The astronaut office has provided their view of the transition to commercial crew. I have some heartburn with it:
As commercial providers become integrated with NASA flight operations, questions pertaining to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) versus NASA certifications and standards arise. Currently, FAA (Office of Space Transportation) standards are only designed to protect the public from over-flight hazards associated with a launch. In contrast, NASA’s Human-Rating Requirements (HRR) for Space Systems (NPR 8705.2B) and Flight Rules have evolved over decades and are set in place to protect both the flight crew on board the vehicle and the public. It is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing. Even with collaborative efforts amongst licensing agencies that evolve for human space vehicles, the NASA Human-Rating Requirements are the only current benchmark standards and should be used as the controlling document for certifying human rating of crewed spacecraft.
You mean the human-rating requirements that NASA hasn’t designed a vehicle to meet in decades, and had to waive when Orion couldn’t meet them? There needs to be severe pushback against this from the CSF.
One other point. I disagree with this requirement:
While on the ISS, each crewmember requires a path to return to the Earth in the event of a catastrophic station failure or medical emergency. A ready vehicle (lifeboat) attached to the ISS, in lieu of a ground based launch-on-need vehicle is required for ACR. A de-orbit in this ready vehicle must be executed to a targeted ground site capable of post landing support.
These are two different requirements, and may require two different vehicle types — a “lifeboat” and an ambulance. It also ignores the requirement of a non-catastrophic station failure, which might necessitate temporary abandonment, but not a wholesale evacuation all the way to the ground. I’ve always found the designation of “lifeboat” for a vehicle designed to return crew to earth to be a misnomer. A lifeboat is a temporary vehicle to provide protection until the survivors can be picked up by another vessel, not something that takes the Titanic passengers all the way back to Southampton.
There is an intrinsic assumption in this requirement that spaceflight remains expensive and rare, and that there are no other facilities in orbit to which to repair if there are problems on the station. But part of the idea of the new plan is to fix both these problems (or at least the former — I’m not sure much thought has been given to the latter, but cheap regular access makes it easier to solve). So, the notion of simply going somewhere else and waiting out either a repair of the station (if possible) or a rescue vessel from earth doesn’t occur to them, hence the (IMO, ridiculous) requirement that everyone has to go back to earth any time there’s a serious problem.
And it becomes doubly absurd if you insist that the assured return vehicle be an ambulance as well. If you use it for that purpose, it may kill the patient, since the design requirement for a crew return vehicle might assume healthy passengers, and have several gees on entry. In addition, it means that the station will be without a return capability for the rest of the crew, if the vehicles are one-size-fits-all. It would be a huge waste of (say) a six-person vehicle to use it to deliver one sick or injured crewperson. Again, this assumes that either a) there is no capability of getting an ambulance up from earth or b) no ability to so so in time. Now (b) is certainly a possibility for certain emergencies, but should we really let that drive transportation requirements? As I’ve pointed out in the past, the people wintering at McMurdo have no “assured crew return” capability, and when they get sick, they tough it out (including Jerri Nielsen, the woman physician who came down with breast cancer and treated herself until spring — she died last year). Why are astronauts more special than polarnauts? I’m sure that if we wanted to spend a few billion, we could come up with a vehicle that could extract people from the south pole during the winter. Why haven’t we done so?
These requirements are based on old mind sets and architecture assumptions. I think that they need rethinking, as part of a larger set of infrastructure requirements.
[Late afternoon update]
From a high-level government source:
The astronaut office, as well as many other NASA parties, have been making their views known for some time to the COTS team led by Geoff Yoder in ESMD. Industry will also be given an opportunity to provide input.
Allowing the astronauts to provide input is appropriate, as they are a “user”, but they are not in control.
That’s what I assumed. And hoped.
There is an intrinsic assumption in this requirement that spaceflight remains expensive and rare
It’s also a self-fulfilling prophesy: spaceflight is expensive and rare, so we must do everything possible to make it expensive and rare. We must levy expensive requirements on the program that drive up costs with minimal increases in safety to justify our phoney-baloney jobs. We can’t expect the astronauts to accept the same level of safety that a mere tourist would accept! No, our astronauts are steely-eyed, rock-ribbed examples of the finest humanity has to offer, so we must not expose them to the same risk as a millionare tourist.
As for the space ambulance, maybe it’s time to develop those one or two person escape pods so popular in science fiction.
Sticking an Uncle Sugar fed intravenous line into the most promising of the NewSpace companies might simply transform those companies into next generation NASA zombies.
It would be so much easier to deploy non-NASA Bigelow destinations and ignore the NASA astronaut office on matters such as these. But if the mission is flying NASA astronauts to ISS, how can Congress be persuaded to ignore advice coming from NASA astronauts?
By going through NASA rather than around NASA, NewSpace risks assimilation into NASA.
I wonder if NASA has human-rated its office buildings and fleet vehicles.
We might as well abandon any pretense of doing any beyond-LEO human exploration with these “requirements”. One second after your engines shut down from doing the trans-Mars injection burn, the Earth may look close, but it’s really three years away.
Many comments, such as Bill’s above, seem to imply that what is going on is somehow an attempt by private space to ally with NASA to obtain funds, and points out the risks in such an approach. That isn’t how I see it at all.
Private orbital human spaceflight is coming. It may take a long time or a short time, but it is obviously within the capabilities of the U.S. industrial base. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has repeatedly failed to field a system for orbital transportation to follow the Shuttle and now, whether extended one more time or not, the end of the Shuttle era is clearly near or here.
If the U.S. government chooses to become an early customer for private orbital human spaceflight, it will accelerate the availability of those services, greatly improve the U.S. competitive position vs. other countries, and allow the U.S. government to spend more of its budget on exploration services.
If the U.S. government does not choose to become such a customer, it will likely be forced to focus its budget on orbital services rather than exploration, as the idea of abandoning ISS is politically untenable. If that happens, then when private orbital human spaceflight arrives or even appears near, NASA will have grave difficulty justifying its continuation in the human spaceflight business, since it will have no function then not duplicated by the private sector.
Those seeking to preserve NASA as a monopoly on U.S. flagged orbital human spaceflight are attempting to obtain a few more years of business as usual at the price of the eventual destruction of the agency.
This isn’t the private sector trying to suck up to NASA — this is some people within the U.S. government who realize that judicious use of the private sector can save NASA by turning it back in to an exploration agency — whose job will then never be truly done. The question is whether they will be allowed to save it.
It also begs the question from a merit perspective: what are these astronauts doing to advance the nation’s economic standing, national security, or exploration that merits so many billions of dollars spent on their “home”, “ambulance”, “lifeboat”, and “hospital”?
When I saw the title of this post, I thought you were referring to plan B talked about in this WSJ article:
http://tinyurl.com/yjgvss2
As to NPR 8705.2B mentioned in the snippet, who knew that National Public Radio wrote our Human Rating Requirements. It might explain a lot! đ
Adding to what Kirk said: or even what the merits of the ISS itself are. Some feel government funded manned spaceflight is intrinsically wasteful. Others see ISS as a valuable stepping stone. In my opinion doing manned spaceflight in LEO is a total waste of money unless you 1) intend to go beyond LEO eventually and 2) intend to blaze a trail for commerce to follow. Anything you do towards those goals should of course also be judged according to cost, time scales, probability of success et cetera. So either don’t do it at all, or do it in a way that advances those goals.
This is why rules are meant to be broken. Stupidity should not be allowed to rule. What are the penalties for breaking the rules? Decertification? So what does that mean? This is why outlaws were invented. If they outlaw space, only outlaws will go into space. Yeehah!
Interesting. So, is NASA going to require that the commercial systems it buys rides on be certified to a higher level of safety than Soyuz?
Bill,
[[[Sticking an Uncle Sugar fed intravenous line into the most promising of the NewSpace companies might simply transform those companies into next generation NASA zombies.]]]
Exactly the point I have been making since New Space started going after NASA funding with programs like COTS.
If you want a viable commercial human Spaceflight Industries (CHSF) industry you need to develop products targeted for the non-government market, not demand the government buy your services.
Government has a role in creating a environment for CHSF, via development banks, development corporations, funding regional space academies, etc. But forcing NASA, as a matter of policy, to buy your services and fund your R&D will just lead to New Space becoming the New Space Contractors…
But I see little hope for this paradigm shift in New Space until New Space Advocates get over their NASA fetish and start basing their policy on what actually works for nurturing new industries…
Jeff,
[[[If the U.S. government chooses to become an early customer for private orbital human spaceflight, it will accelerate the availability of those services, greatly improve the U.S. competitive position vs. other countries, and allow the U.S. government to spend more of its budget on exploration services.]]]
But at NASA the R&D culture means they will never be a mere customer in the traditional sense. Instead NASA will want to be a partner in its developemtn and in the process micromanage to destruction any New Space firms unlucky enough to get pulled into their sphere.
And its not something that will be fixed by a mere policy change. Policy never fixes organization culture.
NASA’s HSF requirements will only be the start. Now that Commercial Crew is seen as the critical path NASA will want its staff to be part of every design meeting and decision, just as they were in the past. The only difference NASA will see in the new policy is who owns title to the vehicles. The management of its design, construction and operation will be handled that same as with Shuttle, Saturn V/Apollo, Titian/Gemini, etc. because that has been the culture of NASA’s relationship with its contractors.
What is needed to to find ways to make DOD or DAPRA your customers.
Or create new institutions, like a Lunar Development Corporation, or a Space Infrastructure Development Corporation, that won’t have the culture legacy of NASA.
Rand,
[[[t is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing. Even with collaborative efforts amongst licensing agencies that evolve for human space vehicles, the NASA Human-Rating Requirements are the only current benchmark standards and should be used as the controlling document for certifying human rating of crewed spacecraft.]]]
I wonder when the FAA AST will issue their statement saying they are not going to base THEIR HSF requirements on NASA’s đ
Like I said in earlier threads, the new policy means the camel’s nose is in the regulatory tent. The rest will follow shortly…
Thomas, to have a vibrant commercial human spaceflight program (which I think would be wonderful) we would have to identify what humans would be doing in space that would justify the enormous expense required to launch, maintain, and return them. So far, the activities in space that have been commerically successful (communications, imagery, resources, etc.) have all succeeded WITHOUT requiring humans there in space to make them work.
I wonder when the FAA AST will issue their statement saying they are not going to base THEIR HSF requirements on NASAâs.
There’s no rush, given that they don’t even have statutory authority to establish HSF requirements. The subject will be debated if/when Congress passes legislation granting it.
Kirk,
[[[Thomas, to have a vibrant commercial human spaceflight program (which I think would be wonderful) we would have to identify what humans would be doing in space that would justify the enormous expense required to launch, maintain, and return them.]]]
And as long as NASA is the only game in town and only sees space as science that will not change. That is why you need to create new organizations, with new missions, to create the vibrant space economy that CHSF will be part of.
Markets don’t come from top down, the emerge from the bottom up. But you need the institutions that will create the environment for them to emerge.
Perhaps the Commercial Spaceflight Federation should put out a press release stating that the assertion that NASA human rating requirements are “current benchmark standards” is not really true because no vehicle has ever been certified under those standards.
But Rand, I was suprised you didn’t take issue with this statement:
“It is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing.”
Really, the FAA by itself will determine the rules and regulations for space control (analogous to air traffic control) and vehicle licensing. NASA will be merely a customer deciding if they want to buy a particular provider’s product.
I do take issue with whether or not it should or will happen, but I can’t really argue with it as stated — rightly or wrongly, NASA does anticipate that…
The standards for spacecraft on which the government buys service must be developed and maintained by some other entity than NASA, so long as NASA has any ambitions to develop and operate its own spacecraft. This means building up a genuine engineering capability at FAA/AST or, over time, some other entity. Whatever standards are generated should also apply to any craft NASA or other non-defense government agencies may develop or operate.
This should be a fundamental demand on the part of the space development community.
Kirk: …justify the enormous expense [of humans in space]
Thomas: …as long as NASA is the only game in town … that will not change
Both right. To justify and lower the expense, space companies need to become freight and passenger lines… but there are not yet any customers.
In time there will be, after we establish bases, then settlements. Freight and passengers travel between destinations. No destinations. No freight. No passengers. Just unmanned network nodes.
Rand,
[[[Thereâs no rush, given that they donât even have statutory authority to establish HSF requirements. The subject will be debated if/when Congress passes legislation granting it.]]]
If the Merchant 7 are already building to meet NASA’s standards by then it may be a moot point. Indeed, as has happened in other industries, they may even lobby for those standards to be adopted to create a barrier to future competitors so they will have a market for their “high” cost NASA driven systems…
they may even lobby for those standards to be adopted to create a barrier to future competitors so they will have a market for their âhighâ cost NASA driven systemsâŚ
They may indeed. If so, they should and will be fought, tooth and claw. If as a result of NASA standards, the costs of spaceflight remain high, and others, with different and better standards can offer it for a much lower price, there will be pressure from them and their customers to allow it.
“It is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing.”
This doesn’t make sense.
NASA can have a voice in vehicles it puts its employees in. That’s fine. If they’re paying for the service, they have a say in it.
NASA should have no involvement in rules and regulations for licensing or anything else like that. If the passengers or cargo aren’t NASA passengers or cargo, and they’re not going to a NASA space station, NASA has no role whatsoever.
If the passengers or cargo arenât NASA passengers or cargo, and theyâre not going to a NASA space station, NASA has no role whatsoever.
Except if in providing for NASA they institutionalize costs they otherwise wouldn’t which all their customers then pay.
Right now NASA is considered the government’s center of technical expertise regarding manned space flight. Until and unless some other part of the government builds up such a capacity, the FAA and any other government entities will end up deferring to NASA’s decisions, and they will become de facto standards, and ultimately will be encoded in regulation.
@ Jeff Greason
We need the word monopsony as well as monopoly and my complaint about the plan announced on February 1st is that it shall fail to end the NASA monopsony. I agree completely with this:
Those seeking to preserve NASA as a monopoly on U.S. flagged orbital human spaceflight are attempting to obtain a few more years of business as usual at the price of the eventual destruction of the agency.
However, NASA buying commercial crew and cargo to ISS will not facilitate parallel non-NASA destinations in LEO (Bigelow hotels and R&D labs) especially if NASA is allowed to impose the types of regulations described in Rand’s post.
I would pressure Charlie Bolden to acknowledge that Dan Goldin got it wrong in the MirCorp episode and that Mike Griffin got it wrong when he allegedly told folks to stand down from plans to provide Mr. Bigelow a crew taxi.
Official NASA policy should be to acknowledge and promote non-NASA destinations in LEO sooner rather than later. Otherwise commercial crew shall end up being a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” scenario.
Rand’s post illustrates how that will happen.
NASA does anticipate thatâŚ
I should amend that to “the astronaut office does anticipate that.” What “NASA” thinks remains to be seen. I’m hoping for a clarification from headquarters soon.
Bill White said “…NASA buying commercial crew and cargo to ISS will not facilitate parallel non-NASA destinations in LEO…”.
If NASA is one of many customers for commercial crew-launch services, then yes it will. The more customers commercial companies have buying their services, the cheaper and more reliable their services will become. This is capitalism 101. SpaceX and Bigelow have stated goals to go to LEO, with or without NASA. Who knows if the economics are there yet for them to do it, but if NASA starts buying services from them, it will be a big help.
As was said in an earlier post, at some point there will be commercial crew launchers – it’s just a matter of when and whether NASA will be a help or a hinderance. If they help, the launchers will be U.S. based. If they hinder, they will go off-shore (like Bigelow has already done).
Well, it’s bad now and it’ll get worse. The Astronaut Office has experienced a lot of grief and stress and was given a lot of promises on CEV back in 2003 and they want what they were promised. There’s a ray of sunshine though: the Astronaut Office hates the idea of shuttle extension. Shuttle is their baseline of safety and returning to flight on the old ladies was a gamble that they’re not willing to take anymore. So commercial providers only have to be safer than Shuttle and, frankly, that’s not hard.
So far, the HSF safety requirements are unmeetable simply because we have no idea what they are. SpaceX have done everything they can to meet the published standards but this is NASA we’re talking about, expect not only absurdly difficult to meet requirements, but also requirements that are deliberately designed to be obstructionist. And even if NASA puts together some sensible requirements this year, except those requirements to change next year.
The Astronaut Office has experienced a lot of grief and stress and was given a lot of promises on CEV back in 2003 and they want what they were promised.
Gee. That’s a shame.
How does that entitle them to billions of dollars in taxpayer funds? What dire events would occur if we just got new astronauts?
s/CEV/CLV/
Rand, let me put it in terms you can get behind hating đ
NASA Astronaut Office == Government Mandated Union.
Rand,
[[[They may indeed. If so, they should and will be fought, tooth and claw. If as a result of NASA standards, the costs of spaceflight remain high, and others, with different and better standards can offer it for a much lower price, there will be pressure from them and their customers to allow it.]]]
But by then they will be entrenched and it will be an hard uphill battle nearly impossible to win. This is why commercial crew is a very bad idea for New Space.
Think of it as the old trick for catching monkeys. Put an orange in a jar tied to a post. The monkey reaches in to get the orange and is trapped. The monkey will not let go of the orange so they are now “trapped” and may be easily sent off to the zoo.
COTS-D is the orange that will trap New Space with a expensive and restrictive regulatory regime. Time to let go of the orange and escape. Of course the monkey won’t and neither will New Space. The orange is just too good to abandon…
It’s ironic that the Astronaut Office is worried about the safety of these commercial launch vehicles even as congressmen are plotting to have them fly on the shuttle for five more years. Seems like ANYTHING would be safer than that.
I don’t see how NASA or FAA or anyone in the US is going to go about setting standards while ITAR is in place. Right now the de facto standard for airlocks is the Russian design, since the American design is hidden behind ITAR, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. How does one propose to open up a spaceflight industry without opening up competition to the whole world?
I don’t like the over-reliance on fault tolerance over FMEA. I understand that for systems that are not operated often, fault tolerance can manage the risk uncertainty. But a no-fault tolerant system that fails 0.001% of the time is better than a two-fault tolerant system where each fault happens 10% of the time. It is the classic systems engineering fatal conceit: we don’t know how often this $1M doodad will fail, so we’ll spend $10M triplicating rather than just build and launch 10 of them and improve it each time. Nevermind that we just made the system at least 3X more complicated and therefore 3X harder to fix. It’s fault tolerant!
Gee letâs seeâŚWe need a vehicle that can act as an ambulance and a crew transport in case of problems. It needs to have a backup of course so we can get a replacement crew transport in place if the first is being used as an ambulance. And of course it has to be âman ratedâ or something that has the appearance.
It sounds like somebody is making a case for extending the life of the shuttle fleet.
Here’s a novel idea: NASA specifies how much it wants to pay for crew delivery and then suppliers compete to provide the best solution that fits in that budget. It will likely be safer than anything the same money could afford under “human rating” scenarios whatever those are.
1. >Thomas Matula Says:
>March 4th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
>> Jeff,
>> [[[If the U.S. government chooses to become an early customer for private
>> orbital human spaceflight, it will accelerate the availability of those services,
>> greatly improve the U.S. competitive position vs. other countries, and
>> allow the U.S. government to spend more of its budget on exploration services.]]]
> But at NASA the R&D culture means they will never be a mere customer
> in the traditional sense. Instead NASA will want to be a partner in its
> developemtn and in the process micromanage to destruction any New
> Space firms unlucky enough to get pulled into their sphere.
>
>And its not something that will be fixed by a mere policy change.
> Policy never fixes organization culture.
I disagree about it being a R&D culture â but yes NASA was insanely anal retentive. When NASA was launching astrounauts on Atlas and Titan boosters they spent weeks prepping the things, with building full of people in KSC and JSC looking over and analyzing the data â but they were built and operated by the AF to sit largely unattended in their silos and fire on a few seconds notice when 2 guys turned a pair of keys at the same time.
One of the biggest problems NASA has inflicted no space â is it burned into folks minds, even space advocate folks, that you needed the huge overhead and vast money, or at the least we had no idea how to do it simpler and cheaper. That the physics and science forced it on you. Instead it was just a policy choice.
> NASAâs HSF requirements will only be the start. Now that Commercial
> Crew is seen as the critical path NASA will want its staff to be part
> of every design meeting and decision, just as they were in the past.
> The only difference NASA will see in the new policy is who owns title to the vehicles. ==
Sadly, you get it.
2. > Trent Waddington Says:
> March 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
>== So commercial providers only have to be safer than
> Shuttle and, frankly, thatâs not hard.
Actually Trent, Shuttles have the best safty record of anything ever launched, and I donât beleave any of the commercials think they will exceed it?
1. > Thomas Matula Says:
> March 4th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
> If the Merchant 7 are already building to meet NASAâs standards
> by then it may be a moot point. Indeed, as has happened in other
> industries, they may even lobby for those standards to be adopted
> to create a barrier to future competitors so they will have a market
> for their âhighâ cost NASA driven systemsâŚ
Wouldnât be the first time, and given NASA may be the only customer they could find for some time â they could well want to protect their turf.
Certainly NASA would like this, since a huge commercial market is a major threat to their existence.
>==
> Think of it as the old trick for catching monkeys. Put an orange
> in a jar tied to a post. The monkey reaches in to get the orange
> and is trapped. The monkey will not let go of the orange so they
> are now âtrappedâ and may be easily sent off to the zoo.
>
> COTS-D is the orange that will trap New Space with a expensive
> and restrictive regulatory regime. ==
Hey, the gov captured most of the rest of the aerospace industry that way.
….and of course the monkeys are starving now, so any food is desperately needed — even if you need to put on a leash to eat it..
Agree strongly with the general thrust of Bill White and Thomas Matula’s responses to Jeff Greason. Some stark realities:
* DreamChaser’s only customer is NASA.
* Blue Origin’s only customer is NASA.
* NASA is responsible for the large majority of SpaceX’s revenues and practically all of its Dragon revenues.
If this is not an alliance between NewSpace and NASA I’d like to know what would be. Money talks, BS walks. These companies are on the same path taken by Orbital Sciences two decades ago — starting with great dreams of commerce they ended up as a typical government contractor. An energetic startup turned into a zombie by the bureaucracy and political games required in government contracting.
That said, the problem goes deeper. Over 99% of HSF is still bankrolled by government space agencies, not by private customers, nor even by those other practical users of space, militaries. With so much easy money coming from NASA there is little incentive for any companies NewSpace or otherwise to change this. And even if orbital tourism magically mushroomed by a factor of five, the HSF “market” would still be more than 95% artificial.
The main problem with NASA is not that it costs too much. The main problem with NASA is that it is doing the wrong things. Just as fish grow up knowing nothing but water, we have grown up from childhood steeped in NASA’s economic fantasies. I’m afraid this is even reflected in some of Bill’s and Thomas’s ideas about the way forward, and in what Bob Bigelow is trying to do. But we can’t privatize an economic fantasy. We can only shut it down when people get tired of subsidizing it.
The way forward is shown not by NASA but by real commerce: space commerce that regularly meets the needs of people on earth and doesn’t require a large subsidy. Communications, navigation, geographical information, and much more.
>== The way forward is shown not by NASA but by real commerce: space
> commerce that regularly meets the needs of people on earth and
> doesnât require a large subsidy. ==
Agreed -but currently there is damn near no market for space or space launch — which makes it damn hard to leverage the market up to something bigger.
“Forecast International is projecting deliveries of approximately 262 commercial communications satellites destined for geostationary or medium-Earth orbit, worth $38.7 billion, during the next 10 years. The low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) market, comprising satellites primarily for the provision of mobile communiÂcations, will see production of 142 spacecraft worth about $2.7 billion.”
http://www.forecastinternational.com/press/release.cfm?article=179
Doesn’t sound very small to me. Just ignored by astronaut fans. If we can’t lower costs for real customers in a real market, NASA contracting gimmicks aren’t going to do the trick either.
> Forecast International is projecting deliveries of approximately
> 262 commercial communications satellites destined for geostationary
> or medium-Earth orbit, worth $38.7 billion, during the next 10 years.
26 flights a year -globally? Meaning no single vendor could really hope to get more then half that – at best. If that doesn’t sound like extreamly small to you, we have different hearing. For a commercial aerospace product as sophisticated adn expensive to develop as a launcher – you expect to sell hundreds to thousands of vehicles, each flying hundreds of times each per year. tens of thousands compared to ten?
Each of those 10 flights maybe markets for $100 million? Profit margin maybe 10% of that? A good sized farm or car dealership could make more money a year.
Kelly, the revenue per flight is very large. Which means if your costs are low that the profit per flight is very large. The early airliners started on far less revenue. A typical high-tech startup can only dream of that kind of revenue. It’s only small by contrast to the fat NASA and DoD contracts the industry is used to.
> googaw Says:
> March 7th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
> Kelly, the revenue per flight is very large. Which means if your
> costs are low that the profit per flight is very large. The early
> airliners started on far less revenue
Except the costs are huge$ Dev costs for a booster are similar to the cost for a plane with similar cargo capacity and long trans pacific flight range. But after you drop say a $billion or $3, you might never fly more the a couple dozen flights in a couple decades — while keeping the team and all the parts supliers going just to build the parts for your one or two flights a year.
For example. The shuttles flown more times then anything ever did to space. Closing in on flight 130. Cost adjusted for inflation to develop it was $37 billion (tiny compared to just Ares-I/Orion. But that means the R&D costs are $280 million a flight. Add the care and feeding of KSC, and pork hung on it for political tastes, your overhead costs unrelated to what the ship needs are more hundreds of millions a flight. If your a commercial booster you can skip a lot of the pork, but you need insurence, still need to pay range fees, etc. They would run $100-$200(?) million a flight.
Oh, and the actual flight runs about $60 million.
Your just in a really bad part of the economic curve.
Except the costs are huge$ Dev costs for a booster are similar to the cost for a plane with similar cargo capacity
Alas in the gold-plated world of government contracting this is true. And orbital launch necessitates a certain minimum scale which drives up the development costs and makes it too risky a venue for daring innovation. But with suborbital, X-planes, and other smaller scale activities much more innovation can occur for far less R&D cost.
Possibly, Big Dumb Booster ideas will work — but I’m a skeptic until I see a Small Dumb Booster (suborbital) work first. Can somebody get to suborbital space with a rocket built using only off-the-shelf tooling from the amateur-built airplane and automotive industries? That would be a neat trick. Use only cheap machine tools and offshore all but the final assembly to Mexico and Malaysia. Until we can make rockets like that we shouldn’t wonder why they are expensive.
>googaw Says:
> March 7th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
>> Except the costs are huge$ Dev costs for a booster are similar
>> to the cost for a plane with similar cargo capacity
> Alas in the gold-plated world of government contracting this is true. ==
No I mean commercial dev cost (gov are higher). Its about the same cost for a aircraft of similar cargo cap and very long range.
Really that’s not bad, I mean compared to folks figuring its $50 billion to do a 2 passenger craft or something.
>==Can somebody get to suborbital space with a rocket built using
> only off-the-shelf tooling from the amateur-built airplane and
> automotive industries?
Depends on how suborbital you mean. Other then the engine adn some ods adn end SS1 was something a good home builder could do.
Really the killer is can you build a engines (engines are harder then aircraft mainly — well except for some ramjets) and do you have a design that works. I’ve sen folks homebuild turbojets or turboramjets — flew the later in a high power rocket. But one you’ld put in a maned craft?
I mean if you had a machine shop, or a good set of catalogs, and you know what your doing…. but man if you screw up, you can generate a lot of scrap metal damn fast.
I’ld be tempted to see if you could find old rockets somewhere.
Its about the same cost for a aircraft of similar cargo cap and very long range.
Development costs for rockets to be economical have to be far lower than for airliners, because more airplanes are made and they are reused thousands of times. The tooling for an economical rocket has to be far simpler than for an airliner. $50B or even $2B is not economical, the development costs to first operational orbital flight really need to come in well under $1 billion and preferably closer to $100m. It could be a big part of our problem that rockets are built by airliner and defense/NASA contractor companies rather than by automobile or shipbuilding companies with their cheaper tooling. The connection between SpaceX and Tesla might prove valuable in this regard.
I take it you disagree with John Walker’s comment that rocket engines are really no more complex than automobile engines?
Man-rating bureaucracy could seriously blow the budget and is not necessary for real commerce, so I would skip it or do it much later.
man if you screw up, you can generate a lot of scrap metal damn fast.
I would try to develop the cheap-tooling rocket with a test plan like Armadillo or Masten, starting with small tethered flights, then going to suborbital. Perhaps with an entry into the Rocket Racing League or an X-Prize. If I’ve proven (rather than disproven, which would be sad but also valuable information) that I can build a rocket with cheap tools then I’d scale up to do it orbital.
Here’s an X-Prize idea: the Suborbital Kit Rocket. One team makes the plans and kit parts and a second team, none of whose members can ever have met members of the first team, builds the rocket from the kits parts plus standard off-the-shelf parts and launches it. The first pair of teams such that both teams get their rocket to suborbital space wins the prize. One of the contest rules is that the winners have to release their design into the public domain (though they can sell the kit parts).