Anybody get a kick out of Spacex's success with the Dec 8 flight test of Falcon-9/Dragon? I kinda think that's the next generation of manned spaceflight, and for cargo, especially bigger payloads. This thing is roughly equivalent to the old Saturn-1. It's a heavy lifter.
They did good with the test. "Steely-eyed missile men" indeed, the way they handled the cracked engine skirt.
The other I'd like folks to take a look at is XCOR and their "Lynx" suborbital spaceplane. HTO/HL single stage from the runway. I predict it'll fly in about 18 months or so. What makes it work safely is the engine. It has high performance, yet it has lifetime characteristics resembling traditional aircraft engines. That's another piece of the future of human spaceflight.
The Next Generation of Human Spaceflight
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GW Johnson
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Yeah, Elon was apologizing in the post-flight for incoherence due to a blown mind, from success "almost too good" to be true.
He then went on to tout the Dragon as able to do everything Orion could have, plus make ballistic atmospheric entry to Mars, which would crisp Orion (more advanced heat shielding). Someone mentioned the $4bn for Orion and the $0.4bn for the entirety of the Falcon/Dragon development. Elon was diplomatic and didn't follow up too much, except one comment that that seemed like a lot of money for Orion.
He then went on to tout the Dragon as able to do everything Orion could have, plus make ballistic atmospheric entry to Mars, which would crisp Orion (more advanced heat shielding). Someone mentioned the $4bn for Orion and the $0.4bn for the entirety of the Falcon/Dragon development. Elon was diplomatic and didn't follow up too much, except one comment that that seemed like a lot of money for Orion.
Help Keep the Planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 Output!
Global Warming = More Life. Global Cooling = More Death.
Global Warming = More Life. Global Cooling = More Death.
And XCOR is sweet, but "sub-orbital" isn't really "almost orbital". That last step is a biggie. As is the re-entry at 5X the velocity.
Speaking of re-entry, SpaceX is working towards 1st-stage recovery. Musk thinks they're on track in the next 2-3 years, and made a REAL strong point of emphasizing that it was crucial to routine space access. I was quite surprised about how vehement he was. Re-usable 1st stages make that much difference to the cost structure? Could be.
Speaking of re-entry, SpaceX is working towards 1st-stage recovery. Musk thinks they're on track in the next 2-3 years, and made a REAL strong point of emphasizing that it was crucial to routine space access. I was quite surprised about how vehement he was. Re-usable 1st stages make that much difference to the cost structure? Could be.
Help Keep the Planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 Output!
Global Warming = More Life. Global Cooling = More Death.
Global Warming = More Life. Global Cooling = More Death.
Yes, me, me, me!Anybody get a kick out of Spacex's success with the Dec 8 flight test of Falcon-9/Dragon?
I watched almost every launch live and I was so happy with their success this time!
The launch was so perfect, it looked almost unreal. The flight and landing of Dragon was also great.
It was good to see Elon being so happy too. He is a very "real" guy, I like that.
Link update.
Quote from GIThruster:
"For your consideration, here again is a paper on the TRITON thruster.
http://www.engineeringatboeing.com/data ... 4-3863.pdf
"
That link is now dead.
Here's a good one.
http://www.pwrengineering.com/dataresou ... 4-3863.pdf
"For your consideration, here again is a paper on the TRITON thruster.
http://www.engineeringatboeing.com/data ... 4-3863.pdf
"
That link is now dead.
Here's a good one.
http://www.pwrengineering.com/dataresou ... 4-3863.pdf
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria
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GW Johnson
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Spacex may or may not ever solve first stage recovery and reuse. I hope they do, but at about 10% or less inert weight in the stage, it's pretty fragile for ocean impact, parachutes notwithstanding. That's not a high-pressure solid like the shuttle SRB's, that's a relatively low-pressure liquid tank. It's a whole lot weaker structure. Even the SRB's got bashed and dented sometimes.
Plus, there's saltwater immersion issues with the engines and any structure they do choose to reuse. That's not a trivial issue, by any means.
And, at sea recovery ain't cheap. It's labor intensive and requires a good-sized boat.
Plus, there's saltwater immersion issues with the engines and any structure they do choose to reuse. That's not a trivial issue, by any means.
And, at sea recovery ain't cheap. It's labor intensive and requires a good-sized boat.
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
McGregor, Texas
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CaptainBeowulf
- Posts: 498
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Yes, glad to see a decent sized commercial rocket (as opposed to the "commercial" state design firm EELVs) work well. Hopefully they'll establish a market share and revenue stream which will allow them to undertake more aggressive plans of the type that Lock-Mart, Boeing and NASA have talked about for decades but never done.
However, I really wouldn't expect TSTO aerospike vehicles or the like for another couple of decades. The margins in the space industry aren't that big. Their revenue stream will only be sufficient for incremental improvements that may add up to something revolutionary after a while.
I still think that a DIRECT style derivative of the SSTS should be pursued by NASA to satisfy heavy launch requirements for the next two or three decades. Let commercial learn by doing small and medium, and launching 3-7 person manned capsules to the space station.
However, I really wouldn't expect TSTO aerospike vehicles or the like for another couple of decades. The margins in the space industry aren't that big. Their revenue stream will only be sufficient for incremental improvements that may add up to something revolutionary after a while.
I still think that a DIRECT style derivative of the SSTS should be pursued by NASA to satisfy heavy launch requirements for the next two or three decades. Let commercial learn by doing small and medium, and launching 3-7 person manned capsules to the space station.
Yeah, if it ever gets finished in that time.I still think that a DIRECT style derivative of the SSTS should be pursued by NASA to satisfy heavy launch requirements for the next two or three decades.
The big problem is that congress wants to lowe the investment in commercial crew and cargo transport in order to build a heavy lifter that has no purpose and will cost an order of magnitude more.
I thought it was AWESOME !!!!!GW Johnson wrote:Anybody get a kick out of Spacex's success with the Dec 8 flight test of Falcon-9/Dragon? I kinda think that's the next generation of manned spaceflight, and for cargo, especially bigger payloads. This thing is roughly equivalent to the old Saturn-1. It's a heavy lifter.
They did good with the test. "Steely-eyed missile men" indeed, the way they handled the cracked engine skirt.
The other I'd like folks to take a look at is XCOR and their "Lynx" suborbital spaceplane. HTO/HL single stage from the runway. I predict it'll fly in about 18 months or so. What makes it work safely is the engine. It has high performance, yet it has lifetime characteristics resembling traditional aircraft engines. That's another piece of the future of human spaceflight.
I look forward to a great future of human space flight.
As Brian H. pointed out up-thread, SpaceX developed the Falcon1, 9, 9H and Dragon on a budget of 400 million USD. To put that in perspective, that is the cost of 2.67 F-22 Raptor fighters.CaptainBeowulf wrote:I still think that a DIRECT style derivative of the SSTS should be pursued by NASA to satisfy heavy launch requirements for the next two or three decades. Let commercial learn by doing small and medium, and launching 3-7 person manned capsules to the space station.
80% of a complete space program (neglecting some infrastructure), for 2.67 fighter jets...
Why on Earth should GNDN (oops, sorry, NASA) be trusted with a single development program ever again? Give Musk another 300 million and tell him to develop his 80 tonnes to LEO "BFR"/ Eagle 7. Or offer a prize Ansari style, and let the competitors self-finance. Time to kill NASA and turn its remnants into the National Aerospace Laboratory and a glorified adjunct to the FAA.
Vae Victis
I watched the launch three times on various websites. Very awesome achievement - I particularly like the bit of last-minute 'rocket surgery'... I'm feeling a little better about the future of space travel now, despite Congress' recent attempt to bloat SLS...
...
However, I cannot overlook the foolishness of those who let themselves get carried away and spout nonsense about killing NASA. Apparently not even a lengthy speech from Elon Musk himself about NASA's extensive and invaluable aid and the "shoulders of giants" and all that stuff can prevent people from treating SpaceX as some kind of messiah showing up out of nowhere and pulling off all that they've done completely from scratch for a few hundred mill.
It's true that a young private company headed by a space nut who doesn't prioritize profits tends to be more efficient than a half-century-old government bureaucracy. But there are things the government can do that a private, for-profit company simply cannot attempt.
NASA has spent the last five years or so heroically attempting to realize an abominably bad rocket design that was imposed on them from above by an egotistical administrator and his hand-picked cronies. The engineers in the trenches are not to blame for this - remember, it was mostly those same engineers that were behind DIRECT...
It is also notable that NASA did not have rocket design experience when it started Ares I. SpaceX, on the other hand, was composed largely of the best and brightest across the industry, and lots of them did have such experience. And they still screwed up numerous times (something I think NASA should be a little less afraid of, BTW). NASA should do a lot better the second time around, especially since the rocket they're trying to design will make a lot more sense this time...
As for Orion, it was forced through seven or eight major redesign cycles because of Ares I. It would have been under budget and ahead of schedule if it weren't for the Stick, and the comparison with Dragon would not be nearly so clear-cut (partly because Orion would be a lot more capable than it is now...).
[Also, Dragon doesn't have a service module... probably shouldn't be the bulk of the expense, but still...]
It is certainly reasonable to maintain that NASA should be gotten out of the launch business, and I'm not completely sure I disagree. But killing the whole thing?
The problems with NASA are starting to shake out. Griffin and a number of his cronies are gone, and MSFC is using their brand-new buzzword - "affordability" - as if no one's ever heard of it before. This is a really stupid time to start talking about killing it.
If they botch SLS, that's another story - but even then, such drastic measures would be excessive and probably bad for the nation in the long run... there are intermediate solutions...
...
$300M to develop a super heavy!? I don't think you people fully understand the disparity in scale between what SpaceX has done and what is required for SLS.
Elon Musk has stated that SpaceX could build a super heavy lifter for $2.5B in development funds and $300M/flight (Jim on nasaspaceflight.com, an EELV man with a reputation for almost never being wrong, refers to these as "fantasy numbers"). This does not include an upper stage upgrade, which is necessary if you want an EDS.
ULA seems to believe that they could build Atlas V Phase II for about $3B. This does not appear to include the upper stage (ACES-41, also known as EELV Phase I), which they price at about $3.5B. It also does not include man-rating and support for human spaceflight. Per-flight costs have been estimated at several hundred million a pop, though that may be pessimistic...
NASA should be able to come up with a Shuttle-derived super heavy for around $8-10B, including all the necessary support for human spaceflight, and also including sustainment and modification costs for the systems and infrastructure being carried over. In fact it's a full-wrap cost, which I suspect the other two are not. Again, this does not include an upper stage, which would be about $4B more, though the core alone has similar LEO capability to the Atlas Phase II with ACES-41. Per-flight costs are flight-rate-dependent, but at the Shuttle's recent peak of 6 flights per year (which is not actually all that unreasonable), it'd be somewhere in the general vicinity of $400M per flight for the core, or ~$560M per flight with the big upper stage.
Sure, SpaceX would probably be cheaper, more efficient. But not by an order of magnitude or anything. IMO not by enough that NASA should risk their political support base on it, and certainly not by enough that NASA deserves to be nuked back to the mid-'50s.
For NASA to change its operating mode radically enough to use either Atlas V Phase II or the super heavy Falcon, it would have to spend between $3B and $11B in reorientation costs (Augustine, quoting NASA's estimate). As a result, it is conceivable that going with SpaceX could be more expensive overall than going with SDLV, even now. On the other hand, Elon seems to think that the most logical place to launch his super heavy from is LC-39, so maybe the cost of reorientation wouldn't be all that huge - but his project would have to bear the cost of sustaining LC-39, which I doubt is in the estimate...
...
And, of course, this success means nothing regarding ISS sustainment and resupply through 2012, except that the situation isn't even worse than we thought. (Which is good, because the situation was already pretty dire.) It's too late for Shuttle to continue, and Dragon cannot fill the gap. Nor can any of the other resupply craft; all of them combined, including Dragon, were supposed to act as additional capacity on top of the core Shuttle support. Griffin didn't care, of course...
Dragon can carry, according to Elon, about 3.5 mT of useful cargo to the ISS. Or seven astronauts, but the most that will likely switch out at one time is three or four, so it's not ultimately all that different from Shuttle in that respect (Shuttle needs four guys with fresh training to fly it, so it can usually only rotate three). Speaking solely in terms of pressurized cargo, one Shuttle+MPLM is roughly the equal of two and a half Dragons. The crew capability is another Dragon. Not to mention that Shuttle can carry more than an extra Dragon's worth of unpressurized cargo on the same flight as that MPLM. Shuttle would fly about five or six times per year in full swing; five Shuttles is 23 Dragons. Who here thinks Dragon will fly 18 COTS cargo flights and five crewed flights in 2012?
That's what I thought.
Not to mention that the Shuttle can carry items that Dragon can't, like large spares and ORUs. Dragon can't even carry standard ISS racks...
...yes, you heard me. Dragon can't carry racks. And it's the only spacecraft besides Shuttle with notable cargo downmass. Oops...
In case you don't think downmass is important... look what's happening with STS-135. It's stuffed to the gills going up and going down, and it's a notional flight that's only just been authorized; it's up to a year away from actually flying...
...oh, and if you use the price NASA is actually contracted to pay for cargo Dragon flights, it turns out that logistics using Dragon are not actually any cheaper than logistics using Shuttle (with the STS program in full swing, of course, which it's too late for now)... Hopefully the price will come down once they get into the swing of things, start recovering and reusing hardware, get lots of customers...
My point is, yes, SpaceX is really great, but certain people need to adjust their contrast knobs so the details don't get flattened to black and white...
...
However, I cannot overlook the foolishness of those who let themselves get carried away and spout nonsense about killing NASA. Apparently not even a lengthy speech from Elon Musk himself about NASA's extensive and invaluable aid and the "shoulders of giants" and all that stuff can prevent people from treating SpaceX as some kind of messiah showing up out of nowhere and pulling off all that they've done completely from scratch for a few hundred mill.
It's true that a young private company headed by a space nut who doesn't prioritize profits tends to be more efficient than a half-century-old government bureaucracy. But there are things the government can do that a private, for-profit company simply cannot attempt.
NASA has spent the last five years or so heroically attempting to realize an abominably bad rocket design that was imposed on them from above by an egotistical administrator and his hand-picked cronies. The engineers in the trenches are not to blame for this - remember, it was mostly those same engineers that were behind DIRECT...
It is also notable that NASA did not have rocket design experience when it started Ares I. SpaceX, on the other hand, was composed largely of the best and brightest across the industry, and lots of them did have such experience. And they still screwed up numerous times (something I think NASA should be a little less afraid of, BTW). NASA should do a lot better the second time around, especially since the rocket they're trying to design will make a lot more sense this time...
As for Orion, it was forced through seven or eight major redesign cycles because of Ares I. It would have been under budget and ahead of schedule if it weren't for the Stick, and the comparison with Dragon would not be nearly so clear-cut (partly because Orion would be a lot more capable than it is now...).
[Also, Dragon doesn't have a service module... probably shouldn't be the bulk of the expense, but still...]
It is certainly reasonable to maintain that NASA should be gotten out of the launch business, and I'm not completely sure I disagree. But killing the whole thing?
The problems with NASA are starting to shake out. Griffin and a number of his cronies are gone, and MSFC is using their brand-new buzzword - "affordability" - as if no one's ever heard of it before. This is a really stupid time to start talking about killing it.
If they botch SLS, that's another story - but even then, such drastic measures would be excessive and probably bad for the nation in the long run... there are intermediate solutions...
...
$300M to develop a super heavy!? I don't think you people fully understand the disparity in scale between what SpaceX has done and what is required for SLS.
Elon Musk has stated that SpaceX could build a super heavy lifter for $2.5B in development funds and $300M/flight (Jim on nasaspaceflight.com, an EELV man with a reputation for almost never being wrong, refers to these as "fantasy numbers"). This does not include an upper stage upgrade, which is necessary if you want an EDS.
ULA seems to believe that they could build Atlas V Phase II for about $3B. This does not appear to include the upper stage (ACES-41, also known as EELV Phase I), which they price at about $3.5B. It also does not include man-rating and support for human spaceflight. Per-flight costs have been estimated at several hundred million a pop, though that may be pessimistic...
NASA should be able to come up with a Shuttle-derived super heavy for around $8-10B, including all the necessary support for human spaceflight, and also including sustainment and modification costs for the systems and infrastructure being carried over. In fact it's a full-wrap cost, which I suspect the other two are not. Again, this does not include an upper stage, which would be about $4B more, though the core alone has similar LEO capability to the Atlas Phase II with ACES-41. Per-flight costs are flight-rate-dependent, but at the Shuttle's recent peak of 6 flights per year (which is not actually all that unreasonable), it'd be somewhere in the general vicinity of $400M per flight for the core, or ~$560M per flight with the big upper stage.
Sure, SpaceX would probably be cheaper, more efficient. But not by an order of magnitude or anything. IMO not by enough that NASA should risk their political support base on it, and certainly not by enough that NASA deserves to be nuked back to the mid-'50s.
For NASA to change its operating mode radically enough to use either Atlas V Phase II or the super heavy Falcon, it would have to spend between $3B and $11B in reorientation costs (Augustine, quoting NASA's estimate). As a result, it is conceivable that going with SpaceX could be more expensive overall than going with SDLV, even now. On the other hand, Elon seems to think that the most logical place to launch his super heavy from is LC-39, so maybe the cost of reorientation wouldn't be all that huge - but his project would have to bear the cost of sustaining LC-39, which I doubt is in the estimate...
...
And, of course, this success means nothing regarding ISS sustainment and resupply through 2012, except that the situation isn't even worse than we thought. (Which is good, because the situation was already pretty dire.) It's too late for Shuttle to continue, and Dragon cannot fill the gap. Nor can any of the other resupply craft; all of them combined, including Dragon, were supposed to act as additional capacity on top of the core Shuttle support. Griffin didn't care, of course...
Dragon can carry, according to Elon, about 3.5 mT of useful cargo to the ISS. Or seven astronauts, but the most that will likely switch out at one time is three or four, so it's not ultimately all that different from Shuttle in that respect (Shuttle needs four guys with fresh training to fly it, so it can usually only rotate three). Speaking solely in terms of pressurized cargo, one Shuttle+MPLM is roughly the equal of two and a half Dragons. The crew capability is another Dragon. Not to mention that Shuttle can carry more than an extra Dragon's worth of unpressurized cargo on the same flight as that MPLM. Shuttle would fly about five or six times per year in full swing; five Shuttles is 23 Dragons. Who here thinks Dragon will fly 18 COTS cargo flights and five crewed flights in 2012?
That's what I thought.
Not to mention that the Shuttle can carry items that Dragon can't, like large spares and ORUs. Dragon can't even carry standard ISS racks...
...yes, you heard me. Dragon can't carry racks. And it's the only spacecraft besides Shuttle with notable cargo downmass. Oops...
In case you don't think downmass is important... look what's happening with STS-135. It's stuffed to the gills going up and going down, and it's a notional flight that's only just been authorized; it's up to a year away from actually flying...
...oh, and if you use the price NASA is actually contracted to pay for cargo Dragon flights, it turns out that logistics using Dragon are not actually any cheaper than logistics using Shuttle (with the STS program in full swing, of course, which it's too late for now)... Hopefully the price will come down once they get into the swing of things, start recovering and reusing hardware, get lots of customers...
My point is, yes, SpaceX is really great, but certain people need to adjust their contrast knobs so the details don't get flattened to black and white...
Last edited by 93143 on Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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CaptainBeowulf
- Posts: 498
- Joined: Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:35 am
I agree with some things that 93143 said, but you are assuming that NASA will not overrun the projected costs for the heavy lifter, which it most likely will by a large margin. Also the operating cost of the shuttle and the future heavy lifter are what make this thing even more expensive. A huge standing army for a few flights a year is inefficient. It is better to fly more often with smaller payloads.
The ISS rack thing is news to me and I cant really see why that would be.
Personally I dont see any reason for a super heavy lifter like congress demanded (I consider this insane).
Congress only does that to make sure that the pork keeps going to the usual suspects like ATK...
The ISS rack thing is news to me and I cant really see why that would be.
Personally I dont see any reason for a super heavy lifter like congress demanded (I consider this insane).
Congress only does that to make sure that the pork keeps going to the usual suspects like ATK...
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rjaypeters
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