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Astronaut Group Endorses Commercial Spaceflight
FleaPlus writes "Buzz Aldrin and twelve other astronauts have published a joint endorsement of commercial human spaceflight, stating that 'while it's completely appropriate for NASA to continue developing systems and the new technologies necessary to take crews farther out into our solar system, [the astronauts] believe that the commercial sector is fully capable of safely handling the critical task of low-Earth-orbit human transportation.' They are confident that commercial systems (which NASA already relies on for launching multibillion-dollar science payloads) can provide a level of safety equal to the Russian Soyuz and higher than the Space Shuttle, while strengthening US economic competitiveness. They also support the expected endorsement of the White House's Augustine Commission regarding NASA's use of commercial spaceflight — the Commission's final report will be released today." And here's the Augustine report itself (PDF).
Now compare it to the defense budget for fun.
They don't want their rockets to go *BOOM* any more than NASA does. Perhaps even less so, since they may be financially liable.
No, its rocket engineering.
The first time its proving the science of the fundamental principals at incredible risk, and is a prime fit for government development. The second time its just trying to engineer it better and cheaper -- a better job for competitive enterprise.
What you expect to happen:
Government: "Hey, guys, you know that whole space exploration thing we have? That thing that has in the past and could in the future do one hell of a lot of good for humanity and has advanced technology quite wildly before? Well, turns out it costs money. If we split it up, it's around an extra $110/year. How about it?"
People: "Sure! That's a pretty paltry amount to pay. Would be nice to actually have advancements in our culture so that the rest of the world doesn't mock us quite as often as they do!"
What Reality(tm) says will happen:
Government: "Hey, guys, you know that whole space exploration thing we have? That thing-"
Stupid people: "ZOMG moon == hoax and government == EVIL EVIL they take money and I GET NOTHINGZ why should I ever give you ANYTHING U DUM POLTICANS hate hate hat"
Government: "But... but it's only around 30 cents/day... what-"
Stupid people: "SEE TAHT they want to take mah moneiz and my jobs and I *degrades into incoherence and shotgun blasts*"
Sorry, man, but stupid people are stubborn people. The dark ages were a good time for them.
I guy I knew once said, "if you canceled NASA, the whole of their budget couldn't pay for the Mahogany desk polishing fund at the Pentagon and have enough left over to feed a homeless cat, let alone solve world hunger."
Heavy lift: A heavy-lift launch capability to low-Earth orbit, combined with the ability to inject heavy payloads away from the Earth, is beneficial to exploration. It will also be useful to the national security space and scientific communities. The Committee reviewed: the Ares family of launchers; Shuttle-derived vehicles; and launchers derived from the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle family. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, trading capability, life-cycle costs, maturity, operational complexity and the "way of doing business" within the program and NASA.
I still don't understand the seeming obsession with heavy lift. Why develop and fly a new huge expensive rocket, putting all your payload eggs in one basket, rather than use a greater number of smaller, cheaper, existing rockets? The more rockets you fly, the more you have to build, and you can begin to take advantage of economies of scale and reduce the dollars per kg cost to orbit. Another advantage is that if your rocket does encounter some calamity, you don't lose your entire (much more expensive than the rocket itself) payload, but rather just a piece of it. Yes, flying your moon/mars/where-ever spacecraft into orbit a piece at a time means that you have to assemble it once you are up there, but that just puts into use all this lovely experience gained building the ISS. So, more light to medium lift: give it a chance.
Well, that's because it is.....Why is that interesting? It's common knowledge, and has been for years. The Soyuz is a freakin' tank, and is about as simple of a system as you could design.
Simple engineering - the more chunks you split your payload into, the more complex the resulting assembly becomes (because now you need interfaces between the chunks), the heavier the resulting assembly becomes (because of the connectors between chunks and docking/berthing assemblies), and the greater the chance of fucking something up during building, testing, and on orbit assembly. Then there's simply math - if your rocket has a 98% chance of flight success (about average nowadays), then each launch you add to the manifest means the greater chance one will go awry.
As far as expense goes, you're way off base - rocket costs scale very weakly with size, and very strongly with complexity and the number of man hours required to prep it for launch. (Which is why the Pegasus, despite it's small size and modest payload, is somewhat above the middle of the pack in $/kg to orbit.)
That's the handwaving-and-smokescreen theory. The reality is that economies of scale in manufacturing don't begin to provide significant advantage until you're talking dozens of launches a year. Costs still really don't drop much until you tackle the problem of the standing army required to integrate, checkout, and launch the vehicle - multiple smaller launches can actually cost more in total than one big launch.
That would be a point in favor of multiple smaller chunks - if space hardware could be bought off the shelf like the load of roof trusses I saw dumped all over the median in an accident the other day. But it can't, and won't be for the foreseeable future. This means that losing a portion of the payload is no different than losing the whole payload, either one is game over.
A kind of space janitor if you will.
This can only be a good thing. We're going to need all the space janitors we can get in case the Sariens attack.
And the Russians always felt they didn't have enough money! If some of the horror stories I've heard are true, they really, really didn't, either. Besides, about half the period I covered was "Freedom" not ISS, and there politics was the thing (constant, constant, constant cost-cutting). I agree with you that building the station was a learning process, and to me it said, "Don't build things that you need on short notice (eg., interplanetary spaceships) in space out of a bunch of fiddly bits without a MUCH more mature infrastructure. Cost-cutters, launch delays, and accidents will eat your lunch."