a satellite launcher. The lack of comment other than "we've learned some lessons" on the SS2 propulsion is interesting to me. It sounds like they're still not sure what they're going to do, which continues to put SS2 schedule (whatever it is) in jeopardy. I suspect that Sir Richard's hype remains ahead of the actual program.
In this post Whitehorn mildly disses the Lynx:
XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they're not building a spaceship. They're building basically a high-altitude MiG equivalent. They're building something that you can strap in and go up to 37 miles. You won't get your astronaut wings but you will see the curvature of the earth. That will be an exciting project, but the problem is that it's not a space project, and I think it's been a little bit wrong to call it that.
While technically that's true, it is a project that can easily evolve into a "space project," which is what the program intent is. I don't see this as a problem. In fact, I see it as a solution, because Virgin may have bitten off more than it could chew with SS2. In hindsight (and foresight for some of us) it might have been useful to develop more operational experience with a lower-performance vehicle before moving to a bigger one.
Really, the only thing lacking from the XCOR product is a lack of astronaut wings--it will certainly be a space experience, and a more personal one with a better view, sitting in the left seat. I think that the market for it will be bigger than Whitehorn claims to think.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:02 AMClark is blogging a panel on how the media cover space, to which it looks like Instapundit was a last-minute addition (he's not listed in the program).
[Evening update]
Clark has a new post up on the spaceport panel.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:22 PMClark Lindsey blogs a panel on interactions between private space and the government, that sounds interesting. Unfortunately, because there are so many parallel tracks at an ISDC, it's not possible for one person to cover everything, but he does his best with a report on the space-based solar power session and lunar regolith processing.
And Glenn Reynolds is there now, due to speak shortly, topic TBD. Wish I could have made it this year. I managed to have dinner and drinks with him last year in Dallas (first time I'd seen him in years).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:33 PMClark Lindsey is live blogging Will Whitehorn's and Elon Musk's presentations.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AMClark Lindsey is live blogging, here and here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AMIt's a pretty common occurrence for a little kid to be disappointed when he loses his grip on his balloon, but this is in a different class entirely:
The former paratrooper had hoped his "Big Jump" -- starting 40 kilometers (25 miles) above the Earth's surface -- would set new records for the highest jump, fastest and longest free fall and the highest altitude reached by a man in a balloon.
But those hopes drifted away over the plains of Saskatchewan in Canada when the balloon escaped.
I think he should give up on the balloon thing, and just wait for a rocket ride.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:46 AMFrequent commenter "Habitat Hermit," commenting on my Space Show appearance on Sunday, wrote:
There's still plenty of room for disagreements --I have some myself (perhaps even a big one when it comes to capsules although it depends on the details, I think they've still got lots of more or less unexplored potential...
I agree that there are lots of interesting concepts for capsules and their recovery modes. But that's beside the point. The reason that I don't like capsules, of any form, is quite simple. They imply that the only part of the vehicle (at least the upper stage of it) that returns is the capsule. Hence they imply at least a partially, if not fully expendable launch system. I don't believe that we are going to seriously open up space by continuing to throw hardware away.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AMI have some thoughts on this weekend's successful arean invasion, over at PJ Media.
[Update at 7:40 AM EDT]
Some less lofty thoughts over at Althouse's place, particularly in comments.
[Mid-morning update]
Jeff Foust writes about a second chance for an underdog, over at The Space Review.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:16 AMCongrats to JPL on the successful (so far) landing of the Phoenix. Interestingly (though almost certainly coincidentally), it happens on the forty-seventh anniversary of Kennedy's speech announcing the plan to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
And (for what it's worth--not much, to me, and even more certainly coincidentally) it's the thirty-first anniversary of the initial release of Star Wars in theaters. I didn't see it that day, but I did see it within a couple weeks. I remember being unimpressed ("the Kessel run in twelve parsecs"...please), though the effects were pretty good. But then, I was a fan of actual science fiction.
[Update late evening]
It's worth noting that (I think) this was the first soft landing on Mars in over twenty years, since Viking. Surely someone will correct me (or nitpick me) if I'm wrong.
[Monday morning update]
OK, not exactly wrong (it has been over twenty years), but it's thirty years. I'm pretty good at math. Arithmetic, not so much.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PMI had a post about this last week, but I forgot to remind people today, that I was on The Space Show this afternoon (I took a break from yardwork, where we're tearing out old hedges, and still finishing up guttering--on the radio, no one can hear you sweating). Here's a place to comment for anyone who happened to listen in.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:55 PMDennis Wingo remembers Ernst Stuhlinger.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:43 PMI find it amusing that these folks were clueless as to the purpose of the Google Lunar Prize when they signed up:
In my first blog, I wrote why Harold Rosen formed the Southern California Selene Group. In short, he and I registered our team to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE to demonstrate that a low-cost space mission to the moon could be accomplished and could lead to lowering the cost of some future robotic missions to planetary moons. Plus, we intended to have fun! Harold and I both are strong supporters of space science and robotic space exploration. (For one, I'm an astronomy and cosmology enthusiast.) We love the kind of work that JPL is doing, for example. But we most definitely are not in favor of human space missions. That is not our goal, nor do we support such a goal.
The Team Summit turned out to be a real wakeup call. In the Guidelines workshop that I attended just last Tuesday, the cumulative effect of hearing all day from Peter Diamandis, Bob Weiss and Gregg Maryniak that the "real purpose" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE was to promote the so-called commercialization of space (which I took to mean highly impractical stuff like mining the moon and beaming power to the earth, as shown in one of GLXP kickoff videos), humanity's future in space, etc. etc., took its toll. I couldn't help but think "what am I doing here?" When I spoke to Harold about it on the phone later, he agreed - no way did he want to be involved in promoting a goal he does not believe in.
So, what does this mean? It sounds to me like it's not just a goal they "don't believe in" (which is fine--they could not believe in it and still want to win the prize for their own purposes), but rather, a goal to which they are actively opposed, and don't think that anyone should be pursuing. I'm very curious to hear them elaborate their views, but it sounds like they're extreme Saganites. For those unfamiliar with the schools of thought, you have the von Braun model, in which vast government resources are expended to send a few government employees into space (this is Mike Griffin's approach), the Sagan model ("such a beautiful universe...don't touch it!), and the O'Neillian vision of humanity filling up the cosmos.
So when they say they don't support such a goal, does that mean they oppose it, and would take action to prevent it from happening if they could? Sure sounds like it. And they take it as a given that lunar mining is "impractical," but is that their only reason for opposing it, or do they think that it somehow violates the sanctity of the place, and disturbs what should be accessible only for pure and noble science? I'll bet that they'd prefer a lot fewer humans on earth, too.
[Via Clark Lindsey]
[Update late morning]
Commenter "Robert" says that I'm being unfair to Carl Sagan. Perhaps he's right--I was just using the formulation originally (I think) developed by Rick Tumlinson, though Sagan was definitely much more into the science and wonder of space than were von Braun or O'Neill... If anyone has a suggestion for a better representative of the "how pretty, don't touch" attitude, I'm open to suggestions.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AMApparently, things are starting to get more serious over there, though the EADS/Astrium concept remains a bad joke. Rob Coppinger has a roundup from across the pond.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:24 AMThe comments (125 and counting) in this post over at Space Politics a few days ago have gotten progressively weirder and weirder.
Did you know that New Space is a baby boomer thing? And that it's a failed paradigm, while the standard procedures of NASA giving out cost-plus government contracts has been a total success, and will get us to the stars any year now?
Me, neither. What is "Someone" smoking? No surprise that he or she posts anonymously.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:54 AMAnyone out there know what they're using for comm these days? Do they have a TDRSS system as part of the ISS operations agreement? Or something else? Or both?
[Update about 1 PM EDT]
Via an email from Jim Oberg:
Mir used to have a TDRSS-like system called 'Luch', and a dish antenna capable of communicating with the GEO relay satellite is installed on the Service Module now linked to ISS.Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM
But it's never worked. The old system broke down and wasn't replaced in the 1990's. There are one or two payloads already built, at the Reshetnev plant in Krasnoyarsk, but they won't deliver them until the Russian Space Agency pays cash -- and by now, their components have probably exceed their warranties anyway.The Russians have a voice relay capability through the NASA TDRSS, but can't relay TV or telemetry, so they conduct how-criticality operations such as dockings or spacewalks only when passing over Russian ground sites. They don't even have ocean-going tracking ships any more -- all sold for scrap [one is in drydock as a museum].
The current state of play, according to Glenn Reynolds. There was a piece on the subject in Sunday's Boston Globe as well. I wish that Congress would do something about this. It would have a lot bigger effect in the long run than deciding how much to underfund a failed Constellation concept.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMIt looks like NASA's not going to abandon the ISS. That seems sensible to me.
I'd like to know where they get the 1/124 number for probability of having to evacuate. But it makes sense, given that they're already down at least one (and actually, more like two or three) level in the fault tree, that you can accept a lower reliability for the lifeboat. Lifeboats, after all, have traditionally been pretty iffy propositions. It's not reasonable to demand high reliability of them. That was one of the complaints that I used to have when working on CERV--that the requirements were overspecified for something that was only for use in an emergency.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:39 AMI'll be on The Space Show on Sunday afternoon at noon to 1:30 PM PDT, talking about space and politics, and whatever.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:46 AMWow.
NASA is actually considering abandoning ISS until they can resolve the safety issues surrounding the Soyuz currently docked there (and in general).
This whole fiasco reveals a fundamental design (in fact conceptual) flaw of the station from the beginning (one that was shared by the Shuttle)--a lack of redundancy and resiliency. NASA had the hubris to think that they could design and build a single vehicle type that could not only have the flexibility to satisfy all of the nation's (and much of the world's) needs for transport to and from space, but do so with confidence that it would never have cause to shut down (and remove our ability to access LEO). They learned the foolishness of this notion in 1986, with the Challenger loss.
Similarly, they decided to build a manned space station, that would be all things to all people--microgravity researchers, earth observations, transportation node, hotel--because they didn't think that they could afford more than one, and so they have no resiliency in their orbital facilities, either. If something goes wrong with the station, everyone has to abandon it, with nowhere to go except back to earth.
Having multiple stations co-orbiting, with an in-space crew transport vehicle (which could serve as a true lifeboat) was never considered, though the cost wouldn't necessarily have been that much higher had it been planned that way from the beginning (there would have been economies of scale by building multiple facilities from a single basic design). That would have been true orbital infrastructure.
Instead, we have a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) space station supported by a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) launch system, with only the Russian Soyuz as a backup. And because there is no place nearby to go, if there's a problem on the station, everyone has to come home, and the crew size is thus limited by the size of the "lifeboat," (which is a "lifeboat" only in the sense that it is relied on for life--in actuality, it's much more than that. It's as if the "lifeboats" of the Titanic had to be capable of delivering their passengers all the way to New York or Southampton).
And now we can't trust the backup, and we have no lifeboat at all.
Now that the ISS is almost complete, it is capable of supporting the Shuttle orbiter on orbit for much longer periods of time by providing power, so its orbital lifetime is no longer constrained by fuel cell capacity. But it's still not practical to leave an orbiter there full time, because a) with only three left, we don't have a big enough fleet to do so without impacting turnaround time for the others and b) we're not sure how long it's capable of staying safely without (say) freezing tires or causing other problems, because the vehicle wasn't designed for indefinite duration in space.
So as a result of flawed decisions made decades ago, NASA is in a real quandary. They can leave the crew up there, and cross their fingers that a) nothing goes wrong that requires an emergency return and b) that if the return is required, the Soyuz will work properly. Or they can abandon the station until they resolve the Soyuz issues (something over which they have absolutely no control, and will have to trust the Russians).
Sucks to be them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not that it solves this immediate problem, but Flight Global has a conceptual rendering of a European crew transportation system (presumably based on the ATV) that could (in theory) be available within a decade.
[Another update]
Here's more on ATV evolution, over at today's issue of The Space Review.
[One more thought, at 11 AM EDT]
NASA doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of Shuttle and ISS, because Constellation has exactly the same problem--a single vehicle type for each phase of the mission. If Altair is grounded, we can't land on the moon. If the EDS has problems, we can't get into a trans-lunar orbit. If something goes wrong with Orion, or Ares, the program is grounded. Why aren't there Congressional hearings, or language in an authorization bill, about that?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AMThere's a lot of good discussion (and some not-so-good discussion) of the NASA Authorization bill over at Space Politics, here, here and here. I haven't read the whole thing, and frankly, it's hard for me to get motivated to invest much time or thought in it, because it's just an authorization bill. Most of the time, they never even get passed, and even when they do, they're pretty meaningless, because the only one that really counts is the appropriations bill, where the money gets handed out. Authorization, when it exists at all, simply serves as a sense of the Congress (and more generally, just as a sense of the relevant Congressional committee). But to that degree, it does provide a useful insight into where appropriations might lead, and potential future policy, particularly in the next administration.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:53 PMThomas James writes that NASA is (with little fanfare) disposing of the tooling to build Shuttle Orbiters.
This doesn't make it impossible to build new ones--the blueprints probably remain available, and new tooling could be built in theory, but it dramatically raises the (already ridiculously high) costs of building any replacement vehicles. Even if we were to continue to fly the Shuttle, we will do so with a three-vehicle fleet, so we would never get a flight rate higher than the current one (which is the highest it's been this year since we lost Columbia). Until we lost another one, anyway.
This really is a point of no return.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:42 AM"We became our own customers."
I don't understand why he doesn't see that that's exactly the problem with ESAS.
[Update in the afternoon--sorry, I've been housepainting again, in a race against the approaching summer, when it will be too blasted hot in southern Florida for such things]
I recall that Max Hunter said something very similar, I would guess about twenty years ago at a small workshop on launch vehicle design issues that I attended. He said that the big difference between NACA and NASA was that the former saw industry as its customer, whereas NASA saw it as (at best) a supplier. This was a consequence of going from a pure R&D agency to one with an operational mission (put a man on the moon). It has never recovered.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:38 AMGregg Easterbrook thinks that NASA should be saving the planet from errant asteroids, instead of building a moon base. He can't avoid the usual straw man, of course, which makes much of the rest of his whining about moon bases suspect:
As anyone with an aerospace engineering background well knows, stopping at the moon, as Bush was suggesting, actually would be an impediment to Mars travel, because huge amounts of fuel would be wasted landing on the moon and then blasting off again.
Bush only "suggested" that to people who miss the point of the program. No one is proposing that every, or even any, mission to Mars touch base on the moon before going on to the Red Planet. The point was that the moon might be a useful resource for making Mars missions more cost effective, particularly if we can find water there, and deliver it as propellant to some staging point, such as L-1, which isn't particularly out of the way en route to Mars. In addition, learning how to build a base on the moon, only three days away, is valuable experience to wring the bugs out of a Martian base, which is months away, despite the different environments.
But ignoring that, the real problem is that he doesn't seem to understand NASA's role:
After the presentation, NASA's administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, "We don't make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think." I asked what NASA's priorities would be if he did set the goals. "The same. Our priorities are correct now," he answered. "We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don't need a near-Earth-objects program." In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was "the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years."
Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun--roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative.
Now, I disagree with Mike that we don't need an NEO program--I think we do. But unlike Gregg, I wouldn't put NASA in charge of it. And if Congress wants to fund NASA to look for space rocks, it's going to have to tell NASA not to do the other things that it wants to do, or fund it. Also, this was a little verbal gymnastics on Gregg's part. Mike said that Congress had not instructed NASA to defend the earth, which is true, and the fact that they asked NASA to look for hazardous objects doesn't change that fact in any way, despite his sleight-of-hand at the keyboard. Looking for objects is one thing--actually physically manipulating them is a different thing entirely. It's like the difference between the CIA and the military. The former provides intelligence, the latter acts on it.
The Space Act (almost fifty years old now) does not grant NASA the responsibility to protect the planet, even with subsequent amendments. It is simply not its job. Moreover, no