Category Archives: Space

Economics, Space

Apollo Is Over

33 Comments

But some people can’t get over it:

The Flexible Path tries to satisfy everyone with a long laundry list of destinations, but it is more noteworthy for what it pushes back to the end of the line. The Program of Record (Vision for Space Exploration) has the objectives of manned landings on the Moon and Mars. The Flexible Path does the opposite—an anti-Vision—and tries to do everything except manned landings on the Moon and Mars. Lunar landings are replaced with lunar orbits, and Mars landings are replaced by Mars flybys and possibly Mars orbits. “Look but don’t touch” eliminates the servicing of surface equipment, in-situ resource utilization, and sample return for the Moon and Mars. Manned flights are two-way missions, so removing sample return is particularly short-sighted. The Augustine report includes part of a quotation from President Kennedy: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” If the Flexible Path had been around during Kennedy’s time, all the Apollo landing missions would have been cancelled.

Sigh…

I’m sorry that Mark Whittington’s stupid “Look but don’t touch” phrase seems to be picked up by more and more people, because it’s so misleading. Not doing the planetary surfaces first is not an “anti-vision.” It is simply a different vision, and much more practical one. I will say that “flexible path” is not my preferred plan — I would in fact go chase the lunar rainbows sooner than later, but it’s the best path of any of the proposed Augustine alternatives, because the methods that NASA has chosen for lunar return are simply unaffordable. And it doesn’t eliminate planetary excursions — it just puts them off until they do become more practical, and we’ve developed more deep-space experience. The commission continues to see human Mars landings as an eventual goal. But if you’re going to do that, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to me to go to Phobos or Deimos first, which requires much less earth-departure propellant, with the potential for getting more propellant from those bodies for expeditions down the gravity well.

And suppose that instead of the lunar goal, Apollo had in fact been about beating the Russians to an asteroid, or Phobos, in an unsustainable manner (as the lunar missions were performed)? How would we be any worse off today? In neither case would it have been about opening up space.

The Flexible Path attempts to replace the Ares 5, capable of lifting 160+ metric tons to low Earth orbit, with a less capable launch vehicle, going as low as the 75 metric tons of the EELV-derived vehicle. The notion that the Flexible Path brings us closer to Mars is dispelled by this push for a less capable launch vehicle. Being physically closer to Mars, in terms of distance, does nothing if it runs away from the energy and mass requirements of a Mars landing. The variety of missions possible using the Ares launch vehicles is actually wider and more diverse than what the Flexible Path allows. The Ares launch vehicles are certainly more than capable of launching missions to Lagrange points, near-Earth objects, and any other destination on the list. Reduced capabilities make the Flexible Path decidedly inflexible.Sigh…

This is an extremely simple-minded view of “capabilities.” Is a vehicle with a larger payload better than one with a smaller payload? Yes, all other things being equal. But all other things are rarely equal. One has to take a total systems approach to determine the optimum, and not just focus on a single system element (this applies to safety as well as cost, by the way). If, for example, one can buy ten flights of the smaller vehicle for the cost of a single flight of the larger one, which is better? It’s hard to say, unless one looks at the total mission cost, including amortization of development, as well as legacy value toward the future. Unless one imagines that one will be able to do a Mars mission with a single launch of Ares V (and even its proponents admit that you can’t), then eliminating it does not necessarily affect ability to get to Mars at all.

Consider two alternate architectures. One invests in the development of a large launch system sized for (say) a lunar mission, and ignores the orbital operations necessary to assemble pieces in orbit, or to fuel them. The other takes the money that could be spent on launch systems and instead focuses on the latter technologies, using them to leverage the transport capabilities of existing or slightly modified vehicles.

At completion of development, the former has a lunar transport system (as long as it doesn’t go down for some reason) that has no other capabilities, because it is too small to go anywhere else, and there was no investment in the orbital technologies necessary to do multiple launches with it. And if it goes down for some reason for some significant period of time (as every launch system has to date, other than the EELVs, and it may just be a matter of time for them), the entire enterprise is shut down. If one wants to go to Mars, it will be necessary to either develop those technologies originally spurned, or to develop a (perhaps impossibly) larger-yet launch system. And each flight will be horrifically expensive, and the vehicle will never develop high reliability, because its flight rate will be too low. This is taking the fundamental mistake of the Shuttle (which was not reusability) and tripling down on it.

On the other hand, the latter course provides a system which can assemble arbitrarily large interplanetary missions in orbit to any destination, using a variety of launch systems, ensuring that any one of them standing down does not prevent human space missions beyond LEO. So which one is truly flexible, not to mention resilient?

The Flexible Path replaces set destinations and set dates with a hazy cloud of uncertainty. NASA did not achieve Apollo like this. If the Flexible Path is as good as its proponents say, why will it be applied to human spaceflight exclusively? The entire space agency should have a chance to experience this new transformative policy. But with lesser objectives, lesser launch vehicles, and a lesser budget, it is unlikely the rest of the agency would enjoy the experience.

Let me say it one more time. It doesn’t matter how NASA achieved Apollo, for two reasons. First, Apollo had nothing to do with space. Second, NASA had an essentially unlimited budget with which to accomplish the goal, which was not to open space to humanity, but to beat the Russians in a technological joust. Until we understand this, and stop yearning for something that never was, and never will be, we will continue to waste billions of taxpayers’ money on Cape spectaculars, and never make much progress in space.

I would add one more point, for those who fear the Yellow Menace on the moon, or any other nation that follows the Apollo paradigm. Space will not be opened by throwing large vehicles away a few times a year. If we couldn’t afford it, at the height of our power and influence in the sixties, why should we believe that any other country can?

[Update in the late afternoon]

Incoherent in his apoplexy, seething with unreined rage, foaming at the mouth and eyes bulging, beard afire, Mark Whittington leaps so hard at his chain that he breaks it, and pounds out incomprehensible gibberish on his keyboard about this post and the previous one.

What?

I’m exaggerating? You don’t say…

I also think it’s hilarious that his permalinks still have double page markers, after all these years of running that blogspot blog.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ray from Vision Restoration blog makes a very good point over there:

The Program of Record has virtually nothing to do with the Vision for Space Exploration except at the most superficial level, such as the initial destination (the Moon). The Flexible Path as outlined in the report is a lot closer to the Vision for Space Exploration than the Program of Record. Check out the Vision for Space Exploration documents, the Augustine Committee report, and the status of Constellation – or see some (of many) examples here of how far the Program of Record is from the Vision for Space Exploration.

It is really annoying to have to deal with commentary by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t even bother to read the class assignment. Including Mark Whittington.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Setting It Up

4 Comments

…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:

Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.

Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?

By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.

Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:

SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.

Indeed.

Political Commentary, Space

None Of The Above, Continued

13 Comments

That remains my choice among NASA’s heavy-lift options. Doing a new Saturn V seems particularly crazy to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

More over at the Orlando Sentinel space blog. It’s an interesting point that one of the (many) issues with solids is that they are a lot harder to transport to the pad. And I don’t think that the human spaceflight program should be held hostage to the Pentagon’s need to keep ATK in business for military solid work. If it’s important to national security to have a solid manufacturer available, then let them pay for it, instead of perverting NASA’s launch systems and budget.

Media Criticism, Space

This Is Like A Bad Joke

13 Comments

Time has named the Ares-I the “Invention of the Year“:

TIME’s best invention of the year may send Americans back to the Moon and put the first human on Mars.

Do they even know that it can’t deliver people beyond earth orbit? On the other hand, it is really tall…

This kind of technological illiteracy is pathetic, but it’s what I’ve come to expect from the likes of Time.

[Mid-morning update]

From a reader:

My company was selected for a Time “Invention of the Year.” Hooray, we thought. Then the phone calls from Time started. A bored 20-something with a false Valley girl accent called to talk to the inventor of the thing we had been nominated for. We responded that there was no one person, it was a company-wide effort. It took, and I do not exaggerate, at least 30 minutes to get it through her head that “company” meant “more than one person.” Then the so-called fact checker wanted to know how the one person got the idea for the invention. We patiently explained that it was the company’s job to make such products and that more than one person had contributed to the idea and the building of our nifty little gadget. The fact checker did not know the difference between a pound and a kilogram, had no knowledge of basic chemistry, had never heard of the founders in our field, and didn’t even know what our gadget looked like. Subsequent calls did not remove the impression of careless indifference. Time never did get the story right.

Since that day I have never trusted a single story from Time. Not one. If the writers and editors can’t understand the difference between a pound and a kilogram, what else are they missing?

A lot. It’s a lot easier to just grab a press release from NASA PAO than to have to actually understand what the hell you’re talking about..

[Mid-afternoon update]

More thoughts on the cluelessness of this from Keith Cowing.

Popular Culture, Space

Because I Didn’t Have Time

27 Comments

Clark Lindsey has done us all the favor of reviewing The Space Review today. Like him, I was struck by Tayylor Dinerman’s completely ignoring ULA in his discussion of the “burgeoning” commercial space industry. But even more, I agree that Dwayne Day’s broad conclusion about public interest in space and space settlement from a single stupid network program is absurd:

The paradigm that near-term space can only involve a small number of people in a small habitat doing technical and scientific tasks does not lend itself to great story telling. Conflicts are required for compelling stories and lots of different types of conflicts are needed to generate enough stories for a compelling TV series. I think the “nearest” near future space scenario that could generate an interesting diversity of plots with a diversity of characters would involve a couple of thousand people populating multiple LEO space stations and habitats at a Lagrange point and bases on the Moon. Commercial, government, and international activities of various kinds would inevitably lead to all sorts of conflicts.

Let’s ignore the fact that most television shows (and particularly Big (though becoming smaller) Three Network television programs) fail, often epically. Big media, like (apparently) Dwayne, remain stuck in the Apollo paradigm of space being about a few civil servants doing science and exploration, at great government expense. Here’s an idea. Try a show about real space pioneers and see how popular it is. IIRC, “Lost In Space” actually did pretty well back in the sixties, or at least a lot better than the schlock that Dwayne reviewed. It’s not the sixties any more, but let’s give it a try anyway. It’s not like LIS was based on the NASA paradigm, so that wouldn’t explain its sixties success, right?

Political Commentary, Space

The Quality Of Mercy

3 Comments

Courtney Stadd will not have to serve any time in prison:

A former top NASA official was sentenced Friday to three years probation, six months of electronic monitoring and a $2,500 fine for steering contract money to a private client.

…The courtroom was nearly filled with dozens of Stadd’s supporters, many of whom wrote the judge attesting to his good character.

…”The government called this corrupt and a lack of integrity,” Collyer said. “I think it was a closer call than that.

“The jury found that whatever the lack of clarity in ethics briefings, it does not excuse his actions,” she said.

After Stadd told the judge he and his family have been devastated by the case, Collyer said that prison time was not needed to protect the public. However, she said, the sentence she imposed would “send a message to other government employees” to conduct themselves with the highest ethical standards.

Sounds like a sensible judge. Good for Courtney and his family. And it remains galling that no one from the Justice Department seems to be investigating Charlie Rangel.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

NGLLC Ceremony

3 Comments

Clark Lindsey has a first-hand report:

Mr. Bolden, a couple of House members and a representative of the administration all said very good things about not just the NGLLC but about prizes in general and their ability to leverage lots of innovation and productivity at low cost. Got the impression that there will be more money coming for Centennial Challenges and other prize programs.

Dave Masten and Phil Eaton gave brief but eloquent remarks.

Two former NSS executive directors were there: Lori Garver, now Deputy NASA Administrator, and George Whitesides, now NASA’s Chief of Staff. With entrepreneurial firms getting big checks via an innovative program like Centennial Challenges, which was inspired by the X PRIZE, and with space advocates in NASA management, I get the feeling that the NewSpace current is starting to flow into the mainstream.

Whatever comes of the Constellation mess, this at least is encouraging.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Chuck Divine also attended, and has more details.