Why NASA Rejected Lockheed Martin's Jupiter For Commercial Resupply Services 2 (fool.com) 36
MarkWhittington writes: Recently, NASA rejected Lockheed Martin's bid for a contract for the Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) program as being too expensive. CRS-2 is the follow-on to the current CRS program that has SpaceX and Orbital Systems sending supplies to the International Space Station. Motley Fool explained why the aerospace giant was left behind and denied a share of what might be $14 billion between 2018 and 2024. In essence, Lockheed Martin tried to get the space agency to pay for a spacecraft that would do far more than just take cargo to and from the International Space Station.
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quick poll: bang or not?
The summing up is rather incorrect. (Score:3)
'$10000/lb - in fact it costs a lot more'.
This is misleading - the costs quoted are for an entire developed system and sending it to ISS where it will also dock and return cargo.
This is the difference between someone delivering 10 tons of sand to a dock on the other side of the country, and bagging it nicely in their own truck, and delivering it to your desk.
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You managed to make a car analogy out of this. Luckily, I was able to decipher your meaning by referring back to the original story. On Slashdot, that is hard to do. Almost as hard as driving a Cadillac through the eye of a needle, if you get my drift.
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Drifting a Cadillac? That sounds tough...
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Nope, the ass of those old Cadillac Eldorados house-boats breaks lose pretty easy.
Pigs get fat... (Score:2)
Reminds Me of This "Parable" (Score:4, Funny)
THE KING'S TOASTER
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob and a lever.
"What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said.
The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"
The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself'. The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface.
When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat, and they all lived happily ever after.
Horrible Article (Score:4, Insightful)
So half of it sounds like Lockheed Martin whining that they lost the contract, even though as the biggest aerospace company they should have won. The writer either changed his mind halfway through and decided they deserved the loss, or just copied the first half verbatim from Lockheed Martin's press release.
The other half is based on ignoring the word "development". Sure, the marginal cost to send a pound of stuff to space is about $10K. The cost to design a system to do so is considerably greater, particularly when you're developing not one, but three systems, for redundancy.
And then he caps it off with "maybe we should just build a space elevator?", like the only reason we haven't done so is because it would cost too much, and certainly not because of the immense engineering challenges.
Re:Horrible Article (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how government contract awards go. Losers whine and if the RFP hasn't been properly documented, vetted and scored then bidders can and have overturned decisions. It can even wind up in court based on federal procurement laws. In some cases fraud or collusion is involved while in others despite having an open process, a selected bidder can have an easier path through the process. The latter being the collusion part. For example a department writes an RFP and it goes out to bid for a new computer system that must be natively compatible with IBM's iSeries. Let's count how many bidders there may be.
This is how you get overly priced items built for the government. It drowns in paper and bureaucracy including the annual "spend the budget" fun of summer where government agencies spend unused money on anything and everything because they don't want to risk the upcoming fiscal year budget. Rather than waving or giving the budget back to the treasury they'll spend it on anything they can.
In reading the TFA it sounds like Lockheed did indeed come up with an overpriced system that had features that NASA didn't want. In reasonable cases that'd be it but all of the government contractors, not just aerospace, know how to game the system to the determent of all US taxpayers. It'll be fun to see if this gets dragged out. Fortunately there's two years until the next contract period and if Lockheed ultimately wins, the current contract holders will probably get paid at an escalated rate to deliver resupply missions because it'll be in their contracts as well since it's outside the agreed upon contract duration.
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a new computer system that must be natively compatible with IBM's iSeries.
Funny you should mention that. Way back when we wanted to replace an ageing System/36, we wanted to preserve the significant investment in the application code. Only Wang and IBM were in the running - Wang's system ran the '36 code by re-compiling the source into their own binary code, and IBM obviously bid an AS400. The final prices were (in my mind) suspiciously close. One of those two bidders had a mole in the competition.
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yeah, you could always guarantee that on those kinds of RFPs somebody had too much information. At a private company, we had a bid out for a replacement for an NAS/6 mainframe so IBM came in and bid a 3083 at twice the price of what National Advanced Systems (Hitachi) came back with. When a board member heard about awarding it to NAS, he became upset since he was a former IBM guy. He convinced the board not to approve the funding and buy IBM. That 3083 was a big piece of shit but we had the foresight to
This article is just a poor, unsubtle advert (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a crappy article. It says that Lockheed Martin should have "by all rights" won the contract, even though it then admits that their bid was the highest and was just a way to get NASA to fund their own private goal to build a space tug, which NASA doesn't want and can't afford. And then to bring up a space elevator as though it's a reasonable, inexpensive alternative? What in the hell?
Of course, it caps off with this, and it's then obvious that they just spent a couple minutes summarizing articles from other sites so they could add in their own advertising to it:
Wow, it's just like a good 30% of the spam I regularly get.
The Motley Fool is a pump and dump house (Score:3)
It used to be interesting counter-wall street advice way, way back. Now it's just click bait ads for pump and dump schemes to make them rich.
Not that the ad and click-bait has anything to do with the article, but knowing who "wrote" meant that it was clear nothing of value or insight would be written on those pages.
Mission Creep (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the idea of a space tug that can refuel and move satellites in orbit, but this role seems to be at odds with bringing cargo to the ISS which is the goal of the CRS(2) contracts.
From what I understand the plan goes like this: On the first flight Jupiter (the tug) and Exoliner (the cargo vessel) go up together, once they are in orbit Jupiter adjusts the orbit to reach the ISS, after the cargo is offloaded and garbage is loaded Jupiter puts Exoliner on a path to burn up in the atmosphere while it itself stays in orbit to pick up the next Exoliner that's launched alone, as well as other tug duties.
So the problem as I see it is this:
For a tug you'd probably want a much more efficient ion drive to avoid refueling often, fuel boiling off and the like, you probably want the robotic arm that grabs on to wayward satellites.
For supply deliveries you probably want liquid engines because some of the supplies and experiments are perishable and can't afford to wait the weeks or months it would take an ion engine to boost them to ISS orbit.
And the grabby arm is redundant mass because the ISS has its own arm that's quite proficient at berthing other vehicles like the Dragon or Cygnus.
So it looks like a compromise of design that's intended to get NASA to pay with the cargo delivery contract for unrelated functionality.
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Except that it's really hard to change the direction of an orbit. As in lots of fuel hard. If you send it up to dock with ISS, it's on the ISS orbit. To change it to, say, a polar orbit would require it to cancel much of the eastward orbital velocity, while adding velocity toward a polar orbit, and all the time still moving at the same "horizontal" speed to stay on orbit. (Going up and down in the same orbit isn't a problem, though.) So you have to choose your orbit while you go up, or bring a lot of extra
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Depends on how patient your are. A solar powered ion thruster and a couple of years can do it. That said, you probably wouldn't use the same tug for ISS related work and pulling down errant satellites. You would think carefully about which sats you wanted and work from there.
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No. No it doesn't. An inclination change requires a basic amount of delta-V for a give orbital altitude. It's done at apoapsis for maximum delta theta for a given delta V. Making a change at periapsis will be the most expensive place to change.
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I don't think so, most of your energy budget is spent just getting to any orbit. Changing inclination is trivial because it's a zero-work manoeuvre as momentum is conserved, one burn starts you changing inclination and it continues until you do a breaking burn. Changing altitude is expensive because you have to accelerate out of the gravity well.
ISS is orbiting at 409 km - 416 km with an orbital inclination of 51.65 degrees and orbital period of 92.69 minutes, a Molniya orbit is inclined 63.4
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Most of the energy is spent getting to orbital speed, not getting the necessary altitude. Changing the inclination of the orbit is expensive in energy.
It's not just a quick burn and the orientation starts to change; that's more like spaceship altitude. You have to change the velocity (defined as speed with direction).
Say you're in an equatorial orbit, so your velocity vector points along the equator. Now you want to get into a polar orbit, in which the velocity vector is at right angles to your orig
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Most of the energy is spent getting to orbital speed, not getting the necessary altitude.
Changing the inclination of the orbit is expensive in energy.
Orbital speed and altitude are functional, if you want to increase altitude, you just accelerate to a higher speed, changing speed takes work in orbit. On the moon you can orbit just inches above the highest obstacle in your path.
In orbit you frame of reference is the center of gravity of the Earth
to change inclination, Newton's First law applies
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A rule of thumb for orbital mechanics: the spacecraft will return to where it was, in position and velocity, as of the last velocity change (unless it runs into something). (If there's other bodies exerting significant gravity, this isn't true, but it's close enough in LEO.)
Therefore, without loss of generality, take a satellite in equatorial orbit at 5 miles/second and fire a burn to the south, delta-V 1 mile/second. This changes its velocity by adding a northward component to the eastward velocity.
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Therefore, without loss of generality, take a satellite in equatorial orbit at 5 miles/second and fire a burn to the south, delta-V 1 mile/second. This changes its velocity by adding a northward component to the eastward velocity. It is now in a stable orbit, same as if it had been launched. The orbit is not going to move without further acceleration, and it's nowhere near a polar orbit.
What you are not getting is deltaV = acceleration; under Newtonian Physics things don't accelerate [study.com] unless acted upon by a force [wikipedia.org]. When something faster it is accelerating, when something goes slower it is still an acceleration.
When you start your burn your velocity vector is 5mi/S.( 0 degrees),
finish your burn your velocity is 5mi/S.0degrees + 1mi/S.90 degrees which = 5.099mi/S.11.31degrees
15 seconds later your velocity is still 5mi/S.0degrees + 1mi/S.90 degrees which = 5.099mi/S.11.31degr
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Delta-V is acceleration times time.
Your calculations show that a delta-V of one-fifth of the original velocity moves the orbital inclination by 11.31 degrees, which isn't real impressive. If you want to make a 90-degree change, you need about 1.4 times the original velocity, which is better done by landing and getting sent up again on another rocket.
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15 seconds later your velocity is still 5mi/S.0degrees + 1mi/S.90 degrees which = 5.099mi/S.11.31degrees, therefore you have 0 deltaV (delta = change), i.e. your velocity has not changed, but your moving to port at a steady 1 mi/s or 15 miles during that time period.
then
15 seconds later your velocity is still 5mi/S.0degrees + 1mi/S.90 degrees which = 5.099mi/S.11.31degrees, therefore you have 0 deltaV (delta = change), i.e. your velocity has not changed, but your moving to port at a steady 1 mi/s or 15 mil
Awww Lockheed Martin doesn't get overruns for once (Score:2)
Given how Lockheed Martin seems completely incapable of bringing in ANY project on time or budget it is fitting that they not be awarded any new contracts -yes I can dream anyway, especially with NASA where they simply don't have the option of asking for billions of extra dollars to cover bullshit overruns like the F-35 has seen.
Nor can NASA afford to overspend on a project like the F-35 that cannot actually DO what it was designed to do.
This company would be a criminal enterprise under normal circumstances