SpaceDev has announced Scaled Composites has selected them to develop a hybrid motor for SpaceShipTwo in a $15 million contract. The point that SpaceDev was selected (not down-selected) in SpaceShipOne development was 3.25 years before winning the Ansari X-Prize. This is consistent with the duration announced for the development contract for SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor of “through 2012” with work “primarily completed over the next two years”. SpaceShipTwo will likely burn rubber getting to suborbital space.
Category Archives: Space
Change!
…and hope!
Well, not really. The Obama campaign has released its new space policy, and there’s not much breaking with the status quo in it. It’s basically sticking with the current plan, at least in civil space, but promising (as in all areas) to spend more money. While one suspects that Lori Garver must have played a major role in it, it also reads as though it was written by a committee, or different people wrote different sections, and then it was stitched together, like Frankenstein’s monster.
For instance, in one section, it says:
Obama will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities. NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services is a good model of government/industry collaboration.
But later on, in a different section, it says:
Obama will evaluate whether the private sector can safely and effectively fulfill some of NASA’s need for lower earth orbit cargo transport.
If COTS is a “good model,” why is such an “evaluation” necessary? Isn’t it already a given? I also like the notion that Obama himself would do the “evaluation.” As if.
It’s got the usual kumbaya about international cooperation, of course, which I think has been disastrous on the ISS. There are also implied digs at the Bush administration, about not “politicizing” science (as though Jim Hansen hasn’t done that himself) and opposing “weapons” in space. It also discusses more cooperation between NASA and NRO, ignoring the recent rumblings about getting rid of the latter, and the problems with security that would arise in such “cooperation.”
Also, interestingly, after Senator Obama called McCain’s proposed automotive prize a “gimmick,” the new policy now explicitly supports them. So are they no longer “gimmicks”? Or is it just that McCain’s idea was (for some unexplained reasons) but Obama’s are not?
Overall, my biggest concerns with it are more on the defense side than on the civil space side. This is utopian:
Barack Obama opposes the stationing of weapons in space and the development of anti-satellite weapons. He believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield.
Sorry, but that horse is out of the barn, and there’s no way to get it back in. No anti-satellite weapons treaty would be verifiable. It is good to note, though, that the policy recognizes ORS as a means to mitigate the problem. That’s the real solution, not agreements and paper.
In any event, it’s a big improvement over his previous space policy, which was not a policy at all, but rather an adjunct to his education policy. Now it’s time for the McCain campaign to come up with one. I hope that he gets Newt to help him with it, and not Walt Cunningham.
[Mid-morning update]
One of the commenters over at NASA Watch picks up on something that I had missed:
Sen. Obama names COTS and several other programs by name, but not Ares or Constellation. He mentions “the Shuttle’s successor systems” without specifying what they might be.
That does give him some options for real change. I also agree that a revival of the space council would be a good idea. I hope that the McCain campaign doesn’t oppose this purely because the Obama campaign has picked it up.
[Afternoon update]
One other problem. While it talks about COTS, it has no mention of CATS (or CRATS, or CARATS, or whatever acronym they’re using this week for cheap and reliable access to space). It hints at it with COTS and ORS, but it’s not set out as an explicit goal. I hope that McCain’s policy does.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bobby Block has a report at the Orlando Sentinel space blog.
This part struck me (and didn’t surprise me):
Lori Garver, an Obama policy adviser, said last week during a space debate in Colorado that Obama and his staff first thought that the push to go to the moon was “a Bush program and didn’t make a lot of sense.” But after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, “they recognized the importance of space.” Now, she said, Obama truly supports space exploration as an issue and not just as a tool to win votes in Florida.
I’m not sure that Lori helped the campaign here. What does that tell us about the quality and cynicism of policy making in the Obama camp? They opposed it before they were for it because it was George Bush’s idea? And does that mean that space policy was just about votes in Florida before this new policy? I know that there are a lot of BDS sufferers who oppose VSE for this reason, and this reason alone, but it’s a little disturbing that such (non)thinking was actually driving policy in a major presidential campaign.
George Bush greatly expanded federal involvement in education and expanded Medicare. Are they going to shrink them accordingly? I’d like to think so, but I suspect not.
Space Politics
It’s hard to think of any sitting (or past, for that matter) member of Congress who has done more for commercial space efforts than Dana Rohrabacher. He’s been representing his southern California district for many years, so I was a little surprised to hear that he’s in a potentially tough reelection battle. But his opponent is currently out-fund-raising him, and it’s going to be a generally tough year for Republicans, even those whose seats had previously been secure. So for those of you who want to keep him in Washington for his space efforts (or for other reasons), a fund has been set up to help make that happen.
The Latest On The Space Debate
Jeff Foust has a report on the debate in Boulder between Lori Garver and Walt Cunningham. As I note in comments, if Senator Obama is now interested in prizes, that would be a change of position from when he criticized Senator McCain’s proposal for an automotive prize.
On-The-Job Training
If you want to know why Constellation is such a godawful mess, here’s one reason:
NASA JSC Center Director’s Systems Engineering Forum Planned Aug. 21
There actually are people out in private industry (like me) who do this stuff for a living, or at least would, if NASA would give them a contract. But instead of putting out a SETA or some other support contract for systems engineering, as Steidle had planned to do, Dr. Griffin simply decided that NASA would do it. This is where it’s gotten him. Had he hired a good SE contractor (and listened) the program would likely not be in the kind of trouble it is, either technically or politically. Of course, it would probably look much different, because a proper systems-engineering approach would never have resulted in the Shaft. That was the danger inherent in putting a rocket scientist in charge of the agency. He thought he was smarter than everyone else.
Are You Better Off?
…than you were three years ago?
The official IOC for an Ares I crew launch vehicle able to send a crew of six to the International Space Station (ISS) in the Orion crew exploration vehicle is March 2015.
And now that the Russians have shown themselves for what they are in Georgia, isn’t it great to be dependent on them for crewed access?
Perseids
It’s that time of year again. They peak tonight (or rather, early tomorrow morning). Be sure to get out of town, though. You won’t see any but the very brightest with city lights around.
Nearing The End?
Robert Block is wondering if the Stick is dying. I liked this bit:
In the face of the latest reports of trouble, sources say that NASA leaders are looking at a possible replacement design, including one that would use the shuttle’s two four-segment solid rocket boosters, and a liquid engine with four RS-68 engines and no upper stage. While it sounds similar to a rocket called the Jupiter 120 or the Direct 2.0 concept which is being proposed by moonlighting NASA engineers, the sources insist it is not the same.
Yes. I have a literary theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, but by another blind poet with the same name.
The Latest Buzz
Alan Boyle interviews the first man to relieve his bladder on the moon, about the Moon, Mars and the Gap. And it’s great to see him (and Lois) still going strong. And as he points out, there are a lot of fortieth and fiftieth anniversary news hooks coming up. I hope to take advantage of them as well.
That Was Quick
Henry Spencer got it right (no big surprise):
The gap between engine cut off and staging was 1.5 seconds – which was fine for the ablatively cooled engine on Flight 2. But on Flight 3, with the regeneratively cooled engine, there was some residual thrust after engine shut down and this caused the first stage to be pushed back toward the second stage after separation and there was a recontact between the stages.
One of the big mistakes that people make in writing requirements is not writing proper verification statements for them. One of my rules, that I came to late in life, is to not allow a requirement to be accepted unless it has an accompanying verification statement (i.e., how you verify that the requirement has been satisfied). If you can’t write a verification statement for it, it’s not a valid requirement. The other reason is that verification is where most of the cost of a program comes from. Test is very expensive. If you can come up with ways to verify early on that don’t require it (inspection, demonstration, analysis), you can control and estimate costs much better.
One of the key elements of a proper verification statement is the environment. It’s not enough to say, “Verify, by test, that engine thrust is less than TBD Nt TBD seconds after engine shutdown.” It has to be “Verify, by test, in vacuum, that engine thrust is less than TBD Nt TBD seconds after engine shutdown.”
AMROC had a similar problem on SET-1 back in 1989, because the propulsion system testing had all taken place in the desert at Edwards, and the actual launch occurred in the humid October weather of Vandenberg, at the coast. The LOX valve iced up. The vehicle ended up catching fire and fell over and burned on the pad. There was no explosion, but it was a launch failure.
This is why systems engineering processes were developed. I’d be curious to know what kind of SE processes SpaceX had in place. And what they’ll have in place in the future…
[Late evening update]
Here’s the official statement from Elon Musk:
Timing is Everything
On August 2nd, Falcon 1 executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. At this point, we are certain as to the origin of the problem. Four methods of analysis – vehicle inertial measurement, chamber pressure, onboard video and a simple physics free body calculation – all give the same answer.
The problem arose due to the longer thrust decay transient of our new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine, as compared to the prior flight that used our old Merlin 1A ablatively cooled engine. Unlike the ablative engine, the regen engine had unburned fuel in the cooling channels and manifold that combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust that was just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.
We were aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission.
The question then is why didn’t we catch this issue? Unfortunately, the engine chamber pressure is so low for this transient thrust — only about 10 psi — that it barely registered on our ground test stand in Texas where ambient pressure is 14.5 psi. However, in vacuum that 10 psi chamber pressure produced enough thrust to cause the first stage to recontact the second stage.
It looks like we may have flight four on the launch pad as soon as next month. The long gap between flight two and three was mainly due to the Merlin 1C regen engine development, but there are no technology upgrades between flight three and four.
Good Things About This Flight
- Merlin 1C and overall first stage performance was excellent
- The stage separation system worked properly, in that all bolts fired and the pneumatic pushers delivered the correct impulse
- Second stage ignited and achieved nominal chamber pressure
- Fairing separated correctly
- We discovered this transient problem on Falcon 1 rather than Falcon 9
- Rocket stages were integrated, rolled out and launched in seven days
- Neither the near miss potential failures of flight two nor any new ones
were presentThe only untested portion of flight is whether or not we have solved the main problem of flight two, where the control system coupled with the slosh modes of the liquid oxygen tank. Given the addition of slosh baffles and significant improvements to the control logic, I feel confident that this will not be an issue for the upcoming flight four.
Elon