Ranting and Roaring

Here’s another piece of the of the launch vehicle puzzle: using orbital fuel depots. There’s a long and interesting PDF here on this topic (via here) but allow me to summarize, as you’re hopefully finding this interesting as an overview of what’s going on in human space and aren’t too worried about the entirely hypothetical details.

This again gets into the heart of the debate of do we launch of few Saturn V-type “heavy lift” (called HLV) or do we do a lot more lighter launches – you can read my overview and editorial on the topic here.

The idea is to create a “gas station in space” – the orbital fuel depot. Spacecraft needing to head to the Moon, Mars, the astroids, or just looking to have the tanks topped up can go to the depot and refuel. Humans can be sent to space using light reliable launchers – light, because they don’t need to carry all the fuel for their mission on board; reliable, because they are being built, tested and launched on a regular basis. Independently, fuel is delivered to to the depot in inexpensive launchers – inexpensive, because they don’t need to be “human rated” because in the worst case scenario you’re just losing fuel and a rocket and because theoretically there will be competition to do refueling missions.

The big unknown of course is refueling in orbit, but we do have a lot of experience now with orbital rendezvous, space stations, and assembly.

Slight tangentially, you’ve also decoupled possible causes of failure of missions (i.e. failure related to carrying the fuel weight and failure of the crew vehicle) and something’s itching the back of my brain that this is the most important thing, that there’s some sort of N^2 or NlogN effect for failure on complicated systems.

There’s another take on NASA, that is, of essence it is simply a way of doling out money to corporate welfare bums (that’s a little Canadianism for my American friends). If you’d like to read a lengthy article on what Congress wants NASA to do for heavy launch here it is (from the weekend, my take on where launch is going). Short form: spend money on existing contractors, there shall be less of that money, and they need to do more with it. But it has to be on existing contractors.

If you’ve been away from space for a while, here’s what might be launching Americans into space in the next decade.

Falcon 9

From sometimes Canadian, South African & American Elon Musk‘s company Space X. Musk is a PayPal alumni and Tesla Motors co-founder - remember that latter company name for future trivia questions and/or a remake of Back to the Future. After several successful launches on their Falcon 1 rocket, Space X successfully orbited a wheel of cheese last year on the Falcon 9. Space X has a ~$2 billion contract with NASA for delivering stuff to the International Space Station.

The Falcon 9 is a two stage LOX/Kerosene rocket using 9 Merlin engines on the first stage and a single Merlin engine on the second stage. The Falcon 1 also used a Merlin engine, the business idea being (as I understand it) that standardizing around reliable parts & technologies will lead to greater business efficiencies rather than trying to optimize the hell out of everything (for example, by using toxic monopropellents or LH2).

There’s a Heavy Lift version of the Falcon 9 called the Falcon Heavy which looks like the Falcon 9 with two more lower stages strapped on for a total of 27 Merlin engines.

The Falcon 9 can send 10K+ kg to LEO, the Falcon Heavy 32K kg. In contrast, the Shuttle can send 53K kg to LEO and the Saturn V 120K kg, so “Heavy Lift” is all relative I suppose.

Atlas V

The Atlas V is made by United Launch Alliance (= Lockheed Martin + Boeing). Kerosene + LOX going through Russian (!) built engines in the first stage. 24 launches, 23 of them successful and other 1 mostly kinda sorta successful.

These are traditional big government space companies, but with an excellent track record and commercial experience so there’s almost certainly a future for this platform.

10K – 32K kg to LEO, about the same as Falcon 9.

Liberty Launch Vehicle

The new boy on the block (I just found out about this one today). It’s basically a European Ariane 5 on top of top of a 5-segment Shuttle solid rocket booster in a “corndog” configuration. I’m skeptical (and not only me) because:

• it’s not really a Shuttle SRB, it’s a new thing that’s longer,
• ATK (i.e. Morton Thiokol of Challenger explosion fame) and Ariane are basically geared around selling to government, not industry, and
• it might be just a way of resurrecting Ares I/Constellation … and associated jobs.

Here’s more:

• Video
• Space.com
• Spaceflight Now (note references to other NASA plans to reuse 5-segment SSRBs)

DIRECT

I’m just mentioning DIRECT for fun. Soylent Green is made of people, DIRECT is made of Shuttle. It ain’t going to happen — the production lines have been winding down for years and while reuse is cool, no one wants stuff that’s complicated and blows up. They’ve made a company though – it even has a one page website.

A Quick Editorial

I believe the future of manned space will be along the path of Falcon 9 / Atlas V. The two keys to affordability are mass production and maximizing the benefit of fixed costs. Mass production is simple: one you start factory-lining Model Ts, you reach a whole market that could never sit in a hand-built Rolls Royce. For fixed costs, consider: no matter if 4 or 52 Shuttle flights are launched a year, NASA is still paying for the land, facilities and permanent staff to run that operation — what changes is the fraction you get to divide into the cost of each flight.

If inexpensive light- and medium-lift rockets are the future, how do we get to the Moon, to Mars and outwards, all of which have been pushed on the basis of Saturn V/Ares V platforms? Assembly. NASA has decades of experience of putting things together in orbit and will have plenty of time on its hands when it gets out of the launch business.

In manned space, NASA traditionally has two sides: the Wernher von Braun-launch types and the Houston capsule/payload-types. The first part has been mastered to an engineering art and it’s time to move on.

If you’re planning to be the next Twitter, here you go:

Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?

• The CTO / Lead Architect – your “Howard Roarke” technology perfectionist
• VP Engineering – your quality perfectionist
• Program Manager – the person who syncs the technology with the business — the sales team, the website, etc.
  

I’ll stick to my contention however that you should never hire anyone who volunteers that they want to be “the architect”. What are you, to lazy to build something yourself?

Totally unsolicited advice for RIM. This is what happens when you go to BlackBerry App World when you visit from a Mac. This is f*cking insane, fix it:

I’ve been playing with Task Avenue (actually “Task Ave.” I think but whatever), an iPhone application created by Matt Rintoul, Satish Kanwar, Brian Gilham, Nathan Garvie, and Tony Wallace during Startup Weekend last fall.

Unsolicited and out of nowhere, here are a few random suggestions:

Where?

The application prompts for two things when create a new task – what you want, and where do you want to find it.

The first item unavoidably has to be filled in, but it seems to me the second one should be optional. In particular, it should default to “Near Me Now” (which should be always in the Bookmarks too) but there should be a way in the settings of selecting a previously filled in location as the default. The first time I used it I just added in “Toronto, ON” because it was easy to do, but there’s not great mouth appeal here to brand new users.

What?

Task Avenue could add a “Bookmarks” option to the What field, giving a history of previous items tasked.

Social Connections with Facebook

For what this app does, there seems to be a natural fit for it with Facebook. In particular, I’d suggest the following features:

• allow the Task list to be shared amongst several Facebook friends. In particular, I’m thinking that this will mostly be a family/household/boyfriend-girlfriend type app rather than a personal thing, so there’s real utility to be had here
• allow the Task list to be seen and modified on Facebook. Teh awesome.
• perhaps post status reports to the user’s wall as a way of socially promoting Task Avenue. “David remembered to pick up the Milk”-type status reports. Some privacy issues may be here (“David forgot to pick up the condoms?”) but I think this would be fun.

Addendum: no-one wants or needs another social network to manage.

There’s a very interesting article in AirSpaceMag about the Mojave Air & Space Port, which is sort of a startup park for space companies. Lots of interesting reading about what’s going on in commercial space that you haven’t probably heard about yet.

Things mentioned:

• Friends of Amateur Rocketry – space nerd club with high-explosives-related licenses. You want to join this.
• Lynx – a commercial suborbital horizontal takeoff & landing rocketplane by XCOR, basically in the same space as Virgin Galactic
• Garvey Spacecraft Corporation - commercial launcher of microsatellites
• Xombie and Xaero – reusable vertical takeoff & landing (intention-to-be-)suborbital/microgravity rockets by Masten Space Systems — cool video of Xombie here
• Firestar Technologies - NOFBX – non-toxic mono-propellent startup
• Spaceport America – a competing location to Mojave

Mark Cuban’s 3 Do Or Die Tips For Startups — kinda of a good list, especially (for me) the first two points:

1. Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.
2. Find your weaknesses before competitors do.
3. The best startup capital is ‘sweat equity.

Read the whole thing here.