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Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« Cryonics Breakthrough? | Main | Bad Star, Bad! »

For Want Of A Bolt

There was a disastrous accident at a satellite construction facility a few days ago.

Because someone removed a few bolts from a fixture without documenting it, and someone else neglected to check for their presence, a weather satellite that cost almost a quarter of a billion dollars was severely damaged. The extent hasn't been reported but it will undoubtedly cost many millions of dollars to repair it. It may in fact be (in the words of the car repair business) "totaled," because after a fall like that it may not be possible to ensure the integrity even of the parts that don't appear to be damaged.

Disasters like this, in a mature field, never have a single cause. It requires a(n unlikely) combination of failures, which is why it happens relatively rarely.

Examples of this can be seen in any random perusal of aviation or diving magazines, in which accidents are described in detail, and they are invariably a result of a combination of things going wrong, rather than a single one.

Consider the Titanic. Just one thing going right (e.g., seeing the iceberg in time; not using a little-understood new steel that became embrittled by the temperatures of the North Atlantic in springtime; the captain understanding that he had to have forward power to have adequate steering control, which was not possible because he decided to reverse engines at the same time he was trying to steer away; other ships being close enough, or the California receiving and understanding the radio messages; having enough lifeboats, etc.) and they would have been fine. But everything went wrong, and hundreds of people died.

Or the Donner Party. If there hadn't been an early winter, or they hadn't decided to take the "short cut," or...many other bad decisions had been avoided, they would have been safe in California before winter hit, as their traveling companions were.

Or Challenger. If the weather hadn't been quite so cold, if they'd understood the o-ring issue earlier, if they'd not been delayed by the previous delay caused by the desire to fly the Congressman, if only...

Or Columbia. If they'd been going to space station, if they'd dealt with the foam problem sooner, if...if...if...

People have already commented on this particular accident, and I suspect that it will result in a change in procedure, and perhaps even in the design of the hardware that holds such satellites during ground assembly.

But I'm actually more interested in discussing why it's possible for the absence of a few parts worth, at most, a few dollars each to result in the loss of over two hundred million dollars.

Why do satellites cost so much?

The typical response from someone in the aerospace industry is "Space is Hard." We have to design the satellites for the harsh environment of vacuum, radiation, extremes of hot and cold. But that doesn't explain why similar systems designed for marine use (the ocean has extremely high positive pressures, and seawater is an extremely corrosive environment) can be built for orders of magnitude less.

The real reason comes back to transportation costs. Simply put, satellites are expensive because getting them into orbit is expensive.

Ocean-going vehicles, even underwater ones, can be delivered to their environment very cheaply--just drop them in. But when a launch costs a hundred million dollars or more, you want to make sure that your payload a) lasts a long time and b) works reliably, because if you have to replace it, you're out another hundred million dollars or so for another launch (on top of the replacement cost of the satellite itself). This translates into the use of extremely high-quality (and expensive) parts, a lot of redundancy so that failures of individual components don't result in a failure of the system itself, careful attention to assembly, using highly-skilled and trained technicians to assemble it (which of course begs the question of how this accident occurred). All of this skyrockets the cost of designing and building a satellite.

A second factor, also related to transportation costs, is the need to accomplish the goal within a very restricted weight limit. Launch vehicles have a fixed payload capacity to a given orbit. If the satellite exceeds this by even a few pounds, it won't get to its destination. That means that people will spend huge amounts of money on it to shave off ounces. This mentality of minimizing weight is so ingrained in the industry that engineers will occasionally (unthinkingly) spend more to take a pound out of a spacecraft than it would have cost to launch that same pound (typically a few thousand dollars).

And of course, both these cost-inducing factors cascade into a third one. Because launch, and hence satellites, are so expensive, and we live in a universe of finite resources, we don't do very many of them. It's not a mass-production assembly line, which is the only way to get products affordable to the masses--it's more of a craft, or cottage industry, with a few highly-skilled (ignoring the folks who leave bolts out of fixtures) artisans, building them on a boutique basis.

So when one of them falls over on the floor, it's not a matter of going and pulling another one out of the warehouse--it's more like commissioning another work of art from an artist.

Of course, some will cry, "But how many weather satellites do we need?"

An interesting question. As I write this, there is a hurricane bearing down on the mid-Atlantic states. We get continuous pictures of it (as long as the single satellite that can do so doesn't fail) because it is a geostationary one, and can take continual pictures of a specific site over the planet. But because it's geostationary, it's a long way away, so we can only get limited resolution, and a correspondingly limited understanding of wave heights and wind velocities, and temperatures. Those can only be understood via the primitive methods of sending piloted aircraft into the eye of the storm.

Imagine a different world, in which we had swarms of much lower-altitude satellites that could provide those parameters continuously, in all necessary detail, without hazarding aircraft and pilots.

That's a world that can only be provided by low-cost launch, and the corresponding low-cost satellites.

There's an old saying that "for want of a nail...a kingdom was lost."

For want of twenty-four bolts, a satellite was lost, and for want of a space transportation system that can provide vital space services, billions of dollars of property, and lives, on the east coast of our nation, may be lost.

We have to come up with better (and cheaper) ways of getting eyes (both human and robotic) in the sky, and there's little coming out of our vaunted space agency that seems to propose to do so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 16, 2003 07:19 PM

Comments

I have only occasionally dropped into this blog, but I think that piece was an excellent think piece.

Posted by Call Me Skeptical at September 16, 2003 07:32 PM

For once...

Two thumbs up!

Posted by Duncan Young at September 16, 2003 09:49 PM

Actually, the Titanic wasn't trying to break a speed record. Stephen Cox wrote an excellent article on the disaster, focusing on risk magnagement issues and the myths surrounding White Star CEO J. Bruce Ismay.

Cox dispells the "speed record" myth:

When the ship stopped at Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11, [Ismay] conferred with the Chief Engineer about the possibility of trying her out at top speed on April 15 or 16 -- a trial that was never to take place...[On the night of the collision] Titanic continued moving at 25 miles an hour -- not her top speed, but a very respectable one -- in the direction of the ice.

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at September 16, 2003 11:26 PM

> The real reason comes back to transportation
> costs. Simply put, satellites are expensive
> because getting them into orbit is expensive.

True -- as far as certain satellites are concerned. Small cheaper-faster-better LEO satellites would clearly benefit *enormously* from cheap access to space. However, I would argue that some spacecraft will continue to be relatively unaffected by launch cost. E.g. deep space probes cannot be serviced and they must function reliably for years in deep space. Launch cost is also an insignificant contribution to the total cost of commercial geostationary communications satellites, which produce far more revenue than the cost of building & launching them... In fact, I would argue that GEO satellite operators would be more interested in a RELIABLE launch vehicle that is always available, than the least costly launch option. The main concern to commercial commsat operators is, will the rocket be available when we need to launch? I hear this was a major problem for Teledesic, which settled for relatively conventional launchers such as Atlas because the company could not base its multibillion dollar venture on unproven reusable launchers such as Kistler's K-1.
---
BTW, geostationary weather satellites do have some advantages since they can observe an entire hemisphere, albeit from a greater distance. There are different types of complementary Earth observation satellites in different orbits. I don't think you can say one option is "better" than the other.

MARCU$

Posted by Marcus Lindroos at September 17, 2003 03:52 AM

Even the GEO comsats could be cheaper if they weren't mass constrained (and could be easily refueled and upgraded).

And LEO weathersats are "better" in the sense that it would provide higher resolution. I wasn't proposing eliminating them in GEO--just complementing them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 17, 2003 07:59 AM

Excellent examples all. An interesting (in the sense that a gory car wreck is interesting) comparison can be drawn between the CAIB report and Bernard De Voto's "The Year of Decision: 1846," which contains a thoroughly horrifying recounting of the Donner Party; he makes the point that they didn't experience any unique hazards -- they simply encountered every hazard every other wagon train ran into, culminating in social disintegration.

Anyway, I trust this will be your next Fox column.

(Obligatory bloggish nit: I note that 100-meter resolution -- surely adequate for any meteorological application -- can be obtained from GEO [~40,000 km] with a telescope of only about 12" aperture [~0.5 arc-second resolution].)

Posted by Jay Manifold at September 17, 2003 08:03 AM

>>However, I would argue that some spacecraft will continue to be relatively unaffected by launch cost. E.g. deep space probes cannot be serviced and they must function reliably for years in deep space.

IMO completely wrong. Assume an order of magnitude cheaper delta-V per buck. Instead of one, you could send five probes and afford two of them to fail.
Still half the money saved and probably many times more of your valuable science data returned.

Posted by at September 17, 2003 11:01 AM

Good Piece!

Two minor nits:

?Or Columbia. If they'd been going to space station, if they'd dealt with the foam problem sooner, if...if...if...?

Columbia was heavier than Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor. It wasn?t light enough to deliver modules to the ISS. (See, for example http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/features/000414overhaul/future.html) I doubt it could have reached the station with the research module it was carrying during the flight. But why were they using a shuttle when one of the key reasons for building the space station was to do research? Answer: The station wasn?t ready. What a waste. Yes, absolutely this was a combinational error. Foam had been hitting shuttles for years, they knew it, this time it hit a critical point.

?But because it's [weather sat] geostationary, it's a long way away, so we can only get limited resolution,?

As someone else mentioned, resolution is dependent on effective scope size as well as distance. Of course, it takes more energy to go higher, and bigger hardware is more massive, so it is a tradeoff. A bigger issue is that a geostationary sat can?t see high latitudes well, so some weather sats are in near polar orbits, often sun synchronous.

I have no doubt that if we had cheap space, we?d have space telescopes now showing detailed pictures of earth sized planets in other systems, many space manufactured goods, continuous weather maps from most of the planets in the solar system, orbital vacations, less expensive cell phones that work anywhere on the earth at any time, and so on.

I suspect that we first got into the high cost trap because going to space was originally treated as a ?Manhattan project.? Getting to orbit is a pretty big leap, especially with ?60s technology. They didn?t use finesse, just threw a lot of resources at the problem and built big, dumb boosters. Shuttle was okay as a prototype, but isn?t really very reusable (more like ?refurbishable?). Now, instead of incremental development, they seem to think they have to do an all-in-one multi-billion dollar monster. We need to get back to incremental development and lower cost projects with smaller goals. Suborbital is one great way to try things less expensively. If people can make money at it, that will lead to real advancement to cheaper and better space.

Posted by VR at September 17, 2003 03:14 PM

Columbia was heavier than Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor. It wasn?t light enough to deliver modules to the ISS.

Actually, it was scheduled to go to ISS on its next mission. It couldn't deliver as much, but it could go.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 17, 2003 04:11 PM

>>However, I would argue that some spacecraft
>>will continue to be relatively unaffected by
>>launch cost. E.g. deep space probes cannot be
>>serviced and they must function reliably for
>>years in deep space.

> IMO completely wrong. Assume an order of
> magnitude cheaper delta-V per buck. Instead of
> one, you could send five probes and afford two
> of them to fail.
> Still half the money saved and probably many
> times more of your valuable science data
> returned.

"An order of magnitude cheaper delta-V" would not be that significant for missions such as Cassini or Galileo, where the cost of launching the probe represents ~10% of the total cost of the mission.

BTW, manned interplanetary missions also appear to be surprisingly unaffected by cheaper access to space! This is because a lunar or Mars spacecraft is significantly heavier than a simple Earth orbit shuttle or manned capsule. E.g. a lunar landing mission such as Apollo typically requires roughly eight times as much payload in low Earth orbit as a simple mission to Mir or ISS. This figure will be even higher if you build a heavier interplanetary spacecraft by increasing the design weight margins. And even if you assume a fleet of backup vehicles is launched by much cheaper LVs, the need for reliability is going to be quite high since an emergency return to Earth would take months or years in Mars mission case. This drives up the DDT&E cost. For these reasons, the production cost of the manned (deep space) craft will also be high in case expendable systems are used. Reusable interplanetary spacecraft, on the other hand, will require a significant infrastructure in orbit and/or on the planetary surface since they must be refueled and serviced between missions.

If you examine NASA's recent lunar architectures [e.g. http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/Station/Slides/ ], you will notice the average launch cost (using expendable rockets) for landing a 4-crew on the Moon is about $1 billion... Even if you could reduce this total by a factor of 10 or even 100, you're still talking about a lot of money per mission. E.g. a comparable Soyuz mission to ISS costs "only" about $30-40 million (including $20-25M for launch) according to COMSTAC estimates...

I am sure cheaper, safer and more frequent access to space will have a significant impact in the long term. But it's not a panacea for all problems. E.g. you are not simply going to see commercial lunar surface hotels emerge from nowhere as soon as LEO transportation costs fall by a factor of 10 or even 100.

MARCU$

Posted by Marcus Lindroos at September 18, 2003 05:00 AM

By an interesting chain of links, I linked into your article, "For Want of a Bolt", from another link, MSN's "Space.com" which has been following Burt Rutan's efforts to build and launch the world's first private space rocket/vehicle. From all the reports so far, it looks pretty promising, and definitely fills the bill of what you are rightfully lamenting in your article; the lack of an economical means to get raw materials, resources, and satellites into space. Between that project and the space elevator, maybe we're not so far off after all...

Posted by John at September 19, 2003 06:22 AM

>>Columbia was heavier than Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor. It wasn't light enough to deliver
>>modules to the ISS . . .
>Actually, it was scheduled to go to ISS on its next mission. It couldn't deliver as much, but it could go.

Yes, it could. In fact, the article I referenced mentioned that. The statement I had been commenting on was "Or Columbia. If they'd been going to space station . . ." I don't dispute that Columbia, alone, could have reached the station. But for this mission, it was carrying the research double module and other hardware in the cargo bay massing over 35,000 pounds (see http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/spSec/sts107_archiveb.jsp). Could they have done this mission and reached the station as well? I doubt it. If they could have, why didn't they?

Actually, I've been trying to find out more about the "whys" of Columbia's last mission, and I've found precious little. The subject seems to be largely ignored. I'm surprised there haven't been more questions on this. The station was BUILT to do this type of research. So another "IF": If the ISS had been ready to do research, this mission would not have occurred. You might still lose a shuttle, but not to just haul a lab up into orbit and bring it back down in a couple weeks.

Posted by VR at September 19, 2003 11:47 PM

But for this mission, it was carrying the research double module and other hardware in the cargo bay massing over 35,000 pounds (see http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/spSec/sts107_archiveb.jsp). Could they have done this mission and reached the station as well?

No, of course not, but if they'd been going to space station, they wouldn't have been carrying that payload. Of course, on that particular mission, the orbit they were in wouldn't have allowed them to reach space station with any payload at all--the plane change was much too great.

I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. Obviously it wasn't possible for Columbia to reach station on that mission, but I thought you were saying that it wasn't possible for it to get there under any circumstances.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 20, 2003 10:42 AM

> Burt Rutan's efforts to build and launch the
> world's first private space rocket/vehicle.
> From all the reports so far, it looks pretty
> promising, and definitely fills the bill of
> what you are rightfully lamenting in your
> article; the lack of an economical means to get
> raw materials, resources, and satellites into
> space.

Actually, Rutan's vehicle is incapable of launching "raw materials, resources, and satellites into space" without some sort of expendable upper stage (it seems the Proteus carrier aircraft will double as an air launch platform for microsatellites).
---
SpaceShip One reportedly costs $80,000 per flight to a 100km altitude and it flies nowhere near fast enough to actually reach orbit. Expect perhaps for the air-launch mode, none of the technical solutions (e.g. heat sink thermal protection system, hybrid low-performance rocket propulsion) seem very promising for an orbital launch system. That doesn't mean Rutan's venture isn't worthwhile, mind you. It might be, from a public relations point of view. But it is hardly showcasing any technologies required for a manned orbital space transportation system.

MARCU$

Posted by Marcus Lindroos at September 20, 2003 12:06 PM

Expect [sic] perhaps for the air-launch mode, none of the technical solutions (e.g. heat sink thermal protection system, hybrid low-performance rocket propulsion) seem very promising for an orbital launch system. That doesn't mean Rutan's venture isn't worthwhile, mind you. It might be, from a public relations point of view. But it is hardly showcasing any technologies required for a manned orbital space transportation system.

Dyna-Soar used a heat-sink TPS, as I recall, and it was definitely an orbital system. And I've seen proposals to use those "low performance" (but restartable and amazingly safe) hybrid rockets for on-orbit propulsion.

But the bigger picture is this: in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, aircraft design didn't showcase many technologies required for transcontinental flight, and none at all for supersonic flight. Instead, the designers, experimenters and inventors bootstrapped their way into an ever-accelerating technology of flight. Manned orbital spaceflight, on the other hand, jumped completely over the equivalent period of experimentation, and went directly from ICBMs through minimal orbital work to lunar missions.

I think what Rand has been loudly saying all these years is that we need to return to basics, and do the missing groundwork before we approach orbital flight (and beyond) from a more-rational, more-informed position. And I completely agree.

Posted by Troy at September 20, 2003 09:53 PM

I am late to this discussion and new to your site (very good btw), but I wonder if LEO comm's, weather tracking, etc. might be better (ie: more cheaply) provided by high altitude solar-powered aircraft? The test platform flown out of Hawaii is an example of this, but I envision something that is engineered for optimum performence at altitude and flown to there by a detachable Predator-like drone (or even a piloted aircraft, if necessary). While the materials and technology involved aren't precisely "off the shelf", they wouldn't require more then a refinement of existing tech. A company offering Ten Mile High Antenna services to all and sundry would be profitable, I think, and could serve as a staging point for orbital launches as well possibly.

I don't wish to take up a lot of your bandwidth if this concept has already been roundly rejected, but this would seem to offer a lot of possibility as a cost-reducer for present-day application's currently requireing LEO launches and as a less expensive means of achieving orbit eventually, I think. Indeed, if part of the charter of the antenna compnay was to do that very thing, then ...

Posted by Will at September 21, 2003 01:52 PM

I am late to this discussion and new to your site (very good btw), but I wonder if LEO comm's, weather tracking, etc. might be better (ie: more cheaply) provided by high altitude solar-powered aircraft?

That has been considered, and there are some people looking at it. Burt Rutan's Proteus is in fact such a vehicle, except that it's powered by a very efficient jet engine, rather than solar. Of course, for severe weather tracking, it's a good idea to be looking from outside the atmposphere...

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 22, 2003 06:10 AM


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