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Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA?
l8f57 writes "Hal Gerham (from the NASA CAIB report) is calling for cargo and people to be separated into different missions. He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle."
Separate the cargo from the crew? That might make sense, but it raises other concerns. It is indeed a tragedy when a shuttle is lost. The crew, the ship, and the cargo are lost.
Are they attempting to minimize the impact of potential losses by proposing this separation? We already know that NASA projected the odds of losing a shuttle. What is it, about than 1 out of 200 or so missions could be a loss? What are the odds of losing both the crew and cargo shuttles during the same mission? If the shuttle carrying the crew is lost, they will be able to continue the mission of the cargo with a new crew, if they can avoid obvious delays.
I realize that NASA may be applying logic about how to make their missions safer, however it appears they are more concerned about protecting themselves, and their bottom line. The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects.
This story reminds me of the movie Capricorn One. NASA was shown as running scared, doing anything necessary to cover their mistakes.
Urantian -- and proud of it!
For example, if you were planning to start a colony on Mars, you could use cheaper methods to send the suppies to the planet ahead of time. Then, use the most reliable methods to send the people. The whole enterprise would be cheaper, you could use the most reliable methods to ensure that the colonists would arrive safely, and you could guarantee that the supplies would be waiting for the colonists when they did arrive.
Seriously, our ability to send any kind of material close to effecting another civilization of any kind is nil. We can't even get next door without hyperventilating, let alone outside the solar system to throw garbage on Spock's lawn.
Let's just have this conversation again in 100 years, k?
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Telecommuting is where it's at! One would think that outer space would be a perfect place for astronauts to telecommute. The only reason we still send people into space is to put a human face on billions of dollars - which works well until things start going wrong (an interesting parallel with Iraq).
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I agree with this. By separating out the cargo, the personel-carrying missions can actually become more predictable (less variance due to cargo weights) and are unencumbered with the reusability goals. This means Safety can always be the primary goal for person-carrying missions.
Cargo missions are a much more appropriate area to experiment with reusability or cost-lowering goals as the failure costs are significantly lower. NASA would have a much easier time explaining how they blew up a $40 billion cargo payload to the press compared to the media frenzy created when an astronaut dies.
Just look at the media attention given to this last disaster - how much was covering the loss of human life and how much was covering the financial losses incurred?
I think something many people overlook is that large-scale shuttle type vehicles are extremely complex and difficult to engineer. We can't just slap one together and put it on top of one of our current rockets -- nothing is big enough to launch a similar vehicle!
By seperating the system into two less-complex vehicles, they can focus more on the specifics of both vehicles. Instead of making a jack-of-all-trades, good-at-none "solution", the engineers can focus on making sure each vehicle does it's mission well.
As for non-reusable -- so what! For now, that might be the way to go. Perhaps in the near future the system can be modified with next-generation technology, but again, simplicity is where it's at. Let's not make another overly complex mostrosity with tens of thousands of pseudo-redundant interconnected systems.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
You are using it all the time.
We really haven't explored the limits of reusability or expendability.
If we were to contract out for expendable boosters, built in as cheaply and expendably as possible in batches of 100, it would end up with the launch costs way below what they are now. Our current batch of expendable boosters are far too complicated and are built far too slowly to give us savings like this. This is what is called the "Big Dumb Booster" notion.
The shuttle is a poor example of reusable boosters. The cost for refurbishing between launches, maintaining an army of technicians, etc. is incredible. If we were able to fly one, with the same safety and without appreciable yearly budget increase, once every week, the shuttle would start to look good.
The CAIB's trying to say what has been repeated over and over and over again. One of the reasons why the shuttle has problems is because they tried to create one space vehicle that can do everything. It's like trying to combine a sedan, truck, and crane into one vehicle.
And it's probably easier to build an inexpensive production-grade partially or fully reusable craft before somebody gets a better idea if it just has to do one or the other.
Gentoo Sucks
When you return with a ship of empty space (the cargo bay empty) you are paying an aoerodynamic PRICE. By discarding the cargo transporter, you save because that aerodynamic cost is left in orbit. The aerodynamic cost of the capsule to earth is TINY. That way you can bring back the crew in a capsule,which is easier and safer. So they have to splash down in the ocean, big frickin deal.
So it does make sense for both viable manned and unmanned space flight. I just don't want to see all space exploration done by wire because, ultimately, it just doesn't feel right.
Reusability is orthogonal to this, I think, though once again it Just Makes Sense to reuse what you can. There are extremes that we don't need to go to, though. There aren't too many times I've really wanted a reusable cable tie, for instance.
Ultimately NASA needs to get back to its beginnings. NASA does the big expensive but basic R&D needed for commercial companies to take over. NASA should have a baseline rocket engine research program continually ongoing. They need to have a standard model rocket engine that is continually upgraded and simplified. the design is then published annually for any and all to use (with security clearance) Same needs to be done with tanks, guidance and control systems, reentry systems, spacesuits, life support systems etc.
Admiral Gehman is right. I hope someone is paying attention. He's right because there is no requirement to add a Shuttle crew to a flight that delivers cargo to the ISS. He's right because making a vehicle system safe enough for humans wastes money if the vehicle is also used to carry cargo.
There's too much emphasis on debates about winged spaceplanes versus Apollo-derived capsules; too much debate about reusability versus expendable boosters.
Let's be sensible. If you need to send tons of cargo from New York to Los Angeles, you can stuff into a truck or a freight train. That is, a vehicle deisgned to carry cargo. If you want to send your family from New York to Los Angeles, you would put them on an airplane, a bus, or drive them there in your car. In other words, a vehicle designed to be safe enough and comfortable enough to carry people. We should follow the same principle in getting cargo and people to LEO.
And we don't need to develop new techology to do this. We solved the problem of getting into and out of LEO 40 years ago.
What we need is:
1) A reliable heavy-lift booster that can orbit cargo to the ISS; I argue that we should go the expendable vehicle route because any attempt to design and build a reusable vehicle will add years and dollars chasing a dubious goal. Since the ISS is designed to accept cargo from the Shuttle's bay, I would create this new heavy-lift vehicle by launching the Shuttle without the Orbiter. NASA has had a heavy-lift vehicle within its reach for 25 years and refused to build it, chossing instead to unnecessarily put live at risk. (Meanwhile, we also have the new Delta and Atlas designs at our disposal. Their heavy-lift configurations are nothing to sneeze at.)
2) Every effort to build a winged and resuable spacecraft has failed because it would have required technology that does not exist yet, or cannot be used without skyrocketing costs. The nascent Orbital Spaceplane will face the same problem. Let's shuffle this problem over to the advanced research department, and use technology that we know works to get humans into and out of LEO: capsules. Let's go the Apollo-derived route and get something flying ASAP.
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It's smart to pick *one* requirement (like, say, get 4 people to and from orbit in the safest manner possible) and let that be the only criteria for equipment design.
It may well be that we'll end up using simple rockets for this, like the Russians. Sure, it's not sexy, but I bet it'll be both cheaper than Shuttle and safer. Shuttle suffered from 'feature creep', from wacky Air Force 'cross-range' requirements and serious pork. Get rid of all that and NASA could build a safer crew vehicle.
We'd then use the (not human-rated) big dumb boosters like Delta and Atlas to get cargo up. That, too, would be cheaper than Shuttle. Hrm. So, why do we have Shuttle again?
Calling the shuttle reusable is specious at best. The thing requires a $500Million retrofit for EVERY SINGLE FLIGHT it makes. The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...
It's a one-time use vehicle that we are spending unholy sums of money to fly repeatedly. A split system is a much better idea-- launch the people on a small but completely reliable people-mover, to catch up with a large-but-sloppy-and-cheap cargo hauling ship. Sure, you'll lose an occasional cargo ship-- but if you can make it enough cheaper, people can afford to rebuild and send their crap up twice for the same price as one trip today.
The quote at the beginning of the article
is damning for an organization that NASA is supposed to be.
NASA should be a research and development organization. The job of such organizations is to learn new things and teach the rest of us. The fact that they're not learning from their mistakes shows an organization that's become mired in incompetence.
This is one consequence of the rigid, hierarchical nature of today's NASA. Rigid hierarchies resist change and learning. They're great if you want to keep doing the same thing the same way. For instance, if you want to keep on making buggy whips in the same way to the same standards as your great grandfathers, adopt this kind of organization. Oh, you want to switch from buggy whip making to rocket research? Time to scrap the rigid hierarchy.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
To learn. To build an experience base for human operations in space. So we're not 100% clueless when we decide to actually put people into space to do something serious.
Sort of like practicing how to swim. If you've never practiced, what's gonna happen when you're thrown in the ocean?