Yeah, faster--better--cheaper worked out so well with the original Space Shuttle program and the robotic probes in the 90s.
Choosing slower, more expensive, and more dangerous (which seem to be the main features of the Ares I) isn't necessarily a good idea. There's no problem with faster-better-cheaper if that's actually the case.
For instance I seem to remember hearing (but can't verify so take with a grain of salt) that the selected proposal was very similar to the proposal Griffin himself advocated in one of his theses. Whether he did or not the credibility of the ESAS is already somewhat questionable given that it's rejection of the previously preferred approach coincided with Griffin's appointment. In this context the accusations made by people involved in the process that Griffin had already decided on the desired answer seem reasonably credible.
You're probably thinking of this report which Griffin was co-leader of, which presented the inline SRB design which eventually became the Ares I, and concluded it was superior to all the other launch alternatives. The report came out in 2004, a year before Griffin became NASA Administrator.
The amount of space research and propulsion/vehicle research that NASA could finance if it abandoned the ISS or better yet put man space flight on hold until launch technology improved is enormous... Useful human presence in space requires cheaper launches and the money NASA wastes on manned exploration now could fund an amazing amount of research into new launch technologies.
I'm going to have to disagree on this one. In fact, it's looking like things like COTS missions to the ISS are going to do more for making launches cheaper than anything else NASA's done in the past 20 years.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study [wikipedia.org]. It is a fantastic report - read it here [nasa.gov]. The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV).
Actually, the ESAS is regarded by many to have had some pretty dubious assumptions built in from the get-go, which were pretty much devised to make sure the EELVs couldn't pass them. Also, much of what made the Ares-progenitor design look so good under the ESAS analysis doesn't really apply anymore, since the Ares design and components have been changed to much as to make it "shuttle-derived" only in the loosest sense of the term.
Whether or not the design is better is largely irrelevant to this debate; what is relevant is the DIRECT team are failing to take into account the overhead of switching projects and switching managers at this stage. Regardless of which was the better approach, DIRECT lost the debate some time ago, and revisiting it now (even if it results in a better vehicle in the long run) isn't going to make anything either cheaper or quicker.
Actually, if you look at NASA's budget documents only $2-3 billion has been spent on Ares so far, although that annual rate will increase over the next few years. If we're going to switch architectures now is the time to do it, particularly since DIRECT estimates a savings over Ares in the tens of billions.
As an added bonus, Orion capsule development will also be benefited, since they won't have to spend so much time trying to figure out what to cut and what safety systems to get rid of to squeeze onto the Ares I.
Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?
I think part of the difference is the expected time for completion of development. DIRECT's Jupiter-120 has a predicted maiden crewed flight date of 2013, 2016 for the uncrewed Jupiter-232. The Ares I has a predicted maiden crew date of 2016 (and has already had repeated schedule slips), while the Ares V is expected to be completed in 2018. Being finished sooner means that you have less overall development costs which have to be amortized over the life of the launch system. Much of the conversion work won't occur until after the shuttle is retired; in the case of DIRECT that's a 3-year period until first flight, while it's 5 years for Ares.
According to DIRECT's estimates, there would be a $19 billion savings in development cost and a further $16 billion savings in operational costs over 20 years.
You do realize that the cost of the "chemical fuels" are less than 1% of the cost of a modern rocket, right? Chemical fuels are very far from being the limiting constraint.
I'm saying that having NASA buy commercial launches from Boeing and Lockheed doesn't make NASA into a subsidiary of the DoD, as many seem to think. Do you think that any of the commercial satellite companies that buy launches from them are militarized? What about when you purchase a ride on a Boeing 747?
Sure thing. It's actually kind of fun to apply that to someplace like slashdot, and see how many of the posts on a NASA story fit into the three categories. Von Braunians are usually the ones advocating for reviving the Saturn V design or building an Orion nuclear rocket, and often cite Kennedy's "we do these things because they are hard" speech. Saganites are the ones who talk about how science can be done much more efficiently with robots instead of humans. O'Neillians/Heinleinians (admittedly including myself) are the ones talking about "getting humanity off of this rock" and making spaceflight more accessible through commercialization.
It should also be noted that the "Obama militarizing NASA" story that was on slashdot a few days ago was complete bollocks. The EELV launchers were partially subsidized by the Air Force, but are entirely owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA's used EELVs in the past to launch things like the New Horizons mission, and I don't think anybody claimed that this was somehow militarizing the exploration of Pluto. This article explains things well:
The only problem with this is that -- unless they are talking about some other vehicles, and if so, it's hard to imagine what they are -- the EELVs aren't "military rockets." Their development was subsidized with Air Force funds, but they were developed with Boeing and Lockheed Martinâ(TM)s money as well, and they are commercial rockets, available to the military, commercial users, and NASA. There is no need to "tear down a barrier" for NASA to use them, as evidenced by the fact that NASA is already using them. For example, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was blasted to orbit and off to Mars with an Atlas V/Centaur over three years ago.
There is NASA resistance to using EELVs, but not because they are "military rockets." It's because they are seen as a threat to the agency's -- or more specifically, administrator Mike Griffinâ(TM)s â" desire to develop a new NASA-only vehicle, called Ares 1, and perhaps later, the larger version of it, Ares 5. If the EELVs become viewed as viable launchers for the human missions, the case for the Ares, already weak -- particularly considering its extensive development teething problems â" becomes much weaker, perhaps to the point at which the program dies. (It should be noted that five years ago, prior to becoming NASA administrator, Dr. Griffin, who is apparently desperately attempting to hang on to his job, had no problems with using EELVs for crewed spaceflight.)
1. How to get off the rock - Von Braunian. 2. How to behave once off the rock - Saganite 3. Why get off of the rock in the first place - O'Neillian
There's of course overlap and commonality, but the three mindsets still differ in each of the three items you mention. Stereotypical von Braunians tend to want huge manpower-intensive rockets and are largely motivated by national glory. Saganites don't think much about launch (they often consider it as something which will always have static economics) and are largely motivated by science and discovering the unknown. O'Neillians are largely concerned with making space launch as economical and sustainable as possible, and are largely motivated by spreading humanity throughout the cosmos.
However, we're all still in the Von Braunian stage of knowledge for the first point (with many deep bows to Space Ship One as I say that) - light up explosives/propellents under/behind your seat and use bulky chemicals to reach escape velocity.
Sure, but there's a difference between the von Braun approach (as exemplified by the Saturn V or Space Shuttle) where every launch is a huge national endeavor involving tens of thousands of workers, and the SpaceX approach which has a launch crew of 25 and only 6 people in mission control (the company as a whole has just 600 employees).
Saganites: "Space is big, billions of stars, isn't God's creation incredible...DON'T TOUCH IT." [though in fairness to Sagan, in his later years he became more supportive of human spaceflight]
Von Braunians: "We vill go boldly into space, and you vill watch on television, and you vill enjoy it." That's the current space program.
O'Neillians: "We will build the tools, go into space, and use its resources to expand humanity and freedom into the cosmos."...
In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O'Neillians and von Braunians.
Saganites, named for astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996), are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder. They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists.
O'Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill (1927 - 1992), who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity). Getting people out of here en masse was the thingâ"not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. (An O'Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: âoeSave Earth: Develop Space.â)
Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun (1912 - 1977). Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: large expensive projects like the ones NASA undertakes, projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in.
I'd add that there's also the Heinleinians, who want to use the power of private industry to bring about O'Neill's vision.
Hamas won a slim plurality rather less than 50%, not a majority. Also, according to a poll from November 73% of Palestinians wanted to dissolve the Hamas-controlled parliament and hold new elections in January 2009:
Do you have a citation for this? I can't find one.
They were, in fact, democratically elected by the Palestinian people.
That was only for a plurality (not majority) in the legislative branch. However, the way they seized control of the Gaza Strip was rather undemocratic, with Hamas killing Fatah leaders in the region, leading to the Hamas vs. Fatah "Battle of Gaza" (which Hamas won, killing more than a hundred Palestinians in the process):
Trying to modify Delta and Atlas for NASA's man-rated qualifications would probably cost twice as much and take twice as long as staying the course with Ares.
The "man-rating qualifications" are pretty much pie-in-the-sky anyways, and have been decreased substantially in order to get the Ares I design to sort-of pass the requirements. The idea that getting the Delta or Atlas man-capable would cost more than $10-$20 billion needed for developing the Ares I is completely absurd.
What this is starting to look like is the DoD grabbing a chunk of NASA's budget for their secret programs.
Inflated headlines aside, this has absolutely nothing to do with the DOD seizing NASA's budget. It's simply about having NASA use the already-existing EELV rockets built by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin instead of having ATK build a new rocket.
Wow, next think you know we might be using public taxpayer money to buy privately-built cars and seats on commercially-operated airliners for transporting government personnel!
Their intention is to get the Falcon9 and Dragon man-rated. The published development schedule appears to be fairly agressive. In some respects, I believe they are further along than the Ares 1 and Orion CEV programs are. Imagine a COTS program comprised of crew transport to and from the ISS or LEO.
Obama's space transition team seems to be imagining this as well:
The transition team also wants information from NASA about accelerating plans for using the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to fund demonstrations of vehicles capable of carrying crews to the international space station, a proposal Obama supported during his campaign.
Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder if SpaceX has the option to fly a Falcon 9 Heavy instead of a normal Falcon 9 if they wish to, because of the better cost-efficiency. With a Falcon 9 Heavy they could lift up the prearranged NASA payload, while also selling the excess payload mass to make additional money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, faster--better--cheaper worked out so well with the original Space Shuttle program and the robotic probes in the 90s.
Choosing slower, more expensive, and more dangerous (which seem to be the main features of the Ares I) isn't necessarily a good idea. There's no problem with faster-better-cheaper if that's actually the case.
For instance I seem to remember hearing (but can't verify so take with a grain of salt) that the selected proposal was very similar to the proposal Griffin himself advocated in one of his theses. Whether he did or not the credibility of the ESAS is already somewhat questionable given that it's rejection of the previously preferred approach coincided with Griffin's appointment. In this context the accusations made by people involved in the process that Griffin had already decided on the desired answer seem reasonably credible.
You're probably thinking of this report which Griffin was co-leader of, which presented the inline SRB design which eventually became the Ares I, and concluded it was superior to all the other launch alternatives. The report came out in 2004, a year before Griffin became NASA Administrator.
The amount of space research and propulsion/vehicle research that NASA could finance if it abandoned the ISS or better yet put man space flight on hold until launch technology improved is enormous... Useful human presence in space requires cheaper launches and the money NASA wastes on manned exploration now could fund an amazing amount of research into new launch technologies.
I'm going to have to disagree on this one. In fact, it's looking like things like COTS missions to the ISS are going to do more for making launches cheaper than anything else NASA's done in the past 20 years.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study [wikipedia.org]. It is a fantastic report - read it here [nasa.gov]. The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV).
Actually, the ESAS is regarded by many to have had some pretty dubious assumptions built in from the get-go, which were pretty much devised to make sure the EELVs couldn't pass them. Also, much of what made the Ares-progenitor design look so good under the ESAS analysis doesn't really apply anymore, since the Ares design and components have been changed to much as to make it "shuttle-derived" only in the loosest sense of the term.
Whether or not the design is better is largely irrelevant to this debate; what is relevant is the DIRECT team are failing to take into account the overhead of switching projects and switching managers at this stage. Regardless of which was the better approach, DIRECT lost the debate some time ago, and revisiting it now (even if it results in a better vehicle in the long run) isn't going to make anything either cheaper or quicker.
Actually, if you look at NASA's budget documents only $2-3 billion has been spent on Ares so far, although that annual rate will increase over the next few years. If we're going to switch architectures now is the time to do it, particularly since DIRECT estimates a savings over Ares in the tens of billions.
As an added bonus, Orion capsule development will also be benefited, since they won't have to spend so much time trying to figure out what to cut and what safety systems to get rid of to squeeze onto the Ares I.
Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?
I think part of the difference is the expected time for completion of development. DIRECT's Jupiter-120 has a predicted maiden crewed flight date of 2013, 2016 for the uncrewed Jupiter-232. The Ares I has a predicted maiden crew date of 2016 (and has already had repeated schedule slips), while the Ares V is expected to be completed in 2018. Being finished sooner means that you have less overall development costs which have to be amortized over the life of the launch system. Much of the conversion work won't occur until after the shuttle is retired; in the case of DIRECT that's a 3-year period until first flight, while it's 5 years for Ares.
According to DIRECT's estimates, there would be a $19 billion savings in development cost and a further $16 billion savings in operational costs over 20 years.
You do realize that the cost of the "chemical fuels" are less than 1% of the cost of a modern rocket, right? Chemical fuels are very far from being the limiting constraint.
Yeah, I think you're right on BSG.
It also just occurred to me that you could draw parallels between the mindsets and various sci-fi series:
* Von Braunians: Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica
* Saganites: Star Trek (esp. Next Generation)
* O'Neillians: Firefly
I'm saying that having NASA buy commercial launches from Boeing and Lockheed doesn't make NASA into a subsidiary of the DoD, as many seem to think. Do you think that any of the commercial satellite companies that buy launches from them are militarized? What about when you purchase a ride on a Boeing 747?
Sure thing. It's actually kind of fun to apply that to someplace like slashdot, and see how many of the posts on a NASA story fit into the three categories. Von Braunians are usually the ones advocating for reviving the Saturn V design or building an Orion nuclear rocket, and often cite Kennedy's "we do these things because they are hard" speech. Saganites are the ones who talk about how science can be done much more efficiently with robots instead of humans. O'Neillians/Heinleinians (admittedly including myself) are the ones talking about "getting humanity off of this rock" and making spaceflight more accessible through commercialization.
The private sector doesn't have the money required to make manned habitats cost effective.
Um...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace
http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/
You seem to have an axe to grind, sir. I beg leave to ask by whom you are employed?
I'd give a 50-50 chance the AC's an ATK employee.
It should also be noted that the "Obama militarizing NASA" story that was on slashdot a few days ago was complete bollocks. The EELV launchers were partially subsidized by the Air Force, but are entirely owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA's used EELVs in the past to launch things like the New Horizons mission, and I don't think anybody claimed that this was somehow militarizing the exploration of Pluto. This article explains things well:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/media-botches-story-on-obamas-nasa-plans/
The only problem with this is that -- unless they are talking about some other vehicles, and if so, it's hard to imagine what they are -- the EELVs aren't "military rockets." Their development was subsidized with Air Force funds, but they were developed with Boeing and Lockheed Martinâ(TM)s money as well, and they are commercial rockets, available to the military, commercial users, and NASA. There is no need to "tear down a barrier" for NASA to use them, as evidenced by the fact that NASA is already using them. For example, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was blasted to orbit and off to Mars with an Atlas V/Centaur over three years ago.
There is NASA resistance to using EELVs, but not because they are "military rockets." It's because they are seen as a threat to the agency's -- or more specifically, administrator Mike Griffinâ(TM)s â" desire to develop a new NASA-only vehicle, called Ares 1, and perhaps later, the larger version of it, Ares 5. If the EELVs become viewed as viable launchers for the human missions, the case for the Ares, already weak -- particularly considering its extensive development teething problems â" becomes much weaker, perhaps to the point at which the program dies. (It should be noted that five years ago, prior to becoming NASA administrator, Dr. Griffin, who is apparently desperately attempting to hang on to his job, had no problems with using EELVs for crewed spaceflight.)
1. How to get off the rock - Von Braunian.
2. How to behave once off the rock - Saganite
3. Why get off of the rock in the first place - O'Neillian
There's of course overlap and commonality, but the three mindsets still differ in each of the three items you mention. Stereotypical von Braunians tend to want huge manpower-intensive rockets and are largely motivated by national glory. Saganites don't think much about launch (they often consider it as something which will always have static economics) and are largely motivated by science and discovering the unknown. O'Neillians are largely concerned with making space launch as economical and sustainable as possible, and are largely motivated by spreading humanity throughout the cosmos.
However, we're all still in the Von Braunian stage of knowledge for the first point (with many deep bows to Space Ship One as I say that) - light up explosives/propellents under/behind your seat and use bulky chemicals to reach escape velocity.
Sure, but there's a difference between the von Braun approach (as exemplified by the Saturn V or Space Shuttle) where every launch is a huge national endeavor involving tens of thousands of workers, and the SpaceX approach which has a launch crew of 25 and only 6 people in mission control (the company as a whole has just 600 employees).
That reminds me of how some say there are three schools of thought in space advocacy, which can be summed up as follows:
http://theforvm.org/diary/bill-white/werner-von-braun-carl-sagan-gerard-oneill
Saganites: "Space is big, billions of stars, isn't God's creation incredible...DON'T TOUCH IT." [though in fairness to Sagan, in his later years he became more supportive of human spaceflight]
Von Braunians: "We vill go boldly into space, and you vill watch on television, and you vill enjoy it." That's the current space program.
O'Neillians: "We will build the tools, go into space, and use its resources to expand humanity and freedom into the cosmos." ...
In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O'Neillians and von Braunians.
Saganites, named for astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996), are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder. They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists.
O'Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill (1927 - 1992), who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity). Getting people out of here en masse was the thingâ"not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. (An O'Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: âoeSave Earth: Develop Space.â)
Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun (1912 - 1977). Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: large expensive projects like the ones NASA undertakes, projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in.
I'd add that there's also the Heinleinians, who want to use the power of private industry to bring about O'Neill's vision.
Hamas won a slim plurality rather less than 50%, not a majority. Also, according to a poll from November 73% of Palestinians wanted to dissolve the Hamas-controlled parliament and hold new elections in January 2009:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-11/03/content_10300973.htm
According to the same poll, "If new elections were held in January 2009, 48 percent of the surveyed will vote for Fatah while 12.3 will elect Hamas."
Asuicidebomberismerelyapoorcountry'sF-16.
Yay for moral relativism!
IIRC hamas has an 80% approval rating.
Do you have a citation for this? I can't find one.
They were, in fact, democratically elected by the Palestinian people.
That was only for a plurality (not majority) in the legislative branch. However, the way they seized control of the Gaza Strip was rather undemocratic, with Hamas killing Fatah leaders in the region, leading to the Hamas vs. Fatah "Battle of Gaza" (which Hamas won, killing more than a hundred Palestinians in the process):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Battle_of_Gaza
Atheism is not an idealism. It is the absense of religious ideology and more specifically, the absense of belief in things like gods and fairies.
It can also refer to the active suppression of religious ideology, as had been done in the countries mentioned by the GP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
Trying to modify Delta and Atlas for NASA's man-rated qualifications would probably cost twice as much and take twice as long as staying the course with Ares.
The "man-rating qualifications" are pretty much pie-in-the-sky anyways, and have been decreased substantially in order to get the Ares I design to sort-of pass the requirements. The idea that getting the Delta or Atlas man-capable would cost more than $10-$20 billion needed for developing the Ares I is completely absurd.
What this is starting to look like is the DoD grabbing a chunk of NASA's budget for their secret programs.
Inflated headlines aside, this has absolutely nothing to do with the DOD seizing NASA's budget. It's simply about having NASA use the already-existing EELV rockets built by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin instead of having ATK build a new rocket.
Why does performance matter rather than raw cost/kg, are you kidding me? Do you buy a computer by using only raw cost?
No, but I generally ship cargo based on raw cost/kg, which is exactly what the current announcement is for.
Safety - again, you have to be kidding me. These are manned ships.
No they aren't. I think you're thinking of COTS-D, which has nothing to do with the recent announcement.
Wow, next think you know we might be using public taxpayer money to buy privately-built cars and seats on commercially-operated airliners for transporting government personnel!
Their intention is to get the Falcon9 and Dragon man-rated. The published development schedule appears to be fairly agressive. In some respects, I believe they are further along than the Ares 1 and Orion CEV programs are. Imagine a COTS program comprised of crew transport to and from the ISS or LEO.
Obama's space transition team seems to be imagining this as well:
http://www.space.com/news/081202-obama-space-spending.html
The transition team also wants information from NASA about accelerating plans for using the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to fund demonstrations of vehicles capable of carrying crews to the international space station, a proposal Obama supported during his campaign.
Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder if SpaceX has the option to fly a Falcon 9 Heavy instead of a normal Falcon 9 if they wish to, because of the better cost-efficiency. With a Falcon 9 Heavy they could lift up the prearranged NASA payload, while also selling the excess payload mass to make additional money.