March 1, 2011
Discarding Shuttle: The Hidden Cost
NASA spending as fraction of federal budget by year, in constant dollars.
On February 15, 2011 a symposium entitled “U.S. Human Spaceflight: Continuity and Stability” was held at Rice University’s James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy. Organized by George Abbey, the resident space expert at the Baker Institute, one might have suspected that it would be Shuttle-centric and indeed, it was. Many pertinent points relevant to the current discussion about NASA’s human space program and its future (or lack thereof) came out of the presentations at this symposium.
The program featured several speakers, all of whom played major roles in the Shuttle program. I found comments by Robert F. “Bob” Thompson most interesting. Bob Thompson is one of the true “old guard” – an original member of Bob Gilruth’s Space Task Group at NASA Langley, a group pre-dating the Mercury Program. Thompson was head of the Apollo Applications Program (Skylab) and the first manager of the Space Shuttle program. Many of his remarks resonate strongly with points I have made here and elsewhere about serious problems being dismissed or ignored in the unseemly rush to re-vamp NASA from an operational space flight agency into a check-writing bureaucracy for New Space endeavors.
Thompson’s theme was a considered and educated look at what discarding the country’s Space Shuttle Program means. Both his talk and the talk by Howard DeCastro (Shuttle Program Manager at the United Space Alliance, which operates the Shuttle system for NASA) carefully outlined the history of the Shuttle program and the possibility of flying the Shuttle commercially until a new system becomes available, thereby retaining our national spaceflight capability. They covered the many compromises made both in Shuttle’s conception and in its execution, as well as its unique capabilities. The Shuttle can both deliver and retrieve payloads from space; it is a fully integrated transport and servicing system in low Earth orbit. The famous Hubble Space Telescope would be a useless piece of junk instead of a national treasure without the Shuttle missions that first allowed for the repair of its defective vision and then returned to service the instrument in space multiple times over the ensuing decade.
An often ignored but critically important issue is the supporting infrastructure for spaceflight. Thompson made the analogy that when people see a Shuttle Orbiter, they really are seeing just the “tip of an iceberg.” The Shuttle is more than an orbiter vehicle; it is also the servicing facilities at the Cape that process and prepare the orbiter for launch. It is the ET fabrication facilities at Michoud and the SRB plant at Promontory as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that has performed flawlessly over the 133 flights to date. It is the mobile crawler and the launch towers at Pad 39-A. And it is the trained cadre of people that put all the pieces together and make them work in concert to deliver and return people and equipment from space. Thompson rhetorically encompassed his argument thusly: The Shuttle is a “dumb vehicle that cost too much” but is a “fully functional part of a space transportation system – an 18-wheel, extended cab work vehicle.” He told the audience that Orion, Soyuz and Progress were more like “taxis” and “pickup trucks.” He said that the Constellation vehicles (chosen to implement the 2004 Vision) were bad decisions, followed on now by an even worse decision.
Thompson used a familiar graphic, the chart showing NASA’s fraction of the annual federal budget over decades (see above). The large spike centered around 1966 represents peak spending for the Apollo program. Thompson made two specific observations about this graph. First, Richard Nixon (who took office in 1969) is often damned as the President who “killed Apollo.” But the graph shows that the ramp-down in spending for Apollo began two years earlier in 1967, in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The Vietnam War required some of NASA’s money, so Apollo-Saturn production managers were told to build the equipment needed to fulfill Kennedy’s decadal goal and shut down thereafter.
Additionally, Thompson made the very significant point (one usually ignored by many engaged in space policy debates) that the “Apollo spike” paid for the infrastructure – the buildings, laboratories, test and training facilities, and launch systems – that Apollo used and that the Shuttle uses to this day. By terminating the Shuttle with no follow-on, the fate of most of this infrastructure is the scrap heap. Note that the “Apollo spike” in funding happened forty years ago. To design and build the supporting infrastructure for human spaceflight in the mid-1960s, we annually spent ten times the fraction of the budget that we do now. Given the reality of the nation’s finances, NASA will be lucky if they can continue to get one-half of one percent of federal spending per year. This does not seem to be a good time to throw away three functioning Shuttle orbiters, thereby discarding a working national space faring capability, one carefully built and paid for over the last 50 years.
Several New Space companies are working on vehicle designs, which, if successful in creating a replacement space “work vehicle,” will need their own supporting infrastructure. These efforts will necessitate creating all the facilities mentioned above for their vehicles and systems. The cost of any given single launch is rolled into one number, but it must cover a multitude of expenses. Amortized over many decades, they may eventually pay for it all, but only if they can get enough business to fly their vehicles regularly and often. With NASA as their principal customer, will enough flights be purchased to take these New Space companies to the level they need in order to make a profit and survive?
Finally, Thompson asked, what is exploration if not living and working in space and contributing to the economy? He understands that exploration is more than going somewhere and planting a flag or collecting some rocks. Each time NASA launches a Shuttle, it puts 100 tons in space. By replacing the orbiter body with a cargo faring, we are creating a heavy lift launch vehicle. This Shuttle side-mount launch vehicle is something that fits the requirements placed on NASA for a new heavy lift vehicle. Its reliability has been consistently improved over the course of more than 30 years of flight experience and is more than adequate for many different kinds of missions throughout cislunar space. This is where the focus of our space program ought to be – and a zone of space specifically mentioned in the new agency authorization.
Preserving, adapting and using what we already have is smarter than destroying capability and starting again from scratch. We are putting faith in the emergence of space systems that will do what we want, when and where we want. We are told that to nurture and foster other providers of space access, we must throw away the bird in our hand and plant a revolutionary new bush, hopeful that it will grow and attract a variety of new birds. I leave it to you to decide the wisdom of such a restrictive course. Plant the bush but don’t throw away the only bird we now hold. We must be fully conscious about the realities of non-existent systems and preserve the space transportation capability on which America can rely.
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Decommissioning the space shuttle program before there are fully operational successors is a huge mistake! And its going to come as a shock to most Americans when they discover that Americans no longer have any domestic access to orbit. The Congress and especially the President are being extremely penny wise and pound foolish on this!
I think the United Space Alliances concept for operating the shuttle program at a mere $1.5 billion a year with two flights per year is very interesting and should be looked at very very seriously by Congress. If President Obama strongly endorsed this concept, it might even win him some votes in the critical swing state of Florida.
As far as the sidemount shuttle is concerned, I’d favor it if we were still committed to quickly and cheaply returning to the Moon before 2020. But without the immediate goal of returning to the Moon, I tend to favor the inline configurations that still uses the Space Shuttle Main Engines and the 4-segment SRBs since it would give NASA a lot more flexibility as far as payload size, volume, and mass.
I’m also still obsessed with the idea of deriving a simple in-line crew launch vehicle without the SRBs from the shuttle architecture:-) This would be a remarkable machine, IMO, in its safety and simplicity that could launch all types of crew capsules and space planes, plus unmanned payloads while it could still be easily reconfigured into an unmanned heavy lift vehicle once two to four 4-segment or 5-segment SRBs are strapped to it!
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 1, 2011 @ 8:28 pm
Small correction: Howard DeCastro is not the head of USA – he is VP and Space Shuttle Program Manager. And, speaking as one of USA’s “little guys” in the program, Howard is also one heck of a nick guy and a good manager. And he knows the program inside out.
Comment by Jim — March 1, 2011 @ 10:22 pm
Jim,
Thank you for the information. I have made the correction in the text.
Howard elaborates on a few of the themes he talked about at the Baker Institute with Miles O’Brien here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oETy-5pSy3w
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 2, 2011 @ 4:51 am
Marcel,
I think the United Space Alliances concept for operating the shuttle program at a mere $1.5 billion a year with two flights per year is very interesting and should be looked at very very seriously by Congress.
I agree but I am a bit skeptical that it can be made to work for that amount of money, given that we now spend on the order of $3B per year for the same service. But they should make their case and let everyone judge it.
As for side-mount, I support it as the cheapest, earliest, easiest, least-riskiest option for heavy lift. The better is the enemy of the good enough.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 2, 2011 @ 8:11 am
[...] This Air & Space Smithsonian article by Paul D. Spudis uses my chart of NASA’s budget history and links back to my post on that subject. [...]
Pingback by Administrivia and space news | The Thinker — March 2, 2011 @ 9:36 am
Hey, Paul:
Forgive my forgetting recent history — when the decision was made to mothball the shuttles, weren’t we expected to have a replacement vehicle in place? Or was the plan always to rely on a civilian startup company or the Russians immediately filling the void?
It’s kind of amusing that the shuttle is now branded obsolete, but the Soyuz isn’t!
Regards,
William
Comment by William McEwen — March 2, 2011 @ 10:32 am
Hi William,
The original plan from the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration was to 1) return Shuttle to flight (this was in the wake of Columbia the previous year) and complete construction of the ISS, then retire the Shuttle by the end of 2010, 2) build a new vehicle (the Crew Exploration vehicle or CEV) as a Shuttle replacement, developed and tested by 2008 with its first human mission “no later” than 2014. It was to be able to transport crew to and from the ISS; 3) Then, we were to “return to the Moon as early as 2015 but no later than 2020, with the goal of “living and working there for increasingly extended periods.” So there was always going to be a “gap” in American flight capability to orbit.
You may hear talk to the effect that NASA “never got the funding they were promised” to do this, but that’s not true — they got the money promised in the original VSE budget projections. They simply picked an unaffordable architecture to implement the VSE.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 2, 2011 @ 12:01 pm
The author said:
“With NASA as their [New Space] principal customer, will enough flights be purchased to take these New Space companies to the level they need in order to make a profit and survive?”
Any business that depends on one customer is not very smart. Even ATK doesn’t depend on Shuttle business for the majority of their profit.
If we look at what people interpret as “New Space”, that must include United Launch Alliance (Boeing/Lockheed Martin) which although they depend on government contracts, NASA is only one customer. Orbital Sciences and SpaceX both have COTS/CRS contracts with NASA, but also have other customers in their backlog.
Certainly SpaceX is depending on a lot of NASA business to start, but once their Falcon 9 becomes operational they have said they could survive off commercial business, and just not grow as fast.
If anything commercial space will be better than depending on NASA only, because NASA will always be one accident away from shutdown, whereas multiple commercial providers allow for redundancy.
The author also said:
“These efforts will necessitate creating all the facilities mentioned above for their vehicles and systems.”
This should not be a surprise, since each company wants to control their own destiny, and not depend on government facilities that may or may not be working during a budget-caused shutdown. Also, the facilities that they do build will be specific to their launchers, and far smaller/less expensive to operate than corresponding NASA equipment.
SpaceX has even taken a page from the Russians and implemented horizontal integration, which uses an erector to ready the rocket for flight. Why be bound by how NASA did things 50 years ago?
Let’s not tie the hands of business, but let them decide the best ways to get things done. If that includes using NASA facilities, fine, but if not, maybe it’s time to evolve them to some other use.
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 2, 2011 @ 7:25 pm
When I first read about sidemount in mid-2009, I was very excited. I thought Shannon’s proposal was certainly the future of spaceflight. It made so much sense- getting rid of the most troublesome part of the system. A cargo version is, in my opinion, absolutely required if the U.S. is going to have anything worthy of being called a space program. The time has come to stop calling LEO space flight or space exploration. It is more like “endless circles at very high altitudes.” Deep space beyond earth orbit will not be traveled with out the capability of a heavy lift vehicle. The fuel depot schemes and un-shielded spacecraft proposals are not realistic. Sidemount is the only hope for a reasonably priced heavy lift vehicle to maintain a worthy space effort beyond earth orbit.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 2, 2011 @ 7:49 pm
@ Paul Spudis “You may hear talk to the effect that NASA “never got the funding they were promised” to do this, but that’s not true — they got the money promised in the original VSE budget projections. They simply picked an unaffordable architecture to implement the VSE.”
I think when you’re actually looking past the Moon towards Mars, these things tend to happen:-)
It seems like the Mars First folks will never understand the simple logic that the fastest and cheapest way to establish a permanent presence on the surface of Mars is by first establishing a permanent presence on the surface of the Moon.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 2, 2011 @ 10:17 pm
Sorry, Paul, but I disagree with you rather strongly.
The Age of Teleoperation is here. Deepwater Horizon was capped, but not by human hands. UAVs fly constantly over Afghanistan. Teleoperated mining centers are now being established far from the mines themselves.
And the Moon is only a few seconds roundtrip from Earth. It hasn’t sunk in yet what that means.
I believe that it means: WE DON”T HAVE TO PUT HUMANS ON THE MOON anytime soon. We can establish ISRU on the Moon telerobotically.
Robots can be launched on existing launchers such as the Delta IV Heavy, Ariane V ECA, H-IIB and others. Robots can go on one-way trips to the Moon, they don’t need to return like humans do. They don’t need to return until such time as there’s production of propellant instantiated.
With no need to send humans in the near-term, there’s no need for an HLV. With no need for an HLV, there’s no need to continue the Shuttle or preserve the VAB or the crawlers. They’re not needed.
Because we can establish ISRU telerobotically and eventually establish cislunar propellant depots telerobotically, there’s no need for an HLV to eventually send humans.
I don’t see a need to preserve the Shuttle, nor to preserve the Apollo-era infrastructure it uses. Delta IV Heavy and other existing rockets can serve as launch platforms for telerobotic equipment.
Once we have propellant production established on the Moon and solar cell production and metal production and so forth, THEN we can send humans to the Moon. And we won’t need an HLV to do so.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 2, 2011 @ 10:51 pm
Just think about what a teleoperated rover could do on the Moon. It should not be difficult for a human operator in Detroit to control a rover on the Moon at a leisurely walking pace of, say, two miles per hour for extended periods of time. Keep that up for a day, transferring control from the operator in Detroit to another in Istanbul to another in Singapore, and that one rover in one day will travel farther than Pathfinder+Spirit+Opportunity in their entire lifetimes combined.
Any rover we’d put on the Moon would have technology a decade or more newer than Spirit and Opportunity. And landing them wouldn’t require an HLV.
Remember that robotics technology is going to grow wildly, tied as it is to advances in computing, communications and so forth that are commercially driven. So if there’s something you want to do on the Moon right now that might be difficult telerobotically, then wait a few years!
We need to have dozens of rovers and other pieces of telerobotic equipment on the Moon exploring the permanently-shadowed craters at both poles; checking out the pits and caves and lava tubes; producing ground truth for confusing orbital observations; prospecting interesting mineral concentrations at various sites; running ISRU experiments; and so forth. None of that requires and HLV. Organizing to do that, getting the money and doing it will take years, by which time robotics technology will have grown by leaps and bounds.
The idea of astronauts in spacesuits bouncing around on the lunar surface picking up rocks, looking at them and hitting them with a hammer is quaint and out-of-date. It’s not necessary to have a human on the surface to make huge gains towards opening the high frontier.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 1:55 am
… and because it’s not necessary to have a human on the Moon any time soon, it’s not necessary to build an HLV, nor to preserve the VAB, nor to preserve the crawlers, nor to be saddened by the passing of the Shuttle era.
Let’s cut to the chase and get some telerobotic equipment on the lunar surface.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 1:58 am
C. Adelphia,
I would agree with your comments if we were talking about a true private sector space venture. In such a business, they would indeed customize their business plan and operating facilities to optimize their profit. They would also raise their own capital for development, not be paid by NASA for it.
As for all the “other customers” that will use the commercial transport, that is a market that may well exist someday, but right now, it exists only the in minds of the cheerleaders of the “new direction.”
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 4:49 am
Ron,
The Age of Teleoperation is here. Deepwater Horizon was capped, but not by human hands. UAVs fly constantly over Afghanistan. Teleoperated mining centers are now being established far from the mines themselves. And the Moon is only a few seconds roundtrip from Earth. It hasn’t sunk in yet what that means. I believe that it means: WE DON”T HAVE TO PUT HUMANS ON THE MOON anytime soon. We can establish ISRU on the Moon telerobotically.
I’m with you on this. Posted previously: http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/12/can-we-afford-to-return-to-the-moon/
See also this: http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
That said, I see telerobotic operations as pathfinding activities, not a substitute for human presence and habitation. Things break and sometimes you need creative intelligence on-site to fix problems or devise work arounds for them. I also believe that learning to do ISRU on the lunar surface will probably require an interaction of people and machines at a fairly close, real-time level.
There is an enormous national capital investment in the Shuttle system. A smart way to retire Shuttle would to to adapt and use as much of this infrastructure as possible for its successor system rather than simply discarding it. A related point is that once we do discard this supporting infrastructure, it is likely to be gone forever. It will cost an enormous amount to re-create it, if that should ever happen. I believe in keeping the bird in the hand over the one in the bush.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 5:06 am
Eventually there will be maintenance robots that maintain other pieces of equipment, debug and fix problems. They’ll have dexterous manipulators, good cameras, etc.
Like I said, if there’s something you think that teleoperation can’t do now, then wait a few years and technology advancement will enable that activity to be done at that time. In the meantime, do other things: there’s plenty we need to do on the Moon!
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 7:05 am
Ron,
You have much more faith than I do in these systems. I agree that they can and do accomplish a lot, but I remain convinced of their potential, not their capabilities. Yes, eventually there will be maintenance robots. Eventually.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 7:10 am
Last year Deepwater Horizon was capped telerobotically using ROVs designed years ago. Imagine what the capabilities of a maintenance telerobot will be that we *start* to design in, say, 2018.
We probably don’t need to think about designing a maintenance telerobot until that time anyway. In the meantime, we can spend the next 3 years developing a lander that can be launched by any of a Delta IV, Ariane V ECA or H-IIB. By 2015 we could deploy 4 to 6 rovers to a location on the equator. Within a lunar month two of those rovers could be separated by a distance of 1,000 miles. They could explore the nearside. A year later we could put up some comsats and after that land a second batch of rovers on the farside. Etc.
We’ve got plenty to do and while we’re doing all of that, the technology will continue to advance.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 8:25 am
Paul,
When is an asset no longer an asset? The SS United States is a beautiful ship and a perfectly functional passenger liner. The U.S. government subsidized her construction. She has been rotting at a pier in Philadelphia for 15 years. I’m sure for a modest amount of money you could purchase this “fully amortized infrastructure” today. But it’s been sitting there for so long because it is no longer an economical way to move people around the globe. In the same way, the VAB, the crawlers, the MLP and the SRBs are no longer economical. They were great in their day but there are cheaper ways to build a space transportation system today. ATK and USA have put in CCDev2 bids that will use this infrastructure. They appear to be the most expensive bids in the program. That’s not a coincidence.
Comment by Bill Hensley — March 3, 2011 @ 9:28 am
Bill,
When is an asset no longer an asset?
When it’s thrown away without any real replacement identified or available.
If the New Space infrastructure is cheap to make and economical to operate, great — let them be financed by their owners. When they are ready to fly, I’m sure that government will be eager to purchase their services.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 10:48 am
Ron,
Please — the situations are only partly analogous. We have more than fifty years of experience in oceanic subsurface operations, doing a variety of complex tasks at various scales. We haven’t even visited the poles of the Moon once as yet; it is NOT the same environment as the equatorial Moon, with 25 K temperatures and an unknown plasma and electrical charging regimes. There will be a significant learning curve; some things will work easily, some will work with great difficulty, adaptation and modification, and some won’t work at all. To expect to be able to solve not only the foreseeable problems but also the unforeseeable ones solely through teleoperation without any human presence is simply unrealistic.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 10:54 am
@Ron Menich
No teleoperated machine is going to tell you if the Moon’s 1/6 hypogravity environment is either inherently deleterious to humans or harmless to the human body over a period of several months to several years.
Without humans, no machine is going to be able to tell you how effective and efficient recycling trash, air and human refuse is going to be on the lunar surface.
No machine alone is going to tell us if humans can eat crops grown in hydroponic facilities on the Moon using lunar resources.
No machine alone is going to tell you how well humans can cope psychologically being away from Earth for a few years: something we’re going to have to know if we’re really serious about manned interplanetary travel to places like Mars.
Humans on the Moon will also allow us to test regolith, water, and even hydrogen shielding to see what quantities are really needed to protect the human brain and body from heavy galactic nuclei. Again, something we need to know if we’re every going to travel through interplanetary space.
Sending humans to the Moon is also much more interesting than merely sending robots!
I agree that a manned lunar base needs to be as automated as possible. I also believe that most exploration of the Moon should probably be done by robots teleoperated from Earth. But having human beings on the Moon is essential if we want to begin to find out if humans can travel between the planets and also if it is possible for our species to live permanently beyond the Earth.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 3, 2011 @ 12:39 pm
If the New Space infrastructure is cheap to make and economical to operate, great — let them be financed by their owners. When they are ready to fly, I’m sure that government will be eager to purchase their services
Paul, the issue at hand is not who’s going to pay. Of course NASA is going to have to pay a large part of the development cost of whatever system they use, even if it is commercially developed. The issue is whether using the old infrastructure from Apollo and Shuttle will actually save money in the long run. You are implicitly assuming that it will, but that is just an assumption. Just because its original development costs are already amortized doesn’t mean it will be cheaper to build a new system around it. The existing infrastructure is huge, old and labor intensive. That’s the point of the SS United States analogy. It’s already paid for, but the operational costs far exceed what it’s worth. There are two possible ends for the SS United States. It will become a museum ship, if someone is willing to pay for that, or it will be sold for scrap. It would be fiscally insane to fix it up and keep using it to run regular passenger service between the U.S. and Europe. In the same way, the reason we’re shutting down the shuttle program is because it costs so much we can’t afford to keep running it and do the other things we want to do – even with an infrastructure that already exists. Incorporating that expensive infrastructure into the next system is not likely to be the cheapest way forward.
Comment by Bill Hensley — March 3, 2011 @ 12:49 pm
@Marcel:
One possible future involves bringing humans to the Moon to live there; that is the pathway with which your comments are consistent.
Another possible future involves bringing the resources of the Moon to LEO (hotels, sports stadia, manufacturing facilities) and GEO (solar power satellites, communications nodes) and other points in cis-lunar space. It takes 3 days to reach the Moon and it is entirely possible that because of that the Moon will remain an exotic and rarely-visited location for humans in comparison to LEO. Human travel to LEO might become commonplace in comparison.
As you can tell, I’m putting my money on the second scenario in which resources are brought from the Moon to LEO.
If that were to be the case, then it is not important now to ascertain, for example, how well humans could recycle wastes on the lunar surface nor how well their bodies could adapt to 1/6 gravity.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 1:24 pm
Bill,
the issue at hand is not who’s going to pay
I beg to differ — I think that the issue of who pays for what is very much the issue. The whole premise of the “new direction” for NASA is what shall we do next in space and how shall we do it. I don’t hear anyone arguing for the abolition of NASA — I just hear them whining for their money.
To do anything of any significant scale — and the movement of people beyond LEO (for whatever reason) is of such scale — you are talking about the launch and movement of multiple tons of mass into space. You can approach the problem in several different ways, but regardless of how you structure the program, you need a significant supporting infrastructure. You may not like heavy lift – fine, then build a system that launches everything we need in small pieces. But then you’re faced with the assembly of multiple small pieces in LEO. OK, so you’re willing to do that — fine, but then, you must create the assembly infrastructure in orbit, which in turn requires the marshaling and assembly of those pieces.
You claim that the existing infrastructure is antiquated and “too expensive” (whatever that means). My answer is that it exists and creates capability now. Your hypothetical, less costly and more efficient “better way” is a promise, not yet a reality. And your belief that government “investment” (i.e., spending) is the best way to create it discards something that is real in favor of waiting for something that is hypothetical.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 1:29 pm
@Bill Hensley
Going back to 1960s greenhouse gas polluting hydrocarbon rocket engine like Space X is doing is antiquated, IMO. Carbon neutral LOX/LH2 engines are the future. The SSME has a phenomenal record of success. And the cheaper expendable version of the SSME (RS-25E) should be a major step forward.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 3, 2011 @ 2:20 pm
Paul, STS was canceled for fundamentally two reasons. First, it had proved to be inherently unsafe (side mount, fragile TPS, no LES). Second, it cost so much to operate we had to shut it down to carve out a funding stream for the next program. My question is, if the new system is built largely on top of the same infrastructure as the shuttle system, what will be different about it that will make it more affordable?
I’m not opposed to HLV development in principle, but if NASA sinks most of its HSF budget into a new launcher we’re not going to be doing very much in space that’s interesting. We either need to find a much cheaper way to build an HLV or we need to focus on building payloads for the launch vehicles we already have. And don’t start by saying the “much cheaper way” is to keep using the shuttle infrastructure because it’s already paid for. The point is, shuttle is too expensive even though it uses that same, paid-for infrastructure. Or perhaps because it uses that infrastructure.
Comment by Bill Hensley — March 3, 2011 @ 2:54 pm
On the subject of that USA proposal, which appears to be something that has not had any much detail make its way into the news, it would be useful for USA to provide some basics alongside the news announcements. For one, USA is a significant part of the Shuttle costs now, and they can speak credibly about those cost, more than anyone outside. So for starters, they can say -”we’ll be willing to launch 2 times a year for X% of what we charge now were we at that launch rate”. So if the contract now is apx. $1.5B a year, for apx. 5 flights a year, lets have a go at a notional “New USA” figure. Perhaps it would have been $1.2B according to current ways of doing business, just by decreasing to two flights a year. As such, USA could go ahead and state for the record – “we’ll take that value down further to 60% of that, or $720M a year”. They would then have to challenge the rest of the Shuttle systems, centers, suppliers and support to do the same, as a single team, to get the other amount left out down by at least as much. That would be the start of a serious conversation.
Comment by That NASA Engineer@KSC — March 3, 2011 @ 3:39 pm
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 4:49 am
“They would also raise their own capital for development, not be paid by NASA for it.”
I’ve heard this comment before, but it seems targeted specifically for those arguing against non-NASA space efforts (aka New Space).
United Space Alliance has been more funded by the DoD for their EELV’s than NASA. SpaceX was not funded with NASA money, and the only NASA money they have received has been in payment for completed contract work. What company are you talking about specifically?
“As for all the “other customers” that will use the commercial transport, that is a market that may well exist someday, but right now, it exists only the in minds of the cheerleaders of the “new direction.””
I don’t know if you’re aware, but SpaceX lists their manifest on their website. In addition to their COTS/CRS NASA contract, you will see many non-NASA customers such as Iridium Communications Inc. ($492M contract), ORBCOMM ($46M), MDA Corp. (Canada), CONAE (Argentina), Spacecom (Israel), NSPO (Taiwan), Space Systems/Loral, Astrium (Europe) and Bigelow Aerospace. You can go through ULA and Orbital’s press releases to see their non-NASA business is large too. No cheerleading needed – the facts speak for themselves.
The real issue at hand seems to be whether the government should utilize existing Shuttle facilities, regardless of the need? Commercial space companies such as United Launch Alliance, Orbital Sciences Corp. and SpaceX don’t need them for their launchers. ATK/Astrium is depending on them, but it’s unknown if that business will proceed.
If the Apollo/Shuttle infrastructure is no longer needed, isn’t that OK? Do we have to build future space systems based on past designs?
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 3, 2011 @ 3:53 pm
Bill,
My question is, if the new system is built largely on top of the same infrastructure as the shuttle system, what will be different about it that will make it more affordable?
If you’re asking will it be more “affordable” in the sense of costing less, it probably won’t. Except to the extent that a Shuttle side-mount should cost less per launch because it will not require the enormous number of man-hours spent refurbishing the orbiters in the OPF (e.g., tile inspection, cleaning, and replacement).
But what we would get is a functioning 70 metric ton to LEO vehicle with minimal development costs, as it would use existing tooling, parts, facilities, and support infrastructure. That’s not true for any other system, commercial or government.
Of course, if you plan to go nowhere and do nothing, as the “new direction” does, then it doesn’t particularly matter anyway.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 3:57 pm
T N Engineer,
it would be useful for USA to provide some basics alongside the news announcements
Agreed and I indicated such in one of my responses above. I too share some of your skepticism about their cost numbers.
But of course, this is only in regard to keeping STS flying, not to the issue of building a Shuttle-derived HLV.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 3:59 pm
C. Adelphia,
You can go through ULA and Orbital’s press releases to see their non-NASA business is large too. No cheerleading needed – the facts speak for themselves.
OK, so what’s the COTS funding for?
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 4:02 pm
Regarding teleoperation/telerobotics on the moon… some of you have suggested, e.g., “It should not be difficult for a human operator in Detroit to control a rover on the Moon at a leisurely walking pace of, say, two miles per hour for extended periods of time.” It depends on the mode of control. Experiences from the Russian Lunakhod were that the human operator became very frustrated and mentally worn out after about 20 minutes or so, due to coping with the round-trip time delay. So either some advances would need to be made (E.g., in predictor-display approaches) or you would be driven to a telerobotic/supervisory control approach (a ‘la Mars rovers) rather than direct teleoperation.
Comment by Jeffrey Ellis — March 3, 2011 @ 4:11 pm
@Jeffrey
Sure, lunar rovers are not off-the-shelf yet, so some software/interface development is required to efficiently make this happen.
But if Lunokhod 2 was able to travel 37km in 8 weeks in 1973, just think what we’ll be able to do in 2015 with 40+ years of additional computation/communication/control tech development.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 4:59 pm
P.S. Just as a side note, the combined distance Spirit and Opportunity have traveled in 8 years is 34.4 km, just a bit more than Lunokhod achieved in 8 weeks back in 1973.
Being close really helps!
Comment by Ron Menich — March 3, 2011 @ 5:06 pm
The ISS could have been put into orbit using 4-6 Saturn V launches. The Saturn V got its payloads were they had to be every time. Abandoned.
The Shuttle has been flying for 30 years. All the knowledge and experience gained doing that will not be applied to the next generation winged manned spacecraft of similar size and purpose.
We are going to rely on the Russians to get to ISS, who have done exactly what Paul has detailed in his article, using a vehicle that has been in use since 1967 and a launch vehicle developed to launch Sputnik.
Comment by Robert Nidds — March 3, 2011 @ 8:02 pm
It has been argued that one could launch a lot of Falcon 9’s and a solid number of Atlas or Delta combinations for just the price of keeping the shuttle infrastructure intact.
An evolved block II sidemount launching 90 tons once every two months would put up over 500 tons a year. That “solid number” of inferior lift vehicles would have to launch at least 30 times to match that.
I do not think the math is very good. Ariane has taken over most of the commercial satellite market by loading several sats at a time on their Ariane V.
6 launches a year with a proven paid for infrastructure to equal dozens of inferior vehicle launches. 6 launches is very conservative- without the shuttle in the mix 8 to 10 launches a year are a realistic rate. Putting close to a thousand tons a year into orbit. How many falcon 9′s would that take? How many merlin engines would that expend?
I do not share the NASA director’s conviction that private space will deliver. I think the entire private space fiasco will be seen as a deck of cards that fell at the first failure leaving the U.S. with nothing but a ruined space program.
In my opinion we should go with a cargo version of Sidemount and the Liberty launch vehicle. A “corrected and affordable version of constellation” is a much more realistic goal than this hobby rocket farce.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 3, 2011 @ 8:43 pm
Paul,
Below please see an excerpt from my February 2008 Space Review essay Somewhat as a Clamor in the Wilderness (http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1058/1)] which addressed the furor over ESAS (new emphasis mine):
History records only one NASA administrator who had the opportunity to achieve a vision as originally conceived that built for the future and weathered (in large part) the winds of political interference and compromise. James Webb and his team recognized the opportunity presented by the convergence of Sputnik, Gagarin, Kennedy, Johnson, and the mood of the American people in the early 1960s to build a truly substantial beginning for all our future endeavors. When NASA was making the Mode Decision for Apollo and John Houbolt was championing LOR, Webb and his team were intentionally building a robust, nationwide infrastructure that enabled (and, forty-five years later, is still enabling) our country to accomplish truly spectacular achievements in space, achievements that have reached far beyond the original policy that directed NASA to place someone on the Moon. The shuttle and space station programs are using some of that technological investment today; current plans slate Constellation to use it tomorrow.
Few of us, indeed, are keeping our eyes on the bigger picture. And thus I’ll quote from my July/2010 essay on TSR(http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1669/1) some words that I think capture the core of your point :
Perhaps these same negative voices will only appreciate the phenomenal, very real capabilities that Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery represent—their cavernous payload bays, seven-person cabins, weeks-long orbital stay durations, and unmatched downmass capacities—when those capabilities have faded into the grass after the orbiters get carted off to become just three more hulking museum displays alongside the skeletons of the Apollo program, casting similar shadows of former glory.
Comment by Bob Mahoney — March 3, 2011 @ 9:29 pm
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 4:02 pm
“OK, so what’s the COTS funding for?”
I suspect you already know what the COTS program is, but I’ll give my view of it anyways.
To date the ISS has been supplied by the Shuttle, the Russian Progress, and recently the ESA HTV and JAXA H-II – all national entities, and all partners in the ISS. In part to replace the capacity lost by the retirement of the Shuttle, Administrator Griffin created the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program. From what I can see, some form of CRS program had been in mind since before the construction of the ISS, but didn’t get off the ground until Griffin launched it.
Since there has never been a commercial space cargo system, and the requirements for such a system are not “off the shelf”, NASA created the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to help with the development of the vehicles. Considering how fragile the ISS ecosystem is, NASA wanted to make sure there was a high degree of success when commercial cargo companies made their deliveries. This is not as simple as UPS delivering a box to your house.
The COTS program uses milestone-based payments, and both Orbital Sciences and SpaceX have specific milestone schedules that they have to meet. If they don’t complete a task, they don’t get paid. The first COTS demo flight by SpaceX qualified them to receive a $5 million milestone payment.
The CRS program appears to be closer to way we think of cargo delivery services, which means the majority of the payment only happens when the delivery is made. And once Orbital and SpaceX complete their COTS milestones, the only payments they’ll receive from NASA is in actually making CRS deliveries.
Not being an expert in this subject (space is a passion, not a job), I could be off on some details. But what COTS/CRS means to me is the ability for NASA to lower the ongoing costs of supporting not only the ISS, but future endeavors in space.
In other words, it costs less to pay companies to develop NASA specific capabilities (cargo deliveries to the ISS), than to have NASA keep doing it themselves. And in our current budget environment, that is very important.
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 3, 2011 @ 10:25 pm
I’m not convinced that issues of costs, stages of technologic development, or definitions of “commercial” space are the real issues dividing the camps. We can argue these things without convincing the other side because these are not the real underlying issues. Is anyone else feeling the same?
Comment by JohnHunt — March 4, 2011 @ 2:57 am
C. Adelphia,
My point about COTS is that NASA is paying for the development of their systems, not contracting for a service. It is not “commercial” or “private sector” space but rather a “government-industry partnership.” When we talk about this in regard to trade with China, we call it crony capitalism.
it costs less to pay companies to develop NASA specific capabilities (cargo deliveries to the ISS), than to have NASA keep doing it themselves
ISS cargo delivery is not our goal, human travel beyond LEO is. We already have cargo capability to ISS via the Russian Progress and ESA’s Kepler.
The argument that “commercial” can develop trans-LEO vehicles and systems cheaper than NASA is a statement of faith, not fact. We’ll see who is right eventually, but only after the government capability and infrastructure is destroyed.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 3:18 am
JohnHunt,
Fundamentally, the debate is about the difference between having a clear and achievable strategic goal and not having one. I contend that the Vision for Space Exploration was the former and the current “new direction” is the latter. You can rail all day about the deficiencies of Constellation or what a hidebound bureaucracy NASA has become, but at root, if an agency does not have some clear purpose, they will readily spend money but accomplish nothing.
The current “new direction” is the worst of all outcomes. It adumbrated a path that “invests” in technology (a.k.a., we spend money on widgets, with no specific applications in mind, hoping that some magic technology will suddenly materialize via natural selection) while eliminating a specific destination as a goal. And even then, any destination is 20 years into the future with virtually no thought given to what is to be accomplished there. No federal program can accomplish anything under such a paradigm.
In short, it’s the difference between having a space program and not having one but in any case, spending the money. I vote for the former.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 7:04 am
@Paul:
I like your comments to John Hunt. I agree that NASA will likely flail without a clear destination.
Re your comment to Adelphia,
“ISS cargo delivery is not our goal, human travel beyond LEO is.”
I would ask, “Why is human travel beyond LEO *our* goal?” I should think that lunar development and resource utilization should be our goal. Whether or not human travel beyond LEO is required to do that is a separate issue upon which you and I corresponded in earlier posts. To you, I think, it is self-evident that humans are required beyond LEO in order to develop lunar resources. I am not of the same opinion: because sending humans beyond LEO promises to be quite expensive, I think that it must be proven that teleoperation/telerobotics can’t do the job.
Re your comment to Adelphia,
“We already have cargo capability to ISS via the Russian Progress and ESA’s Kepler.”
I would note that there are currently *three* robotic resupply ships docked at ISS, namely, Progress, ATV (Kepler) and HTV.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 4, 2011 @ 8:19 am
Ron,
I would ask, “Why is human travel beyond LEO *our* goal?”
Because the debate about space goals is the context in which Project Constellation was deemed “unaffordable” by Augustine et al. and that’s what set-off this systematic dismantling of the space program. Anyway, the Moon is “beyond LEO” so it’s within such a trans-LEO sphere. You believe it’s all achievable through robotic teleoperations; I agree that much of it is, but not all. But our beliefs are irrelevant — the nation (via both the Executive and the Congress) has decreed that humans beyond LEO is a major goal of the federal space program. So we are debating goals and means within that context.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 9:08 am
That’s fair. So now the debate concerns when humans need to go beyond LEO versus what preparation can be done robotically beforehand.
I haven’t tracked what the current state of affairs is, but a few months ago they were shooting for a 2025 double-Orion rendezvous with a NEO. What if instead we spent the next 10 years doing telerobotic exploration of the Moon and development of ISRU infrastructure there, to the extent practicable given the state of teleoperation/telerobotic technology?
Comment by Ron Menich — March 4, 2011 @ 10:59 am
Ron,
What if instead we spent the next 10 years doing telerobotic exploration of the Moon and development of ISRU infrastructure there, to the extent practicable given the state of teleoperation/telerobotic technology?
Fine with me, but that’s not going to happen, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 11:03 am
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 3:18 am
“My point about COTS is that NASA is paying for the development of their systems, not contracting for a service.”
Maybe you’re not familiar with what the COTS and CRS programs do?
COTS is the development and certification of the cargo systems. NASA is only paying a portion of the overall development costs, not all of them, and NASA is involved because it wants to certify the delivery systems. This is not unusual in the contracting world.
The CRS program is contract services. NASA provides the cargo, and Orbital and SpaceX will get paid for delivering it. In the case of SpaceX, they will also be providing the only down-mass services after the Shuttle program ends.
“ISS cargo delivery is not our goal, human travel beyond LEO is.”
In this day and age, it’s easy to forget how good our logistics infrastructure is. If you need food or want to buy something, you have a plethora of choices. Not so for the ISS, and not so for any expeditions or outposts we establish beyond LEO.
Just as armies have recognized the importance of logistics (e.g. “An army marches on its stomach”), so do any future space endeavors we have. Setting up sustainable and cost effective ways to move humans and materiel is imperative to going anywhere off Earth.
An easy way to see this is to look at how much we spend to put mass at the place we want it in space. It’s not the capsules or landers that cost the most, but the transportation. That huge cost is what has been holding us back from exploring LEO and beyond, not the will or technology.
“The argument that “commercial” can develop trans-LEO vehicles and systems cheaper than NASA is a statement of faith, not fact.”
I don’t know why you draw such a hard line between “NASA” and “commercial”. What does NASA build on it’s own? And doesn’t commercial include the same companies that have been involved in space flight from the beginning?
Besides, the commercial debate I know of today is just for LEO, since there are no funded programs to go anywhere else. Once Congress coughs up the money, then we can reassess where things are, but until then it’s an empty argument.
“We’ll see who is right eventually, but only after the government capability and infrastructure is destroyed.”
What’s getting destroyed? If you’re talking about NASA-specific assets, the VAB is not being destroyed, nor are the crawlers. The Constellation program was going to pay to replace the Shuttle launch pads, but I’m not aware of any money in the budget to still do that.
But this gets back to that harsh line people have between government and commercial. The DoD/NRO are not affected by anything NASA does with the VAB and crawler, so that part of the government is not affected. And as of now there is only the ISS civilian program, which doesn’t need the VAB or crawlers.
So again, this argument is an empty one as long as Congress does not fund a new exploration program. And when they do, the requirements for infrastructure may not need the VAB or crawler, so they can continue to be either rented out or used on the Kennedy Space Center tour as museum pieces, awaiting a future need.
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 4, 2011 @ 1:27 pm
Comment by Robert Nidds — March 3, 2011 @ 8:02 pm
“We are going to rely on the Russians to get to ISS”
Maybe you don’t realize this, but we have always relied on the Russians to maintain crew at the ISS after the Shuttle’s have flown home. The ISS could not be staffed by the Shuttle, since as you point out, it can only stay in space for two weeks. This is not a new problem, but one that has existed since the beginning, and shows how little attention was paid to a Shuttle successor during the life of the Shuttle.
“The Shuttle has been flying for 30 years. All the knowledge and experience gained doing that will not be applied to the next generation winged manned spacecraft of similar size and purpose.”
Today the OTV-2 is schedule to launch, and of any current programs, it comes the closest to being a successor to the Shuttle. It represents the type of program that NASA should have continued funding, but didn’t.
In the commercial world, SNC is pursuing their Dream Chaser, and OSC is pursuing their Prometheus, both worthy (but smaller) successors to Shuttle.
The knowledge and technology of the Shuttle program is not lost, and lives on in many different ways.
And the reason why a similar sized Shuttle successor is not being worked on? Probably because of the combination of cost and capability, in that the Shuttle was wonderfully capable, but we didn’t always have a use for it, whereas it cost $200 million per month to operate, regardless if it launched or not.
Shuttle was a great program, but we need to take lessons from it and move on to what we need next, which is still unknown (i.e. no funded programs beyond ISS). Sometimes in life you have to pause and reassess your needs, and that’s what I see happening with the end of the Shuttle.
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 4, 2011 @ 1:39 pm
C. Adelphia,
An easy way to see this is to look at how much we spend to put mass at the place we want it in space. It’s not the capsules or landers that cost the most, but the transportation. That huge cost is what has been holding us back from exploring LEO and beyond, not the will or technology.
I disagree. We spend close to $20 B per year on a civilian space program and that is enough to get something in return. Up until now, we have gotten a space station (ISS) and an operational space transportation/in-space servicing system. With the “new direction”, who knows what we’ll get? And I contend that it is very much an issue of national will. The new path is essentially no will whatsoever — spend money on technology widgets, shovel pork to New Space companies, and go nowhere.
As far as the chimera of low cost launch goes, I’ve heard this all my career (since the late 1970′s). The fact is that launch costs are high because people costs are high and volume is low. You can do one of two things to change that equation: lower people costs (e.g., outsource it to India or automate fabrication, assembly, checkout and launch) or increase volume. But volume won’t come until costs come down. So the former is really your best option. It’s a Catch-22 and believe all you want to, I think that launch costs have reached a lower plateau, about $5000/kg (the current cost of the lowest cost flight option to LEO, the India PSLV). Other vehicles have yet to demonstrate genuine flight readiness.
What’s getting destroyed?
Our national capability to send people to and from space. The real capability is not in hardware but expertise and accumulated technical knowledge.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 4:10 pm
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 4:10 pm
“With the “new direction”, who knows what we’ll get?”
If you’re talking about the current NASA Authorization Act, what Congress has authorized NASA to build is the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), plus they have authorized NASA to develop a commercial crew program.
No one knows what shape the commercial crew program will take, but I certainly like the idea of getting NASA out of the routine work of getting crew to/from LEO, not to mention replacing the Russian Soyuz. I think there is enough potential traffic to LEO to attract at least two commercial crew transportation services, and two is the minimum needed to get the benefits of competition (cost & features) and redundancy.
“The new path is essentially no will whatsoever — spend money on technology widgets, shovel pork to New Space companies, and go nowhere. ”
I agree that the SLS and MPCV are 100% government pork spending that has no funded need (no program they are supporting).
Commercial crew on the other hand is a relatively small investment on the part of NASA that leverages matching investment from commercial companies. Shared risk and shared reward.
The commercial crew program also provides an avenue of future commerce that the SLS and MPCV don’t, in that companies like Bigelow can use them to start up their own LEO (or beyond) businesses. Bigelow has stated that he won’t depend on NASA for crew services, which in light of possible government shutdowns, is a good idea.
On a slightly different note, did you see the GAO report that came out today regarding NASA programs. The MPCV is reported to still need $20 Billion or more to finish. This is astonishing for just a capsule, and it would be hard to see how it could ever be used for commercial LEO needs.
By comparison, SpaceX has said that they have spent less than $1 Billion so far for developing Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon.
NASA has a lot of bright people working there, but this type of spending disconnect shows that NASA does cutting-edge research best, but services like transportation are best left to the private sector. Yet another reason I got over the end of the Shuttle program – the cost of keeping it going.
“I think that launch costs have reached a lower plateau, about $5000/kg (the current cost of the lowest cost flight option to LEO, the India PSLV).”
The PSLV looks to be too small to be used for human transport or for supplying the ISS. I think a better gauge would be for Atlas V sized launchers, which are not only widely used, but can be used for cargo or crew.
In that case, it may be true that the price for Atlas V has not gone down, but the Falcon 9 has had two successful launches (one test, the other revenue generating), and it is priced at $56 million, whereas Atlas V is priced around $100 million.
For that particular market space, the price is dropping. And that is the best way to look at pricing, by comparing it to competitive alternatives. For instance Boeing wants to build their CST-100 capsule, and it could be launched on Atlas V, Delta IV or Falcon 9, so that provides a basis of comparison by function, instead of just comparing a bunch of miscellaneous launchers.
“The real capability is not in hardware but expertise and accumulated technical knowledge.”
Isn’t a great deal of the knowledge with the commercial space industry? ULA continues to launch a wide variety of rockets, Lockheed Martin & Boeing continues to build complex aerospace systems, and the myriad of other lower tier contractors continue to work on other aerospace programs.
The experts of the Shuttle are disbanding, but the expertise and accumulated technical knowledge lives on in the companies that do the real work of building government space systems. And if someone is out of a job, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX have job openings.
Maybe you need to provide a better example, but from what I can see the aerospace industry continues to survive just fine without the Shuttle and Constellation.
Nice conversation, but the weekend calls…
Comment by C. Adelphia — March 4, 2011 @ 5:23 pm
I wonder if it was deliberate to dismantle the Shuttle infrastructure and stop flying the Shuttle so NASA is forced to develop a new vehicle or die. i.e. same strategy some thousand or so years ago where a general burned the ships of an invading army so the troops had to conquer the enemy fortress or die (early Roman, Greek or Phoenicians).
Comment by Michael Wright — March 4, 2011 @ 5:30 pm
Michael,
I wonder if it was deliberate to dismantle the Shuttle infrastructure and stop flying the Shuttle so NASA is forced to develop a new vehicle or die
Yes, it was deliberate. Didn’t work out too well, did it?
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 5:35 pm
C. Adelphia,
If you’re talking about the current NASA Authorization Act, what Congress has authorized NASA to build is the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), plus they have authorized NASA to develop a commercial crew program.
And I contend that we’ll get nothing from this — no flights, no capability, nothing. We’ll see who’s right.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 4, 2011 @ 5:36 pm
Here’s an interesting quote from Charles Bolden during his testimony before Congress:
“….it would not take us until 2030 to go to the Moon. If we decided that we wanted to go to the Moon and put humans there, you know that potentially could be done by the end of this present decade…” Charlie Bolden March 2, 2011
You can watch the entire video of Bolden’s testimony at:
http://science.house.gov/hearing/full-committee-hearing-0
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 4, 2011 @ 5:41 pm
@Paul,
You say above that a 70-ton LEO sidemount would have minimal development costs. I don’t disagree per se but the part of that I don’t understand is the engines. How expensive would it be to design a tail-pod (or whatever) with SSMEs? Also, how many do we have to use and how much would it cost to build more?
Another problem with all this flailing around is that it makes people at large care less about space. The more people feel that the country doesn’t need a space program – because nothing bad has happened through the lack of one – the less likely any proposals are to get funding or the political backing to be completed.
Comment by Graham — March 4, 2011 @ 7:15 pm
”
Basic principles:
Small, incremental building blocks
Cumulative – each step builds on previous one
Early accomplishment, early capabilities
Robotic presence first, then people
”
I am in enthusiastic agreement with these basic principles that you have laid out elsewhere. I don’t think that these basic principles require us to retain the VAB, crawler or other Shuttle infrastructure. Let them sleep. The Delta IV Heavy is an existing rocket with customers other than NASA that does not use the Shuttle infrastructure and can nonetheless hurl 12 tons to TLI. We can do a lot with that capability. Other capabilities exist now (Atlas V, Ariane V ECA, H-IIB, etc) and others might arise soon (e.g., Falcon 9). Don’t tie the Vision to one Shuttle-derived launch system.
Let the Shuttle die.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 4, 2011 @ 8:31 pm
Graham,
Development costs for Shuttle side-mount are less than any other Heavy Lift option currently known. It also has the virtue of being ready to fly quicker than any other option. The study conducted by JSC last summer (I discuss it in this post: HEFT, Lies and Videotape) uses a reusable SSME pod that is recovered after launch. The program costs are shown in the figure accompanying that post.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 5, 2011 @ 5:22 am
Ron,
The Delta IV Heavy is an existing rocket with customers other than NASA that does not use the Shuttle infrastructure and can nonetheless hurl 12 tons to TLI. We can do a lot with that capability.
True enough. The current cost for a Delta-IV Heavy is $450 M. Each. That’s to launch one-fourth the payload mass of a single Shuttle side-mount.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 5, 2011 @ 5:24 am
“True enough. The current cost for a Delta-IV Heavy is $450 M. Each. That’s to launch one-fourth the payload mass of a single Shuttle side-mount.”
That’s about the same cost of launching a space shuttle which can launch 25 tones into orbit plus 8 passengers. I thought private companies like the ULA were supposed to be able to do things a lot cheaper than the government can:-)
Comment by Marcel Williams — March 5, 2011 @ 7:02 am
C. Adelphia,
Sure do realize that we have relied on the Russians to maintain staff on the ISS. Having it be the only way for anyone to get to the ISS for the next few years is not a good idea. Paul’s original point of preserving, adapting and using what we have is what the Russians have done and what we should be doing. If the Shuttle Sidemount HLV is the heavy lift option that we go with (and proposed by NASA in 1986 as the Shuttle-C vehicle), then retiring the shuttle just doesn’t make much sense, since we will be using the same SRBs and ET that the Shuttle uses to get to orbit. I didn’t point out that the Shuttle Orbiter could only stay in orbit for two weeks, but with an Orbiter extended duration pallet in the payload bay, it could stay in orbit for about 30 days if necessary, Endeavour was built with the fittings to use it, the other Orbiters were retrofitted with them.
Eventually we will need to bring back something from orbit that won’t fit through the docking hatch of a capsule or small lifting body/runway lander type vehicle.
I remember the X-33 Venture Star program that was going to be the Shuttle’s replacement. Single stage to orbit with aerospike engines and a low turnaround time – plug a preloaded payload bay as a single unit into the vehicle, raise it upright and off it goes. Won’t even need a Kennedy Space Center to launch it – it could be launched from anywhere in the USA.
The problem? The composite hydrogen tanks that made the vehicle concept possible and that Scaled Composites swore wouldn’t crack when loaded with LH2, did.
I remember the Delta Clipper SSTO vehicle that lifted off vertically, hovered, translated sideways and landed. And fell over and blew up when one of its landing gear didn’t deploy on a later test flight.
You stated that the Dream Chaser and Prometheus (NASA HL-10 derivatives) are being pursued by the commercial sector -”pursued” being the operative word. Not operational and flying – NASA drop tested the X -38 lifting body/ISS rescue vehicle years ago, and with a propulsion module could have been used as a crew transport vehicle to the ISS.
The Space X people didn’t pay much attention to fuel slosh or software conflicts with their vehicles, and lost them – problems that NASA had dealt with many, many years ago.
I agree that any blunt body capsule design we end up with should be able to be launched on an Atlas V or Delta IV, but they are at least 4 years from being man-rated, if they started tomorrow.
The commercial/New Space efforts have and are going to waste time and money relearing what NASA has done and already knows. Paul’s “don’t throw away the bird that we have in hand” opinion has empirical evidence to back it up.
Comment by Robert Nidds — March 5, 2011 @ 7:47 am
“That’s to launch one-fourth the payload mass of a single Shuttle side-mount.”
The Shuttle side-mount does not exist. NASA’s recent record with big rocket development projects is very bad: after $9B on Constellation, we got one test flight. Orion — just Orion!! — is projected to cost $20B-$29B.
Sure Delta IV Heavy is expensive per launch. That’s a function of flight rate.
But Delta IV exists and flies $1B+ payloads into orbit successfully. HLV doesn’t, not even a ‘simple’ side-mount. I put ‘simple’ in quotes because methinks if authorization were given to build a side-mount, that would rapidly turn into a $20B project for no good reason at all.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 10:05 am
Also, I don’t want to be tied to one and only one launch system. If an HLV were built, then NASA would be tempted to create payloads that can only be launched by that system and cannot be launched by any other. We’d then be hostage to that singular system.
We should pursue a lunar lander that can be launched by
**********ANY*************
of Delta IV Heavy, Ariane V ECA or H-IIB and any newcomers to that 8-ton-TLI-minimum/12-ton-TLI-maximum payload category that might arise over time.
The ISS was held hostage to the Shuttle and took far longer to build than it should have taken. Don’t do it again!
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 10:09 am
Ron,
methinks if authorization were given to build a side-mount, that would rapidly turn into a $20B project for no good reason at all.
You can think whatever you want, but there is a distinction to be drawn between a well run program and poorly run one. There are also costing models that have looked at the issue of EELV vs. HLV and there are benefits and drawbacks to each — neither is a clear winner.
I take my cost estimate for Shuttle side-mount from this:
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/files/2011/01/cost.jpg
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2011/01/heft-lies-and-videotape/
This JSC study indicates a cost of $7.6 billion for vehicle development, but that includes 18 flights. At 70 t/flight, we’re launching about 1260 tons.
For the same amount of money spent on Delta-IV Heavy, at $450 million each, $7.6 B buys around 17 launches which works out to be about 390 tons, a third of the payload delivered by SSM. But let’s say the bulk buy of 18 lowers the unit cost — maybe by half? So we two-thirds the payload, all for the same expenditure.
You cannot compare Ares development to SSM — Ares I was a completely new vehicle and by the time they got finished with Ares V (which was never built), we had a completely new development program. Not the same, regardless of what you think.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 5, 2011 @ 11:56 am
@Ron Menich
Its actually traditional NASA vendors like Boeing and Lockheed that builds rockets for NASA. They also built the EELVs. And Boeing was one of the most vocal advocates urging NASA to fund the development of a heavy lift vehicle.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 5, 2011 @ 1:45 pm
@Marcel: You betcha! It’s a great life. Of course Boeing and Lockheed are going to advocate for HLV!! Lot’s more money in their pockets. Who cares whether it ever gets built?
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 5:16 pm
Atlas V just scored another launch success a few moments ago.
I do not wish to put all my eggs into one future HLV basket, one that does not even exist today. I’d much rather have an architecture that can use existing rockets and can leverage new ones as they enter the market. I want options; I don’t want to painted into a corner.
The EELVs, Ariane V ECA, H-IIB and so forth exist today and are capable of throwing equipment into TLI.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 6:08 pm
“The ISS could have been put into orbit using 4-6 Saturn V launches. The Saturn V got its payloads were they had to be every time.”
I have to disagree Robert. I read that Von Braun wanted to spend a little more money to modify the S-II second stage of the Saturn V and keep it attached to the converted S-IVB that was Skylab. If you calculate the empty space inside that second stage I think you will find it is bigger than the ISS.
So in afternoon an HLV like Sidemount, with a modified external tank, could loft a bigger space station than the decade-to-build incredibly expensive ISS. Cost constraints on the shuttle program kept NASA from pursuing any wet workshop concept- a ridiculous waste. And a sad lost opportunity to build a massive 2001 type space station for what the ISS cost. Consider a space station constructed of over a hundred external tank wet workshops. Immense.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 5, 2011 @ 6:16 pm
Paul:
The link you gave
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/files/2011/01/cost.jpg
shows a DDT&E cost in red of $7.6B. That number does NOT include any flights.
The black number of $28.6B includes “SSP Extension, DDT&E + 18 operational flights”.
At your figure of $450M/flight for Delta IV, the $28.6B would buy 760 tons of equipment injected into TLI, perhaps 200-250 tons to the lunar surface.
I’d rather spend $28.6B getting 200 tons of equipment to the lunar surface.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 8:41 pm
(By the way… amongst the HLV proposals, I would agree with you that SSM is the most reasonable. But I don’t think that building any HLV is a good idea because it locks the country into one vehicle and other reasons I’ve mentioned. So if they’re going to build an HLV, then probably SSM is least harmful. But they shouldn’t build one at all — we can do just fine with the rockets we have and ones that will arise over time.)
Comment by Ron Menich — March 5, 2011 @ 9:06 pm
“You betcha! It’s a great life. Of course Boeing and Lockheed are going to advocate for HLV!! Lot’s more money in their pockets. Who cares whether it ever gets built?”
I do because it will make it a lot easier for NASA to set up permanent facilities on the Moon and Mars.
HLVs will also allow NASA to launch much larger, spacious, and cheaper space stations into orbit like Bigelow’s 100 tonne BA-2100:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BA_2100
An HLV would allow us to place massive fuel depots into LEO and L1 for multiple beyond LEO missions within cis-lunar space for NASA and for private companies wanting to transport customers all the way to the lunar surface in reusable vehicles.
HLVs could help to supply the hundreds of tonnes of mass shielding required for manned interplanetary journeys starting at one of the Lagrange points.
HLVs should make space solar power satellites placed in geosynchronous a lot more economical.
HLVs will allow us to deploy huge space telescopes at one of the Lagrange points.
HLVs should allow us deploy massive light sails to the Lagrange points for manned and unmanned interplanetary journeys that would require substantially less delta-V requirements to travel through interplanetary space.
An HLV will be one of the most useful transportation work horses ever developed for government and private space programs. That’s why even new companies like Space X want to develop them! And the first nations and companies to fully utilize them will strategically and commercially dominate cis-lunar space and probably the rest of the solar system!
HLVs just make doing big things in space a lot cheaper and easier!
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 5, 2011 @ 10:01 pm
Ron,
The black number of $28.6B includes “SSP Extension, DDT&E + 18 operational flights”.
You are correct; I made a mistake in reading my own chart. That money is spent over the course of the next 17 years.
I’d rather spend $28.6B getting 200 tons of equipment to the lunar surface.
So would I, but that is not the choice before us. The choice is whether we follow the “new direction” and discard the existing infrastructure and throw NASA money away indefinitely on widgets and New Space pork or spend the same amount keeping a capability alive that while not used immediately, preserves it for some future time when we have people with vision running things again.
if they’re going to build an HLV, then probably SSM is least harmful. But they shouldn’t build one at all
You know of course that one will be built. Congress specified it in the new authorization and even the administration’s proposal builds one at some point in the (indefinite) future. So the political leadership of this nation has so decreed and your point is not the issue on the table.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 6, 2011 @ 4:26 am
“You know of course that one will be built.”
That’s why I eventually mentally check out of Human Space Flight discussions. We have all the rockets we need right now to lift sufficient payload over time to jumpstart civilization telerobotically on the Moon. HLVs and the Shuttle infrastructure are unnecessary to do this.
Instead, as you very correctly point out, the country will indeed go ahead waste countless billions developing an HLV of some flavor and then they’ll put all of our eggs into that one basket. Maybe we’ll be lucky and they’ll decide to build a reasonable and simple SSM. I’m not hopeful.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 6, 2011 @ 5:00 pm
P.S. As a technical side-note, the $7.6B DDT&E and the $28.6B combined DDT&E, SSP and 18 flights — all of these, no doubt, just account for launching things to LEO and do not include costs for an Earth Departure Stage (EDS). Is that correct?
By contrast, the $450M/flight number you quoted for Delta IV Heavy includes the Centaur EDS. Right now we are capable of launching equipment to TLI. With any new HLV system we’d have to wait years while the booster is developed and tested, then wait further for the EDS to be developed and tested.
I understand your context however: you wish to confine the discussion to live within the politically realistic assumption that some HLV will indeed be built, irrespective of whether doing so is intelligent or not. So the comments in this particular technical note will not substantively change that fundamental discussion.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 6, 2011 @ 5:10 pm
Ron,
all of these, no doubt, just account for launching things to LEO and do not include costs for an Earth Departure Stage (EDS). Is that correct?
Correct.
Right now we are capable of launching equipment to TLI. With any new HLV system we’d have to wait years while the booster is developed and tested, then wait further for the EDS to be developed and tested.
True, but we don’t have to “wait years” — you can use both. Put robotic assets on the Moon now with EELV, then send human missions on SSM later.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 6, 2011 @ 9:04 pm
“….it would not take us until 2030 to go to the Moon. If we decided that we wanted to go to the Moon and put humans there, you know that potentially could be done by the end of this present decade…” Charlie Bolden March 2, 2011
I thought that we could have built and gotten an Orion flying in 5 – 7 years, but more than 5 years after the project started, it is said, by the program’s management, to still be another 5 – 7 years from flight.
Someone said that we spent about $12 billion on Constellation, but all we got was a single test flight. Actually that is not accurate. They flew an off-the-shelf Shuttle SRB, modified to look like something else, but without ever explaining just why.
I’ve been mired in HSF for 30 years and I saw how it worked going into Shuttle, and I saw a lot of new development and first flights, and I saw it done on a timely basis (twenty + years ago); and I’ve seen ISS and Constellation.
I get the impression that the real goal is to create as dysfunctional an organization as possible, staff it with as many neophytes and managerial incompetents as they can find (leaving the experienced capable people out in the cold), an then proceed as slowly as they dare in the hopes of keeping their high paid positions and keeping the current effort, whether it is development or flight, going just as long as they can.
I also hear about all of these new NASA starts of vehicles that were supposed to follow on after Shuttle, but none of which ever made it quite far enough before cancellation.
So if Bolden is to be believed then just how does he think it can be done. An Apollo-like $500 billion crash effort? Apollo did not cost that kind of money in current year dollars?
Comment by Louis Silver — March 6, 2011 @ 10:51 pm
“Put robotic assets on the Moon now with EELV, then send human missions on SSM later.”
Hmm… you’ll need a lander now for the EELVs. Just think: a lander carried on a Delta IV Heavy that can land 3-4 tons of robotic equipment on the Moon could also easily transport two people from EML1 to the lunar surface. For example, they could be in their spacesuits sitting on plastic seats. That would be a fine thing to do if there were already extensive robotic-emplaced infrastructure waiting for them on the surface. And, if that lander were proved out on 20 robotic landings before the first human landing, then that would be a good thing for safety.
Come to think of it, the Delta IV Heavy is capable of transporting a small capsule carrying two people from Earth to EML1 where those two could transfer to a lander of the type mentioned earlier that had separately been launched.
Why did we need an HLV again? Oh, that’s right, because Congress said that it’s necessary. Got it.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 7, 2011 @ 8:24 am
Ron,
That would be a fine thing to do if there were already extensive robotic-emplaced infrastructure waiting for them on the surface.
All described here: http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
Including the role of HLV (not required, but useful if available).
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 7, 2011 @ 8:32 am
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 3, 2011 @ 5:06 am
“That said, I see telerobotic operations as pathfinding activities, not a substitute for human presence and habitation. Things break and sometimes you need creative intelligence on-site to fix problems or devise work arounds for them. I also believe that learning to do ISRU on the lunar surface will probably require an interaction of people and machines at a fairly close, real-time level.”
Thanks for taking up this issue. I am an Ex-EVA hardware/operations type (turned Systems Engineer). During the early days of Space Station we heard repeatedly that” robots can do everything in space better, cheaper, safer than people”. Until the Station design started to mature, then as specific tasks were brought forward we would end up with this string of “well except that of course” walk backs. An over reliance on robotics (even telerobotics) is a prescription for disaster.
Lest I get myself branded a troglodyte, I am not ant- robot. What we are discussing here is the eventual establishment on the Moon of a series of end-to end factories (from raw materials to finished product; first propellant, then tankage to store the propellant, etc.). That is going to require (by current standards) a “jaw dropping” amount of robotics/telerobotics, but a significant human presence will be required as well. Even in the fairly early stages of establishing the installation things like cable routing (for power/data lines) can get tricky.
Comment by Joe — March 7, 2011 @ 1:33 pm
@Louis Silver
I think the most difficult part about developing the Orion was the fact that it couldn’t be determined what the true lifting capability of the Ares I would be and whether or not the Orion capsule would land in the ocean or on land. So it was difficult for Lockheed to figure out what kind of capsule they had to build. But Lockheed insist that their vehicle will be ready by 2015. Boeing says that they could have their space capsule (CST-100)ready by that time also.
So if its true that the space capsules can be ready by 2015 and that NASA can have the heavy lift vehicle ready by 2017 then the hard part of returning to the Moon would be already done. Building a simple EDS (Earth Departure Stage) vehicle shouldn’t cost more than $3 billion to develop. And a simple single stage lunar lander suggested by Dr. Spudis should be at least half the cost of developing a descent and an ascent staged Altair which has been estimated to cost about $12 billion to develop.
Plus we did it before, in less than a decade, using primitive 1960s technology!
Of course when were spending $3 billion a year on the ISS make-work program and potentially another $1 billion a year on commercial crew development, spending $40 billion over a decade for things other than a manned Moon program does have a financial impact.
But I believe that there would be much less waste at NASA in both time and in money if NASA and their vendors had a much more focused goal of returning to the Moon in order to establish a permanent human presence at one of the lunar poles and in order to exploit lunar resources to reduce cost.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 7, 2011 @ 2:29 pm
“I do not wish to put all my eggs into one future HLV basket, one that does not even exist today.”
Everything exists except a cargo pod. The engines, the SRB’s, the External tank. What no longer exists is the most problematic part of the system- the orbiter. What better basket than one that has put a hundred tons up over a hundred times in a row without fail? Over 200 flawless SRB firings. The hardware has been constantly improved over 30 years. Sidemount is so obviously and completely superior to the inferior launch systems being discussed as “better” that I wonder if there is some….conspiracy.
Just kidding. The only conspiracy of course is just good old fashion greed. There are people who that money spent on the heavy lift infrastructure and hardware and they want it bad. So of course they are saying these things.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 7, 2011 @ 5:29 pm
“Come to think of it, the Delta IV Heavy is capable of transporting a small capsule carrying two people from Earth to EML1 where those two could transfer to a lander of the type mentioned earlier that had separately been launched.
Why did we need an HLV again? Oh, that’s right, because Congress said that it’s necessary. Got it.”
Delta IV heavy is not human-rated and will cost a great deal of money to make it so. It will only put up 25 tons while a sidemount will put up 3 times as much (factoring in the wasted mass on seperate delta launches). A block II sidemount will put up 90 tons. The inferior launch vehicles cannot compare to the sidemount for throwing large payloads to the moon- not even close. Do not confuse an astronaut taxi to a moon base enabling heavy lift vehicle. It’s dishonest.
But like I said, of course they will say these things.
Comment by GaryChurch — March 7, 2011 @ 5:36 pm
Marcel wrote:
“HLVs could help to supply the hundreds of tonnes of mass shielding required for manned interplanetary journeys starting at one of the Lagrange points.”
Where did you get this idea? Robert Zubrin has calculated that the amount of radiation, from all sources, that would be received by the crew of a 2 1/2 year Mars round-trip would be about 50 REMs, on average, which isn’t even enough to cause radiation sickness if received all at once. That assumes a reasonably well shielded “storm shelter”, mostly using existing life support consumables for shielding, for solar flares.
50 REMs is not recommended for the general public, but I would accept that dose as the price of going to Mars. As a matter of fact, I was talking to Dr. Meier, my radiation oncologist this afternoon and he told me that my gamma-knife and cyber-knife treatments have amounted to a total of about 5-10 thousand REMS. Approx. 90% of that dose was received by my metastatic brain tumors, but that still amounts to a total brain radiation dose of at least 10-20 times the whole body dose that would be received by a crew member on a Mars round trip. I seem to be still functioning.
Comment by Dick Morris — March 7, 2011 @ 9:23 pm
As an outside observer, I am beginning to believe that Sidemount is the only way out of our current quagmire for the following reasons:
I have closely followed each Space Shuttle mission since return to flight in July 2005. I have been overwhelmed with how well NASA has performed these complex and varied missions, and how they continue to improve their processes even up to the final flights. I could fill my comments here with superlatives for the part of NASA that I will refer to as “NASA-S” for “Shuttle” (or maybe “success”) NASA-S seems to be just now hitting their stride.
At the same time I am now appalled, dismayed, and any other negative word that you can think of with the part of NASA that has been attempting for over a decade now to develop a successor to the Space Shuttle. As we all know each attempt has failed. I will refer to this part of NASA as “NASA-D” for “Development” (or maybe “debacle”). This time last year I was worried about the future of HSF. The way this year has started, I am actually now becoming frightened.
I fully trust NASA-S to launch humans into space. However I no longer trust NASA-D to develop space vehicles. The blame probably goes mostly to upper management and meddling politicians, but whatever the cause, NASA-D has repeatedly failed. However I don’t think we are ready to transfer the development of BEO activities to commercial. I think that maybe, just maybe the NASA-D crowd can handle developing Sidemount. That is, as long as, and only if, they are mandated to reuse all existing Shuttle processes and facilities to the furthest extent possible. Besides the previously mentioned manufacturing and launch facilities I would also mandate the use of existing cargo processing facilities including SSPF, OPF and CRF, which means that the Sidemount cargo canister interior will have to mimic the existing Shuttle cargo bay. In case this seems limiting, if I understand correctly DOD mandated this size, and also in Sidemount configuration this volume would be able to carry much more weight than Shuttle could. I would also mandate that no changes are allowed to the ET, which means that the cargo canister has to use existing attachment points and umbilicals, and the canister has to have three SSME’s, and have similar weight (of Shuttle with cargo) so that the flight profile is the same. MECO has to occur below orbital velocity like it currently does and the ET tumbled so that they don’t have to figure out how to deorbit it. Etc., etc. The list of existing Shuttle processes that will have to be evaluated for inclusion in Sidemount will be incredibly long, and with each process there will be a temptation to improve it, which will add to the risk of delay. A huge question is the computers and software – is it riskier to continue to use old (but proven) Shuttle avionics to control Sidemount, since it would have to be somewhat modified, or is it riskier to develop new flight software using modern computers? I would expect heavy debate on that topic if Sidemount moves forward.
The reason that I feel so strongly that NASA would have to be mandated to use existing Shuttle capability for Sidemount whenever possible is because any change, no matter how well intentioned, would mean new designs, which would be a huge risk to cost and schedule, something we can no longer tolerate. Unfortunately the SSME’s, OMS and flight computers probably won’t be recoverable, at least in the initial design, because developing methods to recover them would likely create delays and cost overruns in the project, and any delays in Sidemount will kill it. Sidemount will be criticized throughout its entire development by those who will hate its antique technology and those who will complain about its limited capability. Any delay or cost overrun due to “tweaking” or “improving” will open the door for critics to instigate yet another cancellation. I agree with Wayne Hale that whatever we start we better finish. I agree with Paul that Sidemount will get us something, even if it’s not exactly what we want. My only concern now is that the Shuttle infrastructure and workforce is rapidly disappearing before our eyes. If we are going to do Sidemount we better decide soon.
Comment by Steve Pemberton — March 8, 2011 @ 12:27 am
@Gary:
“Delta IV heavy is not human-rated and will cost a great deal of money to make it so”
I’m not terribly concerned, because I don’t see a need to send humans to the Moon any time soon. We can spend the next decade at least sending rovers and other telerobotic equipment.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 8, 2011 @ 8:07 am
@Joe:
“That is going to require (by current standards) a “jaw dropping” amount of robotics/telerobotics, but a significant human presence will be required as well.”
There is so, so much to do that is straightforward before we get to the point at which we’ll require jaw-dropping amounts of telerobotics. We need to send a half dozen or more rovers to the Moon, souped-up versions of Spirit/Opportunity/Lunokhod, to scout for concentrated ores. We need rovers to go into permanently shadowed craters and figure out how to do that. After scouting, we might need to return some samples to Earth.
All of these are very doable, and it will take several years if not a decade to do them. By the time we’re completed with these straightforward initial activities, the field of telerobotics will have advanced significantly.
So why all the fuss?
Comment by Ron Menich — March 8, 2011 @ 8:14 am
Comment by Ron Menich — March 8, 2011 @ 8:14 am
“There is so, so much to do that is straightforward before we get to the point at which we’ll require jaw-dropping amounts of telerobotics. We need to send a half dozen or more rovers to the Moon, souped-up versions of Spirit/Opportunity/Lunokhod, to scout for concentrated ores. We need rovers to go into permanently shadowed craters and figure out how to do that. After scouting, we might need to return some samples to Earth.
All of these are very doable, and it will take several years if not a decade to do them.”
From reading Dr. Spudis flight manifest it does not appear that he is talking about a delay of 10 years before beginning to attempt the utilization of Lunar resources, but that is his specialty so I will leave it to him to access that portion of your plan. For me, if we are going to wait 10 years before really beginning; I rapidly lose interest.
“By the time we’re completed with these straightforward initial activities, the field of telerobotics will have advanced significantly.”
In the early 1990’s I (among others) was promised that the Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS) already had many capabilities that are still in the “development stage” today. The kinds of things that will be necessary to do on the Moon to achieve the kind of goals we are talking about without some degree of direct human intervention are well beyond what was promised for the FTS. Sorry, but I just do not have the “faith” that you seem to that the next 20 years of telerobotic development will be so much more spectacular than the last 20 years .
“So why all the fuss?”
No offense intended, but spoken like someone doomed to have the project they purport to support fail.
Comment by Joe — March 8, 2011 @ 11:42 am
@Dick Morris
Let me quote from former NASA flight surgeon Dr. Duane Graveline:
“With our present level of shielding technology a very substantial loss of brain function during a 6-month trip to Mars can be predicted.”
Why?
“It has been estimated that in 6-months of spacecraft travel outside the protective electromagnetic shield of the Earth, every cell nucleus in our body would receive multiple hits from proton radiation. One of every three cells in our body would receive at least one heavy ion hit (oxygen, nitrogen or iron) to its nucleus. ”
“We must remember that cosmic radiation of galactic origin may have energy levels as much as 10,000 times greater than that of solar origin due to their near light speed. Cosmic ray hits damaging just one strand of our DNA are usually reparable by body cells. When double strand breaks occur the result is severely mutagenic and frequently beyond complete repair.
“Heavy ions, especially those having atomic weights approaching that of iron, if of galactic origin, leave a virtual tunnel of destruction surrounded by a zone of ionic chaos as our normal sodium, potassium and calcium ions become disrupted. Even our muscle cells must struggle to repair such damage but what about our central nervous system, having no repair mechanism? In nervous tissue the damage must become cumulative, gradually building up scar tissue as vital functions are progressively eroded. ”
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Lowenstein:
“If every neuron in your brain gets hit, do you come back being a blithering idiot, or not?” asked Dr. Derek I. Lowenstein, the chairman of Brookhaven’s collider accelerator department:-)
I don’t like taking any chances with significant damage to the human brain. That’s why I prefer protecting humans fully from heavy nuclei during long interplanetary journeys.
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 8, 2011 @ 3:40 pm
@Joe:
“For me, if we are going to wait 10 years before really beginning; I rapidly lose interest”
I’d just be happy with small, incremental building blocks; cumulative progress such that each step builds upon previous one; early accomplishment, early capabilities; robotic presence first, then people.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 8, 2011 @ 7:40 pm
Bob Thompson pointed out the destruction of the KSC launch complex infrastructure that the shut down of Shuttle will bring. Bob is likely unaware that for the last 20 years the management, particularly of the ISS Program, and to a lesser degree Shuttle, and the same philosophy was picked up and being used by Constellation-the philosophy being the dismantling of the center-wide subsystem manager approach. Many of the Apollo veterans credited this approach, in which management of every major system and function is performed by organizations and employees throughout the HSF centers who are experts in each system or function, with making Apollo and Shuttle the success that it was.
In the last 2 decades the approach was to manage everything from the grossly overinflated program offices and in some cases farm out support work to the wider organization.
What this often meant was that people with no relevant experience were placed in charge of hardware, systems and functions, and that management took a committee approach in which every significant decision was debated and voted on by a wide range of people, many with no knowledge of the question and ramifications. The new approach dumbed down decision making, increased times for everything, escalated costs, while at the same time eliminating a substantial portion of the more experienced workforce from involvement in the program.
It came about because some people who came from outside the agency and the program had no knowledge of the subsystem management approach, and a lot of people from the operations world, at that time rising to power within the ranks, didn’t see the need to have engineering experts since there were already experts in operations; but there is a world of difference between writing a checklist for operating a piece of equipment, which is what operations focuses on, and figuring out the requirements and design, and then building and testing a piece of hardware. The approaches are entirely different. In the subsystem management approach you have a couple of designated ‘experts’ who you go to for answers; in the more recent ISS, Shuttle and Constellation approach, you go to a committee for a vote and everyone gets a vote whether they have knowledge or not.
So while Bob cites the forthcoming loss of the major Apollo facilities, the destruction of the HSF program in terms of the expertise and responsibilities of the organizations and individuals; that destruction has been underway for a long time at the hands of a bunch of managers-and many are still in place today, who had no idea what they were doing.
That was why Bob Thompson could go from program start in 1972 to Orbiter Enterprise flying in 1977, while in Constellation people are still debating the size and functionality of a far simpler capsule.
Until NASA HSF dramatically changes their approach to program management, and this likely means getting rid of the existing AA for Space Ops and the existing Program Managers, all of whom came had a hand in changing NASA’s management approach, NASA’s program is basically out of control; NASA’s HSF program is basically managed by committees and its not the way to design and build systems.
Comment by James H — March 9, 2011 @ 7:51 am
Comment by Ron Menich — March 8, 2011 @ 7:40 pm
“I’d just be happy with small, incremental building blocks; cumulative progress such that each step builds upon previous one; early accomplishment, early capabilities; robotic presence first, then people.”
We are close to an agreement of sorts. The intent of the article from which these comments are derived, is the jeopardy into which HSF capability has been put (at least in this country). I have been convinced (by the way I am not on an ego trip, I am basically a “blue collar” Engineer; but one with some decades put in the industry) for some time now that any program without milestones in the 5 year time frame is not a real program.
If we are really serious about an eventual mining capability on the Moon there has to be developed a coordinated set of goals (basic knowledge of resources, robotics development – specifically for lunar operations, Human BEO capabilities). All with incremental (roughly 5 year increments) milestones leading to the eventual Lunar Mining capability. Additionally the interrelationship between human/robotic activity needs to be defined (who/what does what basically).
Tough task, but I assume that is what Dr. Spudis initial proposal was intended to kick off.
Comment by Joe — March 9, 2011 @ 10:00 am
James,
Your points are good ones, but I will point out that despite the management issues you have raised (and against which I frequently rail on this blog), we do have at present a functioning and flying human space program. It is not at all clear to me that we will have such a couple of years from now.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — March 9, 2011 @ 10:34 am
If NASA management really did wipe out the subsystem management approach as James indicates, then he’s right, the destruction of HSF started when that was allowed to occur. The program has continued to fly because Shuttle with minor mods had been developed between 3 and 4 decades ago; ISS was designed 3 decades ago and most of its was built in the US by the early 1990s or more recently byt he internationals. So we were continuing to fly, presenting the appearance of a functioning HSF program, but without the development capability you were already missing critical capabilities.
Now I would be afraid that it is very likely we no longer have the capability to re-develop it.
Comment by Dick — March 9, 2011 @ 11:33 am
Marcel:
Different forms of radiation have different biological effects, but those differences are accounted for by the “REM” metric: A REM is a REM. It is also not necessarily true that a particle of higher energy will have a greater biological effect than a similar particle with lower energy. It appears that the residence time of the particle in the body is a factor in determining the biological effect, and faster is shorter.
The Earth’s magnetic field is rather weak, and I would expect it to do no more than slightly deflect a cosmic ray, so astronauts in LEO would receive half of the cosmic ray dose of an astronaut in interplanetary space. If that is the case, then there have been many astronauts who have received about as much radiation dose in LEO as astronauts would receive in a Mars round-trip, and I have not heard that any of them have suffered any long-term ill effects.
The major difference between a cosmic ray and a gamma ray photon is that a cosmic ray particle may shatter an atomic nucleus if it should score a direct hit, But the nucleus is such an exceedingly tiny fraction of the volume of an atom that I would expect the probability of that happening for a given cosmic ray would be very tiny during it’s transit through the human body. If it does happen, the damage may not be significant, and if significant the damage may be repairable by the repair mechanisms possessed by all cells.
I’m not familiar with your “authorities” for this matter, so I don’t know if they have any special knowledge or not. Dr. Zubrin, on the other hand, has a PhD in nuclear engineering, so I would expect him to know something about it. I’ve read enough of his work to know that he is familiar with the BEIR literature. (His degree is from the UW here in Seattle, so I think I will drop by the UW Engineering Library on my way home and look up his disertation.)
If you don’t want to take any chances, then you are, of course, free to stay home. I doubt that we will lack for volunteers.
Comment by Dick Morris — March 9, 2011 @ 3:36 pm
@Joe:
Yes. For reference, the Spudis/Lavoie plan
http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf
does not call for an HLV until Mission 12 happening in Year 11 of the program. Thus, there are 11 telerobotic missions using existing rockets before the first usage of an HLV in the Spudis/Lavoie plan.
Comment by Ron Menich — March 9, 2011 @ 6:54 pm
It’s interesting to see the everyday, practical nature of underwater teleoperation (aka, remotely operated vehicle (ROV)); browse the following site, for example:
http://www.rov.org/rov_design_manipulators.cfm
Comment by Ron Menich — March 9, 2011 @ 10:05 pm
Comment by Ron Menich — March 9, 2011 @ 6:54 pm
“Yes. For reference, the Spudis/Lavoie plan does not call for an HLV until Mission 12 happening in Year 11 of the program. Thus, there are 11 telerobotic missions using existing rockets before the first usage of an HLV in the Spudis/Lavoie plan.”
Two Points:
First, the Spudis/Lavoie Plan may be (in my humble opinion) expecting a little too much from our robotic friends as well. I suspect direct human intervention may be required earlier than it allows. At this point that cannot be more than a “seat of the pants” feeling. But any plan changes as the design matures. This should not be taken as an attack on the Spudis/Lavoie Plan just a (hopefully) constructive suggestion to stay flexible as to what will be required as things “get real”.
Second, even if we take the Plan exactly as is that does not mean it is too early to begin HLV development. Year 11 of a program begun in 2011 would be 2022. If work on the SDHLV (presumably the Side Mount Configuration) were begun (under the presumed budget restrictions) also in 2011 you could reasonably expect the LEO version to be ready in roughly the 2016/2017 time frame (about 5 years before its first use to deliver payload to the Lunar Surface). This also requires a “Cislunar Transfer Stage” which still needs to be implemented and tested with the SDHLV. That is not a long window, so a timely start of HLV development would still be (to put it mildly) “prudent”. When you take into account the assertions in the article upon which this comment thread is based, it should make sense to begin HLV and BEO crew vehicle development in parallel with the rest of the program. If you wait until 2022 (when you want to get the capability) you will not get it for years (if at all if you have allowed the support infrastructure to be closed down).
Comment by Ron Menich — March 9, 2011 @ 10:05 pm
“It’s interesting to see the everyday, practical nature of underwater teleoperation (aka, remotely operated vehicle (ROV)); browse the following site”
I am familiar with the underwater robotic capabilities. But keep in mind that the Gulf repair job you referenced earlier took over a week. It was done entirely robotically because of the depth at which it had to be performed (it may be counter intuitive but it is harder to support humans at that depth under water than it is in space). I have been told by people that do that sort of work that had the repair location been in shallower water saturation divers could have completed the task in a couple of hours. That repair was fairly “simple” (make a smooth cut across the break and apply a cap) compared to what will be required on the Lunar surface for the plans we are discussing.
Again I do not mean this as an attack on the use of robotics (in fact massive use of it – by current standards – will be essential if the objective is to be achieved), but an over reliance on it could cause the project to fail. Were that to happen, the reaction to the attempt at ISRU will be “we tried that and it didn’t work” for a long time and I really do not want to see that happen.
Comment by Joe — March 10, 2011 @ 10:09 am
@Dick Morris
Info or Dr. Duane Graveline can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Graveline
Info on Derek Lowenstein:
http://www.bnl.gov/today/story.asp?ITEM_NO=1876
Another interesting online article by Discover Magazine on the potential dangers of heavy nuclei can be found at:
Are We Trapped On Earth?
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jun/cover
Comment by Marcel F. Williams — March 10, 2011 @ 1:31 pm
The Deepwater Horizon doesn’t look like it was too simple to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkQmsc3quDE
Comment by Ron Menich — March 10, 2011 @ 9:03 pm
Marcel:
Thanks for the links. Dr. Graveline appears to be a credible source, though I didn’t find any original source for the quoted material. Much of what I did find was contradictory. The Discover article, in particular, said that artifical magnetic fields could not shield against cosmic rays, but that the Earth’s magnetic field could. (As an electrical engineer I have some training in particle physics.)
Also, the South Atlantic Anomaly is a product of the inner Van Allen belt, not cosmic rays. Those particles, which are of solar origin, are about 10 MEV.
Comment by Dick Morris — March 11, 2011 @ 7:15 pm
“Comment by Ron Menich — March 10, 2011 @ 9:03 pm
The Deepwater Horizon doesn’t look like it was too simple to me:”
Actually what I said was “fairly simple” compared to what would need to be done on the Lunar Surface. Nothing in the video to which you link invalidates that point or any of the other points I made.
This discussion has been interesting, but it has (I think) run its course. We are down to the point where we will just start repeating ourselves. I am not trying to start a contest to see who gets the last word. If you really want the last word, its yours.
Comment by Joe — March 12, 2011 @ 9:50 am
Ok, I’ll graciously accept your offer and close with today’s beautiful picture of the Japanese automated resupply ship HTV being moved by the robotic Canadarm:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=36392
Comment by Ron Menich — March 13, 2011 @ 4:20 pm
Ending the Shuttle program without something ready to replace it certainly does not make much sense. That can only be characterized as spectacularly bad planning. We would be far better off if the Shuttle had been replaced 15 years ago, and it would have been had NASA selected a practical design for a replacement, instead of trying to “push the technology” with NASP.
Comment by Dick Morris — March 14, 2011 @ 8:59 pm
“instead of trying to “push the technology” with NASP.”
I never understood how they sold that thing; it insulted the rocket equation horrendously.
I can understand why they wanted solid for the first stage and hydrogen for the second- that is really stroking the rocket equation for all it’s worth. The shuttle hardware is actually a heavy lift vehicle- something everyone forgets. It was just lifting the equivalent of 737 every launch instead of useful payload. If you count the SRB’s as the first stage (which actually it is not technically) and the SSME’s as the second, using a J-2 or-another SSME in block II versions with the 5 segment SRB’s- puts a payload up that nothing else on earth even comes close to.
We just can’t throw that capability away.
Comment by VirgilSamms — March 15, 2011 @ 4:48 pm
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