Not many commenters here seem to realize this, but private firms already handle space launches for the DOD and NRO, as well as all of NASA's unmanned science missions. This has been working well. The only new thing about the recent proposals is to have these same private launchers place people in orbit as well.
Businesses in the private sector, selling actual products or services to actual end users, do indeed have incentives to drive costs down. But businesses contracting for the government do not, as can be seen by the money-pit that constitutes the defense-contracting business.
In fact, the opposite is true: businesses contracting for the government have a strong profit incentive to drive costs up.
I think what you actually mean is "businesses selling actual products or services at a fixed-price to end users have incentives to drive costs down, but businesses performing cost-plus contracts for the government do not." A large part of the commercial spaceflight push is to use fixed-price contracts with multiple competitors instead of the sole-source cost-plus contracts typically used by the government. If one of the companies drives costs up, they have to either eat the extra cost themselves or lose their business to one of their competitors.
The thing that really kills me is the contractor's motivation as a business is maximizing revenue from the contracts and thus maximizing profits. It's not in their interest to be on-time and on-budget. And it's also not in their own interest to offer cheaper, better solutions. So we get this perpetual game where they promise the moon for low prices and NASA pretends to believe them and the costs spiral and until projects are canceled.
A large part of point of going commercial is that you use competitive fixed-price contracts instead of the cost-plus contracts typically used by NASA. With cost-plus, if your sole contractor goes over-budget, you just have to pay them more money as long as they fill out the proper paperwork. With fixed-price with multiple competitors, if a contractor goes over-budget they have to either eat the cost, or you cancel the contract and buy launch services from their competitor instead. This is pretty revolutionary for NASA, but opposed by many in Congress because payment is based on performance, rather than what congressional district a company has their employees in.
The fact that commercial space has been 90% vaporware for the past three decades had nothing to do with it. And God forbid anyone suggest that for-profit organizations would cut corners for the sake of making more money.
Commercial space is vaporware? During the past decade or so the DOD, NRO, and unmanned NASA missions have all been exclusively getting to orbit on commercial launchers. All those organizations seem to be perfectly happy using commercial vehicles for billion-plus dollar spacecraft. It's only manned NASA missions which are still being operated largely in-house.
However, it does require that NASA will get somewhere around $3 billion more per year to support manned space flight development including a Saturn V-class heavy lift launch vehicle, fly supporting unmanned space missions, and pay for the missions described in the report.... Finally, it's worth noting that there's a good chance even the relatively low funding needs of the Flexible Path option will not be supplied by Congress. At that point, I don't know what will happen. As far as I know, the Augustine committee simply could not generate a useful manned space plan with the budget manned space flight currently gets.
There's a few possibilities for what NASA can do if there's no budget increase: * If I recall correctly, the Augustine Committee couldn't make any assumptions about international cooperation, as this is more of a political question. If there is international cooperation (i.e. parts of the project handled and paid for by other countries), and it's not done in a totally mangled fashion like the ISS (wishful thinking, perhaps), this could substantially reduce the cost to the US. I suspect Obama would also want to capitalize on the international cooperation aspect as well. * I recall hearing that the Augustine Committee had added on 50% or so to the estimated cost of DIRECT/SDLV-inline to account for typical NASA programmatic bloating, and the DIRECT folks were rather peeved because they had actually already added in that factor. It's possible that in reality the cost of a DIRECT-style architecture will be cheaper than the Augustine Committee estimated. * There's also the no-HLV option, or perhaps splitting the cost with the DOD of funding development of EELV Phase 2. * The $3 billion included $1 billion for general technology development, which could potentially be trimmed (dangerous, though, especially if that tech development helps lower future costs) * We're in an economic recession, so support for expanding NASA's budget is low. However, one benefit of Flexible Path (esp. commercial-based Flexible Path) is that it can easily be scaled/sped up if budget support is there once the recession ends. * As you mentioned, technology like propellant depots and VASIMR are potentially huge game-changers
The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.
FYI, the estimated annual cost for finding 90% of near-Earth asteroids more than 140m in diameter is expected to be at least $50 million; currently only $4 million a year is spent on this. Here's a recent summary of the situation:
The bad news in the report from the National Research Council is that the $4 million in annual funding that several major NEO detection programs receive is nowhere near enough to meet a 2020 deadline set by Congress in 2005 for scientists to find 90 percent of near-Earth objects greater than 140-meters in diameter--space rocks of this size are likely to cause regional, rather than global, damage, though global damage is still possible. The mandate has yet to receive any funding. One of these regional-threat objects strikes Earth on average every 30,000 years, the report states.
Even $10 million in annual funds "would not allow completion on any time scale" of the Congressionally mandated survey of the threats, according to the report. Meeting Congress's goal would take at least $50 million in annual funding; even better would be $250 million in annual funding, with the latter allowing for completion of the survey and support for a space mission to test a mitigation plan.
Orbiting Fuel Depots, 'bout time. Use of the LaGrange points, asteroids, yes! Scifi has known this for years, 'bout time that NASA caught up and went for long term development of space instead of quick one-shot missions.
This. Not everybody realizes that the vast majority of mass you need for space missions (particularly those beyond Earth orbit) is fuel. Fuel itself is cheap, and nobody cares if you lose it, so you can just launch it up to a fuel depot to whoever the lowest bidder is (making it a great catalyst for commercial space startups). Then you can launch the much-lighter unfueled spacecraft up by itself (or construct it in orbit), allowing you to launch much more elaborate spacecraft using smaller rockets. Fuel depots are a HUGE technology multiplier in spaceflight. It's really a shame that NASA's prior architecture for various political reasons was pretty much explicitly constructed to avoid any use of fuel depots or in-space refueling.
One of the old arguments against propellant depots is that the technology is untested, although ULA just reported on the results of their in-space tests this month:
Thousands of tonnes could (theoretically) be launched by something like Project Orion. The estimated cost of the fallout would be ~20 people getting cancer across the world.
Um, yeah, and the next day after the proposal you'd get front-page headlines saying "Dangerous NASA Plan Would Give Cancer Dozens of People" and the day after that you'd have the already tenuous popular opinion set against NASA. NASA has to be funded by Congress, and can you seriously see more than half of Congress willing to support that plan and face the resulting political attacks when they run for office again?
Why is it that the public at large has no idea of the relative safety records of the different carriers, or of the different brand and model of jet? Why don't those with a poor safety record go out of business in short order?
Um, ValuJet? That's the only domestic airliner I can think of where safety was a major issue, and their finances plummeted.
He blasts the panel for 'claiming' his vehicles isn't man rated - but then states "it is man rated except for the escape system"
All of the parts that have been funded and already designed/built are man-rated to NASA standards. That's more than NASA can say for the Ares I, which had to lower its safety standards when it turned out the Ares I was incapable of meeting them.
Yes, it is! History has shown, time and time again, that safety is more expense than it's worth. Go back to seat belts in the 70s, or even Toyota's recent scuffle, where they avoided a recall until forced to do so...
That only applies industries where the public is largely unaware of accidents and failures. You can be rest assured that any accident during a private manned spaceflight is going to be on newspaper/news.google front pages for quite a while, and any private space company knows that would result in its name being negatively embedded in the public psyche for quite some time.
Beyond that, the rockets used to launch people into space are usually not the same as those used for satellite launches, limiting the usability of that equipment for other purposes.
That's pretty much a large part of the point behind commercial spaceflight: The commercial rockets designed for launching billion-dollar satellites (Atlas V, Falcon 9, etc.) will also be used for launching humans after they've been proven on unmanned missions. That way you don't also have to spend tens of billions of dollars developing and maintaining a separate line of human-only rockets.
This is ridiculous from beginning to end. Even with optimum funding, the Ares I won't fly for at least 5 years and probably not for 7 or 8 years. So how has it demonstrated or substantiated any capability or superiority? Citing the Ares I-X flight is absurd. That vehicle had virtually nothing in common with Ares I. Griffin's quick and dirty 60 day ESAS hardly sets a standard for optimized design.
It is in fact the panel that is speculating as to the ultimate safety of the Ares I. It will be so expensive to operate, it will never fly enough times to accumulate sufficient flights to prove any statistical prediction of its safety.
And by the way, why is a safety panel making judgments about cost-effectiveness? Even if COTS-D were funded, Falcon 9/Dragon will involve about 100 times less NASA funding than Ares I/Orion. Yes, the latter is designed for deep space but that should not require 100 times more money. The F9/Dragon operating costs will also be a fraction of that for Ares I/Orion. Ignoring such cost differences would be considered not just "unwise" but ridiculous by most taxpayers.
The panel further speculates on the degree of safety of the COTS designs, which really refers to Falcon 9/Dragon since Orbital has made no move to develop a crew capability for Taurus II/Cygnus. There's no indication that the panel made any effort to investigate the statements from SpaceX that the F9/Dragon system has been designed from the beginning to meet NASA's human rating requirements (at least to the degree that the company could determine those requirements). With such enormous cost savings at stake, you might think the panel would want to know if it could be built with high margins.
The ASAP's repeated references to the two "COTS firms" ignores the fact that many companies, including both established firms and new entrants, will compete in the Commercial Crew Program envisioned by the Augustine Committee. While the Falcon 9 and Taurus II vehicles have already met numerous hardware milestones and will have a substantial track record by the time any astronauts are placed onboard, several other potential Commercial Crew providers envision use of launch vehicles such as the Atlas V, vehicles that are already entrusted by the government to launch multi-billion dollar national security payloads upon which the lives of our troops overseas depend. Despite the ASAP Report's contention that commercial vehicles are "nothing more than unsubstantiated claims," the demonstrated track records of commercial vehicles and numerous upcoming manifested cargo flights ensure that no astronaut will fly on a commercial vehicle that lacks a long, proven track record. The Atlas V, for example, has a record of 19 consecutive successful launches and the Atlas family of rockets has had over 90 consecutive successes, and dozens of flights of the Atlas, Taurus, and Falcon vehicles are scheduled to occur before 2014 in addition to successful flights already completed. Further, thirteen former NASA astronauts, who have accumulated a total of 42 space missions, stated in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that commercial spaceflight can be conducted safely:
"We are fully confident that the commercial spaceflight sector can provide a level of safety equal to that offered by the venerable Russian Soyuz system, which has flown safely for the last 38 years, and exceeding that of the Space Shuttle. Commercial transportation systems using boosters such as the Atlas V, Taurus II, or Falcon 9 will have the advantage of multiple unmanned flights to build a track record of safe operations prior to carrying humans. These vehicles are already set
Just trying readying Feynman's experience with them.
It's really funny that you mention Feynman, because the problem he opens with in his dissenting opinion as a member of the panel which studied the Challenger accident is the exact same problem NASA management (especially Alabama's MSFC) has been having in their push of the Ares I as the "safest launch vehicle ever":
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"...
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.
(It's also interesting to note that Feynman essentially had to fight the rest of the panel to include his dissent, as they wanted to just trust NASA to fix its problems on its own. Also worth noting that the management-to-engineer ratio at NASA is far higher than it was in Feynman's day)
Even though the Ares I exists only on paper and it hasn't even passed a reasonable design review, NASA management (or at least the pre-Bolden management) claimed it would have a failure rate of 1-in-3000. Also, this failure rate ignores a number of potential problems which have come up with the design, but the ASAP panel mentioned in the summary just takes it on good faith that NASA will still make a perfectly safe vehicle with the Ares I. Fortunately, a number of the top Ares managers have already been canned, and the new administrator, Charles Bolden, seems to be much less problematic than his predecessor, Michael Griffin (i.e. he doesn't believe himself to be the world's greatest aerospace engineer, and so actually listens to what his engineers tell him).
It's also worth noting that NASA (and the DOD, and NRO) already uses commercial launchers for all of their unmanned probes, as they've been doing for several years now. We all like to say human life is priceless, etc. etc., but there frankly isn't much more you'd do to safeguard a volunteering person than you'd do for a billion-dollar unmanned probe representing years of work by huge teams.
I'm not questioning the amount of money you have quoted here, as the number feels correct too. It just seems like NASA is incredibly wasteful of the money they have, and that it practically is the very definition of how to spend money in the most foolhardy method possible.
Ack, this is really embarrassing on my part, but it looks like the "$4.5 billion a year" figure is inaccurate. I had it from this source, which was one of the first items to pop up in my Google search: "In the years after the Shuttle retires, the annual operation costs of the ISS will be $4.5 billion per year.1"
The footnote says that the figure came from one of these two GAO sources:
However, after reading your comment I've searched through the text of both GAO sources and I can't find anything to support the first source's claim. I did find the following through from the first GAO report: "NASA estimates that assembly and operating costs of the ISS will be between $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion annually for FY2009-FY2012. The ISS as of February 19, 2008, is approximately 65 percent complete."
The choice of ending U.S. participation in the ISS in 2015 really provides only one benefit, that of freeing up the roughly $2.5 to $3 billion per year needed to run the ISS, which can then be invested in the more rapid development of the exploration systems. The Committee's Integrated Option analyses show that if coupled to the choice of commercial crew launch system to low-Earth orbit and the Ares V Lite heavy lift choice, this expenditure on the ISS would delay the exploration of the Moon until the mid-2020s, only a few years after the most aggressive, unconstrained profile would accomplish it.
In any case, $2.5-$3 billion a year is still a huge chunk of change. I totally agree with your original sentiment.
You could shoot a rocket from a cannon, meaning you'd need less fuel (meaning a smaller fuel tank, meaning even less fuel) to get it up to speed.
That was pretty much the idea behind the later vehicles of the Project HARP in the 1960s, a joint project between the US DOD and Canadian Department of National Defence. The project was ended however, after some suborbital vehicles were fired but a few months before the first launch of their orbital prototype. After the project was cancelled, project lead Gerald Bull ended up going to Iraq to develop a supergun for Saddam Hussein, which ended... poorly.
The Martlet 2G-1 was the absolute minimum gun-launched satellite vehicle. Conceived when the HARP project was under threat, it was a seven-inch diameter, two-stage solid propellnat vehicle that would be sabot-launched from the HARP 16 inch gun. Its total payload in orbit would have been just two kilogrammes - ideal for today's planned nano-satellites. Unfortunately even this minimum orbital launch vehicle could not be demonstrated before the program was shut down.
During the last year of the HARP program, when it became clear that further funding was not forthcoming, and that the goals of the Martlet 4 program were not to be realised, full efforts were diverted to developing a Martlet 2G-1 orbital vehicle (GLO-1A). It was felt that if a satellite - any satellite, no matter now small - could be successfully gun-launched, that it then would be possible to encourage further funding, either public or private, which would permit the orbital goals of the HARP program to be realised. Unfortunately time and fate were against HARP and the project was closed down on June 30 1967, only a few months before an orbital 2G-1 could be flown.
LEO Payload: 2.00 kg (4.40 lb). to: 185 km Orbit. at: 13.00 degrees. Total Mass: 500 kg (1,100 lb). Core Diameter: 0.30 m (0.98 ft). Total Length: 4.29 m (14.07 ft).
Stage0: 1 x HARP Gun. Gross Mass: 450 kg (990 lb). Empty Mass: 1.00 kg (2.20 lb). Motor: 1 x 16 in gun. Thrust (vac): 127,000.000 kN (28,550,000 lbf). Isp: 365 sec. Burn time: 0.0100 sec. Length: 36.59 m (120.04 ft). Diameter: 0.42 m (1.37 ft). Propellants: Guncotton. Stage1: 1 x Martlet 2G1-1. Gross Mass: 130 kg (280 lb). Empty Mass: 21 kg (46 lb). Length: 3.21 m (10.53 ft). Diameter: 0.29 m (0.95 ft). Propellants: Solid. Stage2: 1 x Martlet 2G1-2. Gross Mass: 41 kg (90 lb). Empty Mass: 7.00 kg (15.40 lb). Length: 0.53 m (1.73 ft). Diameter: 0.29 m (0.95 ft). Propellants: Solid.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is all Obama and I am an American but... to think that just because one nation wants to let their science programs slip even more doesn't mean that anyone should pull the plug on anything.
After the ISS is completed, the annual cost of maintaining it will be $4.5 billion a year. By comparison, the total budget of the ESA for 2010 is $5.4 billion (3.74 billion Euros). Keep in mind that's what the ESA spends for all of its projects -- the portion for human spaceflight and exploration is half a billion dollars.
It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr, almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.
Indeed. If you haven't read it already, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg has a really great piece titled "A Space Program For the Rest of Us" which goes into detail on how the Apollo program, structured to beat the Russians to the Moon at any cost, had the unfortunate side effect of creating a space program which was unable to adapt to making space exploration a sustainable venture once the race (and massive government funding) was over. Unfortunately there's still quite a bit of Apollo nostalgia left, as evidenced by ex-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin structuring his Ares/Constellation program as "Apollo on Steroids" instead of even attempting to make it sustainable. Some quotes:
Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time--and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory--Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place....
In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact--and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he "wasn't that interested in space."
And that has been NASA's fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory....
Apollo inadvertently and quite unfortunately established the paradigm for how the United States would conduct human spaceflight: a government agency would be given a large budget, make plans for the next major steps, determine the single best way to carry them out, and hire contractors to implement the plan. It was essentially the same way the Russians ran their space program, except instead of competing contractors the Soviets had competing design bureaus....
With the end of Apollo, NASA had a problem. It had established a vast infrastructure for conducting human spaceflight, with lots of jobs in politically sensitive congressional districts and
First off, SpaceX and Orbital don't "only engage in suborbital flight," but has designed and launched orbital rockets; in contrast, NASA hasn't successfully designed and launched a new orbital vehicle in around 30 years, despite plenty of attempts which have become case studies in poor program management.
Additionally, you're confusing two different issues: having space exploration entirely privately funded, which hardly anybody is advocating, with the issue of having transportation to low-earth orbit handled commercially (i.e. NASA, scientists, tourists, etc. buying trips to orbit), which many people are advocating. Even if a portion of the R&D for the rockets has been paid for by the government, what's important is that there's a competitive commercial marketplace for manned launches. That way multiple new approaches can be tried in parallel, proving new and more efficient systems with unmanned launches before transporting humans on them. Government-controlled monopolies tend to be suboptimal, to say the least.
Um, yes, much more often than NASA. For example, the United Launch Alliance has commercially launched 36 rockets in the past 36 months, SpaceX has had a number of successful launches (and seems to have worked out of their growing pains), and Orbital also launches regularly.
If you're include non-US companies, Arianespace has used their Ariane 5 rocket to launch an ATV to the ISS. If you're only including US companies, SpaceX will be launching a prototype of their Dragon capsule this month, with two missions to the ISS this year: http://www.spacex.com/updates.php
It's pretty cool and now runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Here's the description from MobyGames:
Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space re-creates the thrilling endeavor of trying to lead your country's space program to the moon before a competing superpower does the same. As head of your country's space program you will need to develop all the hardware you need for your spacecraft and make it safe, choose the right persons to send into space and make sure they come back alive. Loaded with lots of historic video clips, and other historic correct items make this game reflect the "Cold War" situation as it should.
Of course, I'm sure you've been on many decade long aerospace engineering projects to know how it should work.
You don't need to have worked on aerospace projects yourself to know that spending $35 billion to develop a medium-lift rocket+capsule which will launch to LEO at a cost of nearly $1 billion per flight is a bad deal, especially when there's so much more cost-effective alternatives. It's essentially just pork for Alabama and a few other congressionally powerful states.
Slashdot Mirror
Not many commenters here seem to realize this, but private firms already handle space launches for the DOD and NRO, as well as all of NASA's unmanned science missions. This has been working well. The only new thing about the recent proposals is to have these same private launchers place people in orbit as well.
Businesses in the private sector, selling actual products or services to actual end users, do indeed have incentives to drive costs down. But businesses contracting for the government do not, as can be seen by the money-pit that constitutes the defense-contracting business.
In fact, the opposite is true: businesses contracting for the government have a strong profit incentive to drive costs up.
I think what you actually mean is "businesses selling actual products or services at a fixed-price to end users have incentives to drive costs down, but businesses performing cost-plus contracts for the government do not." A large part of the commercial spaceflight push is to use fixed-price contracts with multiple competitors instead of the sole-source cost-plus contracts typically used by the government. If one of the companies drives costs up, they have to either eat the extra cost themselves or lose their business to one of their competitors.
The thing that really kills me is the contractor's motivation as a business is maximizing revenue from the contracts and thus maximizing profits. It's not in their interest to be on-time and on-budget. And it's also not in their own interest to offer cheaper, better solutions. So we get this perpetual game where they promise the moon for low prices and NASA pretends to believe them and the costs spiral and until projects are canceled.
A large part of point of going commercial is that you use competitive fixed-price contracts instead of the cost-plus contracts typically used by NASA. With cost-plus, if your sole contractor goes over-budget, you just have to pay them more money as long as they fill out the proper paperwork. With fixed-price with multiple competitors, if a contractor goes over-budget they have to either eat the cost, or you cancel the contract and buy launch services from their competitor instead. This is pretty revolutionary for NASA, but opposed by many in Congress because payment is based on performance, rather than what congressional district a company has their employees in.
The fact that commercial space has been 90% vaporware for the past three decades had nothing to do with it. And God forbid anyone suggest that for-profit organizations would cut corners for the sake of making more money.
Commercial space is vaporware? During the past decade or so the DOD, NRO, and unmanned NASA missions have all been exclusively getting to orbit on commercial launchers. All those organizations seem to be perfectly happy using commercial vehicles for billion-plus dollar spacecraft. It's only manned NASA missions which are still being operated largely in-house.
However, it does require that NASA will get somewhere around $3 billion more per year to support manned space flight development including a Saturn V-class heavy lift launch vehicle, fly supporting unmanned space missions, and pay for the missions described in the report. ... Finally, it's worth noting that there's a good chance even the relatively low funding needs of the Flexible Path option will not be supplied by Congress. At that point, I don't know what will happen. As far as I know, the Augustine committee simply could not generate a useful manned space plan with the budget manned space flight currently gets.
There's a few possibilities for what NASA can do if there's no budget increase:
* If I recall correctly, the Augustine Committee couldn't make any assumptions about international cooperation, as this is more of a political question. If there is international cooperation (i.e. parts of the project handled and paid for by other countries), and it's not done in a totally mangled fashion like the ISS (wishful thinking, perhaps), this could substantially reduce the cost to the US. I suspect Obama would also want to capitalize on the international cooperation aspect as well.
* I recall hearing that the Augustine Committee had added on 50% or so to the estimated cost of DIRECT/SDLV-inline to account for typical NASA programmatic bloating, and the DIRECT folks were rather peeved because they had actually already added in that factor. It's possible that in reality the cost of a DIRECT-style architecture will be cheaper than the Augustine Committee estimated.
* There's also the no-HLV option, or perhaps splitting the cost with the DOD of funding development of EELV Phase 2.
* The $3 billion included $1 billion for general technology development, which could potentially be trimmed (dangerous, though, especially if that tech development helps lower future costs)
* We're in an economic recession, so support for expanding NASA's budget is low. However, one benefit of Flexible Path (esp. commercial-based Flexible Path) is that it can easily be scaled/sped up if budget support is there once the recession ends.
* As you mentioned, technology like propellant depots and VASIMR are potentially huge game-changers
The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.
FYI, the estimated annual cost for finding 90% of near-Earth asteroids more than 140m in diameter is expected to be at least $50 million; currently only $4 million a year is spent on this. Here's a recent summary of the situation:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=new-report-warns-against-smaller-ne-2010-01-22
The bad news in the report from the National Research Council is that the $4 million in annual funding that several major NEO detection programs receive is nowhere near enough to meet a 2020 deadline set by Congress in 2005 for scientists to find 90 percent of near-Earth objects greater than 140-meters in diameter--space rocks of this size are likely to cause regional, rather than global, damage, though global damage is still possible. The mandate has yet to receive any funding. One of these regional-threat objects strikes Earth on average every 30,000 years, the report states.
Even $10 million in annual funds "would not allow completion on any time scale" of the Congressionally mandated survey of the threats, according to the report. Meeting Congress's goal would take at least $50 million in annual funding; even better would be $250 million in annual funding, with the latter allowing for completion of the survey and support for a space mission to test a mitigation plan.
Orbiting Fuel Depots, 'bout time. Use of the LaGrange points, asteroids, yes! Scifi has known this for years, 'bout time that NASA caught up and went for long term development of space instead of quick one-shot missions.
This. Not everybody realizes that the vast majority of mass you need for space missions (particularly those beyond Earth orbit) is fuel. Fuel itself is cheap, and nobody cares if you lose it, so you can just launch it up to a fuel depot to whoever the lowest bidder is (making it a great catalyst for commercial space startups). Then you can launch the much-lighter unfueled spacecraft up by itself (or construct it in orbit), allowing you to launch much more elaborate spacecraft using smaller rockets. Fuel depots are a HUGE technology multiplier in spaceflight. It's really a shame that NASA's prior architecture for various political reasons was pretty much explicitly constructed to avoid any use of fuel depots or in-space refueling.
Aerospace engineer Jon Goff at "Selenian Boondocks" has some really great write-ups and conference papers about propellant depots and how they can benefit a human spaceflight architecture:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/09/space-2009-papers/
http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/07/depot-centric-human-spaceflight/
One of the old arguments against propellant depots is that the technology is untested, although ULA just reported on the results of their in-space tests this month:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2010/01/additional-av-017-flight-experiment-information/
Thousands of tonnes could (theoretically) be launched by something like Project Orion. The estimated cost of the fallout would be ~20 people getting cancer across the world.
Um, yeah, and the next day after the proposal you'd get front-page headlines saying "Dangerous NASA Plan Would Give Cancer Dozens of People" and the day after that you'd have the already tenuous popular opinion set against NASA. NASA has to be funded by Congress, and can you seriously see more than half of Congress willing to support that plan and face the resulting political attacks when they run for office again?
Why is it that the public at large has no idea of the relative safety records of the different carriers, or of the different brand and model of jet? Why don't those with a poor safety record go out of business in short order?
Um, ValuJet? That's the only domestic airliner I can think of where safety was a major issue, and their finances plummeted.
He blasts the panel for 'claiming' his vehicles isn't man rated - but then states "it is man rated except for the escape system"
All of the parts that have been funded and already designed/built are man-rated to NASA standards. That's more than NASA can say for the Ares I, which had to lower its safety standards when it turned out the Ares I was incapable of meeting them.
Yes, it is! History has shown, time and time again, that safety is more expense than it's worth. Go back to seat belts in the 70s, or even Toyota's recent scuffle, where they avoided a recall until forced to do so...
That only applies industries where the public is largely unaware of accidents and failures. You can be rest assured that any accident during a private manned spaceflight is going to be on newspaper/news.google front pages for quite a while, and any private space company knows that would result in its name being negatively embedded in the public psyche for quite some time.
Only thing different is payload and aeroshell between Falcon 9 for satellite and Dragon capsule.
Correct, and the Dragon capsule will also be used quite often for unmanned science experiments.
Beyond that, the rockets used to launch people into space are usually not the same as those used for satellite launches, limiting the usability of that equipment for other purposes.
That's pretty much a large part of the point behind commercial spaceflight: The commercial rockets designed for launching billion-dollar satellites (Atlas V, Falcon 9, etc.) will also be used for launching humans after they've been proven on unmanned missions. That way you don't also have to spend tens of billions of dollars developing and maintaining a separate line of human-only rockets.
Clark Lindsay:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=17960
This is ridiculous from beginning to end. Even with optimum funding, the Ares I won't fly for at least 5 years and probably not for 7 or 8 years. So how has it demonstrated or substantiated any capability or superiority? Citing the Ares I-X flight is absurd. That vehicle had virtually nothing in common with Ares I. Griffin's quick and dirty 60 day ESAS hardly sets a standard for optimized design.
It is in fact the panel that is speculating as to the ultimate safety of the Ares I. It will be so expensive to operate, it will never fly enough times to accumulate sufficient flights to prove any statistical prediction of its safety.
And by the way, why is a safety panel making judgments about cost-effectiveness? Even if COTS-D were funded, Falcon 9/Dragon will involve about 100 times less NASA funding than Ares I/Orion. Yes, the latter is designed for deep space but that should not require 100 times more money. The F9/Dragon operating costs will also be a fraction of that for Ares I/Orion. Ignoring such cost differences would be considered not just "unwise" but ridiculous by most taxpayers.
The panel further speculates on the degree of safety of the COTS designs, which really refers to Falcon 9/Dragon since Orbital has made no move to develop a crew capability for Taurus II/Cygnus. There's no indication that the panel made any effort to investigate the statements from SpaceX that the F9/Dragon system has been designed from the beginning to meet NASA's human rating requirements (at least to the degree that the company could determine those requirements). With such enormous cost savings at stake, you might think the panel would want to know if it could be built with high margins.
Commercial Spaceflight Federation:
http://www.commercialspaceflight.org/?p=1058
The ASAP's repeated references to the two "COTS firms" ignores the fact that many companies, including both established firms and new entrants, will compete in the Commercial Crew Program envisioned by the Augustine Committee. While the Falcon 9 and Taurus II vehicles have already met numerous hardware milestones and will have a substantial track record by the time any astronauts are placed onboard, several other potential Commercial Crew providers envision use of launch vehicles such as the Atlas V, vehicles that are already entrusted by the government to launch multi-billion dollar national security payloads upon which the lives of our troops overseas depend.
Despite the ASAP Report's contention that commercial vehicles are "nothing more than unsubstantiated claims," the demonstrated track records of commercial vehicles and numerous upcoming manifested cargo flights ensure that no astronaut will fly on a commercial vehicle that lacks a long, proven track record. The Atlas V, for example, has a record of 19 consecutive successful launches and the Atlas family of rockets has had over 90 consecutive successes, and dozens of flights of the Atlas, Taurus, and Falcon vehicles are scheduled to occur before 2014 in addition to successful flights already completed.
Further, thirteen former NASA astronauts, who have accumulated a total of 42 space missions, stated in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that commercial spaceflight can be conducted safely:
"We are fully confident that the commercial spaceflight sector can provide a level of safety equal to that offered by the venerable Russian Soyuz system, which has flown safely for the last 38 years, and exceeding that of the Space Shuttle. Commercial transportation systems using boosters such as the Atlas V, Taurus II, or Falcon 9 will have the advantage of multiple unmanned flights to build a track record of safe operations prior to carrying humans. These vehicles are already set
Just trying readying Feynman's experience with them.
It's really funny that you mention Feynman, because the problem he opens with in his dissenting opinion as a member of the panel which studied the Challenger accident is the exact same problem NASA management (especially Alabama's MSFC) has been having in their push of the Ares I as the "safest launch vehicle ever":
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the ...
probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The
estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher
figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from
management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a
Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could
properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the
machinery?"
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering
often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of
originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a
very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with
apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights
may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively
unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent
(it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the
probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this
may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and
success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that
they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost
incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working
engineers.
(It's also interesting to note that Feynman essentially had to fight the rest of the panel to include his dissent, as they wanted to just trust NASA to fix its problems on its own. Also worth noting that the management-to-engineer ratio at NASA is far higher than it was in Feynman's day)
Even though the Ares I exists only on paper and it hasn't even passed a reasonable design review, NASA management (or at least the pre-Bolden management) claimed it would have a failure rate of 1-in-3000. Also, this failure rate ignores a number of potential problems which have come up with the design, but the ASAP panel mentioned in the summary just takes it on good faith that NASA will still make a perfectly safe vehicle with the Ares I. Fortunately, a number of the top Ares managers have already been canned, and the new administrator, Charles Bolden, seems to be much less problematic than his predecessor, Michael Griffin (i.e. he doesn't believe himself to be the world's greatest aerospace engineer, and so actually listens to what his engineers tell him).
It's also worth noting that NASA (and the DOD, and NRO) already uses commercial launchers for all of their unmanned probes, as they've been doing for several years now. We all like to say human life is priceless, etc. etc., but there frankly isn't much more you'd do to safeguard a volunteering person than you'd do for a billion-dollar unmanned probe representing years of work by huge teams.
I'm not questioning the amount of money you have quoted here, as the number feels correct too. It just seems like NASA is incredibly wasteful of the money they have, and that it practically is the very definition of how to spend money in the most foolhardy method possible.
Ack, this is really embarrassing on my part, but it looks like the "$4.5 billion a year" figure is inaccurate. I had it from this source, which was one of the first items to pop up in my Google search: "In the years after the Shuttle retires, the annual operation costs of the ISS will be $4.5 billion per year.1"
The footnote says that the figure came from one of these two GAO sources:
* NASA: Challenges in Completing and Sustaining the International Space Station
* Space Station: Actions Under Way to Manage Cost, but Significant Challenges Remain
However, after reading your comment I've searched through the text of both GAO sources and I can't find anything to support the first source's claim. I did find the following through from the first GAO report: "NASA estimates that assembly and operating costs of the ISS will be between $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion annually for FY2009-FY2012. The ISS as of February 19, 2008, is approximately 65 percent complete."
I ended up looking through the final report of the White House/NASA Augustine Commission (published late 2009) and found this in section 6.4.2:
The choice of ending U.S. participation in the ISS in 2015 really provides only one benefit, that of freeing up the roughly $2.5 to $3 billion per year needed to
run the ISS, which can then be invested in the more rapid development of the exploration systems. The Committee's Integrated Option analyses show that if coupled to the choice of commercial crew launch system to low-Earth orbit and the Ares V Lite heavy lift choice, this expenditure on the ISS would delay the exploration of the Moon until the mid-2020s, only a few years after the most aggressive, unconstrained profile would accomplish it.
In any case, $2.5-$3 billion a year is still a huge chunk of change. I totally agree with your original sentiment.
You could shoot a rocket from a cannon, meaning you'd need less fuel (meaning a smaller fuel tank, meaning even less fuel) to get it up to speed.
That was pretty much the idea behind the later vehicles of the Project HARP in the 1960s, a joint project between the US DOD and Canadian Department of National Defence. The project was ended however, after some suborbital vehicles were fired but a few months before the first launch of their orbital prototype. After the project was cancelled, project lead Gerald Bull ended up going to Iraq to develop a supergun for Saddam Hussein, which ended... poorly.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/martlet.htm
Martlet 2G-1.
Martlet 2G1
Status: Development ended 1966.
The Martlet 2G-1 was the absolute minimum gun-launched satellite vehicle. Conceived when the HARP project was under threat, it was a seven-inch diameter, two-stage solid propellnat vehicle that would be sabot-launched from the HARP 16 inch gun. Its total payload in orbit would have been just two kilogrammes - ideal for today's planned nano-satellites. Unfortunately even this minimum orbital launch vehicle could not be demonstrated before the program was shut down.
During the last year of the HARP program, when it became clear that further funding was not forthcoming, and that the goals of the Martlet 4 program were not to be realised, full efforts were diverted to developing a Martlet 2G-1 orbital vehicle (GLO-1A). It was felt that if a satellite - any satellite, no matter now small - could be successfully gun-launched, that it then would be possible to encourage further funding, either public or private, which would permit the orbital goals of the HARP program to be realised. Unfortunately time and fate were against HARP and the project was closed down on June 30 1967, only a few months before an orbital 2G-1 could be flown.
LEO Payload: 2.00 kg (4.40 lb). to: 185 km Orbit. at: 13.00 degrees. Total Mass: 500 kg (1,100 lb). Core Diameter: 0.30 m (0.98 ft). Total Length: 4.29 m (14.07 ft).
Stage0: 1 x HARP Gun. Gross Mass: 450 kg (990 lb). Empty Mass: 1.00 kg (2.20 lb). Motor: 1 x 16 in gun. Thrust (vac): 127,000.000 kN (28,550,000 lbf). Isp: 365 sec. Burn time: 0.0100 sec. Length: 36.59 m (120.04 ft). Diameter: 0.42 m (1.37 ft). Propellants: Guncotton.
Stage1: 1 x Martlet 2G1-1. Gross Mass: 130 kg (280 lb). Empty Mass: 21 kg (46 lb). Length: 3.21 m (10.53 ft). Diameter: 0.29 m (0.95 ft). Propellants: Solid.
Stage2: 1 x Martlet 2G1-2. Gross Mass: 41 kg (90 lb). Empty Mass: 7.00 kg (15.40 lb). Length: 0.53 m (1.73 ft). Diameter: 0.29 m (0.95 ft). Propellants: Solid.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is all Obama and I am an American but... to think that just because one nation wants to let their science programs slip even more doesn't mean that anyone should pull the plug on anything.
After the ISS is completed, the annual cost of maintaining it will be $4.5 billion a year. By comparison, the total budget of the ESA for 2010 is $5.4 billion (3.74 billion Euros). Keep in mind that's what the ESA spends for all of its projects -- the portion for human spaceflight and exploration is half a billion dollars.
It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr, almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.
Indeed. If you haven't read it already, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg has a really great piece titled "A Space Program For the Rest of Us" which goes into detail on how the Apollo program, structured to beat the Russians to the Moon at any cost, had the unfortunate side effect of creating a space program which was unable to adapt to making space exploration a sustainable venture once the race (and massive government funding) was over. Unfortunately there's still quite a bit of Apollo nostalgia left, as evidenced by ex-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin structuring his Ares/Constellation program as "Apollo on Steroids" instead of even attempting to make it sustainable. Some quotes:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-space-program-for-the-rest-of-us
Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time--and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory--Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place. ...
In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact--and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he "wasn't that interested in space."
And that has been NASA's fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory. ...
Apollo inadvertently and quite unfortunately established the paradigm for how the United States would conduct human spaceflight: a government agency would be given a large budget, make plans for the next major steps, determine the single best way to carry them out, and hire contractors to implement the plan. It was essentially the same way the Russians ran their space program, except instead of competing contractors the Soviets had competing design bureaus. ...
With the end of Apollo, NASA had a problem. It had established a vast infrastructure for conducting human spaceflight, with lots of jobs in politically sensitive congressional districts and
First off, SpaceX and Orbital don't "only engage in suborbital flight," but has designed and launched orbital rockets; in contrast, NASA hasn't successfully designed and launched a new orbital vehicle in around 30 years, despite plenty of attempts which have become case studies in poor program management.
Additionally, you're confusing two different issues: having space exploration entirely privately funded, which hardly anybody is advocating, with the issue of having transportation to low-earth orbit handled commercially (i.e. NASA, scientists, tourists, etc. buying trips to orbit), which many people are advocating. Even if a portion of the R&D for the rockets has been paid for by the government, what's important is that there's a competitive commercial marketplace for manned launches. That way multiple new approaches can be tried in parallel, proving new and more efficient systems with unmanned launches before transporting humans on them. Government-controlled monopolies tend to be suboptimal, to say the least.
Nobody wants to see a space truck until they need a delivery.
Sure, but is it wise to have a "space truck" be your country's only way to get people into orbit?
Have they sent anything into orbit?
Um, yes, much more often than NASA. For example, the United Launch Alliance has commercially launched 36 rockets in the past 36 months, SpaceX has had a number of successful launches (and seems to have worked out of their growing pains), and Orbital also launches regularly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight#Commercial_launchers
Have they made a trip to the ISS?
If you're include non-US companies, Arianespace has used their Ariane 5 rocket to launch an ATV to the ISS. If you're only including US companies, SpaceX will be launching a prototype of their Dragon capsule this month, with two missions to the ISS this year: http://www.spacex.com/updates.php
Any other questions?
For the curious, a few years ago the 1990s game Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space was open-sourced to the "Race Into Space" project:
http://www.raceintospace.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/raceintospace/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/buzz-aldrins-race-into-space
It's pretty cool and now runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Here's the description from MobyGames:
Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space re-creates the thrilling endeavor of trying to lead your country's space program to the moon before a competing superpower does the same. As head of your country's space program you will need to develop all the hardware you need for your spacecraft and make it safe, choose the right persons to send into space and make sure they come back alive. Loaded with lots of historic video clips, and other historic correct items make this game reflect the "Cold War" situation as it should.
Of course, I'm sure you've been on many decade long aerospace engineering projects to know how it should work.
You don't need to have worked on aerospace projects yourself to know that spending $35 billion to develop a medium-lift rocket+capsule which will launch to LEO at a cost of nearly $1 billion per flight is a bad deal, especially when there's so much more cost-effective alternatives. It's essentially just pork for Alabama and a few other congressionally powerful states.