Launching Frequently Key To NASA Success 145
teeks99 writes "Even NASA could benefit from the 'Launch Often' idea that is frequently referred to in the software development community. However, in NASA's case, the 'launch' is a bit more literal. Edward Lu, writing in the New York Times, points out that by lowering the consequences of launch failure, and making frequent launches available to engineers, NASA could open up a new wave of innovation in space exploration. If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many opportunities for new ideas to be tried out in communications, remote sensing, orbital debris mitigation, robotic exploration, and even in developing technology for human spaceflight. Another benefit would be that the rockets would be well understood, which would improve reliability."
What a bunch of crapola (Score:3, Interesting)
The rockets are well understood. The Atlas/Delta/Centaurs are all 45 year old designs and well shook down and understood. Even the "new" rocket is 85% old Space Shuttle booster, 30 yr old design.
The Saturn V was considered well understood and capable of being "man-rated" after six launches. So this rationale does not hold water.
You might look for other motivations, like maybe huge profits for the rocket makers and launchers?
This is BS (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel. Sending tiny robots into space is not interesting to most people, and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).
The way to get national interest in space travel up again is twofold:
1. Get NASA going full-bore on manned exploration of space. Put the Mars mission on an Apollo-like timetable. Of course, no one wants to spend the money for this because nobody cares about space, so we have to use the next point to get them there:
2. Aggressively support commercial manned space travel. Give more people a chance to go into space, even just LEO, and you'll have a lot more willingness to fund aggressive exploration missions. This means the price for a trip has to go way down, and the safety has to go way up. If we can get to a point where a trip to space costs the same as, say, an all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean, everyone will want to go.
The current strategy of announcing big initiatives and then starving them of funds, and letting commercial space ventures limp along with inadequate funding and no direction, is not getting anybody anywhere. As long as NASA is saying 20 years just to get back to the Moon (assuming the funding isn't cut, which it always is), and it still costs $20 million to get a private citizen into LEO, interest in space travel will remain low. Launching more rockets filled with tiny robots is not going to fix that.
Re:Not impressed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets say a big launch can throw 10000kg into the orbit of the ISS. To do that you need a big launcher and if it fails you lose the whole thing. A small launcher throws 1000kg into the same orbit. Assuming a zero failure rate one big launch should be cheaper than ten small launches.
But you can get better, faster at the small launches, because you might be doing one a week. Now thats a nice pattern if you think about it. You could stack the vehicle on Monday, roll it to the pad on Tuesday, test the payload on Wednesday, etc. Then light the fuse on Friday and repeat the whole process next week.
So overall its more expensive that way but if you take failures into account you might just be ahead.
Re:A rocket launch is just like a software launch (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is they need more launches to maintain interest in the public sector so we might get a budget that actually allows things to get done. Of course they need a more efficient launch system, something that diverting 20-30% of the defense budget unto NASA could accomplish.
Re:This is BS (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that we need to generate public interest, but I disagree on your methods. So instead of sending robots, we send people. To what affect? Who cares?
Look back at the great space race of the 60s. What made it as special as it was? Was it that we were flying men in to space with little more than tin foil and duct tape? Or was it that we were actually in a race? We had to beat the commies! I don't really know why it really mattered, but it was a national pride thing so I guess tangible results weren't required.
We need a goal. We need a "mission". Something the country can look towards and hope for. Putting people in space is done. We've done that. No one cares. Now, racing the Chinese to the first long term moon base? That's a goal worth pursuing ( although I still fail to see the deliverables, it would again become a thing of national pride ).
it would be a nice place to be (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA is not going to the be the guys for quick jaunts into space. For that to happen, the west is going to have to have a much higher tolerance to exploding spacecraft, and the economics is going to have to allow for profitable ventures to succeed even when the launch vehicle fails and the company gets sued because someone was woken up by the explosion.
Three other lessons learned from software development. One,doing more increase communications costs, and those communications costs can overwhelm a management structure. NASA does pretty ok with communications as launching a space craft requires a lot of high quality communication. Two, there is no silver bullet.Real problems are really hard to fix, and most of the time requires a novel solution, not just doing more of the same. Three, system can quickly become complex enough so that no one fully understand what is happening.Our machines do grow more complex and sometimes we don't know exactly what is happening.
Then, again, there is the issue of launch vehicles exploding in space. When google mail goes down, as it does, people are annoyed. When a launch vehicle does down, as happened two years ago with Sea Launch,the communication payload, launch platform, pretty everything goes kaput.
Speaking of Sea Lauch, I wonder if we don't have a launch a week from the various people who do this. Such a distributed system might be better as it prevent one company, such as google, from being the absolute arbiter or what is a good idea and what is a bad idea.
SSTO (Score:5, Interesting)
The best papers I've ever read on this subject were Jerry Pournelle's Getting To Space [jerrypournelle.com] and The SSX Concept [jerrypournelle.com]. Basically he makes a simlar argument in the context of SSTO. The problem with the way we do space right now is it's just too expensive to do anything useful. Things we could do like space-based solar power and asteroid mining are now totally impractical because it costs, what, $20k to put a kilogram in orbit? As long as that's the case we're pretty much stuck with LEO vanity projects. We can't even afford to go back to the moon.
Getting the $/kg to LEO down should be the single-minded thrust of the US space program in the coming years.
Re:Not impressed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But in the big picture. Have you seen it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly you have not even looked at the big picture.
First off the fuel is Hydrogen and Oxygen. Which by product is water.
The space program has given us. world wide telecommunications, GPS, weather satellite. How many lives and how much energy have those things saved? GPS alone applied to the transport industry has been a huge fuel saver.
"If" we develop fusion we will need fuel. Where is the highest concentration of fusion fuel? The moon.
Would it not be more ecological to mine asteroids than the amazon?
What about the development of clean 24/7 solar power? That can only be achieved in space.
The Moon program of the 60's gave us the transistor and ultimately the processor in your computer you used to view this. How many lives have been saved by the chip. Hybrid cars would be impossible with them.
The space program is possible the last area where mega projects can have significant positive impact on the planet, man and our future.
And lastly the resources in space are LIMITLESS. Once we learn how to tap them properly.
Price? (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds quite nice, but consider the costs. According to NASA, each Space Shuttle launch costs an average of $450 million. Doing one each week would amount to approximately $24 billion per year in costs. This would be similar to the per-year project cost of the Apollo program. If we are going to spend that much, shouldn't we go to Mars or something rather than just throwing up a bunch of rockets?
Anyhow, given the debt that the US is currently putting itself into, it seems to me like it would be a much better use of money to create more 'prizes' for private builders...something useful that can be done at a fraction of the cost.
Re:Single stage ground to orbit and other stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
SSTO is basically a dead issue. Nobody has figured out how to build one. It may not even be feasible to build such a thing. Having worked in the field I can tell you one thing, its JUST barely possible to hurl stuff into orbit at all. The engineering is a nightmare. We aren't even close to anything like SSTO and its not even clear that if you could build such a thing it would be cheaper than disposable rockets.
The best idea anyone has come up with yet that is provably viable is essentially what the Russians do, a big dumb rocket. The concept could be pushed further but essentially the idea is you build a rocket using simple low performance systems. It will be BIG, but it can be built cheap and mass produced. Reliability comes from simplicity and when its cheap you really can launch on a fairly aggressive schedule and make it even more reliable.
The whole concept was mapped out pretty thoroughly in early 70's and many components were even built and tested. Engines fabricated out of ordinary grade materials with what were called "shipyard tolerances" etc. Totally gravity flow design with no turbo pumps or other moving parts. They're just big, but so what?
Re:But in the big picture. Have you seen it? (Score:3, Interesting)
In space?
The easy ones are:
Solar power
Hydrogen
Oxygen
Iron
But everything else is out there. We just have to figure out where and how to get at it in a cost effective manor.
We are not rocket scientists, obviously. (Score:3, Interesting)
But we can at least speculate on a realistic plan for frequent launches:
1. Adopting a limited number of launch vehicle types. Atlas, Titan, Delta, Ares or whatever it becomes, and maybe a commercial design or two in there, but probably just one. The Virgin/Scaled Composites projects are out of scope for this, let them do their own thing.
2. After certifying new designs and man-rating them, we move from testing to 'production'.
3. Ramp up launches so that you are probably only launching every 3-5 weeks realistically.
4. Allow for more launches when needed.
5. Multiple pads are in use. Currently, pads 36A&B, 39A&B, 40, and 46 are active, 37 and 41 are under construction for Ares (probably) and Delta IV respectively. So we could have 2-3 pads for big lifts, and 3-4 pads for utility launches. This makes some 3-8 week turnarounds practical, and some shorter.
6. Some rockets have different prep times. I suspect the goal of the Ares-type launch vehicle is to get it into a rapid cycle, but I dunno if Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, and Delta can be prepped that quickly. However, if you tell them you need 15 Delta launches a year, I be they can do it.
7. Now to get some payload for these. Certainly, sending a new set of Mars Rovers up would be cheapo science. I bet the guys at ASU could have them ready in a year. How about sending a set of them to a Saturn moon? Need bigger panels of course, and improved radios, but maybe send a Surveyor-style satellite up there also as a multipurpose mapper and relay? More solar expeditions? Venus has been neglected. replacement and maybe even return and refurbishing of some communications birds? There are plenty of projects.
8. Benefits; Regular routine launching gets everyone in the mode of a business-as-usual launch team. Practice makes perfect. Small problems should be detected and resolved. Obviously big problems get attention and maybe even a stand-down to work the problem. A multitude of small payloads spreads the potential loss, though in some cases I bet the vehicle is more expensive than the payload, if small science is a goal. And, and, maybe there builds pressure for more reusable vehicles. Routine launching makes the ISS easier to maintain, in a way, if you have regular smaller deliveries. Losing one doesn't hurt so much, and repairs can be done faster. Faster crew exchanges might be useful, especially if you just send a specialist up for a 3-week project, knowing they will be able to go back up in 6 months. You can work to improve experiments in a way you can't much do now with the expense and time needed to send up crew and equipment.
Can we hope there is some economy of scale? I'm not sure how important that is, since I think NASA should be getting a LOT more money, but I'm a space wonk.
Then again, maybe Rutan and Branson team up and make a servicable small payload launch version of the White Knight, and we get competition.
Thinking this through, NASA could probably do a lot of launches with not too much problem. And we could build or rebuild a few pads...
Re:SSTO (Score:2, Interesting)
If we built and launched just one Super Orion we would never have to send anything but people into space again. And if we sent enough people up, that wouldn't be a requirement so much as a nice-to-have. Launching 3 million tons of cargo anywhere in the solar system would instantly create a space-based production capability and we'd never have to look back.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/updated-project-orion-nuclear-pulse.html
Re:What a bunch of crapola (Score:3, Interesting)
I do know SpaceX considered it enough of a problem that they preferred having multiple launch sites (Kawelejian, Omelek, Vandenberg). AFAIK they were all but kicked out from Vandenberg, allegedly because authorities were concerned an exploding Falcon 1 would drop on top of the Atlas V launch pad. Had they not those extra launch sites, they would probably be out of business by now. It remains to be seen if there will not be trouble with them launching Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral... AFAIK there is a Delta IV pad in there.
Re:We are not rocket scientists, obviously. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I closed my post pointing out that the White Knight project could become competitive. And yes, other commercial ventures might come out if there was the opportunity to compete for launches.
But the money is merely a choice. NASA is a small part of even the minimal Federal budget, not counting the current expansion thereof.
And when you complain that I ignore the commercial launch industry, then earlier in your post you point out that Atlas and Delta are commercial designs. I suspect we could agree that as EELVs, they are old and inefficient designs, save for their reliability. Heavy, un-reusable, old school in a way that costs more. But they are well understood and reliable, so long as you remember to use the right software load and rulers.
I distinguish between Atlas and Atlas-Centaur on the basis of payload. They are indeed both Atlas on the bottom. How old is that vehicle design? Didn't I watch Atlas launches in the Mercury program?
The money is an investment, on par with healthcare and roads. We made incredible progress because of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs. Something similar would take at least 15 years to complete, and would leave behind a relatively huge science infrastructure that would change the world again. Those engineers would be the ones solving pollution, energy, and transportation problems for the world. Unless other nations do this, and then we might finally end up buying the really cool stuff from someone else. I want MAKE and SELL the realy cool stuff. Not iPods, but ultra high efficiency personal vehicles. Not personal computing, but massively parallel processing power for the masses. Not the next MRI machines, but telesurgery. Not wind farms, but thorium reactors. Not sustainable agriculture, but completely portable agriculture.
We learn how to make those things not by going back to the Moon, but by going to Mars, by building a second ISS, by making space travel routine, by solving problems we don't have right now with techniques and technology that we can't quite imagine now.
But we need that imagination. Do we, as a nation, possess that imagination any more?