I’m driving over from LA this morning, and hope to arrive in time for conference start. I’ll blog from there as possible.
Oh, and the title of my talk will be “Lies, Damned Lies, and Launch Costs.”
OK, I’m at the conference, listening to Henry Spencer describe the technical route from suborbit to orbit.
[Bumped]
I’m not sure whether it’s her way of celebrating April Fools Day, but Robin Snelson (aka “Rocket Sellers” in Second Life) decided to start a new blog.
I got into LA about 5 PM, and American managed to not lose my luggage this time. Henry Vanderbilt called me while I was grabbing some stuff at Trader Joe’s for dinner, and apparently I’m now scheduled to be a speaker tomorrow, if I can drive over to Phoenix in the morning sans incident. And think of something non-useless to say.
Actually, if Henry is reading this and wants to update the program, I’m going to talk about one of the most misunderstood and ignored (at least by the main aerospace establishment) topics that have kept us stuck on the planet — marginal costs.
Can anyone figure out how this story about the Falcon 9 justifies its headline?
What is the “crucial step”? When did it occur? All the story says is that the vehicle has been sitting on the pad since January which, at the end of March, hardly seems like hard, breaking news.
I’m also amused that PopSci accepts the characterization of the vehicle as “reusable.” While I hope that they can ultimately achieve that goal, that’s all it is, as I understand it. It’s not a current design feature.
If you are, you’re not very shocked. Ares 1/Orion is looking at an eighteen-month schedule slip. And no, it’s not because it was starved for money:
The problem isn’t just funding – which has become problematic for CxP over the last few years – but also what is described as “serious disconnects” between related departments, such as Orion, Ground Ops and Ares.
While continued changes to the designs of Ares and Orion are part of the natural development cycle, issues such as Thrust Oscillation and vehicle performance have come at a price for both schedule and costings, despite fine work from the engineering teams tasked with mitigating the issues.
a314CxP attempted to protect the schedule and budgetary pressures by offsetting these additional strains by deleting test items – notably on the Upper Stage. However, this only proved to cause further disconnects throughout the program.
Gosh, who could have foreseen that?
I haven’t read through the whole thing in detail, and I can see at a glance that there’s a lot to chew on, but the main point that seems to be lost is that, even if it was on budget, and on schedule, it is an intrinsic programmatic disaster from the standpoint of affordability and sustainability. Each mission would still cost billions of dollars, not even attempting to amortize the development costs, and there would be no more than a couple a year, into the indefinite future. This is not something that any sane person should be willing to spend fifty billion dollars on.
Doing Apollo made sense in the context of the Cold War, if not in opening up the space frontier. Repeating it half a century later makes absolutely no sense at all.
Rocketman thinks that a new NASA administrator has been chosen. For what it’s worth (not much, since we don’t know whether he really knows, and we don’t know who it is).
This is my kind of space research — growing flowers on the moon.
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts, in response to a couple of posts over at Personal Spaceflight, on the implications of the economic and finance problems for the industry.
Obviously a wealthier world would be better, but I suspect that it will at worst slow things down. The airlines and air transport, after all, matured a great deal during the Depression.
In case you haven’t been checking the web site (graphic link also over to the left), Henry Vanderbilt has updated it with the current list of speakers, and the conference starts a week from today. It’s really the best conference to go to all year if you want to find out what’s going on in the world of private space launch. I’m looking forward to seeing Henry Spencer’s awaited exposition on how we get to orbit from suborbit.
I usually miss the beginning of the conference in the afternoon, still being on the road from LA, partly because Henry has a stock discussion on general orbital mechanics and space access issues, but this will be a new talk, at the request of several people. It is a contentious issue, and it’s one that’s often thrown back at proponents of suborbit (“You need orders of magnitude more energy! It’s a distraction and a waste of time!”). I fully expect Henry to compellingly explain why it’s not, even if some skeptics will remain forever unconvinced (even after we do it).
Oh, and I’m not specifically slated to talk, but Henry has made great efforts to get me to come, so I assume that he’ll want to do something with me (perhaps on the wrap-up panel, if nothing else occurs to me in the interim).
The comments section in this post over at Space Politics has certainly gotten lively, with an ad hominem attack on me (after which Ferris Valyn of all people rises to my defense) and Alan Stern weighing in on his New Horizons program overruns. Not to mention that he clarifies why he left NASA, and takes himself out of the administrator race (not that his name has been floated anywhere other than by some wishful thinkers).