It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:
Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.
The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.
Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.
‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.
One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).
During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.
This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.
This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.
The saddest part of all this is that some of the wunderkinden who brought us the shaft are busy getting awards for their accomplishments. If this was some private company being arrogant and retarded, it would be one thing, but this is public funds. I think one of the biggest jokes looking back will be the concept that funding Ares-1 at several times the level of COTS represented a case of Griffin showing “fiduciary responsibility”.
~Jon
What is heavy lift? I think we need to redefine “heavy”, in the way that the B-36 made the B-29 look like a toy.
Build a 100 metric ton to LEO vehicle on the Big Dumb Booster concept – cheap enough to fly a dozens of times a year. Then astronauts will ride to orbit sitting on MOOSE rig, in an ejector seat, in a capsule *each* 🙂 when they need to go up.
the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine.
I almost spewed my water on that one Rand. That is one of the funniest (yet tragically true) things I have ever seen you write.
Following up on Anon’s “Big dumb booster” idea, I often wonder about the odds of a SeaDragon-like rocket being built. Does anyone know if that’s even being talked about around water coolers, or is it 100% off-radar?
Personally I’d love it if NASA’s non-COTS funding was cut to shreds and most of it instead given to a SARPA-like agency for testing SeaDragons, nuclear lightbulbs, etc. and then letting the technology loose into the private sector and for COTS purchases. NASA’s ISS division needs to be a man with a desk, catalog and phone. That’s Change! I can Hope! for.
What is heavy lift? I think we need to redefine “heavy”, in the way that the B-36 made the B-29 look like a toy.
And the Spruce Goose made the DC-3 look like a toy, but the DC-3 was reliable, economical, and quite safe by the standards of its time while the Spruce Goose barely flew. Which was the better airplane?
Is size more important than economics?
Build a 100 metric ton to LEO vehicle on the Big Dumb Booster concept – cheap enough to fly a dozens of times a year.
Sure it would “cheap enough” — if we cancelled the entire Defense Department to pay for it. That’s a strange definition of “cheap.”
We’ve spent fifty years and half a trillion dollars on Big Dumb Boosters. How much longer do you think we should go down that dead end?
Please don’t tell me that so-and-so wrote a book showing that rockets are more efficient as you build them larger. Fuel efficiency is not the problem. Propellant costs are a tiny fraction of what it costs to operate those big dumb boosters.
Then astronauts will ride to orbit sitting on MOOSE rig, in an ejector seat, in a capsule *each* 🙂 when they need to go up.
Do you think all it takes is an ejector seat to make a rocket safe?
Have you ever wondered why the Air Force bothers to flight test aircraft hundreds of times to make sure they’re safe? Why they rely on ejection seats only as a last resort, not a first resort?
It’s not because they’re stupid. Do some reading about the medical consequences of even a “successful” ejection.
Take a look at this article — http://www.astm.org/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/2432.htm — then look at the chart on this page — http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/eject.htm
Ejection is not the magic bullet Mike Griffin thinks it is.
We’ve spent fifty years and half a trillion dollars on Big Dumb Boosters. How much longer do you think we should go down that dead end?
Without question, the most successful booster ever made would fall into the general category of “Big Dumb Booster.” I’m talking about the SL-04 Soyuz and SL-06 Molynia derivative. Over 40+ years, the Russians have built and flown nearly 2000 of them with a success rate of about 96%. That’s many times higher than any other booster by any other country. They designed it as a derivative of the rocket that launched Sputnik, Gargarin, and a host of others. They made them reliable, they made them buildable, and they kept the engineers from constantly messing with a good design to keep the R&D costs low. It’s even man-rated. During the 1980s, the Soviets were flying over 60 space launches each year with over 30 of them being R-7 series boosters. That kind of flight rate lowers the cost considerably.
Just to be clear, when I call the R-7 series “Big Dumb Booster”, that’s in no way meant to be derogatory.
We’ve spent fifty years and half a trillion dollars on Big Dumb Boosters. How much longer do you think we should go down that dead end?
We’ve spent 50 years on a Non-RLV rockets and the Shuttle boondoggle, run by a government program. That doesn’t mean boosters are bad design.
Here’s a design for a “Big Dumb” SSTO RLV with a 20 diameter (30 meter high) payload bay and a 1,000 tons of capacity to LEO.
http://nuclearspace.com/Liberty_ship_pg10.aspx
Would it work? I’m not an engineer. But wouldn’t it be nice if NASA were actually SARPA and they were funding teams to get us from here to there?
Question:
They switched from an air-startable SSME for the Ares-I US because it was too expensive and would take too long to engineer. Now, here we are looking at a five-six year gap *and* crummy performance. Why are they not looking at going back to the SSME? Yeah, the gap would remain, but at least the Orion would be able to fly in a way that doesn’t require its astronauts to skip breakfast and sweat out weight in a suana before flights.
Brock, I don’t think any nuclear design is going to make lift off for quite a while. Regardless of how much more efficient nuclear is.
I think there may also be some confusion over what a big, dumb rocket (BDR) is. As I understand it, the “dumb” part refers to the overall simplicity of the design, particularly the propulsion system. So an SSME (Space Shuttle main engine), for example, would not be on a BDR. Pressure fed propellant is more likely to be a feature than a turbopump (which can be more complex). Kerosene instead of liquid hydrogen. Not too many stages maybe.
I don’t think most launch systems today would qualify as BDRs.
I don’t think most launch systems today would qualify as BDRs.
Laugh. Of course not. The term “big dumb booster” is reserved for some paper ELV that’s supposed to be dirt cheap. When one actually gets built, or at least started, the costs become apparent. At that point, the true believers cease to call it a big dumb booster and start clammering for an even bigger rocket.
Remember when NLV/EELV was supposed to reduce launch costs by a factor of 10? It did nothing of the sort, as any decent accountant could have predicted, so no one calls that a big dumb booster anymore.
Then, there was Ares, which was going to be”safe, soon, simple.” It would be even bigger than EELV-H and use the dumbest type of motor around — solid rockets! That hasn’t turned out as predicted, either.
So, now the true believers have an even bigger rocket, Direct! And when Direct fails, they will propose something even bigger and more expensive. As Lazarus Long said, most people are incapable of learning from experience.
By the way, Larry is wrong in saying Soyuz was a big dumb booster. Soyuz is a relatively small rocket by Western standards. That’s how the Russians were able to afford 2000 of them. Their big dumb boosters, the “G” class and the Energia, never made it off the pad.
The concept of “Big Dumb Booster” is to design a booster using simple materials and components (to lower R&D costs) and mass produce them. By that criteria, the Soyuz series complies.
American engineers have a natural tendency to keep tweaking a design trying to squeeze out as much performance as possible. While admirable from an engineering standpoint, that drives up the costs. Higher costs tend to drive a lower launch rate, further driving up the cost per launch. The Russians built and flew Soyuz boosters for decades, only upgrading them when absolutely necessary. Between the lower R&D amortization costs and the high flight rate, their actual cost per launch was probably under $1000 per KG to LEO. Launch rates have since dropped and they’ve been upgrading the design lately, but the cost per KG is well under competing American designs.
As a data point, the Soyuz 11A511U version is rated at 7,200 KG to a 200 KM orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination. According to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, they launched 699 of them with 18 failures, giving a success rate of 97.42%. Show me any other booster in the world that comes close to those numbers.
Most of the BDB concepts I’ve seen weren’t specific about the payload. “Big” is a relative term. The Energyia was certainly big but hardly simple with 4 liquid fuel strap on boosters (essentially Zenits) and a bunch of disposable engines at the bottom of the ET. It was an interesting design but there simply wasn’t enough demand for a launch capacity so large. Given that they spent so much money developing it and only launched it twice, it hardly counts as mass produced.
The Soyuz booster is dumb in at least one sense. It has about 29 reconfigurable parameters for each launch. It doesn’t take 600 USA personnel and months to configure it for each mission.
The concept of “Big Dumb Booster” is to design a booster using simple materials and components (to lower R&D costs) and mass produce them. By that criteria, the Soyuz series complies.
That’s only half the definition, Larry. The first part of “big dumb booster” is “big.”
There’s still no evidence that ELVs “lower R&D costs.” Max Hunter made a convincing case that reusable vehicles are cheaper to develop because flight tests cost much less.
I’m still waiting for ELV fans to give me an example of an expendable with performance comparable to SpaceShip One that made an equivalent number of test flights for an equivalent amount of money.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never get it.
As for the 97.42% “success” rate, how would you like to buy a car that has a 2.6% chance of blowing up every time your turn the key, has no brakes, and stops by crashing itself into a tree after “successfully” ejecting you at your destination?
If ELVs are so reliable, why do they require a long series of “monkey flights” before they can be “man rated” while reusable rockets like the X-15 can be piloted from the first flight? And as General Dynamics noted, the X-15 cost less to develop than the Atlas A which had similar performance.
Also, a Soyuz seat costs $25 million, which is around $250,000 per kg not under $1000. For anyone who cares about human spaceflight, big dumber boosters (or even big small boosters) are a big dead end.
The Soyuz booster is dumb in at least one sense. It has about 29 reconfigurable parameters for each launch. It doesn’t take 600 USA personnel and months to configure it for each mission.
It didn’t take 600 people to launch an ICBM (like Atlas or Titan), either.
But it does take months to *build* an Atlas, Titan, or Soyuz and hundreds of people, too. Those people count also.
Ed, you said Energia didnt make it off the pad, but it launched both Polys and Buran. Not arguing about BDBs, just trying to set the record straight.
“Edward Wright wrote:
I’m still waiting for ELV fans to give me an example of an expendable with performance comparable to SpaceShip One that made an equivalent number of test flights for an equivalent amount of money.
If ELVs are so reliable, why do they require a long series of “monkey flights” before they can be “man rated” while reusable rockets like the X-15 can be piloted from the first flight? And as General Dynamics noted, the X-15 cost less to develop than the Atlas A which had similar performance.”
Spaceship One, X-15…………..Atlas, Delta
Now, let’s see, how do these two groups differ? What is it that distinguishes one from the other?
From what I’ve gleaned talking to people who are working on Ares, the basic architecture could still be salvaged, if they’d give up on the specific implementation of it – i.e. give up on the 5 segment solid 1st-stage, one J-2 2nd stage, and go instead to a 4 segment 1st-stage, and use two J-2’s in the second stage. But this is resisted at the highest levels – the people working on the design are simply told: This is the way it’s gonna be – make it work. (Mind you, with a solid first stage, it might still be a pretty rough ride).
The rationale of NASA’s management, as I understand it, is that they don’t want two non-redundant upper-stage engines as it increases the probability of loss of mission. Of course, if by using only one upper-stage engine, you end up with a Rube Goldberg design for the whole vehicle, then you might end up having bought yourself a lot more risk than you’d have taken on by just having two engines in the first place.
It is this desire for a single engine upper-stage which is driving most of Ares’ problems. They keep demanding that the first stage do more of the work than a first stage ought to do. We’ve seen this before……X-33 and Venture Star. Requiring more work from the first stage, taken to its absurd conclusion, is to require that ALL the work be done by the first stage, as in an SSTO (Single Stage To Oblivion), the salient feature of which is that the vehicle ends up having almost no payload.
NASA is still trying – and trying hard – to forget one of the critical developments of 20th century rocketry…..Staging.
A lot of people at NASA (and at the contractors, I suspect) know all this. But the project managers are unswayed. The way it’s often been told to me is that Griffin and the ESAS team fixed the outer mold-line of the rocket, and that’s it. Whatever rocket you build, it has to have that (and only that) silhouette. Just make it work. Don’t confuse us with engineering.
We can all guess how well that approach will work.