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India Planning Reusable 2-Stage-to-Orbit Vehicle
WoodenKnight writes "India's ISRO Chairman, G Madhavan Nair recently gave a brief description of a fully-reusable 2-stage satellite launch vehicle that is being planned at ISRO. From the article: 'This is in its initial stages of vehicle configuration and the first stage is configured as a winged body configuration, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. This stage after burnout will re-enter and will be made to land horizontally on the runway, like an aircraft. The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land. This is only in its conceptual stage.'"
NASA's stuff to India now?
In fact we will
A blog about stuff.
The Western Nations (US,Canada, UK, etc.) also have starving and homeless people and yet they also send things into space and spend billions of dollars on defence. It may not seem like a worthwhile endevour but the technological fallout from a project of this scope (in experience, new materials, new technology, etc) will benefit everyone in the long term.
Strangly enough history shows us that government spending on large projects like a space program are very good things for an economy. They provide jobs mostly and encourage spinoff innovations.
Here. Check out this link. Imagine the possibilities: long inclined launch ramp = low launch costs = pervasive human presence in space. Nuclear propulsion would be nice, too.
And I seriously wonder if the Indian aerospace industry is up to the task of building this thing. But if they are, then bully for them.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Everytime there is a post about India, some know-nothing decides to chime in with just such a comment. First off, there will always be a problem somwehere. So, if you insist that progress is only allowed to occur after all old problems are dealt with, nothing will ever be accomplished. Second, what the hell makes you so qualified to comment? You were posting on Slashdot when you could have been helping backwoods Indian villagers! (And, so am I!) You express a concern about it, so I'll assume you do volunteer work, and donate just like I do. But, neither of us dedicates 100% of our time and money to helping others. Nobody does. So, no government does for the exact same reason - governments are made of people!
Lastly, India uses the space program to do a lot of very real good. Weather satellites save lives. Earth observation satellites can help see how crops are doing, and make it easier to get better yields. They can help find where water is, and help make maps to figure out how to get it where it needs to go.
Jerk.
This is not zealotry, but an informed comment.[1]
Unlike other societies that do have a lot of money to throw at such problems, ours does not (as you've noted). The difference is the way in which scientists in India go about designing these stages. All stage designs are done as efficiently as possible to allow reuse in multiple tasks---for instance between stages of missiles and rockets. The individual projects are not large scale, and built by using small addons to previously existing technology. This is not as expensive as you might imagine.
[1] This is stuff I cite from a couple of books I read by the Indian president, (really) a rocket scientist.
My photolog
The developed world seems to have a notion that every last penny of the budgets of developing countries should be spent on eradicating poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, it takes more than throwing at money at the problem to make those things go away (why hasn't the US eradicated hunger and poverty in that case?). I think India realizes that one way to a better economy is by utilizing that massive amount of engineering/IT/science brainpower that all its universities are spewing out every year. Better economy leads to better infrastructure, which is the first step thats needed on the road to curing the other problems. So no -- their priorities are not messed up, and it's not like they're snatching money from the poor to send rockets up in space. Your view of economies and development is overly simplistic.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
It is extremely expensive to go into space with conventional rockets beacause it's near the limit of what's physically possible. Had our gravitational well (product of surface gravity and planet diameter) been twice as deep, we'd might as well forget about launching conventional rockets into orbit.
Spaceship One didn't go into orbit. It had enough oomph to get about 100km of altitude. That's only a few percent of what's needed to get into space, and the cost increases exponentially as the delta-g needed increases, with a doubling constant of about 2km/sec or so, the exact figure depending on the reduction and oxidizing agents used with hydrogen and oxygen giving the largest constant.
Additionally, for-profit businesses have virtually no incentive to invest in long term research. Their discount rates tend to be around 10% (even in this era of uber-low interest rates) and that's for a sure bet investment. Risky multi-decade investments that might or might have a huge payoff in 30 years are not what they like. Governments and non-profits (like the Mars Society) are the only groups that have the necessary long-term thinking to develop this field, and even then they miss more often than hit. There are plenty space shuttle-type boondoggles for one Sputnik or Soyuz or Apollo victory.
As far as I know, private space research is either lightly encouraged, or treated neutrally. It's more that few people are so foolhardy to invest in it at this point. Rutan might make money because of publicity and there being a limited tourist potential for sub-orbital flights, but his research is a dead-end that will not bring us any closer to routine orbital space flight.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I'd summarize the reasons as:
1) Launches should take place somewhat near the equator, and not over populated areas, limiting the number of launch sites. Maybe not a huge concern since the use of already established launch sites could be negotiated.
2) Private space programs need to be organized in countries with free market systems that encourage investment and risk taking, again limiting the number of suitable places to run this sort of thing.
3) In the US, space travel falls under the purview of the FAA, meaning any space tourism is going to be at least as regulated as airline travel. I want to see space too, but if I have to take off my freaking shoes to go through security, I may say screw it and use a telescope.
4) No one can quantify (or at least, no one has yet) the expected ROI for something like this. Any number of companies (Microsoft, Dell, etc.) could drop $1 billion cash into space travel without much pain, start a space tourism business and probably make it work, at least on some level. The problem is that the shareholders aren't going to be to happy about it without knowing what they can expect to make in the long run.
Zillionaires like Branson can afford to do this kind of thing now but there aren't many people like that in the world. However, I don't think it will be too long before major private investment efforts are made. Someone came up with the $7b for Iridium; I'm sure someone else can find that kind of money for private space travel.
Sure, India has a long way to go. But the country has some of the world's best scientists and has become a significant center for global technological innovation. Why shouldn't they put their skills to work in space?
Of course, it all may be about ego, about promoting national pride. Americans, though, are hardly in a position to judge others about that. After all, our entire space program was built on beating the Soviets to the moon!
If you build it, they will come...
Have you been to India? I used to believe the same thing- people in poverty in India are responsible for their own demise. I believed that right up until I was there for three weeks this past summer. I was in that place without clean water. Let me tell you something, until you too don't have basic human necessities available to you, like clean water, you have no idea what it feels like. Yes, the whole space thing is great for India and will probably help it overall, but let's not overlook the importance of human life. It's not like the Indian government is going out of its way to help people in need, although progress has been made recently.
It is very easy to point at a problem. It is often very difficult to suggest a solution. Yes, clean drinking water, toilets (mind you, I said toilets, not 'clean' toilets - that'd be the next phase!), electricity, transport, assured employment are the issues that need to be tackled more or less in that order in India. But as it often happens with difficult problems, the solution lies at an altogether different level. A couple of NGOs can probably pool up enough money to ferry water in tankers to some remote villages - but that model is not sustainable.
The issue then is not to provide a patch, but to root out the problem itself. And that makes you think deeply about the problem itself. The real problem isn't actually lack of the resources but utter mismanagement of them. Water is available everywhere in India (you'd have to agree to that cuz people aren't dying in huge numbers - and you know that water is essential to survival!), but the distribution channels are horrible and people aren't aware of how to use it optimally.
India's 2 core problems are (in order) population and corruption. In fact, the 2 feed each other. As population grows explosively, resources become scarcer, and as a result, those who control the resources become more corrupt. Literacy/education fits right in the barrier between the 2 problems. If the electorate was literate and aware enough to elect good, honest representatives into positions of power (i.e., the ones that control the resources), a negative feedback cycle will ensue and the system will stabilize. Unfortunately, education itself has always been a scarce resource in India. Hence the people in power have a vested interest in keeping the resource scarce so as to manipulate the electorate.
If you remember Renaissance in Europe, you'd remember that the middle class played the biggest role in the overhaul. This will have to be true in India as well if the alternative of complete destruction followed by rebuilding is to be avoided. The middle class is literate enough at present - but they aren't aware enough and they aren't large enough in numbers. When the middle classes reach critical mass, they will be in a position to bring about true change.
The way the middle class grows is through the infusion of more money into the economy such that it truly trickles down to the bottom. As the Indian economy grows, more of the poor will graduate into the middle class. And simply by the law of large numbers, there will end up being some of the 'newly educated' who turn out to be intellectuals and leaders. It's only when a new breed of intellectual leaders crops up in India will there be any true change there.
The point where my analysis ties in with the article above is the economy. Space is a huge revenue generator. Space tourism is inevitable within a decade or 2. Given that only about 10 countries in the world have the technology to handle that, there is a lot of money in it for them. India has a lot of very talented scientists - heck, the President himself is literally a Rocket Scientist! The 2 areas where real research is being done in India are space science and missile technology (go figure!). India needs to leverage that advantage to jump into the space tourism industry. So, it is great to hear that progress is really being made towards that.
I'm planning to have Catherine Zeta Jones as my wife. The project is in a conceptual stage right now, but I'm planning real hard. If only I could get some private funding to make myself fiscally attractive, I'd be all set.
Actually, it the Space Shuttle as it was originally designed. I remember: two stages, the first to bring the joined craft up to high altitude, then release stage two and airbreathe back to earth on a runway. The second stage was supposed to fire up to orbit, then come back down as an airbreather and land on a runway.
The whole concept had to be scrapped because Congress wanted to kill the whole program after Apollo. To survive, NASA shopped the Shuttle to the Air Force. The Air Force had no use for the two-stage, small payload shuttle which was designed for mostly passengers, not freight.
The Air Force wanted something to lift the Keyhole spy satellites, which were pretty damned big -- the Hubble Space Telescope is essentially a Keyhole, just pointing away instead of at the license plates of evil Russians -- so NASA redesigned the Shuttle into a heavy lifter by getting rid of the flyback first stage, adding a disposable external fuel tank, and tacking on two solid rocket boosters to get the whole mess into orbit.
The Air Force signed on to add their weight to lobby for the new system, and lo! the idiot Shuttle, good for nothing but lifting Keyhole telescopes into orbit. NASA engineers probably cried themselves to sleep for years.
The Air Force later stopped using the Shuttle for spysats, leaving NASA with the flying boxcar that no one wanted to use.
Most of the above is from the book Enterprise, by Jerry Grey.
And remember this: it was the solid rocket boosters, and later the external tank, that destroyed two shuttles. Air Force: our thanks...
We never got an actual cheap shuttle, because Congress (the american people) didn't care about it, and the Air Force barely got a bastardized version built. They've been underfunded and unused by an American public who doesn't understand about what could have been done -- read The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill to get an idea of what we've lost -- and the funds to build a successor went into an insanely expensive scramjet program in the nineties that merely made aerospace companies richer by a few billion bucks. There have been shoestring programs, like the Delta Clipper DC-X single-stage to orbit prototype that never was developed, as well as rotor-landing concepts that never got past the testing stage, because Congress (that's us, in toto) constantly whittles NASA down to a state where only ONE development program can proceed at one time. It's a fake zero-sum game, where decades go by while NASA is chastised for it's "waste" while the military and new off-shoots like Halliburton drain trillions withut stay or let. NASA would love to have multiple programs testing different systems, like railguns supplanting the first stage, or winged dual stages like India's concept, or Pournelle's Delta Clipper one-stage vertical launch and land, or laser assisted takeoffs, or an advanced spaceplane, or just dirty old Saturn V's to get jobs done... but the US does not have a citizenry that has the education, the imagination, or the spirit necessary to fund even one program thru final operations, let alone multiple concepts.
The US is just not the country to do this. We did Apollo because we hated the Russkies so much that price was no object. After Apollo reached 17 (there were supposed to be 20, then the Selene permanent lab on the moon along with the Zeus Mars missions -- atomic powered, that one) there simply was no political pressure to keep going. Even today, NASA tries to get one-off Mars manned landers because they think that that is all the public will buy -- and they're right. Americans won't finance space colonization or L5/L2/L4 space industry. They don't even know what an ORBIT is, much less what all the rest means. And "sci-fi" in movies and TV sure as hell didn't help. Without the science, it's just WW II in space. Space has advantages for industry and solar energy transmission to ground, but you have to have a special kind of education and imagination to understand what the ideas mean -- and we don't have it