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Launching Frequently Key To NASA Success
teeks99 writes "Even NASA could benefit from the 'Launch Often' idea that is frequently referred to in the software development community. However, in NASA's case, the 'launch' is a bit more literal. Edward Lu, writing in the New York Times, points out that by lowering the consequences of launch failure, and making frequent launches available to engineers, NASA could open up a new wave of innovation in space exploration. If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many opportunities for new ideas to be tried out in communications, remote sensing, orbital debris mitigation, robotic exploration, and even in developing technology for human spaceflight. Another benefit would be that the rockets would be well understood, which would improve reliability."
I mean, your'r a silicon valley startup, you launch a POS software that crashes, you redo it, no blood no foul; the only problem is some pissed off customers, but hey - it's software, we expect it to not work on ver1.0 (or ver10,0 if your are MS) Just like putting 100,000 gallons of toxic explosive up into the air - the consequences of failure due to rapid product cycle are just the same.
each shuttle was supposed to be able to be readied for launch in 2 weeks, and there were going to be 10+ launches a year
they can't even roll it from the VAB to the pad in 2 weeks it turns out
Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis? And for how long? Is this limitless or what? I mean, I love sci-fi too but unfortunately have become aware of the fact that resources are not limitless....
Actually, lets just build a voyager probe every four hours and launch it, and shoot it in a slightly different direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
Per-launch costs can be measured by dividing the total cost over the life of the program (including buildings, facilities, training, salaries, etc) by the number of launches. With 115 missions (as of 6 August 2006), and a total cost of $150 billion ($145 billion as of early 2005 + $5 billion for 2005,[19] this gives approximately $1.3 billion per launch. Another method is to calculate the incremental (or marginal) cost differential to add or subtract one flight — just the immediate resources expended/saved/involved in that one flight. This is about $60 million U. S. dollars.[21]
Well, the government just spent 800+ Billion dollars this morning. If only we can convince them to trade the health of America for 800 (on the low end) or so rocket launches.
The first thing that occurs to me is that it probably takes more than a week to gather all the fuel to launch a satellite into orbit, you insensitive clod.
The rockets are well understood. The Atlas/Delta/Centaurs are all 45 year old designs and well shook down and understood. Even the "new" rocket is 85% old Space Shuttle booster, 30 yr old design.
The Saturn V was considered well understood and capable of being "man-rated" after six launches. So this rationale does not hold water.
You might look for other motivations, like maybe huge profits for the rocket makers and launchers?
"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."
Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.
These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
And, with all of those extra launches, there will be extra debris to attempt those orbital debris mitigation techniques on! It's win/win!
Rhapsody in Numbers
We have a shuttle launch every few months, and every time the general public's reaction is almost total apathy. Satellites are launched into space all the time, and nobody cares.
We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel. Sending tiny robots into space is not interesting to most people, and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).
The way to get national interest in space travel up again is twofold:
1. Get NASA going full-bore on manned exploration of space. Put the Mars mission on an Apollo-like timetable. Of course, no one wants to spend the money for this because nobody cares about space, so we have to use the next point to get them there:
2. Aggressively support commercial manned space travel. Give more people a chance to go into space, even just LEO, and you'll have a lot more willingness to fund aggressive exploration missions. This means the price for a trip has to go way down, and the safety has to go way up. If we can get to a point where a trip to space costs the same as, say, an all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean, everyone will want to go.
The current strategy of announcing big initiatives and then starving them of funds, and letting commercial space ventures limp along with inadequate funding and no direction, is not getting anybody anywhere. As long as NASA is saying 20 years just to get back to the Moon (assuming the funding isn't cut, which it always is), and it still costs $20 million to get a private citizen into LEO, interest in space travel will remain low. Launching more rockets filled with tiny robots is not going to fix that.
Launching Frequently Key To NASA Success
Really, I wouldn't call NASA now "successful", if it wasn't for NASA having a nearly unlimited budget to compete with the USSR, they wouldn't have achieved much. I'd say "unlimited money in the hands of a simi-competent organization can let you do great things". Lets see what state NASA is at in 2009. They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014. The Space Shuttle was more or less a disaster having lost 2/5 of the shuttles and really accomplishing very little.
NASA is by no means successful, just because it is more advanced than Russia's space program which hasn't changed for several years and has hardly any funding, the ESA which is more or less a bureaucratic nightmare, and JAXA which wasn't really formed till 2003.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
No shit, Sherlock? Good luck succeeding without launching. :P
(Yes, I know.)
In order for the National Aeronautics(rockets) and Space(rockets) Administration to be successful, they have launch...............rockets?
Isn't launching frequently the definition of NASA success?
I mean, would you think it was profound if someone said "Making money is the key to MegaBank's success!"
NASA is not going to the be the guys for quick jaunts into space. For that to happen, the west is going to have to have a much higher tolerance to exploding spacecraft, and the economics is going to have to allow for profitable ventures to succeed even when the launch vehicle fails and the company gets sued because someone was woken up by the explosion.
Three other lessons learned from software development. One,doing more increase communications costs, and those communications costs can overwhelm a management structure. NASA does pretty ok with communications as launching a space craft requires a lot of high quality communication. Two, there is no silver bullet.Real problems are really hard to fix, and most of the time requires a novel solution, not just doing more of the same. Three, system can quickly become complex enough so that no one fully understand what is happening.Our machines do grow more complex and sometimes we don't know exactly what is happening.
Then, again, there is the issue of launch vehicles exploding in space. When google mail goes down, as it does, people are annoyed. When a launch vehicle does down, as happened two years ago with Sea Launch,the communication payload, launch platform, pretty everything goes kaput.
Speaking of Sea Lauch, I wonder if we don't have a launch a week from the various people who do this. Such a distributed system might be better as it prevent one company, such as google, from being the absolute arbiter or what is a good idea and what is a bad idea.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The best papers I've ever read on this subject were Jerry Pournelle's Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. Basically he makes a simlar argument in the context of SSTO. The problem with the way we do space right now is it's just too expensive to do anything useful. Things we could do like space-based solar power and asteroid mining are now totally impractical because it costs, what, $20k to put a kilogram in orbit? As long as that's the case we're pretty much stuck with LEO vanity projects. We can't even afford to go back to the moon.
Getting the $/kg to LEO down should be the single-minded thrust of the US space program in the coming years.
I don't want to sound negative, but until we have a single stage ground to orbit reusable vehicle, this probably won't happen. The shuttle had the right general idea, but failed for numerous reasons and it also was not a single stage ground to orbit vehicle. One of those issues was the re-entry, which damaged the heat shield tiles requiring a large number of man hours to inspect and replace, and another was that it took for ever to get readied again for launch. There are technologies being researched that will resolve these issues, but they are far from ready.
Even if we consider a rocket based solution to the two week window, we have to consider whether the cost can be justified and whether safety can be maintained. These are two things that are of importance to the public funding the program and to organisations putting their precious payload on top of the rocket. The other question to ask is whether we have enough backlog to have a well managed two week window. I would be curious to know how many space programs NASA has delayed because of rocket wait time and how much more space is their for yet another non maintainable orbiting satellite.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Clearly you have not even looked at the big picture.
First off the fuel is Hydrogen and Oxygen. Which by product is water.
The space program has given us. world wide telecommunications, GPS, weather satellite. How many lives and how much energy have those things saved? GPS alone applied to the transport industry has been a huge fuel saver.
"If" we develop fusion we will need fuel. Where is the highest concentration of fusion fuel? The moon.
Would it not be more ecological to mine asteroids than the amazon?
What about the development of clean 24/7 solar power? That can only be achieved in space.
The Moon program of the 60's gave us the transistor and ultimately the processor in your computer you used to view this. How many lives have been saved by the chip. Hybrid cars would be impossible with them.
The space program is possible the last area where mega projects can have significant positive impact on the planet, man and our future.
And lastly the resources in space are LIMITLESS. Once we learn how to tap them properly.
This sounds quite nice, but consider the costs. According to NASA, each Space Shuttle launch costs an average of $450 million. Doing one each week would amount to approximately $24 billion per year in costs. This would be similar to the per-year project cost of the Apollo program. If we are going to spend that much, shouldn't we go to Mars or something rather than just throwing up a bunch of rockets?
Anyhow, given the debt that the US is currently putting itself into, it seems to me like it would be a much better use of money to create more 'prizes' for private builders...something useful that can be done at a fraction of the cost.
Which resources are limitless now?
this is nonsense
if it was as cheap and rosy as you pretend it is, why does it cost hundreds of dollars per kg launched into orbit?
the answer is: you are lying. it is not cheap. it would be a ridicolus waste of money. money that could be spent on actual space exploration rather than just firing loads of crap into the sky.
Metals, Coal, Petroleum. Most of the major deposits are either tapped right now or been exhausted. Additionally, the new deposits are in areas that are harder to get to such as under the sea or miles below the surface of the earth. You must ask yourself is it better to keep digging or possibly get off this rock?
In space?
The easy ones are:
Solar power
Hydrogen
Oxygen
Iron
But everything else is out there. We just have to figure out where and how to get at it in a cost effective manor.
You kids these days.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
At no point did I say cheap. I said heavy lifters are cheaper. When you talking about millions of dollars cheaper is far better.
Also if you don't learn how to utilize the resources out in space you ain't doing any exploration. Cause it's going to cost ridiculous amounts of money to get those resources into space if you don't use the resources up there.
But we can at least speculate on a realistic plan for frequent launches:
1. Adopting a limited number of launch vehicle types. Atlas, Titan, Delta, Ares or whatever it becomes, and maybe a commercial design or two in there, but probably just one. The Virgin/Scaled Composites projects are out of scope for this, let them do their own thing.
2. After certifying new designs and man-rating them, we move from testing to 'production'.
3. Ramp up launches so that you are probably only launching every 3-5 weeks realistically.
4. Allow for more launches when needed.
5. Multiple pads are in use. Currently, pads 36A&B, 39A&B, 40, and 46 are active, 37 and 41 are under construction for Ares (probably) and Delta IV respectively. So we could have 2-3 pads for big lifts, and 3-4 pads for utility launches. This makes some 3-8 week turnarounds practical, and some shorter.
6. Some rockets have different prep times. I suspect the goal of the Ares-type launch vehicle is to get it into a rapid cycle, but I dunno if Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, and Delta can be prepped that quickly. However, if you tell them you need 15 Delta launches a year, I be they can do it.
7. Now to get some payload for these. Certainly, sending a new set of Mars Rovers up would be cheapo science. I bet the guys at ASU could have them ready in a year. How about sending a set of them to a Saturn moon? Need bigger panels of course, and improved radios, but maybe send a Surveyor-style satellite up there also as a multipurpose mapper and relay? More solar expeditions? Venus has been neglected. replacement and maybe even return and refurbishing of some communications birds? There are plenty of projects.
8. Benefits; Regular routine launching gets everyone in the mode of a business-as-usual launch team. Practice makes perfect. Small problems should be detected and resolved. Obviously big problems get attention and maybe even a stand-down to work the problem. A multitude of small payloads spreads the potential loss, though in some cases I bet the vehicle is more expensive than the payload, if small science is a goal. And, and, maybe there builds pressure for more reusable vehicles. Routine launching makes the ISS easier to maintain, in a way, if you have regular smaller deliveries. Losing one doesn't hurt so much, and repairs can be done faster. Faster crew exchanges might be useful, especially if you just send a specialist up for a 3-week project, knowing they will be able to go back up in 6 months. You can work to improve experiments in a way you can't much do now with the expense and time needed to send up crew and equipment.
Can we hope there is some economy of scale? I'm not sure how important that is, since I think NASA should be getting a LOT more money, but I'm a space wonk.
Then again, maybe Rutan and Branson team up and make a servicable small payload launch version of the White Knight, and we get competition.
Thinking this through, NASA could probably do a lot of launches with not too much problem. And we could build or rebuild a few pads...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Alternatively: doing a few launches a year makes it impossible to take advantage of economies of scale.
Not a typewriter
I'll give you solar power in all practical timescales. The rest... limitless?
Where're you going to get coal and oil in space?
Instead of the Space Shuttle/Moon Landing/Space Program the U.S. could've had gobs more of:
Oh, wait, we DID HAVE THOSE THINGS!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Silica
Asteroids are full of silica. Silica will be the primary building material used in space. It is easy to cast, alloy, cut, grind, weld, etc. People will live in giant chunks of orbiting glass because that is what you find when you tear into an asteroid.
mod up. this story is old news
Would everyone stop talking about the fusion-fuel-on-the-moon myth? The helium-3 on the moon currently cannot be used with any fusion reactor. If we did create a working fusion reactor in the next ten years, ocean water would work just fine. Using helium-3 would take years and years of additional development with the only added benefit of aneutronic fusion...
To actually read TFA: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com
coal is carbon. carbon is quite common in space. As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.
oxygen is abundant. It's a byproduct of the fusion process in stars. It's usually found in oxides and can be found in large quantities there. If you have solar power available in quantity, you can break down the water or silicates or metal oxides to produce the raw metals and all the oxygen you could need.
There is no shortage of metals - most of the earth is metal. The problem is that it is difficult to dig deep enough.
if it was as cheap and rosy as you pretend it is, why does it cost hundreds of dollars per kg launched into orbit?
Hundreds of dollars per kg would be pretty sweet. You could put a bunch of people (bulk rate here) in orbit for less than a million dollars apiece at those rates. Unfortunately, current launch costs are somewhere between $5k and $40k per kg depending what you use (Russian vehicles for the lower cost, Shuttle for the higher cost) and how often you use them.
The shuttle's systems can launch as rapidly as 24 times a year. The hangup of launch times is the shuttle itself. The original plan was for an assembly-line setup, but the refurbishment of the shuttles turned out to be too time consuming. A disposable system utilizing the STS system, like the DIRECT or the original ESAS Ares V, could be flown at 18-24 times a year using the existing system, simply due to the most time consuming piece of the puzzle, the shuttle, being taken out of the picture. The Ares V Classic could lift 155mT to orbit, 24 x 155mT == a whole lotta stuff in orbit.
In addition, once you do 8 flights a year, the Shuttle-Derived solution costs less to operate than any other system currently in operation.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
NASA had a vision in the 1980s to become "the trucking company of space", which is akin to the idea of weekly launches. They hired expensive consultants to help them prepare for that future. They ran into at least two brick walls. One was the lack of funding. The second was a culture of being risk averse. The Atlantis crash was used by the risk averse to force the culture everywhere. NASA is now coasting on its resources and is a small shadow of its original dream - being only an occasional developer and launcher of small science probes.
The future of space will be created by corporate development and launch organizations. They will bring a higher risk tolerance to ventures. Some accidents will happen, just as in the early days of air flight. But the flip side is that much more progress will be made, as we have seen from the results of competition in the airplane industry as it developed over the past 80+ years. Some cluster of corporate ventures will eventually produce weekly launches. NASA will not be a party to them. Their dream has passed. Corporations will compete for success and resources, and pass by NASA's shadow.
coal is carbon. carbon is quite common in space. As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.
Clearly the words of a chemist.
Coal is Carbon. So is Graphite. So is Diamonds. So are Buckeyballs. All of which have different properties, and are non-trivial to rearrange.
Space is full of carbon? Yeah, so? So is Earth. Unfortunately, just like space, it tends to be held up in organic molecules. (No, "organic" does not mean "biologically created.")
Methane? Well what type of lubricants are we going to get from a gas? You may be accidently considering abiotic origins or petroleum, but unfortunately "there is no indication that an application of the hypothesis is or has ever been of commercial value."
Space is big and empty. It's not Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin.
I've always wondered where John Walker got his idea. Now I know he was just imitating Ed Lu! Edward Lu is a Fucking Genius!
Seastead this.
Yeah! And who wants a power source that doesn't produce nuclear waste anyway?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.
I think the bigger issue for fuel is going to be oxidizers. For your typical H2/O2 rocket, the O2 represents 89% of the fuel mass. And finding free oxygen in space is going to be almost impossible. Sure, you can probably find it bound up in ores/etc, but it takes a LOT of energy to separate it back out (more than you'd get back by burning it, of course).
I think that combustion isn't a very practical source of energy in space.
And here is the real kicker - if you solve your space energy and propulsion problem, chances are you've solved the energy crisis on earth as well, which begs the question of why do we need to go to space to do that?
I'm all for space exploration and science and all that, but there are much cheaper ways of doing it that don't involve so much spam in a can. Once we can get the per-kg costs way down and work out the basic technologies a bit more, maybe then it will be time to start putting people up there...
The space program has given us. world wide telecommunications, GPS, weather satellite. How many lives and how much energy have those things saved? GPS alone applied to the transport industry has been a huge fuel saver.
Those are tremendous advances and there are many more besides. Problem is that the users of them often had nothing to do with the funding of them. That linking of the technology and the funding needs to happen for entrepreneurial activity to take place. To date the tremendous costs have made it very difficult for most entrepreneurs and businesses to directly pursue projects in space. (indirect opportunities such as building satellite parts or commercializing research are of course possible) Direct entrepreneurial ventures (Sirius Satellite Radio for instance) carry such high costs that commercial success is too risky to seriously contemplate most of the time. So right now we put up technologies that are subsidized. You are absolutely right that there has been valuable use of space but it's so expensive to get physical objects there that we've only been able to scratch the surface. So far only telecommunications, military and research (weather, etc) have directly participated because they mostly don't involve transporting more than the satellite itself into orbit - the data is the valuable thing and data weighs literally nothing.
My take on NASA is that it is useful as a research institution but not as a resource for lowering costs. There needs to be more emphasis on bringing the cost to orbit down. NASA may not be the best organization to pursue that goal. Absent some technological revolution however, orbital and higher launches are unlikely to become truly cheap anytime soon but cheaper would still open up many doors. Should we accomplish (relatively) inexpensive spaceflight then you need regulations and legal framework for activity in space by private enterprise so we don't stupidly abuse resources and cause other problems.
On UseNet (look in Google groups!) there was a posting...
"A Rocket A Day" ... which kinda makes sense.
To expand a little more on my post....This is an excellent idea. In fact, it could probably be done for not a whole lot. The entry-level SpaceX rocket costs $6million per launch, and NASA could probably get a (very) bulk discount, so lets say $5m. If they launch 50 times a year (take a couple weeks off for christmas or something), that's only $250million...just chump change in NASA's budget.
Then it would be an issue of finding payloads for these 50 launches each year. Ideally NASA could have a competitive process that would let individuals or organizations compete for the free launches. Then if the org isn't able to get their payload ready in time, you could have a pool of ready-to-launch payloads that didn't win the competition, but are willing to launch if there is a chance. If all that fails, the rocket should launch anyway, and just do a sub-orbital flight, so that the system stays sharp.
There's a couple issues with this...one if the biggest is range tracking and availability. Having to be available to launch every week would be very tough for the range, because it usually takes them 24hrs+ to get set for a launch, then there are several days booked where the launch can happen any time in that window. To solve this problem, something that launches with this regularity would need to be independent of the current assets, which with cheap GPS and sat data links shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Another thing to think about would be orbital debris. Launch every week, with the competitively determined payloads, which probably won't be as long lived as traditional payloads, could contribute negatively to the amount of debris in orbit. To mitigate this, a big part of the competitive selection process should be how the payload will de-orbit itself, even in the event of a failure.
Yes, it's good to have people care about NASA so that maybe Congress will actually fund them, and not just keep shoving pork on them.
However, the need for more launches is to be able to do science. Yes, the launches themselves can be exciting, but you could put on a fireworks display for a lot less money.
And NASA can't set their priorities and timetables when they have no control over their budget. I have no idea just how many projects got cut when the whole 'go back to the moon' thing happened, but I know the one I was working on got cut in a major way, and I know of a few that were canned entirely. ... and then there's the problem with launch vehicles -- even the unmanned. STEREO would have launched months earlier if it hadn't been for a strike by a certain launch vehicle manufacturer. As a result, we got grounded, and the costs of storing a satellite on the ground in Florida is *more* than the cost of operating it while it's in space, *and* analyzing the data. There was a discussion if it was worth risking moving everything twice to get it back to Goddard, and then ship it back down to Florida when we were past the launch delays.
NASA is much more than just manned space missions. There are a whole lot of engineers, scientists, computer programmers and people who support them who have absolutely nothing to do with the manned missions.
(disclaimer -- I'm a NASA contractor)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I agree on combustion for spaceflight. We have technologies that are better suited there. but, when trying to get off of the surface, the booster phase, combustion may remain the safest method for the foreseeable future. Until, as you point out, we've solved the energy problem and have a form of fusion reactor that we can wedge into a spacecraft structure.
Free oxygen is damn near impossible to find. Anywhere. If plants weren't constantly replenishing the supply on Earth there would be none here either. I expect the only way to get free oxygen off Earth will be to split oxides. Not energy efficient at all, true. But, if you build a plant using solar power the cost in the decade time frame will be low and you do have the side benefit of obtaining the quantities of purified metals from the other electrode.
Methane? Well what type of lubricants are we going to get from a gas? You may be accidently considering abiotic origins or petroleum, but unfortunately "there is no indication that an application of the hypothesis is or has ever been of commercial value."
No. I'm referring to the gas that's available in quantity. You need oil, think like a chemist and reform the methane into longer chain molecules.
Don't forget the direct electricity generation from high energy protons thing, without any of those pesky steam turbines.
Launching Frequently Key To NASA Success
Frequently key to NASA success? I'd say it's almost always key to NASA's success, otherwise it'd be known as the National Staying Right Here On The Ground, Thank You Very Much, Administration.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Really, why did everybody forget about A-4 rocket? (aka V-2)
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
One that hath name thou can not otter