NASA Eyes Shuttle Replacements 353
jonerik writes "According to this article at Space.com, NASA yesterday released a status report on the first year of NASA's Space Launch Initiative; the search for a space shuttle replacement, currently planned to begin operating ten years from now. The competing contractors - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and a team consisting of Northrop Grumman and Orbital Sciences Corp. - have their work cut out for them. NASA is looking for both a ten-fold improvement in per-pound launch costs (from $10,000 per pound to $1,000) and massive improvements in crew survivability."
In related news, Rubyflame writes: "Aviation Now has a
story about four new kerosene-fueled rocket engines being developed by Aerojet, Pratt & Whitney, Rocketdyne, and TRW. These are engines that will produce a million pounds of thrust, intended to outdo Russian designs in reliability and launch cost, and one of them may power a new reusable launch vehicle. Kerosene has the advantage that it's denser than hydrogen, so the fuel tanks can be smaller."
about time (Score:3, Insightful)
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Re:Just another NASA bait'n'switch (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA's justification for existing (Score:5, Insightful)
American tax dollars are working to make these "new toys". The primary justification for NASA's funding is that the technologies that come out of these "technology development programs" push the cutting edge of modern tech.
It's been a long time since Congress has thought about the values of "exploring space". That's just an side-effect of research spending.
It's like those robot-construction competitions where they have to get all the balls into the goal. The contest isn't to designed to solve the great "yellow ball problem", it's to build and explore ideas in technology.
Congress views funding NASA the same way; by funding NASA they're advancing America's technical know-how. Not to mention that NASA contracts go to high-tech american industries.
There's not some sort of conspiracy to keep regular people out of space here. NASA's just doing its job.
Sweat
Re:BDB is the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem was the Saturn 5 was already paid for (million pound thrust kerosene engine -- didn't they call than the F-1?) while the Shuttle that replaced it required billions in development cost. Also, the Saturn could put 4 times the payload in LEO, making it half as expensive as the Shuttle per pound, and it could send stuff to the Moon.
Instead of punching around with the Shuttle in LEO and this Space Station which is the overpriced whatever, we could have kept Apollo going and evolving, and with the same money we have spent, we could have had a permanent human presence on the Moon by now.
What would that gain? Well, we could have a much more thorough evaluation of lunar resources (possible polar ice) and more thoroughly evaluated O'Neil's ideas of using the Moon as a source of construction materials for space-solar beamed power systems in geosynchronous or L-whatever orbits. Instead we are dinking around in LEO learning nothing.
The Big Dumb Booster by the way, was an idea to scale up the Lunar Module descent engine (had to be a KISS design to bring the astronouts down in one piece) -- they gave the job of building a prototype motor to some general construction contractors who didn't know the first thing about rockets, and they test-fired a successful motor. The thing would have been the size of a Saturn but much more cheaply (heavily) build -- payload would have been more in the Shuttle category, but the idea is that boiler and bridge makers could slap them together. Of course the Shuttle killed the idea.
Airbreathing engines are needed (Score:3, Insightful)
At these low altitudes, air resistance is a major factor and, due to the heavy fuel-load still onboard, a great deal of power is required.
Conventional rocket motors suffer from the need to carry their own oxidizer (O2) but if the first stage of flight used air-breathing engines then far less of this heavy fuel element would be required. The result would be a lighter "wet" vehicle that required less power to fly.
This is why NASA and other researchers are spending such huge amounts of money on things such as the SCRAMJET and Pulse Detonation Engines [aardvark.co.nz].
Unfortunately it appears that there's still a big gap between laboratory and launchpad as far as these new engine designs are concerned.
Liquid-fueled rocket engines will always be risky and fuel-hungry. The magnitude of improvement in safety and price-performance being sought will probably have to wait until they're perfected.
Re:Multi-stage Launch (Score:4, Insightful)
I honestly don't think we'll ever get SSTO going with conventional chemical propellants. You simple have to carry too much weight in fuel, which means you need a bigger rocket, which means more fuel, then a bigger rocket...you get the idea. What we need is a way to extract more energy from whatever fuel we use. One way to do that is to go nuclear.
Nuclear rockets have been proposed in the past and always shot down by the enviro-Nazi, anti-nuke crowd. Seems you can't split an atom these days without attracting a lot of attention from this fringe crowd that cringes at the very word "neutron". Yes, nuclear technology CAN be dangerous. So can a lot of other things. NASA has an enviably safety record given the hazardous work they do, and I have no doubt that if the nuclear engine project were ever to become reality it would be a paragon of safety.
Of course, there could always be something flying out of left field here like some sort of teleportation technology or anti-gravity, but I doubt it in my lifetime.
And if we ever get REALLY serious about getting off this planet, the ONLY way to fly would be a space elevator. A monumental engineering task to be sure, but once in place it'd be the cheapest ride into low Earth orbit that we could come up with.
Re:Crew survivability? (Score:2, Insightful)
The probability of any of them going wrong is actually fairly low (as our record as indicated with 10 deaths, and only 7 in the shuttle) and our ability to recoup is actually pretty good, but I think NASA wants a system in which *if* something does go wrong, they won't loose an astronaut.
Re:Multi-stage Launch (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that opposition to nuclear propulsion comes from rational concerns about its safety as well as irrational hatred of everything nuclear, don't you? I don't have particular problems with nuclear energy in general, but I have serious reservations about any flying nuclear system. A nuclear powered spacecraft is not like the radiothermal generators that have been used in spacecraft so far. It would require a large amount of quite hot material, so any accident could spread a lot of radiactive contamination over a very wide area. I'd want to be damn sure that there were adequate safeguards against that before signing off on such a thing.
An important fact to consider (Score:3, Insightful)
However.......one of the single biggest problems with the Space Shuttle is also one that could be solved in the future by creating a market for them - with space tourism or somesuch.
When you decide to build something like the Shuttle or the Concorde and then you find yourself with one or two users and no need for any more beyond the origional production run, then you have serious problems down the line that drive up costs to an insane level.
Simply put, you run out of spare parts.
The Shuttle and the Concorde were built all at once. The factories churned them out one after another. They needed parts - lots of them - so factories mass produced them.
Then, there weren't any more Shuttles to be made, so there was no need for parts to be built.
Time passed.
Things broke down.
And they broke down again.
And again.
Guess what happened? They started to run out of things. But you can't retool an entire factory to make 100 more of something you need - and do this for every part. So, instead, when something breaks, you have to make it. If some parts of the Shutte go bye-bye, guess what? Someone has to walk into a file room, pick up the blueprints and make a one-off of that part by hand.
Sounds like excruciatingly time and money consuming fun, huh?
Well, it _is_
A growing market for a vehicle such as the Shuttle would mean more parts could be built, and for less. A permananet Shuttle maintence industry could be established, driving costs through the basement.
telepresence (Score:3, Insightful)
If we need real-time human intelligence for planetary exploration, telepresence from orbit is likely also a better choice than human landings: you reduce risks greatly, save on equipment, and still get real-time manipulation. But current planetary exploration goals are so modest that purely robotic systems are probably better.
So, let's scrap human space flight for the time being. We can do an enormous number of really neat exploratory missions in space for the cost of the shuttle program and its replacements. When we return to the issue of human space travel again in a few decades, we'll have much better technologies.
Inefficent Americans could learn from Russians (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny how our competitive capitalistic system ended up producing a bloated monolithic space industry dominated by a government bureaucracy. Our funding of NASA has been too high in my opinion. It allows all sorts of inefficiency like the space shuttle while discouraging private enterprise from getting into the game. Why risk time and money getting into space when the US tax payer is willing to foot the bill and assume all of the risk. It is much easier and safer to feed from the government trough. As another
The Russians on the other hand have a cheaper and more efficient way of getting into space. Their lack of funding has actually encouraged innovation and efficiency. They can't spend their way into space. They must be clever. They also seem to be open to new sorts of ventures such as paid space tourism. Our high brow NASA frowned upon the riff raff getting into space but the cash strapped Russians were forced to be more pragmatic about things.
I think that it is a shame that our space program which started out to be a demonstration of US might and know how has turned into what it has. It is downright un-American. After 40+ years of space flight our space program should look much different. I would prefer funding dozens of smaller competing designs compared to one large shuttle project. Encourage efficiency and innovation, not playing it safe. Why put all of your eggs in one basket? Why lock yourself to one design by one company? NASA has so much money invested in the shuttle that they can't walk away from it even though it has not even come close to meeting its original goals.
The Russians pushed to efficiency and needing funding will ultimately be more open to trying new things. Entrepreneurs and visionaries will probably have a much easier time dealing with them than the US program which tends to push them aside. The one thing that I see getting in the way is that they seem to be feeding at the US government space program trough also. They may end up being as complacent as our traditional contractors going for the easy and repeatable money.
What about the little guys? (Score:1, Insightful)
Over the past several years, I have watched countless small companies try to break into this market and fail. In 1998, there were over 80 for-profit companies around the world attempting to develop launcher technologies. Most of these have failed now.
I will be the first to admit that most of these companies deserved to fail, putting fantasy before reality. But to watch the glimmer of technological evolution be quashed because NASA chose to only back the "Big Boys" is a real disappointment.
Can anyone tell me the last "small" company to get a foothold in the space launch business? Orbital is the closest I can come.
just the ramblings of someone who hoped for better.
That's because the shuttle is an utter failure. (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, the shuttle was originally supposed to save money vs. the Saturn V. It doesn't. It is at minimum an order of magnitude more expensive to run than the staged rockets it replaced. Just how expensive is not clear: it depends how much of the cost of its infrastructure you include in the cost of a launch. But the absolute minimum I've seen quoted is 300 million a launch, and that does not include infrastructure at all. Compare it to a cost of 20 million for a commercial flight of a Soviet space capsule, which includes both payments on infrastructure and a profit margin. And, because the shuttle was designed at the command of politicians and beaurocrats, the infrastructure is spread all over the country, to spread out the pork and give work to each of the beaurocrats' petty little domains. Why, for instance, didn't we just build the shuttle factory adjacent to the launch site, and cut out the cost of transporting it across the country? Why weren't the landing fields adjacent to the launch site from day one? Why use expensive and dangerous booster rockets? Why build the booster rockets using completely different technology than the main engines? Because it was a beaurocratic clusterfuck, that's why.
The shuttle was supposed to be reusable, so that it could be turned around quickly and relaunched. Instead, it takes months to refit a shuttle.
The shuttle was supposed to be safer than the systems it replaced. Obviously, Challenger blew up, the Saturn V's did not (the crew of Apollo 1 died in a ground test of the capsule, not the rocket). But also, one has to look at the underlying problem of operational complexity: the shuttle is just too damn complicated. It is a credit to the people involved that it has flown as safely as it has.
There were supposed to be many shuttles, flying every few weeks, which would have made each launch less expensive by spreading out the infrastructure costs more. Instead, there are a handful of shuttles, flying about once a year. They're too expensive to build, and take too much time to refit.
I'm not even going to talk about it landing at airports.
Lastly, when you look at Shuttle, you have to point out that at the time we stopped production of the Saturn V, we HAD THE SATURN V ALREADY. The space shuttle cost billions to develop, on top of what we had already spent to develop the Saturn V. Worse, it set the space program back at least 20 years. Hell, we still don't have a replacemnt for the Saturn V.
Jon Acheson