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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."
The problem with incremental development of RLVs is that there's a huge
leap between the size and difficulty of putting something into space
for five minutes (as in the current X-prize contenders) and putting it
into orbit (as in the shuttle). That will make it difficult to evolve our
way into a commercial space program.
I often find myself pointing out that just getting into space isn't
all that hard. Lifting yourself up 100km requires about a megajoule
(that's the energy equivalent of a stick of dynamite, or about 1/12th
of a gallon of gasoline (about 1/4 kg or 1/2 pound of gasoline), or a
jelly doughnut, or running a hairdryer for 2 minutes) per kilogram of
mass.
By contrast, orbital speed is something like 7000 meters per second,
(or 16,000 miles per hour for you provincials). Getting going that fast
requires an additional 24 megajoules per kilogram of mass (for a total of
25).
In short, the difference between the amount of energy you need to
get into orbit and just into space is a factor of 25, for the same
mass. That ratio of 25 is about equal to the difference between the
latent chemical energies of broccoli and gasoline.
Except that, in the case of space travel, you better be burning
something at least as energetic as gasoline to start with, or you'll
never even hoist yourself up 100km.
The way we've traditionally gotten into orbit is to concentrate the
kinetic energy into ever smaller bits of the vehicle: you use a huge
rocket motor and tanks to get everything started moving, then ditch the
empty tankage and rocket motors for the first stage -- that lets you
concentrate on moving a smaller amount of stuff even faster.
Realistic reusable designs are usually not staged designs,
because it's hard to recover and reuse the first stages. The problem is
that you have to have incredibly lightweight tankage and engines to make
everything work. But pushing stuff to lighter weight makes it more
flimsy and less prone to being reusable. Darn.
The VentureStar, IIRC, ran into problems with exactly this technology --
they were using lightweight carbon fiber tanks to hold their propellant,
and they couldn't make the tank light enough to boost itself into orbit.
The shuttle is NOT a reusable vehicle in any but the most technical
sense of the word: it requires constant skilled redesign and intelligent
(rather than scripted) maintenance, and the engines have to be overhauled
after every flight.
We already developed the Eagle RLVs for Moonbase Alpha more over 4 years ago. Ask Commander Koenig.
The types of subsidy commercial entities are able to offer to space travel are nothing to scoff at, either. I would be willing to put up with advertising on the side of a shuttle, or under an orbital satellite, or even time-limited advertisements on the moon if it meant people got to ride there for free, and people who would complain about such things are no better than the ones who won't explore the heavens and won't let anybody else do so, either.
We've got to start looking at these alternatives if we're ever going to get anywhere.
Has any thought been given to reusing the main rockets? A friend once suggested getting them into orbit and using the shell as add-on modules for a space station. It seems like it would save time and money.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
The best picture I could find was this one on HowStuffWorks.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
It's imagination. The aviation industry used to have a handful of folks who could imagine and conceptualize the darndest vehicles - and a slew of brilliant engineers to turn those concepts into reality (or dis-prove the concept based on technical limitations, materiaks, etc.)
Nowadays, money issues and the eternal pursuit of higher profit margins has forced many of the dreamers out of the big aerospace companies and into places where there simply isn't the technical base to turn their ideas into anything at all. That's where the X-Prize will hopefully bear fruit - IF (when) the prize is claimed.
How long did it take for Trans-Atlantic airlines to start showing profits after Lindy made his flight? It's a rhetorical question, but the answer might be interesting, nonetheless.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
From my point of view, you seem to have hit the nail on the head. RLVs are something that our current energy sources just can't dream to achive. We could build the vehicle that could sustain it, but we currently have no way of powering that vehicle.
IIRC, this is the reason behind the space elevator. Thus, we can get into space and dock with something already in orbit. Then we can transfer to some other station where work on space only vehicles can take place. These vehicles can then take advantage of ION Propulsion since it provides a constant acceleration.
My degree isn't in aerospace engineering, neither i have i even attempted to read futher on either of the above concepts other than a quick glimpse, but it seems to me that we are going about things in the wrong direction. I wonder what it will take to bring that revelation that suddenly changes everything?
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
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.
People now pay $5000 to fly a MiG for a few minutes; imagine how much they'll pay to gaze out the window at a big blue marble!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
Well, the article makes a case for how the X-prize entries could be the springboard to cheaper access to orbital space. It seems like a nice idea, but it remains to be seen if that's the direction it will go in. I'm sure the X-prize backers have in mind a scenario like that for expanding the scope of non-governmental space efforts.
As for an RLV, it is true that only one design has ever flown; however, to give up on a whole class of vehicles when we're still on the 1st model seems very premature. Here's one remarkable fact about the Space Shuttle Columbia: their was a breach in the wing and the it was coming apart. Yet the craft (and its software) was actually able to maintain level flight until the wing actually broke off.
Are there flaws in the shuttle? You bet. But with 125 flights under their belt, NASA has a much better idea now how to build a reliable RLV. We're a long way from an operational vehicle, but that's only because of the high cost (and subsequent low number) of tests and launches. Maybe the X-prize entrants will solve this problem, or maybe a 2nd generation RLV will make a quantum leap in improvement-- today's big, dumb boosters are a lot better than how they started out; I bet the biggest improvments were early on.
So good luck to Armadillo and Scaled and NASA. If congress allocates the funds for NASA, I'm sure they can build a better, safer shuttle. If not, private industry will get there someday.
I'd be happy with some of that space broccoli.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Ed, one of the guys aboard the ISS currently, wrote his take on the future of spaceships, which i thought was a good read.
That big blue marble is my home you insensitive clod!
The unofficial
...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!
You're out a bit with that hair dryer. At 2400W (max in places like Australia and New Zealand), it takes 416 seconds to go through a MJ and 555s at 1800W (max for North America (I think: I might be wrong about the 15A)). That's not quite 7 minutes and over 9 minutes, respectively. Even then, I don't think I'd want a 1800W hair dryer pointed at me. That's no hair dryer, that's a hot-air paint stripper!!!
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
acutally, algea produce far more oxygen then the rain forests. too bad the weather pattern changes from the loss of rain forest will probably kill the algea.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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.
RTFWG!
Read The F*ing William Gibson! Not troll, more like alluding to books that should be mandatory reading as an example of 21st century poetry...
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
or Blow if you prefer, but as long as we keep using them this whole space exploration going to consist of nothing more than hop around the moon at best and a few robot probes.
Time to start considering real concepts like Daedalus or Orion.
The markets which such RLVs will serve also seem to be dominated by government. Missile testing? Remove sensing? I can't remember having bought a missile or whatever the hell it is that a remote sensor gives you lately. Seems like we'll be paying for it through taxes for a long time yet.
Of course, the (disposable) booster stage would be much bigger and more costly than what they use now, but it still might be a win... emphasis on might. :-)
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
The earth is a penal colony for the stupid, the lazy, the criminal, and the insane. (I fall into all of the above...)
In short, unless you plan on not coming back, don't bother trying to escape.
---
Earth has no survivors. Everyone who has ever been born here, has died here.
If I understand your friend, he proposes converting the upper stages in space. This would be difficult. You would need to rip out the machinery. Then if humans are to go inside, decontaminate them of any hazardous chemicals, left-over fuel, etc. Then install the equipment to turn it into something useful, which has to be brought up separately. Considering the difficulties of working in space, it is probably easier to do all of this on the ground.
where Enos, the orbiting chimp, went in 1961.
Um. You do know that the only reason that the Space Shuttle isn't fully reusable is that Congress wouldn't pony up enough development (not research) budget at the key point in the architecture cycle? That there existed and exists an entirely plausible design based on the same basic technology that the Shuttle uses?
My degree isn't in aerospace engineering
Ok, perhaps you didn't. So why are you stating that something can't be done when you don't actually know about it?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.Has there ever been a business case (ie profit) for ANY manned spacecraft at all? If NASA has failed to create one even with billions in taxpayer money, it follows that a huge leap would be required to fly one for profit. So I don't find the article too surprising.
Then sit back and see what kind of aircraft carrier sized behemoth vehicle they come up with...
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?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Well, if you want a (not terribly poetic, but still oddly familiar sounding) fictional look at what might happen if some philanthropist/entrepreneur was successful at RLVs, read Michael Flynn's Firestar, followed by three others in the series. Four books could've been tightened up to three, but it's still a good read.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Sorry to disagree but your argument is historically invalid. Every new frontier has had entry costs: cost in money, cost in materials, cost in lives. If Columbus had thought the way you do the New World would never have been discovered, and you probably wouldn't be here.
Eventually, every frontier has been commercialized and used for profit, whether it be new continents, the sea, space, the microcosm, you name it. Space already has been successfully exploited for communications, research, military and entertainment purposes, and if we continue to expand our presence there it will become even more valuable. I got news for you: space became commercially viable some time ago.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oh, and your defence concerns are bunk.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
This is my sig.
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?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Given the amount of gold, silver and other valuable minerals that made their way from the New World to Spain and other European nations of the time, I think you're a little off-base. Historically they got a lot from the New World, as a matter of fact an entire merchant/banker class arose to profit by that exploration. Certainly, the trifling investment made by Queen Isabella in Columbus' multiple expeditions was returned handsomely. Your comparison of the exploration of the New World to our current space efforts is flawed, I'm afraid. A good history book would be in order.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, we certainly won't be asking you to design any Martian landers! ;)
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
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.
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
Seastead this.
No problem. Check out the NASA history on the subject; it's reasonably good.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Once upon a time the USA never had a reputation for doing things on the cheap. But today, it looks like they are trying to do everything on the cheap. (Iraq?) Seems like Washinton has been invaded by penny pinching accountants, or is it body snatchers, I cant remember.
It would seem to me that companies like UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc... would find the ability to ship from New York to Hong Kong in a couple hours a significant incentive to start investing in this field.
Is it possible, say within the next ten years, to develop a suborbital shipping vehicle that can carry enough payload to make it worth thier while?
The idea is that as the companies compete to build systems that can handle even heavier payloads, out of this should emerge a system that can also handle orbital flights with a bit lighter payload.
Is this a reasonable assumption?
McDoobie
Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.
DARPA is currently funding a project called RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) that would use such a high-altitude, high-speed aircraft to launch small (on the order of 100 kg) spacecraft into LEO quickly and cheaply. Earlier this year they awarded a contract to a startup, Space Launch Corporation, to continue design work on RASCAL. First flight is tentatively scheduled for 2006.
Jeff Foust
The Space Review