Future of Our Space Program

[Pyrotex]

Hello, space fans, wherever you are.

 

I am Pyrotex, aka Nelson, and I'm an aerospace engineer working at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. I've been working on various NASA projects since 1980 --almost thirty years. And I have something to say.

 

If we are not very careful, we will lose our national space program. That's right, lose it.

 

Oh, we'll keep launching weather satellites, and military satellites. We'll put up a few probes to Mars, probably.

 

But our ability to put people into space, to put any LARGE cargo into space (like another Hubble Telescope), to take on any meaningful "manned" exploration of the Moon, other planets, or even low Earth orbit (LEO) will be gone for the foreseeable future.

 

The Shuttle must be retired soon, and we have NOT prepared for this eventuality. We have NO heavy lifter in the wings to replace the Shuttle. It will be five, some say seven or even nine, years before we can develop a heavy lifter from scratch. (This is called "The Gap".) The factories for building the Titan-3 and Titan-4 are gone. (And besides, the Titans were hideously expensive, designed as they were on military engineering principals.)

 

The Constellation Program (acronymized as "CxP" within NASA) was thrown together a decade ago by a few companies who obviously and validly did not want to disappear with the Shuttle program. But those engineers aren't around any more, and they have left with us the legacy of a poorly thought-out rocket system: The Ares-1. (Also called "the stick" within NASA.) Going for the Ares-1 will leave us with The Gap, during which we will not be able to make serious use of the International Space Station (ISS). We will lose our 100 Billion $ investment in the ISS.

 

There are other problems with the Ares-1, but I won't go into that yet. Just take it from me, it's a pitiful attempt to replace the Shuttle.

 

What we need, to not only replace the Shuttle, but also to close The Gap, was outlined by the Augustine Report. CLICK HERE

 

That report gave 6 options, but only ONE option replaces the Shuttle to at least some extent, is expandable so that we will eventually get even more bang/$ than the Shuttle, utilizes the best of Shuttle technology, requires only ONE rocket system, will save our aerospace workforce and expertise, AND will CLOSE The Gap.

 

OPTION 4B.

 

Here are your orders:

1. Go to that website.

2. Look at the videos.

3. Contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators, and...

4. tell them you want Option 4B, with no compromises.

 

Don't do this just for me -- I'm retiring in a few years.

 

Do this for yourselves, your kids, your grandkids, your country.

[JMJones0424]

If you don't mind- I would like to pick your brain for a minute and receive your opinions on my views.

 

I have long been of the opinion that the primary purpose of the space shuttle was to give us the capability to retrieve satellites from earth orbit and bring them safely back to earth. It does not make sense economically for the shuttle to be used as a freight truck as it has been, but a capsule can not bring back soviet satellites. No more Soviet Union, no more space shuttle.

 

I have been of the opinion that it does make more economical sense to send crew separately from cargo, especially when the weight of the cargo is massive, as would be the case for a mission to mars or other manned missions beyond the moon. Perhaps the current approach involves a poorly designed launch system, but is not the over-all aim better than putting all you eggs into one big basket like the direct-launcher that you posted a link for?

 

And slightly off-topic, but for long-term manned stations on the moon or mars, wouldn't we be far better off developing technologies for "burrowing" into the body we land on, rather than shipping the entire living structure there. Seems to me that the danger of solar and cosmic radiation and micro-meteorite strikes, not to mention the weight savings and potential expansion of underground sealed structures would make this approach far superior than sending surface dwelling units. Perhaps I am missing something or overestimating our mining capabilities.

[Pyrotex]

...I have long been of the opinion that the primary purpose of the space shuttle was to give us the capability to retrieve satellites from earth orbit and bring them safely back to earth. It does not make sense economically for the shuttle to be used as a freight truck as it has been, but a capsule can not bring back soviet satellites. No more Soviet Union, no more space shuttle.....

Uh... No.

The Shuttle has never retrieved a foreign satellite and brought it back to Earth.

The Shuttle has retrieved only one US satellite and brought it back to Earth. (I think. I could be wrong about this.

 

Not likely for four reasons:

1. The maximum load the Shuttle can put INTO orbit is around 45,000 pounds. The maximum load the Shuttle can safely bring BACK from orbit is around 8,000 pounds.

2. To hold a satellite, the payload bay must be outfitted with a docking cradle with hold-downs (straps and bolts), not only so it will not break, but so it will not shift around in the payload bay. This is true going UP or DOWN. The docking cradle must be precisely customized for THAT satellite, and its center of gravity, external construction, load points, etc. If we don't have detailed blue-prints of a Soviet satellite, we can not build a docking cradle for it.

3. Satellites have attitude control systems. These have little rockets. These require rocket fuel. Rocket fuels tend to be dangerous, corrosive, flammable, poisonous. NASA refused to carry the Galileo probe on a direct shot to Jupiter because that required a Centaur second stage: liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Too dangerous. Going out to pick up a Soviet satellite carrying god-only knows what fuels is totally out of the question.

4. To catch a satellite, the Shuttle has to be in the SAME ORBIT, which is pretty damned obvious from the ground. Had we ever tried that, the Soviets would have complained. Or lobbed a missile at us.

 

Sorry, but your premise is wrong.

[Moontanman]

I got a 404 error on that link Nelson. I'll try it again later. I think everyone who has listened to me over the years in any format knows I am a rabid proponent of the space program. I would give much to to see our space program funding increased 100 fold at least.

 

I was disappointed from the get go the space shuttle was so wussy, I wanted to see a bigger launch capability. Many people seem to think space is some how frivolous or unnecessary while they live in a world that depends on space for everything from entertainment to warfare. Our economy in a real way depends on communication that depends on space technology.

 

Expansion into space can only be a good for the USA and the world society as a whole. I won't repeat the whole blah blah blah thing here but unless we as a nation and more importantly as a society want to be regulated back to 2nd world or less status a strong non military presence in space is necessary. i won't try to say what the advantages of being big in space will be mainly because I honestly think no one really knows.

 

It's easy to try and predict what the future holds but I doubt anyone could have predicted how England would have dominated the world before they dominated the sea or how England would have influenced the world long after they stopped being an empire due to the dominance of their sea power. Possibly everyone would be speaking Spanish instead of English or maybe it would have been much more profound than that.

 

I am certain there are many real world scenarios that require space travel but the most important are the ones we don't know about yet, probably no tremendous science fiction type scenarios but then 500 years ago the new world was a science fiction type scenario. To allow the USA and by extension our friends and allies to be denied unfettered access to space would be a big mistake for everyone involved.

 

Maybe China, Russia, India and any other country willing to make the effort would bring us along but then again maybe they will put self interest first and regulate us and others to the bin of histories has beens.

[Pyrotex]

I got a 404 error on that link Nelson. I'll try it again later. I think everyone who has listened to me over the years in any format knows I am a rabid proponent of the space program. I would give much to to see our space program funding increased 100 fold at least.....

MooMan, try

 

http://www.directlauncher.com

 

That should get you there. It's the same URL as in my link, which works fine for me.

Even just doubling the space program funding for just 20 years would give us a permanent infra-structure for going to and from a permanent, nuclear powered, 20-person Lunar base; with mining facilities for obtaining O2, H2O, He3, metals, silicon, etc. And fabrication facilities for making and storing rocket fuel, fiberglass, composites, structural elements, etc.

[Pyrotex]

...the opinion that it does make more economical sense to send crew separately from cargo.... Perhaps the current approach involves a poorly designed launch system, but is not the over-all aim better than putting all your eggs into one big basket like the direct-launcher that you posted a link for?...

Yes, it does make sense to separate cargo and human launches -- for most scenarios. However, there are a lot of scenarios where the heavy cargo is a laboratory, requiring humans to perform experiments inside. The Shuttle took up a number of these.

 

We will always be "putting our eggs in one basket", no matter what option you choose. Given the expense of heavy lifters and human space flight, the EFFECTIVENESS and FLEXIBILITY of the option have higher priority than mere simplicity. Effectiveness *IS* the over-all aim. Building a quick-and-dirty rocket system that can barely orbit the Orion exploration vehicle (crew capsule), with 2 of the 6 seats empty, and only enough consummables for a few days (instead of 3 months as required for a Moon mission) just makes no sense.

 

The Ares-1X launch you may have seen on TV was NOT the actual Ares-1 launcher. The actual launcher is still not fully designed and is not built, and will take even LONGER to design and build than the "Jupiter" direct launcher seen in the link I provided.

[CraigD]

The DIRECT “STS (space shuttle) derivative” is surely an interesting and impressive lot of design. If I’ve read it right, the recommended immediate option, “1b” (here’s its “baseball card” data sheet), is essentially a rearrangement and stripping down of the STS, the orbiter’s 3 main engines being placed on the bottom of the external fuel tank and the Apollo-like Orion CEV and adapter being stacked on top. Discarding the STS’s reusable orbiter, with its complicated and massive wings and heat protection systems, about tripling the 45000 pound payload of the STS, after the 27000 to 43000 pounds of the Orion CEV (crew and service module) are deducted (unlike the STS, these are considered payload, not part of the vehicle)

 

Being an old – some might say die-hard – fan of the STS, I can’t help but seeing DIRECT as in ways a step backwards, in that whereas everything but the external fuel tank – in particular the 3 main engines - was reusable in the STS, while the only reusable part of the DIRECT stack is the crew module, wonder what its per launch, per flown mass, and projected real mission cost is compared to the STS, and suspect they might be little or not at all less the STS. The DIRECT website, while pretty and informative about the engineering, was skimpy on cost, though I’m confident this has been estimated in detail.

 

I have been of the opinion that it does make more economical sense to send crew separately from cargo, especially when the weight of the cargo is massive, as would be the case for a mission to mars or other manned missions beyond the moon. Perhaps the current approach involves a poorly designed launch system, but is not the over-all aim better than putting all you eggs into one big basket like the direct-launcher that you posted a link for?

The DIRECT lunar missions pretty much do separate crew from “cargo”.

 

The lunar mission models all call for 2 separate launches. Model 1 through 3 launch the manned Orion CEV and the LSAM lunar lander on one DIRECT booster, the EDS transfer module in another, with everything rendezvousing in Earth orbit, while model 4 launches the LSAM and the EDS together, the manned CEV alone, with a rendezvous in Moon orbit (without any additional payload, the 4-engine DIRECT can apparently transfer the CEV to lunar orbit without an additional EDS).

 

All this brings me back to my dear old STS, and even further, to the various models and animation von Braun and others showed on TV in the 60s and 70s. All emphasized the idea of fairly small payloads lifted to and assembled into big flight systems in Earth orbit (usually with permanent manned Earth orbiting vehicles – “space stations” – as well). With the success of a single large Saturn V booster flying the small, minimal mass Apollo Moon mission system, this idea seemed to me to be shoved into the wings of spaceflight design and planning. ;)

 

So, my radical(ish) engineering preference is to replace the STS with … something similar, capable of orbiting (or perhaps not quite orbiting, if you could manage to rendevous a sub-orbital vehicle with an additional stage that can finish the transfer to orbit – whee!) smallish (70000 pound) vehicles, which are assembled in Earth orbit for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, while minimizing cost by having mostly reusable components. I see this as something of a return to pre-1960 thinking, and the best approach.

 

With this in mind, I’m wary of pursuing – long term - “bigger booster” approaches like the old, accomplished Saturn V, or the new DIRECTs. Short term, however, DIRECT might well be the only way to fly large vehicles into Earth orbit, or to the Moon or Mars, and does seem better than the planned Aries series.

[Pyrotex]

Hi Craig!

I have to agree with most of what you said. But remember, don't confuse the romance and beauty of the Shuttle with the principal intention: to get into space as economically and as safely as possible. The Shuttle was indeed gorgeous and the idea of flying it back through a fiery re-entry is indeed captivating. Maybe one day, we can do it again.

 

But for now, we cannot afford romance and beauty. The cost breakdown goes something like this: (all numbers are approximations)

 

Design of Shuttle: 150.00 B$ (complexity costs big bucks)

Construction of a new Shuttle (w/o SRBs) is about 2.00 B$ -- one time cost.

A pair of SRBs cost another 0.50 B$ -- one time cost.

External tank about 0.25 B$ -- one per launch

Pad preps & assembly 1.25 B$ -- one per launch

 

So for Shuttle, you got up front 152.50 B$ + 1.50 B$ per launch

 

Design of Jupiter/Orion: 30.00 B$

Construction of a new Jupiter (w/o SRBs or ET) is about 0.50B$ -- one per launch

A pair of SRBs cost another 0.50 B$ -- one time cost.

External tank about 0.25 B$ -- one per launch

Pad preps & assembly 0.25 B$ -- one per launch

 

So for Jupiter/Orion, you got 30.50 B$ up front and 1.00 B$ per launch.

 

The sheer astronomical cost of building the Shuttle is exceeded only by the enormous cost of refurbishing, checking out and assembling the Shuttle back on the pad. The reusability of the Shuttle saved us nothing.

 

Ignoring up-front costs, we have:

Shuttle: orbit 20 metric tons for 1.50 B$ = 0.075 B$/MT == $38,000 per pound

Jup/Or: orbit 40 metric tons for 1.00 B$ = 0.025 B$/MT == $12,000 per pound

 

If you ammortize the Design costs over 50 launches, then

Shuttle Design adds 3.00 B$ per launch, yielding 4.50 B$ per launch total cost.

Jup/Orion Design adds 0.60 B$ per launch, yielding 1.60 B$ per launch total cost.

 

A final note: assembling anything in orbit out of pieces taken up one at a time is expensive.

Breaking stuff up into pieces costs design effort, and it adds to the mass of the assembled thing.

Assembling in orbit requires expensive and dangerous EVA.

Assembling in orbit incurs much greater risk due to launch windows, extra launch risks, orbit decay, cryogenic fuel evaporation, and timing, ground organization and training, training, training.

The original Space Station Freedom was only supposed to cost 8.00 B$.

Instead, it cost nearly 40.00 B$ -- primarily because of the extra expense of: design, assembly, & risk mitigation.

[Pyrotex]

Hello, space fans!

 

Here is another excellent read, and valuable source of space rocket info!

Remember, you were told about it HERE.

 

Review of Human Space Flight Committee

[Moontanman]

I still can't read any of the links but it sounds like we need nuclear power! Put it all in orbit in one shot!

[Experiment Garden]

It seems to me to be ironic that the US is getting rid of its space program even as crazy people like these are planning a space program:

 

galactic suite

 

The site shows their interesting take on a shuttle launch. (In the image gallery) Rather than using a booster rocket it looks like they are going to use a maglev track ramp to propel the rocket to escape velocity.

 

Personally I don't think these guys will ever be able to pull this project off. But who knows?

[CraigD]

Rather than using a booster rocket it looks like they are going to use a maglev track ramp to propel the rocket to escape velocity.

This falls, I’d say, into roughly the same category as space guns

 

It’s been pretty seriously studied and developed by NASA and others, but is pretty implausible for launching humans, because to reach escape speed at accelerations we can survive, the track must be impractically long. For example, a 6 g (about 60 m/s/s) acceleration (which a well-conditioned astronaut pilot might survive) would need [imath]\frac{11200 \,\mbox{m/s}}{60 \,\mbox{m/s/s}} \dot= 187 \,\mbox{s}[/imath], and a length of [imath]\frac{60}{2} \cdot 187^2 = 1049070 \,\mbox{m}[/imath] – about the distance between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. A more ordinary-person-survivable 3 g acceleration would require 2 times that distance, about from central Kansas to the east coast.

 

Shortening the track to a more practical length, say 10000 m, and the acceleration required is [imath]\frac{11200^2}{2\cdot10000} \dot= 6272 \,\mbox{m/s/s}[/imath], a non-human-survivable 640 g. Such a system could conceivable launch sturdy machines and materials, but not humans.

 

Most of the practical proposals for a magnetically accelerated space gun I’ve seen only take the place of the first rocket stage, allowing a single stage rocket to reach orbit.

 

A scheme similar to a maglev launcher is the “launch loop”, which are proposed to be about 2000000 m long and self-suspend at about 80000 altitude, neatly avoiding the problem of air resistance encountered near-surface space guns. We discussed it in the thread 16574.

[Experiment Garden]

I believe that the "Galactic Suite's" ramp launch system just takes the place of the first stage. The shuttle itself still has rockets. But this does make me wonder about whether or not it is feasible from an acceleration point of view.

[Pyrotex]

The electro-magnetic rail-gun idea of replacing the massive first stage with a reusable ground facility, goes back a long way. Robert Heinlein championed the use of rail-guns in some of his novels, including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and in his short stories. The problems of using rail-guns have been sumarized above. Add to that the fact that such a huge ground facility (likely to be tens of kilometers long) will require an ARMY of people to maintain and repair it.

 

But this was exactly the reason the Space Shuttle was so expensive. It required an ARMY of people to maintain and repair it. 20,000 engineers, with salaries of $100,000 per year (that includes benefits, insurance and medical) amounts to $2 Billion per year! Add to that the cost of maintaining the buildings, laboratories, utilities and infrastructure: another $2 Billion per year. That's $4 Billion a year even if you never do a launch at all!!!!

[Jay-qu]

Well here it is guys, the stake in the heart of the constellation program:

 

President Barack Obama's 2011 budget request has effectively shut down NASA's five-year effort to return astronauts to the moon, leaving the U.S. space agency with lofty goals — but no firm deadlines — to once again send humans beyond Earth orbit.

 

The budget request, released Monday, would scrap NASA's Constellation program to build the Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets for new manned moon missions — a $9 billion investment to date.

 

NASA drops moon plan and refocuses vision - Space.com- msnbc.com

 

Thoughts?

[JMJones0424]

Its hard not to be jaded and pessimistic. Cutting entitlements or defense spending costs votes. Cutting manned space flight results in a flurry of news reports and then a cacophony of silence.

[Boerseun]

Every president does it.

 

George Bush the elder committed the US to go back to the moon when his popularity was fading, and Bill Clinton axed it to save money. NASA is an easy target, after all. So George Bush the lesser grasped at the moon in the face of fading popularity, only to have it axed by Obama. Basically, the reason the US will never go back to the moon has little to do with the costs or difficulties involved and everything with the length of such a project and the length of a presidential term. Because every president who tries to recapture a John F. Kennedy moment for himself commits his successor to see it through.

 

The US will never go back to the moon unless the committing president gets assassinated and his successor will feel to much of a **** to axe the program (our beloved president's legacy, etc.) or they allow a president to stand for more than two terms, Roosevelt-style, so that he can see it through.

 

But look on the bright side:

 

You've been to the moon. There's nothing there. The Chinese are blowing money hand over fist to go to the moon to confirm that sad and sorry fact for themselves. You can sit back and laugh as the Chinese Moon Program peters out from lack of funding and public interest as moon shot after moon shot reveals vast vistas of neverending nothingness.

 

Just make sure your biggest ballistic missile can reach Beijing and you're all set. The moon's for idiots who use $100-million gravity-defying zero-g space pens where the rest of us will use a pencil.

 

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for going to the moon. But I'm for it if there's a solid reason, like setting up a telescope in one of the polar craters that never sees sunshine, or something productive like that. I don't think spending billions just to stand on a vast dusty plain and whack a golf ball for miles, get back in your rocket and come back to earth is such a hot idea, other than a ginormous, nation-wide tiny penis syndrome. If that's the goal, then let the Chinese do it and burn their money.

 

(Okay, their money is actually your money, I know, I know, but you see my point.)