So, instead of optimizing the vehicle to be just a launch system, they are creating additional revenue by adding in a passenger compartment. "Only $1,000 will get you a window seat where you can watch rich people fly into space!"
Hey, I'd pay to see something that cool up close, especially if they also threw in a few zero-g parabolas.
Virgin Galactic will use the cash injection to develop equipment - including a new pylon between the twin hulls of WhiteKnight Two - able to carry a two-stage launcher and satellite weighing up to 200kg (440lb), with a total payload of 17t- into orbit. The aircraft is designed as the mothership for Virgin Galactic's spaceliner SpaceShip Two. Virgin Galactic's chief executive Will Whitehorn says that the company will begin its space cargo business in about three years time, two years after it expects to carry the first paying space tourists into suborbit. "For the first five or six years, 80% of our business will be tourism, but five to nine years after that it will be 50/50 [between passengers and cargo or training and scientific flights]," he says. Whitehorn says the company could take the cost of launching a satellite into space using a ground-based launcher from $30 million to "as low as $2 million" using WhiteKnight Two. He expects the first satellite launchers to be Virgin's own design, either built at its factory in Mojave, California or contracted out to a specialist manufacturer, but eventually the aircraft will be able to carry third-party boosters. Whitehorn says that Virgin Galactic was approached by Aabar because the latter saw the opportunity beyond space tourism for the Scaled Composites-built WhiteKnight Two. "This investment now gives us the capital to take us through the commercial launch and build an extra WhiteKnight for the satellite business," he says.
The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Honest question: How many times has that down-mass capability actually been used? I don't know of any time the "bring broken ISS equipment back to the ground" scenario you describe ever occurred, although I might just be unaware.
The modular approach you describe is more-or-less what Bigelow Aerospace is doing with their private space stations. It'll also be flying at a higher orbit than the ISS, so should suffer less from atmospheric drag problems.
Why no other country had succeeded yet in developing technologies that could mimic what the space shuttle could do in order to supply the "International" Space station after the United States retire the shuttles. (with the exception of Russia)
Sally Ride mentioned this in her Augustine Committee presentation, but other countries do have this tech, and will have it ready to service the ISS in a few years. There's also the COTS options as well. I thought it was kind of bizarre when Sally Ride immediately said afterwards that she didn't think they would be able to reduce the gap, without explaining her rationale.
There's also the EELVs (Delta IV and Atlas V), but the designs for delivering to the ISS haven't been funded yet. The estimates are that those would be ready for delivering humans to the ISS in 3-4 years, and could presumably deliver cargo much earlier.
NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them.
I was with you right up until you mentioned the X-33. The X-33 would've tested some really neat technologies, but the way to test previously-untested new technologies is NOT to cram them all into one spacecraft which relies on all of them working to succeed. Rather, one creates a number of simple spacecraft which test all the technologies individually. The X-33 approach was just asking for failure.
That, and I'm rather more partial to the DC-X approach to single-stage to orbit. It relied on already-existing technologies, cost a fraction of the X-33 and actually flew a number of test flights, until it was canceled so NASA could focus more on the X-33.
I think the Thursday meeting will be the most interesting one, as it'll include the presentations from the "Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit" subgroup. Some options the subgroup is studying include not just the "Moon Base" plan, but also plans for going directly to Mars ASAP, as well as a "Flexible path" option which would involve manned trips to destinations in shallow gravity wells, like L1, asteroids and Phobos.
The videos from the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings aren't available yet, but you can find out much of what's been discussed already at the following links:
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
I actually use my MSI Wind netbook as more-or-less my primary machine nowadays. The main problem I had with the netbook is the lack of a DVD drive, so my solution was to just spend $100 for a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and copy images of every DVD I own to it. I take my netbook almost everywhere since it's so light, and it's quite handy to be able to show any movie from my collection whenever I'm at a friend's place. It's also been handy for offloading several gigabytes worth of photos/videos from my digital camera while on-the-go. The convenience is well worth $100.
Payload launch costs of $10,000 or more [futron.com] per pound? You gotta be kidding me.
It should be noted that SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy has that price down to less than $1500 a pound, with plans to drop it even more. There's still quite a ways to go in making rockets more cost-efficient, and SpaceX is pretty much the first company to really try making a cost-efficient rocket from scratch.
If we could find a source of rocket fuel that isn't at the bottom of a major gravity well, I would say go there first, but in the meantime visiting and eventually moving NEO would be the highest priority for me.
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Why Study Asteroids?... The asteroids that are potentially the most hazardous because they can closely approach the Earth are also the objects that could be most easily exploited for raw materials. These raw materials could be used in developing the space structures and in generating the rocket fuel that will be required to explore and colonize our solar system in the twenty-first century. By closely investigating the compositions of asteroids, intelligent choices can be made as to which ones offer the richest supplies of raw materials. It has been estimated that the mineral wealth resident in the belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would be equivalent to about 100 billion dollars for every person on Earth today.
Why Study Comets?... As with asteroids, comets are both a potential threat and a potential resource for the colonization of the solar system in the twenty first century. Whereas asteroids are rich in the mineral raw materials required to build structures in space, the comets are rich resources for the water and carbon-based molecules necessary to sustain life. In addition, an abundant supply of cometary water ice can provide copious quantities of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, the two primary ingredients in rocket fuel. One day soon, comets may serve as fueling stations for interplanetary spacecraft.
From the linked story, the current focus isn't on orbital research but on microgravity and suborbital research, which current has to be done on things like sounding rockets which are quite a bit more expensive than what Armadillo Aerospace is offering:
(it occurs to me that I'm pasting almost the entire link...)
Later that same afternoon, a second successful low-altitude flight was performed using a âoeboosted hopâ trajectory of the same type that will be used for suborbital flights to space. The âoeboosted hopâ trajectory allowed the vehicle to maintain a reduced-g environment through closed loop throttle control, a technique that opens the door for future flights for microgravity science, technology development, and education missions.... Professor Collicott has been leading a group of Purdue University students in developing a fluid-mechanics science payload that they plan to fly soon on board the Armadillo Aerospace vehicles under an agreement developed by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
âoeSeeing the latest Armadillo Aerospace launches in person was a thrill. Weâ(TM)re very excited about the reduced-gravity experiment value of these innovative Armadillo rockets. In addition, there is nothing like seeing a launch live to get people and especially students excited about aerospace technology,â said Professor Collicott. âoeArmadilloâ(TM)s eager leadership in moving student sub-orbital rocket experiments from dreams to reality is already impacting the next generation of aerospace engineers in a uniquely powerful way,â Professor Collicott concluded.
The work between Purdue University and Armadillo Aerospace is serving as a pathfinder effort for future integration of other science payloads on commercial suborbital vehicles. Large numbers of research flights on a variety of suborbital vehicles are envisioned under NASAâ(TM)s Commercial Suborbital Research Program, based at the NASA Ames Research Center, and scientists are eager to begin working with vehicle developers to get experience integrating science payloads with vehicles.
Seriously, if they have this down and working, could this be used on the moon?
I'm pretty sure it's on their mind, especially since they won part of the Northrop Grumman/NASA Lunar Lander Challenge and anticipate winning the rest this year. Since it uses methane as its fuel, I imagine the system could also be quite handy for a Martian sample return or human mission, as you could harvest methane from the Martian atmosphere.
A copy of a post by one of the Armadillo team members from this weekend:
Still very much in the game. In the past week, we've done three free flights with the Methane mod for the NASA contract. Tuesday night was just to make sure everything was A-OK for Saturday's flight, which was in front of a bunch of NASA people and other folks. Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down.
Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down (this will be more like the flight profiles of the higher and higher altitude testing we're close to beginning). That flight went well too, except that in order to make sure to stay below the restrictions in the waiver for those flights, we put less pressure in the boosted-hop flight just to play it conservatively, and as a result it didn't go as high as we thought it might (only about 45 meters instead of twice that).
Also, we've already internally decided on a date when we'll attempt LLC level 2; not sure when that gets publically announced. That will be with the high-pressure augmented Mod that we've been calling the Super Mod, not the Methane Mod.
Oh, and alas... even though I say "we" in the above commentary, I was too busy at my "day job" so I missed ALL of the three free flights this week. So, I don't know what we'll have by way of video to show. I know Phil tried his best to capture some, but with all the other things he also had to worry about, I know the coverage will be limited.
I'm a little worried that their first reference is Fritz-Albert Popp, who's kind of a pseudoscientific quack and into biophotonics, which is often used to try to validate things like homeopathy.
This recent NewScientist article overviews a recent report from the NSS co-authored by Buzz Aldrin with a similar conclusion, Astronaut-authored report says NASA needs new direction [newscientist.com]
Coincidentally, the Flexible Path option is essentially the same as the early- and mid-term (pre-2030) stages of Buzz Aldrin's proposed plan for NASA. The plan has construction of LEO and L-1 refueling stations, trips to L2 in 2016, the Comet Wirtanen in 2018, the asteroids 2001 GP2 and (potential planet-striker) Apophis in 2020 and 2022, Phobos missions starting in 2024, then Mars in 2032.
OTH, if we say that we are going to put man in other locations in space, then it makes sense to have a diversified rocket launch capability. That means that we should PUSH private rockets as well as develop a new large system.
Actually, one of the reasons I really like the "Flexible Path" option is that sending people to shallow gravity wells should be quite feasible with commercial launchers (EELVs, SpaceX, Orbital, launchers from other countries like Soyuz and Ariane). By acting as a customer to the commercial ventures, NASA will help the companies grow and become better at lower launch costs, and they'll eventually build larger vehicles to further optimize costs.
I actually think you can also do deeper gravity wells (Moon, Mars, etc.) as well with smaller launchers, although that requires more effort with propellant depots.
Burt Rutan [ted.com] discusses this issue fairly well, I'm with him, private industry and people will be the viable plan for future spaceflight, forget the government.
I'd personally rather see the government acting as a customer. This seems to have worked pretty well in the realm of unmanned science missions, with NASA giving money to private industry and academic institutions to build probes and instruments, and then buying a commercial space launch. I'm not sure why (besides congressional politics) NASA is so opposed to doing something similar with human spaceflight.
The most important single advance that could help spaceflight, manned and unmanned would be to reduce the cost to LEO. This will require, ultimately, a SSTO (single stage to orbit) launcher. Of course it's tough (remember the X-34? the Delta Clipper?) but that doesn't mean that with new advances in materials (can you say carbon nanotube reinforced composites) it's impossible.
Actually, the Delta Clipper (DC-X) didn't seem too "tough," at least as far as manned space projects go. The only problem it had was an easily-fixed faulty landing gear, and the main reason NASA cancelled it was so that it could focus attention on the much more expensive X-33. The follow-on orbital SSTO program, DC-Y, was estimated to only cost $5 billion to develop, which would include 4 production vehicles. Hopefully Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin (which has hired many of the original DC-X engineers) can pick up the torch.
Even with SSTO though, I think SpaceX is showing that you can lower costs quite a bit by designing a multi-stage rocket with cost in mind. Elon Musk seems to believe that he's fully capable of dropping launch costs by at least an order of magnitude with his current approach, and has bet quite a bit of his own money on that.
Anyone have ideas on how to pitch "Flexible Path" as an exciting option to the public? I mean, I personally think asteroid mining, learning to detect potential planet killers, visiting comet cores, and viewing Mars from Phobos would be pretty inspiring, but I'm not sure how to sell it to the public.
The ultimate mission of Apollo was to build a moon base.
Do you have a citation for this? My understanding is that in 1969 Von Braun proposed as a follow-on project to Apollo not a lunar base, but human exploration of Mars. Under Von Braun's 1969 plan, the first Mars manned mission would launch in 1981, with a 50-person Martian base by 1989, using reusable spacecraft and under a peak NASA budget of $7 billion a year. Of course, I suppose he may have wanted a lunar base in parallel.
I knew we were a glorified pack of narcissistic monkeys but this just take it.
I don't know about you, but I personally think it's pretty cool that an independent team might be able to accomplish with a few million dollars what it previously took an entire government billions of dollars to do.
Meanwhile that 5.5 year number comes from the most experienced people in the business who are already launching rockets that can achieve the mission.
Quick nitpick: from the ULA's presentation to the Augustine commission about using EELVs for human spaceflight, they claim it would take 4.5 years to launch Orion, and 4 years to non-Orion manned capsule. The 5.5 years figure is from Aerospace Corp's analysis, which was solely based on how long "analogous projects" tend to take. Last I heard Ares I's schedule had slipped to 2016 (7 years from now).
Sources report that Steve Cook and his team were preoccupied on Friday with the ramifications of this report going public. Several meetings were held on Friday and another was planned for Saturday morning. Lots of finger pointing and asking questions along the lines of "who knew what and when did they know it?" and "how do we respond?" was reported to have happened on Friday. A briefing is being prepared for NASA Administrator Bolden for presentation as early as Monday.
Do you have a reference for his statement? Not doubting you, in fact I believe that he probably did say it. I just want to see the quote and any additional information.
But NASA says new supercomputer analyses will prove the Ares I launch abort system would do its job, propelling the Orion crew module and astronauts safely away from a dangerous maelstrom of fire and debris during an emergency.
"We feel we have a very, very, very safe first stage. Very reliable," said Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA's Project Constellation, which is developing Ares rockets and Orion spacecraft in an effort to replace retiring shuttles and to ultimately carry astronauts to the moon by 2020. "We think we have a very robust design for the abort environment."
Unfortunately, this seems to be a recurring problem with NASA: Soliciting proposals from the commercial sector, many of which are really great, and then discarding them all so they can use their own design which is more responsive to the needs of politics than engineering and economics.
Slashdot Mirror
So, instead of optimizing the vehicle to be just a launch system, they are creating additional revenue by adding in a passenger compartment. "Only $1,000 will get you a window seat where you can watch rich people fly into space!"
Hey, I'd pay to see something that cool up close, especially if they also threw in a few zero-g parabolas.
Orbital human flights aren't planned for SpaceShipTwo, but they are planning on doing orbital microsatellite launches:
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/07/30/330347/oshkosh-2009-virgin-galactic-flies-high-at-oshkosh.html
Virgin Galactic will use the cash injection to develop equipment - including a new pylon between the twin hulls of WhiteKnight Two - able to carry a two-stage launcher and satellite weighing up to 200kg (440lb), with a total payload of 17t- into orbit. The aircraft is designed as the mothership for Virgin Galactic's spaceliner SpaceShip Two.
Virgin Galactic's chief executive Will Whitehorn says that the company will begin its space cargo business in about three years time, two years after it expects to carry the first paying space tourists into suborbit. "For the first five or six years, 80% of our business will be tourism, but five to nine years after that it will be 50/50 [between passengers and cargo or training and scientific flights]," he says.
Whitehorn says the company could take the cost of launching a satellite into space using a ground-based launcher from $30 million to "as low as $2 million" using WhiteKnight Two.
He expects the first satellite launchers to be Virgin's own design, either built at its factory in Mojave, California or contracted out to a specialist manufacturer, but eventually the aircraft will be able to carry third-party boosters.
Whitehorn says that Virgin Galactic was approached by Aabar because the latter saw the opportunity beyond space tourism for the Scaled Composites-built WhiteKnight Two.
"This investment now gives us the capital to take us through the commercial launch and build an extra WhiteKnight for the satellite business," he says.
The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Honest question: How many times has that down-mass capability actually been used? I don't know of any time the "bring broken ISS equipment back to the ground" scenario you describe ever occurred, although I might just be unaware.
The modular approach you describe is more-or-less what Bigelow Aerospace is doing with their private space stations. It'll also be flying at a higher orbit than the ISS, so should suffer less from atmospheric drag problems.
Why no other country had succeeded yet in developing technologies that could mimic what the space shuttle could do in order to supply the "International" Space station after the United States retire the shuttles. (with the exception of Russia)
Sally Ride mentioned this in her Augustine Committee presentation, but other countries do have this tech, and will have it ready to service the ISS in a few years. There's also the COTS options as well. I thought it was kind of bizarre when Sally Ride immediately said afterwards that she didn't think they would be able to reduce the gap, without explaining her rationale.
Anyways, here's the options:
* Russian Soyuz
* ESA's ATV
* Japan's HTV
* SpaceX Dragon
* Orbital Taurus II
There's also the EELVs (Delta IV and Atlas V), but the designs for delivering to the ISS haven't been funded yet. The estimates are that those would be ready for delivering humans to the ISS in 3-4 years, and could presumably deliver cargo much earlier.
NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them.
I was with you right up until you mentioned the X-33. The X-33 would've tested some really neat technologies, but the way to test previously-untested new technologies is NOT to cram them all into one spacecraft which relies on all of them working to succeed. Rather, one creates a number of simple spacecraft which test all the technologies individually. The X-33 approach was just asking for failure.
That, and I'm rather more partial to the DC-X approach to single-stage to orbit. It relied on already-existing technologies, cost a fraction of the X-33 and actually flew a number of test flights, until it was canceled so NASA could focus more on the X-33.
For those interested, the third and final meeting will be broadcast Thursday, running from 8am - 4pm EDT:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/NASA-TV-HD
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=14237
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23nasahsf
I think the Thursday meeting will be the most interesting one, as it'll include the presentations from the "Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit" subgroup. Some options the subgroup is studying include not just the "Moon Base" plan, but also plans for going directly to Mars ASAP, as well as a "Flexible path" option which would involve manned trips to destinations in shallow gravity wells, like L1, asteroids and Phobos.
The videos from the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings aren't available yet, but you can find out much of what's been discussed already at the following links:
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Alabama - Reviews
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Houston - Reviews
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17962.0
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
I actually use my MSI Wind netbook as more-or-less my primary machine nowadays. The main problem I had with the netbook is the lack of a DVD drive, so my solution was to just spend $100 for a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and copy images of every DVD I own to it. I take my netbook almost everywhere since it's so light, and it's quite handy to be able to show any movie from my collection whenever I'm at a friend's place. It's also been handy for offloading several gigabytes worth of photos/videos from my digital camera while on-the-go. The convenience is well worth $100.
Payload launch costs of $10,000 or more [futron.com] per pound? You gotta be kidding me.
It should be noted that SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy has that price down to less than $1500 a pound, with plans to drop it even more. There's still quite a ways to go in making rockets more cost-efficient, and SpaceX is pretty much the first company to really try making a cost-efficient rocket from scratch.
We're talking NASA policy here, which needs to have the greatest information yield per dollar possible
That's not NASA's policy, nor should it be.
If we could find a source of rocket fuel that isn't at the bottom of a major gravity well, I would say go there first, but in the meantime visiting and eventually moving NEO would be the highest priority for me.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/
What Is A Near-Earth Object (NEO)?
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Why Study Asteroids? ... The asteroids that are potentially the most hazardous because they can closely approach the Earth are also the objects that could be most easily exploited for raw materials. These raw materials could be used in developing the space structures and in generating the rocket fuel that will be required to explore and colonize our solar system in the twenty-first century. By closely investigating the compositions of asteroids, intelligent choices can be made as to which ones offer the richest supplies of raw materials. It has been estimated that the mineral wealth resident in the belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would be equivalent to about 100 billion dollars for every person on Earth today.
Why Study Comets? ... As with asteroids, comets are both a potential threat and a potential resource for the colonization of the solar system in the twenty first century. Whereas asteroids are rich in the mineral raw materials required to build structures in space, the comets are rich resources for the water and carbon-based molecules necessary to sustain life. In addition, an abundant supply of cometary water ice can provide copious quantities of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, the two primary ingredients in rocket fuel. One day soon, comets may serve as fueling stations for interplanetary spacecraft.
From the linked story, the current focus isn't on orbital research but on microgravity and suborbital research, which current has to be done on things like sounding rockets which are quite a bit more expensive than what Armadillo Aerospace is offering:
(it occurs to me that I'm pasting almost the entire link...)
Later that same afternoon, a second successful low-altitude flight was performed using a âoeboosted hopâ trajectory of the same type that will be used for suborbital flights to space. The âoeboosted hopâ trajectory allowed the vehicle to maintain a reduced-g environment through closed loop throttle control, a technique that opens the door for future flights for microgravity science, technology development, and education missions. ... Professor Collicott has been leading a group of Purdue University students in developing a fluid-mechanics science payload that they plan to fly soon on board the Armadillo Aerospace vehicles under an agreement developed by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
âoeSeeing the latest Armadillo Aerospace launches in person was a thrill. Weâ(TM)re very excited about the reduced-gravity experiment value of these innovative Armadillo rockets. In addition, there is nothing like seeing a launch live to get people and especially students excited about aerospace technology,â said Professor Collicott. âoeArmadilloâ(TM)s eager leadership in moving student sub-orbital rocket experiments from dreams to reality is already impacting the next generation of aerospace engineers in a uniquely powerful way,â Professor Collicott concluded.
The work between Purdue University and Armadillo Aerospace is serving as a pathfinder effort for future integration of other science payloads on commercial suborbital vehicles. Large numbers of research flights on a variety of suborbital vehicles are envisioned under NASAâ(TM)s Commercial Suborbital Research Program, based at the NASA Ames Research Center, and scientists are eager to begin working with vehicle developers to get experience integrating science payloads with vehicles.
Seriously, if they have this down and working, could this be used on the moon?
I'm pretty sure it's on their mind, especially since they won part of the Northrop Grumman/NASA Lunar Lander Challenge and anticipate winning the rest this year. Since it uses methane as its fuel, I imagine the system could also be quite handy for a Martian sample return or human mission, as you could harvest methane from the Martian atmosphere.
A copy of a post by one of the Armadillo team members from this weekend:
http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=38466#p38466
Still very much in the game. In the past week, we've done three free flights with the Methane mod for the NASA contract. Tuesday night was just to make sure everything was A-OK for Saturday's flight, which was in front of a bunch of NASA people and other folks. Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down.
Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down (this will be more like the flight profiles of the higher and higher altitude testing we're close to beginning). That flight went well too, except that in order to make sure to stay below the restrictions in the waiver for those flights, we put less pressure in the boosted-hop flight just to play it conservatively, and as a result it didn't go as high as we thought it might (only about 45 meters instead of twice that).
Also, we've already internally decided on a date when we'll attempt LLC level 2; not sure when that gets publically announced. That will be with the high-pressure augmented Mod that we've been calling the Super Mod, not the Methane Mod.
Oh, and alas... even though I say "we" in the above commentary, I was too busy at my "day job" so I missed ALL of the three free flights this week. So, I don't know what we'll have by way of video to show. I know Phil tried his best to capture some, but with all the other things he also had to worry about, I know the coverage will be limited.
I'm a little worried that their first reference is Fritz-Albert Popp, who's kind of a pseudoscientific quack and into biophotonics, which is often used to try to validate things like homeopathy.
This recent NewScientist article overviews a recent report from the NSS co-authored by Buzz Aldrin with a similar conclusion, Astronaut-authored report says NASA needs new direction [newscientist.com]
Coincidentally, the Flexible Path option is essentially the same as the early- and mid-term (pre-2030) stages of Buzz Aldrin's proposed plan for NASA. The plan has construction of LEO and L-1 refueling stations, trips to L2 in 2016, the Comet Wirtanen in 2018, the asteroids 2001 GP2 and (potential planet-striker) Apophis in 2020 and 2022, Phobos missions starting in 2024, then Mars in 2032.
OTH, if we say that we are going to put man in other locations in space, then it makes sense to have a diversified rocket launch capability. That means that we should PUSH private rockets as well as develop a new large system.
Actually, one of the reasons I really like the "Flexible Path" option is that sending people to shallow gravity wells should be quite feasible with commercial launchers (EELVs, SpaceX, Orbital, launchers from other countries like Soyuz and Ariane). By acting as a customer to the commercial ventures, NASA will help the companies grow and become better at lower launch costs, and they'll eventually build larger vehicles to further optimize costs.
I actually think you can also do deeper gravity wells (Moon, Mars, etc.) as well with smaller launchers, although that requires more effort with propellant depots.
Burt Rutan [ted.com] discusses this issue fairly well, I'm with him, private industry and people will be the viable plan for future spaceflight, forget the government.
I'd personally rather see the government acting as a customer. This seems to have worked pretty well in the realm of unmanned science missions, with NASA giving money to private industry and academic institutions to build probes and instruments, and then buying a commercial space launch. I'm not sure why (besides congressional politics) NASA is so opposed to doing something similar with human spaceflight.
The most important single advance that could help spaceflight, manned and unmanned would be to reduce the cost to LEO. This will require, ultimately, a SSTO (single stage to orbit) launcher. Of course it's tough (remember the X-34? the Delta Clipper?) but that doesn't mean that with new advances in materials (can you say carbon nanotube reinforced composites) it's impossible.
Actually, the Delta Clipper (DC-X) didn't seem too "tough," at least as far as manned space projects go. The only problem it had was an easily-fixed faulty landing gear, and the main reason NASA cancelled it was so that it could focus attention on the much more expensive X-33. The follow-on orbital SSTO program, DC-Y, was estimated to only cost $5 billion to develop, which would include 4 production vehicles. Hopefully Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin (which has hired many of the original DC-X engineers) can pick up the torch.
Even with SSTO though, I think SpaceX is showing that you can lower costs quite a bit by designing a multi-stage rocket with cost in mind. Elon Musk seems to believe that he's fully capable of dropping launch costs by at least an order of magnitude with his current approach, and has bet quite a bit of his own money on that.
Anyone have ideas on how to pitch "Flexible Path" as an exciting option to the public? I mean, I personally think asteroid mining, learning to detect potential planet killers, visiting comet cores, and viewing Mars from Phobos would be pretty inspiring, but I'm not sure how to sell it to the public.
The ultimate mission of Apollo was to build a moon base.
Do you have a citation for this? My understanding is that in 1969 Von Braun proposed as a follow-on project to Apollo not a lunar base, but human exploration of Mars. Under Von Braun's 1969 plan, the first Mars manned mission would launch in 1981, with a 50-person Martian base by 1989, using reusable spacecraft and under a peak NASA budget of $7 billion a year. Of course, I suppose he may have wanted a lunar base in parallel.
I knew we were a glorified pack of narcissistic monkeys but this just take it.
I don't know about you, but I personally think it's pretty cool that an independent team might be able to accomplish with a few million dollars what it previously took an entire government billions of dollars to do.
Meanwhile that 5.5 year number comes from the most experienced people in the business who are already launching rockets that can achieve the mission.
Quick nitpick: from the ULA's presentation to the Augustine commission about using EELVs for human spaceflight, they claim it would take 4.5 years to launch Orion, and 4 years to non-Orion manned capsule. The 5.5 years figure is from Aerospace Corp's analysis, which was solely based on how long "analogous projects" tend to take. Last I heard Ares I's schedule had slipped to 2016 (7 years from now).
Of course, most of these comments are made pseudonymously and should be therefore be taken with a grain of salt, but they're still quite interesting:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/ares_doubts_con.html
Sources report that Steve Cook and his team were preoccupied on Friday with the ramifications of this report going public. Several meetings were held on Friday and another was planned for Saturday morning. Lots of finger pointing and asking questions along the lines of "who knew what and when did they know it?" and "how do we respond?" was reported to have happened on Friday. A briefing is being prepared for NASA Administrator Bolden for presentation as early as Monday.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/usaf_orion_crew.html
When people at MSFC tried to discuss this in 2007/2008 "Niki the aborts manager" shut them down and made sure two most vocal left the group.
Do you have a reference for his statement? Not doubting you, in fact I believe that he probably did say it. I just want to see the quote and any additional information.
Here's an earlier similar quote, from June 7:
http://m.floridatoday.com/news.jsp?key=218238
But NASA says new supercomputer analyses will prove the Ares I launch abort system would do its job, propelling the Orion crew module and astronauts safely away from a dangerous maelstrom of fire and debris during an emergency.
"We feel we have a very, very, very safe first stage. Very reliable," said Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA's Project Constellation, which is developing Ares rockets and Orion spacecraft in an effort to replace retiring shuttles and to ultimately carry astronauts to the moon by 2020. "We think we have a very robust design for the abort environment."
Astronautix has a pretty fascinating overview of all the shuttle concepts here:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm
Unfortunately, this seems to be a recurring problem with NASA: Soliciting proposals from the commercial sector, many of which are really great, and then discarding them all so they can use their own design which is more responsive to the needs of politics than engineering and economics.