Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Impatience

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In the comments section of a post public support for the space program over at Space Politics, a twenty something asks a damed good question:

Those who support the current lunar program often forget the opportunity costs. There are better ways to spend the same money on developing space. I’m 24 – with the current Constellation program plan, I’ll be in my mid 30s by the time we get back to the moon. If we operate the system for a decade or two after that, as is likely, all I can expect in my career is to see 4 people land on the moon twice a year. That is not exciting – nor is it worth the money. Maybe by the time I retire we’ll be looking at another “next generation system”.

What’s the point of any of this for someone my age?

Well, it’s been more than a couple decades since I was twenty something, but it seems like there’s even less point for someone my age. Why in the world does Mike Griffin think that anyone, other than those getting a paycheck from it, are going to be inspired by such a trivial goals?

Of course, as usual, we heard the typical chorus of “space is hard, and it will take a long time, and you’re doing it for your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-great…grandchildren.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There was nothing inevitable about ESAS, and it isn’t written in granite that government space programs must do the least possible with the greatest amount of money, and the money invested provide such a poor return in either output or future capability on which to build. It is likely that this will be the case, but it’s not inevitable. As I’ve said many times, we won’t have a sensible government space program until space (that is, actual progress in space, not jobs in certain districts) becomes politically important. The last time that occurred was in the 1960s, and even then, it wasn’t politically important to have sustainable progress–only a specific space achievement (and that only because it had almost arbitrarily become a technological gladiatorial arena).

Anyway, Jon Goff followed up with a good comment, and then a blog post on the subject:

If our current approach to space development was actually putting in place the technology and infrastructure needed to make our civilization a spacefaring one, I’d be a lot more willing to support it. Wise investments in the future are a good thing, but NASA’s current approach is not a wise investment in the future. It’s aging hipsters trying to relive the glory days of their youth at my generation’s expense.

Patience is only a virtue when you’re headed in the right direction and doing the right thing. If Constellation was truly (as Marburger put it) making future operations cheaper, safer, and more capable, then I’d be all for patiently seeing it out.

While Constellation might possibly put some people on the moon, it won’t actually put us any closer to routine, affordable, and sustainable exploration and development. I have no problem with a long hard road, just so long as its the right one.

Unfortunately, it comes back to the fact that we never have had that serious national debate about space, and why we have a space program, that we so badly need (and despite his wishy-washy words now, I doubt that it will happen in an Obama administration, either). As the Chesire Cat said, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

PR Stunt Delayed

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If this report is true, it looks like NASA is not going to hit its milestone of the first test flight of the Potemkin RocketAres 1-X vehicle planned for a year from now:

Ares I-X now has little chance of making its April, 2009 launch date target, initially due to the delay of STS-125’s flight to October.

The first Ares related test flight requires the freeing of High Bay 3 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and Pad 39B – which will first host STS-125’s Launch On Need (LON) rescue shuttle (Endeavour/LON-400) – being vacated for modifications ahead of Ares I-X.

However, a new problem has now come to light with the MLP (Mobile Launch Platform) that will be handed over from Shuttle to Constellation for the test flight. This problem relates to the stability of Ares I-X during rollout to the Pad.

The modifications to the MLP initially called for Ares I-X to be placed on one set of the existing Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) hold down posts, with a tower to be erected on the other set of hold down posts – with support for the vehicle between the tower and the interstage level.

When NASA changed contractors for the MLP work associated with Ares I-X, the design changed, omitting the adjacent tower, instead relying on three steel cables – 120 degrees apart – to help hold the vehicle steady during rollout.

Given the projected weight of the vehicle at rollout – with a heavy dummy upper stage – additional stability is now being called for, leading to a redesign of the MLP support structure.

In combination with the projected delay to handing over Shuttle resources post STS-125, internal scheduling is showing 60 to 90 days worth of delay to Ares I-X’s projected launch date.

Gee, it’s always something. Guess that’s what happens when you come up with a new vehicle concept with a ridiculously high aspect ratio, that makes a whip antenna look positively zaftig. Has anyone ever had to use guy wires on a rocket before, or is this another proud first for our nation’s space agency?

Anyway, as it goes on to point out, this probably will waterfall down through the whole schedule, further increasing the dreaded “gap.” Not that it will matter that much, once the budget gets whacked in the next administration, regardless of who is president. But then, maybe if they’d come up with an implementation that actually appeared to have some relevance to peoples’ lives, instead of redoing people’s grandfather’s space program, they’d get more public support, instead of ever less.

It’s hard to see how this ends well, at least for fans of Apollo on Steroids. But it’s mostly irrelevant to those of us who want to see large-scale human expansion into space. That will have to await the private sector.

Space

OK, What Am I Missing Here?

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NASA apparently plans its first Ares flight test a year from today.

The April 2009 flight will be the first of four test fights for the rocket’s first stage, derived from the current space shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters. In particular, NASA hopes the flight will validate measures it is now undertaking to quell an anticipated vibration issue in the booster system, which could pose problems down the line for the survivability of later variants of the rocket.

The flight will also demonstrate the abilities of the first-stage flight control systems to keep the “single stick” rocket on course, without the benefit of control fin surfaces.

For the first test flight, NASA will use a four-segment booster, topped with an empty fifth segment. Replicas of an Ares 1 second stage, Orion space capsule and launch abort system rocket will ride up top. The dummy segments will feature correct exterior detailing for aerodynamics testing, and will weigh about the same as their real-life counterparts.

“It’s made to look a lot like the Ares 1 vehicle, but it’s a very different animal,” said NASA lead ground operations engineer Tassos Abadiotakis. “We’re also going to get some aerodynamics data, some thermal data — just the basic rocketry laws to make sure what we’re proposing to go fly for Ares 1 actually is going to perform as advertised.”

OK, so, if it’s “a very different animal,” how is it going to validate the real animal? I thought that the concern with the vibration was the fact that they’ve never flown a five-segment booster, and don’t know what its resonant modes will be. I don’t see how flying an four-segment booster with an empty casing on top resolves those concerns in any way. Why can’t they fly a five-segment booster? Presumably because it won’t be far enough along in development to allow a test flight a year from now.

And will the upper stage be just a dummy mass, or will it be active? I thought that the Ares was supposed to get roll control from the upper stage, since it has no way of doing it with the booster (as the article points out, it has no fins, and even if it did, they’d be useless once it left the atmosphere). The first stage can control pitch and yaw through gimbaling, but absent some kind of control jets on the circumference, there’s no way for it to control roll on its own.

So, just what is it that this test is supposed to accomplish? Other, of course, than getting something on the pad and flying it to maintain program momentum at a time that a new administration is coming in and considering what to do with it?

[Update on Thursday morning]

I’ve gotten more than one private email from program insiders that this is a political stunt, not a useful engineering test.

Economics, Space

Long Term Space Budgeting

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In Monday’s part 1 of “VSE and the Retirement of Baby Boomers,” Charles Miller and Jeff Foust port the conventional wisdom about budgeting to the space discussion. These are two of the most well-read, connected and smart people on space topics. I’d like to give folks addressing this issue some more texture to add some items that are not part of the conventional intergenerational budget debate which can be summarized perennially as “vote for me or things will all go to hell pretty soon if they aren’t already there”, but every year real personal income rises and real government spending minus interest payments rise; life expectancy goes up and almost all the Cassandras are proven wrong, but by then they’ve long since moved on to the next pending calamity. Here are the unconventional texture points:

  • Personal income is continuing to rise ahead of inflation such that every generation earns about twice as much per capita as the one before
  • That is, a falling percent of the federal budget should still buy more robotics, rockets, science, human spaceflight, exploration (and settlement?!) even as it buys fewer staffers and is a lower share of GDP
  • Bracket creep, estate tax and alternative minimum tax are going to increase receipts above historical revenues and changes that fix these are likely to fix macro spending issues at the same time
  • The boomers are likely to work part time or full time during retirement years
  • The boomers are more comfortable with the stock market and are likely to earn higher returns there than previous generations of pensioners
  • The boomer echo will put more workers in the worker to retiree ratio again as the boomers die off before the boomer echo generation retires
  • Between Federal, State, County and Local taxes, we are taxed together at above the monopoly rate; if there were a coordinated decrease, revenues would increase for each
  • Private spending on human spaceflight will rise and is already about 0.3% of NASA spending; depending on how you count capital spending by people like Bigelow, it’s in the single digit percent
  • First-party State, County and Local spending and incentives for space flight will increase as more states cross the income threshold of the US and USSR economies in the late 1950s which was about 1/8 what it is now for the US. California has already crossed this. Texas and New York will in the next 20 years. If space gets cheaper, Florida may enter the ranks of states that could have their own space programs. Initiative by a vocal minority may rocket this issue into the fore. Oklahoma and New Mexico are more like the USSR in the space race looking at space as a way to look far bigger than their economies suggest and to leap frog other states in an emerging industry. The Soyuz is still flying and is now profitable even as Russia has an economy 1/6 the size of the US (USSR had 1/2 the US economy in 1960) so the space portion of their strategy is validated. And may even work for New Mexico which has about 1/12 the size of the 1960 USSR economy now
  • Boomers dying will likely dry up support for a cargo-cult do-nothing NASA as memories of Apollo die with them; Obama can be seen as a coming attraction of how the next generation will treat NASA
  • Support for ITAR and missile counter proliferation will wane, but existing techniques will ossify as civilian launches start to dwarf military ones as long as there is no space 9/11 which has a mixed effect on cost of flight
  • Competition and achievement from the private sector will put pressure on budgets to achieve more value for the dollar, but at the same time make obtaining that value easier
Business, Space

Rocket Racing Competition

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Alan Boyle has more info on this morning’s press announcement from the Rocket Racing League. It looks like they haven’t necessarily dropped XCOR as a supplier (as I previously speculated–note that there is a comment in that post, ostensibly from someone from the RRL, saying it was good news for everyone), but are looking for more competition for propulsion, so now they’ll have a kerosene engine from XCOR and an alcohol engine from Armadillo. If they can spread the wealth and expand the industrial base for these technologies, that’s all to the good.

And this should gladden the hearts of LLC competitors:

Carmack recently said he would make rocket engines available to customers at a cost of $500,000 apiece. He declined to say exactly how much the racing league was paying Armadillo for the current project – but he said the project had a higher priority than Armadillo’s renewed push to win the NASA-funded Lunar Lander Challenge.

That could conceivably mean that they won’t even bother, and will leave the money on the table for someone else, but even if they compete this year, their chances of winning will be reduced if they’re not focused on it, so it could represent an opportunity for Masten, Unreasonable Rocket, and others.

Anyway, I’m glad to see this industry finally (literally) getting off the ground. I wrote a paper at STAIF ten years ago that we needed a racing industry to push the technology, just as occurred in the auto (and air) racing business. A lot of people at the session in which I presented it were skeptical at the time, but it looks like my vision is finally coming to fruition.

[Mid-morning update]

Here’s another pre-press-conference report from the New York Times.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Clark Lindsey live blogged the press conference via call-in. I don’t see any mention of XCOR.

Political Commentary, Space

A Space Race To Worry About

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Unlike the Chinese slow-motion space program, if the Russians are serious about this, it would put them well ahead of us in spacefaring capability, and in a much better position to do missions not just to the moon, but out into the solar system.

According to Perminova, Roskosmos proposed the establishment of a manned assembly complex in Earth orbit. The government Security Council on April 11, supported the idea. The complex can be built ships too heavy to take off from the ground.

What a concept.

But we won’t have to worry about NASA getting involved in such a race as long as Mike Griffin and the giant-rocket fetishists are in charge.

[Update about 9:30 AM EDT]

This isn’t directly related, but what are the Russians talking about here?

Perminov said Friday that Russia may stop selling seats on its spacecraft to “tourists” starting in 2010 because of the planned expansion of the international space station’s crew.

He said the station’s permanent crew is expected to grow from the current three to six or even nine in 2010. That will mean that Russia will have fewer extra seats available for tourists on its Soyuz spacecraft, which are used to ferry crews to the station and back to Earth.

This is the first I’ve heard of such an “expectation.” While I have no doubt that a fully-constructed station could support that level of crew, what do they do about lifeboats? My understanding has always been that the limiting factor on how many crew the station can handle at once is a function of the ability to return them to earth in an emergency. I’ve never agreed with that philosophy, and always thought that a backup coorbiting facility was a much better solution than evacuating the entire crew back to earth, but what I thought has never mattered. Are they proposing to leave crew without a way home, or adding docking modules for additional Soyuz (you’d need three to evacuate nine)? It has to be one or the other, at least until we get Dragon, or Orion or other alternatives flying, and certainly the latter is unlikely by 2010.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Obama’s Space Policy

Well, he still doesn’t have one, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about these comments, as far as they go:

Q: What do you plan to do with the space agency? Like right now they’re currently underfunded, they, at first they didn’t know if they were going to be able to operate Spirit rover. What do plan to do with it?

Obama: I think that, I, uh. I grew up with the space program. Most of you young people here were born during the shuttle era. I was the Apollo era. I remember, you know, watching, you know, the moon landing. I was living in Hawaii when I was growing up, so the astronauts would actually, you know, land in the Pacific and then get brought into Honolulu and it was incredible memories and incredibly inspiring. And by the way inspired a whole generation of people to get engaged in math and science in a way that we haven’t – that we need to renew. So I’m a big supporter of the space program. I think it needs to be redefined, though.

We’ve kind of lost a sense of mission in terms of what it is that NASA should be trying to achieve and I think that we’ve gotta make some big decisions about whether or not, are we going to try to send manned, you know, space launches, or are we better off in terms of what we’re learning sending unmanned probes which oftentimes are cheaper and less dangerous, but yield more information.

And that’s a major debate I’m going to want to convene when I’m president of the United States. What direction do we take the space program in? Once we have a sense of what’s going to be most valuable for us in terms of gaining knowledge, then I think we’ll able to adjust the budget so that we’re going all out on what it is that we’ve decided to do.”

I’ve long said that we need to have a national debate on what we want to do in space, and why–something that hasn’t really happened since NASA was chartered, half a century ago, so I would certainly welcome such a debate in the unfortunate event of an Obama presidency.

My question is, though: why wait? Why not have the debate now, so we can decide who we want to vote for, at least for those of us for whom space is a voting issue (if not the only consideration). What would be the venue and framework for the debate? What does Senator Obama think that the potential options are? Will he be constrained by past thinking, of space as the province of NASA and astronauts, with billions of dollars flowing in its porcine manner to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, or will he be open to both goals and means that are more innovative than we’ve seen from any previous administration, including the Bush administration? Will he be a candidate for “hope” and “change” for the high frontier?

Well, like all his other positions, he does offer “hope” and “change” for space with the above words, but not clue one as to what we should be hoping for, and what form the “change” will take. In other words, as on other issues, he continues to deal in platitudes, and is unwilling to take a stand, or even discuss potential options, for fear of alienating the voters, who he hopes will continue to view him as a political Rorschach test, and see in his space policy, as in all his policies, what they want to see.

So while I hope that if elected, we will have that national dialogue about space, I don’t have any high expectations either that it will actually happen, or that anything useful will come out of it, because he offers me no substance now.

Of course, even if he told me that he’s going to do all of the things that I’d like to see from a space policy standpoint, it wouldn’t be sufficient to get me to vote for him because a) I couldn’t be sure that he meant it, given his flip flopping on other issues, 2) his positions on other issues are too odious to allow me to be a single-issue voter on space and 3) even if sincere, there’s no reason, given his complete lack of executive experience, that he will have any success whatsoever in implementing them.

Still, I’d sure like to see that national debate.