When I was at the AIAA meeting in Pasadena last month, Doug Stanley told me that this study would be coming out soon:
Commercial launch with propellant depot architectures significantly improves the extensibility and mission payload capability by providing a robust framework for all foreseen missions in the next 30 years. Adding to commercial launches every few months provides experienced and focused workforce to improve safety, operational learning for reduced costs and higher launch reliability, reduce launch costs depending on the government/industry business model. The depot framework allows multiple competitors for propellant delivery that is low-risk, hands-off way for international partners to contribute because it is not in the critical “mission” path and provides redundant alternatives available if critical launch failure occurs. The architecture provides reduced critical path mission complexity (Automated Rendezvous and Docking events, number of unique elements), provides additional mission flexibility by variable propellant load. Commonality with COTS/commercial/DoD vehicles will allow sharing of fixed costs between programs and “right-sized” vehicle for ISS, thus stimulate US and international commercial launch industry. Development risk is reduced by eliminating four space elements including the major Earth-to-orbit launch vehicle and solar electric propulsion transfer vehicle, large mass margins with current and proposed launch systems, and the Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer in-space technology demonstration program. Finally, the architecture creates powerful partners from commercial US industry and internationals that increases political sustainability of the overall program.
But other than that, it totally sucks.
Isn’t he the guy that gave us the shaft? Well, if he didn’t give it to us then he was the guy that rammed it in deeper. I do hope you don’t mind that I don’t read his pathetic attempt at redeeming himself and his buddies.
The launch cost versus payload graph was very interesting, but what nagged at me was the unstated case that such a mission is more beneficial than other possible activities. Perhaps that case is laid out in other documents, but it still feels like the goal is planting a flag where no flag has been planted before. Unless they plan to move or process the NEA, couldn’t we just design a much smaller mission with a long, thin, final landing stage that sticks itself in the dirt and doubles as a flagpole?
What’s Stanley’s involvement with this? I didn’t see his name on the paper.
As far as I know he had no direct involvement (though he’s been on this page for a while now — I talked to him about it a couple years ago at the same AIAA meeting, in Anaheim). But he and Alan Wilhite have been working together for decades at Langley. I knew them both back in the early nineties when I was managing a task-order contract with them for Rockwell. Also, Alan told me in July that he was working on this when I saw him at the New Space conference in Santa Clara.
Is he at all embarassed by his involvement with Constellation? I know he is a friend of yours, but I find it hard not to think of him as one of the bad guys.
I’m not sure if he’s “embarrassed,” but he does seem to regret it
Note to self: in future don’t misspell “embarrass” when criticising someone. 🙂
Simple, it was done by Dr. Stanley’s associates at the National Institute of Aerospace, where he is the executive director, thus he knew about it. Also, it was done by people who work under contract to Langley, supporting HEFT, thus their large body of knowledge about the various proposed missions and required vehicles.
http://www.nianet.org/resources/Research/Exploration-Systems.aspx
http://www.nianet.org/about-nia/Leadership.aspx
Yes, also what Wes said.
$83b over twenty years to do what???
For that money I’ll give you a whole world in ten years.
Plus I’ll deposit a million dollars into the account of each and every colonist on top of the square km and luxury home they get when they arrive.
Let’s see. That 27 colony flights. One billion to the colonists. That leaves one billion for me, which means I can finance a Red Lander supply mission to mars every two years for the rest of my life… and live like a king doing it.
Of course, $83b only pays for the first thousand colonists. Which means, by my settlement charter, I can claim one million sq. km. or 247,105,000 acres. So I need $336 per acre to fully recover my costs.
For $7 billion more than that you could give the US green energy programs that produce kilowatts of power, if not whole megawatts!
I know it is fashionable to bash so called renewables at the moment but wind isn’t that bad. Even if you only got 10% of capacity factor (it’s more like 30%) there are 3 MW wind turbines (and larger) out there and a wind farm has dozens or hundreds of these. The subsidies are stupid? Sure. I particularly dislike corn ethanol subsidies and a lot times the wind and solar subsidies are ludicrous as well. Should we stop using nuclear? No.
No, sorry but wind sucks. You have to have huge spinning reserves because it is not a steady source. And one is kind of neat – a few spinning together can be pretty to watch, but hundreds are an eyesore, noise polluters and a bird/bat slaughterhouse. Did I mention they seem to break down a lot?
Absolutely right, although you can have many of them if they look nice. This one near my house is very nice, as are the other eight in my home town. Note that they don’t produce electricity, they are tourist attractions that also serve as housing and / or pumping stations (only useful in areas below sea level). The ones near my current place of work don’t look nearly as nice.
They don’t have wind farms, that implies a limited geographic location where large numbers are grouped together. They spread these things over vast areas of onetime pristine wilderness. They are distributed everywhere and are one of the greatest affronts to the senses mankind has ever invented.
Pay attention to George. It doesn’t matter how nice some power is. It’s about power density. No amount of scaling or subsidy can overcome that.
Electricity should be so cheap we give it away to Canada and Mexico (please don’t tell me we already do. Please don’t.) But even if, we are never getting away from fossil fuels unless we replace car engines with a half pound of thorium engine.
It might be worth shooting the lawyers to make both so.
If you were free to use enough thorium reactors, you could probably make your own liquid fuels from carbon and hydrogen at competitive prices. 🙂
One thing I’ve thought about is using the heat from a thorium reactor directly has heat for making cement, glass, brick, and other products that have a high-temperature processing step that currently relies on fossil fuels.
Coal to liquids could also benefit by using the thorium powerplant to make hydrogen from water, then using both the reactor waste heat and hydrogen to convert the coal directly to higher hydrocarbons which are easier for vehciles to utilize than either coal or hydrogen.
This is why we need frontiers. It may never happen on earth. On mars they say, “but of course.”
Electricity should be so cheap we give it away to Canada and Mexico (please don’t tell me we already do. Please don’t.)
But Ken, we do. And we -pay- for the privilege.
In the northwest, there are heavy pockets of wind stations. They peak at a different time than peak energy consumption. There is enough generating capacity that no one can consume it -then-. In fact, we pay British Columbia to take up the extra electricity. (My understanding is that they pump water uphill to store any excess. The stated reasons we don’t do the same thing on a significant basis are nonsensical.)
And, a few hours later we buy the energy back at peak electrical demand. Because we don’t produce enough at peak. (Not -can’t-, the dams -can-. But we -don’t-).
[Maxwell Smart voice] I asked you not to tell me this.
Yes Rand, it does totally suck, because you’ve forgotten that the purpose of NASA since JFK put it on the right track with Apollo and LOR is to build the biggest flagpole, and the SLS gets us back on that track real good.
No matter the barriers in time and money, no matter the eggheads who want to substitute quantity of flagpoles for size of flagpole, the biggest is always the best.
(wince at your own risk,we may drop a mockup of the SLS on your head.)
One thing I haven’t seen yet is an analysis of the orbit mechanics of a mission leaving a depot and injecting into an interplanetary trajectory. Lunar opportunities occur every 11 days or so, and I’ve talked to people who are adamant that there’s only one opportunity in each interplanetary window, but those folks haven’t shown me the numbers. I agree that a certain depot orbit would have one ‘perfect’ alignment moment, but want to see whether opportunies before/after that one cost ‘a little’ more propellant or ‘a lot.’ Anyone aware of such an analysis?
I thought one of the reasons for using a lagrange point was that you could leave at any time?
Sorry. I wasn’t clear. My question was related to LEO depots, as featured in the paper at 407km. Lagrange point depots are much further out of Earth’s gravity well, and have a whole different set of questions.