Forty years ago today, President Richard Nixon announced that the nation would build a reusable vehicle, that would be used to fly all of the nation’s payloads into space. It first flew a little less than a decade later, and flew its last flight last summer, after a little over thirty years of operations. We are only starting to recover from the policy disaster.
[Update late morning]
The Space Shuttle, in happier days (flyback booster, no SRBs, no ET).
Rand:
Yep. I actually worked on the Space Shuttle flight simulators at NASA/JSC back in 1979-80 — fulfilling a lifelong dream to someone be involved in the US space program — but as I wrote back in 2007:
Uh, “to be someone”.
We’ll need reusable launch vehicles to be a proper space fairing society. But placing reliance on a not yet developed vehicle was bad policy. That this vehicle pushed the technology and performance envelope, then short changed development at the expense of quality and operating costs put us in a really bad position.
I think the need for a reusable launch vehicle depends on whether its operating costs and flight rate are cheaper than expendables. In the case of the Shuttle, the answer to both those questions was no. We could imagine hypothetical case where expendables would be dramatically better than what we had. For example, if we produced a manned rocket for every thousand cars we build, you’d be talking about 10,000 rockets a year with launches occuring more than once an hour. Even you built an expendable for every million cars produced, you’d still beat the Shuttle’s flight rate.
Yes, the focus should be on reducing launch costs, not immediately on how to achieve those cost reductions. Reusable vehicles are one approach to achieving lower launch costs. It makes perfect sense – recover, service and refuel the vehicle for the next flight just as we do airliners. However, if the R&D, production and servicing costs are too high, they could still end up being more expensive than expendibles (e.g. big dumb boosters).
The key to lowering launch costs is to greatly increase the flight rate. To do that, you have to have a market sufficient to drive a higher flight rate and an economical system capable of flying very often. If you can build and fly 100 times a year, your cost per flight is much more likely to be lower than if you fly only a few times a year regardless of whether you use reusable technology or not. However, if the market for all of those flights doesn’t exist, then you’ve spend a lot of money developing a system that won’t be used often enough to meet your cost goals. As an analogy, a 747 is very economical on a per seat basis for long flights but only if you can fill the majority of the seats. If there isn’t enough of a market to fill those seats (e.g. Colorado Springs to London), then the per seat costs will be very high.
The focus needs to be on creating market demand in order to drive technology development. This model of build it and they will come the space advocate community has followed for generations simply doesn’t work, and Falcon I is a prime example. It exists, its available, where are all the small satellites it was suppose to launch?
The rise of the secondary payload proved to be a disruptive tech that took the Falcon 1’s niche.
To be a truly soda drinking society, we need a fully re-usable soda can.
Well, if the soda cans cost $100 each, we do.
In the early days of soda(19th century), a soda can might have cost one hundred dollars or more. Thus, all soda was drunk at the fountain, out of a fully re-usable glass. Soda cans are now so cheap that we should throw them away since they are more expensive to re-use or recycle than to produce anew. So too shall it be with rockets, which have a lot in common with soda cans.
The gold dream is to have a vehicle that can launch, land, refuel and launch again multiple times a day; airplane operations with spacecraft. The problem is our technology is not there yet. Only now are we approaching this capability with suborbitals, technology for orbital is still in the works.
Whether you talk about reusable or expendable the key to lowering costs is flight rate. The higher the rate the lower the cost per flight. Current expendable flight has enormous fixed costs that have to be covered no matter how many flights you have. Launch sites and the associated infrastructure is expensive and must be maintained even if it is used only once a year.
However, as SpaceX is showing, building rockets is (I won’t say cheap) the smaller cost in the equation. By building more of them each year you start taking advantage of economies of scale. You buy in bulk and build in bulk. Basically the marginal cost of adding a flight is far less than the overall cost of the system. Once the launch system is covered it only adds a small percentage for each additional flight (up to a maximum the system can handle).
If you want cheap access to orbit now then we need to develop a system that can fly 3 to 4 times a month and fly it that often. As a provider you schedule the launch then sell the capacity. Come launch day you fly whether your cargo bay is full or not. You may even set up bulk cargo (such as fuel, water, air, foods, etc) that flys space permitting. Again you are doing airline operations with spacecraft. Reusable could lower the costs but we could reduce costs dramatically by just changing how we do business now.
Let us become a soda drinking society now and then work on a reusable soda can.
George,
I agree, its markets that will drive reduction in launch costs not the CATS approach. That is why COTS/CCDev is doomed as far as being a breakthrough in launch costs. Four flights per year to ISS meeting NASA safety requirements for a few years is not going to create the volume needed.
You wonder where we would be today if he has chosen the lunar base option and restarted Saturn V production instead of trying to reduce the cost of space launch. Historically reduction in transportation costs have always been from demand pull rather then technology push and forty years wasted chasing CATS has proved that more then ever.
It doesn’t make sense to try to create demand for high flight rates when there are no vehicles that can support high flight rates. We need an enabling transportation capability, otherwise those still-hypothetical markets cannot and will not develop. Even with a “cheap” expendable, you still have to build a whole new vehicle for every flight – not exactly conducive to high flight rates. And cranking out a stream of expendable launch vehicles without identifiable customers doesn’t seem like a particularly viable business model.
For new markets to develop, we need new capabilities that expendables will never give us. And technology is not the obstacle. It’s been possible for quite some time to build reusable two-stage vehicles. Unfortunately, so many people and institutions have never believed that, or cling to overly conservative approaches (e.g., the Air Force’s RBS program), that no one has put up the money to really go after such a vehicle. It’s refreshing to see that SpaceX now appears to be working towards truly reusable launch vehicles.
Thomas,
What makes you think that building more Saturn V’s to support a NASA lunar base, with flight rates that would not likely exceed a few per year, would be any more conducive to space development than the COTS/CCDev program that you deplore?
Dave,
The difference is that if we would have developed a lunar base we would have discovered the Moon’s water decades ago. Not to mention the existence of other lunar resources which are only speculative now. Even more important we would have been building a permanent infrastructure on a New World and would have been able to develop the technology needed for ISRU.
By contrast what is the Shutte’s legacy? Some satellites? The ISS which will eventually be scrapped? The Hubble, which will also be scrapped since there is no way to service? With a Lunar Base we would have has a series of telescopes on the Moon and we would have had them decades sooner.
As for COTS/CCDev, its just more going in circles as we have for decades, just continuing the failed fixation on CATS. Maybe it will survive the end of the ISS, maybe it won’t.
Going with the lunar base option would have given us a new world, instead all we have are what we had forty years, dreams of what may be IF we find the money to return to the Moon.
So . . . where’s the soda?
RE: Markets Vs. Transport Availability:
In the early 1900s Henry Flagler opened up the east coast of Florida by building the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC). He would lay track to an interesting spot..say St Augustine…and then use his railroad to build a resort and other industry. Afterwards he would continue on with his railroad to the next interesting destination for another resort and industries. The railroad was both a means for him to build his resorts and how to service them, thus he created his own market for the railroad. The really great thing about it was that once there was a railroad other companies and people began to use it to build homes, industry and resorts. (BTW, he did what was considered impossible in his day and extended his railroad to Key West).
In the same way we could move into space. Build a high launch rate system that dramatically reduces launch costs but has more capacity than the market needs. Use the excess capacity to build a space station and/or fuel depot which, in turn, can be used to build the next leg of the system which may go to lunar orbit or to asteroids. Repeat.
Transportation to nowhere is a loser. A destination without transportation is lost. You need both for a system that is sustainable and profitable. Just ask Bigelow, he has a destination but no transportation.
You can find your soda at the local market about 205 miles from you…straight up.
George,
Two points. First Henry Flagler first conceived the island when he went on a vacation to St Augustine with his wife for her health, so there actually were destinations already. The Biscayne Bay Country was already known for its orange groves and the east coast was full of fishing villages while a major naval base was at Key West and the keyes were already home to a number of wealthy owners of shipping lines.
Now what the Florida East Coast Railway did was to make the area more accessible to the growing upper class seeking escape from cold northern winters and locals looking a faster way to market for the products of the farming and fishing industry, so it was a huge stimulus to growth, but the destinations were already there, just as the wealth of California was, simply waiting for cheap, rapid transportation to enable them to expand.
BTW the second point was that the technology needed was off the shelf, so it was possible to get a very good estimate of costs, always important for new business ventures.
Thomas,
Even if those things had resulted from a continuation of Apollo, without low-cost space transportation, it’s unlikely that we would have had much in the way of of a permanent infrastructure on a New World. Transportation costs, even with ISRU, would have remained high and served as a brake on lunar and space development. Lunar resources are not a prerequisite for a real space transportation system – what we need are the right vehicles.
Regarding the Shuttle’s legacy, that was an enormously flawed attempt at developing a low cost system. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t and weren’t better ways to try. The “fixation on CATS” is only a failure in the same way that a “fixation on heavier than air flight” was a failure before 1903.
Dave,
Unlike Earth orbit, anything you place on the Moon stays there without any need for station keeping. The only reasons we aren’t receiving information from the ALSEP packages is because NASA decided to turn them off so they could use the money on the Space Shuttle. Over 40 years quite a bit of infrastructure, habitats. etc. would have built up even with only 2-3 missions a year. And that in itself would have lead to lower cost launch systems to service it.
And if we had selected the lunar base option we would have had a way to send a Apollo capsule to save Skylab, or to easily replace it with another Saturn V launch (recall the backup one rotting in the Smithsonian for lack of a Saturn V to launch it…), so you would had a space station as well with nearly 40% of the volume of the ISS (319 vs 837 cubic meters) so if you really wanted COTS you would have been able to still have it in the 1980’s 🙂
And don’t forget, there was a plan to use the Saturn V to go to Mars, basically combining a Skylab type habitat module with multiple S-IVB for propulsion. Yes, Mars would have been available in a few years if it was desired and we got tired of the Moon.
Yes, America really goofed chasing after CATS…