Innovations in Space Launch Systems

WolfWithoutAClause writes "Its long been a dream of people to just fly into space in an airbreathing aeroplane, however this has sadly remained as science fiction. The main problems have been a) collecting air at mach 23 requires that most expensive material: 'unobtainium' ; and b) having to carry extra airbreathing equipment into orbit. New Scientist has an article on a new study that NASA is funding to investigate whether an airbreathing launch vehicle might in fact be possible."

Comments

Retro is the way of the future

[Foss_Eats_Sod's_Meat]

Inexpensive space travel is well within our reach if we but take heed of the lessons taught by ancient sci-fi classic Flash Gordon.

All you need to get to another planet, never mind just into orbit, is a toilet roll tube, a sparkler and a funnel or perhaps a bit of rolled card to make the nosecone of your intergalactic spacecraft.

Of course they used old-fashioned sparklers back then, modern ones would be too feeble compared to the old ones that would take your arm off if you weren't careful lighting them...

Kieth Henson's idea.

[jcr]

Keith Henson got a patent on a very clever space launch technique. You put the payload on a several mile-long tether trailing behind a large, heavy aircraft like a Boeing 747. You then fly the plane in an arc that cracks the whip. The payload goes into LEO. The cable isn't re-useable (it tends to burn up), but cables are a lot cheaper than many alternatives.

-jcr

Re:FOX TV special

[Leon Trotski]

Speaking of the moon, I thought I'd revive a legendary /. troll classic from the immortal streetlawyer, Have fun!

The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.

Cheapen the shuttle in the short term

[Chairboy]

The problem with these technologies is the amount of money it takes to develop them to working examples. The solution? Make it _worth_ investing the large sums of money.

The current launching market is too small to support large R&D efforts. The rate of commercial launches is dropping steadilly with the dissolution of market drivers like Iridium. To make it worth the while of companies like Lockmart to spend big bucks on space you need to make space appealing to the industries that would purchase cheap access to space.

The first step is not to spend $10 billion for a Venturestar (which will never get congressional approval). The real step is to make the Space Shuttle as cheap as possible in the short term so that business in space can get started. Here's how:

1. Remove government restrictions on using the shuttle fleet for commercial operations. This reactionary restriction that came in the wake of the Challenger incident hurts our future in space and forces companies to use expensive ELVs.

2. Give NASA the chance to profit. Any commercial money NASA ever makes is funneled straight back into a general slush fund. If they had a direct incentive to operate more like a business, they would start innovating.

3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.

4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.

5. Convert the Enterprise into an unmanned cargo launcher. Removing the life support, crew cabin insides and so on and automating it would drop the between flight costs and increase payload significantly. Use this to deliver things that don't need human interaction to orbit.

6. Re-activate the Centaur upper stage project and install the plumbing in at least two of the OV fleet. Cryogenic upper stages increase your payload to geosynchronous orbit and let you build things like transfer vehicles to the moon. The shuttle uses IUS solid upper stages that have a fraction of the performance.

7. Last and more importantly, commission the development and construction of LFBB (Liquid FlyBack Boosters) to replace the dangerous and low performance SRBs. Liquid fueled boosters would increase the payload to orbit, offer abort modes during the first 2.5 minutes that the SRBs don't (see the Challenger disaster for an example of where this would have helped) and could be a lot cheaper then dragging the solid steel SRBs out of the ocean and rebuilding them. Boeing wants to make LFBBs. They would land themselves on a runway and be ready for launch shortly afterwards. LFBBs could lower costs for other boosters like the Titan V, the EELV, Ariane 5 and more.

Once companies can afford to get stuff to orbit, the market will exist to develop the new space craft that will drop costs to where we want. Until then, it will be entirely dependent on how much pork a congressman will get.

Re:Hard to See

[ScuzzMonkey]

Actually, they don't, and haven't for some time. This is an old myth that's trotted out anytime someone brings up the Space Pen, but the Russians use it too. Here's a link that both talks about the Apollo 11 story and shows Russian cosmonauts with the pens:

Apollo 11 Space Pen Story

I've heard (although this is unverified) that the problem with the pencils was graphite dust getting into the machinery--or at least the potential for it.

Some more Info

[jonfromspace]

There has been extensive research on this:

Including, but not limited too:

1)This Article in Scientific American
2)This Reasearch Paper
3)This NASA report


Just FYI ;-)

Hard to See

[SatelliteBoy]

The last paragraph says a lot about this concept. They may end up with a net energy loss.

The problem with Horizontal Takeoff, Horizontal Launch designs is resident time in air. Most boosters launch on a pretty vertical trajectory to get above the energy-robbing atmosphere. They do pitch over in the air, but only to use gravity to do most of the work for them. Boosters even launch up, reach a local maximum altitude, then decend under power in order to obtain the very large velocity required for orbit. Getting this velocity in air gives a lot up to drag.

This idea gets around the mass penalty for heavy landing gear by gaining weight in the air. Aircraft landing gear accounts for about 3% of the maximum total takeoff mass. This is for sufficient strength in a takeoff abort situation.

Pretty clever, but I think complicated machinery that requires extensive maintainance won't get us into space cheaply. The price of space travel is largely the cost of people on the ground. It takes about 10,000 people to service the Space Shuttle, hence its cost. LOX is cheap, and so is LH2.

It will be interesting technology, but I disbelieve that it will lower the cost. To get into space cheaply, I think we need to do two things:

1.) build it big.
2.) build it simple.

After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...

SatelliteBoy

Re:Hard to See

[Leon Trotski]

After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...

Spider Robinson writes a column, Past Imperfect, Future Tense, for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Some time ago, his column was titled "Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle". In it, Spider relates a conversation he had with Buzz Aldrin at a science fiction convention where they were co-Guests Of Honour. Buzz Aldrin related a fairly hushed up incident in the Apollo 11 mission.

The lunar landing module was very tight for space. The story is that, at the end of the exploration phase of the mission, as our heroes get ready to return to Earth, they need to remove their backpacks (dead weight) and switch back to the LEM air supply. In removing his backpack in the tight constraints of the LEM, Neil Armstrong breaks the ignition switch for the ascent engine. They are stranded on the moon with no tools to fix the problem and a finite reserve of air.

As Spider puts it:
``It dawns on Armstrong and Aldrin that they are now dead men walking, a long way from home.

``And then, God be thanked, Armstrong remembers what Senator Jocksfire called the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle. That egregious taxpayer-ripoff frippery: his zero-gravity pen. He retrieves it, roots around in the ruins of the switch...and becomes the first man ever to hot-wire a vehicle on another planet."

In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.

The space pen had a bigger side effect than having any notes written by American astronauts more easily preserved for posterity. The failure of Apollo 11 could have crippled the American space program and provided the Russians with breathing room for their moon landing efforts. Kennedy's goal, after all, was ``to land a man on the moon and return him safely"

Jerry Pournelle argues the point that the fall of the Soviet Union is in large part due to the fact that the Russians bankrupted themselves trying to match the American SDI ("Star Wars") effort. Their belief that the Americans might succeed at Star Wars was, Pournelle believes, founded in the USA's success on seemingly impossible projects like Apollo. Would we still be living with the Cold War had we not had the space pen?

Yawn. Take a look at the "Black Horse"

[McSpew]

Seriously, a former USAF captain proposed a hybrid air-breathing vehicle which would be fueled with LOX once in the air by a modified KC-135 at least 7 years ago.

The guy who came up with the idea has since left the USAF and founded a company solely for the purpose of commercializing the concept.

The primary difference between the Black Horse concept and the one proposed in this article is that it wouldn't take three hours for a Black Horse-type aircraft to collect the LOX necessary to fire its rocket motor(s). They'd take on the LOX from the KC-135 while airborne in presumably less than three hours.

even at cheaper cost, you'd get few takers

[mattorb]

Sure, the Shuttle is expensive as a launch vehicle. But only part of that is the cost of the actual launch itself : a hidden, but very real (and rather large) cost to those who might use it is the additional quality assurance program you have to go through to certify any reasonably-sized payload to fly on the Shuttle. Because the Shuttle carries humans -- so if your payload screws up in a catastrophic way, people might very possibly die -- you have to prove that your payload is safe in a much more rigorous fashion than with unmanned launch vehicles; this doesn't just mean proving "my payload won't explode," you have to guarantee that no screw can pop loose and rupture something in the cargo bay -- which entails lots of nasty things like x-raying components and looking for signs of metal stress -- plus lots of other stuff. Thus, development cost for a mission designed to fly on the Shuttle is higher by at least a factor of 3 in most cases than one designed to fly on an unmanned vehicle.

Some applications don't care about this, and I expect you're correct in thinking that if the actual launch cost went down, that might lower the barrier to some companies, and of course there are some things where you actually need the Shuttle, but there will still be many, many applications for which the Shuttle is not a cost-effective launch vehicle. It's a two-edged sword: the Shuttle is great because it's a manned vehicle, but it's also terrible for the same reason, and there's no good way around that.

Just my 2 cents. :-)