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."

Comments

phallus

[frieked]

Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/shared/news2003/OSP/O SP4.jpg

Solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we can outsource it and have the Russians and Indians build it?

Re:What about the X prize

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Why not just support the X prize project

The X-prize is suborbital. Still, supporting a similar orbital prize may very well be a good idea.

The guy who wrote it comes off as a smart ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Other familiar images on NASA.gov

[goldspider]

Want to see another familiar image on NASA's site? Check out my sig!

Troubling

[Fux the Pengiun]

I glanced through the article...this is unfortunate news, and I hope the author's conclusions are incorrect. The shuttle is aging, and I think we all expect it to go the way of the Segway pretty soon.

Maybe with some more $$, NASA could do a better job of shoring up the space program, to ensure boy-band members will still have the opportunity to travel in space for the foreseeable future. Perhaps if they switched the shuttle's software to an open source alternative, like Linux, or even one of its flakier derivatives like BSD, they could save enough money to get this new space plane up and running. It may also improve safety, as some of the reports from the Endeavor disaster cited issues with Windows .NET Server Orbital Vehicle Edition failing to convert between metric and English units correctly as leading to the tragedy. Space travel is important to our culture, the future of our children, and our global economy...we in the open source community need to do our part to ensure its success.

there is a company with an interesting design

[the_2nd_coming]

and the prototype is working.

they used a modified 747, and a special tow line. they then tow the orbiter up to very high altitutes and launch the orbiter.

the orbiter then ignights its rockets and because it it already high in the atmosphere, it can use half the fuel of bullistic launch.

Re:there is a company with an interesting design

[WhiteBandit]

That company is Kelly Space and Technology based in San Bernardino, CA. (Which is right down the street!)

Re:there is a company with an interesting design

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, during the late 1980's there were some serious studies of building a small spaceplane that could be launched from the top of a modified 747-200.

Essentially, the 747-200 would be fitted with a de-rated version of the Space Shuttle main engine, which will allow the 747 with the spaceplane on top to do a steep 35 degree climb to around 50,000 feet. The spaceplane, which has a small external fuel tank attached, would then launch at that altitude and fire its engines (essentially 3-4 RL-10's used by the Centaur upper stage) for a 7 minute flight to orbit. Because the launch happens at 50,000 feet, there is no need for the spaceplane to lug along a big load of propellant fuel, and that means it could carry a load as large as seven crew members or its equivalent weight in cargo to the International Space Station. I can envision by 2014 crews will visit the ISS either by using this new spaceplane or much-updated versions of the Soyuz spacecraft; ISS consumables and future extensions to the space station will be brought up by lifting them to orbit on uprated versions of the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy rockets plus updated versions of the Russian Proton rocket.

Re:there is a company with an interesting design

[RocketScientist]

Your entire comment makes the rather broad assumption that air density is the same at sea level, 10km and 150km. I'm kind of thinking it drops pretty quickly.

It saves quite a bit of fuel because there is significantly less drag at 10km than there is at sea level. 10km would be, what, pretty much 35 thousand feet, but the service ceiling of an unmodified 747 is 45,000 feet (google owns you).

Air density at 45,000 feet is .000460, air density at sea level is .002377, so air density at 45,000 feet is about 1/5 that of sea level (google rocks, chart 1).

So, if the 747 dropped the payload at 45,000 feet, and the payload gained altitude at a good rate, it would require significantly less rocket fuel than taking off from the ground. In addition, the payload could have smaller fuel tanks, which means smaller pipes, less structure and less insulation to fall off and ding a wing.

Re:Inches or Centimeters?

[Mondoz]

what else do you expect from a money pit uh i mean a research institute.

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...

More pictures and info...

[pen]

Orbital Space Plane @ orbital.com
Orbital Space Plane @ globalsecurity.org

Re:What next?...

[umrgregg]

Seems to me NASA is working itself backwards in technology:

"Space Shuttle" to "Space Plane" and some sort of "Space Elevator"

I can't wait to see the specs for the "Space Staircase."

More of the same

[ChuckDivine]

OK, NASA still looks screwed up.

Possibilities we must consider:

• Space travel is really beyond us.
• Space travel is beyond current day NASA. Given current management problems, that is looking increasingly likely. The Washington Post now has a special section on the Columbia disaster.

What should we (the United States in particular and humanity in general) be doing?

• One thing is support the X Prize. This will provide alternative experience and data to the NASA monopoly. The more attempts we make, the better. The greater the variety, the better.
• Since NASA is a U.S. government creation, U.S. citizens should write their Congressional representatives, citing articles such as this one by Jeff Bell and the Washington Post section linked to above. It's time for some light and heat to be shed on this agency.
• Look for investment opportunities if you have the money.

Re:More of the same

[stinky wizzleteats]

You omitted the real problem. We're not committed to spending what it will really take to do what we want NASA to do.

Space Plane can't be as bad as current airlines

[YetAnotherName]

... or could it?

Simple lap belt replaced with 7-point harness.

In-flight movie would just have to be Apollo 13.

In-flight beverage would be Tang.

Mandatory cavity search at security gate.

No sharp or blunt objects allowed on board.

That includes shoes.

In case of decompression, a preferred religious object will drop from ceiling.

*N*autical *M*iles, not nanometers

[sh00z]

This is why we missed Mars.

Compact Car

[n1nj4k3n]

From the article:

But, sometimes when you're just going for a drive or taking a trip, you don't really need a bus, a moving van, a construction truck, a science lab, or a race car. Sometimes, a simple compact car would make traveling a lot more convenient and less expensive. The same principle applies to spaceflight.

I wonder if NASA has considered actually bringing some compact car makers as consultants. How would Honda, Mitsubishi, or Toyota would go about tackling these problems? Combine the efficiency of the Civic or the Insight with the existing X-plane aerospace technology of Lockheed Skunkworks and Boeing, and see what happens.

Everyone looks to NASA

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Why? NASA is only a governmental department. Why on earth would you want the government to deliver you to space; when that means in practice that a committee chooses who has their great honour of deciding who they feel like sending, based mostly on how well they toe the party line?

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.

Re:Everyone looks to NASA

[jdhutchins]

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.

That's not exactly correct. By saying that, you're saying that supporting the government at all is bad, because most of what the government does is 'for the good of the country'. If you want to get spacefight done, or at least develop spacecraft, it requires A LOT of money. It requires a lot of money to develop the spacecraft, which is before you would have any profits. Private companies aren't going to be able to run for 5-6 years without a profit to develop a spacecraft and test it without running out of money. The government doesn't have to worry about profits, so theoritacilly (sp?) it can fund the research and development of new spacecraft.

Funding is the reason NASA isn't doing so hot. It doesn't get enough money to fund the Space Shuttle, unmanned spaceflight, and development of new spacecraft. Saying "we'll just cut the shuttle" won't work, because after the shuttle gets cut, NASA loses that money, and then they're no better off than they were before, except that they don't have the thing that they're best known for. The author of the article doesn't make this point: If NASA could spend as much money on research as the military does, (or even half that amount), we'd probably already have a Shuttle replacement.

The wheel might never work...

[mikeophile]

Many problems have plagued wheel developers over the years.

Budget overruns, construction difficulties, and safety issues are causing many tribal elders to reconsider whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs.

Many tribal members feel increasingly alienated by technology.

A case in point is fire. The recent development of fire has been seen as a mixed blessing by many in the community.

"Fire bad.", says Dr.Ugh, gesturing to his burned hands suffered during an early meat cooking experiment.

Good or bad, fire has been rapidly adopted by the younger generation as both a means of cooking and the primary source of entertainment.

If the wheel does beat the odds and becomes a viable means of transportation, what will it mean?

Is our technological advancement going to far, too fast?

Where will our science lead us, and do we really want to go there?

No more truck drivers in space please

[Rogerborg]

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.

Hmmmm....

[jpellino]

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.

Stupid...

[tinrobot]

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...

That's a feature, not a bug

[Chris Y Taylor]

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",

Re:Ahh the benefits of hindsight-

[Jonathan_S]

from the article :You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.

Bullshit it can't....

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.

Re:Bring back the Delta Clipper!

[RayBender]

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...

Man..

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

If only NASA could win the X-Prize, the 10mil would more than triple their current budget :(

The fallacy that you can assume the "obvious"

[geoswan]

I said I would give an anecdote illustrating why it is foolish to assume that you don't have to state obvious objections to an idea. Dead wrong! Read and weap.

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