In reading this article about whether or not there’s money to be made on the moon, I came across this link, with an estimate from about three years ago of the cost of a lunar base.
The numbers seem way high to me, but of course, they’re based on Constellation. But I can never get over the cost estimate for Altair. Twelve billion dollars to develop a lander? How can that possibly be? The only way I can think that they came up with that is to look at the LEM costs in the sixties, and scale them up in both size and current-year dollars. Which is a completely useless way to do it.
We could just use a modified Dragon and save about $10 billion dollars that isn’t available because of the SLS costs.
A Dragon’s dry mass is almost exactly twice the dry mass of an Apollo LM ascent stage. The RCS and software is already capable, so the ascent stage cost is just adding landing cameras and an airlock on the inside of the Dragon’s side hatch, and a service bay big enough for 10,700 lbs of ascent fuel. One Super Draco is overkill for ascent and even provides more thrust than the 60% upper throttle requirements for the descent stage (which would be 12,500 lbf). If the same Super Dracos were used for ascent and descent, the descent stage would just be tanks, legs, and ladders.
The total vehicle mass prior to descent from lunar orbit would be 68,000 lbs, about twice the LM’s mass, but with greater internal volume and a larger crew.
This design study cost $0 dollars.
I don’t think Dragon is the right base for doing a lander. But with as many companies out there developing powered landing capabilities, you’d think there’d be ways of doing even a fairly gold plated lunar lander for well under $1B. $12B just smacks of silliness.
~Jon
How many companies out there are are seriously developing powered landing capabilities ? And how are they different/better/more efficient from Grumman Aircraft Engineering and Tom Kelly in 1962 ?
According to oft cited universal source of notoriously unreliable human knowledge, wikipedia, there were 11 companies asked to submit LEM designs, and 9 responded. I doubt you could do much better with the sorry state of aerospace industry, today.
According to oft cited universal source of notoriously unreliable human knowledge, wikipedia, there were 11 companies asked to submit LEM designs, and 9 responded. I doubt you could do much better with the sorry state of aerospace industry, today.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. It’s worth noting that there are at least two companies that currently are developing lunar landers, Masten Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace, which didn’t even exist ten years ago.
And one doesn’t need a better design than whatever was kicking around 50 years ago. One just needs a working design that is sufficiently cheap and reliable. Those old designs or something comparable to them today may be what is needed.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this
Simply this : back when LEM was built, US aerospace industry was at its peak. Plenty of young and highly motivated talent in a good number of companies competing with each other, with a lot of fresh experience in building completely new types of aircraft. This was pre massive consolidation, before a lot of regulation and bureaucracy and processes.
Back then, everything was considered possible until proven otherwise.
I see no reason to believe that the industry could somehow magically do much, much better today. The modest relevant advances in technology ( GN&C, materials ) or design and manufacturing methods have not nullified or even significantly reduced the need to have large enough pool of good talent working on the problem – that also gets paid for it.
Try to shift your thinking from engines and ISP and RCS to people, organizations and experience, and you’ll see what i mean.
( Oh, and it’s worth noting that neither Masten or Armadillo are not, and have not developed lunar landers )
Try to shift your thinking from engines and ISP and RCS to people, organizations and experience, and you’ll see what i mean.
What would be the point? People, organizations, and experience are solved problems. Lunar landers are not.
( Oh, and it’s worth noting that neither Masten or Armadillo are not, and have not developed lunar landers )
Except of course, they have. By your argument above, we would have only three developers of lunar landers in the 60s (Gruman, Hughes Aircraft, and the Russians).
The Dragon (with very little left to add or test) is a lander. So it’s a little like saying some car is not a good base for a car. It was overbuilt intentionally. It’s a shame that with all the numbers SpaceX provides they don’t provide the right numbers. But basically instead of $12b you get a lander for $50m and should be able to create a better clean sheet design for even less. Operational costs of $7b gives a lot of space to work in.
Dragon doesn’t really need an airlock (but could include a lightweight inflatable without much mass penalty.)
Sometimes it’s smarter to use what you’ve got even if it isn’t optimal.
Will a fully fueled Dragon reach orbit (moon or mars?) I read the Superdracos got their first full thrust burn just a few days ago. Apparently the older test was more for duration.
Regarding overbuilt: you really don’t need 8 superdracos; 3 would do the job or even 1. 5 might be the sweet spot. 18 dracos is again an example of overbuilt; because safety for crew wasn’t an afterthought.
Using a cluster of Dracos (perhaps a dozen) in between the small (90 lbf) and large (15,000 lbf) might be the best option. Say a 1,500 lbf Draco, so twelve would produce a maximum thrust of 18,000 lbs. Eight drop you into the top of the throttling range (10% to 60% of max on the LM). They would be cheap to develop from their existing hardware and offer multiple redundancy. One of the weaknesses of the Apollo LM design was that the lone ascent engine simply had to work, a single-point failure mode with no workaround.
Regarding the lack of lander design expertise that a reader pointed out above, JPL has designed lots of successful landers, they just weren’t manned landers.
I did not point out lack of lander design expertise, i opined that nothing fundamental has changed to somehow make building a manned lunar lander much easier and cheaper today, than it was back in Apollo days. I don’t think that todays nascent space companies can somehow magically do orders of magnitude better than people did 50 years ago.
Actually, most of it is much easier now. Legs, tanks, hatches and windows weren’t hard then or now. The challenge was engines, RCS, guidance, and electronics. Our engines are already developed, in some cases developed for Apollo. RCS is already routine, and the pilot-operated valves we’ve used since Apollo are much, much lighter than pure solenoids.
But the biggest change is in electronics and guidance. We don’t need a heavy, 3-gimbal gyro with resolvers (they obviously should’ve gone with a 4-gimbal). We don’t need a hundred pounds worth of computer (70 for the AGC plus 30 pounds for the abort guidance system). We won’t use miles of analog wiring to banks of potentiometers and switches. We don’t have to develop beyond-state-of-the-art radios and circuits.
Using electronics and control systems from the early 1960’s, a lunar lander was barely possible, and required enormous and expensive engineering to make those systems work, and it all had to be done with drafting tables, slide rules, and early computer runs.
You could certainly shave a lot of weight off a Dragon for the lander role (no need for PICA, etc) and use a much more optimal configuration, but I’d bet competing programs would have trouble beating the short design time a Dragon enhancement would require. Plus, SpaceX probably already has it sketched out for their Mars landing ideas.
There would be some simplicity and redundancy in using a double Dragon mission, one acting as the lander and one as the command/service module, with either one usable for the return and re-entry. It may not be mass efficient but it would probably be cost efficient ($12 billion buys a lot of fuel!).
But of course a lunar lander should cost 20x what Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Dragon cost together. Space is Hard Rand! Didn’t you get the talking points?
~Jon
I too don’t think that Dragon is the right starting point for a lunar lander, but it does show why a lunar lander shouldn’t cost $12B.
The lunar architecture that I think is pretty well thought out is the ULA horizontal lander based on their ACES-41. Essentially it’s a fuel tank with RL-10’s on the back end for the big pushes, but rows of small thrusters on the side of the “tank” so it can land on it’s side.
The big advantage is that the whole vehicle is close to the ground, passengers will have easy access getting in and out, and cargo pods can just be unhooked (similar to how the Sky Crane helicopter layout). ULA also envisioned that the crew pod would be able to eject from the rest of the vehicle in case of emergency.
I think the key here is that NASA should open up all their hardware needs to competition – involve academia and industry to come up with the best ideas. NASA tends to come up with ideas that follow what Congress is pursuing (like the unneeded SLS), and they don’t necessarily think “out of the box”, especially where money is concerned.
I agree, that configuration would be very flexible. You might not start out with RL-10 engines but you could convert to them fairly easily if/when lunar ice becomes harvestable for propellant. Until then, you might want to stick with throttleable hypergolic engines like the SuperDrago.
A Dragon capsule would be overkill for the job. It’s heavier than needed for a lunar lander because it was built to withstand the stresses of launch and reentry. It’s possible some of the systems could be used in a new lander.
As for the cost, that was probably based on the legacy cost-plus model. If so, then it’s probably low, especially if Lockheed “Overruns R Us” Martin wins the contract.
Somehow I doubt there is so much hydrogen in the Moon that it will make sense to use LOX/LH2 fuel. There was someone who worked on LOX/Al slurry monopropellant rockets using ISRU that sort of thing seems IMO to make much more sense. You do not need a lot of ISP to land on the Moon. Otherwise you can do a solar thermal rocket powered vehicle where you can use just about anything as a reaction mass including LOX.
One thing I’ve wondered is why someone doesn’t try to use liquid aluminum with pre-heated tanks and pre-heated titanium plumbing. If the ambient temperature of a planet was above aluminum’s melting point, it would be a storable liquid propellant and RP-1 and hydrazine would by cryogenics.
I like the idea of the Langley lander from the early 60’s. It looks like it would be great for short hops for exploration.
http://www.airspacemag.com/multimedia/photos/?c=y&articleID=16047762&page=1
You could try replacing the legs with a skirt, so you don’t so much hop as glide. In my Dragon calculation above (a 2x lunar lander), the mass on the lunar surface (including the empty descent stage) is 31,000 lbs, with a surface force of about 5,200 pounds. If it sat on a 16-foot diameter skirt (about the size of their larger launch shroud), it would lift up with an exhaust gas pressure of 0.18 psi, supplied of course by the descent engine or thrusters. Not quite as efficient as wheels, but certainly better than direct reaction thrust.
It might even make more sense than legs for landing, whether you try to move anywhere or not.
I once asked somebody I know who worked for TRW for 10 years how aerospace companies did cost estimation. The answer was about what Rand said above.
Isn’t Masden working on a lunar lander based on a centaur upper stage they got from ULA? The idea being to add masden’s motors along the side to give a lander similar to the ULA horizontal lander (but at a fraction of the price.)
Depending on your definition of “working on”. They put forth a proposal, and they have some surplus Centaur stage to play with.
Oh, and its Masten Space Systems, not masden. The company name is somewhat of a misnomer too, as AFAIK they have not built any hardware that has been to space, yet.
The company name is somewhat of a misnomer too
Why? Are you claiming that the systems they develop are not ultimately intended for space? Where else are they going to use a rocket powered vehicle that hops up and down? Agriculture? Sporting events?
Or is it merely that they haven’t yet deployed anything in space? Should we say that the Space Launch System is similarly a misnomer because they haven’t yet launched a vehicle into space (and might never actually).
Sporting events?
I think yer on ta something Karl.
As another data point in support of the more cynical viewpoint, GLXP was announced in 2007. Five years on, not one of the competitors is even close to having hardware ready that actually stands a chance of landing a tiny payload on the moon.
As an interesting thought experiment, imagine if the announced prize pot was double, quadruple, or even ten times more than it is now. There is a prize money vs feasibility graph to be drawn here, and i doubt that anything less than a few hundred million would make a real difference.
GLXP is set at a price point where conventional launch on existing launch vehicles at current prices is ruled out. So those competitors not only have to put something on the Moon, they also have to figure how to get it off of Earth. In other words, it’s a much harder problem than at first it appears.
Meh, look at how much NASA has spent on Morpheus and they still haven’t gotten off the tether (it’s doubtable if they ever will).
why is it “doubtable”? or does that just mean that you are able to doubt?
Also I did a little googling around but have not found any budget numbers. Do you have a reference?