This is sort of interesting, if true:
NASA sees China’s strategy for a manned lunar landing as launch vehicle intensive. While America’s notional Constellation moon project centers on a single – and still unbuilt – Ares-V “superheavy” lift booster for a direct ascent to the moon and two “lunar orbit rendezvous” operations, China will likely opt for two complex “Earth orbit rendezvous” maneuvers.
This will require four “Long March V” rockets – in the same class as the Pentagon’s Delta IV heavy lift launch vehicles – to put their cosmonauts on the moon. Launched in pairs over a two-week period from China’s new Wenchang Space Center on the South China Sea island of Hainan, the four Long March Vs will each loft 26-ton payloads into low Earth orbits. The first mission will orbit the rocket for the translunar journey which will then join a second payload of an empty lunar module (LM) and its lunar-orbit rocket motor. Those first two unmanned payloads will rendezvous in Earth orbit and then fire off for the quarter-million-mile journey to the moon.
Once the unmanned LM is in a stable lunar orbit, the second pair of missions will be launched into Earth’s orbit; the first with another translunar rocket motor and the second with a combined payload comprising the lunar orbiting module, a modified service module, an Earth re-entry module and the manned Shenzhou capsule with three Chinese cosmonauts.
Unlike many at NASA, they’re smart enough to avoid the huge development costs of a heavy-lifter. Of course, it will still be a very expensive mission, but based on existing vehicles. We looked at these kinds of architectures at Boeing during CE&R, before Mike Griffin took over and they became anathema. Of course, we were trying to actually satisfy the requirements of the VSE and the Aldridge recommendations, something that Mike apparently never considered important.
I should add that the article is clearly wrong on this point:
October’s launch of the experimental Ares 1-X heavy lift rocket, while flawless, may well mark the end rather than the beginning of America’s next-generation Constellation manned-space program.
It was hardly “flawless,” unless you don’t consider a failure to deploy all the chutes a flaw.
I see no reason to work with China until they respect intellectual property law. It’ll just be another opportunity to steal technology from us.
Rand, last time I checked, the Delta-IVH cost 200 million dollars. So if they were using Delta-IVH rather than Long March V (which I didn’t know was operational yet)… this implies a cost for the launchers of about 800 million dollars total.
So if we were doing this instead of the Chinese, the launch costs would be .8/17.6 = 4.5% of the NASA budget.
So while it’s expensive for you and me, it’s not very expensive for NASA.
You’re not considering the cost of the payloads.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s a small fraction of what was already spent on Ares I.
Well, yeah, but the payloads cost the same whether they’re launched on small rockets or on large ones. Unless you’re making the capsule as large as possible so that only The Stick can carry it, most of the lifted payload is fuel.
I’m not saying it’s unaffordable, but it’s too much money for a serious lunar base.
Who has the better chance of developing the mission vehicles more cheaply, those who spend billions of dollars on a use-once-a-year launcher, or those who make do with existing hardware?
(For that matter, who has a better chance of actually developing a lunar base, those who do a 2-taikonaut-to-the-moon mission with delta-4h equivalents, or those who dump tens of billions into viewgraphs?)
But the LM-Vs are provided by the Chinese government. So they’re free, right?
Obviously the Chinese approach is better than NASA’s. That doesn’t make it good.
If for some reason we chose to join the Chinese, we could easily throw in a couple of Centaurs for Kick Stages.
It looks like SpaceX is offering one ton to LEO for about ten million on the regular F9 (couldn’t find pricing on the F9heavy.) Assuming it performs, how does that compare?
While the model’s been tossed away, the original idea of the EELVs was that there would be so many of them launched, the price would go down drastically. When I toured the Delta launch facilities, I was told that their max production rate was 42 core first stages. That would be either 10 heavy launches (assuming 12 medium flights for other payloads), and the cost would have gone down significantly. When the market didn’t appear as expected, the AF chose to give Boeing a cash infusion, so that model may be completely dead now. If the AF had purchased 6 (or whatever number the money would buy) flights for the same cash infusion, we might be in a radically different place.
Ken,
To me it looks like SpaceX is offering about 10 tons to LEO for about $44 million.
Less than half of what you are quoting.
If we will be using medium lift, EML depots remain a game changer for getting to the Moon (and creating a permanent presence) especially if fuel can be delivered to the depot in advance by slow boat trajectories.
As I have said before . . .
EML Gateways and reusable lunar landers, whether its NASA, ESA, Russia, China or whoever.
Although to pacify Edward Wright I’m now calling them RLLs not r-LSAM.
= = =
Deploy an EML Gateway and sell China rides to the lunar surface. Lets get back some of that money folks have been spending at Wal-Mart.
To me it looks like SpaceX is offering about 10 tons to LEO for about $44 million.
The Falcon I has a much higher price per kg than the Falcon 9. Both numbers are probably right.
The mere mention of a Chinese program to put humans on the moon will certainly send the Constellation supporters into wild gyrations. From a technical standpoint, they have a sound approach to the mission. But how long can we expect Long March 5 development to take before the largest version is operational? And how difficult will it be for the manned spacecraft to locate and rendezvous with the unmanned lander in lunar orbit?
Wikipedia says that LM-5s be flying in 2014. Sounds reasonable, but it is Wikipedia.
Rendezvous in Lunar orbit is no trickier than rendezvous in Earth orbit. As long as they have a solid solution on the lunar lander’s orbit, it’s just a matter of timing (and the associated computational power) for the crewed vehicle to meet up with it. The important thing will be being able to predict their rocket engines’ performance as they enter and trim the crewed craft’s lunar orbit. Rendezvous is one of those things that once people got over the ‘hit a rock with a rock’ analogies, they realized it was a challenge, but not really hard.
The plan sounds like it will work, and they have the resources to pull it off, but the timelines strike me as optimistic. Sure, they’re getting lots of data from the Russians, but the Russians haven’t built a lunar lander since the 60s. Given the .5 flights/year flight rate into Earth orbit (admittedly, Wikipedia says they may launch a station, two uncrewed flights and one crewed one this year…we’ll see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzou), and the plans to launch space station beforehand, 2022 strikes me as an outside chance, and the 2017 date strikes me as someone making a pitch for more Constellation money.
Supposedly the Chinese already finished development on the new engines named YF-100 and YF-77. There were some articles in Chinese news sources about that. YF-100 is allegedly a staged combustion LOX/Kerosene engine roughly in the RD-191 class. YF-77 is supposedly a LOX/LH2 gas generator engine about half the thrust of a J-2.
The Chinese have broken ground in Hainan island and are building the spaceport as we speak. IIRC The Chinese also have some kind of LOX/LH2 upper stage based on an existing design, although it uses gas generator cycle rather than expander cycle. Yet they are not exactly known for having a fast space program, and their aerospace projects are also usually delayed. So I would expect even the 2014 number to be overly optimistic. Maybe it would be possible to make a test launch of the smaller versions…
As I have said before . . .
EML Gateways and reusable lunar landers, whether its NASA, ESA, Russia, China or whoever.
Yet you simultanneously insisted that the only Politically Correct architecture to suppport was ESAS, which included neither of those things. Thus demonstrating cognitive dissonance.
This sounds like the reason Jon recently got paranoid about talking about depot-centric architectures so openly.
Rand, last time I checked, the Delta-IVH cost 200 million dollars. So if they were using Delta-IVH rather than Long March V (which I didn’t know was operational yet)… this implies a cost for the launchers of about 800 million dollars total.
Don’t make the mistake of believing that their costs are the same as our costs. For one thing, labor in China is still a lot cheaper than labor working at ULA.
I like their hybrid EOR/LOR approach and recommended the same thing a long time ago as an alternative to building costly heavy lift boosters.
I think that this article and NASA’s analysis of a Chinese Manned Moon mission are wrong.
The Chinese would use 2 Long March V launches and do assembly in low lunar orbit, just like the Russians plan to do with their Rus-M/PPTS Manned Moon Mission architecture. The Chinese would not waste their time with LEO assembly, and would not use 4 Long March V rockets when they could use 2 rockets instead.
An 8-ton Shenzhou needs a Long-March V with 40-tons to LEO and 16-tons to lunar transfer orbit (LTO) to launch it to Low Lunar Orbit with enough delta-V to dock with a 12-ton Lunar Lander that is waiting for it in Low Lunar Orbit and to later rocket itself back to Earth.
In order to have a Long March V rocket with 40-tons to LEO and 16-tons to LTO, the Chinese would only have to add 2 additional 3.35-M strap on boosters to the 4 strap-ons they already used in their “heavy” configuration. This would be similiar to the Russian Angara-7 launch vehicle concept which also has 40-tons to LEO (but a worse LTO because of a weak upper stage).
This article and NASA are wrong, because they assume an inefficient and old architecture for manned moon landings. NASA probably assumes this architecture, because it assumes rendezvous technology from the 1960’s that was not sophisticated enough to conduct 2 separate low lunar orbit rendezvous and dockings. We and the Russians have computers now that can do this.
The United States could land men on the Moon by 2014 using the rockets and spacecraft that we have right now if we used the same “Russian” architecture with an 8-ton/4-man Dragon spacecraft(available in 2010) and an Atlas-V heavy, Delta-IV heavy (with the new 4 RL-10 engine CUS upper-stage), or Falcon-9 Heavy (with Raptor LH2 upper stage) rocket with 40-tons to LEO and 16-tons to LTO capability.
I hope that NASA starts using technology that has been developed since the 1960’s when Apollo was architected. There are a lot of poor assumptions being made.
Ed,
In a (minor) defense of Bill White, he was a DIRECT supporter, not Constellation supporter. Not that I personally see much difference, but. just saying…
Trent,
Laziness on my part is a better explanation than paranoia. I actually had some posts I wanted to put out about propellant depots and depot-centric architectures, but it’s just been lack of energy (busy day job + 3 high-energy little kids) that’s been keeping me from writing as much as I’d like. Unlike Rand, I don’t have time to put 4-5 blog posts out per day…
🙂
~Jon
The next Chinese launch of their space station at the end of 2010 will be using the new engines for the Long March V rocket, so I think that most of the Long March V design is mature, except for the new 5.2-meter LH2 core.
The Long March 2F/G will use the YF-100 stage combustion engine (which is half the thrust of an RD-191) and the new LH2 engine. It will have 12-tons to LEO performance versus the hypergolic engines that the Chinese use now on the Long March 2F for manned spaceflight. In 2011 they will launch the new Shenzhou-8 spacecraft on a similar Long March 2F/H, so over the next 2 years, China will demonstrate a dramatic leap in their spacecraft and rocket technology.
We in the United States would love to know how to manufacture the highest performance expendable staged-combustion engines like the Russians and Chinese do, and would love to have automated rendezvous and proximity operations (ARPO) like the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, and Europeans have within their manned spaceflight programs.
My support of EML Gateway architectures is “launcher neutral”
In other words, I believe EML depots, transfer stations and fully reusable landers will provide optimal access to the lunar surface regardless of the launcher used:
DIRECT’s Jupiters
Existing EELV
SpaceX
Orbital
Proton
Long March
Ariane 5 or 6
Each and every one of these carrier rockets are leveraged by depots – even TAN enhanced launchers – and there are plenty of public papers on the subject available to the Chinese..
I will advocate for EML depots no matter what launcher NASA chooses.
Obama kills VSE regulates US commrecial industry to deadend LEO ISS until 2020 or something who knows what . Meanwhile China eats our lunch scores the moon and develops technology to colonize etc…and move onto Mars. Meanwhile China has island hopped and stole the show while the US randomly spins its wheels on the FLEX route. Killing VSE killed the US manned space program! What have done?????
An 8-ton Shenzhou needs a Long-March V with 40-tons to LEO and 16-tons to lunar transfer orbit (LTO) to launch it to Low Lunar Orbit with enough delta-V to dock with a 12-ton Lunar Lander that is waiting for it in Low Lunar Orbit and to later rocket itself back to Earth.
That’s a problem right there since Chang Zheng 5 doesn’t have that kind of payload. It maxes out around 25 metric tons. Maybe six strapons are possible, but does China have the experience or infrastructure to make that work? How are they going to move a rocket with that many strapons?
Glancing at hypothetical drawings of CZ-5, they don’t have the space for 6 strapons. Those drawings are probably wrong in some way, but you still need to find the space. Further, two extra strapons of the same size as the other four aren’t going to increase payload by 60%.
Moving on, China still has to work it’s way up to that sized platform. Maybe they’ll start early on with launching 25 ton rockets. But that seems a bit risky to their land-side infrastructure. Can the pads handle that? Will they have another of their little guidance problems that took out a village or two?
The next Chinese launch of their space station at the end of 2010 will be using the new engines for the Long March V rocket, so I think that most of the Long March V design is mature, except for the new 5.2-meter LH2 core.
And integration, where they test everything out on the same rocket. It also depends on whether the rockets work. Further, nobody should consider technology that has been shown to work once in the real environment to be “mature”.
The approach they’re using where they launch infrequently with huge steps in between is bankrupt. They’re piling on huge risk without knowing what or where it is. I think they’re doing a fair job given the constraints (numb-skulled leaders who restrict the program to a manned launch every couple of years), but the constraints are a killer as we shall find out. Keep in mind we’re already speaking of one of the most lethal rocketry programs since the Second World War.
Yeah, they should have made more frequent launches to get experience. But they have managed pretty well with their current strategy, replicating Vostok/Soyuz/Mercury/Gemini functionality in a couple of flights. Next up is their very own Salyut space station. Sorry. Tiangong.
After that it remains to be seen what will happen. We have to remember the largest rocket in the family they are doing is in the same payload class than a Proton, or an EELV Heavy. So the rockets are not anemic. They just designed their launchers using practical rather than purely propaganda considerations. If their new launchers work well from the onset (and that is a pretty big if) they will have virtual feature parity with anything anyone else can offer in terms of launchers and human space. By that time Shuttle will most likely be retired.
But they have managed pretty well with their current strategy
There’s a single word for that, “lucky”.