50 Years of Progress in Launcher Design

[93143]

Yeah, where Boeing has indicated that they will not continue the CST 100 development if NASA does not commit to at least a certain about of launches (with them) a year.

That's not what they said.

Besides, why should they? Boeing has no obligation to keep a crew capsule running if it isn't going to make them any money. This has nothing to do with cost plus or sole-source.

And Liberty was dead the moment NASA did not give them any CCDev funding this round.

That was pretty funny... but the fact is they were willing to compete in the same arena, under the same rules, as SpaceX, Boeing, SNC, etc.

...hmm. ATK is on the "interested parties" list for CPC...

No, it's time to fully fund NASA and try to shake some of the politics out.

What does "fully fund" mean? I am all for more money for science and NASA in particular, but I am for spending it well.

That's why I mentioned depoliticization. Certainly some areas of NASA need to internalize the idea of "affordability", which has been quite the buzzword around the SLS project for the past year or so. But NASA is underfunded for what it's supposed to be doing. HSF, science, aeronautics, all of it. Match the funding to the mission and let the engineers do their jobs.

Well take the JWST for instance. I think that they should have done a CCDev like contract for that.

Uh, no. Radically advanced one-off development projects like that are exactly what single-vendor cost-plus is for. There's no way to reliably predict the cost or schedule beforehand, so a fixed-price milestone-based project would rapidly become a train wreck. And paying multiple companies to do the same thing just multiplies the cost of the train wreck by the number of companies. NASA might have been able to run the program for a lot less than $8.8B, but it wouldn't have gotten a telescope out of it.

Now, there does appear to have been contractor malfeasance in connection with JWST, and I expect (I hope) there will be consequences. But a good chunk of the cost increase was simply fixed costs to keep the program going over an extended schedule; trying to fund multiple vendors would have made that considerably worse.

Well their RLV tech got further than anything NASA has ever attempted

...Shuttle?

Mercury Redstone was as much an RLV as anything SpaceX has ever gotten off the ground. IIRC they haven't managed to recover a nominally-intact first stage yet, never mind anything in good enough shape to refly. Their original plan for reuse was an abject failure, so they're changing tactics. I'm hoping they're successful too, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch...

The whole myth of the launch rate required to make an RLV pay of is of course a myth too. The launch rate is needed to get a return on the initial developent cost which is naturally higher for an RLV.

It also has to do with the cost of refurbishment and the significantly lower payload for the same launch infrastructure and ops requirements.

That however is of course much more relevant for a multi billion government programme with a giant development effort (full of fancy new technology) and a huge standing army to support it), than a slick and comparably low cost, efficient private development effort and operations like the one SpaceX is doing.

You have no idea what SpaceX will end up spending to make Falcon reusable. They're still feeling their way.

Skylon gets a lot of flak for its high development cost. This is probably because it's the only RLV program that has mapped out its development in sufficient detail to come up with an honest estimate.

SpaceX already is profitable with the launch rate that they have, being able to reuse at least part of the vehicle will only make that margin better, not worse.

Depends how much payload they lose, how much money they had to sink to make that part reusable, and how much it costs to turn that part around for reflight.

They do have an advantage in that their RLV is already flying as an ELV. This gives them an excellent baseline and fallback position, as well as a revenue stream. They have another advantage in that their boss cares more about the RLV than about the sunk money...

It is also pretty clear from the way the suborbital market has clearly developed that the market for space launches does increase when the prices come down far enough.

The tipping point for orbital launch is about $2500/kg ($800/lb in 1994). Above that, the market is inelastic.

People are so concerned about mass fractions, when the fuel only makes a completely negligible part of the cost of a rocket launch, e.g. 200,000 out of 50 million for the F9).

That's a fallacy. It's not the cost of the fuel that kills you - it's the cost of everything else. All else being equal, if you need a bigger rocket to do the same job it's going to cost more, and not because it uses more fuel.

The insight underlying Sea Dragon was that all else is not necessarily equal. Estimating cost based on dry mass only works for systems of comparable complexity and sophistication.

SLS is about fueling money to ATK. Shameless Shelby even bragged how he managed to insert the language into the NASA bill to make sure that they have to use ATK for the development of the SLS.

If I scratch your back, and you scratch mine, both our backs get scratched.

The 5-seg boosters were already nearly ready, and well suited to the task. Assuming SLS flies, they will do quite a good job of muscling the rest of the rocket through the maximum gravity and drag loss regimes. And the political support of the Utah delegation improves the chance that this thing will actually accomplish something useful.

Furthermore, the advanced booster competition is most certainly not a lock for ATK. It has been suggested (by an SLS worker, I believe) that the Block 1B idea of delaying the advanced boosters is good partly because it gives the liquid guys time to mature their proposals, balancing the playing field and making it less likely that the advanced boosters will be solids too...

VentureStar was an attempt at a reusable SSTO.

Waaayy to ambitious.

SLI was working on low-cost TSTO RLV technology. The SSTO was just higher profile. Like I said, SLI should never have been cancelled.

Personally I am annoyed with NASA after 30 years of broken promises I have come to the conclusion that they simply can not do it and I think it is time to try something else.

There have been a couple of bodges, but it seems to me that the main problem is that they are trying to work within an inadequate budget for politicians who change their goals every 4-8 years, often for no good reason.

A clean-sheet design - any clean-sheet design - would take considerably longer than SLS, and would lose a lot of political support. Furthermore, a clean-sheet MCD rocket would not have the technical history of Shuttle-derived, and thus not as much confidence in its reliability

This is all of course BS.
1. the shuttle was never save to begin with.

Even with the vulnerable spaceplane hanging off the side, it had one of the lowest failure rates of any rocket ever, and it was safer in its last years than ever before. Take away the spaceplane (and upgrade the engines to the far more robust Block III, as is the plan) and the reliability should be extremely good - there was only ever one LOM that resulted from a non-spaceplane-specific problem, and that problem was subsequently fixed. The fragile TPS and lack of a LAS has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical reliability of an inline SDLV.

2. Constellation was never fast to develop and the SLS is not either.

Constellation was slow because Ares I was a stupid idea. SLS is (relatively) slow because its funding is barely adequate to keep it alive.

3. SpaceX clearly shows that a clean sheet design can be done faster than anything NASA has ever attempted.

This is an egregious apples-to-oranges comparison, besides being inaccurate.

The long pole is usually engine development, and SLS doesn't have much of that (J-2X is basically good to go (ahead of schedule), the 5-seg boosters are basically good to go, and the SSME is good to go until such time as the Block III simplifications can be implemented). Even without brand-new engines, from-scratch development generally takes longer than modification of an existing design. True MCD could potentially mitigate this due to simplicity, but SpaceX doesn't do true MCD...

If you're going to use the word "ever", you're going to have to acknowledge that SpaceX took about the same amount of time from inception to first launch of the Falcon 9 (with extensive help from NASA) as NASA took from Kennedy's speech to Armstrong's boot print. Apples to oranges...

4. The EELVs have a pretty decent flight history. You can launch crew on them and launch the cargo separately. That is what should be done anyway. It simplyfies operations enormously, since you dont have to worry about failures as much for the pure cargo flights. That makes everything cheaper.

The EELVs are neither clean-sheet nor MCD. They're actually quite expensive, though their technical history means they are pretty reliable.

5. The EELVs would actually be capable of doing a BEO mission. There are several studies about this, both by NASA and Boeing. They were held back for political reasons, but some senators like Rohrabacher got really annoyed about this and have been making some noise. Look it up!

I don't need to look it up. I've been aware of this for years, and the held-back study thing was hard to miss. SLS still has some operational advantages, supports a high-rate program better (not that such a program looks real likely right now), and is somewhat more Mars-forward (go Elon/Bond/Park/Woodward), but for low-rate lunar or NEA exploration the EELVs work fine. Mind you, it's still not cheap; you can't use them as is, and you still need spacecraft (Orion etc.). You also need to convince the Air Force to let you mess with their launchers. More importantly, the politicians don't seem to want to fund it.

It appears that ACES is going ahead anyway, and NASA is looking into the technology for their CPS... we may get DIRECT yet...

If we go to the moon again, we should do it to stay there and never leave. For this we need to have the cost low enough that it stays underneath the political radar. Otherwise it will get cancelled like Apollo did.

SLS plus Orion plus infrastructure plus L2 gateway plus reusable lander plus lunar base could be less than 0.2% of the current federal budget, maybe a lot less. SLS itself could be maintained for perhaps 0.04-0.05% of the budget. How cheap does it have to get to stay under the radar?

Mars is the same issue.

I'm not in favour of a rush to Mars.

For an architecture like that, the most crucial thing is to make access to LEO affordable and routine. The SLS is not contributing anything to that and thus is worthless, at least at this point in time (though I think it is generally worthless).

That's not the point of NASA exploring space. SLS is not a goal; it's a tool. Private industry is supposed to follow in NASA's footsteps, taking what NASA proved was possible and making it profitable. NASA's attempt at making LEO access affordable and routine ended with SLI. An SLS-based exploration architecture should be eminently affordable for the United States. If Congress wants to slash NASA to the point where it isn't, that's their problem, and switching launchers would not necessarily help, because it would just eliminate NASA HSF's remaining base of support.

Look, I'm not arguing that SLS is the best idea ever. But you're painting everything black and white with a very broad brush, and frankly I'm getting kinda tired of it...

[93143]

Essentially, SpaceX is flying a robust/quality R-7/Soyuz, the most reliable rocket family in human history.

Uh, no. They both use kerosene, but that's the only similarity. The Merlin has nothing to do with the RD-107/108/117; it owes more to the Fastrac and possibly the RS-84.

Besides which, the Soyuz is definitely not the most reliable rocket family in human history. It is the most flown rocket family in human history, with the Soyuz-U demonstrating a roughly 3% failure rate over more than 700 flights, about twice the failure rate of STS.

Shuttle was an attempt at an RLV, but it became obvious pretty fast that it had failed. Every flight essentially required near-remanufacture of the SSMEs and SRBs. If anything, I'm saddened NASA didn't quietly dump the orbiters and shift to Shuttle-C plus a capsule after Challenger. But they just couldn't give up on that "reusable" cachet.

Shuttle offered unique capabilities that Shuttle-C plus capsule couldn't replace. We're just now starting to realize how much we can't do any more without it. Does the name Kevin Holleran ring a bell?

It's a real shame Shuttle was cancelled when it was. It should have been replaced with a better system long ago, but to string it out this long and then cancel it with nothing in place, gambling with the ISS in the process, right when the SSME's long upgrade history was finally about to culminate in something like what the engine was originally intended to be...

scamjets

Har har. Never heard that one before.

SSTO seems obvious. It just doesn't work well enough to justify the huge development cost. Throw-aways are cheaper; this is counter-intuitive, and offends the 'Green/recycle' mentalities in place for decades, but its true.

You do NOT know this. No one ever tried hard enough to prove it. Skylon looks very promising, and Aerojet's thrust-augmented nozzle technology seems to solve three of the key problems with VentureStar in one fell swoop...

NASA's job is to fly rockets. Pushing boundaries should be the job of the national labs.

...wut.

You can't possibly be serious.

SLS isn't about lowering launch costs. It's about scientific study of the moon, asteroids, and Mars, and risk retirement for private-sector BEO operations.

Disagree. SLS is about GETTING to the Moon and perhaps beyond. Only when we're there can the science happen. The vehicle does not equal the mission. Arctic science using nuclear RTGs can be put in place by dog-sled teams, and you're still doing good science. You just aren't looking sexy while doing it. But NASA hasn't been able to look sexy since Apollo-12. Even back then, the complaint was that NASA made going to the moon look boring. Accept that.

Plainly you didn't understand what I was saying. Accept what?

The vehicle does not equal the mission. Why do you care what SLS looks like, so long as it does what it's supposed to? Cheap doesn't matter. Fundable matters.

NASA isn't pursuing any launch vehicle philosophy; they just want something that works and is fundable.

Disagree. NASA has been trying for "knockout-impressive" designs since Apollo, and always disappointing. A decades-long track record of over-promising and under-performing does not impress. :(

You're not even listening any more.

NACA was retired when justified, and a large part of me thinks its time for NASA to tread that path as well.

NACA was folded into NASA. We call it the Aeronautics division now, and it has continued to advance the state of commercial aviation, its economic effect paying for its research budget many times over. But it's starving on only half a billion a year; it needs a boost to get back to its historical levels.

[Skipjack]

That's not what they said.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articl ... le-376515/

That was pretty funny... but the fact is they were willing to compete in the same arena, under the same rules, as SpaceX, Boeing, SNC, etc.

No, they never were. They were hoping that their political connections would give them a free ride.
The moment they got notice tthat they were not selected they ran off pouting and the project was dead.

which has been quite the buzzword around the SLS project for the past year or so

SLS and affordability dont got together in a sentence

Radically advanced one-off development projects like that are exactly what single-vendor cost-plus is for. There's no way to reliably predict the cost or schedule beforehand, so a fixed-price milestone-based project would rapidly become a train wreck. And paying multiple companies to do the same thing just multiplies the cost of the train wreck by the number of companies. NASA might have been able to run the program for a lot less than $8.8B, but it wouldn't have gotten a telescope out of it.

Which is of course nonsense. You pay the companies for reaching milestones. They dont reach the milestones, they dont get paid. No trainwreck.
Cost plus bidding usually means that the companies bidding waaaay underbid compared to the cost that they themselves are anticipating. They simply assume that they will just keep going over budget once the project is running.
It is a HORRIBLE way to do business.

...Shuttle?

Calling the shuttle an RLV is IMHO a bit of a stretch...
Refurbishable would be a more fitting term.

Mercury Redstone was as much an RLV as anything SpaceX has ever gotten off the ground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJb3Onc ... r_embedded
It is only a suborbital demonstrator, but NASA did not even manage to dot hat in the past 30 years. No, I dont count the shuttle. I simply wont.

It also has to do with the cost of refurbishment

Which is what I also meant.

and the significantly lower payload for the same launch infrastructure and ops requirements.

The payload of the (at least partially) reusable Falcon9 will not be that signifficantly decreased compared to F9 1.0, due to the much improved payload of F9 1.1. They are profitable with F9 1.0. Reusability will make that even more so. Dont forget that since they can always spend their savety margins for the save return. If they need the savety margins, they will simply write it off as an expendable stage. This is the advantage of their concept. I am sure they expect loosing a lot of the stages, especially in the beginning. That is OK though. They would have lost them anyway, if they were not reusable at all.

You have no idea what SpaceX will end up spending to make Falcon reusable. They're still feeling their way.

Well, I do already know what they have right now for how much money and that is MUCH better than what NASA ever got in return for their cost plus programmes.

Skylon gets a lot of flak for its high development cost. This is probably because it's the only RLV program that has mapped out its development in sufficient detail to come up with an honest estimate.

No, Skylon is that expensive because it requires a LOT of new developments that simply dont exist yet. This is state of the art research work and I think it is great, but I would not just see it as the cost for an RLV. The technology they develop is much more far reaching and has much broader implications for the future.

Depends how much payload they lose, how much money they had to sink to make that part reusable, and how much it costs to turn that part around for reflight.

True, but we can guess some of these things from the developments that they have done to date.

They do have an advantage in that their RLV is already flying as an ELV. This gives them an excellent baseline and fallback position, as well as a revenue stream. They have another advantage in that their boss cares more about the RLV than about the sunk money...

Agreed with that.

The tipping point for orbital launch is about $2500/kg ($800/lb in 1994). Above that, the market is inelastic.

They think that they can get it way below that even. Also good reference is the suborbital market. Many claims about its inelasticity were made and were all proven wrong.

That's a fallacy. It's not the cost of the fuel that kills you - it's the cost of everything else.

Which is my point.

All else being equal, if you need a bigger rocket to do the same job it's going to cost more, and not because it uses more fuel.

I dont think that it is that signifficant of a difference. The number of engines stay the same compared to the expendable counterpart F9 1.1. The tankage is the same.
The reusable F9 will not be bigger (or only slightly bigger) than the F9 1.1, but it will have the payload of the F9 1.0 maybe a bit below that.
Remember that the F9 1.0 has plenty of margins for profitability.
They will already have everything in place for the F9 1.1. So they wont have to spend much extra on that. It is a win win.

The insight underlying Sea Dragon was that all else is not necessarily equal. Estimating cost based on dry mass only works for systems of comparable complexity and sophistication

I never liked the concept.

The 5-seg boosters were already nearly ready, and well suited to the task.

I have not seen a single testflight of them. The Ares1X was a 4 segment booster, not a 5 segment one. IIRC, testing of the 5 segment boosters did not continue until after the SLS deal was ready.

SLI was working on low-cost TSTO RLV technology.

I cant remember that one. The only thing I remember was the X33 and that was waaaay to ambitious (as usual) and of course a cost plus programme. I was soo upset that they cancelled the DC-XA project for that, even though it had been at a much more advanced stage.
The whole X33- Venture Stat thing was a joke. The wings got larger and larger and the payload was put into an outboard pod because they could not get the thing right.
The reusable Falcon 9 is much closer to the DC-X in its design philosophy, though more conservative. I think that SpaceX will enventually go SSTO one day down the road. But until then they do small incremental improvements and tons of experimental and flight experience, which is the right way to do it.

There have been a couple of bodges, but it seems to me that the main problem is that they are trying to work within an inadequate budget for politicians who change their goals every 4-8 years, often for no good reason.

I think that the procurement is part of the problem. The other problems are of political nature and too high set goals. Learn how to walk before you run. You dont have to have a heavy lift RLV as the first RLV!

Even with the vulnerable spaceplane hanging off the side, it had one of the lowest failure rates of any rocket ever, and it was safer in its last years than ever before. Take away the spaceplane (and upgrade the engines to the far more robust Block III, as is the plan) and the reliability should be extremely good - there was only ever one LOM that resulted from a non-spaceplane-specific problem, and that problem was subsequently fixed. The fragile TPS and lack of a LAS has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical reliability of an inline SDLV.

No escape system, lack of abort modes, no engine out capability...
Plenty of things that made the whole thing unsafe. The allege safety came at a huge cost too. All not worth it.

SLS is (relatively) slow because its funding is barely adequate to keep it alive.

The funding is more than adequate. The contractors are simply ripping the government off.

This is an egregious apples-to-oranges comparison, besides being inaccurate.

How?

The long pole is usually engine development, and SLS doesn't have much of that (J-2X is basically good to go (ahead of schedule), the 5-seg boosters are basically good to go, and the SSME is good to go until such time as the Block III simplifications can be implemented).

Then where is it?!!!

If you're going to use the word "ever", you're going to have to acknowledge that SpaceX took about the same amount of time from inception to first launch of the Falcon 9 (with extensive help from NASA) as NASA took from Kennedy's speech to Armstrong's boot print. Apples to oranges...

Cost?!

The EELVs are neither clean-sheet nor MCD. They're actually quite expensive, though their technical history means they are pretty reliable.

Still cheaper than the shuttle and the SLS and they do already exist. Cant get any sooner than that.

SLS plus Orion plus infrastructure plus L2 gateway plus reusable lander plus lunar base could be less than 0.2% of the current federal budget, maybe a lot less. SLS itself could be maintained for perhaps 0.04-0.05% of the budget. How cheap does it have to get to stay under the radar?

Cheap enough for an average american to be able to dream going there himself one day (of course only few would make it, but at least some would). The SLS wont do that. Anything else wont inspire people anymore.

NASA's attempt at making LEO access affordable and routine ended with SLI.

Yeah, too bad it did. I think they should do a CCDev like thing with the goal of an RLV after CCDev has run its course. Scrap the SLS and fund that with the money saved from that. That would be what I would do.

[Skipjack]

That's not what they said.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articl ... le-376515/

That was pretty funny... but the fact is they were willing to compete in the same arena, under the same rules, as SpaceX, Boeing, SNC, etc.

No, they never were. They were hoping that their political connections would give them a free ride.
The moment they got notice tthat they were not selected they ran off pouting and the project was dead.

which has been quite the buzzword around the SLS project for the past year or so

SLS and affordability dont got together in a sentence

Radically advanced one-off development projects like that are exactly what single-vendor cost-plus is for. There's no way to reliably predict the cost or schedule beforehand, so a fixed-price milestone-based project would rapidly become a train wreck. And paying multiple companies to do the same thing just multiplies the cost of the train wreck by the number of companies. NASA might have been able to run the program for a lot less than $8.8B, but it wouldn't have gotten a telescope out of it.

Which is of course nonsense. You pay the companies for reaching milestones. They dont reach the milestones, they dont get paid. No trainwreck.
Cost plus bidding usually means that the companies bidding waaaay underbid compared to the cost that they themselves are anticipating. They simply assume that they will just keep going over budget once the project is running.
It is a HORRIBLE way to do business.

...Shuttle?

Calling the shuttle an RLV is IMHO a bit of a stretch...
Refurbishable would be a more fitting term.

Mercury Redstone was as much an RLV as anything SpaceX has ever gotten off the ground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJb3Onc ... r_embedded
It is only a suborbital demonstrator, but NASA did not even manage to dot hat in the past 30 years. No, I dont count the shuttle. I simply wont.

It also has to do with the cost of refurbishment

Which is what I also meant.

and the significantly lower payload for the same launch infrastructure and ops requirements.

The payload of the (at least partially) reusable Falcon9 will not be that signifficantly decreased compared to F9 1.0, due to the much improved payload of F9 1.1. They are profitable with F9 1.0. Reusability will make that even more so. Dont forget that since they can always spend their savety margins for the save return. If they need the savety margins, they will simply write it off as an expendable stage. This is the advantage of their concept. I am sure they expect loosing a lot of the stages, especially in the beginning. That is OK though. They would have lost them anyway, if they were not reusable at all.

You have no idea what SpaceX will end up spending to make Falcon reusable. They're still feeling their way.

Well, I do already know what they have right now for how much money and that is MUCH better than what NASA ever got in return for their cost plus programmes.

Skylon gets a lot of flak for its high development cost. This is probably because it's the only RLV program that has mapped out its development in sufficient detail to come up with an honest estimate.

No, Skylon is that expensive because it requires a LOT of new developments that simply dont exist yet. This is state of the art research work and I think it is great, but I would not just see it as the cost for an RLV. The technology they develop is much more far reaching and has much broader implications for the future.

Depends how much payload they lose, how much money they had to sink to make that part reusable, and how much it costs to turn that part around for reflight.

True, but we can guess some of these things from the developments that they have done to date.

They do have an advantage in that their RLV is already flying as an ELV. This gives them an excellent baseline and fallback position, as well as a revenue stream. They have another advantage in that their boss cares more about the RLV than about the sunk money...

Agreed with that.

The tipping point for orbital launch is about $2500/kg ($800/lb in 1994). Above that, the market is inelastic.

They think that they can get it way below that even. Also good reference is the suborbital market. Many claims about its inelasticity were made and were all proven wrong.

That's a fallacy. It's not the cost of the fuel that kills you - it's the cost of everything else.

Which is my point.

All else being equal, if you need a bigger rocket to do the same job it's going to cost more, and not because it uses more fuel.

I dont think that it is that signifficant of a difference. The number of engines stay the same compared to the expendable counterpart F9 1.1. The tankage is the same.
The reusable F9 will not be bigger (or only slightly bigger) than the F9 1.1, but it will have the payload of the F9 1.0 maybe a bit below that.
Remember that the F9 1.0 has plenty of margins for profitability.
They will already have everything in place for the F9 1.1. So they wont have to spend much extra on that. It is a win win.

The insight underlying Sea Dragon was that all else is not necessarily equal. Estimating cost based on dry mass only works for systems of comparable complexity and sophistication

I never liked the concept.

The 5-seg boosters were already nearly ready, and well suited to the task.

I have not seen a single testflight of them. The Ares1X was a 4 segment booster, not a 5 segment one. IIRC, testing of the 5 segment boosters did not continue until after the SLS deal was ready.

SLI was working on low-cost TSTO RLV technology.

I cant remember that one. The only thing I remember was the X33 and that was waaaay to ambitious (as usual) and of course a cost plus programme. I was soo upset that they cancelled the DC-XA project for that, even though it had been at a much more advanced stage.
The whole X33- Venture Stat thing was a joke. The wings got larger and larger and the payload was put into an outboard pod because they could not get the thing right.
The reusable Falcon 9 is much closer to the DC-X in its design philosophy, though more conservative. I think that SpaceX will enventually go SSTO one day down the road. But until then they do small incremental improvements and tons of experimental and flight experience, which is the right way to do it.

There have been a couple of bodges, but it seems to me that the main problem is that they are trying to work within an inadequate budget for politicians who change their goals every 4-8 years, often for no good reason.

I think that the procurement is part of the problem. The other problems are of political nature and too high set goals. Learn how to walk before you run. You dont have to have a heavy lift RLV as the first RLV!

Even with the vulnerable spaceplane hanging off the side, it had one of the lowest failure rates of any rocket ever, and it was safer in its last years than ever before. Take away the spaceplane (and upgrade the engines to the far more robust Block III, as is the plan) and the reliability should be extremely good - there was only ever one LOM that resulted from a non-spaceplane-specific problem, and that problem was subsequently fixed. The fragile TPS and lack of a LAS has nothing whatsoever to do with the hypothetical reliability of an inline SDLV.

No escape system, lack of abort modes, no engine out capability...
Plenty of things that made the whole thing unsafe. The allege safety came at a huge cost too. All not worth it.

SLS is (relatively) slow because its funding is barely adequate to keep it alive.

The funding is more than adequate. The contractors are simply ripping the government off.

This is an egregious apples-to-oranges comparison, besides being inaccurate.

How?

The long pole is usually engine development, and SLS doesn't have much of that (J-2X is basically good to go (ahead of schedule), the 5-seg boosters are basically good to go, and the SSME is good to go until such time as the Block III simplifications can be implemented).

Then where is it?!!!

If you're going to use the word "ever", you're going to have to acknowledge that SpaceX took about the same amount of time from inception to first launch of the Falcon 9 (with extensive help from NASA) as NASA took from Kennedy's speech to Armstrong's boot print. Apples to oranges...

Cost?!

The EELVs are neither clean-sheet nor MCD. They're actually quite expensive, though their technical history means they are pretty reliable.

Still cheaper than the shuttle and the SLS and they do already exist. Cant get any sooner than that.

SLS plus Orion plus infrastructure plus L2 gateway plus reusable lander plus lunar base could be less than 0.2% of the current federal budget, maybe a lot less. SLS itself could be maintained for perhaps 0.04-0.05% of the budget. How cheap does it have to get to stay under the radar?

Cheap enough for an average american to be able to dream going there himself one day (of course only few would make it, but at least some would). The SLS wont do that. Anything else wont inspire people anymore.

NASA's attempt at making LEO access affordable and routine ended with SLI.

Yeah, too bad it did. I think they should do a CCDev like thing with the goal of an RLV after CCDev has run its course. Scrap the SLS and fund that with the money saved from that. That would be what I would do.

[Skipjack]

Oh and I think that NASA should be developing new technologies that should then be licensed to american companies using it to supply NASA with rockets and spacecraft, etc. Just dont pack a technology development programme into a space launch programme. They should be kept separate.

[93143]

You're all over the place. I'm not sure I need to respond to a lot of this.

I was familiar with the information in both your links. Boeing did not say what you claimed they said. And it's not at all clear to me that Grasshopper did in fact leave the ground (those supports seem to have a fair amount of play), though I admit I was overly absolute in my haste to make a point.

Besides, Mercury Redstone did that exact thing one time. It wasn't supposed to, but it did...

You pay the companies for reaching milestones. They dont reach the milestones, they dont get paid. No trainwreck.

Okay, a car wreck. Unless you actually want the telescope and keep trying to goose things after it's plain you aren't going to get one without more money. Furthermore, I seriously doubt there is any company that would take a contract like that for a job like that in the first place.

The whole point is that you cannot tell in advance what it will take to finish the project. And the company probably isn't going to sink loads of their own cash into it because it doesn't result in a profitable system; their only source of revenue related to the project is the fee.

(On the other hand - I don't believe you are aware of this - usually companies working on NASA space probes don't try very hard to profit from it; they're prestige projects, that people work on because they want to.)

You talk as though cost-plus contracts grow in cost solely because of greed on the part of the contractor. It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that a large part of the cost growth (perhaps all of it in some cases) is due to underestimation, and a firm fixed-price contract would have to either use a much larger initial amount (with obscene growth margins added to account for uncertainty) or court failure. This is not like CCDev, where the contractors are all trying to do something that is well understood due to having been done repeatedly in the past.

Multiple contractors only makes matters worse. Unless you downselect very early, you're going to multiply a substantial fraction of the cost by the number of contractors.

The funding is more than adequate. The contractors are simply ripping the government off.

You have no evidence of this whatsoever. I think you vastly underestimate the impact of government bureaucracy, not to mention the much greater size (in multiple ways) of this project compared with Falcon 9, and the amount of existing infrastructure that has to be carried through.

The EELVs burn well over a billion dollars a year in fixed costs, within spitting distance of SLS, and they're nowhere near as big.

Also on the subject of government bureaucracy, the way NASA typically runs these contracts gives them a lot of insight/oversight (though they're trying to be less onerous about it this time around), so if they were getting ripped off you'd think they'd notice...

Besides, with SpaceX around it's a lot harder to pretend that this stuff inherently costs a lot more than it actually does...

You could be right, but you don't get to state it as fact without evidence.

The long pole is usually engine development, and SLS doesn't have much of that.

Then where is it?!!!

It just started development last year. Take a freaking Ritalin...

Projects like this have a cost floor below which you can't get anything done; it's all you can do to keep the doors open and the paper studies flowing. I'm pretty certain SLS is fairly close to that floor. Despite that, they're already past SRR/SDR and pushing for PDR next year, and Boeing is into subcontractor procurement for the core stage.

Actually, NASA as a whole is fairly close to that floor... part of it is inefficiency on NASA's part, but a lot of it is just plain underfunding. And even a lot of the inefficiency isn't NASA's fault so much as it comes with being a government agency...

Oh and I think that NASA should be developing new technologies that should then be licensed to american companies using it to supply NASA with rockets and spacecraft, etc. Just dont pack a technology development programme into a space launch programme. They should be kept separate.

NASA has provided considerable knowledge transfer to SpaceX in addition to the funding. Blue Origin too, I believe. And all of NASA's work over the past half century is available to anyone who wants it. That's what they're there for.

I'm all for them doing more of it...

One thing I want to see (which is a bit different from your recommendation in a couple of ways) is an attempt at an SSTO using Aerojet's TAN technology. It seems made for SSTO - it does altitude compensation without compromising vacuum Isp, it substantially enhances the available throttle range, it's the easiest way I know of to produce a tripropellant engine (reducing required tank volume), and I believe it significantly improves engine T/W at liftoff. And the X-33 program did develop a lot of the technology that would be necessary to build the vehicle, though perhaps Skylon's structural design ideas should be looked at too. No private company seems interested in trying it, though...

No, I dont count the shuttle. I simply wont.

There's really not much point discussing things if you're going to be that pigheaded.

I don't suppose you're aware that they haven't had to rebuild the engines after every flight for quite some time?

Besides, I've wasted several hours of prime Ph.D. research time on this thread, and it needs to stop.

[Teahive]

Besides, I've wasted several hours of prime Ph.D. research time on this thread, and it needs to stop.

Your comments are much appreciated, so I hope you don't consider the time entirely wasted.

[93143]

Thanks for that. I tend to get a bit of a contra mundum feel from these efforts, which would be bad enough even if my opponent were entirely and obviously wrong, and of course he's not...

[Skipjack]

Boeing did not say what you claimed they said.

Yes they did say exactly that, read the fracking link!

And it's not at all clear to me that Grasshopper did in fact leave the ground (those supports seem to have a fair amount of play), though I admit I was overly absolute in my haste to make a point.

Yes, 6 feet. It is not much, admittedly, but it is only the first test. There will be many to follow and probably some setbacks too...

Besides, Mercury Redstone did that exact thing one time. It wasn't supposed to, but it did...

And that is relevant how?

The whole point is that you cannot tell in advance what it will take to finish the project.

Nonsense! So you have never gotten a quote from a contractor that was not revised during the project? I have never paid more than what I was quoted for. Aerospace is in no way different than any other project.

And the company probably isn't going to sink loads of their own cash into it because it doesn't result in a profitable system; their only source of revenue related to the project is the fee.

I am sure one can vary the details of the contracts depending on the project. Most important part is milestone based payments, fixed cost!

You talk as though cost-plus contracts grow in cost solely because of greed on the part of the contractor. It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that a large part of the cost growth (perhaps all of it in some cases) is due to underestimation, and a firm fixed-price contract would have to either use a much larger initial amount (with obscene growth margins added to account for uncertainty) or court failure. This is not like CCDev, where the contractors are all trying to do something that is well understood due to having been done repeatedly in the past.

Oh, come on! It is well known that companies bidding on large cost plus government contracts purposely underbid in order to get the go ahead (and the political support for the project) knowing that they can simply overrun the cost later. There was a pretty good article about that in relation to the JWST. I will have to try to find it again. It also talked about all the inefficiencies within NASA often caused by the differences in management between the NASA centers.
And building telescopes is quite well understood.
Of course if you have NASA micromanaging every small aspect of the whole thing with 20 NASA engineers having to sign off on everything, costs go up. That is why CCDev worked so well. NASA had a much smaller role in this. I think it is a good role model for how things should be done.

Multiple contractors only makes matters worse. Unless you downselect very early, you're going to multiply a substantial fraction of the cost by the number of contractors.

Didnt happen with CCDev.

You have no evidence of this whatsoever. I think you vastly underestimate the impact of government bureaucracy, not to mention the much greater size (in multiple ways) of this project compared with Falcon 9, and the amount of existing infrastructure that has to be carried through.

Oh yes, I do. There is plenty of that.
Yes government bureucracy is a problem, which is to a large extent due to the contract model.

Also on the subject of government bureaucracy, the way NASA typically runs these contracts gives them a lot of insight/oversight (though they're trying to be less onerous about it this time around), so if they were getting ripped off you'd think they'd notice...

You dont know how deep the political rott goes...

Besides, with SpaceX around it's a lot harder to pretend that this stuff inherently costs a lot more than it actually does...

Yes and people are slowly waking up. ULA is having trouble getting the large block buy contract that they have been lobbying for.
Real libertarian politicians Rohrabacher and Gasser are demanding answers regarding the need for certain mega projects in the light of potentially much cheaper (and better) alternatives and they openly critizise the political swamp that is feeding money to certain lobbies.
I am sure ATK is just fine with the SLS never making it into space. They make plenty of money until then, just like they did with Constellation. Same with Lockmart and thei capsule.

It just started development last year. Take a freaking Ritalin...

I thought it was all ready to go? The current schedule is for unmanned flights when again? Remind me please?

Projects like this have a cost floor below which you can't get anything done; it's all you can do to keep the doors open and the paper studies flowing. I'm pretty certain SLS is fairly close to that floor. Despite that, they're already past SRR/SDR and pushing for PDR next year, and Boeing is into subcontractor procurement for the core stage.

Which is why they are a problem.

NASA has provided considerable knowledge transfer to SpaceX in addition to the funding. Blue Origin too, I believe. And all of NASA's work over the past half century is available to anyone who wants it. That's what they're there for.

I'm all for them doing more of it...

Yeah, but so much was lost with the projects they cancelled. I hear about the scrapping of the metalic TPS for the X33. How can such a thing happen? Anyway, NASA is of course doing things like these, but it should focus even more on that and less on actually building and designing rockets. That should be done by companies like SpaceX.

One thing I want to see (which is a bit different from your recommendation in a couple of ways) is an attempt at an SSTO using Aerojet's TAN technology. It seems made for SSTO - it does altitude compensation without compromising vacuum Isp, it substantially enhances the available throttle range, it's the easiest way I know of to produce a tripropellant engine (reducing required tank volume), and I believe it significantly improves engine T/W at liftoff. And the X-33 program did develop a lot of the technology that would be necessary to build the vehicle, though perhaps Skylon's structural design ideas should be looked at too. No private company seems interested in trying it, though...

Because of the myth that there is no market! And then there is also the unfair competition from government sponsored sole source cost plus contracts. And the myth that RLVs cant be done, just because NASA never could do them (which is another thing that makes me mad).
I think that if SpaceX manages to make an RLV, even a reusable first stage, the flood gates will open and we will see a lot more competition and innovation in the industry.

I don't suppose you're aware that they haven't had to rebuild the engines after every flight for quite some time?

They did in the beginning and they still needed a lot of maintenance after every flight. The tiles were also a major nightmare. The boosters were basically just empty shells. The actual rocket engine is in the solid fuel, which is why they are so expensive. Then you have the huge tank that is wasted. The horrible vertical integration, etc, etc.
The shuttle was a bad design, period.

[Skipjack]

And the pork keeps flowing! Proofs my point again. A space infrastructure with cheap routine flights to LEO is the most important thing. It could not only save NASA money, but also the airforce. That means more money for other things.
http://www.spacenews.com/military/12100 ... t-ula.html

[paperburn1]

And the pork keeps flowing! Proofs my point again. A space infrastructure with cheap routine flights to LEO is the most important thing. It could not only save NASA money, but also the airforce. That means more money for other things.
http://www.spacenews.com/military/12100 ... t-ula.html

I agree the 800 pound gorilla is cheap to low eart orbit. Arthur c Clarke wrote a very interesting book called "Half way to everywhere" It was about how cost to LEO affected everything.

[Skipjack]

I agree the 800 pound gorilla is cheap to low eart orbit. Arthur c Clarke wrote a very interesting book called "Half way to everywhere" It was about how cost to LEO affected everything.

Clever man that

[93143]

Boeing did not say what you claimed they said.

Yes they did say exactly that, read the fracking link!

I had read that article before you posted your link. They DID NOT say what you claimed they did. If you can't tell the difference, that's your problem.

And it's not at all clear to me that Grasshopper did in fact leave the ground (those supports seem to have a fair amount of play), though I admit I was overly absolute in my haste to make a point.

Yes, 6 feet. It is not much, admittedly, but it is only the first test. There will be many to follow and probably some setbacks too...

As I said, there was significant play in the supports, and it isn't clear that it actually completely lost structural contact with the ground. When I made my initial comment, I was under the impression that it hadn't, but it may have.

This is splitting hairs. You can rage all you like, but Shuttle was much more of an RLV than Grasshopper, which is only a testbed for reusable first stage technology. This makes your original statement incorrect... not that this matters terribly. These discussions of ours have a tendency to explode beyond any reasonable scope...

Besides, Mercury Redstone did that exact thing one time. It wasn't supposed to, but it did...

And that is relevant how?

It's funny.

I didn't pick Mercury Redstone for that reason, but I recalled afterward that it had in fact performed a virtually identical maneuver at one point. The unit turned out to be reusable with some minor refurbishment (though it was never actually reused; it's on display).

The whole point is that you cannot tell in advance what it will take to finish the project.

So you have never gotten a quote from a contractor that was not revised during the project? I have never paid more than what I was quoted for. Aerospace is in no way different than any other project.

We're not talking about replacing a door frame here. There are projects that are well understood up front, and there are projects that aren't. For the latter, it often happens that the only viable contracting mechanism is cost-plus. JWST falls into this category, because it required loads of cutting-edge tech development. It was impossible to accurately predict the cost or schedule.

It is well known that companies bidding on large cost plus government contracts purposely underbid in order to get the go ahead (and the political support for the project) knowing that they can simply overrun the cost later. There was a pretty good article about that in relation to the JWST.

Among NASA's unmanned probes, JWST seems to be basically the only example of such a dramatic overrun. Cost plus usually works pretty well unless the project is mismanaged.

Cost plus saves money in most cases like this. A fixed-price contract would have to be inflated up front to cover contingencies; cost-plus allows you to only pay for contingencies that actually crop up.

And building telescopes is quite well understood.

...if that's the level of understanding you're at, it's no wonder your views are so simplistic.

Multiple contractors only makes matters worse. Unless you downselect very early, you're going to multiply a substantial fraction of the cost by the number of contractors.

Didnt happen with CCDev.

Yes, it did. This is trivially obvious. They're paying more than one company to do the same thing.

You dont know how deep the political rott goes...

Rank handwaving. You're just going on what the blogs and mainstream media say, as you so eloquently proved last time I accused you of it...

I thought it was all ready to go?

I said the engines were "basically good to go". See the difference? There's still testing to be done, but development is basically over for J-2X and RSRMV, and the bulk of the RS-25E program was done almost a decade ago when they were calling it the SSME Block III. Also, we don't need the J-2X right away, if ever. We don't even need the RS-25E right away, since the RS-25D is still available, not to mention the existing leftover units...

Falcon 9 took five years to go from first public announcement to first flight, despite the fact that the engines (which had been in development for a while) were ready three years before that first launch. Atlas V Heavy is essentially just taking two extra cores (that were already designed for this) and bolting them onto the central core, and the advertised lead time is 30 months. This stuff takes time.

Projects like this have a cost floor below which you can't get anything done; it's all you can do to keep the doors open and the paper studies flowing.

Which is why they are a problem.

Any organization that has to pay for stuff to get things done has a structural cost below which it can't accomplish anything.

Everything SpaceX does is a "project like this". They keep the floor as low as they can, and thus far their NASA funding and revenues, plus a bit of money from Musk himself and some private investors, have been sufficient to keep them above the floor and working briskly. The floor has been rising, but that's because they need corporate resources to do what they plan to do.

I hear about the scrapping of the metalic TPS for the X33. How can such a thing happen?

Nothing else had a low enough ballistic coefficient to use it. It's not like the knowledge was thrown away.

Because of the myth that there is no market!

I know of no such myth. The market problem is real (otherwise the last big "commercial space" push wouldn't have fizzled), but it's not simply a question of it not being there. The real reason is probably that a reusable SSTO would be an expensive endeavour with a dubious technical outcome, and no private company is willing to take the risk.

I don't suppose you're aware that they haven't had to rebuild the engines after every flight for quite some time?

They did in the beginning and they still needed a lot of maintenance after every flight.

The Block III wouldn't have.

The tiles were also a major nightmare. The boosters were basically just empty shells. The actual rocket engine is in the solid fuel, which is why they are so expensive. Then you have the huge tank that is wasted. The horrible vertical integration, etc, etc.

Boeing had come up with a much more robust tile material, which had begun to be integrated. Somebody had come up with a much more robust carbon-carbon leading edge material, which is used on the X-37. The solids were designed for a high flight rate (high fixed cost, low incremental cost), which was never achieved, partly due to problems that only became apparent after the solids were picked. They tried to go to liquid boosters at least once. The ET was a small fraction of the incremental cost of a launch; it was basically a glorified drop tank. As for the "horrible" vertical integration, I suspect you have no reason for your opinion other than the fact that SpaceX doesn't do it that way.

Hmm... ATK seems to have come up with a set of process improvements that slash the manufacture time for the 5-seg boosters by almost half...

The shuttle was a bad design, period.

Considering what it was required to do, and the available experience and technological level at the start of the program, combined with the lack of hindsight, I'm going to have to disagree. The Shuttle was a good first try. So good, in fact, that NASA never got a second kick at the can; everything else they tried was cancelled, perhaps because Shuttle was available as a fallback...

And the pork keeps flowing! Proofs my point again. A space infrastructure with cheap routine flights to LEO is the most important thing. It could not only save NASA money, but also the airforce. That means more money for other things.
http://www.spacenews.com/military/12100 ... t-ula.html

As with most of your "proofs", this one has two sides to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFeZkrRE9wI

Rockets blow up now and then. The DoD wants it to happen as little as possible when they're flying their stuff, and their stuff is often so expensive that it almost doesn't matter what they spend on the rocket.

[GIThruster]

The whole point is that you cannot tell in advance what it will take to finish the project.

Nonsense! So you have never gotten a quote from a contractor that was not revised during the project? I have never paid more than what I was quoted for. Aerospace is in no way different than any other project.

You've never been able to understand the reality behind this issue, despite its been explained to you many times. It is not that these are aerospace projects that is the salient point. It's the size of the projects. They are too large for any company to take the risk involved. What you don't get is, that no company would take the risks you're assuming they would.

Not sure how many times you need to be told the same thing. "Cost plus" serves 3 purposes. First, it removes the risk from the contractor thereby making contractors able to participate when otherwise they could not.

Second, it removes the economic pressure to cut corners. These mega-engineering projects would fail if they were left to suffer the pressure to use the cheaper bolt or glue. Cost plus allows contractors to use the best of the best in every point of decision.

Third, you seem blissfully ignorant of all the supervision all US Gov. contracts entail by law. All US Gov funded contracts require an extreme accounting of every penny spent which drives the cost up, but which also makes the contractor accountable in ways you seem to be assuming don't exist. I assure you, they do. In fact, the accounting system is so involved and complex that many smaller companies won't be bothered to enter competitions for such contracts because it's not worth hiring administration to cope with the accounting needs.

[GIThruster]

The whole point is that you cannot tell in advance what it will take to finish the project.

Nonsense! So you have never gotten a quote from a contractor that was not revised during the project? I have never paid more than what I was quoted for. Aerospace is in no way different than any other project.

You've never been able to understand the reality behind this issue, despite its been explained to you many times. It is not that these are aerospace projects that is the salient point. It's the size of the projects. They are too large for any company to take the risk involved. What you don't get is, that no company would take the risks you're assuming they would.

Not sure how many times you need to be told the same thing. "Cost plus" serves 3 purposes. First, it removes the risk from the contractor thereby making contractors able to participate when otherwise they could not.

Second, it removes the economic pressure to cut corners. These mega-engineering projects would fail if they were left to suffer the pressure to use the cheaper bolt or glue. Cost plus allows contractors to use the best of the best in every point of decision.

Third, you seem blissfully ignorant of all the supervision all US Gov. contracts entail by law. All US Gov funded contracts require an extreme accounting of every penny spent which drives the cost up, but which also makes the contractor accountable in ways you seem to be assuming don't exist. I assure you, they do. In fact, the accounting system is so involved and complex that many smaller companies won't be bothered to enter competitions for such contracts because it's not worth hiring administration to cope with the accounting needs.