…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

It doesn’t sound like a smart design to me, though:

The first stage is configured as a winged body system, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. After burnout, the vehicle will re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and will be made to land horizontally on a runway, like an aircraft.

In the second stage, after delivering the payload, the vehicle will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in sea or land.

No description of the first-stage propulsion, but if Clark Lindsay (from whom I got the link) is right, and it’s a scramjet, that’s a huge mistake. And an ocean recovery with airbags? Please.

Of course, what do you expect from a government? And at least they haven’t bought into the current nonsensical conventional wisdom that “Shuttle proved that reusable vehicles don’t work.”

I’m too busy to blog much, but the Chairforce Engineer has a follow-up to the previous discussion (see here, too) on lunar transportation architectures and L1.

Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on space system design goals, and some advice for Elon Musk:

Take a look at the EELV program, and even SpaceX. EELV’s goal was to reduce the cost of launching satellites for the military from absolutely obscene to merely ridiculous (ie a 50% drop in price IIRC). So, they tried to make some incremental changes to how they build and operate their vehicles. In some areas they’ve gotten a lot better, but the reality is that they didn’t even acheive the modest goals they set out for themselves. It isn’t that they’re dumb, or malicious, or incompetent. It’s just that they set themselves too easy of a goal, so they didn’t actually have to think outside the same high-cost artillery box that they’ve put themselves in over the years.

It should be pointed out that one of the reason that they haven’t achieved the cost reduction goal is the collapse of flight rate. As I pointed out in my New Atlantis piece, flight rate, even for expendables, is a much higher contributor to launch cost than design is.

He also writes something that a younger Jon Goff would have found heresy:

…if they go for the BFR instead of trying to radically change the Earth-to-Orbit transportation market by going fully reusable…They’re probably going to get their lunch eaten. I mean, they could possibly acquire one of the companies that actually develops a fully reusable, high-flight-rate orbital space transport. But the reality is going to be that if they don’t keep pushing more and more reusability into their Falcon line, it’s going to go obsolete.

That’s sort of an inside joke to long-time readers of sci.space.*, but once upon a time, Jon was a, hmmmm…shall we say, vociferous proponent of expendable launchers. It would be interesting (and possibly educational to others) sometime to hear a description of how his thinking has evolved.

Now, we just have to work on his politics…

Ken Murphy has a useful tutorial on the use of Earth-Moon L1 as a staging point to and from the Moon, and to other destinations.

The latest newsletter of the Space Access Society is out, and it has a long, but good rundown of the current situation in space transportation (at least that portion of the industry that actually promises to reduce costs and improve reliability).

We are seeing signs that this industry is growing up fast. One trend is specialization – rocketship builders are starting to differentiate from rocketship operators, something that happened to the air transport industry too around the time it was getting serious.

Another is that rocketship builders are beginning to access a novel method of finance for this industry: Paying customers, both government agencies wanting a mix of tech development and delivered payloads, and commercial operators wanting actual ships to fly.

And while most company finance in this industry is still via some variant of “angel investors”, aka wealthy individuals, there have been a number of signs that the venture capital industry may not be that far behind. First there’s all the positive press buzz of the last year, of course. Never underestimate the herd factor in investment trends.

There are also signs of a fundamental VC investment requirement firming up: The exit strategy. One time-honored way to cash out investment in an innovative startup is by selling out to an established player that wants a foot in the new door. Arianespace showed up at the X-Prize Cup’s Personal Spaceflight Symposium last fall “looking for possible connections” in this new industry. We’ve seen indications the US launch majors too are keeping a close eye on developments among the startups. Looking to eventually buy what they can’t foster internally? It wouldn’t be unprecedented.

I think we’re a long way off from a rocketcom bubble (that would be fun, for a while…), but it’s nice to see the money finally starting to flow.

It also announces the final date and location of the next Space Access conference, which is a must-go for people really into this subject.

Grant Bonin is having a debate on the appropriate launch vehicle size for exploration. My attitude is either use what you have, or if you’re going to spend billions of dollars developing new vehicles, focus it on something that actually reduces cost and improves reliability.

Wayne Eleazer has an interesting brief history of the US military space program at today’s issue of The Space Review. I was working at the Aerospace Corporation when some of the changes described were occurring in the early eighties. Clearly what they’re doing now isn’t working well, but I’m not sure that just going back to the SPOs is going to help. The problem is, as described, that space hardware (at least as historically developed and procured by the Air Force) is not like airplanes. Until they get some fresh thinking there, and try to make it so, I suspect that their woes will continue.