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Orbital Space Plane Problems
FTL writes "NASA's next big step in space (after getting the remaining Shuttles flying again) is the construction of the Orbital Space Plane. It is a small vehicle designed to transport people to and from ISS. Jeffrey Bell takes a close look at OSP in this article and comes to the conclusion that it will result in yet another crippled vehicle. Sounds like what people were saying about the Shuttle's problems back when it was being designed."
Wonderful lines like:
Sound familiar? It should. The OSP is only the latest of many "Shuttle replacement" programs that have all failed dismally.
Most critics have focused on the suspiciously low development costs, or the embarrassing gap between 2006 and 2010 in which no ISS lifeboat is planned. In fact, the basic concept of the program is so stupid that every knowledgeable person involved in it must be perfectly aware that it will never fly.
Lost my attention at this point. If he had anything worth saying he destroyed his credability by that point.
Yeah I read the article. However I realized it would've been against the rules to RTFA and then post, so I'm pretending I didn't. :)
Anyways, it sucks that this "space plane" still needs a big buttload of fuel tank and booster rockets to get off. This is hardly gonna save any money... What nasa oughta build is a reusable launch vehicle that can carry the OSP or the shuttle off, and then land and refuel.
I'm assuming you don't realize how many technologies you use on a regular basis that were developed by NASA.
I'm also assuming that you don't realize that due to NASA's charter, all the new technologies they develop are given away to companies for commercial development.
Calling NASA a 'money pit' is true in a sense - they can't actually make money - they're not allowed. If congress had written NASA's charter to allow for commercial development of technologies they invent, they'd have made a fortune on medical equipment alone... And on UV-filtering sunglasses, communication devices, fireproofing materials, life support equipment, remote-sensing weather prediction systems, composite materials development... etc... etc...
/sig
Then why hasn't congress rewritten the NASA charter in such a fashion that NASA can pad its own funding with its profitable endeavors?
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
An interesting can of worms to open here, who owns those patents? If NASA developed them, then they should be in the Public Domain, since they used public money for funding, shouldn't they? Even if they are developed outside of NASA, if NASA pays for it, the U.S. government pays for it, so indirectly I've paid for it, so if anyone is making money I should get a cut. (Hey, that's Metallica's reasoning.)
I'm not trying to start a IP bru-ha-ha(sp?), but I'm curious if anyone actually knows this. Or do these end up in those companies with the "We don't make X, we just make it better" ads?
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Me, I think that Dennis Tito did it right- buy a flight at the lowest price he could. Ok, so it turned out to be the Ruskies, I call that an incentive to Americans to actually get off their money-wasting duffs and actually go out and make competitive rockets rather than the government subsidised massively overpriced efforts you see at the moment.
I mean, everyone acts like 'high technology' is the answer. Nope. Sorry. 'Low Cost' is the answer. And you nearly always don't get that from Government run operations. Government departments want to grow; they don't want to shrink. They don't want higher efficiency, because that just means they can do the same with less, that just means that their 'excess' budget gets cut and they end up doing the same amount for lower cost.
No. We need businesses. Businesses actually have an incentive to grow the market. Launching more often actually makes launching cheaper, and this in turn grows the market and hence the business and the total profits. Businesses win over governments.
Frankly, if you're proNASA you're pretty much a communist- (no I'm not trolling, not everything that seems controversial is a troll) NASA is run by the country 'for the good of the country'. I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone. Being nice does not scale like profit motive does. We need to scale space up to put a reasonable number of people into space, you and me.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You omitted the real problem. We're not committed to spending what it will really take to do what we want NASA to do.
We spend tens of millions (hard to say, NASA won't disclose) training "astronauts", and then dedicate most of the lifting capacity of the vehicles to keeping them alive while they watch a board and occasionally push a button that could be pushed by the guy that trained them back at mission control. That's a hell of a lot of money per button push.
Buzz Aldrin says it best. He never thought space exploration would come to mean shuttling cargo up to low earth orbit. Let's leave that to the machines, and send men out to do what they can't. Explore and describe the wonders that are out there, so that us lesser men touch them by proxy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I don't know this guy, but sounds like there's a considerable chip attached somewhere south of neck. Invoking the word 'stupid' towards your critics in a technical article isn't going to go over too well.
Look. Flying to space is hard. People are going to die doing it, just like people are going to die driving across the state or flying across the country or running around the water on a jet ski.
As long as we do it only a few times a year, the fatal mistakes are going to look horrific. If a million people a day flew through space and a few dozen died, why is that any more astounding than what happens on the roads?
Of course I'm not proposing flying lots of people into space to make the accidents look good. But realize the carnage we DO put up with to get to the movies or visit some tourist trap.
Now, if it were simpler, it'd be safer.
If it were truly reusable it'd be cheaper.
If it were less vulnerable to chaos (water landings, wind shear, parachutes) it'd be easier to swallow the alternatives.
As for climbing cables to orbit, a bunch of smart people on a shuttle had a real tough time wrangling a few hundred meters of cable - but 200 km? I want a few more proof-of-concepts and sims before I grab the business end of one of those.
Part and parcel in this whole thing is the time to market - the shuttle took too long to get to the pad - if it had flown with current at the time avionics and computers, it'd been in much better shape. Tony Englund tells the story of being in the shuttle simulator when they shut it down one day and said sorry guys - we need the cue-ball - a mechanical cue-ball - becasue the last working one one a flying shuttle had gone bad and they aren't making them any more. That sort of thing has stopped, but could be repeated with obsolete tech if they don't dev faster...
I would still sit on the shuttle flight deck tomorrow to orbit. Knowing the risks and using the process. NASA ain't perfect. But they're not malicious or stupid.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
things, and not journalists.
In fact, let's thank God the only thing we let journalists do is spew out crap like that found in these articles.
~ now you know
Presumably, you're a libertarian (AKA the free market is god). Why then hasn't the "free market" gotten a human into orbit anywhere? Only state-backed, publically funded efforts have.
One of his arguments is that they will still need the shuttle to bring up supplies. No, they already have the soyuz freighter for that. In fact, I think they hardly ever use the shuttle to bring supplies to ISS. It would be very inefficient (the part he did get right). The point of this vehicle is to allow cheaper and more abundant crew transfer ability, especially in case of emergencies.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Some of it is classified. I would assume (don't know for sure) that only NASA knows for sure where it all is and how to safely avoid it all
Sure it's classified. So what? It's still tracked by a multitude of civilian organizations. Just because it's classified doesn't mean that it doesn't return a radar ping or show up on a tracking sweep for a telescope. The US is far from the only nation putting stuff into orbit anyway. Each nation with an orbital presence has the same issues with making sure you don't whack into something up there (and there's quite a bit of up there too - it's not like a Disney parking lot after all).
Of course, you'll find an amazing number of "communications" satellites orbiting the earth with no comm band registered with the FCC. Funny that.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
It's been that way for almost forty years. It's not getting any better. No combination of parts will fix this fundamentally broken technology.
Space travel is like lighter-than-air travel. The technology has been around for decades, and it reached its limits a long time ago. It's possible to build vehicles. But the weight limitations are too severe for them to be more than marginally useful.
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
Yes, sure, but you forget one thing.
Economics.
A Federal agency has to worry about costs much less than a business. And NASA certainly worries about costs. For a business to compete for a chance to go to space, cheaply, quickly, or any other "ly", there would have to be MONEY up there.
Science doesn't pay. The only reason the Russians launch cheaper is because if they didn't, nobody would use them. They'd get NO money, instead of LEAST money. The Russians are Wal-Mart in this respect.
The only money to be made in space right now is in the launching of satellites. So long as there's insurance for those, the Russian cost-cutting is not much of a problem.
Now, show me something up there to go an actually get, that is of worth, and I'll show you all the current aerospace contractors lobbying the government to be cut loose and allowed to leave NASA in the dust.
But until there's a money to be made, business isn't lifting a finger.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
What surprises me is that it took less than 10 years to go to the moon, with primitive 1960's technology. This project looks like it's going to take just as long... even longer... and this is with more advanced technology, plus all the experience of over 40 years of spaceflight.
Something is seriously wrong...
What function does NASA serve?
Could those functions be served more efficiently by multiple, smaller, privately run organizations?
Why spend so much on manned flights when all of the experiments are simple enough to be automated?
One advantage of a privately run organization is that they can take risks.
When did space travel become something that has to be risk free, with every death being a tragedy?
In the year 2002 42,850 people died in automobile crashes in the US . These deaths accomplished nothing.
What if a fraction of that number, say 500 people, died every year in an attempt to increase humanity's capability to get off this rock. Would that be such a tragedy?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
space travel is beyond current day NASA...
How about, space travel is beyond government??
How do you expect space to be explored by an organization that rewards failure with more money and greets success with disinterest and reduction in funding?
When NASA is going good, the public is ho-hum because the public doesn't get a shot at space when it's controlled by a quasi military, government run organization.
If this were done in the business sector, the motto would always be "faster, cheaper, safer" and tourism would start at $MILLIONS only to fall into the affordable range as they worked the kinks out. Eventually, we'd have $100 per seat price wars for orbital day trips.
Why? Because companies that failed, crashed and burned due to mismanagement, poor engineering, or bureaucratic paralysis would die off opening up more space for those with stronger offerings.
That's why NASA is a non-starter. There is no accountability.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
I think several of his complaints are incorrect.
First, he claims that the OSP is bad because it only ships people, not cargo. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. Manned spaceflight is more expensive than unmmanned flight. It is a waste of money to send anything on a manned flight that could be sent on a cheaper unmanned one. The Russians have already demonstrated that cargo can be taken to the ISS with an umannned system. Satellites can be launched without using a manned vehicle. The only thing that can't be launched on a cheaper unmanned vehicle is people. Therefore the most economical system would be one where the manned rockets were just for ferrying people. That's what the OSP is; yet he seems to have a problem with that. If we start trying to make the OSP do everything, then it will be an expensive boondoggle like the Shuttle. Unfortunately we probably will have to fly the shuttle a few more times to get the rest of the station modules up, but it doesn't make sense to add billions of bloat to the OSP to give it the capability to add the last few modules to the station. Bring up cargo with unmanned vehicles. Bring up the last few modules with a few Shuttle flights (with minimum crew) if necessary. Keep the OSP small and only use it to do crew rotations. That's my $0.02.
He complains about not understanding the plan for the escape system. That is his inadequacy, not the OSP's. The original plan I saw (which was called the Orbital Space Plane because it was Orbital Science Corp's proposal) had a rocket on the spaceplane that was used as an escape system for the manned section in case of a booster failure, and was fired as an additional stage after the booster dropped away if there was no booster failure. He says this introduces an "extra" failure mode. Well, yes and no. If you are concerned about mission success (getting the OSP in the right trajectory) then I guess it does add additional failure modes. If you are concerned about keeping the crew alive (which the crew would probably appreciate being top priority), then it adds a "new" failure mode but not "more" failure modes. Sure, there is the chance that the escape system/final stage rocket could blow up and destroy the vehicle. But if any of the other stages blows up, then having that escape system turns those from fatal disasters to non-fatal mission failures. Since the escape system/final stage should be a reliable, evolutionary rocket design that gets a lot of attention, the odds of it failing catastrophically should be much smaller than the odds of one of the booster stages failing. Adding this system will, therefore, slightly increase the odds of a mission failure, while greatly reducing the odds of a crew fatality. Whether that is an "extra" failure mode depends on if you are looking at mission failure or crew loss. In my (and certainly the crew's) point of view, having an escape system is essential to the design's commitment to the safety of the astronauts.
He claims that the OSP is not much more technically sophisticated than the Dyna-Soar. That's fine with me. The point of the OSP is to reduce cost and reduce technical risk. At the time, the Dyna-Soar was ambitious, costly, and risky. With today's technology it is a cheap solution with low technical risk. Why would we want to introduce new technical risk if we don't have to?
He also complains about the possibility of the OSP being built with a reduced size that would require more than one launch to perform one crew rotation for the ISS. I agree with him that that would be bad, but I don't yet know how likely that is to be a problem. Something to watch out for, but I don't think it is as likely as he seems to.
He would prefer a capsule to a lifting body for reentry. A capsule is not necessarily bad, and I wouldn't dismiss it just because it is "old tech". The choice, however, is a complex technical trade off and not the sort of thing that can just be decided with a knee jerk reaction, nostalgia for the "good ol' days of Apollo",
I grant you that it has sufficient return cargo capacity to return a satellite to earth. And with the canada arm it can capture a satellite, as demonstrated by the Hubble repair.
However, while technically the shuttle could return a satellite for repair, there are a couple of problems to overcome.
First almost all satellites orbit higher than the shuttle can fly, so it can't get high enough to capture them.
The original idea was that there was going to be an on orbit tug to ferry satellite to and from the shuttle. Never got built.
Second the canada arm's capture device only works on satellites that have a special attachment point on them like the Hubble. As far as I know no other satellite has one, so a satellite couldn't be easily capture even if it was close to the shuttle.
Third, NASA is very worried about possible damage to their shuttles, and don't like flying it near anything they don't have too; much less a damaged satellite which could do something unexpected or have debris floating around it
And Fourth, while this isn't a technical point it isn't economical to return a satellite for repair and reorbit. Its cheaper to build a new one and scrap the old one except in maybe in special cases like the one of a kind Hubble.
So in summary, the shuttle could retrieve a damaged satellite and return it, if it could reach it (which it can't), and capture it (which it can't), and NASA would authorize it (they wouldn't) and someone would pay for it (which they won't). The original statement that the shuttle can't retrieve a damaged satellite might be overstating the case, but stating that they won't would be about right.
Obviously this doesn't count thing like spacehab which stays docked in the shuttle's cargo bay, or a science experiment released and recovered during a flight.
The Delta Clipper was not capable of orbit; not even close. It only looked good because it wasn't attempting the really hard part. ANY single-stage to orbit vehicle requires very advanced technology - there is no "off-the-shelf" engine with the specific impulse, and no "off-the-shelf" material with the strength/mass ratio, required. It's a simple matter of physics. The rocket equation tells us that getting into orbit using currently available rockets will ,for a single-stage vehicle, require that about 90% of the liftoff mass be fuel. You have to fit the engines, fuel tank, payload etc into the remaining 10%. The Delta Clipper only had a fuel fraction of about 50%.
The Lockheed X-33 tried to get around this in two ways: use a higher efficiency rocket engine (the aerospike) and light-weight composite structure, allowing a greater portion of the remaining mass to be used as payload. It's the only possible approach if you are limited to single-stage to orbit. Don't kid yourself, the other X-33 proposals were just as risky. It says a lot about the ignorance of the author that he even used this argument; it doesn't hold up to closer inspection.
Regardless of how important you happen to think space travel is (and I think it's nothing less than the key to the future of the human race, ultimately), there are a few really big problems with the future of space travel: physics (we have to find a more efficent engine), investment (we have to convince people that space is worth the real investment required) and "religion" (it seems like every person involved has an absolutely unwavering opinion of the ONE TRUE WAY to get into space, and they simply will not engage in a rational debate).
The last point is actually important, and well illustrated by the article; the author clearly belongs to the "ballistic re-entry" sub-sect of the "expendible launch vehicle" religion. He spends many more words attacking the "winged, reuseable" approach than explaining why his particular approach is so much better. Which of course it isn't - all designs have drawbacks. Trust me, the designs that are built are chosen on more than just the basis of the oft-repeated "pilots want to fly something with wings".
To illustrate the situation, consider the choice between Russian-style expendible capsules and what the Shuttle should (would) have been given proper development funding (the cuts by the Nixon administration forced the use of solids; as any good engineer understands, this one bad choice forced a cascading series of ever more disastrous adjustments, ultimately killing the concept).
Anyway, the Russian capsules work rather well, and are moderately reliable. However, they cost on the order of $20 million per launch (at Russian wages). This cost can likely not be further reduced, since you can't amortize the construction cost of the vehicle and booster over several flights. A truly reuseable Shuttle (say, an X-33 derivative launched off the back of a 747 or something), while considerably more expensive to build, can fly 100 times. That's the only reasonable way to get launch costs below something like $1000 pound (where according to some analysts it becomes economically feasible to develop space in a big way).
To make a long story short you have a choice: a) pick the initially cheaper option of expendible capsules, and be forever stuck at relatively high launch costs, or b) pay the steep development cost of a truly re-useable vehicle, and in the long term you'll have a cheaper way of getting to space. NASA started with option b, spent most of the money, then was forced to adopt some aspects of option a, ending up with the worst of both worlds.
Of course, now I've revealed my own religion.
I'll probably be tied to a launch tower and burnt by the flames of an expendible (solid) booster for it...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Irrespective of this guy's opinion in this article, I simply wonder where the real problem is. Since the beginning of space shuttle programme there have been exactly two ways to get someone into space and back. One has been in a capsule with ablative heat shield on top of a standard rocket and the other has been in a glider with fragile tiles on top of or strapped to a standard rocket. Specifically, both have been expensive and both have had pros and cons.
The fact that shuttles have crashed is not really shocking, given how long they've been in service. There have been crashes with Soyuz capsules as well.
What seems to me to be the problem is that there is simply a lack of money. The fact that there is a lack of money is partly because of spiralling costs, but also due to an incredible inconsistency of policy and bad planning.
Consider that ESA started working on Hermes almost 20 years ago. While the author states that this vehicle is also lacking in saftey, the fact is that the vehicle is not here, now as ESA abandoned it due to spiraling costs. Consider that the Russians had a working shuttle , Buran, capable of automated flight also around 15 years ago, and built with typical Russian solidity. That is now for sale on ebay, because no one wanted to fund it. So we have two possibly better or at least alternative shuttles that were killed off due to lack of funding.
Prior to, during and since that time, many nations have being studying alternative methods of human spacefilght. The Dyna-Soar, the lifting body studies during the 60's, the Delta Clipper, the British Hotol, the X-what have you. They were all dropped due to lack of funding. Has anyone, ever, considered how much money has actually been wasted/spent on these studies?
For me personally the concept of a two stage, conventional rocket powered glider where a larger unmanned booster took off conventionally from a runway and the second smaller manned glider seperated at high altutude with both landing conventionally on runways was probably the most practical. I further imagine that with all the enormous amounts of funds that were simply thrown away in developing alternative after alternative without having a coherent goal this type of orbiter/lander could now be in service today
Years ago, my campus newspaper had a profile of a professor who had just been awarded funds to do a study on women's attitudes towards fitness and their negative images of their bodies.
It seemed like a good idea to me. But a female buddy came in, looked at the article, and was outraged. "What an obvious waste of money! Yada yada yada." I asked, and she explained to me why she thought it was a waste of money.
Another gal comes in. My buddy shows her the headline of the article that outraged her. The other gal agreed that the study was an outrageous waste of money. My buddy left. The second gal finished reading the article.
So, I asked her why she thought it was an outrage. Guess what? These two gals both thought they were in complete, loud, certain agreement that the study was an obvious waste of money, that there was no doubt as to how the money should best be spent.
But in their discussion with one another they never actually said why it was an outrage, and although they thought they were in complete agreement, their views were diametrically opposed.
One gal thought it was obvious the money should be spent teaching women to be more comfortable living with their bodies current shape and level of fitness. The other gal thought it was obvious the money should be spent teaching women to develop better fitness habits.
People who thought they agreed whose interpretations were actually diametrically opposed.
So, Miket01 and the a.c.? You think you are united in your outrage? Your views might be diametrically opposed
Nautical Miles are generally abbreviated in capitals (ie. two nautical miles would be represented as 2NM.). Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik, the article didn't do that.
Either way, it's wrong.
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