Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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....
A lot of the costs of maintaining the launch system go by the day and hour anyway, not per launch.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Lets say a big launch can throw 10000kg into the orbit of the ISS. To do that you need a big launcher and if it fails you lose the whole thing. A small launcher throws 1000kg into the same orbit. Assuming a zero failure rate one big launch should be cheaper than ten small launches.
But you can get better, faster at the small launches, because you might be doing one a week. Now thats a nice pattern if you think about it. You could stack the vehicle on Monday, roll it to the pad on Tuesday, test the payload on Wednesday, etc. Then light the fuse on Friday and repeat the whole process next week.
So overall its more expensive that way but if you take failures into account you might just be ahead.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How about the megatons of fuel used per launch? Where does that come from, btw? & is it limitless?
Pretty much. Its just hydrogen and oxygen. Viewed differently its just water and electricity. With the right plant you can make megatons of the stuff quite cheaply.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Jeebus, at least RTFS, please. It's saying that launching *more frequently* than they do now *would make* NASA a success. It does not say that NASA is currently a success.
*Also*, on an *unrelated* note, I *like* asterisks.
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....
Have you ever seen how much fuel is required for an Abrams Tank? I think if we are worried about energy expenditure we should scale back our military operations before scientific endeavors.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis?
Can't we? Don't we expend several orders of magnitude more energy every day "launching" millions of cars onto the roads of America? Compared to that, launching one rocket a week is trivial...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
Well, actually, taking all sentimentality aside, there are a lot of people who would want to be an astronaut. But the sheer lack of missions mean that very few can actually make it. I mean, there has only been less than 600 astronauts from all the countries in the world. And there are a lot more people who would want to be an astronaut and others who are qualified to be an astronaut but instead do something different (such as fly a fighter jet)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
When are the engineers and scientists supposed to learn from all of this; on the weekend?
Root cause analysis takes months on complex systems. If you have to stop your launches due to an unknown issue then you do that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
SSTO is basically a dead issue. Nobody has figured out how to build one. It may not even be feasible to build such a thing. Having worked in the field I can tell you one thing, its JUST barely possible to hurl stuff into orbit at all. The engineering is a nightmare. We aren't even close to anything like SSTO and its not even clear that if you could build such a thing it would be cheaper than disposable rockets.
The best idea anyone has come up with yet that is provably viable is essentially what the Russians do, a big dumb rocket. The concept could be pushed further but essentially the idea is you build a rocket using simple low performance systems. It will be BIG, but it can be built cheap and mass produced. Reliability comes from simplicity and when its cheap you really can launch on a fairly aggressive schedule and make it even more reliable.
The whole concept was mapped out pretty thoroughly in early 70's and many components were even built and tested. Engines fabricated out of ordinary grade materials with what were called "shipyard tolerances" etc. Totally gravity flow design with no turbo pumps or other moving parts. They're just big, but so what?
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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.
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.
Where're you going to get coal and oil in space?
I recall reading that an Abrams Tank gets 1 mile/gallon and has a 60 gallon tank.
But then reading a bit into it, I'm wrong. (I'm probably thinking of a different tank.) The M1 Abrams gets 0.6 miles/gallon and has a fuel capacity of either 498 gallons or 505 gallons.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
You probably meant kilotons here. Though even Saturn V didn't use as much as three kilotons of fuel per launch.
Seriously, the amount of fuel required for a rocket launch, even a very large rocket launch, isn't all that much. Remember that the USS Iowa carried 2.1 million gallons of fuel, which translates to about seven kilotons of fuel, no more than a month's supply.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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?
If I had to guess I'd say Skylon will probably fail. Your right, its the only viable approach in the long run, and they may well be able to produce an operational vehicle. The trick will be to make an operational vehicle that is cheap, safe, and reliable. I think basically its one of those "pick 2 of the these three" situations.
The fundamental problem with ALL rockets is you're operating at the very most hairy edge of what is possible. Everything has to be feather light, withstand huge aerodynamic stresses, monster vibration, large temperature variations and heat flux. Its a real nightmare. Even simple stuff is hard. All we worked on were avionics packages. Way simpler than structure or power. Still, try to make a piece of electronics that has to be able to work with 100% certainty after sitting on a pad for weeks, survive 180db plus vibration at all modes, temperatures from -20C to 200C. Oh, and weigh next to nothing of course. One tiny box with the simplest function, millions of dollars to develop and maybe $250k a copy. You could build the same thing for $100 if all it had to do was work in a shirtsleeve environment.
Power systems? OMG. An SSME is the size of a VW bus and has the power output of California. Its insane.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson