With the summary of the Augustine report being released today, and a lot of people thinking about future space policy, while I don’t have time in the middle of a move to write anything fresh, I’ve written so much in the past that I can run some golden oldies. Here’s what I think is a relevant piece that I wrote over half a decade ago.
3 thoughts on “Launch Reliability”
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I do not know if any of you have read about the plans for the next generation Japanese SLV but they are interesting. They are planning to abandon their high performance, staged combustion, first stage from H-2A for a simpler and more reliable expander bleed cycle engine:
http://www.senkyo.co.jp/ists2008/pdf/2008-a-02.pdf
If they pull that off, it will be the first space launch vehicle using this benign combustion cycle on all stages.
Greetings,
The part that bothers me the most is, if you told people (business) that whatever they find would belong to them, they would have an desire to go and find it.
Right now, that is in doubt.
Regards,
from your article:
“There’s only one way out of this dilemma. We have to make a conscious national decision to do enough in space to start climbing the learning curve, rather than remaining at a base camp at the bottom. Until we make a deliberate choice to become a truly spacefaring nation, we will never have either affordable launch, or reliable launch (and unreliability has its own obvious costs, making the status quo even more unaffordable).”
I would say that this is impossible. And it’s already been “tried”.
We don’t make these kinds of “conscious national decisions” without some driving reason which causes us to make such decisions.
We didn’t decide to send a man to the Moon, we HAD to send a man to the Moon- it was a solution to a problem- “how to beat the Soviets”.
So, if you want a lot of rockets build per year/month. There has to be something which drives this. If the Japanese wanted to dominate to rocket launch market- because- fill in the blank. Then you might have something which causes it to occur.
So, if there was a reason to for the Japanese to dominate this market, then you might get somewhere. Otherwise they will continue farting around with it.
This is a matter of why, not how.
Now, the private sector has whys- it always has whys.
Such things as “making money” and other reasons, like being the cool dude who does something “really important”- or because it is there.
A why for a govt could include national security issues. Though these same national security priorities can interfere [and have interfered] with opening up the space frontier.
Generally I would say it’s not all about rockets, it’s more about launch pads or space ports/airports. For instance, is there any spaceport in the world which “could” launch enough rockets? Even if the rockets had little chance of exploding, would say as little as 1 launch per day be a problem for nearby residents at KSC?
Not mention, the inability of that infrastructure in dealing with such a low traffic.
So, if there was a reason why, then one would first build a spaceport- a spaceport which could actually do the job of getting rockets into space.
How much does it cost to build one launchpad at KSC? How much does it costs to build all the rockets which will launch from that pad. How much does it cost to maintain a pad during it’s life of launching all these rockets?
The pad is mostly ignored with all attention on the rocket, but it’s a significant cost in launching a rocket.
So if we were serious, then such things would not be ignored.
Now, of course we could have spaceports which actually assisted a rocket getting in space, other than mostly being a location to launch from. But such a thing as Mag Lev assisted launch would have a high cost- perhaps a insignificant cost per unit, but a high cost if one has low launch rate.
But why would a govt or a people want to go into space?
There are lots of reason and some good reasons why individuals would want to do it, but for a collective it’s not as defined.
Though default prority for a group of people is usually related to security concerns.