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NASA, Congress Reach Accord On Commercial Crew Program
MarkWhittington writes "NASA and Congress have reached a deal on how to proceed with the commercial crew program that provides government subsidies to pay for the development of private spacecraft. NASA will select two competitors from the current four — SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada. A third competitor will be picked for partial funding as a fallback in case both of the main competing companies run into difficulties developing a spacecraft on time and on budget."
How is an IPA going to get people into orbit?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I have a hunch that "Sierra Nevada" gonna be the candidate that will get axed
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
pay for the development
It works the same in NASA as it does in software dev: you get what you pay for. If you want results, pay for results. If you pay for development, all you get is lots of development.
What happened to Orion? When I visited Lockheed in December they were all gung-ho building a spacecraft. Not that I'm pushing for it, just wondering why it is apparently no longer a factor.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
It's obvious that SpaceX will be selected.
How soon will Dragon be man-rated, and even more important, Falcon 9 and/or Falcon Heavy?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who heads the House appropriation subcommittee with NASA oversight, said today that the program would fully fund two companies â" and could partially fund a third.
Thatâ(TM)s down from as many as four companies, according to Wolf.
âoeThis downselect will reduce taxpayer exposure by concentrating funds on those participants who are most likely to be chosen to eventually provide service to ISS,â he said in a statement.
IMHO, that's doublespeak for "I was able to take out two of four potential competitors to my favorite space pork, the Space Launch System."
The deal also would lay the groundwork for NASA to impose stiffer regulations on the companies competing to develop the rockets and capsules â" a priority for Wolf â" while giving NASA more leeway to nix contracts if it thinks aspiring companies are overselling their capability and financial health.
In other words, a series of irrelevant obstacles can be thrown in the way to hinder these companies even more. The "stiffer regulations" simply isn't needed. NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS. But it's a great tool for adding cost to these activities. We'll see how that gets abused in the future.
Similarly, more leeway to nix contracts means greater uncertainty (and resulting weaker financial health) for the contractors. NASA already is a problem child for bad contracts due to its considerable ability to renegotiate contracts, Darth Vader style. Being allowed even more excuses to renege on contracts will cause even more problems for these contractors.
This isn't going to kill the COTS program, but we should remember that some people are trying to. I think in part this is to remove competition for the SLS and in part just a ploy to eventually suborn COTS funding for the SLS.
This "accord" is for low earth orbit commercial space launches. Orion is intended for beyond LEO. Or something like that.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.
The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".
Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.
Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.
What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.
Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.
... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.
So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?
Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.
*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.
But the profits will all go private - nice deal for someone
I think NASA showed that they hadn't a clue what they should do with their terribly expensively developed "National Assets". They are all now rusting hulks. And they are developing another one with no clue as to what it is for (jobs for retiring engineers maybe).
At least the commercial guys are likely to rack their brains out as to how they can get more money out of "their" assets.
And face it - if a war broke out and SpaceX had useful assets, who do you think would control them overnight?
I'd like to point out that Space X did first prove they're capable of real life feats with Musk's own money. Yes the latest developments and the docking with ISS has been co-funded (or mostly funded) by NASA and they'll pay them more for additional launches, but they're getting a real deal out of it as SpaceX is doing it way cheaper than any alternative and they actually deliver already today, not far fetched promises.
You forget the alternative. If the public funds the development of new rocket systems by NASA and keeps using them at a cost of 5x that of the private company, then after N launches the total cost for the public is higher than had they developed it in cooperation with a private enterprise that then operates the technology under contracts at a much lower cost. As an example, Falcon 9 of Space X has lift capacity of 10 tons for a cost of $56M. The Delta-IV rocket had 22 tons and $300M so the cost per kg is 3x higher. The Ariane 5 rocket by ESA has 21 ton lift to LEO and cost of $200M. The Atlas V (earlier one) had lift on 9t at a cost of $125M.
Now if Space X can pull off Falcon Heavy (the first launch is planned already in 2013) then the planned cost of 53t to LEO is $80-125M. That gives it a per kg cost of 5.8x less than Delta-IV, 4x less than Ariane 5 etc. And that's assuming the high end of the price range. It's also a rocket that can deliver cargo to trans-lunar-orbit or even to Mars (14t to Mars, 16t to trans lunar). Why the hell would we need an SLS with 50-130t capacity with an outrageous price tag when we can just launch two Falcon 9 heavy's for the same capacity and probably less than the equivalent launch cost and if need be assemble the final inter-plantery spacecraft in orbit...
I have to disagree with you on SSTO being nonsense - only a small percentage of the cost of an orbital launch is the unavoidable fuel costs, much of the rest is in ground control and and the fact that we're basically throwing away everything except for the orbital capsule with every launch. That made great sense during the cold war when the space program was basically PR campaign piggybacking on ICBM technology to reach orbit - and an ICBM is pretty much by definition a single-shot vehicle and requires ground control because we're squeamish about both suicide missions and autonomous nukes. The space shuttle was a...change from that, but still used much of the same philosophy, just with a larger, more sophisticated orbital capsule
In the modern world where the space is becoming a thriving commercial destination a reusable launch vehicle that doesn't require extensive ground control makes a lot more sense. Granted SSTO has some problems - not really much call to carry the full mass of the launch vehicle all the way to orbit where you'll just be stuck shoving around a lot of useless mass, but the Blue Origin New Shepard seems to be moving in the right direction as a reusable, suborbital launch system with a separable crew module. Assuming the long term goal is to replace the expendable Atlas rocket family with a reusable Shepard descendant it actually makes a lot of sense - even if the eventual Shepard N were to cost 100x what an Atlas rocket does, the fact that it would require minimal ground support and could relaunch almost immediately with minimal maintenance means it could pay for itself within a year or two. The fact that they're doing something fundamentally new though does boost the development costs considerably, especially if you consider the current generation to be a research prototype with few if any direct applications. It could make sense to help fund its development not because you want this vehicle, but because you want the vehicle this vehicle's technology will enable once proven and refined. A true long-term investment if you will - exactly the sort of thing governments tend to be better at funding than private industry.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh forgot to add. Space X took the risk on themselves when the did the Falcon 1 and it failed 3x in row. They bet the company on the 4th launch and it worked and have been delivering cargo to LEO and now to ISS since. The Falcon 9 works (it has had 3/3 successes) and Falcon Heavy is basically re-using a lot of the Falcon 9 material so it's likely they'll make it work too. The maiden flight of SLS is planned in 2017 while I'd assume the Falcon Heavy or it's successor might easily be providing the service in 2017 for a lot cheaper (they'll probably have ironed out the reusability part of the first stages by then).
I don't know about the name being negative, I was quite disappointed to learn the "new Orion" was chemical powered. Hardly seems fair to give a glorified orbital space-taxi the name that once belonged to a design that would have put the the entire solar system at our feet. Sort of like resurrecting the retired jersey number of a football superstar only to give it to the water-boy.
Of course the "old Orion" could never have been used as a launch vehicle or even in near orbit without serious ecological and EMP-related side effects, not to mention treaty violations. But in deep space... well the flash wouldn't hurt anything there, and the whole place is already bathed in radiation far beyond what a little rapidly-dissipating fallout cloud could possibly contribute. I mean come on, before you were anywhere close to cruising speed you'd have multiple Earth-diameters between detonation points.
They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think a lot of this is indeed coming from the fact that SpaceX is operating like a startup. They also have claimed a lot of the cost reduction comes from the fact that they manufacture every single component themselves in their own factory where the raw materials come in from one door and spaceships/rockets come out the other. They also re-use a lot of the tooling etc because of the design (Falcon 9 is basically 9x Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavy is basically 3x Falcon 9 with inter-exchange of fuel). Due to their relative size as a company their corporate overhead has to be an order of magnitude smaller than say Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And their main interest is first off to get to be a major player in the space industry and to compete they have to be unique in some way and their way is the cost. I'm guessing their cross margin per launch is quite small while I'd not be surprised if others have a 100% or more cross margin. Musk's vision is to help make humans a space faring civilization with cost to orbit heavily reduced and allowing exploration of the solar system including colonization. As I've understood his hope is to retire on Mars so he's pushing with the company towards making that a reality within his lifetime (assuming he retires at 60/65 he's got 20/25 years left, it's not fully utopic).
And having worked for a private company and government contract and a large EU project I can tell you that the costs shown in a large EU project per person are far higher than you'd normally associate with the tasks done just because you can. And considering that there aren't too many players around I'd not be surprised if they've kept the launch device costs somewhat bloated because they can and it's being disrupter right now by an independent player that has different motives :)
Damn hit submit and then remembered your other parts of the question. With regard to safety and redundancy it's actually in favor of SpaceX. As an example from Falcon Heavy wiki: "The structural safety margins are 40% above flight loads, higher than the 25% margins of other rockets.[10]". They've designed the whole things from ground up for manned flight with extended safety margins so this is not the reason for cheapness...
And with regard to Musk and his motives for the company. Look at the recent 60 minutes interview with him. When Neil Armstrong etc claim that one shouldn't push for commercialization and NASA should do everything themselves (sounds like SLS lobbying to get the old guys out and get support without due consideration what they're doing) Elon's basically in tears. You can see that those guys were/are his heroes and motivation to do the same kind of stuff and it really hurt him. So he's not a fat CEO waiting for a fat paycheck, but this IS his vision and hope and that defines his priorities.
I misread the topic as 'Nasa, Congress Reach Around'
Also, you underestimate how much overhead there is in a 3-tier contracting scheme. 3x cost would be just about believable.
Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"
And that logic is wrong.
First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.
But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.
People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.
Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
I had the same question. So instead of funding one project, they are now funding 2.5 projects? How is this any different than pet projects that distributed out NASA in the first place. I am amazed at how quickly the private sector could get these from concept, to testing/deployment. However, it is clear that the private sector is standing on the shoulders of giants. The fact that they could do this so quickly was because the information was publicly owned or at least easily available. I am curious as to if there will be an initial jump in creativity only to be hidden behind trade secret and patent(IP) wall. Ultimately, the cost really is the same as you say. It is the whole shell game. These are private companies ROI is not magical. At a certain point it will increase because it has to. Investors want dividends; they are not in it because space travel is cool. Eventually, you have to invent ways of generating revenue, and that means raising prices at a rate that is higher than inflation. There is no actual incentive to be under budget, and paying some lobbyists will insure that these companies will be paid. Perhaps I am being cynical, but privatization, in my experience, has generally not worked out in the long term if the goal is cost savings. In contract law, the concept of puffery always accompanies the sales pitch. The conversation that leads to the bargain that is not considered part of the contract, but may have affected the inducement. So you sell the public on the idea that the private sector is magically more efficient than a highly regulated government, but meanwhile in the terms of the contract you make sure that the government is the one holding the bag if assumptions were not correct, or there are "unexpected" over-runs. So the puffery is the "cost-savings," just like "this used car runs like a dream", but is sold "AS-IS" disclaiming all express or implied warranties.
This actually legitimizes taking space out of education.Giving the able student one less dream, or asperation for the future. Government science was hard to get into, but the processes were open for transfer to all other, not just one, company.
NOPE! It just takes the astronaut dream from science majors and gives it to the business majors. I can see it now: Come to THE University of Chicago, where ASTRONAUTS are made!
Yes, Orion was, back in the Ares-1 days envisioned as going to the ISS. However, that was only meant as a stop-gap, a temporary solution until Commercial Crew came online. Back in those days, the plan was to fly the shuttles to 2015 as well.
Unfortunately, as built, Ares-1 could not even put Orion into orbit, and it's big brother, Ares-V, would have been prohibitively expensive to build and launch (and further, wasn't meant to take crew). One was overkill, and the other, anemic.
I too wonder about long duration flights on the Orion. I envision a secondary capsule, something along the lines of a transhab module from Bigelow, being added to the Orion for such trips.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yep. Elon's response to the criticism of his heroes shows one thing:
This guy has a PASSION for achieving his goals and driving his company forward.
It is something that IMHO NASA needs to grab on to and embrace.
SpaceX is in this to succeed and they appear to be incredibly committed to their goals.
Its nice to see people with that kind of drive back in the space industry again.
Map legend for non-rocket scientists:
HTP == High Test Peroxide, a high percentage Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) solution.
ISP == Isp == Specific Impulse, basically MPG for rockets.
LOX == LOx == Liquid Oxygen, not smoked salmon.
RP1 == RP-1 == Rocket Propellant 1, a highly refined kerosene used as a rocket fuel.
The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program with many members of congress trying to go out of their way to kill the program... just as is being done again by Frank Wolf. They simply can't conceive a situation where a private company on their own dime could develop a spacecraft.
I agree with you that as a practical matter there were numerous problems with the Orion. One of the largest problems with the vehicle is that it was explicitly engineered in such a way that it couldn't fly on either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, so it simply had to fly on something like the Ares I or Ares V. That wasn't an engineering decision but rather a political decision made explicitly so EELVs couldn't be considered in the process and that so much money would be dumped down the rathole of Orion development that it became "too big to fail". That is also why Orion development has continued, and why the SLS program was developed.... to build a rocket large enough to carry the Orion capsule since obvious none of the existing launchers could possibly be able to carry a spacecraft capable of putting people into space.
Then again it sort of stings when you point out that Atlas rockets have been used in the past to put people into space. John Glenn didn't mind the ride... 50 years ago. If it could be done then, why not today?
One can always chain capsules to make larger volumes. But I must admit that it'd probably make much more sense to attach the capsule to some sort of inflatable habitat, such as Bigelow's proposed BA 330 (which would have over 35 times the interior volume of an Orion capsule).
What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).
When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much less be able to reasonably estimate the costs of building those things. The same expectation was true for the Apollo project, as well as many of the aircraft and ships being built for the U.S. military over the years (like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers). A rough guess was made over the costs involved, but no company was willing to gamble billions of dollars on the off chance their estimates for the cost of these projects was wrong. Instead, the government took the financial risk in something called a "cost-plus" contract. In other words, the contractor was expected to accurately report what the actual costs of the project were, and when the whole thing was finished there was a reasonable expectation of a profit for the company... in other words the "plus" was a guaranteed financial bonus given to the company regardless of how much the contract cost.
This is also where you hear loud screaming with cost overruns, because a project that runs into some technical challenges or has the requirements change over the years of its development will end up driving up those "costs" that simply must be paid for by tax payers and not the companies involved.
For spacecraft being built by companies for NASA, this is the only way those spacecraft have been paid for. Some of this is understandable, as nobody before Werner Von Braun had ever built a spacecraft that took people to the Moon and brought them back to the Earth. To say that anybody in 1960 had a clue as to how much it really was going to cost to build a Saturn V is somebody somebody smoking some hemp or having a few too many beers. For crash programs where there is an issue of national security on the line, a cost-plus contract model even makes sense. There were slogans posted on walls of NASA contractors that openly bragged "waste anything but time".
What is happening with CCDev (the commercial crew development program) and COTS (commercial orbital transportation services) is something very different. There are also several very different things that are happening here too.
One of the things going on is that NASA is providing technical support for companies who want to provide commercial services that NASA could use, such as delivering supplies to the International Space Station (aka COTS) or providing a service to bring astronauts to Low-Earth orbit at various places, including the ISS as well. By technical support, NASA is providing consultants to explain some of the history and technical details for how their earlier spacecraft worked, what problems they had with historical spacecraft like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and other vehicles that NASA has worked with over the years. NASA also has huge libraries of technical studies and documentation about these spacecraft including performance data and details about all kinds of engine designs and all kinds of other engineering data that is very useful for anybody building rockets or trying to go into space. Providing these consultants or having people help in digging up that documentation does cost some money, so part of the program is simply paying for all of those people doing that running around, scanning documents if they need to be digitized (keep in mind that some of that data is from the 1950's and 1960's) and perhaps flying consultants to the factories where these commercial companies are building the rockets. Useful stuff and it doesn't go direct to these private companies, but is an ongoing expense.
Another thing NASA is doing is helping pro
It would probably keep the competion tight if Boeing were the company kept on partial funding whilst SpaceX and Blue Origin (or maybe Sierra Nevada) duke it out.
After all its not a company thats heavily dependent on the space program, and could keep a project ticking over easier than any of the others...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat.
Wrong. Quoting a representative posting on the SpaceX careers page:
"To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State."
I guess this is one of those regulations they could theoretically avoid, but where exactly do you think would be a better place to do business, given that a large fraction of the potential customers will be in the US (either the government or companies)? And where else do you think has a sufficient labor pool? Right now the choices are the USA, Russia, or the EU. India might get there eventually. You'd have to be insane to relocate a commercial space flight company to China.
"Stop gap" was perhaps the wrong term. However, it is definitely the case that commercial crew would be the primary means to get to the ISS, and Orion merely a backup: "NASA shall make use of United States commercially provided ISS crew transfer and crew rescue services to the maximum extent practicable." [/include #PDFWarn]
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Interesting points, I'll admit it's been a long time since I paid much attention to the details of launch systems, too many other interesting fields to keep track of. It does sound like HTP might prove to be an... interesting choice of oxidant, especially for a reusable vehicle where systems will inevitably develop stress flaws
One observation about propane though - unless the Propane has a notably lower total volume than the LOX it would seem a shared bulkhead will significantly *increase* the amount of insulation necessary. Before you only had to insulate the LOX from the environment, now you also have to insulate the Propane, and surface area increases with volume as V^(2/3).
Let's see... looks like the LOX/Propane ratio is ~3 by mass with LOX being ~2x as dense. Okay, wasn't really expecting that figured LOX would be the smaller player. So anyway unchilled propane would add ~2/3 the volume of the LOX, so about 40% more surface area. If it chills to the same density as LOX then +21%, or +11% if it chills to twice the density. Maybe not so bad.
There's also the fact that Propane has far more intramolecular freedom than LOX so will require considerably more energy to cool, but that effectively just raises the initially cheap fuel price and may actually help reduce insulation requirements as it will also require considerably more energy to heat, acting somewhat like blue-ice in a cooler.
Hmm, physical properties could be an issue though - LOX boils at about -183C, whereas propane freezes at about -188C. 5C isn't exactly a big window to work with, especially when you figure the tanks will begin cooling as soon as you start relieving pressure. Even if you could keep the temperature stable the liquid propane might also be "syrupy" so near it's freezing point, which could cause other complications. Plus there's the fact that instead of just opening the valve you'd have to heat your propane by over 100C if you want it gaseous again
Perhaps you could arrange a "nested" tank - LOX within insulation within propane within more insulation to keep the propane dense while also harnessing the "blue-ice effect" to reduce the total insulation needed, but frankly that sounds like an engineering, maintenance, and safety nightmare.
Hmm, and honestly now that I think of it insulation tends to be really light, while a double bulkhead between your fuel and oxidant sounds like a *really* good safety feature. Its a clever idea, but as a non-rocket-scientist it sounds like one giant headache in practice to me. Maybe someone else can chime in.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.
So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?
Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.
*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.
Without tax payer dollars, from the beginning, Boeing, United Airlines, McDonnell Douglass, Lockheed Martin, etc., never exists. These ``leave it to private enterprise'' stalwarts seem to ignore history. Really big ideas require national support. Unless you have a company with the funding like Apple willing to fund billions nothing will evolve in space without the US Government.
The largest current problem the HTP is simply getting permission from the Department of Homeland Security to even let you ship it at all, where refineries which make the stuff generally won't ship to you unless you are already using it in large industrial scale quantities. That really stinks if you are using for R&D purposes or something like a small start-up company.
Armadillo Aerospace spent a whole bunch of effort on the stuff, and John Carmack even sent out a general request on several mailing lists and news groups begging for people to help him out in the acquisition of the stuff. There was essentially nobody who was willing to sell it to him at any price. I don't know if Jeff Bezos has had the same problems (who has a fair bit more money than John Carmack), but this does seem to be the current issue where there is a huge niche that nobody wants to fill in terms of providing the material. Making your own production facilities to make HTP is an option.... but it is sort of a chicken or egg problem as well and is something that is best done on a large industrial scale as well in terms of costs.
It may very well be that HTP is a more cost effective approach to spaceflight, but getting over that hump of costs when other options that are "good enough" are available can make it much harder to go down that path. It is sort of like the problem of introducing alternatives to gasoline for automobiles, as the infrastructure is already in place for gasoline distribution but not nearly so much for compressed natural gas, or more exotic fuels like Hydrogen gas or quick recharging stations for electric cars.
LOX is already being used for rocketry and the infrastructure is also set up to be able to deliver the material in quantities needed for orbital spaceflight, not to mention that it has other applications besides rocketry. I don't know precisely if the LOX/Propane issue you are suggesting here is any better or not than LOX/RP1, although I will take your word at face value on this issue. Getting permits to transport Propane in bulk is much easier to get and it is readily available from many companies who are willing to go through the necessary steps of dealing with companies and experimenters who work with rocketry.
What that has to do with the New Shepard as it applies to commercial crew development, I don't know. That Jeff Bezos sees some potential in the technologies developed for the DC-X and is trying to run a private research group experimenting with those concepts and pushing them in a different direction that may hold some promise is interesting and worth watching. Sometimes it is useful to find out what was going on with some of the older programs and what might be rescued from them.... particularly when the program is shut down for political reasons and not engineering reasons as happened with the DC-X. If anything, I'd put the DC-X program as one of the most successful alternatives to the Shuttle that ever happened, and certainly got further along on its development than other projects like the Dynasoar or even Constellation and soon to add the SLS program to that list of failed NASA spaceflight efforts.
One area where HTP+RP1 might be useful is with in-orbit refueling depots. LOX+Liquid Hydrogen are currently being proposed in that situation, but the boil off from long term storage is a huge issue where HTP and RP1 wouldn't be nearly so big of a deal in that situation. The only other alternative is to use something like Hydrazine, which makes all of the technical problems of HTP look like child's play.
That is where you get things like the NAUTLUS-X proposal.
It was sort of sad though, at a recent "press day" at KSC prior to the launch of the Falcon 9 there were several NASA public relations guys that were hyping up the Orion capsule and the SLS as the "deep space" alternative to the Dragon capsule, and waxing on and on about how Orion was the "solution" to deep space travel and that the Dragon would only be used for trips to places like the ISS.
One of the participants at the gathering asked the NASA official about the NAUTLUS-X program, and it totally stumped the guy to the point he sort of suggested that it was a private program, or something made up out of whole cloth by some troll on Wikipedia.
I sure hope somebody talked to the guy. A video of this can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjutZLmKchs
The statement was made about an hour and a half into the video. The beginning of this video is worth watching just to see Gwynne Shotwell talk candidly about SpaceX and discuss some upcoming project they are working on, but the later half sort of shows the political climate all of this commercial crew program is working in and how even major players like NASA PR guys who should know this stuff are misinformed about even their own agency.
Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.
Yeah LOX has nearly the same density as H2O2. It is cryogenic but only mildly (certainly not as hard to handle as LH2). It is widely available for all sorts of industrial applications. Thankfully SpaceX didn't go that route.
Blue Origin gets most of its money from Jeff Bezos as more of a hobby than anything else. I'll let you look up his name elsewhere to see if he can afford a personal space program or not.
The commercial crew program is the first time that Blue Origin has even tried to go after a government funded project of any kind, and in the reviews I saw where they were selected, the NASA review committee seemed to have been quite impressed with not just the proposal but the kinds of things that Blue Origin has done already including an on-site visit of the Blue Origin facilities by NASA officials. You might just be surprised.
Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.
Blue Origin doesn't discuss much of anything to anybody. As to if they have a roadmap or a strategic plan, I have no idea if they do or don't. If you know something I don't, I'd love to know how you found out about their lack of a plan.
Jeff Bezos runs the company like a skunkworks and the employees of the company are famously tight lipped about almost anything the company is doing. Far more is known about more esoteric things the company is doing like retrieving the original F1 engines used for the Apollo 11 Saturn V and the 10k year clock being built at their launch/test facility in Texas than is typically known about what they even do for building spacecraft.
About the only time you even know they are doing a flight is when they are issued a flight permit and a NOTAM is issued by the FAA just prior to the flight.
In short, I don't think there is any way to tell what plan they may of may not have in the future as Jeff Bezos isn't really saying much at all. The only reason anything is known about this particular project under CCDev is because Blue Origin is required by law to disclose certain pieces of information and make them available to the public. That is by far and away very different from SpaceX, where Elon Musk has a personal blog, sends tweets about the company, and routinely brings members of the press core on tours of the plant... the "press corps" being loosely defined as anybody with a blog that has more than a couple hundred people reading it.
Just compare SpaceX with Blue Origin.
SpaceX developed the Kestrel and Merlin engines based on LOX/Kerosene. The Merlin (with modifications) is still used by them today. The experience they got with Kestrel can be applied more or less to the hypergolic engines they eventually developed which are also pressure-fed rockets. The US and the Soviet Union followed a similar path in developing rocket engines. The manufacturing techniques and avionics they developed with Falcon 1 got reused with Falcon 9. Falcon 1 was orbital from the get go even if the payload was small.
When you look at Blue Origin it is completely different. They develop a vehicle (Goddard) using monopropellant H2O2 (which is never going to turn out a reusable orbital vehicle because the performance is crap). It can't even be called suborbital. It doesn't even leave the atmosphere. Then Blue Origin posts they are searching for propulsion engineers which have worked on chemical bi-propellant engines (WTF? how were they planning to make an RLV without decent engines?). It's like the company is run backwards or something. Now they are planning to use H2O2/Kerosene when they can't even develop a much easier LOX/Kerosene engine. There is like one orbital launch vehicle using that propellant ever (Black Arrow from the UK in the 1960s) and it used silver plated catalysts...
They seem to be working with composite structures... and that is about it. Many aerospace projects historically failed because the project didn't manage to produce a working engine. Without having a decent working engine the vehicle isn't going to get there. Ever. Heck IMO even Sierra Nevada is a more credible company. At least they manage to produce working hybrid rocket engines. XCOR has been producing working bi-propellant rocket engines for yonks. Blue Origin still hasn't.
Again I ask how you know so much about what Blue Origin isn't doing? I can name a few things they are doing, but due to the fact they are so tight lipped it is hard to say what they aren't doing because you can't prove a negative action.
In the case of SpaceX, you would know what they are not doing because if there was anything they were doing it would have been discussed a long time ago. It is thus easy to say that SpaceX isn't building inflatable orbital habitats because if they were it would be something found on their website or bragged about elsewhere. I can't say the same thing about Blue Origin though, or the secret base they have (or don't have) on Mars or anything else that company is doing.
I certainly think it is myopic to say that Blue Origin isn't working on an engine when there is no way to prove that, where if they were working on new engine technology it wouldn't be public knowledge. Perhaps you have a drinking buddy who has let slip out some information about Blue Origin who is also an employee there that knows some of the inside information. I'm not ruling it out completely but such an information leak would also likely get such an employee spilling inside information about the company fired as well. That is how Jeff Bezos is running Blue Origin.
There are some very skilled people with advanced knowledge of aerospace engineering working for Blue Origin, so I wouldn't put anything past them. What I do know is that the NASA people looking at the proposal from Blue Origin for CCDev was impressed enough to push them ahead of other similar proposals from other companies like ATK, which was soundly rejected in the screening process. And frankly the ATK proposal was pretty good as were several other CCDev proposals that didn't make the cut.
Actually there is a lot of SpaceX we don't know. Do you know what their main propulsion team is working on? I have heard all sorts of rumors and read past publications and it still isn't clear what the heck they are doing or what will come out. They have one other team working on SuperDraco. Probably the same guys who worked on Draco. They also have another team (probably a splinter of the main team) doing the Merlin 1D. Yet that still leaves a number of people in their staff I haven't heard about for a couple of years now. I doubt they are doing nothing, it is a for profit business after all, and there are several things they could be working on at a preliminary level. But it isn't clear what it is and what will come out.
Inflatable habitats were conceived by the Transhab project at NASA and Bigelow bought the right to use those patents. It would be a bit suicidal to compete against him using that technology given the tremendous head start he has.
The reason Blue Origin was selected for CCDev is kind of obvious. The ship design is different enough from the others (blunt biconic) that NASA was interested in funding it. However if you look at where most of the money was put into (CCDev 2) Blue Origin is only getting a minor chunk of the action compared with Boeing, SNC, or Space X. Not even a tenth of the money those companies are getting. Contrary to what you said ATK's proposal wasn't good. It was crap. Why? They are basically using the 'Stick' (Ares I-X lookalike) as a launcher. The 'Stick' proved to have major design flaws during the conducted tests. The test launch had vibrations higher than the limits NASA has mandated for flights carrying human passengers because of the solid propellant first stage. It also has awful failure modes because of the solid first stage. Their second stage is proposed to use a Vulcain 2 engine. Well that was originally developed as a first stage engine in Europe for Ariane 5 ECA. So it is kind of understandable why that would be a reason for concern as well. The capsule is a smaller version of Orion which has so far proven to have weight issues and is already being funded under the SLS contract. So ATK's proposal for CCDev has no technical or economic sense. SNC is being funded because they are working on a winged vehicle contrary to Boeing and SpaceX (or even Blue Origin) which are working on capsules.