I’m as shocked as everyone else to see that Boeing’s first commercial crew flight to ISS has slipped to 2018.
OK, not really.
In sort of related news, this assessment of Falcon reusability is amusing:
It’s easy to see why there’s such excitement about Falcon 9 and reusable rockets then. Except, of course, Falcon 9 isn’t really a reusable rocket. It’s still a two-stage launcher designed to deliver SpaceX’s Dragon craft into space, and only one stage is designed to be recoverable (rather like the space shuttle, only commercial) – something that Sadlier says would reduce costs by around 30%, not 99%. ‘It’s an amazing innovation, but it’s kind of a baby step.’
It will reduce costs by much more than 30%. He apparently doesn’t understand the difference between cost and price. And then there’s this:
not everyone is convinced that any of the space players are going to revolutionise 21st century life. ‘Since I entered the space business in 1983, I’ve been hearing claims about big money to be made in space tourism, the space launch business, space mining, space manufacturing,’ says Billings, who served on the US National Commision [sic] on Space under Ronald Reagan. ‘The longer I’ve been listening the more sceptical I’ve become about the more extreme of these claims.’
Others remain optimistic, whether about the likes of Falcon 9 or indeed about Reaction Engine’s Skylon space plane, a revolutionary British technology that delights enthusiasts but never seems to have enough funding for a prototype. As with any other futuristic technology, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
Linda completely ignores SpaceX’s huge commercial backlog. And it’s amusing to see an actual flown recovered vehicle compared with a non-existent vehicle that is unlikely to ever exist.
They simply don’t understand the bell curve (actually S curve which is the first half.)
We’ve been on the shallow slope for too long. We are now poised for the big climb. Government interference has held us back (while giving a show of progress… It ain’t progress.)
Without the ISS and NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, SpaceX would have no business
Good grief… how do people live in such a bubble?
It’s easy. Ken, you see KSC and NASA as a rice bowl. There are many rice bowls. They last awhile but the are finite and eventually you need a new bowl. But to others, KSC and NASA is a gravy train. It is infinite, and if it is not; there is no more gravy, therefore you have to believe it is infinite anyway. I saw the phenomenon up close when then shuttle gravy train came to an end. Some people are still waiting by the tracks hoping for the train to come by again.
That was a great analogy about the space shuttle gravy train and people waiting by the tracks for it’s return. It is amazing when you read space blog comment sections and see that exact phenomenon written about over and over again in the comments. People wishing if we had ONLY kept funding the space shuttle. Never mind that the economics of operation were crushing the Nation’s space efforts.
The word “compared” (or similar) is missing in the last sentence.
I do still see ‘Bigelow’ on the future mission list, and I seem to recall something about possible test objects for Falcon Heavy. Do we have any news on ‘how orbital destinations other than ISS’ are potentially shaping up?
Bigelow has cut one deal directly with ULA to launch 2 B330s by 2020. tory Bruno was right there at the announcement beaming at the module model, …if you’ll pardon the pun. It fits for ULA, if you look at plans for ACES, whose reuse in Space requires a propellant depot,and a place to mate new payloads.
Whether the other uses blossom as Bigelow sees their required 2 US customer delivery vehicles come online is yet to be answered. Those 7 MOUs with “sovereign clients” are still active AFAIK, but whether they can they raise the money from their legislatures in the present world economy will be an interesting question.
Ah, Skylon and the SABRE engine, the dream of Aerospaceplane and LACE lives on . . .
Whatever happened to the Big Dumb Booster? The idea that it is the upper stage that costs more — or should cost more — even though the upper stage is a smaller article of less weight? Or that crude, non-weight optimized design of a booster is favored because a pound on a booster exacts less of a performance penalty as a pound on an upper stage, so the big booster should be cheaper than the upper stage, that is, if you do it right?
What happened to the Space Tug? The original Space Transportation System had both a Shuttle and a Tug, and the Tug never got funded? In Heinlein’s aphorism about low-Earth orbit being “halfway to anywhere”, it remains only half of the way, and the rest-of-the-way needs a transfer stage.
What about someone coming up with a on-orbit-refuelable aero-braking-reusable transfer stage? I guess that is not Democracy-whiskey-sexy (i.e. how some wag in Iraq described the anticipated social reforms under U.S. occupation that never materialized) in the same way as STS, Skylon, or even the SpaceX booster recovery successes?
When Robert Bigelow released the GATE I and GATE II studies he included tugs. Do you know if those studies were made public by NASA?
ULA hopes to expand the use of its ACES stage into a semi-spacetug for cis-lunar space at least. Its a possibly good strategy instead of trying to make the second stage reusable through re-nrty and direct reuse as a seciond stage, if you think the market won’t expand as drastically as SpaceX is counting on. If ULA’s deal with Bigelow holds up, one of the 2 B330s it inculdes might be a depot/base for the tug.
I can tell you what happened to an on-orbit refuelable aerobraking orbit transfer vehicle: the vehicle was heavier and a two-way trip needed more delta-V than an expendable, even with aerobraking, and if you had to haul that extra propellant up on the Space Shuttle, at $5000/lb., it was prohibitively expensive.
You can look at the numbers here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/whyhuman.htm#aotv
Will Starliner launch on an Atlas V with no solids? Is it likely that the CST-100 could be launched on a Falcon 9? If so, it would be a delicious irony. I’m guessing that even with just Cargo Dragon data, Spacex probably has a pretty good handle on the acoustic level for a capsule on a Falcon 9.
Will Starliner launch on an Atlas V with no solids?
That seems to be the $64 question. You can find many artist’s renderings of the Atlas V-Starliner stack on the web. Some of them show no solids. Some of them show two. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Personally, I’m guessing if there is an acoustics issue, the renderings with two solids are probably accurate. The Shuttle astronauts always commented on how noisy and rough the first minute and a half of the ride was. The Shuttle had a lot more internal volume within which to accommodate sound insulation than Starliner does. It also had the hellaciously big External Tank to soak up a lot of the solids’ acoustic energy and general boisterousness.
The Falcon 9, of course, entirely eschews solids so plus one for SpaceX.
Just got a look at a new story up on NASASpaceflight.com. According to them, the Starliner will launch on an Atlas V 422 model. That’s an Atlas V with two solids and a twin-engine Centaur.
That’s interesting. According to Wiki, the 422 has never flown, but the 421 has. It’s also interesting to note that the new F9 gets more payload to LEO than the 421, but I guess that’s assuming the 1st stage is expendable. In any case, from purely a performance standpoint, F9 should be able to launch a CST-100, likely with enough to spare to recover the 1st stage. I suspect you’re right about the solids being the concern re the acoustics issue. One would think that ULA would have a lot of acoustic data from their 5 (?) 421 launches, assuming of course that they had thought ahead and instrumented them for such a purpose. In any event, if a CST-100 can go up on a rocket with solids, it should be able to survive one without.
It’s true that no 422 model of Atlas V has ever flown.
In fact no twin-engine Centaur has ever flown on any model of the Atlas V. But twin engine centaurs have flown many times on previous generations of boosters so the technical risk involved seems relatively trivial.
Concur about the Falcon 9 likely being able to put the Starliner’s ca. 13 tonnes into LEO and still be recoverable. The current Full Thrust model is good for not quite 23 tonnes in expendable mode so even with the Starliner’s reported “weight problem” there would still seem to be plenty of margin available. The even newer “Fuller Thrust” version of F9 which is to debut soon might be capable of even more, though it will come at the cost of an increase in average acceleration as fuel capacity of the F9 is already pretty much maxed out after stretching length to fineness ratio limits and super-chilling the propellants.
Turns out I may not have been correct that the solids are the source of the “aeroacoustics” issue I thought they were. Some of the reportage that has come out subsequent to the initial stories quotes Boeing execs talking about additional wind tunnel tests anent this issue. That suggests that the combined Atlas V 422-Starliner stack might have a slipstream-induced resonance issue that manifests at some point in the preferred ascent profile.
If true, that could prove tricky to fix. It also raises legitimate questions about why such a problem wasn’t discovered until this late in the game. The mold line of the Starliner has been, so far as I know, locked down for quite awhile. The required use of a 422 model Atlas V seems also to have been no last-minute revelation. Why all-up computational fluid dynamics/wind tunnel scale model testing of this configuration has not, it would seem, been run until recently creates the strong impression that cheese-paring has trumped engineering in Boeing’s development process.
Not saying Williams, Boe, Behnken and Hurley necessarily need brass balls the size of the ones Young and Crippen were packing on STS-1, but I would personally be a lot more at ease sealing into a Dragon 2 than a Starliner for a test ride.
Can’t reply to your very nice analysis below (maybe there’s a limit to the nesting level). So it seems that the problem is caused by Boeing trying to put a stubby 15 ft diameter capsule on a 12 ft rocket. The funny thing is that the Dragon V2 (12 ft diameter) fits nicely on either an F9 or an Atlas V. I guess the solids are a response to CST-100 acquiring a “Freshman 15” weight problem. I suppose that Boeing could get around the resonance issues by cocooning the CST-100 in a faring (!!) but that would have severe safety issues, along with greater weight (hey, just add a couple more solids). In any case, it seems very odd that this rather obvious problem is arising so late in the design cycle. It’s too late to make the CST-100 more sveldt, so we just have to hope that any needed modifications to the service module + interstage don’t add too much weight, while also not interfering with abort options. What a mess.
Rand,
I actually think that the cost savings overall for the level of reuse and flight rate SpaceX are likely to achieve probably is only a little more than 30%–enough to offer a 30% price break while keeping a similar profit level to before. That’s nothing to shake a stick at, but all the talk of $7M Falcon 9s is going to require a much more reusable vehicle than they’ve designed so far. And a much, much bigger market. I think reusability *can* get prices where SpaceX talks about them going, but I don’t see solid evidence that they’re taking the steps to get to that level of reusability with Falcon 9. At least not anytime soon.
~Jon
It will really depend on how many flights you will get to amortize the cost to build/refurbish the stages? If they never do a reusable second stage they will never achieve it also is my understanding? If they did a raptor high energy second stage, would that be able to try reuse?
I’d be inclined to think a Raptorized Falcon upper stage most probably would be reusable.
Whatever the right number is, I’m guessing that he took Gwynne’s description of a price reduction and translated it into a cost reduction, with no basis.
Now that they’ve got first stage recovery and think second stage recovery is too expensive, the cost shifts should drive a redesign centered around further savings the could achieve.
One option would be to make the second stage as cheap as possible. They’ve already landed a very hot first stage, so shift more of the rocket’s delta V to the recoverable first stage and less to the second stage, moving away from pure performance optimization toward cost optimization.
Another option is to look at a lower performance solid-fueled second stage to save the cost of a liquid engine.
Elon has mentioned that the lightweight carbon-fiber shroud is about a million dollars. What if they made a longer hinged shroud that enclosed both the payload and the second stage? It could open for stage separation and then close once the second stage pushes clear, returning with the first stage. It would add to the first stages stability on the return while allowing the second stage to be a full vacuum non-streamlined design.
I like the hinged payload shroud idea, reminds me of the rocket from You Only Live Twice!
I think once they have more data on reusing first stages they need look to increase robustness and transition to more airplane like operations. They should also go wider on their next version (F9v2.0?) and start looking at reusable second stages with Raptor engines
I believe SpaceX is already working on parachute recovery for the fairings.
So Boeing, with double the budget of SpaceX to produce a less capable design, is now running late too? (shocked face)
Just shows the difference in attitude- Boeing are just in it for the money while SpaceX are thinking bigger with Dragon, which may end up having a long life as an in-space transport and lander. I’ll be surprised if CST-100 ever flies a mission outside beyond the CCtCap program.
Isn’t Bigelow rather attached to Boeing?
To a limited degree. I think that relationship has gotten stale.
In that sense, it’s on track, but it’s not exactly unique
+
doesn’t mean SpaceX will change the world, of course.
= cognitive dissonance.
Oh, those kids at SpaceX might have made it mundane to land their first stage at sea and land but other people are working on emulating their achievements so they really aren’t that special and they just don’t have the impact on the industry that people claim they do…
IMHO, someone had to write one or more articles like this to reassure the managerial community that they were not returning to the days of “bet the company” on every new vehicle. The problem is, that exactly what is happening. If the market expands as SpaceX expects, that is the direction. Whether it happens in 5 years or 20 is the only real question, IMHO.
ULA’s BoD has started trying to lever money for Vulcan out of Congress, though, TMK, Tory Bruno has not demeaned himself so badly in public, yet. This is the action of a group of people praying that things stay the same long enough for them to get to retirement. “The same” being that aerospace makes its money off of government financed R&D, while production, much less operations, is a necessary but low income portion of the business.
I still think Tory Bruno seems willing to break out of that, but neither the Boeing D&S nor the LM members of his board seem to agree with it. Perhaps we could get a future with Boeing Airliner Company to take over the Board positions now held by Boeing D&S? Nice dream, anyway.
2nd stage reuse should be infinitely easier than 1st stage… you just leave it in orbit and refuel it. Used 2nd stages would get real cheap, real quick (and so many uses.)
All they have to do then is the 2nd stage is your general purpose spaceship… fun for the whole family.
Not only that, you get somebody to pay you for the flight that “gets it to the sales lot”, …in orbit. Not a bad strat, …unless the market for full launches takes off like SpaceX expects. Then, well, this could be a niche business still, and maybe a place in the market from which to build the fully reusable booster you should have built at the start.
That’s more repurposing than reuse, like turning a 747 into a restaurant after flying it across the ocean once.
I wonder how difficult it would be to recover part of a second stage, for example the engine and avionics. Most of the volume is the propellant tanks which I would suspect aren’t as expensive. I could imagine recovering the engines by accumulating them in orbit and bringing them down on a separately launched vehicle.
Another possibility would be a second stage that uses some kind of transpiration cooling to survive entry. The coolant could be launched separately and transferred to the stage in orbit, so it wouldn’t affect the payload mass of that launch. Of course you’d need another launch (or fraction of a launch) to send up this coolant (and possibly landing propellant), but hey, higher flight rate is good.
Rand, I have a Shuttle/Centaur question:
Something that has perplexed me. Why was the Shuttle/Centaur twin-engined?
It was launched from already in LEO so gravity losses should have been small at that point. Why lug the weigh of engine two to GEO or Escape or whatever when you could just burn a single RL-10 longer and apply the mass savings to the payload?
Burning an engine longer results in payload loss due to gravity loss.