Ranting and Roaring

For your edification, here are two well written articles on why we should continue with government space.

Discarding Shuttle: The Hidden Cost

The Once and Future Moon argues:

An often ignored but critically important issue is the supporting infrastructure for spaceflight. Thompson made the analogy that when people see a Shuttle Orbiter, they really are seeing just the “tip of an iceberg.” The Shuttle is more than an orbiter vehicle; it is also the servicing facilities at the Cape that process and prepare the orbiter for launch. It is the ET fabrication facilities at Michoud and the SRB plant at Promontory as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that has performed flawlessly over the 133 flights to date. It is the mobile crawler and the launch towers at Pad 39-A. And it is the trained cadre of people that put all the pieces together and make them work in concert to deliver and return people and equipment from space. Thompson rhetorically encompassed his argument thusly: The Shuttle is a “dumb vehicle that cost too much” but is a “fully functional part of a space transportation system – an 18-wheel, extended cab work vehicle.” He told the audience that Orion, Soyuz and Progress were more like “taxis” and “pickup trucks.” He said that the Constellation vehicles (chosen to implement the 2004 Vision) were bad decisions, followed on now by an even worse decision.

NASA’s future depends on spaceflight neophytes

Jay Barbree argues:

It’s not as if hiring the inexperienced was NASA’s only choice. For the same money spent on these commercial contracts, the space agency could have had a commercial U.S.-European rocket. It would have been provided by ATK Space Launch Systems, the builders of the space shuttles’ solid booster rockets; and by Astrium, the company that builds the liquid-fueled core stage of the European Ariane 5.
For the past 25 years, the space shuttle’s booster rockets have flown 214 times successfully. That’s 107 shuttle missions in a row, with two rockets for each. Meanwhile, France’s Ariane rocket has flown 41 times without a failure, and the hardware was originally designed to be human-rated — that is, cleared for flying astronauts. The Liberty rocket would have used NASA’s existing facilities at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, trimming back the costs of operation as well as the time needed for Americans to be riding their own spacecraft again.

The comments are fun in both articles.

Aviation week:

China’s space industry remains hopeful it can do business with the U.S., despite a renewed chill in relations. But executives at China Great Wall Industry Corp. are finding it hard to believe that California-based Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) is offering lower launch prices than they can.

[...]

Declining to speak for attribution, the Chinese officials say they find the published prices on the SpaceX website very low for the services offered, and concede they could not match them with the Long March series of launch vehicles even if it were possible for them to launch satellites with U.S. components in them.

SpaceX announced this week a new launcher, the Falcon Heavy. This baby can put 53,000kg into LEO which is twice what the Shuttle can do and just under half what the Saturn V could do back in the day. It uses two strap on boosters which cross-feed to the center core which means once they’re exhausted they drop away leaving the remaining center booster fully fueled. This size vehicle could be used a basis for manned lunar missions – using multiple launches. Hell, it could be used for manned Martian missions though I’m holding out personally for VASIMR.

It’s interesting that a company without too deep a launch history is announcing this type of product. As previously noted, one of the primary benefits of light launchers is you get to do lots of them with the efficiencies of an assembly line. True, the engines are mostly the same – an upgrade – but how many launches in this weight class will there be? My explanation, for what it’s worth, is — besides “this is the Silicon Valley way” — is to preempt new Big Government Launchers of which there is still a lot of political pressure for.