Category Archives: Space

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

Ignorance On Space Power

8 Comments

I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:

Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.

…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.

The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.

And then we have this:

there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.

First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:

Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.

Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:

Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.

“…astronomical…” Sigh…

And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?

The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:

As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?

Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.

Space, Technology and Society

Landers, Schmanders

21 Comments

Could we get back to the moon with an elevator?

It’s certainly a lot easier problem, and one more within current tech, than one from earth. This is the kind of innovation that NASA should have been pursuing, instead of redoing Apollo.

Of course, an interesting question is how you’d get to other locales on the moon, so you’d still need a hopper of some kind (pretty much functionally equivalent to a lander, except for total impulse requirements), but if you could manufacture fuel at the base of the elevator, you could deliver it to orbit with the elevator, and to the rest of Luna with the hoppers/tankers, really opening up the whole planet, while dramatically reducing costs of operating in cis-lunar space. For example, whether it made more sense to get to the south pole by going down the elevator, and then hopping, or direct descent from the Lagrange point using lunar propellants would be a function of the relative economics and propellant prices in the two locations. These are the kinds of studies that it would be nice to see out of an architecture revisit. It begs the development of scenario simulation tools (that would make for interesting sim games for the general populace as well…).

[Update a few minutes later]

It seems entirely possible that it would be cheaper to deliver propellant from the moon to LEO via elevator/high-Isp-tanker than from the surface of the earth. That would be a real game changer, but it would wipe out much of the new market for launchers. On the other hand, in-space transportation might become so cheap that it would open up vast new markets for other things. For instance, vacation cruises to the moon become much more affordable.

[Link via Clark]

Political Commentary, Space

The New Policy Starts To Take Shape

29 Comments

Clark Lindsey has a summary of the direction that the new space policy seems to be taking, based on Space News reporting:

/– NASA not likely to get the boost in budget of $3B that the Augustine panel recommends
/– Looking for ways to save money and a Deep Space Option sort of approach with no early landings on the Moon or Mars. Instead, asteroid visits and flybys.
/– ISS will be extended to 2020
/– A commercial crew competition program would get $2.5B as the panel recommends.
[/– Deep space exploration projects would get $1B starting in 2012-2013 time frame.]
/– Will also try to save money by using fixed-price contracts rather than cost-plus.
/– Looking at the possibility of a private contractor operating the ISS
/– R&D will get ~$800M rather that the $1.5B recommended by the panel.
/– Ares 1 will probably be axed. Orion could survive as a backup to a commercial capsule.
/– An amended NASA budget will be submitted to Congress in mid-Sept.

It seems much more promising, and budgetarily plausible, than Constellation ever was. I wonder how, and where, they plan to implement the fixed-price procurements? There’s no mention of robotics, but it would be nice to see some ISRU demos on the lunar surface. If successful, they would provide a lot of leverage for lunar landings. This might be a good prize program — land something on the surface that can generate TBD lbs/hour of LOX (and possibly LH2 as well).

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s an NBC news report, with complaints about job losses. And Andy Pasztor has a story at the Journal:

A presidentially appointed commission on the future of U.S. manned space efforts is wrapping up a study urging the White House to rely on commercial transportation of both cargo and crew to the space station. The commission, which presented its initial findings to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and senior White House science aides earlier this month, wants President Barack Obama to revitalize NASA by getting it out of the routine business of shuttle operations: launching to and returning from low-Earth orbit.

Instead, the commission recommends NASA rely on a combination of commercial and government-developed technologies to explore deeper into space. The study group, for example, wants NASA to start working on ways to combat the rigors of cosmic radiation, lengthy travel times and other challenges presented by possible manned missions to nearby planets and outside the solar system.

In the shorter term, companies expected to benefit from the heightened commercial focus include Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp., both already working on cargo-delivery systems for NASA. Proponents of the new approach are betting that more competition will emerge as companies see more focus on outsourcing certain missions.

Proponents of the commercial approach also say it would save the government money because companies would use their own funds to develop innovative new technologies and recoup their investments over a longer period by providing services. Such programs also are intended to be faster, more nimble and less bureaucratic than traditional NASA acquisition procedures.

With less than $10 billion annually earmarked for manned space exploration, commission members concluded NASA can’t afford to embark on sweeping new initiatives at the same time it is pursuing plans to return astronauts to the moon, most likely after 2025. One of the biggest decisions facing the White House is whether it is willing to shelve those moon ambitions, at least temporarily, even if that results in industry disruptions and job losses. That would entail ending development of an expensive new crew capsule, dubbed Orion, along with work on certain rocket and lunar-lander projects.

And of course, there is no mention of propellant depots or refueling. I’ll be curious to see what the final report has to say about them. Has there been no discussion of them, or do the reporters not understand their significance?

Also, Keith Cowing seems to have corroboration of Rocketman’s report that Bolden questions the value of the Ares-1X “mission.” And Keith displays the sunk-cost fallacy:

Given that the hardware is in place, and the money has more or less been spent, it would seem to be a total waste to not finish things up and then fly the mission.

What is the value of flying a test of a system that isn’t particularly relevant to the actual hardware when the program itself is going to be cancelled? The money has been spent, and it’s dollars over the dam, but there is still some risk involved in the flight, and I haven’t heard that the Range-Safety Office at the Cape has given the go-ahead yet. Yes, it is a waste of money, but it was always a waste of money. Let’s finally stop wasting the money.

Political Commentary, Space

Conflict Of Interest

16 Comments

There’s an interesting story over at Wired about the need for more commercial involvement in human spaceflight. And it asks the obvious question about the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) coming from Lockheed Martin:

Stevens raises some valid points, but he’s also got a clear agenda — SpaceX and other firms like it are competitors and ultimately could do the job faster, cheaper and better than NASA. The Orion program is unlikely to make it to the moon any time soon based on current budgets projected in the future. The review committee says the goal of getting back to the moon by 2020 is currently about $30 billion short. And unless an extra $3 billion a year is put back in to the NASA manned space budget, the International Space Station is likely to be the only destination in space for the United States for the foreseeable future.

Naturally Musk, Burt Rutan and many others think otherwise. If they can do it, why shouldn’t they?

And what Stevens says is nonsensical, really:

“We know how difficult it is to transport to the station and we don’t want people to cut corners, and downstream having NASA pay the penalty of the time and cost of doing this,” John Stevens, of Lockheed Martin’s human spaceflight division, told Aviation Week.

That issue aside, Stevens wonders how the government is supposed to finance NASA and a contract with someone like SpaceX. “If we can’t afford one program, how can we afford two?” he asks.

We obviously can’t afford two of the way NASA wants to do it. We can’t even afford one. But NASA plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on Ares and Orion. To date, SpaceX has developed Falcon 1, mostly developed Falcon 9 and Dragon, for something south of half a billion. Based on that history, there’s no reason to think that it will cost even a full billion to get the final ingredient of a launch escape system. We could afford dozens of programs like that, not just two, for the same money that Lockheed Martin proposes to spend on its one.

Is it because SpaceX has “cut corners”? I don’t know, but you know what? If they can save that much money by “cutting corners” and have something that people are willing to fly, I say let’s cut a lot more corners. The reality, of course, is that the “corners” they are “cutting” is not using the standing development army at Marshall and Johnson that are driving the high costs of the current NASA way of doing business. I don’t believe that such corner cutting makes it less safe than Shuttle, or Ares/Orion.

But even if it is less safe, so what? Here is the director’s cut on that topic from my New Atlantis piece:

But will it be safe to trust our precious astronauts to private launchers?

There is no such thing as safe. Despite the fantasies of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) types at NASA, “safe” and “unsafe” are not binary conditions. There is no ultimate safety, this side of the grave. All we can do is to make things as safe as reasonable, and that includes reasonable expense. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things “safe” over the decades, and they killed seventeen astronauts. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps killed a few more astronauts, but made a lot more progress. Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we’re not killing people, we’re not pushing hard enough. If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been “safe” to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that we’ve ever faced, but fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier.

Before Mercury, the test pilots who flew in that program used to attend funerals of their colleagues, who had made smoking craters in the desert, on a frequent basis. But no one else knew about them, or cared much. They were just doing their job—developing the technologies and weapons that we needed to win an existential war. When they got out of their test aircraft and climbed into a Mercury capsule, they knew it was risky, but it was a lot less so than their previous job.

A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this was where all those who would lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system would be laid to rest. And to make it big, just to make the point. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.

SpaceX is going to fly people on its Dragon, and it’s going to make it as safe as it can afford to and still have a market for it, but I doubt that they will “human rate” it, and I see no need for ULA to do so with its launcher, either. No one, after all, “human rates” an airplane. What ULA needs to do is to modify the design to make them reasonably safe, and contra the recent Aerospace Corporation report I’m confident that they can do that for a lot less than thirty-five billion dollars and in less than seven years, which is a pretty low bar to beat Ares I. If private individuals willingly climb Mount Everest every year (and many die in the attempt), and if private individuals are willing to pay their own money to fly on a private vehicle into space, what does it say about us as a nation, that the astronauts who are supposed to be super humans, willing to risk their lives, won’t do the same thing? At the risk of repetition, it says, as all of our space policy has said for the past forty years since Tranquility Base, that space is not important. It says that we are not serious about it.

This talk about “cutting corners” and safety is nothing but continued rent seeking by a government cost-plus contractor.

[Update mid morning]

It sounds like the new administrator has already made a major decision:

An honest question from the audience set the tone. “We’ve got a rocket assembled in the VAB ready for launch. Are we going to launch it?” came the inquiry from a veteran space worker.

“Well, that’s a good question,” said the Band Leader. “Since the program of record will not be recommended by the Augustine commission, I don’t see any point in continuing with the launch.”

What will Rob Coppinger say?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

The Coming Mythology

30 Comments

I found this comment over at NASA Watch (in response to Mike Griffin’s latest attempt to rehabilitate his reputation) by someone who calls himself (or herself) “AresEngineer” sort of interesting:

Where’s all this “Ares is Bad, Bad Rocket” stuff coming from? Is it because the engineers on the project are saying that it was bad from the start, or because it’s easier to just parrot the news media? The media’s philosophy is “no publicity is bad publicity”, especially when they’re screaming “Ares is finished” predicated by initial findings that we need more funding for ISS and deep-space. Yes, the Augustine Commission has found a valid reason for concern. Just remember that they’re an advisory committee, not the ones that say yea/nay to the space program. And even the President can’t sack the project…only Congress can, and there’s almost unilateral support there for deep-space missions and the Ares program. And I think the whole “Ares is going we’re nowhere” is nonsense when at this hour, a 329-ft rocket is sitting in Kennedy’s VAB getting ready for it’s first test flight…Ares IX. One-half percent of the annual federal budget to fund space (and the technological fallout inventions which produce more jobs), is a great investment. If questionable programs like Cash for Clunkers went through, Auto company bailouts went through (and don’t forget the banks), U.S. Space can get it’s 3 billion a year (until launch) too.

It combines many of the prevailing false myths of space policy: that all NASA needs to succeed is enough money, and its technical choices are irrelevant; that we get more benefit from “spinoff” than the cost of the HSF program; that deep-space missions and heavy-lift in general (and Ares in particular) are synonymous, and that the former cannot be done without the latter; that having a fake rocket stacked at the Cape is somehow indicative of progress on the program.

In the coming decades, we can expect to hear this kind of thing forever: Mike Griffin’s NASA had a great idea for how to become space faring and get back to the moon, and the rocket was almost ready to fly, but unvisionary pinch pennies in the White House and Congress decided to end the next glorious chapter in spaceflight just when it was on the verge of happening. It will be very similar to the economically and politically ignorant refrain from people who bewail the short-sighted end of the Saturn program, or the wonderful SST that would have made us competitive with the Europeans, or Orion, which would have opened up the solar system with colonies on Ganymede by now if only the politicians hadn’t been such luddites and shut it down.

I’m sure that there are and were good people and good engineers working on the program, and when it’s your job to try to build something, you salute and do the best you can. And it’s hard to motivate yourself to do your best, or even go in to work in the morning, unless you believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile, so on a program like this, it can sometimes involve a certain degree of self delusion. But not everyone was so deluded, or we wouldn’t have been getting all of the inside scuttlebutt that we have been for years, from inside Marshall, Johnson and HQ, from people like this guy. And I assume that, when the program is finally put out of its and our misery, that many working on it will be relieved to not have to continue to charge that particular trench and barbed wire, and happy to be put on something with more promise, if that happens.

But there will also be people who will go to their graves cursing the philistines who couldn’t see the magic and wonder in Ares that they did, and I suspect that “AresEngineer” will be one of them. There’s nothing we can do about it — it’s just human nature — I’m just warning you now to be ready for it.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Long Live Space Station!

4 Comments

So says Jeff Manber:

By all media accounts, including that of Augustine himself on the news shows, the officials were told that going back to the Moon or on to Mars is impossible at current budget levels. I’m happy about that—because it just seems to me that the Augustine panel’s report should focus not on another hardware project, but how the federal government procures space goods and hardware.

I’ve thought from the start that a government commission deciding which rocket should be built, or where the orbiting gas stations should be located, smacks of government planning at its worst. If all of Washington, including President Obama, can agree that despite investing $50 billion in General Motors, the auto czar has no place selecting the new models of automobiles, why should it be different for rockets or lunar modules?

For me, it was kind of a Cold War throwback to have watched as members of the Augustine panel have traveled around the country listening to engineers and industry executives talk up one launch system and bad mouth another, push for one new NASA program and throw cold water on another. Think “sunshine laws” meets a Politburo meeting.

Norm Augustine should report to the president that the problem afflicting our space program is not this hardware or that program, but the way we are spending our tens of billions for space.

Exactly.

[Afternoon update]

The Space Frontier Foundation says that Ares needs a death panel:

“Derivatives of proven commercial launch systems, and new ones under development, could meet any reasonable need for heavy lift,” said Foundation co-Founder, James Muncy. “The barrier is psychological: NASA will have to stop pretending it can design cost-effective launch vehicles and instead focus on exploration systems that fit on the launch vehicles taxpayers can really afford.”

Werb concluded: “The choice is clear. We can continue funding an overpriced, government space limousine, or we can kick-start a whole new industry that will reduce government’s costs and create new jobs. The tools of private sector innovation and competition offer our best and only chance to have affordable and sustainable human space exploration.”

Unfortunately, it’s not so clear to those who want to keep Huntsville green.

Business, Economics, Space

Doubts About Depots

29 Comments

Josh Hopkins has a thoughtful article over at The Space Review on the issues that must be addressed by proponents of propellant depots. I may have a response a little later, but I would note that Boeing has done a lot of work on the concept, and may have answers to some of the questions. In any event, we could have resolved them with a tiny fraction of the money that we just pissed away on Ares over the past four years.

[Update early afternoon]

In comments over there, Jon Goff makes one of the points that I would have had I gotten around to it (we’re getting ready to move, and writing SBIRs among other things, around here). It’s worth repeating:

2-Regarding launch costs: I think most depot researchers, like myself, would agree that if the cost for propellant delivery were truly likely to be in the $30-60kg range, that depots weren’t likely to make sense. However, is using delivery of cargo to a manned space station, where the cargo carriers themselves have to function as pressurized space station modules, really that realistic of a starting point for estimating the cost of propellant delivery to a likely unmanned depot? I know that that was probably the easiest way to do the analysis, since those numbers are available…but aren’t we setting up a strawman here? First you pick the obviously most expensive route (having the tankers be fully-functional prox-ops vehicles), and then pick one of the most expensive possible cases of such vehicles–vehicles designed to interface with a manned space station.

This is a typical tactic of opponents of an idea — to pick a worst case, and sort of imply that it’s a best one. It is not a realistic assumption, and was one of the flaws that jumped out at me at the time.

Another one is the concern about departure windows. Yes, launching from earth gives you more flexibility, but so what? If there are multiple opportunities per month from orbit (and there are, depending on how much you want to pay in delta vee for wider windows), then it doesn’t help you much to be able to launch more often from earth when your HLV architecture won’t be able to afford to launch more than a few times a year, even using the cost estimates of its most ardent proponents.

[Tuesday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts.

[Bumped]