Jim Muncy and John Olson (NASA Intergration Directorate) in a panel on requirements.
Muncy: Wants to raise some perspectives in the context of the Augustine panel activity. Has a list of goals (not exhaustive). Not discussing current architecture. If you don’t like architecture, you might find another reason why, but that’s not the purpose of the discussion.
ESAS didn’t just happen: space policy goals and assumptions and constraints that created it. One was that it would enable human exploration for Mars. Couldn’t do moon, then Mars, because they didn’t have the money. Another was that NASA would build a transportation system that it could use for decades (“build once”). Another, from Congress, was “use Shuttle-derived workforce infrastructure and base facilities.”
Classes of goals:
Destinations: (Moon, Mars, NEO, Belt)
Strategic: Affordability, drive technology
Political: Relevance (jobs/education/environment)
Infrastructure: new industries, training
Architectural: flexibility, utilize new things
Social: more public participation
One of the constraints is that you have to make it work, including commercial and international partners. How do you transition people from Shuttle to other jobs during the gap? Not an easy problem. It’s not just rocket science, but management, and business. Manageability is a constraint.
Crew safety and separation of crew and cargo were tenets that came out of Columbia and fed into ESAS. Transition to Constellation will encompass half of the agencies budget and is a major challenge. Average age of NASA employee is 47 and Shuttle is 53, so very uneven demographic spread due to unevenness in hiring over the years. Hiring ceilings and no RIF authority makes it difficult to hire needed skills when you can only replace by attrition. Very coastally located, with hurricane risk, add risk of facilities, and fifty-state job spread of Shuttle difficult to sustain.
Muncy: What is performance? Number of people on the moon? Number of jobs created in the right states? Growth of NewSpace industry? We (the Frontier Foundation) have to come up with out own set of goals that could be a check list against Augustine options.
Someone on the history channel just made the point that we abandoned skylab just like we abandoned the moon. So…
I go through that list of goals and have to reject them all. The goal should be a program that moves toward being self sustaining as quickly as possible. Making that the goal will focus the effort like nothing else will. The class that’s missing is…
Economic: Able to support life indefinitely through ISRU and build a colony with the potential for growth.
An interesting goal, but I’d be surprised if you could get enough support for it. Redundant commercial manned access to space and continued existence of the ISS may be about what we can hope for. Rumour has it NASA is now thinking about LOR-LOR, thus giving up one of the big excuses for SDLV, whilst still insisting on one of course. The Augustine commission is studying depots and its Flexible Path option would be good for commercial development of space. I’m still pessimistic.
Imagine instead of going for Shuttle, NASA had gone for a design like the EELV family using a F-1 engine per first stage element and a J-2 or RL-10 engine powered second stage. My guess is it such a rocket would still be flying today, and servicing Skylab derived stations, much like the USSR did their station program. There would have been no manned spaceflight gap, or need to spend money developing EELV in the first place. The technology required for making Moon rockets would have been preserved. Eventually a reusable second stage could be developed for manned spaceflight. As reusable second stage technology improved a reusable SSTO could have been attempted.
Instead the fragile Shuttle design was pursued with arguably worse economics and crew safety than a Saturn V derived vehicle. The idea of putting all the eggs in one unproven basket proved a waste of time and money.
The one piece of worthwhile technology that came out of the Shuttle program was SSME and that is useless for anything but a crew vehicle. That would be ok but the thing cannot do air starts. Hence side mounting.
I’d say OMS was also a useful piece of technology. It may have been Apollo-derived, but the reusable bit came from the shuttle.
We talk about architecture when the real question is should NASA even exist? Government grants could probably do the job a lot better funding incremental goals.
Godzilla, I was thinking along those lines as well, although the concept vehicle in my head would have used 4 RS-27 on the first stage, with the second stage powered by an appropriate number of RL-10s. This would have kept engine commonality with the Delta/Atlas/Titan series of the time, thus negating the need to maintain 1 or 2 exclusively used engine lines, or create one in the SSME. The single 2 stage core would loft a minimized capsule for Soyuz equivalent manned missions. Perhaps small solids could have augmented the single core for unmanned launches if that would have been beneficial. To accommodate larger payloads as need be, extra first stage cores would be added as boosters, as in the 3 body Heavy EELV configuration, to beyond that with 5 or 7 body configurations.
Another option available to NASA which was not pursued was putting a capsule on the Titan 3/4(?) line. This would perhaps have set up a play where NASA could have divorced themselves from, and become agnostic toward, the launcher side of the equation and instead focus themselves on the payload/space side. Not having their own vested launch interest, they perhaps could have become better stewards over the conduct of the space program, and their demand could have led to better and more competitive systems coming online, in conjunction with the putting of payloads launched by Shuttle to competitive launch service. Alas, NASA at the time cooked up an ESAS style comparison that showed a favourable Shuttle economic picture beating out such a Titan manned system over the course of the space program, but with that Shuttle economic future never playing out in the real world. As the Air Force SRB fratricide report puts it, the manned Titan course would not have been a perfect solution, but could have been a better path to start off the next 30 years of NASA and the American space program.
I’m not sure if I should laungh or scream.
> Crew safety and separation of crew and cargo were tenets that came out of Columbia and fed into ESAS
No, it said that given the current ships aren’t all that safe, flying a crew just to lift a cargo might not be justified. Flying them, but in separate ships doesn’t help – actually it increases the risks.
Orion is I gather projected to kill twice as many crews per numbers of launches then shuttle – so no safety improvement.
> Affordability, drive technology
With Aries /Orion? Are you kidding? Cost per flight is projected to be several times that of shuttle, even with dramatically reduced capabilities. And it just recycles the worst bits of shuttle and Apollo. No new tech, its oing back to even older tech!
Really Aries/Orion is a design for pork system. It has nothing like the capability, affordability, or safety of shuttle – AND SHUTLE WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH!!
What it does do is replace shuttle with a much lower flight rate, lower expandability system – but keeping all the pork going to the old places (Utah, New Orleans, etc). All of the RLV replacements, or even shuttle refits, proposed – would have slashed those costs dramatically. Voters like pork and kickbacks more then space missions. So the Aries/Orion design may cost more crews and failed missions – but it efficiently supplies the pork.
> ken anthony Says:
> We talk about architecture when the real question is should NASA even exist?
> Government grants could probably do the job a lot better funding incremental goals.
The goal for NASA is really:
1- Keep NASA around because of the national pretigue of having the agency that landed men on the moon.
2- jobs in the right congressional districts.
>–Instead the fragile Shuttle design was pursued with arguably worse
> economics and crew safety than a Saturn V derived vehicle. —
Actually shuttle was much safer then the Apollo era Saturn, and has far more capacity for safty and cost improvements then Saturn. But thats kind of a moot point given the political reality.
That’s a hard argument to make Kelly, since Saturn had a perfect record even with engine outs while the shuttle…
You would have said the same thing about shuttle if it only flew 20 times.
Oh, actually you couldn’t since the Apollo lost one crew during a pad fire caused by a radio check and nearly another due to a tank explosion on route.
Sadly, shuttles the most relyable LV, especially manned, that ever flew. There was no expectation even in the Apollo era, that Saturn/Apollo could ever go as long for as few losses.
Just so happens I was listening to the speakers at the Smithsonian the other day that talked about the Apollo. The point he made was that the Apollo that lost a crew was not the same capsule that went into space. That first Apollo was crap (this is a technical engineering term meaning garbage.) After the fire they made 125 changes producing an entirely different product.
As a general rule two things lower safety, higher complexity and trying to get the absolute limit of performance. I’m not qualified to make any claims of shuttle vs. Saturn safety on that basis, but as a casual observer I think putting the crew on top of the bomb instead of on the side, that alone makes the Saturn safer.
That’s launching, now landing. A capsule heatshield vs. tiles that tend to come off? A shape that is inherently stable vs. a shape that requires a computer to make stable. I believe as far as safety the capsule wins again. I would prefer landing in the shuttle myself, but not because it’s safer.
I do admit the shuttle is safer en route to the moon since it can’t.
125 changes in a craft that cost $5-$10 billion to develop is not a totally different craft. And the fact you nearly lost a craft in flight out of 9 Flights of Apollo…
> As a general rule two things lower safety, higher
> complexity and trying to get the absolute limit of performance
Its a wash there between the two craft. Saturn has more stages. Is about as complex.
Also first time flights are more dangerous, adn with ELVs its a lot harder to learn whats wearing out faster then expected or whatever.
> I think putting the crew on top of the bomb instead of on
> the side, that alone makes the Saturn safer.
Not sure how? Mainly the shuttles problem is that the crappy throwaway tank keeps raining stuff on it (or in the case of Challenger, collapsed and threw it tumbling into the airstream causing it to lose its wings and break up.
If eaither exploaded all the fuel both folks are dead.
> now landing. A capsule heatshield vs. tiles that tend to
> come off? A shape that is inherently stable vs. a shape
> that requires a computer to make stable.
The Apollo heat sheild is tearing itself apart and burning off all the way down – not sure what the compareable likelyhood of losing a ship is assuming it wasn’t blasted apart by something else.
I think both can reenter with out computers, but the shuttle needs its fly-by-wire system to fly. Apolo drops like a uncontroled stone and needs its parrachutes. Shuttles computers have proven more relyable — and you don’t wind up radically off course as capsules frequently do.
The big dif is the likelyhood of the craft failing in space, adn how tough they are. The orbiters pretty rugged in compareison, adn has beemn flown and the new vehicle bugs shaken out.
Kelly, your assertion was about safety, so looking at your comments…
> 125 changes in a craft that cost $5-$10 billion to develop is not a totally different craft.
The engineer that spoke at the Smithsonian claims it was after describing the total horror the first one was. I said ‘not the same’ which you’ve changed to ‘not totally different.’
> And the fact you nearly lost a craft in flight out of 9 Flights of Apollo…
Nearly. Again, we’re talking about something a shuttle can’t even do. So perhaps change number 126 would be to fix the problem Apollo 13 exposed which would be a very minor change. I wonder how the shuttle crew would survive if a tank blew up?
>> I think putting the crew on top of the bomb instead of on
>> the side, that alone makes the Saturn safer.
> Not sure how? Mainly the shuttles problem is that the crappy throwaway tank keeps raining stuff on it
You answered your own question. Nothing rains down on you when you are on top. If you’re driving down the freeway, which car would you like to see explode… the one behind you or the one next to you?
> If either exploded all the fuel both folks are dead.
Buzz said just the other day that although they never had to use it, he believed the Apollo escape system would save lives. Shuttle has no escape system.
>> now landing. A capsule heatshield vs. tiles that tend to
>> come off? A shape that is inherently stable vs. a shape
>> that requires a computer to make stable.
> The Apollo heat sheild is tearing itself apart and burning off all
> the way down
As designed… and it worked.
> I think both can reenter with out computers
Nope. Without computers you die in the shuttle.
> Apollo drops like a uncontroled stone and needs its parrachutes.
A safe stone by it’s record.
> Shuttles computers have proven more reliable
Compared to what?
> you don’t wind up radically off course as capsules frequently do.
Safely off course.
> How tough they are.
That’s something you can do to both; however, an inherently stable form is safer.
You could assert that shuttle is a better system (but given the parasitic weight I’m not sure that assertion would fly) and you could assert that the Apollo was not as safe as it could have been designed to be; But to assert that an unstable design is safer than a stable design is just not true.
1. > Kelly, your assertion was about safety, so looking at your comments…
Bottom line on safty is the shuttles have flown more then anything else, with far less projected or actual failures.
==
>> And the fact you nearly lost a craft in flight out of 9 Flights of Apollo…
> Nearly. Again, we’re talking about something a shuttle can’t even do. ==
What exactly? The Apollo SM and shuttles use the same kind of power systems with the same tanks. Improved since the Apollo 13 explosion obviously.
>== I wonder how the shuttle crew would survive if a tank blew up?
They have more redundant power systems so it would likely not be as crippling a problem. Shuttles have lost fuel cells in flight, and have to come back early. I can’t remember if Apollo had multiple redundant power systems.
If a tank exploded, the big question would be what else did it damage. If it damaged the hull in a critical place it might not be able to reenter and have to wait for a rescue. For Apollo obviously a blast that bad would have killed the crew in seconds (it nearly happened with Apollo 13.) But the point is it didn’t have anything like that happen in 30 years of operations.
>>> I think putting the crew on top of the bomb instead of on
>>> the side, that alone makes the Saturn safer.
>> Not sure how? Mainly the shuttles problem is that the crappy throwaway tank keeps raining stuff on it
> You answered your own question. Nothing rains down on you when you are on top.==
But your question was what if it blows. In which case theres no difference between above or to the side..
Things raining down on boosters etc is common (look at the close ups of the Saturn launch) why they never tested the shuttles leading edges impact resistence ….’ll give you NASA was very sloppy. They should have either speced the tanks so things don’t fall off – or spec the shuttle to take the hits.
>> If either exploded all the fuel both folks are dead.
> Buzz said just the other day that although they never had to use it, he believed the Apollo escape system would save lives. =
Sometimes –but then again the crew in the Apollo 1 fire was killed by a safty system designed into the hatch. Safty systems add their own risks.
>> now landing. A capsule heatshield vs. tiles that tend to
>> come off? A shape that is inherently stable vs. a shape
>> that requires a computer to make stable.
You can land a shuttle without its computers, but it ain’t easy. S
I was going to say the same as modern airliners – but I don’t think they have backups for the computers anymore. So if you lose the flight control suit in said airliners you crash. obviously its not common.
> The Apollo heat sheild is tearing itself apart and burning off all
> the way down
> As designed… and it worked.
So do the shuttles tiles, and they performed over ten times as often.
>> Apollo drops like a uncontroled stone and needs its parrachutes.
> A safe stone by it’s record.
No, the are not as safe and has caused near misses and deaths in various Ballistic return craft.
Don’t confuse Apollos lack of more deaths in so few flights as being safer.
>> Shuttles computers have proven more reliable
>Compared to what?
Balistic reentry.
>> you don’t wind up radically off course as capsules frequently do.
> Safely off course.
Not always. We never few many so we didn’t lose anyone, but it came close and the Russians had more issues, one crew nearly died from exposure or wolves. (They had a choice.) If you come down hundreds of miles off course – they might never find you. Or if that off course reentry was also a bit more violent – you might spring a leak and sink.
>> How tough they are.
> That’s something you can do to both; however, an inherently stable form is safer.
Apollo is inherently a less safe configuration. Even with the same technology it couldn’t be made as safe as Shuttle. You could talk about a whole new capsule and booster like Orion/Aries – but as we’cvve seen that’s far les safe or survivable then shuttle.
> You could assert that shuttle is a better system (but given the parasitic weight I’m not sure that assertion would fly)
?
Well safety systems are parasitic to.
😉
Definatly shuttle is a far more capable and safer system then Apollo/Saturn.
>and you could assert that the Apollo was not as safe as it could have been designed to be; But to
>assert that an unstable design is safer than a stable design is just not true.
Your wrong here. The safty or danger of the system involves a lot of factors and how they interact. Its not as simple as a shape solving everything.
The safety … of the system involves a lot of factors and how they interact. Its not as simple as a shape solving everything.
Absolutely correct and I do not believe I ever said the shape solved everything. However, isolating the variables I can say stable is safer than unstable and here shape does matter.
Isolate another variable: thermal protection on reentry.
Thermal tiles were chosen for the shuttle to reduce cost not as an improvement to safety. The one piece heat shield of Apollo tends to be held in place (that stability thing) but suppose we replace it will tiles like the shuttle. What happens when some come off?
Temperature rises perhaps to unsafe levels, but the craft doesn’t disintegrate as a result (like the shuttle has.) Temperature doesn’t kill, heat kills. It’s not clear if the loss of some tiles would allow enough heat to enter Apollo during the brief period of reentry to harm the crew (since the craft is stable it won’t disintegrate which is what lead to the deaths of the shuttle crew.)