Some potentially exciting breakthroughs, using nanotech. This will be a very important technology for space as well.
Category Archives: Space
Turning On A Dime
Remember the Bob Zubrin who cast scorn on the idea of propellant depots?
Well, now he has a new proposal:
Zubrin’s concept is, at its core, a space access subsidy program. Rather than spend billions on new launch vehicles, he envisions NASA instead spending a modest amount of money—he suggested $1.2 billion a year, about six percent of its current $18.5-billion annual budget—buying the most “cost-effective” launch vehicles available. That cost effectiveness would be some function of its price and payload capacity; Zubrin has a particular preference for SpaceX’s proposed Falcon Heavy, which could launch up to 53 metric tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) for as little as $80 million a launch.
NASA would then, in turn, resell that launch capacity to itself, other government agencies, and the private sector, at the artificially low price of $50 per kilogram, or about $2.65 million per fully-loaded Falcon Heavy. Those launches, he said, would take place on a regular schedule, regardless if the capacity on each vehicle is fully subscribed. “You don’t hold the train in the station until it fills up,” he explained. Any excess capacity would be filled with consumables like water, oxygen, and propellant, which could be stored on orbit for use by any interested parties.
Emphasis mine.
In what does he propose to store the propellants, if not depots?
I should note, though, to be fair, that he wrote the PJM stuff a few weeks ago, so it’s possible he’s changed his mind.
So How’s The Engine Coming?
…why the relatively silence from a media savvy Virgin Group that understands the PR value of showing a rocket engine firing?
Nobody knows for sure. However, people familiar with such things thought the engine firings in the initial video looked rough. (At least from what they could see of it through the enormous cloud of dirt and dust the engine threw up.) Soon after the video was released, stories circulated that engineers at Sierra Nevada Corporation were having a hard time scaling up the hybrid engine system from the small, X-1 sized SpaceShipOne prototype to its business jet sized successor. Oscillations sufficiently severe that nobody would want to ride the vehicle.
The stories have persisted and, if anything, have grown stronger. The latest one circulating in Mojave is that the test in March didn’t go well, and that the propulsion team has decided to abandon the hybrid rocket for a liquid system. There is also a confirmed report that Virgin Galactic has formed its own propulsion team and hired the former director of SpaceX’s Texas engine testing facility — and an expert in liquid propulsion — as a member of it.
On Saturday, I asked Whitesides whether they were considering dumping the hybrid system entirely. He reaffirmed that the company are focused on hybrids for now; liquid propulsion is something that would be consider down the road.
I’ve always thought that the hybrid was a mistake. The late Jim Benson sold Burt on it for SpaceShipOne, though, and the success of the X-Prize apparently gave him the confidence to stick with it for SpaceShipTwo, despite its operational disadvantages. After the explosion in Mojave, I suggested to Alex Tai that it was a good opportunity to change course, but he said that it would cost too much in vehicle redesign, due to the different mass distribution. I’ll bet that they’re now really regretting that decision, if they have to do so anyway, because it has cost them years in schedule. Also, I wonder (assuming the rumors are true) why they’re developing their own, instead of just buying from XCOR? That was the mistake they made with the hybrid.
Legacy Space Companies
…getting desperate.
I have a response to Loren Thompson’s latest load of bilge, over at the Washington Examiner.
Apollo Thoughts From The Economist
There will be many retrospectives this week on the half-century anniversary of Kennedy’s speech. Here’s one from The Economist, that reads like they’ve been reading me for a while:
To many Americans, neglecting human space flight this way looks like a sorry end to the glorious chapter Kennedy opened half a century ago. He set out to make America’s achievements in space an emblem of national greatness, and the project succeeded. Yet it did not escape the notice of critics even at the time that this entailed an irony. The Apollo programme, which was summoned into being in order to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system, succeeded by mobilising vast public resources within a centralised bureaucracy under government direction. In other words, it mimicked aspects of the very command economy it was designed to repudiate.
Exactly. Well, not exactly. One of the reasons that they did it this way (as I pointed out in my recent debate with Bob Zubrin) was that it wasn’t intended to be a demonstration of the free-market system:
There was a reason that Apollo ended over forty years ago. It had accomplished its mission, which was not to go to the moon, but to demonstrate that democratic socialism was superior to totalitarian communism in terms of technological prowess, which it did when Apollo 8 flew around the moon in 1968, and the Soviets gave up and pretended they had never been racing.
In any event, few people have any conception of how much Apollo warped our perception of how to explore and develop space, because they have no other framework in which to think about it. But that will change over the next few years as private entities start to show how Americans do space in a more traditional American way.
The Great Space Debate
Bob Zubrin and I rhetorically duke it out over at Pajamas Media. This exchange actually occurred several weeks ago, but it was only published this weekend.
[Update a while later]
Unfortunately, since I went first, Bob got the last word, but that’s why I have a blog. I’ll note that I find it utterly bizarre that he sees no value in orbital propellant storage (today was the first time I’ve seen his final response). Does he really think that all missions to Mars will originate from the surface of the earth, forever more? I’ll note also that he vigorously kicks the stuffing out of a strawman with talk of the problems of the orbital mechanics. It sort of reminds me of the arguments that missile defense proopponents used to make in places like Scientific American, coming up with some ridiculous way of accomplishing the thing, pointing out how ridiculous it was, and implying that there are no sensible alternatives. He doesn’t even mention Lagrange points, which obviate most of the plane-change issues.
One other thing. I think that his ad hominem attack on Jeff Greason was both gratuitous and laughable. Does he really believe that a) no one else on the Augustine panel favored propellant depots and b) that the only reason Jeff supports them is because they provide a market for a vehicle that he might build some day? Really?
[Update a couple minutes later]
In rereading his final rebuttal, I notice that he didn’t respond to much of what I had to say, particularly with regard to ending Apollo and the difficulty of doing what he wants to do, and making long-term space plans in a representative republic — he just repeated the same things he always writes.
It’s A Mystery
Frank Morring has a story over at Aviation Week on Chris Chyba’s testimony to Congress, in which he pointed out the same cost analysis that I did the other day:
Chyba repeated his 2009 warning that NASA has not been able to develop one vehicle and fly another at the same time, given historic budget constraints. But he said NASA may be able to learn from SpaceX as it develops the heavy-lift launch vehicle Congress has ordered it to build for missions beyond LEO.
“The other thing that I think one would want to understand in some detail would be why would it be between four and 10 times more expensive for NASA to do this, especially at a time when one of the issues facing NASA now is how to develop the heavy-lift launch vehicle within the budget profile that the committee has given it,” Chyba said.
I suspect the question was somewhat rhetorical — he probably knows the answer. As far as Congress is concerned, high costs are a feature, not a bug, as long as they don’t get so high that the program dies. Because high costs means lots of jobs for their constituents that they can point to at election time. A more efficient commercial industry would probably create even more jobs, but they would be a lot less visible. And note that whether or not anything is actually accomplished is secondary, if it’s a concern at all. Did anyone in Congress ever complain that Constellation was behind schedule? Maybe, but I don’t recall it. There were no complaints about the program from the rocket scientists on the Hill until it got canceled.
Activists Rally For Space
I have a blog post over at the Washington Examiner about this week’s call to action.
On War
A book review, of an old book:
On War is shaped by Clausewitz’s encounter with the history and ideas of his times; it is also shaped by his experience in one of the first truly modern bureaucracies. (One of the achievements of Frederick the Great that so impressed contemporaries was the meticulous organization of the Prussian army and state.) The relationship of individual genius and vision to bureaucratic routine is a serious strategic problem in the modern world. The virtues that make a great military commander are, as Clausewitz notes, intensely personal: imagination and moral courage being perhaps the rarest and most valuable. These are perhaps the worst qualities for an aspiring bureaucrat to have.
There are desk generals and battle generals, and the unequal struggle between them is a recurring problem — and not just in military organizations. Desk generals excel in the arts of bureaucratic warfare, stick close to the conventional wisdom in all ways, and were brilliantly described in two unforgettable Gilbert and Sullivan songs: Modern Major General and The First Lord’s Song. In times of peace these timeserving mediocrities rise inexorably to the top; wars usually begin with a painful shakeout while the beribboned and bemedaled lunkheads demonstrate their hopeless incapacity at the true military art. Then and only then do the unclubbable and unconventional officers whose only virtue is their ability to somehow win battles gradually edge to the fore and the Grants and the Shermans elbow past the Popes and the McClellans.
In terms of space, NASA has been at peace since the late sixties, and hasn’t had the necessary crisis to bring forth the war-fighting generals, though the current budget crunch may make it happen. We’re starting to see some signs of it (e.g., Phil McAlister). The problem remains, though, that space isn’t important. Until it is, we won’t take it seriously.
Call Your Congressperson
Both the Space Access Society and the Space Frontier Foundation have put out political action alerts. From SAS: Continue reading Call Your Congressperson