John Hare has some thoughts on boxes, and thinking in or out of them.
Category Archives: Space
Not Just A Wind Problem
There’s a good article over at NASA Spaceflight on the lift-off drift problem of the Ares 1.
Safe, simple, soon. Scam.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More at the Orlando Sentinel, on the Congressional Budget Office finding that the vehicle can’t hit its IOC date without billions more. And there will still be a gap.
Billions of dollars to develop a new vehicle we don’t need, when we could have been flying something by 2010 or 2011 with Steidle’s original plan.
Raise Shields, Captain
They’re developing a magnetic shield to protect space travelers from radiation. This is a critical technology for a spacefaring civilization.
Geezersat
A commercial comsat is being retired after thirty-two years. The original design life was five. Space hardware tends to be overdesigned, but I wonder how they had enough propellant to go that long?
It’s Getting Harder And Harder To Surprise
The Orion spacecraft program was reviewed with the wrong configuration. There’s more here:
So an older, immature design of the Orion capsule is brought up for review and passes muster, when it fact it lacks many of the features a flight worthy capsule would have (e.g., a weight that would be liftable, a means of landing that won’t kill the occupants) along with several that a real vehicle wouldn’t have (e.g., extra amounts of hot water for BroomHilda’s cauldron).
That’s not the way the process is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, the IG’s office, not known for their brilliance or their ethics, took the ESMD Viceroy’s non-concurrence with their findings and said, “ok, so sorry to have bothered you,” and moved on.
Can’t anyone here play this game? How much longer before this misbegotten program augers in?
Government Space Programs
Clark Lindsey points out the inherent problem:
I’ve certainly always believed that NASA can get anything to fly with enough time and billions of dollars. The issue is cost-effectiveness. This vehicle, which is obsolete for the 20th century much less the 21st, is simply not going to pay off in terms of making space exploration cheaper or safer.
Ignoring its gigantic price tag for the moment, if Ares I were just one of several competing commercial rocket vehicle projects funded in a COTS type of program, I have no doubt that NASA would have been canceled it long ago just on technical grounds and missed milestones. Unfortunately, when a large project is developed internally, it becomes virtually impossible to stop, especially in a case like this where the top management is so deeply invested in it. The next administration might take another look at Ares but unfortunately the battle for Florida votes has left both candidates committed to it as a jobs program. Such is how a promising vision for space exploration finds itself hung by a boondoggle.
While I agree, I have to say that the last sentence sounds painful. And at least psychically, it is.
Lessons For Space Transport Development
Henry Spencer has some useful thoughts (as always) on Armadillo’s accomplishment, and failure.
Don’t Know Much About Launch Costs
The Space Review is up (a little late–it’s usually available first thing Monday morning, but Jeff is probably recovering from his trip to New Mexico), and it has a couple interesting articles. The first one describes the benefits of amateur efforts toward space settlement. The second one is a relook at the economics of O”Neill’s Island One space habitat. It’s nonsensical, because the author doesn’t understand much about the economics of space launch. Let’s start with this:
O’Neill’s expectations about launch costs (like those of other 1970s-era prophets of space development) proved to be highly optimistic, even given the disagreement about how these are to be calculated. A $10,000 a pound ($22,000 per kilogram) Earth-to-LEO price, almost twenty-five times the estimate O’Neill worked with, is considered the reasonable optimum now.
Considered so by whom? Not by ULA. Not by the Russians. Not by SpaceX. The only launch vehicle that has launch costs that high is the Shuttle, and that’s because it flies so seldom that its per-flight cost is on the order of a billion dollars. In a due-east launch, it can get close to sixty thousand pounds to LEO, and if it cost six hundred million per flight (as it did before Columbia, when the flight rate was higher), that would be about ten thousand bucks a pound. But to call this “optimum” is lunacy. Other existing launchers are going for a couple thousand a pound (the Russians are less based on price, but its not clear what their costs are, and if they’re making money). SpaceX is projecting its price for Falcon 9 to be about forty million, to deliver almost thirty thousand pounds to LEO, so that’s a little over a thousand per pound. And that’s without reusing any hardware.
But even these are hardly “optimum.” The true price drops will come from high flight rates of fully-reusable space transports, and there’s no physical reason that these couldn’t deliver payload for on the order of a hundred dollars per pound or less.
Of course we aren’t going to build HLVs for space colonies, as Gerry O’Neill proposed. If it happens, it will happen when the price does come down, as a result of other markets. But if the point is that Island One is unaffordable at current launch costs, it’s a trivial one–most intelligent observers realize that. But it’s ridiculous to think that lower launch costs can’t be achieved, or even that his stated number has any basis in reality.
More LLC Links
Clark Lindsey is back from New Mexico, and has a roundup of links about the Lunar Landing Challenge.
Jeff Foust also has a couple video interviews, with Ken Davidian and John Carmack.
Picky, Picky, Picky
Well, here’s the latest in the Perils of Ares I–it might sideswipe the gantry as it launches:
The issue is known as “liftoff drift.” Ignition of the rocket’s solid-fuel motor makes it “jump” sideways on the pad, and a southeast breeze stronger than 12.7 mph would be enough to push the 309-foot-tall ship into its launch tower.
Worst case, the impact would destroy the rocket. But even if that doesn’t happen, flames from the rocket would scorch the tower, leading to huge repair costs.
“We were told by a person directly involved [in looking at the problem] that as they incorporate more variables into the liftoff-drift-curve model, the worse the curve becomes,” said one NASA contractor, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss Ares.
“I get the impression that things are quickly going from bad to worse to unrecoverable.”
But all is not lost:
NASA says it can solve — or limit — the problem by repositioning and redesigning the launchpad.
Sure. No problem. Just reposition and redesign the launch pad. Simple, safe, soon.
NASA officials are now looking at ways to speed up the development of Ares and are reluctant to discuss specific problems. But they insist none is insurmountable.
Of course they do.
“There are always issues that crop up when you are developing a new rocket and many opinions about how to deal with them,” said Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation program, which includes Ares, the first new U.S. rocket in 35 years.
“We have a lot of data and understanding of what it’s going to take to build this.”
Yes, they have so much data and understanding that they don’t find out about this until after their fake Preliminary Design Review. And (just a guess), I’m betting that if I look at the original budget and development schedule, “repositioning and redesigning the launch pad” isn’t even in or on it.
Look, obviously, if you pick a lousy design, you can eventually make it fly, given enough time and money. But in the process, it may end up bearing little resemblance to the original concept, and if it’s neither simple (which it won’t be with all of the kludges that they’ll have to put on it to make up for its deficiencies), safe (no one really knows what the probability of loss of crew is, since they still haven’t finally even nailed down the launch abort system design) or soon, then the nation has been sold a pig in a poke. And there’s no budget line item for the lipstick either, though NASA has been attempting to tart it up as best they can.
As Einstein once said, a clever man solves a problem–a wise man avoids it. Since Mike Griffin came in, NASA has been too clever by half. Given the budget environment we’ll have next year, it’s hard to see how this unsustainable schedule and budgetary atrocity survives in anything resembling its current form.