The Business Case for Reusable Launch Vehicles

An anonymous reader writes "Remember the failures of "shuttle replacements" like VentureStar? A Space Review article argues that even if VentureStar succeeded technically, it and other proposed big RLVs would never have made it financially: they cost too much to develop and wouldn't have made it up through increased launches. What's the solution? The author says that suborbital RLVs, like what Carmack, Rutan, and the other X Prize contenders are working on, will create a business cycle that will eventually lead to orbital vehicles."

Comments

What About The Origional RLV?

[MBCook]

I just saw a thing on the shuttle a few days ago that aired on the History Channel. They said that the shuttle was origionaly designed to have an RLV, but it was canceled due to budget concerns. It was supposed to launch with the shuttle on it's back, and would fly up near orbit where the shuttle would detach and fly the rest of the way. The RLV would then land so that it could be used again. It looked sort of like a plane. Has anyone thought about updating the design for this thing and making it?

The best picture I could find was this one on HowStuffWorks.

RLVs

[Henry V .009]

The one and only point of RLVs is to be cheaper than one-time use vehicles. But they aren't. The technology and the engineering just isn't there to make them so. As an idea, the RLV has been proved to be completely worthless.

Now, it is possible through economies of scale to bring costs down a great deal. Look at what the Germans managed with the V2 rockets. But we aren't bombing England here, and there is no reason to make that expenditure right now -- certainly not for a million dollar "X-prize." And there is still no guarantee that RLVs will surpass the cost savings of one-time use vehicles.

This is nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read the article, because I've seen too many like it already. It is motivated by capitalist dogma. The fact is that space exploration does not make business sense. There is nothing stopping businesses from building these things right now, if the "market" could support it. The technology exists. The only way to support construction of these things right now is by government support, and the justification is not "it makes business sense", but because the knowledge gained through them is of benefit to humanity.

What do they honestly recommend? That we wait while individuals businesses develop inferior, and largely useless, suborbital vehicles in order to "create a business cycle", when the technology to build more useful orbital vehicles exists and has for decades? It does't make economic sense, and it certainly doesn't make sense if you believe space travel is in the greater interest of humanity. Like the internet, there may be a day when space vehicles are cheap enough that building them and operating them DOES make business sense, but like the internet, it will get there through public investment, not the dogma of economic liberalism.

Re:This is nonsense

[PhaseChange]

I have come around to the opinion that the current shuttle configuration doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. One was the aforementioned fact that it was woefully underfunded in the early stages of development. Second is the paridigm that if it's reusable, it's got to have wings & a stick that someone can control. There have been some good discussions (e.g., at http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0307/23osp/) around just using a reusable Apollo type CM with a refurbishable heat shield as an RV. No, it doesn't get you to a true RLV, but it's a short path to a cheap RV (as in reentry vehicle).

Where is the "killer app" for suborbital vehicles?

[RocketRick]

While the article does make some good points about the high development costs, technological hurdles, and poor ROI on reusable orbital vehicles, I think that there is very little evidence of any solid business case for reusable sub-orbital vehicles. Just because it's not cost-effective to build and fly ROVs doesn't somehow make RSVs any more logical.

As a development step leading to the next ROV, an RSV may make sense. I am the first to admit that *anything* that gets the public to refocus their attention (and money) on the pursuit of space-related technological goals is a good thing, as it will inevitably drive the aerospace industry to push the engineering envelope in many areas, particularly in materials science (things like new composites, high-temperature ceramics, etc.). Technological advancement is a worthy (and, ultimately, profitable) pursuit.

But, in and of itself, as a "working vehicle", I can't see any suborbital spacecraft making money. There just aren't that many rich "space tourists" around to subsidize this as an industry. Suborbital vehicles are completely useless for the two main "space jobs" that countries and/or companies are willing to pay for: satellite launches and trips to the ISS.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is a useful destination. If you can get "stuff" into LEO, later trips can bring more "stuff", and, if you bring enough pieces of another space ship to LEO, you can assemble them there, and can go to other places. In terms of energy, LEO is truly "halfway to anywhere". One of the (rejected for complexity and deadline reasons) proposed Apollo moon landing plans involved assembling a Earth-to-Moon ship in LEO from modules launched over a period of time using multiple smaller launchers.

But, suborbital vehicles, by definition, can't reach LEO. Anything launched sub-orbitally *will* return to Earth, usually sooner, rather than later. There's simply no market for delivery vehicles that always bring their cargo back, and never leave it at the destination!

Bottom line: it may make sense to use an RSV as a technology test-bed as a step on the path to developing an ROV. It makes no sense to develop an RSV as an end in itself.

Re:There is no incremental development path to orb

[cperciva]

Don't forget that all this stuff called "air" gets in the way at times. Once you're 100 km above the surface of the earth, speeding up is just a matter of pushing yourself forward; starting from the surface, you need to worry about pushing all that air out of the way.

I don't know any sort of exact figures, but I'm sure the ratio is much less than 25:1 when you consider the energy lost to air resistance.

Re:Business case?

[Anonymous Coward]

...then imagine how much they'll pay for the experience of zero-G sex! Screw the mile-high club, I wanna join the 800-mile high club!

Hot Air Hijinks.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't forget that all this stuff called "air" gets in the way at times. "

Then strap a RLV to a weather balloon and release your vehicle at the apogee of the balloons flight. It's all "up" from there.

gut NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have read the CAIB report, one has to ask :

1) Why and how did Linda Ham go from being against additional imagery and questioning threat to orbiter issues to grilling the management team in three days?

2) Why did the management team go from demanding additional imagery at first to claiming "all the evidence" shows a safe, single return over the same three days?

3) What was Linda Hams' rationale for terminating all requests for additional imagery over a 90 minute period one morning?

4) Why did Rocha go from demanding additional imagery to insisting a safe return was probable?

5) Who in the USAF questioned what was happening at NASA when they noticed an imagery request come in, only to be cancelled 90 minutes later by Linda Ham?

6) Should the public demand the immediate resignation of all shuttle management who made the statement "Why do anything further? There is nothing we could do anyway", given that the CAIB outlines two specific scenarios that would like have saved the astronauts and Columbia?

Space Elevator

[mumblestheclown]

Or, we do what we should be doing NOW:

1. Funding to nanotubles.
2. Use remaining shuttle flights to build a space elevator. Low estimates put this at 6 flights - let's conservatively double this to 12.
3. Space elevator by 2015 is a possible reality - financially and technologically.

Roadblocks:

• "rocket culture" at NASA
• "astronaut culture" at NASA
• materials science issues are quickly disappearing
• some probability of catastrophic (not deadly, just catastrophic) failure early on. must be budgeted using real-options analysis.
• 10-20B USD. This can easily be funded without "coalition" help. The US would soon own space like never before, as ESA's rockets would quickly look outdated.
• Defense concerns - the notion that a space elevator is vulnerable to, say, hostile fighter planes.

SPACE ELEVATOR NOW - it's good science, it's good policy.

Re:Space Elevator

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Currently, nanotubes cables are not strong enough to make space elevators, they may never be for all we know. It looks promising but it's premature to start building something without all the ingredients to make the cake rise.

The problem, as I say is the cable. The current state of the art is about 72 GPa threads multiple centimeters long. That's extremely promising. Trouble is, nobody has built a strong rope from those threads yet. Splicing normally loses 20% of the strength; pretty much we need 65 GPa strength to reach orbit- plus a safety factor; but the carbon nanotubes are really slippery right now- sticking or splicing them doesn't seem to work.

The second problem is nearly as bad. The projected cost is maybe $20 billion (for example, nanotubes are thousands of dollars per gram, but you need ~20 tonnes for the initial 'seed' cable).

This means that the cost of putting something up the elevator (which takes a couple of weeks anyway) is projected to be something like $500/kg (bearing in mind that the money would have to be borrowed and repaid, quite a lot of the money is repayments of the loan). That's only slightly better than a rocket can do right now- and incidentally the same nanotube technology probably allows much cheaper/better rockets to be built.

Then there's the radiation problem- the space elevator goes all the way through the Van Allen belts and out the other side. The Van Allen belts are really nasty- the Apollo astronauts got something like 1% of a fatal dose during the few hours they took to go through them, but an elevator goes much, much, much more slowly. That means heavy shielding, but the shielding cuts into the weight that the elevator cable can carry- you're talking about a foot thickness of heavy shielding all around the elevator. So the elevator is mostly only good for freight until you have a really beefy cable (expensive), or unless you can remove the Van Allen Belts (HiVolt is one proposal to do that).

Re:There is no incremental development path to orb

[cperciva]

Once you're above, oh, say, 40,000ft or so (IE, and minute or two after launch) you're above 99% of the air.

Yes, and how much fuel do you burn in that first minute?

Go Ruskies!

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The article makes some very good points, and the route to space that they outline is a plausible one; but they've missed one thing.It's easy to forget that the Ruskies already sell space tourism services.

So this gives another route there- the Ruskies sell a whole bunch of space tourist seats, and grow the market organically. Now, once they've tapped out the multibillionaires, the only way to grow is to cut the launch price; to attract the slightly less rich. The Ruskies are making a pretty decent profit on this at the moment, and if they up the launch rate the cost of the vehicle comes down at about 15% cheaper every time they double production. Now the biggest market is down at about $100,000-$500,000 per trip end, and the Ruskies are well placed to capture it and make a reasonable profit- their kit is cheap, and good.

Of course as they prove out the market, it means that competitors will be able to borrow money to start up their own businesses; at the moment few investors believe that the market is real.

So I don't believe that the RLV market is necessary to actually get us to full-on orbital tourism for the (well-heeled) common man. But it's still a good idea, and I hope it works out too.

Rendered movie of Rutan's baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Check it out at http://rc.explosive.net/rutan

- jason

Rockets are antiquated

[ScrewMaster]

Let's not forget that there are a number of potentially viable alternatives to strapping oneself to a controlled chemical explosion and hoping it gets you where you want to go.

The mass-driver concept pioneered by MIT is one that could provide continuous access to near-Earth orbits with clockwork precision. It would be expensive to build and run, but once running would reliably put anything we want into orbit, continuously, twenty-four hours a day.

Another possibility is the laser-launcher. A rocket fueled simply by tanks of water would be heated by a bank of ground-based lasers: the resulting superheated steam would lift the vehicle into the desired orbit. The energy to propel the spacecraft would come from the source powering the lasers, not from any chemical fuel in the vehicle itself. This system would have the advantage of not requiring massive acceleration: laser power could be modulated to provide a comparatively gentle takeoff.

The irrational focus on self-contained launch vehicles is the problem: there are ways to get the required kinetic energy to the vehicle without an on-board fuel supply. Granted, it might take a nuclear power plant or two to run either of the above options, but that's a lot cheaper than building even a single space shuttle, much less developing and flying the current crop of pie-in-the-sky alternatives. Current estimates put the cost of a single space-shuttle launch at 1.5 billion dollars (I suspect that's conservative.)

And hey, when one of these gound-based launching systems isn't boosting spacecraft into orbit, it can be connected to the local power grid to light homes and businesses. Sales of power to the local utilities could be used to help offset launch costs.

Re:Rockets are antiquated

[krysith]

Some people have suggested the idea of combining reusable vehicles with mass drivers. You know, launch a reusable vehicle out of a mass driver, etc...

I feel this is completely backwards.

Instead, I think you would get much more bang for your buck by putting a mass launcher on a reusable vehicle. Ablation at mach 30 is not such a big issue at 100,000 ft, and we already know how to build reusable vehicles (airplanes) which can go that high. If we had mountains that high, firing a mass launcher off the mountain would be an optimal solution, but since we don't, lets use airplanes.

There are many different kinds of mass launchers, and not all require expensive electronics. My favorite is the light gas gun. It is certainly possible to build a gas gun which can fire a small particle at mach 30, if the particle is small enough. Air resistance, even at an extreme height, determines an effective minimum size per particle. So these parameters determine what the minimum investment is. However, unlike rockets, each time you send something up, your capital investment remains on earth (in the plane).

Of course, this can only be used for cargo. People can't be fired out of 5 mm holes at thousands of gees. At least, not cleanly. But when you have $5/kg bulk matter transport to LOE, who cares that it is expensive to get a few astronauts up there?

Screw SSTO: Make boosters cheap

[tjstork]

I'm wondering if the right tack is to just make boosters cheap. It seems to me that it is fundamentally difficult, considering the requirements for reuse and reentry survivability, to make any sort of SSTO cost effective given not only today's technology, but, tomorrow's as well.

Instead of trying to solve the hard problems via a pseudo commercial program, invest instead in the basic research for things like material sciences so that reusable space materials might be mass produced for other applications, driving down the cost of space.

In the mean time, we should be looking at how to simplify and reduce the construction cost of rockets so they can be made cheaper - since they are throway, and, while we are at it, if we can't keep the space "capsule" itself from being throwaway, at least design rack mounted stuff so all of the expensive avionics can be swapped out into another shell.

The "A Rocket a Day" approach

[dublin]

I already wrote a comment about this under the new launch vehicle topic, but it seems to be a better fit.

Those who haven't done so should read John Walker's (yep, the guy who wrote AutoCAD) paper written ten years ago on a different approach, one that *will* reduce the cost of spaceflight, and prove one way or the other if there is really enough commercial potential in space to build a sustainable space economy.

Here's the link to the paper: A Rocket a Day - Keeps the High Costs Away

Note especially how there is valid historical documentation to support the viability of this aproach - it's not just blowing hot air, we have hard economic evidence that this both is doable and affordable.

It's time to kill NASA and do this right. What are we waiting for?

Market Failure is the Result of Capital Failure

[Baldrson]

It's insanely easy to open space up to frontier development. Reusable? Yes. Expendible? Yes. The issue isn't Reusable vs Expendible -- manned vs unmanned or any of the rest of it.

Basically capital has failed to open space as a frontier due to capital welfare in the form of protection of asset concentrations paid for out of taxes on things other than asset concentrations themselves.

The Coalition for Science and Commerce's work on space policy reform and fusion policy reform led to the realization that capitalization of technology required a radical restructuring of the tax code.

The result was a white paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy". Essentially the biggest economic problem civilization faces is the fact that those who acquire wealth can buy political favoritism in the form of taxes on everything _but_ wealth itself. This results in everyone paying the cost (in blood and money) of defending the legal rights of asset concentrations that are untenable militarily or morally. Stated another way: Wealth is not income. Its possession isn't protected for free. That's why taxes pay for police and armies and should be based on possession of wealth rather than its transfer (or its creation).

The fact that welfare for capital is an inescapable feature of existing political entities has created the wrong kind of economic heirarchy in the world at the wrong point in history. The insanely zero-sum mentality infecting the leadership of the world, while solar energy streams past the Earth in quantities orders of magnitude over what we could even conceive of using on Earth will be investigated by future historians as the only worth-while subject to understand of this era.

Here are the important excerpts from the aforementioned 1992 white paper:

The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property should be exempt.

...With the exception of basic functions of government and the pay down of debt, the government budget should be dispersed to citizens as cash, rather than being spent in government programs or even limited in the form of vouchers. This is "market democracy" in which the citizens and their markets, rather than central planning and politics, influence the selection of goods and services to be capitalized and provided.

...In reality, we are surrounded by "frontiers" in many dimensions. Few have the profound implications of a physical frontier such as the American west or space, but all share in common the attribute that proprietary access to them is restricted by government so as to prevent unproductive hoarding.

In the case of technological frontiers, this problem is solved by limiting the patent claims to 17 years. An inventor can sit on an invention doing nothing with it for up to 17 years, but beyond that time, its use cannot be inhibited by the inventor. In practice, most inventors are so eager to see their invention brought into widespread use, they endanger their own claim. The patented technique is unique among frontier claims in that it's use is not inherently limited -- techniques are not "resources", and in that it is truly the creation of the inventor -- not an emergent phenomenon of civilization and nature.

But in other areas, such as radio frequency and orbital slots, the analogy with frontier "land" is almost perfect.

The NAT, unlike George's land tax, makes it possible for the government to open up all frontiers to private claim and development. Claimants must simply define and register the nature of the property rights that they wish to claim so

Re:There is no incremental development path to orb

[Anonymous Coward]

The external tank is a nothing more than a drop tank. Not all that different than the tanks used on the P-51 Mustang and the B-58. It is not most of what gets the shuttle into orbit. It is just a big honking tank.
Yes the shuttle is a reusable vehicle. The higher the profromance of a vehicle the greater the maintenance required. Other vehicals need to have there engines overhauled after each use Top fuel dragsters, Stock cars, Indy Cars, F1 Cars... The Shuttle is not a commercal space craft and needs to be replaced but it was not a diasaster or a bad idea. Just over sold and under funded. It was supposed to be part of a system. The Shuttle plus a space tug and a Space Station.
Only the Shuttle got funded.