Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides thinks that the on-line community can help NASA come up with one.
<VOICE=”Alice“>Must…stop…fingers…of satire…</VOICE>>
Hey, there’s always the comments section.
And yes, I have emerged, blinking and confused, from SBIR proposal hell. Thanks for asking.
Live from Second Life, it’s the Frontier Spaceport. Robin Snelson reports that Colonel Smith is going to report to the Pentagon that SPS is viable.
We’ll see.
[Update about mid morning.]
Colonel Smith (aka “Coyote”) explains why the DoD is interested in power from space.
Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.
Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.
Almost half a century after the first orbital launch by the Soviets, and in the wake of another failure of a supposedly “reliable” Russian launcher, Clark Lindsey has a brief, but appropriate rant about our national failure to develop reliable and low-cost access to space, a goal that NASA is not only doing very little about, but, by building yet another horrifically expensive throwaway, actually spending billions to delay.
You’re going to see a lot of these kinds of pieces as we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, now only one month away. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably come up with a version of my own in the next few weeks.
This article on testing satellite shielding against space debris is a good reminder that even if NASA solves the foam problem, or someone comes up with a new reusable vehicle concept that isn’t subject to debris during ascent, that space vehicles will always be vulnerable to orbital debris:
An object less than 0.05 inch across blew a hole through a section near the payload door of the shuttle Atlantis during its mission last September, according to the July edition of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News journal.
The damaged section was replaced.
Had the object, which investigators think was a piece of a circuit board, hit the thinnest part of the wing edge, “There is a question whether the vehicle would have survived re-entry,” said Eric Christiansen, a NASA engineer specializing in debris shielding.
A spacefaring nation will have the capability to do repairs on orbit to mitigate the hazard of such events, but to do that requires the development of a orbital infrastructure, something that NASA’s current plans strenuously avoid.
Space logistics consultant Mike Snead has an interesting article at The Space Review on how to become a space-faring nation. I’ve glanced over it, but haven’t had time to absorb the whole thing. I don’t know how politically realistic it is, but what is most interesting to me is that the word “NASA” does not appear in it, anywhere.
I think that this was fundamental policy failure of the Vision for Space Exploration. While the vision was seen as important for the administration, just as was the case with Shuttle after Apollo, and space station after Shuttle, it was primarily treated as something for NASA to do after Shuttle and station, not an intrinsically important goal in itself. If it had truly been important, an entirely new entity would have been created to carry it out, without the baggage of the past, in much the same way that missile defense was viewed as too important to leave to the Air Force in the eighties, resulting in the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).
Up now at Out Of The Cradle. Ken Murphy’s done a great job.
I’m kind of surprised (though pleasantly, if true) at the estimated cost of the contract to Boeing for the Ares 1 upper stage:
The $514.7 million cost-plus-award fee contract runs through 2016 and covers the manufacture of a ground test article, three flight test units and six production flight units.
So they’re getting about ten units altogether for half a billion? Even if the development costs are zero, that’s only about fifty megabucks a copy. If we assume that it’s a couple hundred millions for DDT&E, that’s only about thirty million each. I’m sure that the J2-X will be cheaper than an SSME, but I would think it’s still going to cost several million dollars per engine. I would have guessed that the stage cost was higher. These numbers imply to me that, with learning (and I guess it helps that NASA provides the production facilities at Michaud–I’ll bet that’s not included in the costs stated above) that they could get the marginal cost per stage down in the twenty-five million range or less.
Better news for sustainability than I would have thought. I wonder what the cost of the first stage is?
[Thursday update]
OK, there seems to be a consensus in the comments that this price doesn’t include engine or avionics (those are separate contracts), which is where a lot of the cost of a stage lies. So it’s not that great a deal. I thought it was too good to be true.