Chair Force Engineer has been reading the DIRECT rebuttal, and says that there are problems with both the RS-68 and the SSME has an upper-stage engine. One point that he doesn’t make, but is a major issue, is that the SSME is not currently capable of air (or vacuum) start. It currently needs a lot of ground support equipment. Even ignoring the manufacturing cost (which will be recurring every flight), requalifying the hot box for second-stage work will be a major program cost and risk.
Abandoning reusables because of the Shuttle and X-33 is nuts. It’s Wile E. Coyote engineering.
“Therefore any “trade” between SSME versus RS-68 regen MUST also include the cost of J2X development.”
True from the point of view of DIRECT, which like Ares insists on EOR-LOR, which seems an unpopular architecture on this blog. It’s irrelevant if you use staging.
“Therefore any “trade” between SSME versus RS-68 regen MUST also include the cost of J2X development.” True from the point of view of DIRECT, which like Ares insists on EOR-LOR, which seems an unpopular architecture on this blog. It’s irrelevant if you use staging.
If by staging you mean “depots” and no upper stage you don’t need the RS-68 regen at all. Delta IVH doesn’t need an RS-68 regen, does it? A depot centric approach means no need for RS-68 regen or J2X – avoid them both and that is a viable alternative, except
But to go with a depot-centric architecture without any STS whatsoever would also require calculating the costs and benefits of going “Ctrl-Alt-Del” on NASA
But if you mean J-130 only, once J-130 is paid for and deployed, the additional costs of adding 6 RL-10s on stage two and a 4th SSME on stage one would seem extremely modest for a substantial increase in payload.
As for giving incentive to non-NASA players, grow the overall demand for human spaceflight rather than forcing NASA to procure rockets they don’t really want. DIRECT after all is an internal NASA insurrection against ESAS rather than an externally imposed solution.
Instead of going “Ctrl-Alt-Del” on NASA, let NASA have DIRECT and in exchange insist on non-NASA operated destinations now (LEO depots & hotels and EML depots) as part of the package.
the Moonie and the Marsie Churches won’t even consider something that reasonable.
Well that’s a broad brush.
Nobody’s considering building taxis at all (except perhaps something like the Bigelow Cislunar concept.) By taxi, I mean a real spaceship, that can be refueled and provisioned to go anywhere in the inner solar system (including Mars and the belt.) It doesn’t require any new developments because all the parts exist today. It can be assemble in large pieces and all it’s systems can be tested in Earth orbit and it could be a tourist destination itself, until ready for it’s true purpose of going beyond Earth orbit. Then it could take tourists around the Moon, until it is ready to take colonists to farther locations. Obviously, this is a privately owned ship and not something NASA would or should be involved in.
It just requires a billionaire with the inclination. That just requires someone to show them there is a tourism market and an affordable ship that can service it. We’re almost there.
A compromise would be an architecture that allowed NASA to begin trips to the Moon and Mars with existing commercial rockets while the rest of us worked on reducing the cost of space transportation
The problem with this sort of compromise is it’s a little like selling your soul to get what you don’t want. I don’t want NASA going to anywhere and giving others something to point at and say it’s too expensive, a mistake, let’s all just stay on Earth.
I also don’t want NASA to think they own space and others should stay out. Frankly, I think that if all those working for NASA were to suddenly find themselves out of work (it happens to other people) some of them might find useful work that moves us much farther toward expansion into space.
There is a chicken and egg aspect of building real spaceships. They don’t land, they just orbit, so you may need a lander at your destination. But taxis aren’t hotels and nobody expects them to be. A colonists going anywhere would only be paying the taxis their fare to destination. They or others would provide the lander service the same way SpaceX might provide the service to the space ship in Earth orbit. Space will have many players, each serving there own market niches.
Karl, can you imagine any scenario in which RS-68 regen is cheaper than SSME if we amortize the cost of J2X development onto every RS-68 regen deployed?
Sure, if the marginal cost of RS-68 plus that amortized cost of the J-2X is less than the SSME plus any related amortized costs. I notice above that we’re only provided with numbers from P&W. Similar numbers provided by ULA may show that the RS-68 is much cheaper under the same conditions as the provided P&W numbers.
Plus why are we adding J-2X development to the RS-68 platform? Why wouldn’t it get developed anyway? I don’t know what the current estimates for remaining development costs of the J-2X are, but we may be well along on developing the engine. If so, it may make more sense, even in a SSME environment to finish development and switch to the J-2X when it is ready.
The thing is, I don’t think Congress will fund this and I don’t think they will believe it’s possible.
So? If Congress won’t fund anything useful, they will be irrelevant to space development. The choice is theirs.
But Congress needs flags and bootprints missions too.
Indeed, which is the weekness of their current plan. It won’t provide very many footprints, and no footprints at all any time soon. As Tom Wolfe said, “The public wants to see Buck Rogers.” If NASA continues to send fewer and fewer people into space, as it has since the 1980’s, public support will decline. Sooner or later, even NASA and Congress will realize that.
Whatever is done should create a reusable transport infrastructure that allows others (including international and commercial players) to follow more easily.
In that case, NASA should be designing all of its lunar hardware to be small and modular, so it can easily transferred from one launcher to another.
Unfortunately, the Moonie Church doesn’t believe in that. They think ISS “proved” in-space assembly is too difficult, so everything must be launched in one piece and integrated on Earth. Even Dennis, who claims to believe in in-space assembly, wants great big rockets with huge payload shrouds so he can avoid doing in-space assembly, and I don’t think he realizes the contradiction himself.
This is the mistake NASA made with ISS: Making the modules so big that they could only be launched by the Shuttle. Except, of course, that it wasn’t a mistake. It was done deliberately, to make sure the Shuttle could not be retired before ISS is complete. In similar fashion, those great big lunar base modules will be used to argue that Shuttle-C cannot be retired until the lunar base is complete.
The moon is the first major target, as it should be because of ISRU,
That’s like telling Orville and Wilbur that China should be the target for their first airplane flights. No matter how many people wanted to fly from the US to China, it was a bridge too far in 1903. Airplanes needed to fly around the field a few times faster, then between neighboring cities, then New York to Chicago, then transcontinental flights, then across the Atlantic…
Spacecraft need to evolve the same way. The Moonies and the Marsies don’t have the patience for that, although if they read The Tortoise and the Hare they might know that a little patience could get them where they’re going sooner than an unsustainable sprint. But since they don’t, let them go to the Moon and Mars now, if they like, as long as they use existing commercial rockets.
Absolutely. So what would be a good compromise? Your suggestion gives NASA the moon, but not the shuttle stack.
In the Bush era, the Moonies wanted both the Moon and Ares. They got neither. There should be a lesson there, although I predict it will be ignored.
Nobody’s considering building taxis at all (except perhaps something like the Bigelow Cislunar concept.) By taxi, I mean a real spaceship, that can be refueled and provisioned to go anywhere in the inner solar system (including Mars and the belt.)
Why stop there? Anyone who’s watched Star Trek knows a real spaceship can go from here to the Neutral Zone. 🙂
That argument is like saying the Ford Trimotors was not a real airplane because it couldn’t go everywhere and do everything a 747 can. If Ford hadn’t built Trimotors, Douglas never could have built the DC-3, and Boeing couldn’t have built the 707 and its successors.
It doesn’t require any new developments because all the parts exist today.
If all you want to do is “land a man on Mars and return him safely to the Earth,” yes.
Making it affordable enough for a *significant number* of people is another matter. We’re just approaching the point where we can do that for suborbital flight. Mars and the asteroid belt are a ways off, no matter how much you and I might wish it were otherwise.
Karl,
One of the advantages of Direct 3.0 will be NO new engine development programs.
Use existing 4 segment SRB, existing SSME and existing RL-10s
Use the savings derived from not developing new engines to fly more missions.
Ares I & V need new engines at every point in the design — RS-68R, J2X, 5 segment & 5.5 or 6 segment SRBs with new fuel grains and composite casings. That adds time and expense better spent on flying missions.
= = =
Edward,
Making it affordable for everyone simply isn’t in NASA’s cultural DNA.
Demanding that NASA accomplish that would require a total re-boot of the Agency that would consume years of time and the expenditure of enormous political capital. George W. Bush refused to do that and I doubt Barack Obama will either.
Therefore someone other than NASA needs to perform that function.
That is why NOW is the time to pressure the Obama Administration to create an environment that will facilitate and encourage non-NASA players to deploy LEO facilities and EML facilities. Locations NOT owned operated or managed by NASA.
A “MirCorp II” effort but using Bigelow rather than Mir (although Russia and Europe have modules that could be attached to a Bigelow hab)
“One of the advantages of Direct 3.0”
from what i’ve seen of the paperwork Direct 3 is as bad as Ares.
There isn’t enough margin so it’s going to grow and stall just like Ares.
Why stop there? Anyone who’s watched Star Trek knows a real spaceship…
My apology. I obviously didn’t make my point very well.
That argument is like saying the Ford Trimotors was not a real airplane because it couldn’t go everywhere and do everything a 747 can.
This indicates a profound misunderstanding of what I was trying to say… but then you agree we have what we need today. This is my point.
Making it affordable enough for a *significant number* of people is another matter.
You make it affordable by having a business model that scales up. No one company should try to eat the whole hog. The point of a spaceship, defined as I have, is it is financially viable by itself, yet serves a greater purpose. It is the trimotor. Or perhaps better to think of it as a cruise ship. It’s affordable now, not in the star trek future. You can amortize the costs once you have passengers signed up. You could start with Lunar excursions. It’s fully reusable with a life of decades to centuries. It’s easier to expand in microgravity than a navy destroyer getting subroc (where they cut the ship in half and extend it.)
It’s a bundle of habitats (Bigelow has set a price) a fuel that can be stored (which doesn’t have to be high thrust) and engines that can shut down a restart reliably (lot’s of vendors, but expect more suitable to be developed.)
This isn’t rocket science, this is marketing.
Or perhaps better to think of it as a cruise ship.
Like this?
http://www.al-cruise.com/Cruise-Ship-Expanded.html
“It’s a bundle of habitats (Bigelow has set a price) a fuel that can be stored (which doesn’t have to be high thrust) and engines that can shut down a restart reliably (lot’s of vendors, but expect more suitable to be developed.)”
It can even be high-thrust, it doesn’t have to be high Isp. If I’m not mistaken, MMH/NTO augmented by SEP or some other high Isp propulsion method (and here the thrust may need to be low) to preposition propellant is enough to get you to Mars. From L1 the needed hops to low Mars orbit are <=2 km/s. Over such delta-v’s the inefficiency of hypergolics is only 20% worse than that of LOX/LH2. Combined with prepositioned propellant you would likely have a higher effective Isp than LOX/LH2 without depots.
@Bill White:
If you are reading this, a RLL would then have the required delta-v to go to Mars. Something you may want to mention in front of an appropriate forum 😉
You can amortize the costs once you have passengers signed up. You could start with Lunar excursions.
Space Adventures is offering lunar excursions right now. Not surprisingly, there don’t seem to be a lot of takers at $100 million.
The only entity that could unambiguously afford such trips is NASA, but none of the Moonies on this side of the Atlantic will even consider such a thing. (ESA has done some studies of lunar architectures based on Soyuz. They seem to be less dogmatic.)
For the rest of us, the Moon is still a bridge too far.
Okay money’s on the table. Which launch vehicle is NASA going to end up using in the next 6 years? Shuttle, EELV, Ares, or DIRECT(variant)
I’m doubling down on Shuttle.
Obama needs a decision to reverse on Bush. He’s tried at several stops and keeps having to renege. Also, he needs to keep the jobs numbers up or at least look like he is trying. Finally, he really wants NASA to get the science centers geared back up. Any other path means money channeled to launch vehicle development and I think he is more keen on environmental monitoring and energy research. EELV maybe seen as giving money to the DoD and he certainly not going that direction. His bold vision may very well be in having NASA build another shuttle to replace 1 of the 2 that are lost. Not that they will actually accomplish this but will give the army of Constellation engineers something to nibble on.
That’s my hot space opinion for the day.
Space Adventures is offering lunar excursions right now. Not surprisingly, there don’t seem to be a lot of takers at $100 million.
Do you suppose that would change (demand being elastic and all that) if you could actually go today and it was only $10 million per tourist?
Once you have a cruiser in space, the vehicle cost to orbit can be amortized over a very long life, bringing it’s per trip cost very close to operational costs which themselves are spread between a few dozen passengers per trip. I’m thinking a cluster of seven BA300 modules giving over 2000 cubic meters of crew, passenger and cargo space. I’ll bet Bigelow would give a discount to someone buying seven?
Actually, you could even do better than that. Assign all the costs to a colony mission (to the place most Earth like in our inner solar system) sometime in the future and consider the lunar excursions just a bonus.
The most important thing is you now have a market for fuel. Someone (or many) will figure out a cheaper way than bringing it from Earth. Creating markets is how we will become space faring.
“The most important thing is you now have a market for fuel.”
Give that man a cigar.
Do you suppose that would change (demand being elastic and all that) if you could actually go today and it was only $10 million per tourist?
Undoubtedly. You’d probably get a small multiple of the number of people going to ISS today, but several tens of millions of dollars would still not pay for such a project. To create a viable market, the cost has to go way down, not slighly down.
Once you have a cruiser in space, the vehicle cost to orbit can be amortized over a very long life
Only if your accountant was absent the day they taught net present value.
Only if your accountant was absent the day they taught net present value.
Would I be correct in assuming what you mean by this is that there are better ways to spend the money? Perhaps.
The fact remains, we could put this cruiser in orbit at a cost that is within reach of private investors with modules that exist today. The result would be experience and new markets. I’ll be cheering the guy on that decides his money could be spent this way. I’d spend my own money on this if I had it… even if other investments were more profitable. That’s the beauty of individualism.
several tens of millions of dollars would still not pay for such a project
Good point. I estimate my seven ba-300 module cruiser would cost about $2 billion to orbit. So if you had a $2 million markup on ticket prices it would take 1000 passenger trips to break even. That would be about 3 years. All within the realm of possibility I believe.
Compare this to an ocean cruise ship which costs about half a billion.
Is there a way to get the ticket prices in line? Yes, in deed. A tournament would do it. For $100 you could compete with others where the grand prize was one ticket to ride (which you could sell to others for more or less than it’s worth.)
I don’t think one space cruiser would be enough… now I’m thinking about a dozen would soon be required. Say five years from today?
Some would still choose to pay full price and bypass the tournament.
Okay money’s on the table. Which launch vehicle is NASA going to end up using in the next 6 years? Shuttle, EELV, Ares, or DIRECT(variant)
I’m doubling down on Shuttle.
I disagree. Shuttle is too expensive and they don’t have anything for it to do. EELVs will be flying for sometime. NASA is already buying payloads and it’s likely they’ll continue to do so. Manned EELVs are a small stretch for a budget-challenged government.