I’m at the ATK press conference. I’ve been tweeting @Rand_Simberg
[Thursday morning update]
It was hard to get everything accurately while tweeting, but NASASpaceflight has a good technical description of the system. The key thing I didn’t catch until talking to Rominger later at the reception is that it’s not using the Orion tractor abort system.
This is some serious competition and I expect them to score high in the CCiCap selection process.
That will require substantial investment on the part of the participants…and they aren’t the kind of participants who invest in anything. Trust me on this one…
Which participants are you talking about? It’s worth mentioning that ATK has done everything they’ve done so far without CCDev funding.
And what exactly have they done so far? Anything beyond paper studies?
You think those are free? We don’t know how much they’ve spent so far, but it’s obviously more than nothing.
It seems they got a lot of money from the Constellation program. It will be cool if that money turns out to be not entirely wasted.
This is not nearly as bad as I had feared, but I do wonder why you think it will score highly. Because of shenanigans or because there is a good case for it? I can see why their capsule might be a prominent entry (but only if there are 3 awards, and after Dragon and CST-100), but not the launch vehicle. Three launch vehicles (Atlas, Delta, Falcon) is plenty, why spend scarce money on yet another launcher?
They will take two items designed for completely different missions, combine them and somehow get them to work together and fly sooner than any other launch system. And they claim it is, “the safest, most reliable, cost-effective commercial space transportation service ever developed,” based on…zero flight experience with these components put together as a system, plus an unflown capsule design.
“Liberty” = liberty to lie.
Eat your heart out, Mr. Orwell.
I’m not sure how you can tell naivety with dishonesty, but I think we’re required to assume it is the former unless there’s some evidence of the latter. It would not be fair, for example, to accuse Elon Musk of being dishonest for all the amateur claims he made at the start of the SpaceX experience.
One of these things is not like the other.
When a dewy-eyed newcomer makes a misstatement, one assumes naiveté and lack of experience.
When a veteran player with a history of manipulating the political system to their own ends makes a misstatement, one assumes ulterior motive.
Great news if they really did solve the technical problems mentioned in Rand’s tweets.
The mass of the upper stage and capsule will dampen and mitigate the thrust oscillations that plagued Ares 1X. The Vulcain 2 upper stage LOX/H2 upper stage has formidable performance. SpaceX sure could use a Raptor upper stage. Every major player but SpaceX has high performance upper stages with ISP over 400s. Rands comments should be interesting considering the bile he generated for the “Corndog” ancestry of this Liberty beast. Love or hate ATK, this machine sitting on the pad would be quite a sight.
A more massive upper stage and payload would dampen impact of thrust oscillation, and reduce overall acceleration.
SpaceX appears to be taking the approach that a common engine core and propellants for both stages is good enough. That the extra ISP isn’t worth the trouble of a different engine type and the cold bulky hydrogen. Given their record to date I can’t say their approach is wrong.
Flying the SSMEs on a second stage was a problem because they were designed for ground igniting, as Vulcain is flown now. It will be interesting to see if the same issues exist here.
I know very little about the Vulcain engine and how it compares to the SSME, so I can’t address your concern. How difficult will it be to air-start a Vulcain? It isn’t as if this is a new problem – they’ve been air-starting LH/LOX engines since the RL-10 and J-2 in the 1960s. I think the problems with the SSME were likely unique to that design. NASA had to be absolutely certain those engines were firing properly before lighting the SRBs, although ESA has a similar concern on the Ariane V.
Vulcain is a gas generator, like the RL-10 (and Merlin). The problem with the SSME is that it’s staged combustion, and I think that it requires some GSE to bootstrap it up. It’s possible to air start it in theory, but I think that NASA eventually despaired in practice.
RL-10 is an expander. I’ve read that the trouble with SSME as an upper stage engine is that it is too hard too restart it in vacuum.
I hope senators from Utah got the memo on this one.
There are obvious technical challenges to making this mash-up work; air-starting the Vulcain 2 is among the knottier ones. But assume all such vehicle-related challenges to be surmountable. The Liberty still has infrastructure and overhead issues that doom it as an economically competitive platform over the long haul.
First, it requires vertical integration in the VAB. The VAB is a half-century old, has been crumbling for decades and has become the space-age equivalent of an inner-city public housing project in terms of general dilapidation. It’s problematical how much more useful service can be gotten from this gigantic piece of slum housing before a thorough gut-and-rehab can no longer be staved off with duct tape and pop rivets. Who pays for this? My guess is John Q. Taxpayer. SpaceX assembles Falcon 9’s laying down in what is essentially a prefabricated steel-frame warehouse building that is brand new, indisputably weather-tight and already paid for.
Looking down the road to, one hopes, increasing flight rates, the VAB has only two assembly bays and I’m not sure both are concurrently usable at present. Even if they are, the VAB is a future bottle neck for high flight rates of Liberty. SpaceX can always build duplicates of the their current catalog-item assembly hangar quickly, cheaply and as required.
Given its vertical assembly, Liberty also requires a stand-up ride to its pad. Again, the only rides available are the two Apollo-era crawler-transporters that were first repurposed for Shuttles, then for the ARES-1X “Corndog” test flight.
There are only 2 of these beasts in existence, they are as old as the VAB, in questionable shape, getting more difficult to maintain and parts – as they say – are hard to get. If only one is available to be configured for Liberty use, then its failure would ground the vehicle just as surely as would a Challenger/Columbia-type disaster. If, for whatever reason, neither existing crawler/transporter is made available, then ATK has to design and build a suitable equivalent on its own dime. Falcon 9’s are much smaller and lighter vehicles that ride to their pad horizontally on a transporter built from commercially available big rig and construction machinery components. If more are needed, more can be economically and expeditiously made.
Finally, there are those “thousands of jobs” that will allegedly be saved by Liberty. But it’s exactly this standing-army model of spaceflight that made the Shuttle unsustainable. If Liberty cannot be built, prepped and launched with a SpaceX-scale payroll, it won’t be economically viable over the long term.
I don’t see Return of Son of Corndog being much of a hit at the launch services box office.
“Given its vertical assembly, Liberty also requires a stand-up ride to its pad.”
Hi Dick,
In the distant past, did we not vertically integrate rockets at the pad? Lift up pieces with a crane and stack one atop the other?
How were the Titan Rockets of the Gemini-Titan age integrated? Were they not trucked out to a ‘cradle’ at the pad, integrated while horizontal, and then rotated to vertical via that ‘cradle’?
All these memories may be faulty – I’m just looking for info here.
Btu if I do recall correctly, then is there some reason why we can’t do that with Liberty?
thanks
Don’t know how the old Atlas-Mercury and Titan-Gemini rockets were integrated and erected and a cursory web search didn’t turn up anything definitive on the matter. Perhaps some of Rand’s other readers can enlighten us all on these matters. I’ll confess that you’ve got me curious.
As to Son of Corndog, I suppose it is possible that a horizontal integration approach could be used if the VAB/crawler-transporter infrastructure proves too expensive/unreliable/unavailable. But I believe the Liberty vehicle is, all up, at least half-again as tall as a Falcon 9, which the SpaceX website says is 180 ft. tall. I think the 5-segment solid booster of Corndog Jr. is about that tall all by itself.
The Falcon 9 transporter/erector has a non-trivial job to do in getting that thing from horizontal to vertical at the pad, but the job is still within the capabilities of a device built from heavy truck and construction equipment components. I couldn’t find a specification stating the F9’s empty weight, but, given its much smaller diameter, I’m guessing it likely doesn’t exceed the weight of an empty Shuttle external tank even though it has 10 engines and a payload the ET doesn’t. The Shuttle ET’s came in a bit under 30 tons each.
The Liberty is not only much taller, but, unlike the F9, which goes out to the pad dry, the 5-segment solid first stage will be going to the pad fully fueled regardless of its orientation during transport. The 4-segment solids used on the Shuttle weighed 630 tons each. The 5-segment Liberty first stage probably weighs in at 775 tons or so. Even if I was off by as much as a factor of two about the empty F9’s weight, it still wouldn’t even be in the same order of magnitude as a Liberty ready to travel to its pad.
As you can appreciate, building something capable of standing that sucker upright may well require the use of components in the heavy mining equipment class. This is analogous to the difference between standing up, say, the cardboard tube inside a roll of gift wrap and doing likewise with a baseball bat. At that point, you’re pretty much right back in crawler-transporter country because those monsters were built, back in the day, by Marion, one of the nation’s – at the time – two leading producers of heavy mining equipment. Marion was later bought out by their major competitor Bucyrus-Erie. Repurposing one of the existing crawler-transporters is going to be non-trivially expensive as it is. Designing and building from scratch a brand-new haul-flat-and-tilt-up transporter-erector capable of dealing with 800 or more tons of all-up mass stretching nearly 300 feet from nose to tail would be very non-trivially expensive. For a project with a stated first flight objective of three years from now that’s also a heck of a lot more to load onto the critical path chart.
Then there’s the matter of SpaceX having announced a planned evolution of the F9 toward full reusability. ATK, in contrast, doesn’t even plan to recycle the Liberty’s first-stage solids to the limited degree that was routinely done with the Shuttle’s boosters. Their greater length apparently makes the depth the recovery crew divers might have to descend to cross some expensive line as to safety procedures and allowable equipment. Everything takes longer and costs more.
Can Liberty be built? Sure. Can it work? Sure. Can it do so economically and competitively in just three years? I seriously doubt it. Can it be viable if its major competitor is getting progressively more reusable? I confess I don’t see how it can.
I suspect that any attempt to rotate a solid booster assembly, or even just filled casings, from a horizontal to a vertical orientation would stress the grain and, at least, require another X-ray check because even a minor crack in a solid will really spoil your day 🙁
So maybe you stack the solid components vertically and then keep on stacking.
Are you sure about only 2 assembly bays in the VAB? I know it no longer has 4, but when I last saw it, with the Ares 1 being assembled, it appeared to have Ares 1 in the NW bay and then had the two eastern bays available for SSP.
The fix is in. The Liberty system is designed to help keep legacy space companies in business at the expense of the up and coming rocketeers like Space X and others Watch for the porkish traitors like Shelby, Hall, Hutchinson and Wolf to hail this as an “economical” solution to America’s manned spaceflight gap and then redouble their efforts to kill Commercial Crew.
Michael got it in one. Congress is attempting to cut CCDEV back to one… and I can see the usual pork belly crowd lying through their teeth to claim that this is better and a more secure way to keep america launching astronauts.
Oh, the whole program is already crystal clear… which is why I really hope Obama vetoes and causes things to keep going as they are for another year… after that, it probably won’t matter because the porkers will be sausage.