Category Archives: Space

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Astronauts Want To Increase Crew Size

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Eric Berger has the story. But no mention of when they could do this, other than “later this decade.” What’s the constraint? As far as I know, nothing except the lifeboat issue. NASA insists (irrationally in my opinion — we have no such capability for Scott/Amundsen in the southern winter) that it must be able to evacuate the entire crew all the way to earth in an emergency, and since a Soyuz can only handle three, the maximum crew with two of them docked is thus six.

What would it be worth to get that extra researcher aboard? Again, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but most crew time is taken up with maintenance functions of the facility, leaving only one crew member available for the actual research for which the thing was ostensibly built. If true, that means that adding another crew member would effectively double the amount of utility from the facility (presumably, CASIS would know). That is, if we get (say) four thousand hours a year of scientific research at the ISS with six crew (I’m assuming more than a forty-hour week, obviously), we might get to eight thousand with that seventh crew member. If it’s costing three billion a year to maintain, that drops the cost per hour from $750K/hr to only $375K/hr. Still ridiculously high, but a relative bargain.

What is such research time really worth? Likely a lot less than that, of course, but suppose someone were willing to pay $50K/hr for ISS research. That would mean that the extra crewperson would be worth $200M/yr. A different way of looking at it is, how much would the marginal cost of that person be were we to accelerate the time line? To answer that question means that we have to understand what is involved in such an acceleration.

If Dragon had a life-support system (even one only good for a couple hours) and couches, it has demonstrated its ability to serve as a lifeboat now, except for one issue — it has no independent docking/undocking capability, and won’t until it gets a NASA Docking System (NDS) as part of Commercial Crew. But despite what Skip Hatfield says in the linked Space Safety piece, even the system it used for the berthing could be used to undock in an emergency, by just releasing it and backing off with thrusters. Similarly, Boeing could probably have a CST sitting there within year or so, after a test flight to demonstrate its entry capability (as Dragon did in 2010), given sufficient funds. The long pole in its use as a crew module are development and testing of the abort system, which is unnecessary if it is used as a lifeboat. If I were CASIS, I’d ask SpaceX and Boeing how soon they could provide that service, and how much it would cost. Because, at least in theory, it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact that this isn’t being accelerated while wasting billions on an unneeded rocket that won’t fly for many years (and is unlikely to ever fly) is just one more demonstration of the dysfunction of our space policy.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Farmers, The Committee, And Tinkerbells

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Jeff Foust reports on Mark Albrecht’s diagnosis of NASA’s ills. And in comments over there, Mark Whittington once again demonstrates himself to be a tinkerbell.

[Update late evening]

Hilarious. Tinkerbell has showed up in comments here, whining about being aptly named, and cluelessly clapping her little hands to keep the useless SLS/Orion alive.

[Monday morning update]

Jeez, Mark is so bereft of the ability to understand Albrecht’s metaphor that he imagines I’m actually calling him a fairy.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Perspective

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Did the nation invest a hundred billion dollars in Colorado Springs? What will the effect be on foreign policy if it burns? Shouldn’t safety be the highest priority for our firefighters? Don’t their lives have infinite value? Why are we risking their lives in fighting this fire?

Finally, which would you rather do, and feel it more worth the fight in terms of your risk of life? Fight this fire, or ride a Dragon to the space station without a launch abort system?

Just asking.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

NASA’s Strategic Direction

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Check out the group of people determining it at the National Academies.

There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.

Business, Media Criticism, Space

Boeing’s Human Spaceflight Experience

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In an LA Times interview with Ed Mango, he repeats a common fallacy in the aerospace industry:

Boeing has their design, which is also a capsule-type design, and is trying to work out the same kind of issues that Dragon has. The only difference is that they haven’t flown their stuff yet. But Boeing has 50 years of human spaceflight already. They have all the people who did Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle. They have all the trips and falls that have been made over those 50 years.

As I’ve said for years, companies don’t have experience — people do (this is a fallacy that government evaluators subscribe to, because every proposal we put in to NASA or the Air Force always included the past experience of the organization, regardless of whether or not the people who would be actually working it had such experience). Most of the people who actually worked on the development of those programs are retired or dead. At this point, I would say that when it comes to building reliable cost-effective space hardware, SpaceX has the best team in the country, with the most recent experience (though they got help from some key people at NASA, such as John Muratore). That is not to say that the people working CST at Boeing aren’t good, but it’s really meaningless to tout their historical experience as having any relevance to the current team.