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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• it was a few degrees clockwise of where I was expecting it (N rather than NNW). Must be the geographical vs. magnetic north pole issue.
• I used this tool to give me the exact time
• It was bright, very bright: magnitude -6; the best you get is -8
• I didn't wake up Trinity-Anne because she's feeling a little ill (aren't we all these days?) but next time for sure. We were looking at Orion, the Plaides and the heads of Gemini last night at midnight when she got up for a few minutes.