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Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo Or Spirit of Solyndra?
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."
The problem is they deliver stuff that works the same way stuff worked 50 years ago. There just isn't any room in physics and engineering to allow the massive amounts of energy the overoptimistic delusions of the Space Aged promised.
SpaceX have had only a single successful commercial flight, and even then that was somebody being willing to take a risk on putting their payload onboard a testing flight. I'm happy to be hopeful, and I see no reason why they can't in time develop into a company with a record for reliability, but it's premature to say that they deliver stuff that works.
I generally see Mark Whittington as being the chief cheerleader for the "let's do Apollo again" school of space flight. There's nothing wrong with that, except that NASA has pretty definitively proven over a period of decades that it's too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and too much organized as a patronage/jobs organization to do anything big in manned space flight. Even were that not the case, it's a shame that Whittington continually elides the fact that the commercial space contracts — both cargo and crew — only pay out when specific milestones are achieved, and they pay fixed amounts for those milestones. In other words, this isn't Solyndra, where money is just thrown down the drain with no expectation of success; that actually better describes NASA's normal manned space flight program than it does the commercial space companies.
I think Chaikin's right, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized NASA in the 1960s now resides in the private space companies. And as a bitter critic of the Obama administration on pretty much every other point, I nonetheless have to say that this is the one area where they've definitely improved on the Republicans.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The space shuttle cost between a billion, and half a billion dollars per launch.
Of that, well under a percent was the fuel.
A Falcon 9 launch retails at $50m, and of that perhaps .4% is fuel. (300 tons of propellant at $1/Kg, which is a high estimate)
There are plans to make portions of the falcon reusable.
There is _CONSIDERABLE_ room for launch cost reduction, if they suceed.
Considering that Deke Slayton was heavily involved with the construction of the Conestoga rocket system in the 1980's, I'd say he certainly has a foot in both the early days of Apollo (even being one of the original Mercury seven), and in some ways one of the very early pioneers of commercial rocketry. He embodies perhaps the whole of what was once upon a time NASA of a long ago era and what could have become of commercial spaceflight.... if America will only let it happen.
Yeah, the spirit of Deke Slayton would be of particular interest at the moment, and it would be good to invoke him in any such discussion of the intersections of NASA's past glories and what is happening now for spaceflight in America today.
The Space Shuttle could have been considerably more efficient, had the budget for it not been slashed many times over. Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go. Had there been a more enlightened attitude on both sides of the curtain, we'd have colonies on Saturn's moons by now, never mind Mars. Ion drives make extended-mission space probes a real possibility, but the lack of isotopes to make nuclear energy cells (due to a total lack of decent nuclear facilities in the US) means that the probes will still have propellant long after the batteries are dead.
Ok, launch systems. ARLA is a real possibility for low-mass satellites. TAR is a real possibility for larger systems. NASA is experimenting with ski-jump assisted launchers but I doubt that will go anywhere - Congress keeps slashing the budget. Blended-Wing Body aircraft could have been released by NASA by 2010, but Congress - guess what! - slashed the budget and the program was killed off.
NASA could do a hell of a lot better, but it can't do it for free. The current rocket program is a mistake - NASA is an R&D facility, a discovery facility, not a mass production facility. Multiply NASA's budget by 10 or 20, build it a dedicated reactor for producing the necessary isotopes for batteries, devolve it as a quango so it has less political interference, and you'll see what it is capable of. All without breaking a single law of physics.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I agree with you to a point. SpaceX has been able to prove they can get stuff "up there" in one piece, and that they can nail orbital parameters that they set out to achieve.
This next year (2012) is going to be the big year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Either they are going to have several successful launches or they are going to have several spectacular failures including their collapse as a company. Assuming they get the NASA COTS demos completed, they will certainly have a proven track record including to paying customers.
There are several commercial customers that are taking a "wait and see" attitude toward SpaceX, and presuming these flights are successful there are more flights that will go onto their backlog of flights. It is also worth telling that SpaceX has already sold more flights this past year to new customers than all other spaceflight companies in the world, including the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and ESA combined. That should say something which should be worthy of notice, and also tell a sad tale of the incredibly small market that there currently is for commercial spaceflight. It isn't a completely dead market, but it is still incredibly small... and I'm talking about people willing to pay for telecom satellites and other proven commercial markets for spaceflight.
Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go.
More the lack of an arms race, really. NERVA was pretty much ready to go, but had no use for ICBMs: it was aimed squarely at a mission to Mars. A very expensive, not particularly-useful-in-competing-with-the-USSR mission to Mars.
It all depends on what you want to accomplish. I would dare say that the "problem" of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO, aka what the Space Shuttle did and what most other spacefaring countries are currently doing) is a "solved problem" and really something that needs to be handed over to private companies completely. Back in the 1950's, there still was doubt it could be done at all or at least reliably done. That isn't even a remote issue any more. LEO is hardly even a frontier any more and there are some serious traffic issues in terms of dealing with what is up there because so much stuff is up there at the moment.
Turning over actual launches to private companies seems like a very wise use of tax dollars, and try to set up the means for private individuals (or companies) to be able to launch their own payloads on the same vehicles.... just like is done currently with commercial aviation. The U.S. government often does buy flights on commercial carriers or even individual seats on regular commercial routes. Why can't that same business model be applied to spaceflight if you can get similar economies of scale?
As for going to the Moon, the notion that you have a disintegrating pyramid that absolutely must start on the ground here on the Earth is the first idea that needs to be killed. Once you give up that notion, it becomes much, much easier to design a vehicle and system which can go from LEO to the Moon and back. We certainly don't need a multi-billion (with a giant "B") dollar boondoggle that is only really designed to keep rocket engineers busy in key congressional districts that does more of the same and even duplicating services being done by private companies.
It isn't really so much we forgot how to go to the Moon, but that the cost of doing so with this massive disintegrating pyramid is so huge that designing a unique vehicle to accomplish that one task is cost prohibitive. The circumstances which created the original Apollo program won't be duplicated and currently don't exist either. We (as a country or even as a species) aren't in a particular hurry to get to the Moon either.
Going to space is, however, more like some of the early flights that were done in aviation. Many of those early aircraft were incredibly flimsy and there were thousands of (non-military combat) related deaths each year in the early years. If anything it is the risk aversion that is to me something that is repugnant, other than the fact that nobody wants to be responsible for the death of somebody else.
In terms of some of those deaths on spaceflight, all 14 of the Shuttle-related deaths could have been prevented had NASA simply followed their own safety guidelines. Apollo 1 was also an unfortunate accident, and something which should have been preventable.... also something which didn't even happen during the course of the actual flight but during a ground test that could have even been inside of a factory. On top of that, the number 17, while technically accurate by figures that NASA claims, is only Americans and not deaths by other people who have attempted spaceflight or deaths by Russian Cosmonauts. It also doesn't include other astronauts who died "on the job" through other means, nor does it include deaths of ground personnel in many countries that can also be related to spaceflight.
Yes, it is dangerous, but so is simply living as a person. You take risks, but you also take measures to try and avoid the most serious injuries and hopefully take safety measures seriously. The trick is to learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others so you don't repeat them... particularly the most dangerous mistakes.
BTW, in terms of spaceflight, most vehicles have built into them the knowledge and experience of the previous generations of astronauts where those mistakes... especially fatal mistakes... are not likely to be repeated. That is true for anybody trying to push the boundaries of human experience. I certainly would assert that anybody going into space today on board any modern spacecraft is going to be far safer than their predecessors by an order of magnitude or better, and I expect that to improve over time. It certainly isn't a reason to fear going into space.
By far the largest problem in terms of going into space is simply the cost. That is, of course, what the whole point of commercializing spaceflight is all about. There is certainly room to make the trip to space much cheaper.
It's not really about commercial vs private, they've framed it that way to simplify the debate for the public. This is about fixed firm contacts versus cost plus contracts. And if the early results are any indication, fixed firm is much better.
The Obama administration has a lot of problematic policies related to tech (Solyndra, Yucca Mountain, green energy, etc.) but as far as NASA and space is concerned, they for once have the right idea of buying services from the private sector.
Congress is the group that wants the return to the old NASA, primarily because that keeps the money flowing to the old NASA centers.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.
For myself, I think the DIRECT approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.
Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.
Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.
Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.
Not a lot of people realize this, but -all- DOD launches and all non-Shuttle NASA launches, plus of course all commercial satellite launches, have been on privately-built rockets for quite a few years now. This includes multi-billion dollar satellites critical to national security. It's somewhat nonsensical to have a separate government-designed/operated launcher just for manned US launches, especially when NASA hasn't successfully developed a launch vehicle in the past 30 years (plenty of failures, though).
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but here are the facts.
First of all, the Falcon 9 has flown twice. The first time there was a problem when the second stage separated, and the dummy cargoe ended up in a lower than intended orbit. But it made it to orbit. And of course it crash landed because it had no landing systems. It was a mock up of a dragon module. It was only there to give the rocket something to lift.
On the second flight, it lifted a first generation dragon module into the correct orbit. The dragon then re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down. The flight went nominally, it and it's cargoe were recovered. This was the flight NASA paid for, and Space X delivered it.
They had a secondary objective of recovering the first stage of their rocket, but the first stage burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere. That was not something NASA had paid for, it is an experimental program SpaceX is undertaking to try to further reduce the cost of their launch system.
Too bad there's still no destination for people, eh? It's still a vacuum, it's still a radiation-blasted hell, and it's still empty. Low Earth Orbit is not "space"... Too bad we still need massive amounts of material to build rockets, too bad there's no new physics of propulsion... Why are the dead dreams of bygone eras so important to a small segment of rich, white middle-aged geeks?
What happened to the 1997 Japanese space hotel? Oh yeah, nothing. What's going on with the PG&E space based solar power? Oh yeah, nothing. Space is dead. None of the delusions about orbital ball bearing factories, commuting to the office on the Moon or retiring on Mars make a shred of sense. The two most powerful nations on Earth entered a no-holds-barred contest to get people on the Moon, and even THEY, at the PEAK of their power, weren't able to sustain it.
But somehow, CEO and his magical sidekick, the Free Market, will do it? It's time for a reality check. Metal tubes filled with chemicals don't compensate for the basic fact that people arent' meant for space, there's nothing IN space, and space is so enormously bigger than anything we can conceive... Think we'll colonize the universe with balding middle-aged apes with bad eyesight? Where is the free market life extension effort to go with the size of the universe?
It's very simple. Even here on Earth, where EVERYONE and EVERYTHING is, we couldn't even sustain Concorde. Where are these magical rich people just waiting in line to shower money at the private space buff(oon)s? After the novelty of going nowhere wears off, then what? It wore off already in 1972. It won't change.
Iridium is able to make a small profit after admittedly a financial disaster over the previous decade. The next generation satellites look like they will finally have some real bandwidth as well.... being flown up into space on Falcon 9 rockets no less, so it looks like Elon Musk has that market cornered as well.
Really, commercial spaceflight currently falls into the following categories:
To add to these areas, two other very likely and emergent areas of commercial spaceflight can be summed up in the two following areas:
the tech to get there cheaply
Physics (gravity, heat dissipation, fluid dynamics, structural integrity, physical properties of aluminum and rubber) and chemistry (unless there are some easily transportable fuels and oxidizers in some lab somewhere that have more energy and less toxicity and cost than kerosene and LOX ) aren't going to change any time soon. Fiction writers hand wave over a STUPENDOUS amount of complexity.
there is a universe of materials floating around us
Except that
1) it's REALLY FSCKING FAR AWAY,
2) bathed in high-energy radiation,
3) we're at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
4) surrounded by a friction-inducing atmosphere, and
5) require on a consistent basis food and a pretty narrow range of temperature and oxygen and nitrogen partial pressures.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1