Slashdot Mirror
Private Space Shuttle Flights
An anonymous reader writes "It has recently been suggested that when the Space Shuttles are retired after their final flights this year, they may continue operations under the funding of private enterprise. United Space Alliance is considering a $1.5 billion per year proposal to take the fleet private. The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason. Is it safe to continue flights in private hands?"
If I can wave the magic wand, I would have NASA build a new Space Shuttle by learning to do it better the second time around. Of course there's arguments winged vehicles are limited and retro spam cans are safer (though water landings are dangerous, almost lost Grissom), however, there are limits to parachute size.
OK so the Shuttle has its flaws but so did the Tri-Motor. But that didn't stop engineers from building a better airplane, they nailed a useful design with the DC-3 and some of them are still in service! In the late 70s and in 80s, it was said if NASA spent more on development, the operational costs would have been lower (and perhaps could have eliminated some inherent dangers of non-stoppable boosters, foam shedding, and other scary stuff).
mfwright@batnet.com
What is the purpose of re-using them? Is it purely as a space tug, or a space cargo shuttle that has self-guided re-entry, or is it something else? It seems to me that a lot of the stuff we do in orbit doesn't have to be staffed with humans for everything,....I mean, why else keep making software do new stuff?
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Ahh! You mean like the Boeing X-37B:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Hell of a craft. All the pros of the shuttle, with none of the cons.
Is space flight at the present development of the state of the art ever safe? There has to be some risk, if really high tech stuff is to be developed. I'd trust private industry over the government any day of the week.
To determine the airworthiness of the shuttles. Then the real question would be whether or not the FAA could possibly gather the balls to issue airworthiness and pilot certificates. It's a very interesting question. If it could be done, it might greatly speed the privatization of space.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
More like the investors take ter chances, investing in this enterprise (no pun intended).
Space travel is dangerous in general. Until private space travel takes off (no pun intended) we won't have a good set of figures to find out which is relatively safer, private space travel or public, and even then, private travel will have made it's way on the shoulders of publicly funded research into what was basically unknown until people were willing to take a chance.
I'm sure we can create a relatively useful and beneficial private space industry going with open minded entrepreneurs willing to cooperate with straightforward and intelligent government oversight. I hope that doesn't get in the way of summary's anti-business rail and the parent comment's anti-government hard-on rage he was going for.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
...and boosted to orbit as a payload of expendable launcher (with Russian main engine, to boot)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Won't work. The Shuttle required a huge infrastructure, employing about 15,000 people as late as 2009. Layoffs have been underway for years. Manufacturing and repair facilities have been closed down. The parts stock has been depleted. It's over.
Just imagine what Scaled Composites would be able to do with $1.5 billion!
Payload to orbit of STS is in the range of quite a few other launchers. Nothing "nice" about system which ends up more expensive than them, and wastes ~90 tons of mass to LEO on airframe.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I have often wondered how much it would cost to build new shuttles? The technology is better now, cheaper, and there are plans obviously. No expert here, just a question.
The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years
That's a little disingenuous, while Discovery and Atlantis are from the original fleet are 27 and 26 years old respectively, Endeavour was a replacement first used in 1992 and therefore only 19 years old. Note that ALL of the current fleet have gone through significant refits. If I recall there were two refits for Discovery and Altantis and one for Endeavour.
and NASA is retiring them for good reason.
True. Nobody expected the program to go this long without a replacement. Up until the 80s and the Shuttle NASA had been fairly aggressive with new R&D. It's really easy to point fingers and assign blame, but quite frankly the hope and dream of the 60s has long been buried in bureaucratic mismanagement and budget cuts. There are a lot of people at NASA who, if given a budget and a free rein, could inspire us again.
I really feel sorry for the under 30 crowd who never got to see the Apollo missions. Personally the only one I remember is the Apollo/Soyez linkup but being a kid in the 70s you had the impression that things were happening and that the future was in spaceflight...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I believe the standard reply to your post is "why trust a corporation with a profit margin to protect when you can trust a government that's unafraid of wasteful spending?" The number of lives lost in the US space program is paltry compared to certain attempts to get into space on a cost-cutting budget. If there's a place in the universe where wasteful government spending is preferable to a "get it done" mentality, surely it's when so many lives are at stake if a rocket fails to launch correctly.
That being said, the private industry for space launch vehicles has been very efficient and reliable for launching satellites, but a shuttle is a very baroque piece of hardware with many points of potential failure. You also have the people factor: the NASA engineers who work with the shuttle today have been operating it for decades. That's either a lot of rehiring or a lot of lost experience.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Ah yes, the "private enterprise does things better than the government" meme. It is unfounded, of course, but sounds really good. This time, it's being applied to 30 year old space vehicles built for the government then operated and maintained by them (two of which suffered catastrophic failure, BTW). By some magical force (the Invisible Hand, perhaps), private enterprise will not only make them work better than ever before with a truly spartan budget, but with wealthy civilian passengers onboard!
1) Propose some bullshit idea to privatize a government function
2) Shut eyes really tight and repeat some capitalistic mumbo jumbo (any one will do)
3) ???
4) Profit!
While I doubt USA (the company not the country) has a lot of options, this reeks of desperation. The Shuttle has huge flaws and liabilities that don't go away merely because you transition its operation to private hands.
1) There are only three Shuttles (one which has been mothballed). Lose one and it's the end of the program. Who would develop a $1 billion probe that could only be launched on the Shuttle, knowing that there's a double digit chance that the Shuttle ends through accident by the time the project is ready to launch?
2) Even as $1.5 billion a year, that's $750 million per launch. For payload, that's $20k per kg. Everything else that the US has is much cheaper than that per kg and per launch, even the Delta IV Heavy.
3) There's no reason to expect the Shuttle to achieve this cost goal. NASA manned launch contracts typically are low balled by a factor of two or more. Given that the current cost of the Shuttle is $3 billion per year and the bid cost is $1.5 billion, I think it likely that we'd see little in the way of cost savings.
4) You have to restart significant portions of the Shuttle assembly line. The external tank (ET) and Space Shuttle main engines (SSME) manufacture have been completely shut down, for example. They'd have to rehire a bunch of people.
5) There's little need for the Shuttle and its capabilities. The biggest feature, "downmass" (or moving stuff from the ISS to the ground) can be covered with the ATV, HTV, or Dragon. And after the Shuttle ends you have some part of $3 billion per year freed up to perfect these other approaches.
In summary, while the USA proposal crosses one of the key Shuttle privatization hurdles (actually finding someone to do it), it still doesn't make sense.
Just imagine what Scaled Composites would be able to do with $1.5 billion!
I was thinking of Ariane, those $1.5 billion would buy twenty flights, each sending twenty tons to low-earth orbit.
In honor of those lives lost in 86 [...] the fleet should have been grounded a LONG time ago
I'm pretty sure that none of the people whose lives were lost would consider it an honor for the fleet to be grounded. Pilots, researchers, and anyone else who undertakes to get onto a giant chemical rocket pointed up accepts that there's some risk, and they accept it willingly. This isn't a job at McDonalds that people take because they have no other choice, this is a job that highly skilled and motivated people take, despite (relative to what many of them could be doing in private industry) crappy pay, shitty hours, and lots of hard work. Not to mention that all told space travel under NASA has been exceedingly safe, being a commercial pilot would, in fact, likely be riskier to life and limb, it's just that when things go wrong with space flight in it's current state they go *wrong*.
and millions starving instead of being fed to do so [...] NASA is a pig, a money pit, we all know it
NASA is such a tiny portion of the federal budget that the idea of calling it a money hog is laughable. No one is starving because of the shuttle program, and the basic research NASA has produced has, in fact, helped farming methods, food safety standards, food packaging and shipping technology, food processing technology... etc. Not to mention that your argument is a false dichotomy, the only two things the govt spends money are not NASA and food...
Hell, if we'd funded NASA better we'd probably have a shuttle replacement flying by now.
it is already private with FAT government spending and waste
Uh, what?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
In the Shuttle's defense, I must say it has much better acceleration and a much higher top speed than the Corvair. Oh, and it flies too!
The fundamental flaw in the Shuttle design was putting the booster tanks beside the Shuttle instead of below it. It's successors won't make the same mistake.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft have already conducted successful orbital and reentry operations and will be performing resupply missions to the ISS this year. As you mentioned, there's also the Soyuz for crew exchange missions until the Dragon is man-rated, and both the European Space Agency and Japanese Space Agency will be operating unmanned resupply operations, in addition to the Russian Prospekt missions. The reality is that we're not suffering from any gap between our space transport needs and available capabilities, attempts to convince the American public otherwise are simply transparent cash-grabs by the military industrial complex (Boeing, Lockmart, and the other contractors that make most of their money building things that go boom), supported by Republican congressmen in love with pork.
I take it you don't consider space exploration important. Despite what you think, space exploration should be something near the top of everyone's list to worry about.
Why? A multitude of reasons, firstly the perpetuation of the species. If we can live in space and/or on another planet, say Mars. In the event of a major widespread illness or natural disaster, there would be enough people living on another planet to survive. The second reason is population, with 7 billion people on the planet it is getting pretty full, we need new places to expand. Thirdly, natural resources, we can probably find lots of much needed natural resources on the other planets in the solar system.
Being able to have space stations in orbit or other places in the solar system would allow for the safe R&D of dangerous technologies, for example if research on infectious disease could be done on a space ship or space station, in the event of an accident they wouldn't risk the entire planet.
Plus space exploration has a major trickle down effect on a lot of other industries. For example long range (like to go to mars) space ships are going to need efficient long term power generation, food production and high speed communications, compact life support systems, all that technology can be applied to other areas here on earth. Not to mention all the jobs it can create since people need to design and build that stuff.
All those rockets NASA burned up during the Mercury program to get a working launch vehicle that could send an object into orbit paved the way for all the satellite systems we now enjoy.
As for the people that died in 1986, while tragic and completely avoidable, we have to realize some people are going to die pioneering this frontier. Sure NASA has been caught twice now (Challenger and Columbia) taking some safety for granted but that is a fixable problem. If you think they should have stopped in 86 because of the loss of the Challenger, they should have stopped after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts. But it didn't stop them, they figured out what went wrong and made to design changes to prevent it happening again. And with Challenger while being negligent in authorizing the launch, afterwards they did redesign the O-ring system to better prevent the issue from happening.
There is no way a private company could keep the shuttles flying and make any sort of profit.
Even when they were brand-new, the shuttles needed an insane amount of work to service them after each flight. According to Henry Spencer, in postings on sci.space, it took a "standing army" of NASA employees months of work to prep a shuttle for the next launch. The main engines need to be pulled and overhauled, tiles need to be inspected and damaged tiles replaced, and I don't even remember all the details.
I remember he said it takes a million signatures to launch a shuttle. As in: work gets done, someone runs down a checklist and makes sure everything is good, and someone signs off that the work is complete. That, times a million.
As others have noted here, the payload capacity of the shuttle is rather large, which isn't actually that useful most of the time. On the other hand, the shuttle can only reach a low orbit, which is also not ideal. So basically a shuttle flight can lift a stupidly large payload to low orbit, then it needs man-centuries of maintenance before it can do it again.
Adding spice and excitement is the chance the shuttle will be destroyed during the mission. (The people on board might or might not die: historically each shuttle lost has killed everyone, but one of the exciting failure modes would be for the landing gear to fail and the shuttle skid to a stop, never to fly again.) Henry Spencer estimated that the shuttle is only 99% likely to avoid being destroyed, which is terrible odds. (I believe he made that estimate after Challenger and before Columbia.) The shuttle has had 132 missions and two catastrophes; I have no reason to think it has gotten safer since then. (Yes, lessons have been learned and applied, so I shouldn't expect the exact same catastrophes again. But what other catastrophes might happen with an aging space shuttle?) Also according to Henry Spencer, if two tires on any single landing gear arm blow out during landing, that would total the shuttle (probably without hurting any astronauts). That has never happened, but one tire blowing out has, more than once.
As many have said for many years, what we really need is a "space pickup truck". There are times you want a giant moving van, but much of the time you are better off with the smaller capacity pickup truck.
What we really need is a launch vehicle that can take a small payload (one single ton would be plenty for many useful purposes) into orbit, then land, be minimally serviced, and then do it again tomorrow. You could ferry people and supplies up and down quickly and easily. You could have one or even several on stand-by to launch in case of some sort of emergency. You could send large things up in modules, and connect the modules once in orbit.
The ideal reusable vehicle would be a "single stage to orbit" (SSTO) design. You want your space pickup truck to have as low a total cost of operations as possible, so having pieces fall off it during launch is a complication you want to avoid.
If you must, do a two-stage to orbit. Some serious proposals have called for two manned vehicles, docked, with one lifting the other part-way up and then a pilot flying it back down while the other vehicle goes the rest of the way to orbit.
I believe that, when we get our "space pickup truck", it will have been developed by private industry. Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, XCOR, and various others are trying various things, and after enough generations of prototypes, somebody will get an affordable system for moving things and people in and out of space.
Many things become possible once you have cheap and reliable access to space. For example, if you want to send people to Mars, you would do well to ship fuel, oxygen, and other supplies up in a bunch of little cheap flights, rather than trying to do the Apollo thing of having a complete and self-contained system launch from Earth.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Every illustration, poster, image, of a "space station" produced from 1975 to 2007 showed a docked shuttle. Usually it was some "expanded" version of the ISS, and there was always a shuttle in those images, docked.
I propose we keep one in space. Send it up unmanned, remotely piloted (or send up a single pilot, who's return flight will be provided by the Russians), and keep it docked to the ISS.
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong. Furthermore, as Apollo 13 showed us, it's good to have an extra "lifeboat" that the crew could evacuate to if there's a problem aboard the ISS that can't easily be fixed.
It could be both an escape pod and an extra shelter. We know that seven people can fit on the shuttle's living quarters and you can bet the folks up there would appreciate the extra space.
Plus is has it's own O2 scrubbers, fuel cells, and could even be used as a tug to boost the ISS into a better orbit someday. Why throw it away? That makes no sense if we've already got people up there.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Fine: Soviet, basically - better? (really, next time, before replying, check what one of the rockets that you mentioned (and the only which lifted X-37 so far) uses as its main engine...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Umm.. are you deliberately trying to be ironic?
You *are* aware that the Soyuz is operated by a "private enterprise" right?
They even have a website.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The complaint is that a good chunk of the expense of the Shuttle program is actually launching them, retrieving them, and maintaining them. Building them isn't necessarily that expensive--especially if the contracts are written with an eye on savings. I remember that there was a scandal where Rockwell was building both the Space Shuttle and the F-16. The F-16 was a fixed cost contract (eg, you build us an F-16, we give you x dollars) and the Space Shuttle was a "Cost Plus" contract (eg, spend as much as you want and we'll pay for your expenses plus y dollars). Whenever there was an issue building F-16s, Rockwell would charge the time to resolve the problem to the Space Shuttle.
Hey, I love the Space Shuttle. But it isn't really worthwhile anymore. We have a space station for low-earth orbit experiments--don't need the Space Shuttle for that (and people can stay more than a couple of weeks on the space station). Actually, one possibility would be to have NASA just turn the whole US portion of the ISS over to the National Science Foundation and let them contract with the Russians, Chinese, SpaceX, or whoever to ship people and supplies. Let NASA concentrate on getting people to high earth orbit, Lagrange Points, the Moon, Mars, etc.
Atlas V uses a Russian RD-180 LOX/Kerosene motor in it's first stage. It's derived from the RD-170 used in the Energia booster, except it runs two combustion chambers (instead of four) off a single turbo pump.