As Clark Lindsey (and Keith Cowing) notes, NASA hasn’t formally dropped methane propulsion from Constellation, or CEV. The final CFI doesn’t, after all, forbid methane, or specify hypergolics. They simply appear to have dropped it in the final version because the earlier draft version of the CFI so emphatically required it.
However, given the risk aversion of industry, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that neither bidder on CEV will propose methane propulsion, absent a strong sense of a desire to have it on NASA’s part. The driving requirement at this point seems to be cost and schedule (including schedule risk), which means avoiding any unnecessary technology development programs on the critical path. So despite the fact that methane propulsion isn’t intrinsically risky, the fact that it’s currently non-existent in terms of the technology-readiness level that NASA will want at the Preliminary Design Review probably assures that it won’t be incorporated into the CEV, at least for the initial version. It could, however, be an upgrade later, assuming that the program gets to the point at which upgrades will occur.
I’m busy writing a proposal or two, but here’s an innovative way to get to the Moon. Much lower marginal cost, and exactly the kind of things that NASA should be considering.
TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?
TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?
TSR: With all the information you’ve presented, shy of seven relatively sympathetic and understanding billionaires and an engineering group from heaven, what other missing pieces are needed for someone to develop The Rocket Company?
But, hey, if it was, no one would bother to shell out a couple hundred thousand for the real thing, right?
Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane emails that they have a streaming video of a computer-generated movie of one of their suborbital flights over at Pure Galactic (apparently a new spaceline on the block). I was surprised to see that the modified Learjet has a “V” tail.
He’s interested in comments on the soundtrack. It’s a little too new agey and native Americany for my taste, and the musical transitions don’t evoke the visual ones to me. But what do I know?
Thomas James beats the eternally clueless Bruce Gagnon with a heavy cluebat. One could say that he beats him senseless, but it’s so short a journey that it would be pointless.
It does bring to mind an interesting issue. If we do ever achieve the desideratum of low-cost, high-volume launch, will it become a significant contributor to atmospheric pollution? As Thomas points out, Jet A and oxygen overwhelm rocket exhaust by orders of magnitude, so it’s hard to imagine lox/RP, lox-hydrogen or even lox-methane as being a problem, but I can see a point at which solids might be banned (though I suspect that they’d have long before that point been eliminated as unsafe and uneconomical).
I’m struggling through my Internet issues to do a little posting tonight. Mike Griffin was interviewed by the BBC, and had some interesting comments. Think of this less as a fisking, than an analysis of what’s really going on in the agency.