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Low-Cost Space Shuttle Replacement Proposed
FleaPlus writes "The Washington Times and Space.com has an article on a plan for a low-cost shuttle replacement by t/Space, an organization whose team includes AirLaunch LLC and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites. Instead of a one-size-fits-all craft, t/Space's plan is to build an air-launched four-person capsule termed the Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV), specialized for carrying people to and from low-Earth orbit. Once in orbit the CXV would dock with a separately-launched Crew Exploration Vehicle (likely built by Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman), which could be optimized for traveling between Earth orbit and the Moon. The CXV would also be able to dock with a space station or serve as a crew lifeboat. The group, which has already received some NASA funding, calculates that it can have the system ready by 2008 for $400 million, with a per-launch cost of $20 million (compared to ~$500 million per shuttle launch). Development would be done under a competitive fixed-price (instead of cost-plus) contract."
Why not just give them US$400M? Northrup and the others will spend that kind of money just thinking about it all - then at least they'll have two options at the end of it!
I want to see NASA successfully put people into space and not have them return as barbecued chunks.
I also like the idea of manned space missions at a fraction of the current costs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Why it costs $500 million dollars just to put a frickin "re-usable" space-bus into orbit? Is it mostly a lot of variable costs that have to be paid every time we put a shuttle up, or are there just mostly fixed costs, then divide by shuttle missions per year?
AccountKiller
400 million? It costs 2 billion (taxpayer) dollars to build ONE stealth bomber. One.
This is cheap.
If we can get back into space for 400 million, call it a bargain and GO!
Here, here! Build the pieces needed to do each part of the job right, and stop trying for a one-size-fits-none solution.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
What about when the backers are brought before Dubya and he asks them how much of the 400 million initial and 20 million per launch goes to helping the good old boys and the backers look at each other and groan? I've never been accused of having much faith in the US administration but I just figure the men in charge of our dear sweet US of A will just say thank you for the fine offer but we've already got a team on the problem. I've never seem the government interest peaked by cost savings unless that savings goes to their friends/screws the general public or both of the above.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
Actually, considering what Scaled Composites has done so far, and the budget they've used, I have some belief that this might be doable. Of course it would not include funds for running a huge NASA paperpusher army, so it probably won't include costs of extensive certifications and testings to get the failure rate down to minimal. Space is risky business, and spending megabucks for additional 1-2% success rate is just a bad idea. Every astronaut can themselves consider the risks and decide if they are happy with the launch vehicle.
:)
Nobody was out there demanding stacks of paper and testing from the Wright brothers when they experimented. In retrospect their contraption was highly unstable and unsafe. Same should apply for launch system developments. Sure, stuff will blow up, and people will die. People who understood the risks and knew exactly what they were doing. If they run out of people who are willing to hop onboard, they know they must spend time and money on the safety. Today, I doubt they'll have many issues as long as the (test)pilots are involved in the process and know how the tincan they are hopping into ticks.
No need to bog it all down with 100M$s of paperwork and extra safety tests and checks that really won't improve safety. The law of diminishing returns applies - sure, you want to test and make sure the damn thing works, but beyond certain point extra testing and checking is not going to change the safety much - only the pricetag will go up, see NASA
This is the wrong way to think.
Lower costs will greatly expand what people view as possible with space exploration. Richard Branson's space tourism proposal hinges completely on Rutan's low cost technology. Other applications (space mining, space based astronomy, etc...) will follow if we can get into space cheaply.
Resting with the status quo is silly and short sighted.
Cute. It isn't that we can't find people who will take the risks, it's our safety obsessive culture that cannot tolerate your suggestion. Sure the money would be far better spent on foreign aid, in terms of lives per dollar, but public sentiment isn't rational. And NASA depends on public sentiment for it's cash, not the delivery of a product.
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Most likely, people who say this are arguing that the benefit is not worth the price.
Er, yes. But the real argument is not about whether the money will be reinvested. It's a given that the money goes somewhere when the government spends it, just the same as it does when an individual spends it. The question is who will choose where these funds go. If the government decides, the money will almost certainly go to different places than if individuals decide separately. Then supply and demand kicks in and the number and type of goods and services available on the market begin to change.
While I think you're on the right track, I'm not sure that there's a whole lot of profitability out there right now. We have so many cheap mineral resources here on Earth that an expensive extra-terrestrial mining operation makes no economic sense. Tourism is about the best we can do for the moment, I think.
Actually, if the deal is "fixed price" and there's no nasty backdoors, either they do it for below $400M and get the rest as a profit, or they go above $400M and pay the difference from their pockets. Most probably they would go for it, because before they know they are over budget, they will have spent enought, that it will cost them less to finish the work and get $400M back, losing total minus what they get (say, $500M-$400M=$100M) than all they have invested so far (say, $250M). Not to mention all the "prestige" work for NASA gives.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
If the separation procedure is safe enough (e.g. the shuttle is detached - dropped from the bottom of the plane and falls at least 100m before launching its own engine), it may be one of the safer methods. If the top of the carrier plane is used as a launch pad, that's a different matter. I haven't heard of a bomber plane destroyed by colliding with its own bomb midair.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Heh, where's the old hacker spirit?
Why develop the same thing twice and compete, when you can cooperate? I don't know the costs of the russian development, but if it's comparable, why should both parties separately pay $400M for a new design from scratch, each, if you can share the costs and pay $300M each to have a common design and two identical shuttles built.
Is the word "cooperation" so dead? Cold war rages on?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
the tech has improved so much in the 30 years since the Shuttle was designed that almost anything Bert Rutan is likely to come up with will be a hell of a lot safer. Reentry from orbit is the most stressful thing anyone does with anything that flies, and any current construction isn't going to have 30 years of accumulated material fatigue in it. The other point was that the design of the Shuttle was dictated largely by political considerations which partitioned the design components to put as many military contracts in the districts of politically powerful Congressmen as possible. While the same may not be true of the regular aerospace contractor building the other part of the system, AFAIK, the only priority Rutan's got is safe, profitable flight, and things that fall out of the sky will put him out of business. He hasn't been around enough to have the kind of political connections the big aerospace companies do, he isn't going to get financially rewarded for failure.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Unless you know of an environmentally cleaner way to get enough power to put "clean coal" out of business than a solar power satellite network.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Is the US supposed to rely on Russia for getting into space now?
News flash: It already does for manned space flights.
Which is why we need private enterprises taking the initiative.
Business, hiring qualified test pilots to do stuff they are supposed to be doing. Everyone doing it can compare their paycheck to their job description and choose if the want to ride the experimental thingy.
Yes, I can imagine congressional hearings and 'oversight' destroying the whole thing after a crew exits stage left in a fireball. That means US has a problem, and such business should relocate elsewhere...
Odd that nobody seems to raise holy hell over dead military test pilots who have over the years died while testing military hardware. Nobody ever hears of them. People also seem to shrug off accidents during pilot training and military exercises. How is this any different from space exploration? It isn't. Space = risky business, where people can die. Live with it.
I know I'd love to go up there like just about everyone else. I also know that today's hardware for doing so is somewhat unreliable and 'prototype' in many ways, so I'd currently choose not to take the ride. I could take a zero-g ride on a vomit comet (airplanes are petty mature), but betatesting a rocket is not my idea of a fun occupation. At the same time I'm quite sure you'd find immensely qualified takers for the job...
Alright guys, this means we will have it around 2015 for about $750 million.
That is still cheap compared to STS.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Very true and there isn't much Burt Rutan can do about this. The problem is one congressman will hold back support until there is money added to the project to buy "outer space safe" band-aids with special adhesive (for some reason) which of course only someone in his distract can make for about $10,000 per band-aid. Then another will hold back support until money is added to have all instruction manually "speically" printed by someone is his district which of course will cost $1,000 per page.
This will go on-and-on until everyone has a little piece. By time time its done it'll be a few billion for development and of course all these "special" items will need to be replaced for each launch so it'll be back to hundreds of millions for each launch as well.
Based on Scaled Composites history, I have full confidence they could do the job well. However, I have no doubt "pork politics" will drive up the price drastically. Of course, that assumes the congressmen with Boeing, Northrup Grumman, etc in thier districts would ever allow this to go forward which I wouldn't call a given.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
1) Prevent explosion of the line upon disconnect.
2) 1/3 of the fuel is A LOT. Actually, 1/3 of the solid state fuel in the helper rockets. Not pumpable and even if it was, way too much to be pumped in such a short time.
3) They are disconnected really fast after, so that's not much of the problem anyway.
The suggested solution is much more radical: get the shuttle some 10 miles up by a jet plane and then launch it from there.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The Broken Window Fallacy is used to justify some destructive, entropic event. That's what makes it a fallacy. Because in the end, even though fixing the window keeps people employed, the owner of the window is only as well off as he was before the window was broken, whereas he could've spent the same amount of money and been better off had the window not been broken in the first place.
But investing in spacecraft isn't like investing in a broken window. (Or at least, it isn't any more *necessarily* that way than any other human endeavor.) You are investing money to create something new that does all the work of employing others but also gives us something new in return, abilities we didn't have before.
You can have a discussion about whether the benefits of low-cost space travel are worth more or less in real terms than, say, the benefits of a war, or a prescription drug benefit, but if you categorically dismiss it as a Broken Window, then the sloppy thinking is on your end.
NASA Engineer: Hey do you think we should do something original this decade?
NASA Boss: Well, we haven't done anything original since the Viking Lander. Why spoil a good thing?
NASA Engineer: Good point. Doing something new might require actual work.
NASA Boss: Yeah. Hey, let's throw some money at Lockeed, Boeing, or Northrop. They'll give us cool animations and huge promises
NASA Engineer: Will they actually deliver the product?
NASA Boss: No, but the public will have forgotten about all our original promises long before realizing they never delivered. And we'll have a whole new batch of cool animations and promises to distract them by then.
NASA Engineer: Sounds like a plan. I'm going to go take a nap. Wake me up when our funding is renewed
NASA Boss: You got it!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Gem diamonds are basically worthless. Debeers is sitting on whole shitload of diamonds in their vaults and only releases just enough to keep the price high. There's no resale market for diamonds, and they advertise like crazy to convince people to buy new diamonds.
There are a lot of fallacies in this post. Lets go down the list:
Actually, considering what Scaled Composites has done so far
Scaled has done almost nothing in terms of sending a craft to orbit.
Of course it would not include funds for running a huge NASA paperpusher army
NASA's "paperpushing" regulations are largely due to the private companies trying to take advantage of them. Trust me, I used to work for one company that did - Rockwell-Collins. They had a Space Shuttle contract, and started charging all of their other projects that were low on budget to the shuttle contract, then simply claimed that the project was running overbudget. Eventually they were caught and smacked down with fines and regulatory penalties, but far down the line.
The regulations are designed to make sure that the net result is A) what they asked for, B) safety corners haven't been cut, and C) . Can they be improved? You bet. Have they been improved already? You bet (as much as O'Keefe has done wrong, most will agree that he made NASA regulations a lot easier to deal with).
Every astronaut can themselves consider the risks and decide if they are happy with the launch vehicle.
I'll agree with that one.
Nobody was out there demanding stacks of paper and testing from the Wright brothers when they experimented.
Experimented on themselves. When they wanted to sell their airplane to the military, the military put it through the works.
In retrospect their contraption was highly unstable and unsafe.
Unstable? Yes. Unsafe? Hardly. Early airplanes flew so low and so slow that even when you crashed, it was rarely a fatal event. The first fatality wasn't until 1908, despite several hundred (yes, hundred) teams around the world building their own airplanes in that time, many with dubious methods. If I recall the number correctly, the first cross-country flight attempt in order to win a cup involved about three dozen crashes *by the same contender*, who each time patched his airplane up and took off again. Even with all of the advances in speed (and increases in flying altitude), and with far more rugged terrain, of the dozen crashes in the first attempt to fly around the world in 1924, none were fatal. The first fatal commercial flight wasn't until two planes in (late 1920s, early 1930s? Don't recall the exact date) collided over the English Channel. I could keep going, but I think you get the picture. Early amateur airplanes were nothing like amateur rockets - their failure modes were far, far more gentle.
No need to bog it all down with 100M$s of paperwork and extra safety tests and checks that really won't improve safety.
You better believe that all of those "extra safety tests" increase safety. Take a look at the history of any rocket development program's tests. Often, you won't find burnthrough fuel/oxidizer leak, or other potentially fatal complication until you've mounted everything on the launch pad to each other and are doing your 20th or so static firing of the engines.
The law of diminishing returns applies - sure, you want to test and make sure the damn thing works, but beyond certain point extra testing and checking is not going to change the safety much
Quite true. But look at all of the public outcry (and even outcry on Slashdot) when a manned spacecraft fails. They have reasons other than pure logic to take into account: public reaction. If t-space wants to step into the public limelight as such, they better be prepared to take that on as well.
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