Some good advice from FLAToday. Unfortunately, the comments section is overflowing with ignorance and illogic, including the usual lies about SpaceX.
25 thoughts on “NASA, Why Build A Rocket?”
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Some good advice from FLAToday. Unfortunately, the comments section is overflowing with ignorance and illogic, including the usual lies about SpaceX.
Comments are closed.
Umm.. as much as I agree with the sentiment, he seems to be confused about heavy lift and super heavy lift.
We don’t have any definitive class of rocket sizes. The fact is when there comes a commercial need private business will be able to meet it.
What size classification makes sense? (In that it would continue to make sense over time as capabilities change.) It’s got to account for everything from a few pounds to Nuke Orion Battleships.
I’m not disagreeing with you Trent. But we do not have a clearly defined problem here and it shouldn’t distract from the fact that NASA should not be in the rocket design and manufacturing business. It’s questionable whether they should be in the payload business either. One really good suggesting is that payloads should be sized on the launcher out principle (which has a link back to Rand but not to the permalink.)
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1495/1
How much lift would be needed for an -unloaded- Orion? Or heaviest-single-item that’s anywhere in planning?
Because if we can finally break the cargo-with-crew thinking, we had damn well better be able to get the cargo up for a much lower price than the crew. And a whole lot of the cargo should be as divisible as need be (food, air, water, fuel).
We don’t have any definitive class of rocket sizes.
Actually, we do. These classes are defined by FAA-AST:
Heavy >= 9,000 lb. to GTO, i = 28 deg
Intermediate 4,000-9,000 lb.
Medium 2,000-4,000 lb.
ken, I’m not making a semantic argument. I’m saying his first sentence is misleading..
“Why in the world is NASA developing its own supersized rocket when no fewer than three private companies already have one on the drawing board?”
who are these three private companies? He later says identifies them as Boeing’s Delta 4, Lockheed Martin’s Atlas 5, and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Clearly, he’s referring to the “heavy” versions of these vehicles.
So either he’s deliberately conflating “heavy” with “supersized”, or he doesn’t know the difference. I think we’re required to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s just confused.
To quantify this, none of the “commercial” heavy vehicles will be carrying more than 32t to LEO. The Congress doesn’t seem to think that’s big enough.. they wanted 75t+ and now they’re demanding 130t+. No doubt as a result of influence from MSC.
Why NASA can’t make do with what’s available or soon to be available is what he wants to ask, and for good reason: no acceptable answer has been provided.
Because if we can finally break the cargo-with-crew thinking, we had damn well better be able to get the cargo up for a much lower price than the crew.
You mean the same thinking found in ocean shipping, aviation, trucking — all of which are successful transportation industries, I believe? Have you told Federal Express that they “break the cargo-with-crew thinking”?
Apart from “unmanned space” ideology, what reason is there to believe that cargo should have a “much lower price than crew”?
Ed, the only space booster ever made that combined carrying people with cargo is the Shuttle. No one else has ever done it and for good reason – it’s too damned expensive. A Proton booster can put 20 metric tons into a 51 degree inclination LEO orbit for about $100 million. The Shuttle can put that same payload (give or take a little) and up to 7 crew members for a cost of several hundred million to a billion dollars per flight.
@Trent:
Or, he’s using plain English. This point’s trivial, anyways.
Because:
1. NASA–like every other launching body in the world–is in the habit of delivering payload straight from the pad to its ultimate destination, and
2. At the rate NASA and the upstarts are going, it’s unclear as to when a reasonable, let alone commercial alternative to super heavy lift will emerge. Let alone how much it will cost.
Trent, it’s legitimate for him to say ‘supersized’ for anything larger than what’s currently available. I agree it’s confusing.
Crew always includes cargo (although what they carry with them may not be much.) Elon, has or soon will, show(n) that there doesn’t have to be a significant difference in cost.
And Saturn V.
…it’s unclear as to when a … super heavy lift will emerge.
Why unclear? Start by changing their habit (using the launch out principle.) Then as flight rates go up, incremental size increases will happen as the economics allow for it. This is the fastest way to multiple source heavy platforms. Falcon X and XX are examples. They will happen as soon as the actual need (rather than ignorant requirement) occurs.
To be more explicit. If you size payloads for the second highest payload mass launcher, the guy with the third largest is going to scale up until you have more capacity than payloads. Then payloads will scale up for capacity.
Ed, the only space booster ever made that combined carrying people with cargo is the Shuttle.
And Saturn V.
Perhaps, and as magnificient a rocket as the Saturn V was, they quit building them because they were too expensive. While the dataset is small, I do see a pattern emerging.
As for Ed’s example of FedEx, they don’t carry much in the way of passengers on their flights (an occassional company employee). Even their 747 freighters only need a crew of 2 and if the FAA would certify a transport UAV, FedEx would use it.
These classes are defined by FAA-AST:
Not surprising Ed. The FAA still has docs written by Wilbur and Orville.
However, those three classes don’t seem to be the end of the story. Here’s where I might go…
BASE: Ten metric tons to 500 kilometer circular earth orbit.
Underbase: anything smaller.
B2: 10+ to 40mT. B3: 40+ to 90mT B4: 90+ to 160mt. etc.
Not that classes of lift capacity are that useful in any case.
@Ken:
It’s unclear because nobody’s put numbers to it yet. And that’s the bare minimum you need to do to even start talking about changing a $20 billion a year agency’s habits.
The stupid part about all of these pro-HLV arguments is that we will never have a rocket big enough, ever.
We have Delta IV Heavy right now, and that’s not big enough because of whatever reasons somebody comes up with.
Then the next guy comes along and says, no we really need 75 tons, so we need some form of SDLV because of reasons x, y, and z. So, we need to siphon billions of dollars and years and years to build that because it doesn’t exist, because we just can’t do anything without it.
But, wait no, the third guy says we need 130, and repeats the same arguments as before, but with the number 130 instead of 75.
And on and on.
At some point you need to just need to find a cut-off point and live with the limitations of each “launch increment”, whatever it is, and learn how to build stuff in orbit. If you can’t do that, we will always be waiting for the next bigger rocket.
And if we need to learn to build stuff in orbit anyways, regardless of the launcher size, we might as well start with the rockets we have right now that have some sort of commercial applicability (Delta IV) than wasting billions on SDLV/SLS/whatever that has no commercial applicability at all.
Ed, the only space booster ever made that combined carrying people with cargo is the Shuttle. No one else has ever done it and for good reason – it’s too damned expensive.
Really? Did I imagine the X-15? SpaceShip One?
There are reasons why no one has built an orbital RLV, but they have nothing to do with being “too damned expensive.” A small orbital RLV could be developed for a fraction of what the US has spent on Ares, for example. (Which, you will note, did not turn out to be cheap, despite Griffin’s allegiance to “separating crew from cargo.”)
A Proton booster can put 20 metric tons into a 51 degree inclination LEO orbit for about $100 million.
In other words, it’s “too damned expensive.”
All mature transportation systems operate at ~3x fuel cost. “Separating crew from cargo” hasn’t produced vehicles that operate anywhere close to that range — after 50 years of trying.
As for Ed’s example of FedEx, they don’t carry much in the way of passengers on their flights (an occassional company employee).
Ignoring, for a moment, those shipments which FedEx contracts out to the passenger airlines, you’re changing arguments in mid-horse.
Passengers are not “crew,” Larry. They’re passengers. So, this is not an example of “separating crew from cargo.”
Even their 747 freighters only need a crew of 2 and if the FAA would certify a transport UAV, FedEx would use it.
No, they wouldn’t. Marketing hype to the contrary, UAVs have loss rates that are orders of magnitude higher than manned aircraft. Federal Express couldn’t afford to spend tens of billions of dollars to replace lost airframes every year — even if the FAA were crazy enough to certify them.
Not to mention all of the lawsuits from people who lost relatives or property from all those airframes falling out of the sky. Fedex can’t clear everyone out of the flight path every time they fly, you now. The only systems that can afford to do that are — what was your phrase again? — “too damned expensive.” 🙂
Ed, the only space booster ever made that combined carrying people with cargo is the Shuttle. No one else has ever done it and for good reason – it’s too damned expensive.
Really? Did I imagine the X-15? SpaceShip One?
What was the cargo carried on the X-15? SpaceShipOne had a capacity of 3 people but never flew with more than one on board. Neither came close to achieving orbit so calling them space boosters is a bit of a stretch.
As for the Proton, it’s maybe an order of magnitude less expensive than the Shuttle in large part because the Shuttle is manned. Carrying people along with the cargo drives up the cost considerably which is why no one else does it.
As for UAVs, the military is flying them constantly. With experience and improvements on the designs, they’re accumulating an improving operational record.
What was the cargo carried on the X-15? SpaceShipOne had a capacity of 3 people but never flew with more than one on board.
The X-15 carried nearly a thousand pounds of scientific instruments on its later (research) flights. Did you think that was a rhetorical question?
SpaceShip One carried cargo equal to the weight of two passengers — that was a requirement for winning the X-Prize.
Those payloads could have flown on sounding rockets, which according to your argument should be “so damned cheap” because they “separate crew from cargo.” But sounding rockets are not “so damned cheap” as your theory predicts. How come?
Also recall that when Mike Griffin was Chief Technology Officer at OSC, he persuaded NASA to fund development of a suborbital RLV. Mike was one of the early promoters of the mantra about “separating crew from cargo.” If you and he are right, X-34 should have been “so damn cheaper” than SpaceShip One? SS1 cost about $25 million to develop. X-34 was nearly $150 million. SS1 was a couple hundred thousand dollars per flight. X-34 was infinite.
Neither came close to achieving orbit so calling them space boosters is a bit of a stretch.
No RLV has come close to achieving orbit. You’re not reasoning from a single data point, you’re reasoning from zero data points. Claiming that the Shuttle, Soyuz, and Saturn V are representative of every vehicle that might be built in the future is much more than a stretch. It’s like claiming the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin were representative of every future air vehicle.
On the other hand, while we have no examples of crewed orbital RLVs, we have (as you point out) many, many examples of orbital launch systems designed around the principle of “separating crew from cargo.” None of which have turned out to be “so damned cheap” despite five decades of development.
We also have data points on crewed suborbital RLVs, as well as data points for air, sea, and land transportation — none of which support your hypothesis.
You can waive your hands and say that orbital vehicles are somehow “different” from all other forms of transportation but without any data to support that notion the default assumption should be that they are not “different” and obey the same laws of economics as every other form of transportation.
We could have developed multiple small crewed RLVs for what Mike Griffin spent on his foolish attempt to “separate crew from cargo” in Ares/Orion. So, which one is really “so damned expensive”?
Presley, the Saturn V was test-flown without any crew. It was also flown without crew on the Skylab launch.
So, the Saturn V is yet another data point on “separating crew from cargo.” The USG could have kept it around for cargo flights, if that made sense. It didn’t. So, obviously, it was not the crew that made the Saturn V “so damned expensive.”
…to even start talking about changing a $20 billion a year agency’s habits.
There’s the answer right there… stop feeding the habit. We could start with a launch out law forbidding NASA from designing any payload larger than the second largest launch system. All launches must be purchased commercially on existing systems. Put out the word that they would buy launches for larger payloads if the systems existed.
NASA is not held responsible to produce any specific accomplishment. So they don’t. Give the boys money for toys without a very specific goal and they will spend all their time achieving next to nothing.
It’s unclear because nobody’s put numbers to it yet.
Putting numbers to HLV is the exact mistake they shouldn’t be making. That’s constructing the tenth floor before the foundation has been laid. Instead they need an environment where HLV is naturally developed in its own time when the need is clear. That happens by creating the economic incentives for progress. That’s the launch out law.
The launch out law creates a natural incentive to participate in the market by creating incrementally larger systems without any need to specify the numbers first (in the sense of doing it prematurely when it’s ridiculous to do it.)
Ken, the Launch Services Purchase Act already requires NASA to purchase all launches commercially. It contains specific exceptions for the Shuttle but not for future launch systems (which weren’t even contemplated when the law was written). The problem is, NASA and Congress simply ignore the law. And the courts won’t get involved because no one except NASA contractors or vendors has “standing.” (Just being a US citizen concerned about how his tax money is spent buys you nothing.)
It does no good to pass laws as long as the government (especially the Alabama delegation) is filled with scofflaws.
That’s a sad truth Edward. Makes you want to be king just long enough to fix the mess.
If I remember correctly, Proton’s initial payload was intended to be the Sov’s very large bomb. It was also part of their non-N-1 lunar mission plans using a Soyuz (Zond) lander. But that was before people had problems “man-rating” LVs. Cheers –