Category Archives: Space

Space

Clueless At GWU

I wish I could get a sweet gig like this. I could have given NASA much better advice than this study, for a lot less than three hundred thousand:

The study by George Washington University researchers urged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to cut down on shuttle flights by limiting construction on the space station and to reinvest extra funds in developing a new manned vehicle. NASA could use shuttles as remote-controlled cargo ships to finish the station, the report said.

No matter how many times people make that recommendation, it remains fundamentally wrong, and displays an ignorance of economics, and the purpose of the Shuttle. There’s no point in flying it at all if you’re going to fly it without crew, and no way to justify the expense of maintaining the infrastructure for it. The astronauts, who are paid and willing to risk their lives, are the least valuable element of the system, and NASA has an oversupply of them. NASA only has three orbiters left, and if it loses one more, it will almost be out of the Shuttle business anyway, regardless of whether or not more astronauts are lost.

But I can’t get my head around this bizarre notion that some seem to have that sending people into space is supposed to be risk free. What is it about that environment, unlike the sea, coal mines, construction, or any other activity in which people die all the time, that make some people check their brains at the door?

NASA at least had an appropriately diplomatic response:

Erica Hupp, a spokeswoman for NASA, said the organization “appreciates all the work that George Washington University put into its study. We are working toward the same goal to make human space flight more reliable and less hazardous.”

Translation: thanks for the clueless advice, but no thanks. What a waste of money.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Keith Cowing isn’t very impressed, either.

Space

Alienating Constituencies

Clark Lindsey has lots of interesting thoughts on NASA’s priorities:

It certainly seems strange that NASA is initiating the VSE by alienating virtually every natural constituency that it has. In addition to this hit on space education, the science community is becoming convinced that the VSE just means big cutbacks in its funding (At NASA, Clouds Are What You Zoom Through to Get to Mars – NY Times – Mar.21.05), the aviation community is now sure that NASA wants to eliminate all aeronautical research (Congress Quizzes NASA On Cuts in Aeronautics Spending – Space News – Mar.21.05), closing a research center or two will certainly reduce its circle of friends (NASA BRAC: a bad idea – The Space Review – Mar.21.05), and cancelling the Hubble repair mission angered every astronomy fan in the country.

It’s not as if NASA has a shortage of waste. It could clearly accomplish much more with its 16 billion dollar budget. Often it appears, however, that particular NASA programs are cut not because they are failing or because they lack cost-effectiveness, but because they are small and don’t have the political clout to fight back. Meanwhile, the huge Shuttle and ISS programs relentlessly suck up all funding in sight.

He also has an updated timeline for private space activities. He’s increasingly optimistic. Me too. But I’d expand on one point that he makes:

In the US, for example, it is quite possible that NASA’s new exploration initiative will fail to produce new systems that significantly lower the cost of access to space.

I would put it more strongly. It will almost certainly fail to do so, particularly since that doesn’t even seem to be a program goal.

Based on the results of the architecture studies so far, NASA seems to find it satisfactory to spend billions to send a handful of NASA astronauts to the moon once or twice a year fifteen years from now. Mike Griffin wants to develop a heavy-lift vehicle for that purpose. The traffic rate doesn’t justify one such a system, let alone the two that would be required to provide resiliency in the architecture.

The utter economic absurdity of our current approach to spaceflight (which seems largely a return to the glory days of Apollo) continues.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other comment on his new timeline:

2009-2010: …NASA cancels the CEV under development by one of the large aerospace consortiums and contracts with the America’s Space Prize winner for its launch needs.

I don’t know if they’ll cancel the CEV per se, because they still need an entry vehicle capable of returning astronauts from the moon, unless the plan changes to have them deorbit propulsively. This requires much more heat shielding than a simple entry vehicle from orbit, because the specific energy to be dissipated is twice as much.

What NASA will really have to do (and should be thinking about now) is how to design the CEV with the flexibility to “unbundle” its functions. Private access to orbit means that they don’t have to develop the CEVLV (which probably consists anyway of simply “human rating” an EELV like Delta 4 or Atlas V, whatever that quoted phrase turns out to mean), and they don’t have to deliver crew to orbit in the CEV command module. Cheap access to orbit, for both people and propellant, will require a radical rethinking of the requirements for a CEV from the current ones, including propellant depots at LEO (probably low inclination, not ISS orbit), as well as at L1 and on the lunar surface. With sufficient propellant available from the moon, propulsive circularization in LEO (perhaps with an aerobrake assist) from the lunar vicinity becomes a more reasonable proposition, and we can design systems that are more specialized for their environment, rather than one that, like Apollo, has to go all (or most) of the way to the moon from the earth’s surface, and return, which is the current CEV concept.

And part of that rethinking also has to be the possibility of private interest in developing regular commerce to and from the moon…