This is good news. Hans Koenigsmann just did a press conference with Kathy Lueders in which they announced the root cause of the explosion. Apparently it was a failed check valve prior to the test as they were pressurizing, that resulted in some NTO setting fire to titanium piping, causing an overpressure which then cascaded to mixing of the hypergolics. At least that’s my preliminary understanding. They’re going to go from check valves to burst disks, and the fix doesn’t seem to be on the critical path to getting to a November flight.
So, the Dragon 2 explosion happened because a leaking check valve allowed some oxidizer to flow into the pressurization system. The fuel plumbing is probably stainless steel, the helium plumbing is titanium. When oxidizer was pressurized against this titanium it burned.
Yes, this would be a much better architecture, but unfortunately, while Buzz is probably the most famous moonwalker, he’s also not taken as seriously by many in the industry.
Two comments: I’ll have to ask Eric where he gets the $1.5B/flight number for SLS. And is he proposing to do this in the ISS orbit, or at a lower inclination?
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).
I thought at the time that it was a bad idea for the Pentagon to push for consolidation in the 90s, and in particular for the FTC to approve the sale of McDonnell Douglas to Boeing. History has proven me (and others) correct. The article doesn’t talk about space, but NASA’s procurement practices have been as bad as the Pentagon’s, in terms of encouraging and rewarding poor performance.
In the wake of the Potemkin abort test of Orion, Eric Berger has a reality check.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a perfect example of the problem:
Even as NASA needs to be spending money on a lunar lander, it has been directed by Congressional authorizations to spend more money on the SLS rocket. To that end, NASA announced last week a $383 million cost-plus contract to build a second mobile launcher, to be used for the Block 1B version of the Space Launch System rocket, which has a more powerful upper stage. This rocket is at least five years away from launching, will cost billions to develop, and is not currently used in any of NASA’s plans for the 2024 landing.
As Bob Zubrin often says, they don’t want to spend money to do things; they want to do things to spend money.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Also, if Starship really flies in 2021, all of NASA's current lunar plans are going to be blindingly obvious in their absurdity, particularly if New Glenn is flying as well, and New Armstrong on the way.
Light/non-existing posting because since boarding red eye to DC Tuesday night, I’ve been attending the Space Enterprise Summit at the State Department.
For one thing, it’s more sustainable. And it will accomplish much more. Whenever kids (i.e., people less than 50) tell me they envy me that I saw men walk on the moon, I tell them that I envy them for all the much more exciting things in space they’ll see (assuming that we don’t get life extension).