I got another interesting email in response to this week’s Fox column, this time from Scott Benson, who writes:
I enjoy reading your musings, and always find things to agree and disagree with. But this time, I must be missing your point.
It seems to be: In a high flight rate mission model, reusable launch vehicles make much more sense.
Well, that is interesting, and I tend to agree; but it is totally irrelevant for the next 20 (?) years minimum. The mission model for the foreseeable future is 10’s of launches per year, not thousands, as much as we wish it would be the latter. And for better or worse, the NASA mission model is primarily about 5 human space flights per year, carrying 3 – 7 people to the ISS, with an assortment of 10 or so other earth and interplanetary missions. It is perfectly rationale, under that reality, to use expendable launch vehicles and reusable crew modules.
Well, here’s where the disagreement lies. There is no such thing as a mission model. This is just a fiction that government bureaucrats come up with to generate requirements for potential new government launch systems. Mission models were always, to me, the absurdity of activities like the Space Transportation Architecture studies (some of which I participated in, and even managed). There is, in fact, no particular need for us to do anything at all in civil space, at least not in civil manned space.
“Mission models” are driven by launch capability–not the other way around. We have a “mission model” to deliver a certain number of crew to space station per year. Why? Not because there’s anything in particular for those people to do in space, but because we built a space station of a certain size, and that’s how many it holds. Why was it that size? Primarily because we decided from day one that one of its stone-tablet, not to be even questioned, program requirements was to put it up in pieces with the Shuttle.
For the amount of money that we spent on station to date, we could have built a station ten, or even a hundred times the size, had it been important to do so. But the primary purpose of station was to give JSC and Marshall something to do after the Shuttle development was complete, and to justify the development of the Shuttle. So as an artifact of that decision, we end up with a “mission model” that requires delivering a couple dozen people to space for the next twenty years.
Had Reagan said, instead of asking for a scientific space station, that he wanted a habitat for a hundred people in orbit, and he didn’t care how NASA did it, he could have had it for the same money (after diverting a few billion to a heavy-lift Shuttle derivative that could launch huge modules, a la Skylab, out of ET barrel sections). If he’d done so, we’d now have a “mission model” of many hundreds of annual crew transfers, rather than a dozen or so.
There’s a phrase for basing present decisions on past flawed ones. It’s called “throwing good money after bad.”
NASA’s options are:
1) Use STS forever and cross their fingers
2) Build a reusable launch system (that certainly doesn’t seem to be in favor)
3) Buy the commercially available low cost reusable launch services
4) Go with expendables to mitigate STS life risks, and to wait until the commercial reusable launch services arrive.Are you in the “build it and they will come” camp, with the assumption that building a commercial RLV will instantly lower the price of access to space and result in rapid growth in flight rate? I suppose it could happen, and that your article is trying to convince the entrepreneurs to invest their billions. Maybe that is the point. I’ll check your feedback to see if I guessed it right.
I’d go with a combination of options 1 and 4: use STS until the commercial reusable systems come along, but also put into place government policies that encourage (rather than discourage) the latter.
I am in the “build it and they will come” camp, and I do want entrepreneurs to invest (though I don’t believe that it will require billions, at least not to get operating revenue and profits). But I’m also in the camp that wants to see a fundamental rethinking of the purposes and means of government space policy. I’d like to make it more transparent, and be explicit about why we even have a manned space program.
The dirty little secret, of course, is that we do it for jobs in Houston and Huntsville and Florida and California, and international prestige, (and more recently as a means of providing foreign aid to Russia without dipping into the State Department’s budget), not because we’re trying to accomplish anything in particular in space.
If it’s to open up space as a frontier, and truly become a space-faring society, the current path is not going to get us there, and developing a new generation of expendable launchers is on that current path. For the limited amount of activity proposed by NASA’s “mission model,” there’s no point in ever developing anything new. It cannot pay for itself.
We’re still flying B-52s, and we can probably get decades of life out of the Orbiters as well, given the low flight rate.
If, on the other hand, we make a conscious decision to develop a lot more capability, then there are policy routes to get there. I would propose an airmail-like subsidy, having the government purchase thousands of round-trip tickets at much lower costs than current, using what it needs for its own purposes, and then auctioning the rest back on the market.
And NASA should have absolutely no say in the vehicle design. They need to get out of operations entirely, and get back into a NACA mode (the way they would have operated had we not panicked after Sputnik).
But why bash NASA for looking at reasonable alternatives, especially given the options?
Because I don’t think they really have a problem. They just want another development program. It’s just the next way to sell X-38.
I also object to your characterization of “converted munitions”. The current generation of Atlas and Delta rockets have almost (or absolutely) nothing in common with their missile ancestors. The designs of these vehicles have been driven by one thing over the last 20+ years, making a profit in a commercial market place (a concept I believe you are in favor of). I doubt either LockMart’s or Boeing’s mission statements read “We are extending the application of first generation ballistic missiles into their 6th decade!!!”
That’s a semi-fair criticism. They aren’t literally converted munitions. But they are based on the same philosophy that goes all the way back to their ICBM progenitors, and it’s not one that will ever give us the reliability and low costs that are absolutely necessary to do truly ambitious things in space, and to open it up to society. As for making a profit delivering comsats, that’s nice, but it has very little to do with opening up space to the masses, which is my goal, and one that I believe is achievable given a change in mindset among the policy and investor communities, and the public.
That was the point of my column (and most of my columns).
I also hope the incredible happens, and someone finds the way to open space to all of us. Thanks for your efforts in getting the word out.
And thank you for putting in another quarter. Hope you enjoyed the rant.