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NASA's Ares 1 To Be Reborn As the Liberty Commercial Launcher
MarkWhittington writes "When President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation space exploration program, it was thought the Ares 1, the much-maligned planned rocket that would have launched the Orion into low Earth orbit, was dead and gone. However, it looks like ATK, the aerospace firm that manufactures solid rocket boosters for NASA, has entered into a joint venture with Astrium, the European firm that builds the Ariane V to build a commercial version of the Ares 1."
It's not Ariane V, it's Ariane 5. And also not Ares 1, but Ares I... don't do it, it looks & feels bad.
(the end result is not really Ares anyway... yes, it will use the solid stage from ATK. But the rest would be mostly Ariane 5-derived, it seems)
PS. WTF, "Liberty" rocket?! How on Earth Astrium agreed to such ridiculous name?... (will any possible manned spacecraft launched by this rocket include "freedom fries" in its menu?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Auntie Beeb's article has pictures.
Man does not explore for "no particular reason". Man explores for personal gain.
We are going into space to make money. What it is that is going to make us money is as unknown to us as the wealth of America was known to Christopher Columbus. But we know that there is a high likelihood that something worth some money is going to be found.
And hell, it just might be fun.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The Ariane 5 is already man rated as it was designed to be the booster for Hermes. You could easily slap an Orion on top and call it a day without having this international make-work project.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Have fun dealing with some of the premier assholes of the U.S. space industry.
On the other hand, I suppose ATK can't really lobby Astrium the way the lobby the U.S. Congress....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
If it ends up saving NASA tons of money - what's the problem?
This is blinging
No, just No.
This rocket can be described in a few words: it is a desperate attempt from ATK to find a possible justification for their 5- segment booster.
That is all. There is no technical merit for this rocket.
I can guess the design process went like this:
"Hey, We need an upper stage for our 5 segment booster!"
"How about that Ariane 5 center ( ! ) stage?"
"Sure!"
The press release is an exercise in PR. Flexible, Commercial, hell, the name is LIBERTY!
There are a few things that make this rocket BAD.
The Vulcain engine is not air startable. They will have to fix this; it is not clear how much this will cost
You don't want a Solid rocket engine for manned launches. They are not able to do a hold down test before launch. Once it is lit, you are going, whether it is working or not.
With this rocket, there is once again no Horizontal stacking.
It lifts less than just the ariane 5 as it is RIGHT NOW!
The Ariane center stage will have to be radically altered - right now it is build for bearing the load of boosters on its sides. Now it will be pushed up?
Really, this is ATK lobbying and marketing. It is just not efficient, safe or even a good idea.
If NASA adopts this it will be because of the ATK lobbying lawmakers, not because of technical merit. Because it just has less merit than anything else currently being discussed. They want a piece of the pie, and they will ask for a bigger piece of it while paying less for it then other ideas being discussed.
All in all, I hope this bombs hard.
That is not a rationale. It is a simple statement of opinion. In order to be a rationale, you would need to explain WHY the government can only spend money on defense and law enforcement and, presumably, law creation... but what laws? What would actually be illegal in a libertarian society? Harm, obviously, but what is harm? Does it harm me if you pollute? What if you use child labor and my moral code prohibits it, when you undercut me in the market, is that harm? What if you decide to form some White Citizens Councils and drive all blacks out of business? Certainly that would be considered harm, right? Or would it just be the free market at work? In a libertarian society, what would keep a majority from economically coercing and dominating a minority? Or is that considered okay in libertarian society, as long as the majority uses market forces to oppress the minority?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, the Liberty will be able to put about 20,000 kg into LEO for about $9,000 per Kg. The Falcon 9 can put just over half that (10K kg or so) into LEO for somewhere between $5,400 - $6,000 per kg, depending on the load factor. (Numbers pulled from the SpaceX web site.)
Of course, there are other costs besides the raw launch cost (insurance, etc.), but it will be interesting to see how these two vehicles compete. For things like ISS resupply missions, it may make sense to just shoot the Falcon twice.
Once the Falcon 9 heavy gets into the mix (32,000 kg to LEO for $95M), ATK & Astrium will need to sharpen their pencils a bit. That'll be one and a half times the payload for half the cost or so.
Price wars for space launch capacity? I can't wait to watch!
I don't know how popular it is. Libertarianism always has a populist streak in it, but usually it gets turfed as soon as people realize that Real Libertarians (TM) mean their entitlements as well. It's always easy to say "I don't want my tax dollars paying for x 's schools/parks/roads/etc.", but when the seduced find out that Real Libertarians (TM) are also out to kill taxes going to their schools/parks/roads/etc., it suddenly dawns on them that Libertarianism isn't nearly as attractive as it sounds.
Frankly, I doubt a society could long survive on the purer forms of Libertarianism. I guess the US was sort of a Libertarian system prior to the Civil War, but I'd posit that the considerable pressures put on the Federal Government by a good many of those Libertarian policies, particularly the very strong States Rights arguments that guys like Madison and Jefferson had been in favor of, were in fact the underlying structural problems.
That's not to say I'm in favor of Big Government, per se, or of creeping intrusions of one level into another, and I can certainly appreciate why Obama's health care plan, for instance, really does intrude Federal powers overly much into the business of the States. At the same time, the hallmark of successful modern democracies is not obsessively narrow ideological systems of governance, but rather compromises (ie. free enterprise, but with some sort of socialistic welfare safety net to assure that the lower classes are not entirely left behind). One must govern pragmatically, but there's damned little pragmatism in full-blown Libertarianism. They want the Federal Government hog-tied so tightly that it would become pretty much impotent, and don't seem to realize it was precisely that problem that lead to the Civil War.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NASA has never been great for the "free market." NASA is, and has always been, about making the breakthroughs that needed to be made no matter the cost.
We've gotten more out of NASA's research than we ever expected, and NASA has actually been worth every penny we've ever spent on it. Nowhere in the private sector would the research for any major NASA breakthrough ever have managed to come; the private sector would have taken one look at the development cost and said "screw it, wait for someone else to do the difficult stuff first" and only then come by to make it "cheaper to do" later on - which is precisely what happened, time and again.
The problem is that because its results and benefits aren't immediately realized in a 2-year or 4-year timeframe, politicians on the "cut cut cut rawr rawr kill the government" platform always see it as "wasted money." This is much like the way that retarded "government representatives" scream about how "education funding is wasted" because spending more money doesn't instantly improve results, while ignoring every bit of research that shows quite conclusively that cutting education funding to below a certain minimum guarantees the worst results possible.
The end result today is that NASA's been hamstrung under the "do more with less" attitude for so long, as ordered by blind nincompoops who are insulated from the results of their own decisions, that they're stuck trying to "do more" with mere pennies for the tasks they are continually given.
It's certainly in the direction of "free market success"... and consider how most of the cherished, really really private, space companies also greatly depend on old developments (Bigelow is NASA Transhab; SpaceX, iirc, basing their engine tech on some earlier ideas / generally grabbing lots of existing engineering talent in the area; new Taurus rocket using ex-Soviet engines and the first stage developed by Ukrainians)
;p (don't tell them that James Web Space Telescope will launch on Ariane 5 ;p )
Just slight funny in how it makes the semi-nationalistic motives of armchair stalinist libertarians shining through
One that hath name thou can not otter