They try to tell SpaceX how hard reusability is.
I’ve got to run some errands, but I’ll have some comments later. Briefly, though, Dumbacher’s comparison with the SSME is pretty much worthless.
20 thoughts on “FUD From NASA And CNES”
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They do sound a bit scared.
Yes, recovering solids parachuted into water is hard, so recovering a liquid rocket from a powered landing on pavement is hard. Riiiiight.
Its entirely accurate to say its hard. So is designing an electric car with mass market appeal and many other things.
Getting hard things accomplished however often brings great rewards, too. Many opt out, some persist ..
I like when he says the cost of refurbishing the SRB’s made them to expensive .. ah . gosh .. then why did you use them for 30 FREAKIN’ YEARS.
Then he tries to lecture SpaceX on not understanding how hard the economics of spaceflight is.
It was like reading a standup comedy routine.
When it comes to launch vehicles I can’t say I’ve got much confidence anymore in the opinions of NASA people.
I will say that I thought SpaceX’s initial plan of recovering the first stage from the ocean and reusing it was a non-starter. My own experience with my Nikonos underwater 35mm camera led me to believe that any equipment more complicated than simple structure is going to take a lot of cleaning and refurbishing. I think someone with similar experience talked some sense into them. The land recovery is much more likely to meet their cost targets.
Have they ever talked about a Falcon superheavy with 4 or 5 first stage cores? If they run into mass problems with upper stage recovery, it would be one way out. Of course, you then need more landing pads and more ground support.
My understanding is that, operationally, they intend to land the thing on dry land.
It is now, but the initial plan was to drop the first stage into the ocean, recover it, and refurbish it. Salt water is not your friend.
It’s only hard if you don’t have an engine and a vehicle specifically designed for it. Which SpaceX does. They already reuse the engines several times between the static fires and the actual launches. And they reuse the Grasshopper/F-9R-dev engines as well. Moreover, since the engines aren’t staged combustion, since they don’t experience cold soak and full re-entry conditions (which the SSMEs did) they don’t have as difficult a journey for reuse. It’s funny that NASA and CNES are trying to pretend they know a lot about reusability, at this point SpaceX is becoming the knowledge leader.
Okay, one more time…
“I told Wilbur and I told Orville and now I’m ‘a tellin’ you, that thing’ll never fly!”
“We couldn’t so you can’t.”
Time will tell who is correct.
I see where Mr. Dumbacher – “Mr. SLS” at NASA – is leaving July 1st for a faculty job in the aerospace engineering dept. at Purdue. Off to train up another generation of engineers in how to accomplish nothing when given much, I guess. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up and go to Purdue.
P.S. Look for the big turnaround in a few months when SpaceX demonstrates reusability. Then you’ll hear folks like Arianespace and ULA explaining that reusability is actually really trivial, and something anyone could do if they wanted to, but usually just not worthwhile in the grand scheme of things. They’ll parrot that line until SpaceX has majority marketshare, and then maybe they’ll move onto something else.
You mean to tell us “dn-guy” works at Arianespace?
“Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It’s completely impossible. (2) It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
NASA & CNES, welcome to Stage 2 😉
That article reminds me of something…
“…any one who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine…”
– Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) [1933]
“That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
– Admiral William Leahy. [Advice to President Truman, when asked his opinion of the atomic bomb project.
Even after it worked he stilled didn’t like it:
“After the atomic bombings of Japan, Leahy condemned the use of the atomic bomb for practical reasons:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” (William D. Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441).
And on Aug. 8, 1945 he wrote in his diary:
“there is a certainty that it [the a-bomb] will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.”
He also objected to the a-bomb’s use for moral reasons:
“in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages” (William D. Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441).”
http://www.doug-long.com/leahy.htm
And those who say that launch customers don’t really care about launch costs are whistling past the graveyard. If that were the case, they’d be using the Atlas V and Delta IV for commercial launches. Instead, they’re using Chinese, Russian, Indian and highly-subsidized ESA launchers.
If you read the comments neither NASA nor CNES claimed launcher reusability is impossible. What they claimed is that it is not cost effective versus expendables which is something that has been true in practice so far.
One might argue that there is not enough experience trying to build actual reusable launch vehicles for this to be an established fact. Besides the Shuttle Space Transportation System and Energia Buran there is simply no data for it. Shuttle and Buran both had similar design payloads and Buran was explicitly designed to clone Shuttle despite using wholly different technology. e.g. liquid boosters, putting the ‘second stage’ engines below the center tank, no major propulsion systems on the orbiter itself, etc.
One thing that I think has been proven is that Shuttle size reusables are just too damned big for the present market. Then there is the performance loss of going from serial to parallel staging. The performance loss of designing a second stage engine that actually must work at all altitudes using current nozzle technology. SpaceXs proposal has none of these issues.
Part of the issues with the SSME were that it is a complex staged combustion design difficult to manufacture, assemble and disassemble. RD-0120 was a lot simpler but the engine design characteristics probably relied on the fact that Energia used RD-170 liquid fuel boosters instead of solids like Shuttle. This means the SSME must be able to do a lot of things which are not required to be done in a launch vehicle with all liquid propulsion. Again even with these changes Energia was too expensive to operate so once the Soviet Union collapsed that launcher was shelved. SpaceXs proposal has none of these issues.
Nobody has operated a reusable launch vehicle yet. At best what has gone before, like the abyssmal reusability of the Shuttle system, could be described as refurbishment. At worst it should properly be described as recycling. The Shuttle system was so expensive to refurbish and supply its expendable components for that it cost about half as much as buying a brand new orbiter for each and every launch. No sane person would describe that as proper reusability. As such the “lessons” from that experience are worse than useless relative to operating a truly reusable vehicle.
As for launcher sizing the important aspect is cost and availability, not payload. The Shuttle is an example of how $1+ billion per flight costs are just not sustainable, it’s enormously telling that the launchers of Arianespace and ULA are extremely competitive compared to the Shuttle despite their exorbitant costs on a more objective scale. Energia is a special case as it never had a chance to mature due to the timing of its coming of age, but even so it would have been too expensive for the market to bear. But if you offer a 50, 100, or even 200 tonne payload to orbit at $1/g to LEO or less I can guarantee you that there will be a market for it. At a minimum it becomes much, much cheaper to launch satellite constellations, so we’d end up with much, much better satellite phone/data services, among other things. Not to mention the impact on government and commercial manned spaceflight (and space tourism), and the impact on space science programs (you’d get an explosion of Universities and research institutions building space telescopes and interplanetary probes, for example), and so on.