Clark Lindsey has his first report up, on this morning’s session on suborbital vehicles. Jeff Foust has a report on one of the talks as well, from Virgin Galactic.
[Thursday afternoon update]
Lots more over at Clark’s place. Just keep scrolling. It’s not a permalink, but I assume that he’ll put together a page of links to the posts when he gets back next week.
(Bumped from yesterday)
I’ve attended this event the past two years, but couldn’t make it this year, for lack of time, funds and justification. I also was demotivated by the cancellation of the Lunar Landing Challenge (which was recently reinstated), which was held in conjunction with it.
I’d actually like to go now, and I could afford it now, but I’m busy, and a last-minute ticket would have been pricy. But Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust are attending, and will no doubt be providing updates over the next couple days.
Mike Griffin says that criticism of NASA hurts its morale:
Griffin said critics in the media and on anonymous Internet blogs can “chip away” at the agency by questioning the motives and ethics of engineers designing the new rockets.
Briefing charts used by NASA managers sometimes show up on Web sites without the proper context, he said, and opponents of the agency’s plans to replace the space shuttle with two new rockets have wrongly accused NASA managers of incompetence and worse.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t think that I’ve ever questioned anyone’s motives or ethics. I do question their engineering and political judgment, and fortunately (for now) we live in a country in which I am free to do so. Clark Lindsey has more thoughts:
…just thinking about the Ares monstrosities hurts MY morale…I can’t think of anything more depressing than seeing a one chance in a generation opportunity to build a practical space transportation infrastructure squandered on a repeat of Apollo that consists of nothing but hyper-expensive throwaway systems.
Ditto. It’s a tragedy.
[Update a few minutes later]
There’s more over at NASAWatch:
“…it is incumbent upon us to be able to explain how a decision was reached, why a particular technical approach was chosen, or why a contract was awarded to one bidder instead of another.”
It is indeed. You’ve never really done that with the Ares/ESAS decisions. You just send Steve Cook out to say “we’ve done the trade study–trust us.”
John Hare discusses a concept for dumping propellant from a launcher to a LEO depot in a single orbit.
As I note in comments there, I don’t see any need for such a requirement. Once you’re in orbit, there’s not really that big a rush to come back. The depot has to be in a high enough orbit that it doesn’t decay rapidly, so the only cost of staying longer is crew consumables (if there is a crew). Power would presumably come from the depot itself while mated.
But it’s not only an unnecessary requirement, it’s an impossible one, other than in equatorial orbits (unless you want to wait a very long time for opportunities). Any orbit with significant inclination has a narrow launch window (at least from a given launch site–an air-launched system would have more flexibility). The likelihood that, when you get into the right orbit plane, the station will be waiting for you precisely where it needs to be to rendezvous in a single orbit it exceedingly small. That’s why it takes a couple days for Soyuz or Shuttle to rendezvous with ISS. They launch into the right orbit plane, but they have to spend several orbits catching up with it. And the faster they do it, the more propellant it costs.
As I note parenthetically above, though, you can get there directly if you have an air-launched system with significant range for the aircraft (e.g., Quickreach).
If this is true, don’t expect to see White Knight II flights as soon as Sir Richard promises.
These delays come from his misguided belief that Burt was God.
The new littoral ship that Lockheed Martin is building for the Navy is four percent overweight:
The Navy and Lockheed already have a plan to remove nearly all the additional weight from the ship over a period of about six months once the new ship, which is named Freedom, gets to Norfolk, Virginia, in December, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.
As I said, margin, margin, margin. If you miss your weight target by that much on a launch system, it’s bye-bye payload. In this case, it simply puts the ship at risk in combat.
As the emailer who sent this to me asks, “I wonder if Lockheed will remove excess weight from Orion at no additional cost.”
Unreasonable Rocket has dropped out of next week’s competition. Congratulations for all of the progress and accomplishment, regardless. And the lesson here is one that NASA seems to have forgotten–the three rules of rocket design: margin, margin, margin.
John Hare has an interesting post (if you’re into launch vehicle design issues). The myth of the air breather persists but, as John notes, if air is free, why does the service station charge more for it than gas?
This, coming from Jim Abrahamson, is pretty disappointing:
James A. Abrahamson, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and the chairman of the NAC’s Exploration Committee, praised the Constellation program to the Council at its quarterly meeting in Cocoa Beach, calling it the best program for the agency given its tight budget and schedule.
“The NAC is confident that the current plan is viable and represents a well-considered approach given the constraints on budget, schedule and achievable technology,” he said.
I agree with this comment (and I have a pretty good guess as to who made it):
One Washington-based space policy consultant said: “The NAC’s endorsement of Ares I reminds me of the so-called independent rating firms that kept saying that Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG were just fine.”
Yeah, I don’t think that the NAC is all that “independent.” By its nature, it tends to consist of space industry insiders drinking their own bathwater. Looking over the Exploration Committee, it doesn’t strike me that any of the members are space transportation experts (and no, you don’t become one by being an astronaut, as proven by Horowitz…). But I thought that Abrahamson was smarter than that.
Popular Mechanics has the top ten world changing technologies, with video, including the Mars Phoenix lander.