May occur on February 7th for the Shuttle. Hard to imagine it will beat the one we saw last year, which most program veterans agreed was the most spectacular ever.
Category Archives: Space
No More Moon
At least by NASA, if the Orlando Sentinel has it right:
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama’s long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new “heavy-lift” rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.
In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.
There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years.
As the article notes, there will be a battle royale with people on the Hill like Shelby, but it’s hard for me to see how the program will survive if the White House sticks to its guns. On the other hand, this is not a White House known for sticking to its guns.
Anyway, if that’s the new plan, it actually has a lot better prospects for getting us back to the moon than Constellation ever did, and much more affordably.
[Update a while later]
Clark Lindsey makes a good point on the politics:
Regarding the resistance in Congress to cancellation of Ares I, I’d bet the administration would love that fight. With deficits a huge concern in the general public, the killing of a giant boondoggle government rocket project is exactly the sort of symbolic act that the administration would be happy to see receive a lot of attention. The fact that most of that resistance comes from a handful of Republicans in Alabama and Texas would only highlight the irony of a situation where the President will be fighting conservatives to kill a government program and use private sector services instead.
When it comes to pork, there don’t seem to be any “conservatives.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Keith Cowing feels cheated (again):
NASA has just spent more than half a decade telling Americans that we are all going back to the Moon – and why. In the process, billions of dollars have been spent. Children have grown up being told this again and again – just like my generation heard in the 1960s. Now this is being taken away from them. I can only imagine how my generation would have reacted. It is one thing to alter a plan, change rockets, etc. But it is quite another to abandon the plan altogether.
The ISS has great potential – much of it yet to be realized. But much of that untapped potential was preparing humans to go out into the solar system. Now those destinations have evaporated and have been replaced with the elusive and ill-defined “Flexible Path”.
How is NASA going to explain this about face? Answer – they won’t – because they can’t. They are incapable of admitting mistakes or even stating the obvious. What I really want to see is how NASA attempts to explain this bait and switch to all of the students it has sought to inspire since the VSE was announced. A “Summer of Innovation” centered around a stale and contracting space program seems somewhat contradictory to me.
How will NASA – and the White House – explain the use of vast sums of taxpayer money to bail out the decisions of incompetent financial institutions on Wall Street and yet not be able to find a paltry fraction of that amount to bail out the future of space exploration that future Americans will benefit from – and participate in.
Shrug.
He apparently had far too much faith that anything was going to come of this. I was somewhat hopeful right after the announcement, but once ESAS came out, I knew that the program was doomed to failure. We’ve wasted billions and years more, but at least we’re going to stop the bleeding now. I’m much more encouraged about our prospects to get to the moon now than I have been in five years.
[Early afternoon update]
Bill Posey has fired off a foolish response:
“This Administration has thrown hundreds of billions of dollars into a failed stimulus bill, but when it comes to keeping America first in space his ‘plan’ is to cancel the development of America’s next human space vehicle, outsource our good-paying Shuttle jobs to the Russians, place all of our hopes on a yet unproven commercial adventure, rush/force the transition to yet unproven commercial alternatives, and shifts money from human space flight to global warming research.
“Until we have a clearer plan for the future, the only realistic and reasonable way to preserve America’s leadership in space is too [sic] provide for a temporary extension of the Shuttle. To terminate the Shuttle later this year with no plan, but rather a vain hope, is ill advised.
He has never proposed a realistic plan as to how to extend Shuttle. They’re running out of pieces to fly it, and the lines were shut down long ago. And I get very tired of arguments for “jobs,” good paying or not, with no apparent concern about cost or value to the taxpayer (or space enthusiast, for that matter). I grow even more tired of hearing about how an Atlas that has an almost perfect flight record is “unproven,” while Powerpoint rockets are some kind of sure thing, merely because they are being designed by NASA.
No, this isn’t exactly what I’d be doing if I were president, but it’s a hell of a lot better policy than anything we’ve had since Mike Griffin took over. I don’t even object to spending more money on climate monitoring, particularly given what a mess the science currently is — I just wish that Jim Hansen wouldn’t have any control, or even influence, over it.
Risk Averse
Wayne Hale wonders if NASA’s culture will allow it to enter a new era of private space transportation.
It all continues to come back to the fact that actual accomplishments in space are not politically important, as they were during Apollo. When something’s not important, it’s hard to justify risk for it.
What Is Exploration?
Paul Spudis has some useful thoughts. I think that confusion on this issue is one of the causes of our current space policy mess, particularly with regard to human spaceflight.
High Dive
Alan Boyle has a story on the latest attempt to break Kittinger’s record, with a side story on space diving (something that other reporting has’t mentioned).
Clueless Commenters
As is usually the case, the comments at this Andy Pasztor article on the upcoming changes to the human spaceflight program, are ignorant and often nonsensical (the usual spinoff arguments are employed — one comments corrects another that NASA didn’t invent the microwave oven, only to then claim that it invented Teflon). As is often the case, it’s a stupidly partisan debate, with Obama haters (ironically) defending a bloated government agency. Jim Muncy and Bob Werb try (probably unsuccessfuly) to inject a little sanity.
And I have to say that I really don’t understand all these comments about “outsourcing” to US private industry. The irony of course is that the current plan is to “outsource” all of US human spaceflight after Shuttle to the Russians, indefinitely, and largely because the past five years and many billions were wasted on Ares/Orion instead of providing more incentive to private industry.
Sane, Affordable And Sustainable
“Ray” over at Vision Restoration has a development approach to expanding human spaceflight beyond LEO that would actually work, and work within NASA’s constrained budget. Paul Spudis likes it, and has further comments.
Of course, it makes far too much sense to be adopted in Washington. But this is the approach that will be taken privately, regardless of what NASA does.
Crew Escape Systems
I decided to start a new post based on comments at this one, in which in response to a comment of mine, a commenter writes:
“Escape systems can actually introduce more risk than they remove, and not be worth their cost and weight. There is a reason that airline passengers aren’t issued parachutes.”
This is a rather alarming line of reasoning, the kind that led to seven dead astronauts in 1986. Of course any crewed spacecraft requires some kind of launch escape system. If Challenger didn’t prove that, nothing will.
If so, then nothing will, because Challenger proves nothing of the kind. But once again, this is the fallacy of hasty generalization. Challenger, and the Shuttle in general, don’t “prove” anything about launch systems in general, either expendable or reusable — it’s simply unreasonable to draw huge extrapolations from a single example.
One of the main reasons for abandoning the Space Shuttle is the lack of a launch escape system. Otherwise, why give up such a massively capable vehicle in favor of a 1960s throwback capsule?
There were a number of reasons to give up the Shuttle, and the lack of an escape system was one of the weaker ones. It was costing too much to operate, and becoming untenable to continue to operate it with only three vehicles left in the fleet. Each flight is costing us in excess of a billion dollars now, and if (as some fantasize) the program is extended, at an even lower flight rate, they will cost much more. And each flight risks losing another vehicle, and if that happens, continuing to operate it is simply infeasible. Cold-hearted as it sounds, we have a lot of astronauts, but we have only three orbiters, and the cost of replacing them is far beyond what it would be worth.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the basic philosophy behind the Shuttle — that the cost of an escape system, in dollars and weight, would exceed its value. The failure was in not making the vehicle as reliable as intended.
Now could the Shuttle have been made that reliable? Probably not, in the first attempt. But then, the first attempt should have been a much less ambitious system, and there should have been evolution and lessons learned from it. In a sense, Shuttle was a bridge too far, as Apollo was — a huge government program that became a self-fulfilling prophecy that we could afford only one.
Can any launch system, with today’s knowledge, be made sufficiently reliable as to not need an escape system? I think that a reusable one probably can. Recall that both Challenger and Columbia were lost as a result of expendable components. Can an expendable vehicle be made that safe? That’s more problematic, because no matter how good your quality control, every launch of an expendable is a first launch. So it may well be, depending on what level of safety you demand, that you’ll need an escape system as a backup.
You will probably always be able to find people who will ride a rocket into space whatever the risk, but if crew losses start to mount, and the public perceives that safety concerns are being overridden by bean counters, the sources of funding for manned space travel, public and private, will quickly dry up. If the Challenger and Columbia disasters had happened, say, four years apart instead of 17, U.S. manned space flight would have likely ended then and there.
That’s an interesting counterfactual, but there’s no way to know that. Many always postulate that the next disaster will kill human spaceflight, just as they claim that a single death of a passenger will kill the space tourism industry. Such claims are made in defiance of history and human nature. We killed lots of people in aviation, and still occasionally do, but the industry survives.
I know space flight will always be risky (and hence never remotely as safe as airline travel) and that overemphasizing safety will kill exploration beyond LEO, but you have to provide some kind of escape option during the most risky phase of any mission– the launch. I’m sure Elon Musk understands this and has no plan of putting crew into a Dragon capsule without an escape option.
I don’t know what Elon understands and plans, and you may be correct, but I think that it would be driven by the customer. For instance, if I were buying rides from him, I might say “…skip the escape system — I need the payload, and don’t want to take the risk (for example) of it not separating properly. I have insurance policies for my crew.” If NASA insists on an escape system, it will likely be a political decision, not necessarily one dictated by a rational probabilistic risk analysis (I’ve never seen the PRA for the Orion LAS). I know that when I was doing hazard analysis during Phase II, it wasn’t even a question we were supposed to ask — that Orion would have an escape system, was a given. But an escape system introduces a lot of new hazards into the launch, many of which can bite you on an otherwise nominal mission (e.g., failure to separate). I know that the bureaucrats are afraid of being called before Congress and having to testify that they killed astronauts because they didn’t have an escape system. But they never consider the possibility that they might be called up on the Hill to explain how they killed them only because they did. And it’s not an impossibility.
In any event, if NASA insists on an escape system, it will be a decision implicitly premised on the belief that what we are doing in space isn’t important, otherwise we’d be willing to risk crew on it. If Shuttle proved anything, it is that safety is not a binary condition, and no matter how many billions we spend in an attempt to never lose an astronaut, we’re still unlikely to be successful, particularly with a government program. So we might as well just accept the risk, and do a lot more at less cost.
[Update a few minutes later]
One more point. Several space passenger vehicles are under development, including SpaceShipTwo, Lynx, and whatever Armadillo and Masten are planning. We know that the first two don’t have a crew escape system — they are designing for reliability (actually, I only know that’s true for SS2, I’m not sure about Lynx). Armadillo and Masten may have plans, but I’m not aware.
Yes, they don’t go to orbit, but there’s nothing magic about that. There is no bright energy line on which one side an escape system is required, and on the other it is not. Every vehicle is designed to meet its requirements, one of which is some level of safety, but if too much is spent (in either dollars or weight), the vehicle design or business case may not close, and you may not even get more safety for your dollars. Fortunately, we now have a number of competing designs and can let the market sort it out, rather than a dictate from on high by the kind of idiocy represented by the ASAP.
[Update a couple minutes later]
One more. I would dispute that launch is the riskiest part of the mission. I think that Columbia is a rejoinder to that. When you look at the total risk of a lunar mission, it’s a misallocation of resources and a defiance of rational systems engineering to put so much of them into reducing the risk of launch. But misallocating resources is what a politically driven institution does.
[Another update a while later]
OK, yet another point. I wrote: There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the basic philosophy behind the Shuttle — that the cost of an escape system, in dollars and weight, would exceed its value. The failure was in not making the vehicle as reliable as intended.
I’ve made this point before, many times over the years, but it bears repeating, particularly for new readers here. Shuttle wasn’t just insufficiently reliable to carry crew without an escape system — it was insufficiently reliable, period. This is because, as I said, we have a glut of people willing to fly into space, and a shortage of vehicles with which to do so.
Any reusable vehicle must be highly reliable, regardless of whether it carries crew or not, or it becomes unaffordable (as the Shuttle did). This is why the notion of “human rating” a reusable launcher is nonsensical. It is the value, and replacement cost, of the vehicle itself that drives the reliability, not its payload, whether human or otherwise. It’s also the reason that it makes no sense to put a crew escape system in one (again, the decision to not have one in the Shuttle was the correct one). If your reusable vehicle is so unreliable that an escape system is required, it is unaffordable to operate, period.
The Norway Spiral
I’m obviously a lot less concerned about this than the Russians apparently are — I’m perfectly happy to have their missiles be unreliable. I am concerned, though, how much this deterioration in their capabilities is bleeding over into their space capabilities, and the implications for Soyuz reliability and safety as we come to rely on them for rides to ISS.
Outlived Its Usefullness
I think that, with the nonsensical report that it released on Friday, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel has demonstrated that it’s no longer a body to take seriously, if it was before. The notion that a paper rocket, that will be so expensive to operate that it will rarely fly, is safer than one with a proven track record is ludicrous. Mark Matthews has a report at the Orlando Sentinel blog. He points to perhaps the most absurd quote:
“To abandon Ares I as a baseline vehicle for an alternative without demonstrated capability nor proven superiority (or even equivalence) is unwise and probably not cost-effective,” notes the 117-page report, issued late Friday evening.
Specifically, the advisory panel attacks the idea of using commercial rockets and international partners to resupply the station, as suggested by a 10-member panel convened this summer under the direction of retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine.
The ASAP said NASA warned against putting too much faith in commercial or international spacecraft because there weren’t proper standards for safety.
The notion that anyone defending Ares is concerned with cost effectiveness is lunacy. Clark Lindsey has responded to this nonsense, and Elon Musk has put up a robust defense of his system:
“I have to say I’ve lost a lot of respect for the ASAP panel,” Musk said. “If they are to say such things, then they ought to say it on the basis of data, not on random speculation.”
…
According to Musk, the panel’s findings are “bizarre.” He says the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft “meet all of NASA’s published human-rating requirements, apart from the escape systems.”“They’ve spent almost no time at SpaceX,” Musk said. “They’ve not reviewed our data. They have no idea what what our margins are, and what is and what isn’t human-rated.”
In addition, yesterday, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation put up a point-by-point response. It’s appalling to think that this sort of thing might actually influence policy. I hope it won’t.