23 thoughts on “What Will The Heavy Lifter Look Like?”

  1. Good article.

    In the article you used the phrase “where practicable”. I thought the phrase should be “where practical”, but I looked up the meaning of the word “practicable” and found I was wrong. I honestly don’t think I’ve heard of the word “practicable” before. Just goes to show, if you pay attention, you can learn something new every day.

  2. Just a heads up, in case it’s of concern, but there is a typo in the title of one of the pictures; it shows the Ares I, (the stick) but the title says Ares V.

    Great article! It clearly explains a very convoluted and confusing mess.

    I’ve been a supporter of Shuttle C (side mount) since the early days of the Shuttle program. I thought it would be an ideal adjunct to shuttle, for lifting space station components and other high-mass loads.

    However, as much as I loved that concept, I think the idea of shuttle-derived anything at this juncture is insane. It would require most of what made the shuttle so nightmarishly expensive; the enormous workforce. It makes no sense at all, except as blatant pork, and that’s no way to run a railroad, let alone a space program.

    The commercial space evolved options look to me to be by far the best route, *IF* the need for heavy-lift should develop. However, developing it now is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.

    Thanks for the article, it’s a keeper. 🙂

  7. The origional budget, prior to the exercise in political rocket design, called for R&D for a new engines (something to replace the Russian RD-180) and other risk reduction work prior to picking a heavy lift design. Completely unaddressed is what are you going to use it for? If we were still building ISS, it would be a help, but I can’t think of anything else until we need to launch a really big nuclear reactor.

  8. What would a Heavy Lifter look like?

    How about the Big Cylinder, essentially the Saturn V, but instead of the cylindrical section of the S-Ic and the S-II first and second stages tapering down through the adapter section to the S-IVb, there would be a constant cylinder shape from the S-Ic, S-II, continuing on to the S-N, essentially a big monster LH2 tank to hold the reaction mass for the NERVA nuclear thermal third stage engine.

    The “next step” after the Moon had been Mars, and the logical progression on how to get there would have been nuclear-thermal rockets, on which an enormous amount of work and substantial progress was made in the 1960’s in parallel with the Apollo program.

    Maintaining the “momentum” of Apollo and the NERVA nuclear rocket, manned missions to Mars in the 1980s would have been the logical outcome.

  9. One thought I have always had on nuclear thermal is that it was terribly thermally inefficient and at not that much specific impulse gain, kind of like the railroad steam locomotive. You used enormous amounts of energy from uranium in one case, coal in the other, and used that to heat water to superheated steam, LH2 to superheated H2, and in each case you were limited by heat exchangers and materials to rather low temperatures.

    The one thing about the nuclear thermal rocket as well as the steam engine is that you are discharging the spent working fluid into the environment, up the stack or out the rocket nozzle.

    The big hangup for the nuclear-electric rocket, vastly higher in thermal efficiency and in specific impulse, is that you have to run some kind of closed-loop electric power generation cycle, which means one thing — radiators. In space. Transfering heat to vacuum. Honest-to-goodness radiators, not forced-convection heat exchange to air as in many terrestrial “radiators”, depending on the Stefan-Boltzman T^4 equation for heat transfer. Ugh.

    With nuclear-thermal, the spent heat of the thermodynamic cycle is just blown out the rocket nozzle.

  10. “But the wording of the Senate language leaves some wiggle room, with liberal use of the words “where practicable.” ”

    This is just a cover for the true malice involved, I believe. The requirements a HLV candidate must meet have been tailored around the specific design of the Direct like SDHLV, so that only that option will be the practical design that can pass through those requirements; those requirements specifically excluding contenders like the Atlas 5 Phase 2 that have their own meritable qualities. Consider also that there is no basis for any such requirements: the only payload this HLV is mandated to carry is the sub 30mt Orion, and the scope of any exploration program payloads are completely undefined. The danger of a competitive process for HLV selection is that such a thing would not guarantee emplacement of the program these Senators desire to have, whereas a fixed competition affords them that security. They have set the requirements themselves to select the final outcome.

    “MINIMUM CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS.—

    (1) IN GENERAL.—The Space Launch System developed pursuant to subsection (b) shall be designed to have, at a minimum, the following:

    (A) The initial capability of the core elements, without an upper stage, of lifting payloads weighing between 70 tons and 100 tons into low-Earth orbit in preparation for transit for missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

    (B) The capability to carry an integrated upper Earth departure stage bringing the total lift capability of the Space Launch System to 130 tons or more. “

    The specific design of the Direct vehicle features a core flanked by two srbs that matches the (A) capability threshold, and with the addition of a Upper Stage, matches the (B) capabilty requirement.

    The problem is that the credible alternative HLV options have disimilar designs than that specific layout, and the arbitrary 130 tons requirement also precludes them.

    The Atlas 5 Heavy follows such a different layout. It features a single core variant that can put 25mt in orbit, the Orion for instance, a triple core variant that meets the lower (A) capability threshold, a further 5 core variant that broaches the outside edge of the the (A) capability threshold. It does not conform to the arbitrary design requirement, nor match the arbitrary 130mt threshold outside of a future growth variant. This vehicle has qualitative advantages compared to SDHLV: a shared operational base and reliability base with non-NASA payloads, ground safety handling and cost advantages compared to SRBs, ability to be better matched to payload size, for instance launching Orion on the single core vehicle, but things like these are irrelevant when the requirements have been tailored so to exclude a fair consideration in a competitive selection.

  12. One of the historical developments that makes me sympathetic to the idea of depots is the Agena. There was some journal, was it the British Interplanetary Society? They gave the “back story” on the Agena.

    The history is that when Ike was chastised for waffling on launching an Earth-orbiting satellite and let the Korelev beat us to it, Sputnik mania and all of that, he had waiting in the wings the super-secret Corona program under the “cover” of “Project Discoverer.” The Vanguard and Explorer hardware of the “visible” space program was way primitive compared to the Corona program — upper stage with in-space multiple restart capability, three-axis stabilized spacecraft (both features of the Agena carrier for the photo-reconnaisance payload), motion compensating camera, reentry capsule to recover the film.

    The Agena with its on orbit restart feature (I guess they wanted to make orbit changes to direct the photo recon) was the star of the show. And some engineering problem it was to start a rocket craft with a half-full tank in space, with the fuel forming detached blobs within the tank.

    I read that they had some kind of wire screen cage over the engine inlet pipe, that entrained enough of a blob of fuel and oxidizer in the respective tanks, to allow an engine start, where the G-force would then feed the rest of the tank contents.

    So an orbiting depot will have to address the same problem, of how to not only store but also transfer fluids that want to form amorphous blobs floating around inside the tank.

    So what I am saying is that in the way that Agena was the technical edge that made Corona possible, when they figure out how to make depots work, that will be the technical edge to make crewed planetary exploration possible, and each represents a leap in doing things that one would think is technically impossible. “We choose to do this, and those other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

  13. You know, if Elon ever does that Falcon X (The three core beast), he should make the three Merlin 2 boosters as close to a plug-in-play replacement for an SRB on a Shuttle-derived Heavy lifter as possible to the point where the attachment points for the three core version match the attachment points of an ET to an SRB if that is possible.

    At some point in the future if a Shuttle-Derived vehicle has a SRB problem he might be able to stand up and say he has a solution in hand that only requires minor mods to work.

  14. Paul M.: one can arrange a nuclear thermal rocket to also produce electrical power, if one is clever. For example: pressurize the incoming LH2 to (say) 5000 psia. Run it through a heat exchanger in the reactor, and expand down to 1000 psia (say) through one or more turbine stages (perhaps with reheating beween stages). Dump the hydrogen into the thrust chamber, heat again, and eject out the nozzle.

    The turbine provides a “free” source of electrical power, with all the waste heat being carried off by the hydrogen stream. One might use this power to superheat the outgoing hydrogen (using, for example, an arc) to a temperature greater than the materials of the reactor could withstand.

  15. Elon has suggested his rockets are big enough. Especially if you don’t think of a spaceship as a one use can you throw into orbit for a single mission.

    You need to be able to put crew into orbit. F9 is big enough. You need to resupply. That’s the F9 again (and others.) Components of a real ship can be launched either by the Boeing or SpaceX heavy versions.

    Orbital refueling. I think that covered too. So what is it we actually need? Oh yeah, the damned spaceship. Is anybody working on the design for that?

    There is absolutely no need for the government to be building any new launch vehicles.

  17. Rand, I used to be opposed to the Heavy Lifter, but I’m not anymore.

    * There are going to be political fights in Congress over the space program, and compromises will be inevitable. The Heavy Lifter can let one faction “win” in a way that need not be destructive to the good ideas of the other factions. Let’s concentrate on trying to keep commercial solutions alive.

    (The big problems will be (1) to keep the budget for the Heavy Lifter from eating up the rest of the funding, and (2) if it ever flies, to stop the bureaucrats and politicians from mandating the use of the damned thing for multiple payloads that would have been happier on individual commercial vehicles, just to get some use out of the Big Guy but drying up the market for commercial boosters. And eventually we’re going to lose an important, unique payload, leading to a Study Commission to Determine What Went Wrong and Where Do We Go from Here, and we’ll go though all this again …)

    * The public thinks humungous rockets are cool. There’s no guarantee that any of the good stuff will get funded if the media tell the public that the space program is dead because the Big Frackin’ Booster is dead.

    * Yeah, it’s a waste of money. So? *IF* the good stuff can get funding, the cost of the Heavy Lifter will be down at the noise level compared to all the other things the government is wasting money on. Even left-wing economists are finally admitting that the country pissed away $800 billion last year on the Porkulus. Let’s spend the money while we’ve got it, before the economy goes down the drain. (Cynical? Moi?!)

    * It keeps jobs alive and Congresscritters happy. That’s better than having politicians and unemployed citizens pissed off at space advocates. (“Lenny … you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.”)

    * Hey, we might find a use for it. At the very least, there’s the potential to lift a huge empty fuel tank into orbit (which I wish we had done at least once with the Shuttle). Make it the core of a refueling depot, or the refillable fuel tank of a big deep space vehicle, or living space for an Aldrin cycler. Maybe we’ll have to launch something big in a hurry, like an asteroid killer with its own high delta-v propulsion system. And maybe the horse will learn to sing. Or make lemonade. Or something.

    OK, these aren’t very good reasons, but … what the hell. Whatever happens, someone will find a way to screw it up. 8-(

  18. There’s no guarantee that any of the good stuff will get funded if the media tell the public that the space program is dead because the Big Frackin’ Booster is dead.

    Or…

    NASA could hire a really good PR firm to get ahead of the story to say they were going to do two really cool things…

    1) Build a few true spaceships using off the shelf components and have the first one in orbit in less than a year (to prevent gold plating.)

    2) Use existing companies to provide crew, supply and services to support those ships.

  19. Paul Milenkovic Said on August 18th, 2010 at 6:26 pm

    “And some engineering problem it was to start a rocket craft with a half-full tank in space, with the fuel forming detached blobs within the tank.”

    I just learned this recently, but ullage motors take care of this.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

    If I recall also, ULA has stated that with fuel depots, the boil off of hydrogen could be used for either micro-gravity settling, or controlling the spin of the depot with centrifugal settlement.

    I would imagine the fuel depot tests NASA was budgeting were going to explore this.

  20. Or…

    NASA could hire a really good PR firm to get ahead of the story …

    You mean the same NASA that let the media spread the message that the most important thing about the new administration’s space program is that we’re not going back to the Moon?

  21. Yeah, that’s why you hire one. It’s a simple decision. They just have to figure out what budget item to pay for it. Then they just have to stay on message. The message being, “for the first time in human history we’re really going places.” Include lot’s of nice pictures of the spaceship design.

  22. “I just learned this recently, but ullage motors take care of this.”

    Any fool can do staging or on orbit restarts with ullage motors.

    Agena had this mesh cone over the fuel and oxidizer inlet pipes inside the respective tanks that kept a “start blob” of fluid in place with surface tension.

    I am not saying depots cannot be done, and as suggested, there are a variety of techniques, including inducing “artificial gravity” with spin. What I am saying is that the problem of fluids in zero-G had been addressed in a rather sophisticated way very early in the space program (Agena, the Corona Program), and this should provide inspiration that they can and will be solved to make depots possible.

  23. I read this statement in the article.

    “The upper stage would use one or more (depending on configuration) of the new J-2X LOX/hydrogen engine planned for Ares I and Ares V, which means that the vehicle wouldn’t be able to meet the Senate’s 2016 mandate.”

    Perhaps the Senate intends the HLV to fly by 2016, but it wasn’t in the Senate bill that I read. Perhaps the bill has been amended since I read it? But the only 2016 mandate I saw in the bill was for the crew launcher, not the HLV.

    I’ve seen this supposed HLV 2016 mandate repeated by other space writers and advocates, but it just isn’t in the Senate bill.

Comments are closed.