The only real reason for lunar operations is industry. Judging what is on the Moon from a few measly soil samples and surface imaging is a joke. We really don't know much of anything about what might be there. We do know that a lot of stuff has impacted on it though. Prospecting will be an early high priority task.
Once people start staying there more than a few days there is going to be a significant degradation in the local vacuum and the moon will start to acquire a tenuous atmosphere. Humans are a contaminant wherever we go. The extraction of lunar O2 will be first and foremost and that is mining plain and simple. Tons of lunar material will have to be processed on a monthly basis leading into the thousands of tons per year. We will create tailiings from this process and they will have to be dealt with. If water is found the same thing will happen there.
You can forget about lunar surface habitats. Unless you are fond of mutation. Living will be a lot like being on a submarine for a long time. The establishment of habitation space that does not require the delivery of hardware from earth will be a prime task. You can expect lots of digging, detonations and surface fracture and pulverization activities. These are all dirty, ugly things best done by people without PhD's. Scientists will be seen as a nuisance for quite a while.
Preparation of a large landing pad area will be also be a high priority as will the manufacture of local roads to suppress dust . The manufacture of many large cisterns for water and waste storage will be a big task too. Water paranoia will be the guiding principle on the moon. It will not be wasted. A complete system for the synthesis, liquifaction and storage of LO2 and LH2 also has to be installed using the decent stages of lunar landers for starts. The synthesis of real soils for lunar agnriculture will also be critical. In short, all the boring stuff that few people even thing about are the top priorities on the moon- not searching for He3.
If we want to do this it will take hundreds of people on the surface at any time and they will have to be there for at least 1 year stints to make it economically digestible. The transport is what eats you alive here. You must compel a moon-centric thought process as soon as is practical. If everyone is looking to earth to bring every damn thing the colony will fail. You must be able to repair and replace everything. Most aerospace technology is not amenable to this at present. There will be an evolution of hardware that works on the moon. High performance stuff that is finicky or prone to failure will be ditched. It is this engine of innovation that will be one of the most valuable things we "discover" on the moon.
As for the far side of the moon being radio quiet- not for long. The L2 point is a valuable location and it needs a telecom relay satellite to talk to it. One of the first things we will put up will be a telecom network in orbit and/or at L1/L2. Exploration of the far side will be a far higher priority than a radio telescope. That means comm, machines with electronics and hence noise. Not that they won't declare some small area to be "radio quiet" .
If we discover industrial scale sources of water on the moon its value as a base will be incredible. It is a bio-safe location for people to work. By that I mean they can live and work without the fear of being irradiated to death. What an astronaut will put up with for a few days is utterly different to what a welder should have to put up with over a two year tour of duty. We need the best welders, mechanics,seamstresses, cooks, farmers, doctors, dentists etc etc to make this work. If it is perceived that working on the moon is a death sentence it will be hard to find good help. Working in high orbit like L2 and L2, while necessary, will be minimized. Those are just the equivalent of runways anyway- not much industry that cannot be automated there.
A few corrections to your assessment. Let us focus on Atlas. The Atlas you see today is hugely changed from the Atlas of 1980 or even 1995. During the design of the Atlas III and V we reduced the cost to LEO by 50%. That is a non-trivial effort. Yes we still burn kerosene and LO2 and LH2. That is unchanged. The techniques we use are much more refined and systems are much more elegant. I realize you would not have visibility into this but it is a fact. We commonly now have performance excesses that are the size of our previous total performance.
Elon did not pioneer automation. We did. We make our entire Atlas tankage with 5 guys in a few days. The entire factory was set up to manufacture 20-30 shipsets of boosters per year. The Delta factory in Decatur is state of the art and could crank out 30 Delta IV's per year. Do the math and see what your spans are allowed to be. Elon did not develop his tank stirwelding- we did. Boeing and LM engineers did most of the heavy lifting to bring that technology into rate production.
Boeing and LM spent nearly 3 billion dollars of their own money on the EELV program betting that commercial launch was about to explode. That is many times what everyone else has spent. The entire industry imploded and left them with huge capacity and few customers. ULA is the end result of Boeing and LM trying to stem losses and recover at least some of their investment. There is little prospect of them ever recovering much of it much less with a return.
The key problem is that there is little business case to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars in further investment. We have to work as true penny-pinching engineers: someone who can do for a dime what any damn fool can do for a dollar. Elon can spend whatever he chooses since it is not a business but a hobby that he is running. He has no intent of returning a profit much less a return on prior investment. That is not a business.
We are supporting all the possible customers with our own money in the hopes they will become real. We have to be judicious since there are a lot of pie in the sky schemes out there. Remember Teledesic? Iridium? if Bigelow can get hundreds of billionaires or countries to want to go to space then all power to him.
One key aspect that is rarely talked about is how our customer imposes costs on us. As the owners of spacecraft that cost most of a billion dollars I suppose I can understand their caution. Recognize that these are not men who are convinced by arm waving. They demand costly tests and analyses on seemingly trivial stuff. Hardware that has flown for years can be found to have low margins and require complete redesign. This picky customer imposes work that costs tens of millions per launch. A task that Elon is scarcely aware of. Add in nuclear RTG's and you are facing more paper. This unromantic stuff ends up costing MOST of the launch costs. The metal is almost an afterthought.
I hope this is educational. The world of space launch is full of tough business and technical decisions. If it was so easy as everyone desires there would be a lot more money making rocket builders out there. As it is, all of them are subsidized by one mechanism or other.
Trust me as a designer at ULA we have EVERY motivation to reduce costs and improve performance. We do this on a daily basis. But costs are not driven primarily by design. They are driven by rate. If you order a dozen of anything complicated it will cost a fortune. Order one that has to do exotic stuff like accelerate 20 metric tons to 30 km/sec and it is very expensive. Even more dominating is the cost in extremely talented people to support such exotic machines. Look up how much Ferrari or McLaren spend in a year to field two F1 racing cars. The technology investment and risks are similar but there is a far larger payoff for F1 racing.
Elon has yet to succeed and more importantly his cost model has yet to be validated. I am sure he expects that with first flight or after even the first handful of flights he can shed people and run on automatic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every last sensor, valve, actuator and pyro device requires care and feeding from birth to death. They are subjected to brutal environments that make the most extreme earth-bound environments trivial. While subject to these conditions they must perform flawlessly. Even small deviations in performance must be treated as serious indications of potential future failure. There is a discipline here that is mandated by almost no other activity on the planet. That costs money.
We all hope Elon succeeds. He is a great motivator. WIth tenacity and a lot more money he will succeed. His rockets will not cost $7M- nowhere close.
The concept of the flyback booster is a very old one. It has not come to fruition because the traditional solutions of wings etc are simply not economically viable with existing materials. They transform a super-powerful booster into a feeble one and the physics wars against you. This is NOT to say that there are not viable solutions to make this concept a reality. But they will look different than the sci-fi approach. They have to be super-light, very cheap and ultra-reliable. They have to fit within a compact hypersonic vehicle. Reusing the stuff you save has to be like falling off a log- if you even touch it much the savings will vanish. That is the challenge.
The ARCTUS vehicle proposed for NASA's ISS service (it lost) by ULA and Spacehab embodied a highly efficient recovery concept at its most basic. If you are interested I'm sure a little googling will be informative.
Meanwhile stop making a company like ULA into some sort of demonic barrier to human space exploration. It is comprised of thousands of dedicated and supremely talented folks many of whom share your desire to get into space in a big way. We have the privilege of confronting these technical challenges head on. We take that very seriously. Industries and governments count on us to supply a critical need. This is not a casual hobby.
We welcome fellow warriors to confront these same tough challenges- yes it is a real battle with a very nasty bit of nature. Nearly everyone who joins the fray gets their ass handed to them more than once. But the joy of the battle can't be beat.
Educate yourself before speaking. The vast majority of the funding for the recent EELV's (Delta and Atlas) was provided by the companies (Boeing and LM) themselves. Nearly 3 billion was invested by these private companies. And these were not minor updates. A complete rocket engine, the RS68, was developed as well as a brand new Atlas booster, Centaur upper stage with a single engine system, a wholly new Delta booster and two Delta upper stages. Not to mention new Atlas solids, payload fairings and payload adapters. The USG also got four new launch complexes out of the deal. So for something like 1-2 billion out of pocket the USAF got two new rocket systems and their matching launch complexes. NASA is planning on spending $10B on ARES 1 alone and it is incapable of doing much beyond delivery to low earth orbit. These EELV's could do what ARES is hoping/planning on doing (in 2015 maybe) right now. Is it any wonder that the companies want to do more launch work for NASA and recover their investments? Essentially NASA is going into direct competition with private industry. Boeing and LM essentially washed their hands of the whole affair and created the United Launch Alliance which combined the Atlas and Delta teams in the hopes of staying alive as a viable company. Whether this succeeds is up in the air.
The reason NASA was essentially forced to proceed with the COTS program was based on their stubborn refusal to permit anything else to deliver payloads to the International Space Station that was made in the USA. They adamantly defended their turf and refused to even consider expendable solutions even though they are far cheaper and even more reliable than Shuttle. Then Columbia was destroyed on reentry. This, and the desire to go back to the moon drove retirement of the Shuttle by 2010. But there was nothing in the pipeline that THEY were designing that was going to get to flight before 2014 at the earliest. Only Russian and European systems that are both lame as hell. Combine this with pressure from Elon Musk and you get the half-assed COTS1 competition. NASA chose just about the weakest, least likely to succeed options and Kistler was one of those. They died because they didn't have a billionaire to act as their sugar daddy. The also owed tens of millions of dollars their subcontractors from the LAST time they went out of business. THere are many who suspect NASA chose these two to guarantee that they would fail and hence assure that there is no competition with and greater motivation for the pathetic ARES 1 vehicle. But I suppose that is a conspiracy theory.
The latest competition has some far more viable companies such as Spacehab, United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin as team leaders. They have the flight-demonstrated capability to actually deliver many tons of pressurized and unpressurized cargo to ISS at a cost that is a bargain compared any other options. The award is not until 15 February. Let us hope that NASA finally makes one right decision and picks a viable contender. If they pick one of the lamers then the signal is sent that NASA is afraid of competition from other teams and is giving commercial industry no chance to participate in crewed logistics operations. This is sad since they have demonstrated repeatedly that they lack the know-how to deliver cargos to anywhere on a schedule within cost boundaries. This is very bad for ISS as well as any future lunar operations.
To answer your question about subcontracting every single piece of operational launcher hardware was developed by subcontractors and they have the vast background to actually make flight hardware in a real factory. NASA has none of this experience. They were always systems integrators and operators- not detail designers They are trying to force themselves into this role on ARES even thought they never had it in the glory days of Apollo. This is the result of their administrator Griffin who has also never built anything significant but is a wanna be. This approach will be one of the first things killed by the next administration since it will cost NASA ten to twenty times what it would using more traditional subcontracting methods.
The problems with going to the moon are not technical. They are political and managerial. We cannot adequately supply a spacestation that is a few hundred miles away with enough material to conduct meaningful science. NASA strangled any option for going there besides shuttle and that leaves us with Progress (1.5 tons cargo/launch) and maybe the ATV which costs nearly half a billion dollars a flight to deliver a few tons per year. NASA did this deliberately and consistently has hamstrung commercial space access. How in the world are they going to deliver a practical amount of cargo to support any real science or habitation on the moon? The answer is they can't. The present ESAS moon architecture is completely incapable of doing anything remotely like a moon base or real exploration. It is a dead end levied on NASA by a couple of ego-maniacs with not a lick of real-world experience between them. The sooner ARES is cancelled the better.
There are numerous alternative architectures that can deliver the hundreds of tons of supplies you need on the lunar surface within practical budgets. But they involve direct commercial and industry involvement. Until these players are fully engaged we will not be going back to the moon in a meaningful way. Most importantly these architectures provide the foundations for going to Mars in a meaningful way. Anyone who thinks you are gonna do anything meaningful on Mars with a handful of crew is simply wrong. It requires a bare-bones crew of at least 90 to support three science teams of 6 each. If you want confirmation look at Antarctic operations to get yourself calibrated. Furthermore on any real Mars mission at least part of the crew that goes does not come back on the first return opportunity. They are there for at least two cycles and transfer tasks and responsibilities to the second cycle crew etc etc. It is getting used to not coming back for 5 years that is perhaps one of the most important psychological barriers we must cross. The moon is a good place to start this- staying there permanently creates an enormous improvement in efficiency. You can finally forget about the retreat to Earth as the only safe option. Worth nearly 3000 m/sec delta V.
So the moon is worthy goal- but it is the practice of developing self-sustaining colonies that is the real barrier.
Asteroids are a nuisance to get to from an orbital mechanics standpoint with long transit times that are not compatible with humans who want to get home too. At present they can be explored with far better science returns with unmanned vehicles. The Mars rovers should be the model here- not Apollo.
This comment is clearly based on the musings of someone who has never taken the time to educate themselves about how to design vehicles for every phase of transport within the near solar system. The technology for design and manufacture of chemical rockets has expanded hugely since 1960. It is just that the changes are not always immediately visible to the lay person. Systems that were stretching to move 2 tons to orbit now commonly move 20 tons. Transport is NOT all about specific impulse which is what nuclear propulsion claims as its strength. The mass of the propulsion system is also paramount and that is a huge weakness of nuclear systems based on all known technologies. The generation of brute thrust is also not a great strength of nuke systems. In the end, in order to get the benefits of nuke you must be accomplished in the handling of tons of LH2- which is exactly what chemical rockets do today and are getting better at every year.
The bottom line is that the technology exists today to support a continuous occupation lunar base. This is not to say that the methods for doing this are those proposed by NASA. Quite the reverse. NASA is unfortunately trapped in a vicious political circle which prevents them from doing what they do best- advance new technologies that are not economically viable at present. Instead they are trying to compete with commercial industry to make rockets and they are abysmally bad at doing that- but they have an infinite budget.
The technology for moving on to Mars also is nearly here- the real problem is the human aspect of putting a team on mars for 500+ days with all the stuff they need to operate with total independence. That requires a crew of at least 70 to achieve safely and to actually do valuable science. We are far from being able to work with space-borne crews of this scale. In the end it will be seen that the mission to explore Mars is best done when a large fraction of the crew do not return for many years and possibly never. This allows the expansion of the crew into the hundreds and then thousands which is what is required for any semblance of self-sustaining colonization. NASA is right now at the "6 guys and a couple capsules" phase. That is a total waste of money.
The obvious and low cost solution is to RAZE LC-39 and let it return to the swamp from which it came. The same goes for the VAB. You can launch all the crew you can afford from TWO brand new launch pads on the east coast and a matching set on the west coast. They are the Atlas and Delta IV pads and they are capable of supporting launch rates five times greater than present utilization. The cost to add crew facilities is trivial compared the cost of LC 39/VAB/crawler maintenance.
Stop thinking you need to invent stuff that has already been invented by seasoned professionals in the commercial launch industry. Trust me we have solutions for whatever troubles your heart about spaceflight. We are systematically blocked by pervasive not-invented-here syndrome and an near total lack of hands-on know-how at NASA. We planned out an entire cost effective architecture that would have put people on the moon in 2012 for about 20% of NASA's projected costs. This was to be commenced in 2007. The offer still stands. Have you heard of it? Probably not- it has been systematically blocked from publication by NASA administrators and their henchmen for years now.
But you can keep on with ARES- it will be history within 15 years if it flies at all- remembered as a pimple on the leprous butt that was Shuttle. Sensible designs will outlast it- as they did Saturn.
NASA could solve this artificial funding problem at a stroke by canceling the $10B+ ARES launch vehicle which is not even needed. It is a boondoggle for Marshall SFC, P&W/Rocetdyne and ATK. The present EELV's, already paid for by the American taxpayer and private monies in the billions can do everything ARES can do RIGHT NOW. There, problem solved.
NASA is actually creating deliberate barriers to companies to stop them from competing with their foolish concepts. For decades they blocked alternative access to the space station to preserve Shuttle. Now with that horrid design shown to be the boondoggle it always has been, they act with incredulous desperation that they have no timely replacement. Well DUUHHH. This sort of short sighted "management" is typical. Meanwhile we have an American launch vehicle business that is desperate for new missions and it is starved deliberately down and forced to compete with limitless-funding government-developed vehicles. If this was done with aircraft in the early 20th century we would have delayed aircraft development for decades.
I myself welcome onerous budgetary restrictions. It forces people to make hard decisions and not squander resources. Maybe with the right managers in place they will make the optimal choices. This is a possibility of course - I did not say it was probable. But with fat budgets the stupidest, least efficient concepts are still viable. Witness Shuttle.
DIRECT solves absolutely NOTHING with regard to exploration. it is a techno-geek approach that wholly misunderstands where affordability comes from. Any solution that requires dedicated, single-purpose vehicles with a proliferation of engine types and completely unique hardware is a total loser. It will fail for the reasons that Saturn was a failure. When the US mail decided to start delivery of air mail they did not insist on special-built aircraft and most of all they did not pretend to be the experts in aircraft design. The cut competitive contracts to make the delivery a paying business. That is what lead to amazing success and explosive growth in the aircraft industry (among other things of course). NASA is wholly unwilling to even consider a long term contract for launch vehicles to service ISS until it is almost too late for commercial companies to meet schedule. This is a deliberate attempt to force ARES to be the only contender for this activity.
Direct is neither fast nor cheap. It also requires dedicated launch facilities, dedicated launch crew, dedicated manufacturing and transport systems. It will launch maybe twice a year. The crews will be inexperienced, hardware will evolve at a snails pace and costs will make Shuttle look like a bargain. It is unaffordable.
Stop thinking about reinventing everything and use what is already there and paid for. There are crews out there that could absorb lunar exploration launch schedules without a blink. The EELV launch systems were engineered for rates five times that of today. If you are concerned about having to lift 80 metric tons there are strategies for evolving Atlas that get all the lift you need for 20% of the present course or DIRECT. The rockets would be flying years before the lunar cargos were every ready to fly. They would rack up dozens of paid flights and be proven workhorses before a crewman even set foot on them. Isn't that better than some one-off low rate vehicle with no track record? You cannot even compare the real world reliability of these two options. This was all presented to NASA and summarily ignored several years ago. The Delta and Atlas have state of the art engines, avionics, structures and are made in state of the art, highly automated factories. NASA is even using Atlas avionics for their near term demos for cryin' out loud. All the machines and people are available right now- but you have to get past your preconceptions to allow yourself to pick up the phone.
At least one of the proposals for COTS has the absolute ability to replace Orion for orbital operations- which is all Orion will be doing for at least the first ten years of its life. I know- I designed it. Orbital operations are just not that hard. With a decent launcher under you only a small onboard propulsion system is required for rendezvous and docking. Reentry, so long as the down-cargo is only a couple tons, is straightforward too. This is off the shelf stuff- but you have to go to the right store.
Orion is a hugely mismanaged rathole since NASA does not really know how to prioritize requirements. They want more crew than Apollo but that takes volume and mass. Then they INSIST on a conical design which is just about the most inefficient shape imaginable. It sucked in the 1960's when NASA overrode all the great designs and came up with that horrid thing off the top of their heads. Then Orion starts to get too heavy for the lame ARES so they chop diameter to reduce mass thus totally eliminating crew growth capability. This will cripple its use for Mars operations. They should ditch the freaking ARES rocket- it is just a crummy design that they are trying to glorify as the best thing possible. If NASA would just GET OUT OF THE WAY the contractor could execute and do it well. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Launch Alliance know how to do this stuff- they do it every day. Most NASA personnel have not designed and made anything physical that has flown in their entire careers. It is a fundamental disconnect of who has the know-how and who is running the show.
Orion in its present incarnation is going nowhere besides LEO and maybe a few days in lunar orbit. The whole lunar exploration architecture is just plain wrong and will not accomplish anything meaningful. It is too small, too expensive and whole pieces of technology needed for exploration are being completely ignored. There are cheaper, faster and more expandable architectures that encompass not only indefinite lunar stays but full scale Mars exploration and indefinite occupation. The beautifully animated NASA architecture CANNOT do these things. CANNOT.
They should start by eliminating most of the Orion service module- it is not required for ISS operations. A slightly modified Centaur vehicle on top of a garden variety EELV can do all the delta V and maneuver that is required for ISS crew logistics. The service module is only required since the ARES rocket does not have the ability to place the Orion in a true orbit- it dumps it in a suborbital trajectory that intersects the Pacific Ocean. The big motor on the Orion service module is mostly there to get you to a real orbit. Atlas or Delta would put you completely into the right orbit and the delta V to ISS would be small enough to use small thrusters to achieve. That cuts development of Orion in half and allows a focus on the capsule itself.
The Congress and the American people should be up in arms about the billions that are being squandered by the present NASA administrator. He and his henchmen have made decisions based on their own personal prejudices and political maneuvering. There is not a shred of technical backup for it. None. The sooner the whole architecture is pitched out as the bad idea it is the better. Everyone should know there are far better alternatives and most of that hardware is flying right now. Alternatives that we can all be proud of and can actually afford.
As a worker in the rocket industry I can assure you that unless you are working a classified program you do not have to go through a special background check. These checks are reserved for a select few who work sensitive programs. They are quite expensive and time consuming. The work that JPL does cannot possibly fit within a category that demands these sorts of checks.
What I suspect is that JPL is being singled out for a kind of punishment. The present NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, is infamous for violating clear government ethics rules to manipulate and coerce his own personnel and that of major subcontractors. if you do something threatening to his ideas he has no hesitation to call up the CEO of your company and demand that these innovations be silenced. Since most upper management these days have the will of a noodle they will comply to sooth his ruffled feathers. They should be reporting him to government ethics personnel. He is shameless in his willingness to demand that people kowtow to his will. The main problem is that he is a pretty crummy manager and his technical ideas are sophomoric. But he demands loyalty to these foolish ideas under threat of dismissal or loss of contracts. His behavior is that of a spoiled child- which would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.
There is considerable tension between certain elements of NASA- and JPL is not on the list of teams that NASA headquarters likes. By way of example they were excluded from competition for lunar rovers despite being the absolute center of experience in this technology. Why? So that more favored teams with trivial experience could have a prayer of winning one.
Everyone should know that most NASA activity these days is being manipulated in this way via completely illegal and unethical procurement behaviors. Formal trade studies are manipulated and their leaders are borderline incompetent- many are clearly not neutral and are hardly even shy about their pre-conceived (and mostly dead wrong) notions. THey will defend to the death their decisions even as new data becomes available that wholly undermines their conclusions. Teams are told that they will not be considered in a competition before it even starts- completely in opposition to Federal Acquisition Regs. Why? Because it is clear that they will be the runaway winner and are not on the list of favored suppliers. Winners are often not subject to even the most basic technical oversight to determine if their concept will have a chance in hell of working. This is ignored since they are on the favored list. Of course it MUST work- the idea came from the GODS at headquarters. Strict operational and design mandates are written off in order to allow a loser design to proceed. Often a design feature mandated by some over-enthusiastic NASA engineer is forced into the design by coercion even though the subcontractor KNOWS it will not work. Then after a year's worth of work finally proves this they can remove what was a dumb idea on day one. This costs tens of millions of dollars in redesign and years of time. This only can happen when subordinate NASA personnel mimic their leaders and apply heavy-handed, unethical pressures to the subcontractor.
In other words there are no rules any more. Design definition and optimization are effectively ignored. It is simply the whims of a few rather dumb individuals that guide the design and procurement process. They will be gone- hopefully soon. Believe me most of aerospace industry cannot wait until Mr Griffin and his stooges are history. But the legacy of their incompetence and hubris will linger for decades. Their contamination of the legacy of the free and unfettered exchange of ideas between NASA and its subcontractors and the scientists who are supposedly the purpose behind such things as lunar exploration will take years to clean up.
You are quite right about the destructive circle that results in reduced access to space. It is probably the reason I am most annoyed by the waste of money by folks like Musk.
Many successful businesses could not have been bootstrapped without a source of exterior funding that did not demand immediate returns. This is of course the reason for existence for VC companies. But their resources are almost entirely devoted to software and consumer product companies which have shown explosive growth in the past decades. The space launch business, even we could deliver payloads to LEO at $1000/lbm, does not show the signs of such explosive growth and hence does not normally warrant high risk investment. In fact the reasons for going to space, unless you are the military or a scientist, are pretty limited at present. Perhaps the only real growth potential is space tourism. This may be a pretty limited thing for many decades to come. But in any event the limited amount of this "blue sky" money is never used to make real progress. Instead it repeats the past. Gah!
Now if you had say $20B burning a hole in your pocket you could totally revolutionize the entire launch infrastructure. Heck even $7B would get you a very long way. That kind of money would allow true next generation vehicles to be built that would blow your mind. They are not more elaborate- they are simpler than what flies now. Its just that they leverage what we have learned over the past decade and translate it into real machines. You would not believe how small they can be.
These next generation vehicles permit economical exploration of the moon and set the stage for Mars. Architecture studies that we did showed that in less than three years after start of the project you could place a complete lunar base capable of supporting dozens of full time staff with two or more peripheral exploration bases and multiple orbital bases in different inclinations or occupying L1. That kind of architecture permits real exploration. Not like the anemic and downright unimaginative stuff coming out of NASA these days.
BTW the NASA vision for exploration is just about the opposite of where we should be going. Those vehicles are incredibly inefficient and expensive. But because no one wants to criticize NASA for fear of losing some other contract the entire industry is mum. On the inside everyone knows that the designs are total crap. This should not be surprising since they too were "conceived" by people who had no previous experience with designing rockets! They will use the term "manrated" to defend their crummy designs- that is a total smoke screen. You can pump costs into a machine by demanding that every molecule of metal that went into it is inspected but that will not make your machine better when it is a bad design. That is the lesson of Shuttle.
The best thing for them really is for someone to supply the man lift and cargo capacity before they finish and show that reasonable precautions on a good design are sufficient for flying a crew. But I suspect that will never happen.
People can take a lot more that 5 g's. Especially if they are transient. Pilots can remain concious and in control of an aircraft at 9 G's for extended periods measured in many tens of seconds. If you are a passenger and don't mind blacking out for a few seconds you can take much more. And this is with minimal work to reduce the overall height of the person so that pressure head problems are minimized.
I personally think that eventually some type of ground based launch system will be built since you can eliminate the booster which is the biggest pain in the launch stack. However launch demand will have to increase enormously to justify the investment. Basically the economics are like those of the Chunnel- which took centuries to justify.
I would shoot for a terminal speed at exit of 10-15,000 ft/second with the exit ambient pressure as low as you can get. The object you are launching has to have some sort of propulsion on it so it is pointless to make the thing just the payload. Besides this makes the system much more flexible ( one presumes you might want to go to slightly different inclinations too) and the size of the launch tube and energy delivery is much smaller. To make this really effective you do need to be able to launch about 60-160 mT to this velocity though.
Remember that very light cylindrical structures, when pressurized, can take enormous axial loads so long as they are not subjected to big bending forces. UNfortunately you get those bending forces from the aeroloads you generate on a regular rocket. Your ground cannon may not. Lets say it doesn't. So take a structure 18 ft in diameter. Pressurize it to 100 psia. It can take in excess of 20 G's axial without too much trouble. The vehicle you are pushing scarcely is bothered. Humans might need a load alleviation system. If you can hold 20G's the tube is only like 20 miles long- not too horrible for the folks in the late 21st century to make.
Anyway I think something like this will come to pass- probably past mid century though. BTW the use of pressurized structures is also a good thing for the launch tube supports- it can cut mass enormously. No practical rocket for example can fly without the benefits of internal pressurization.
It would be great for these primitive reaction motor systems to be replaced with something that just makes a hum.
But know this: the technology for getting to orbit and beyond is not tapped out. There are so many directions for improvement that it represents enough work for thousands of engineers for decades. Structures, engines, avionics, fabrication even aero can all be hugely improved. But they are trapped in near stasis by lack of resources. NASA, who used to take on these technological challenges, has become consumed with making rockets that replicate already existing capabilities and going to the ISS to do ant-farm science. It is basically a jobs program where the jobs are fancy but not too hard. Since they have most of the resources for development and are wasting them on old crap these great advances are stalled. But they are so obvious to anyone with any real insight that they will be addressed slowly and steadily- probably by the Chinese.
Yes I do work for one of the two companies you mention- I do this stuff on a daily basis
As for the corporate "masters", your assessment, while totally understandable, is absolutely wrong. First of all no one is making much money on launching rockets. LM and Boeing management would love to get rid of the space launch divisions. They are packed with risk and produce very little money. Boeing has not made a cent on the Delta III and IV. They are billions in the hole. LM just had their first year in recent memory where Atlas broke even on operating costs- but they are still hundreds of millions in the hole.
The space launch business has nearly dried up. There are a few commercial launches but those mostly go to the Russian- built vehicles like Proton or Zenit. You can have a decent capability and pay the engineers a few hundred a month. The successful American vehicles are left with government business. Profits on government services are strictly limited- no one would ever invest a lot of money on that biz given the poor rates of return.
The ability to develop new machines is then strictly limited by small amounts of money that are available. We make slow but steady progress - but only because the financial math doesn't justify much more. It is extremely annoying when folks out of the blue come up with hundreds of millions and then piss it away on showboating ( Spaceship 1- what a joke) or repeating the past (Conestoga, Roton, Beal, SpaceX et al).
We are all space enthusiasts and would love to see some next steps made. It is within our grasp to make vehicles that can make real lunar exploration an economic possibility. And believe me the NASA CLV and CaLV vehicles are NOT the way to go. You could scarecely pick a less effective path. It will be a miracle if even one makes it to first flight. So instead of making educated next steps all the major resources are squandered on crap. Wouldn't you be a little pissed off too?
I personally would like to see some people on Mars before I die. At the present rate of development that is not going to happen. It could though. We could be on Mars in 15 years with a serious exploration effort if we took the right paths. So keep all this in mind when you get all excited about some newbie's attempt to lift 1000 lb to LEO.
For the recent EELV development contract both Boeing and LM had to ante in hundreds of millions of their own money. I think the total for Boeing was something like $2B due to the development of the RS-68. LM developed the Atlas I & II substantially with company money- nearly a billion was invested by General Dynamics. Atlas III also required more company money. So Elon is scarcely alone in supplementing government contract money with company money.
The bottom line on space flight is that if you plan on moving enough mass to orbit to make a profit the machine cannot be a performance pig. WIthin the engines and most other systems are objects that are highly stressed- and simply adding mass is normally not a solution. You are compelled to make elegant and efficient designs. That will cost more than the hardware in your espresso maker.
BTW Atlas V reduced costs to LEO by 50% from previous vehicles. A little known fact. And you can actually buy one and launch it next year if you want. Whether Elon can even match that is yet to be seen.
Lets be realistic- Elon is yet another rich guy who has a fascination with an expensive hobby. He is an outsider who had no prior spaceflight experience. And like most newbies he confused the booster operation with serious spaceflight. The smoke, noise and flames always does that. Yes a booster is necessary but it is only a first step. Reinventing it with some mediocre rocket engines will not push us to another level.
True progress in spaceflight is all about the performance of the upper stage and its in-space capabilities. If you don't make progress there then all the wonderful space missions we all want to see done are out of reach. Elon should have picked up the phone and called the Atlas team. For a fraction of the money he has spent he could have gotten a long-duration Centaur that could have opened up commercial manned missions to lunar orbit. His kind of money and attitude could have really made a difference. And he wouldn't have to create a new team to do it. He could have stood on some shoulders. You get farther that way. You just have to readjust your pride settings and focus on the real goal.
Every damn "space entrepreneur" does the same damn thing- and they mostly piss away hundreds of millions of dollars to do what has already been done. There is not a thought about what to do next. This is mostly because it is much, much harder to do. If these guys gave it a moment's thought they would just go see the experts. We are as smart or smarter than they are- but don't have the luxury of millions in VC or buyout money burning a hole in our pockets. If you add money, an enthusiastic customer and a mission trust me- we will deliver some amazing machines. Essentially they could add their innovations and ideas to ours- and get something better than either could do alone
And its not like we are sitting around doing nothing- the next four generations of launchers and upper stages are already in conceptual design. But there is no mission yet that needs these new capabilities. Cost reductions to $1300/lbm to LEO can be done with present technology but the investment is significant. With present launch rates there is simply no business case. But if you wanted to make a commercial lunar orbiter that could be done in less than four years for less money than you think.
The weird and perversely funny thing is that another newbie- Mike Griffin - is doing exactly the same thing as Elon but with taxpayer money to build a few more mediocre vehicles with a virtually newbie team that has never designed a rocket. It is highly probable that they too will follow this painful path. But education is a good thing I suppose. But we could have gone so much farther as a NASA-industry team. Sad.
Just because they get to fix a huge failure that showed up almost immediately on flight 1 does not guarantee success on ANY subsequent flight. Look up the flight history of the now-defunct Delta III. Or the subsequent failures of the Ariane V. Believe me this team is just starting on a long and winding road that MIGHT lead to success depending on the inherent capabilities of their designs. If they made slap-dash design decisions they will pay for those over and over again. It could easily cost $100M or more to get to reliable operations.
As a designer of very successful rockts I can tell you why making a rocket fly is much harder than making darn near any other machine function properly...you are trying to harness enormous energies which do more than just push the rocket upward. The vibration and shock environments are beyond anything you probably have experienced. A simple connector can see upwards of 300 Grms without even trying. You can reduce polymeric materials to a puddle just with hysteretic heating from vibration. And you cannot simulate and predict everything. Weird system interactions are par for the course. You can only get first flight success with a lot of painful experience. SpaceX do not have this level of experience.
That is why demonstrated reliability cannot be replaced by calculation. Spacex bragged about their high reliability but it is all on paper. Successful rockets have tens of thousands of hours of debugging of problems built into them. You just never see it. Nothing can replace hours in the air. And they come slowly and at great expense.
Elon is now going to learn firsthand why spaceflight is so damn expensive. It is not the lack of innovation or intelligence at Lockheed Martin or Boeing- it is the brutal reality that nature imposes on lack of attention to detail and ignorance. It ain't the metal in the rocket - its the know-how in the people. We have to dig down to root cause on even the most innocuous anomaly - hence we know a lot more about flaws in parts than damn near anybody on the planet. But this knowledge is pricey.
You are quite correct in saying that the best thing that could happen to NASA is for Shuttle to end.
However- just because you launch from somewhere north of the equator does not mean that it is super inefficient. You can perform inclination changes at the transfer ellipse apogee and energy is minimized. This is done on most spacecraft launches. The transfer ellipse can be made "supersynchronous" ie with an apogee above geosync to minimize the final energy to circularize at geosync at zero inclination. The Proton launches from >50deg N and accomplishes its injection with multiple upper stage burns.
You should also know that performing the upper stage burn in one step as is done by Ariane ( injection to LEO combined with injection to transfer ellipse) can be rather inefficient - this is why Atlas does the final injection to transfer ellipse during a second burn as the equator is being crossed. Also note that NASA does not launch military or even scientific satellites on Shuttle. They subcontract that to the Delta or Atlas ( or Pegasus ) launch vehicles. The actual launches are done by Boeing or Lockheed Martin and overseen by NASA. Costs for these launches are quite reasonable and are roughly 1/5 the cost per pound to LEO of shuttle.
Launching to high inclinations is also quite simple using Atlas or Delta. You fly south out of Vandenberg AFB in CA. You can also fly up the coast of the US with some doglegs to avoid populated areas. The latter approach is what would be done to go to ISS with cargo using Atlas or Delta.
It is true that current Russian rockets are cheaper than European or US made vehicles. However they are running out of performance for next gen payloads and don't have much room to grow without a lot of changes. It remains to be seen what will happen in coming years. With the new Ariane able to lift two 6 ton payloads to geosync they are probably pretty competitive. And the Proton is grouded right now after suffering a failure of their upper stage somehow.
Do your research and you will find that CX41 was DESIGNED AROUND supporting HLV. Otherwise the MLP, VIF etc would have been even smaller.
If you are somehow of the belief that a CLV will be available in anything less than the 7 year span presently proposed you are sadly mistaken. The maturity of CLV and HLV hardware can hardly be compared. Essentially ALL HLV hardware has already flown. And that under higher loading conditions than would be seen on HLV. CLV is a powerpoint presentation.
The use of hardware such as a main engine or solid on one configuration can ABSOLUTELY be used as justification for showing demonstrated reliability on a subsequent configuration. You yourself are assuming this when you suggest that CLV hardware development supports CaLV. The key is that CLV and CaLV hardware is a single-purpose system that has no use outside of NASA. It will have inherently low launch rate and will suffer for it. Making a lot of hardware and flying it is the only way to acheive significant reliability gains above present levels. A few extra seconds of operation is trivial beside this effect.
It is possible that no one will have bought an Atlas HLV before 2012. My point is that even if that were the case NASA could finish its last design/test and fly many of them with dummy payloads for a fraction of what they will spend on CLV. They would have a cheaper vehicle with a larger industrial base with more performance and much higher demonstrated reliability. Your only argument is that it might help an even lamer vehicle in some obscure way- a pathetic argument but one NASA can make since they are spending taxpayer money with abandon.
You seem to think that there is a lot of Shuttle hardware that is moving over untouched to CLV and CaLV. This is a joke right? Even the SRB's are now different in a significant way. If NASA plays by their own rules every case will have to be redesigned to show positive margins due to the new 5 segment configuration. The existing cases are worth their scrap metal cost. ET is being resized and has a totally different load path which will force complete new designs. Even the SSME is being modified to reduce costs and that means a complete requal. The avionics and software has to be redone from zero. I'm not mentioning all the blank sheet of paper designs done by a "team" that hasn't ever designed an upper stage! They are wanna bees. And though they have talent they will have to pay for their mistakes like the rest of us. Witness Musk's crew- they are being burned at every turn. The only thing that will be the same from Shuttle is the paint on the SRB and the ET color.
And let us be frank about Shuttle hardware. It works because of a standing army of tens of thousands of people and a bottomless pocketbook. If this were an even playing field Shuttle would have been scrapped long ago. It is a mediocre design. But the principle problem is not the metal. Its the leadership. It is common knowledge that Griffin and his henchman Horowitz are egoists of historical proportions. Utterly unwilling to look at alternate viewpoints and intolerant of criticism. It is their way or the highway. That alone will set NASA up for a failure. If a team is intimidated to surface problems because of fear of retribution it is a recipe for disaster.
Don't believe me? Within the past months these guys have directly intervened to suppress the presentation of AIAA papers simply because they showed how EELV's and their derivatives offer an alternative to their scheme. I mean how threatening is an AIAA paper? But these pathetic souls see themselves threatened and will lash out to suppress dissent. Everyone MUST BELIEVE. Still believe that NASA has the wherewithal to go to the moon or Mars with this attitude? Think again.
And what did these papers show? That simple EELV derivatives can be made that can lift in excess of 80t to LEO. No new engines. No new Launch complex. Schemes for expanding that to 140t were also shown. I personally
The Atlas HLV consists of 95% elements that have already flown. It flies off the same pad and infrastructure as all Atlas V's. It delivers 30t to LEO which is far more than a CLV ever will at probably half the price. It is available in 2 years. CLV might be here in 7. CLV is $10B HLV is less than $300M. For an additional $2B LM could fly six HLV's off to build confidence before the CLV ever cuts first chips.
If NASA feels the need for a new VIF then fine- the whole complex 41 was built for less money than the present cost for tearing down and rebuilding Cx39. Multiple VIFS with clean pad was baselined for this precise purpose. The cost a new VIF would be something like 10% of what NASA plans on spending on ground systems.
The time to orbit is a nearly trivial dial with respect to safety during ascent. What is more important is how many times you have flown that hardware. If the number is small then regardless of your desirements and analysis the vehicle is unproven and has a low reliability. By 2012 the EELV fleet will have many dozens of flights under their belts and CLV will have zip. At planned flight rates they will NEVER overtake the EELV fleet. Failures these days rarely come from calculated events - they come from icing, foam, o-rings and other such weird stuff. Systems interactions that cannot be analysed effectively and cannot be predicted with any confidence today. If it don't fly much it ain't really safe.
What is a major effect is that the CLV does not really place anything in a true orbit-it goes to a 30x160 TRAJECTORY. Which means that if you don't do something you end up in the eastern Pacific. It requires a burn to be performed by another stage- the CEV propulsion system which is not operating on the ground. The addition of this separate new system is a major detriment and very large cost element. With modern EELV's the command module element could be placed directly into orbit without this final stage. The delta-V for LEO ops is small and can be readily obtained with augmented hydrazine supplies and a few more thrusters added to the Centaur or Delta upper stages. That one feature is probably worth $100M per launch.
An existing Atlas V HLV can lift in excess of 30 metric tons to LEO. Actual delivered useful payload. The tare weight of shuttle is not relevant to the performance discussion. The use of the arm is. Concepts where the payloads are placed in trail with ISS by EELV's could drastically reduce the number of shuttle flights at the bare minimum. Then a single Shuttle flight can make multiple assemblies. My put is that for the cost of 1 or 2 shuttle missions a completely autonomous system could be developed that would allow for elimination of the Shuttle for assembly. In some quarters $2b goes a long way. You will eventually need this capability anyway.
Multiple proposals for down mass from ISS have been proposed that replace Shuttle capability and are clearly superior in terms of cost, risk and timeliness- all rejected without a shred of logic.
Your argument on CLV supporting CaLV is pretty hollow. FIrst of all there is a brand new upper stage engine and essentially new solid being proposed. Both unproven. And don't give me all that similarity stuff with four segment- once you change the grain load all bets are off. Not to mention a new roll control system and upper stage vehicle with all new systems. The supposed low cost SSME for CaLV will get no benefit from CLV and it too is essentially unproven. Especially in a five cluster. Even the upper stage elements for CaLV are different from the CLV upper stage- at least at present. The amount of common hardware between the two is limited to the solids - pretty slim pickings.
It's not me with the rosy glasses- its the folks trying ANYTHING to wring more life out of antiquated shuttle hardware. The bottom line is that it would be hard to make a system that would be more expensive, riskier and less flexible for future ops. Lets call a spade a spade and adm
You seem to think that the path we are on is somehow close to optimal. I don't want to rain on your parade but the whole plan stinks! Anyone who has ever applied themselves to the problems of spaceflight will find uncountable avoidable problems with the present Griffin path. Trust me - bad ideas come home to roost- they don't get well by themselves. And we the taxpayers will pay and pay and pay. Just like we did with the horrid Shuttle and ISS. NASA has betrayed the taxpayers by purporting that the plan they have is the best that can be done when it is far from it. The whole thing is a construct of insiders and people with a personal vested interest in hanging on to Shuttle for what appear to be very selfish reasons. Reason and logic were systematically circumvented by the present regime. They run on emotion: mostly grudges and hidden agendas.
The "new expendables" you refer to are the prime source of the problem. The CLV development cost is now at $10B and will likely rise. This to get a rocket that lifts 24.5t to LEO. We can already do this with an Atlas HLV. THe CLV recurring cost is reported to be exceeding $400M per flight. That too is bloated compared to an HLV- which can lift 30t to the same orbit. The whole CLV should be cancelled and the money returned to science. The rantings of Horowitz and ATK aside it is simply a really bad idea done by amateurs- that happens to serve some folks with single-source contracts. We should continue to buy Soyuz and launch 'em on EELV's. Shuttle should be absolutely terminated NOW. Paying off all those whining ISS contributors would be cheaper than doing all the shuttle missions at $1B a pop. And for what? to say you finished a white elephant with no tangible use? Alternatively you could lift nearly every payload to ISS faster and cheaper on EELV's and Ariane V's. They have more performance than Shuttle at roughly 1/5th the price.
Develop CEV command module on a strict commercial competitive procurement with a single mission: ISS. Forget about major exploration of the moon or Mars on storables. The rocket equation simply doesn't make it practical. When you have the time and have regained your senses go and mod the Centaur or Delta upper stages to make them into the CEV propulsion elements. They exist NOW and are superior to the storable junk that is now being developed.
The Earth departure and Heavy lift should also be reopened to commercial competition instead of the horrible NASA monopoly they appear to be. In fact the rediculous 1 & 1/2 exploration architecure should be abandoned as the unaffordable crap that it is. Dual identical 60-80t LEO vehicles are a far more sensible approach with direct lunar inject and lunar orbit rendezvous and no LEO parking orbits with their horrible consequences.
There ARE alternatives to this madness- and they are far better and cheaper than the NASA grand plan. IMHO the Mars, outer planet and stellar science missions should get first dibs on the money- Manned flight should take whatever is left over - after all we don't want to forget the hood ornament on the car of true exploration.
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The only real reason for lunar operations is industry. Judging what is on the Moon from a few measly soil samples and surface imaging is a joke. We really don't know much of anything about what might be there. We do know that a lot of stuff has impacted on it though. Prospecting will be an early high priority task.
Once people start staying there more than a few days there is going to be a significant degradation in the local vacuum and the moon will start to acquire a tenuous atmosphere. Humans are a contaminant wherever we go. The extraction of lunar O2 will be first and foremost and that is mining plain and simple. Tons of lunar material will have to be processed on a monthly basis leading into the thousands of tons per year. We will create tailiings from this process and they will have to be dealt with. If water is found the same thing will happen there.
You can forget about lunar surface habitats. Unless you are fond of mutation. Living will be a lot like being on a submarine for a long time. The establishment of habitation space that does not require the delivery of hardware from earth will be a prime task. You can expect lots of digging, detonations and surface fracture and pulverization activities. These are all dirty, ugly things best done by people without PhD's. Scientists will be seen as a nuisance for quite a while.
Preparation of a large landing pad area will be also be a high priority as will the manufacture of local roads to suppress dust . The manufacture of many large cisterns for water and waste storage will be a big task too. Water paranoia will be the guiding principle on the moon. It will not be wasted. A complete system for the synthesis, liquifaction and storage of LO2 and LH2 also has to be installed using the decent stages of lunar landers for starts. The synthesis of real soils for lunar agnriculture will also be critical. In short, all the boring stuff that few people even thing about are the top priorities on the moon- not searching for He3.
If we want to do this it will take hundreds of people on the surface at any time and they will have to be there for at least 1 year stints to make it economically digestible. The transport is what eats you alive here. You must compel a moon-centric thought process as soon as is practical. If everyone is looking to earth to bring every damn thing the colony will fail. You must be able to repair and replace everything. Most aerospace technology is not amenable to this at present. There will be an evolution of hardware that works on the moon. High performance stuff that is finicky or prone to failure will be ditched. It is this engine of innovation that will be one of the most valuable things we "discover" on the moon.
As for the far side of the moon being radio quiet- not for long. The L2 point is a valuable location and it needs a telecom relay satellite to talk to it. One of the first things we will put up will be a telecom network in orbit and/or at L1/L2. Exploration of the far side will be a far higher priority than a radio telescope. That means comm, machines with electronics and hence noise. Not that they won't declare some small area to be "radio quiet" .
If we discover industrial scale sources of water on the moon its value as a base will be incredible. It is a bio-safe location for people to work. By that I mean they can live and work without the fear of being irradiated to death. What an astronaut will put up with for a few days is utterly different to what a welder should have to put up with over a two year tour of duty. We need the best welders, mechanics,seamstresses, cooks, farmers, doctors, dentists etc etc to make this work. If it is perceived that working on the moon is a death sentence it will be hard to find good help. Working in high orbit like L2 and L2, while necessary, will be minimized. Those are just the equivalent of runways anyway- not much industry that cannot be automated there.
If we go to the moon with some sort of tou
Elon did not pioneer automation. We did. We make our entire Atlas tankage with 5 guys in a few days. The entire factory was set up to manufacture 20-30 shipsets of boosters per year. The Delta factory in Decatur is state of the art and could crank out 30 Delta IV's per year. Do the math and see what your spans are allowed to be. Elon did not develop his tank stirwelding- we did. Boeing and LM engineers did most of the heavy lifting to bring that technology into rate production.
Boeing and LM spent nearly 3 billion dollars of their own money on the EELV program betting that commercial launch was about to explode. That is many times what everyone else has spent. The entire industry imploded and left them with huge capacity and few customers. ULA is the end result of Boeing and LM trying to stem losses and recover at least some of their investment. There is little prospect of them ever recovering much of it much less with a return.
The key problem is that there is little business case to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars in further investment. We have to work as true penny-pinching engineers: someone who can do for a dime what any damn fool can do for a dollar. Elon can spend whatever he chooses since it is not a business but a hobby that he is running. He has no intent of returning a profit much less a return on prior investment. That is not a business.
We are supporting all the possible customers with our own money in the hopes they will become real. We have to be judicious since there are a lot of pie in the sky schemes out there. Remember Teledesic? Iridium? if Bigelow can get hundreds of billionaires or countries to want to go to space then all power to him.
One key aspect that is rarely talked about is how our customer imposes costs on us. As the owners of spacecraft that cost most of a billion dollars I suppose I can understand their caution. Recognize that these are not men who are convinced by arm waving. They demand costly tests and analyses on seemingly trivial stuff. Hardware that has flown for years can be found to have low margins and require complete redesign. This picky customer imposes work that costs tens of millions per launch. A task that Elon is scarcely aware of. Add in nuclear RTG's and you are facing more paper. This unromantic stuff ends up costing MOST of the launch costs. The metal is almost an afterthought.
I hope this is educational. The world of space launch is full of tough business and technical decisions. If it was so easy as everyone desires there would be a lot more money making rocket builders out there. As it is, all of them are subsidized by one mechanism or other.
Elon has yet to succeed and more importantly his cost model has yet to be validated. I am sure he expects that with first flight or after even the first handful of flights he can shed people and run on automatic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every last sensor, valve, actuator and pyro device requires care and feeding from birth to death. They are subjected to brutal environments that make the most extreme earth-bound environments trivial. While subject to these conditions they must perform flawlessly. Even small deviations in performance must be treated as serious indications of potential future failure. There is a discipline here that is mandated by almost no other activity on the planet. That costs money.
We all hope Elon succeeds. He is a great motivator. WIth tenacity and a lot more money he will succeed. His rockets will not cost $7M- nowhere close.
The concept of the flyback booster is a very old one. It has not come to fruition because the traditional solutions of wings etc are simply not economically viable with existing materials. They transform a super-powerful booster into a feeble one and the physics wars against you. This is NOT to say that there are not viable solutions to make this concept a reality. But they will look different than the sci-fi approach. They have to be super-light, very cheap and ultra-reliable. They have to fit within a compact hypersonic vehicle. Reusing the stuff you save has to be like falling off a log- if you even touch it much the savings will vanish. That is the challenge.
The ARCTUS vehicle proposed for NASA's ISS service (it lost) by ULA and Spacehab embodied a highly efficient recovery concept at its most basic. If you are interested I'm sure a little googling will be informative.
Meanwhile stop making a company like ULA into some sort of demonic barrier to human space exploration. It is comprised of thousands of dedicated and supremely talented folks many of whom share your desire to get into space in a big way. We have the privilege of confronting these technical challenges head on. We take that very seriously. Industries and governments count on us to supply a critical need. This is not a casual hobby.
We welcome fellow warriors to confront these same tough challenges- yes it is a real battle with a very nasty bit of nature. Nearly everyone who joins the fray gets their ass handed to them more than once. But the joy of the battle can't be beat.
Educate yourself before speaking. The vast majority of the funding for the recent EELV's (Delta and Atlas) was provided by the companies (Boeing and LM) themselves. Nearly 3 billion was invested by these private companies. And these were not minor updates. A complete rocket engine, the RS68, was developed as well as a brand new Atlas booster, Centaur upper stage with a single engine system, a wholly new Delta booster and two Delta upper stages. Not to mention new Atlas solids, payload fairings and payload adapters. The USG also got four new launch complexes out of the deal. So for something like 1-2 billion out of pocket the USAF got two new rocket systems and their matching launch complexes. NASA is planning on spending $10B on ARES 1 alone and it is incapable of doing much beyond delivery to low earth orbit. These EELV's could do what ARES is hoping/planning on doing (in 2015 maybe) right now. Is it any wonder that the companies want to do more launch work for NASA and recover their investments? Essentially NASA is going into direct competition with private industry. Boeing and LM essentially washed their hands of the whole affair and created the United Launch Alliance which combined the Atlas and Delta teams in the hopes of staying alive as a viable company. Whether this succeeds is up in the air.
The latest competition has some far more viable companies such as Spacehab, United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin as team leaders. They have the flight-demonstrated capability to actually deliver many tons of pressurized and unpressurized cargo to ISS at a cost that is a bargain compared any other options. The award is not until 15 February. Let us hope that NASA finally makes one right decision and picks a viable contender. If they pick one of the lamers then the signal is sent that NASA is afraid of competition from other teams and is giving commercial industry no chance to participate in crewed logistics operations. This is sad since they have demonstrated repeatedly that they lack the know-how to deliver cargos to anywhere on a schedule within cost boundaries. This is very bad for ISS as well as any future lunar operations.
To answer your question about subcontracting every single piece of operational launcher hardware was developed by subcontractors and they have the vast background to actually make flight hardware in a real factory. NASA has none of this experience. They were always systems integrators and operators- not detail designers They are trying to force themselves into this role on ARES even thought they never had it in the glory days of Apollo. This is the result of their administrator Griffin who has also never built anything significant but is a wanna be. This approach will be one of the first things killed by the next administration since it will cost NASA ten to twenty times what it would using more traditional subcontracting methods.
There are numerous alternative architectures that can deliver the hundreds of tons of supplies you need on the lunar surface within practical budgets. But they involve direct commercial and industry involvement. Until these players are fully engaged we will not be going back to the moon in a meaningful way. Most importantly these architectures provide the foundations for going to Mars in a meaningful way. Anyone who thinks you are gonna do anything meaningful on Mars with a handful of crew is simply wrong. It requires a bare-bones crew of at least 90 to support three science teams of 6 each. If you want confirmation look at Antarctic operations to get yourself calibrated. Furthermore on any real Mars mission at least part of the crew that goes does not come back on the first return opportunity. They are there for at least two cycles and transfer tasks and responsibilities to the second cycle crew etc etc. It is getting used to not coming back for 5 years that is perhaps one of the most important psychological barriers we must cross. The moon is a good place to start this- staying there permanently creates an enormous improvement in efficiency. You can finally forget about the retreat to Earth as the only safe option. Worth nearly 3000 m/sec delta V.
So the moon is worthy goal- but it is the practice of developing self-sustaining colonies that is the real barrier.
Asteroids are a nuisance to get to from an orbital mechanics standpoint with long transit times that are not compatible with humans who want to get home too. At present they can be explored with far better science returns with unmanned vehicles. The Mars rovers should be the model here- not Apollo.
The bottom line is that the technology exists today to support a continuous occupation lunar base. This is not to say that the methods for doing this are those proposed by NASA. Quite the reverse. NASA is unfortunately trapped in a vicious political circle which prevents them from doing what they do best- advance new technologies that are not economically viable at present. Instead they are trying to compete with commercial industry to make rockets and they are abysmally bad at doing that- but they have an infinite budget.
The technology for moving on to Mars also is nearly here- the real problem is the human aspect of putting a team on mars for 500+ days with all the stuff they need to operate with total independence. That requires a crew of at least 70 to achieve safely and to actually do valuable science. We are far from being able to work with space-borne crews of this scale. In the end it will be seen that the mission to explore Mars is best done when a large fraction of the crew do not return for many years and possibly never. This allows the expansion of the crew into the hundreds and then thousands which is what is required for any semblance of self-sustaining colonization. NASA is right now at the "6 guys and a couple capsules" phase. That is a total waste of money.
Stop thinking you need to invent stuff that has already been invented by seasoned professionals in the commercial launch industry. Trust me we have solutions for whatever troubles your heart about spaceflight. We are systematically blocked by pervasive not-invented-here syndrome and an near total lack of hands-on know-how at NASA. We planned out an entire cost effective architecture that would have put people on the moon in 2012 for about 20% of NASA's projected costs. This was to be commenced in 2007. The offer still stands. Have you heard of it? Probably not- it has been systematically blocked from publication by NASA administrators and their henchmen for years now.
But you can keep on with ARES- it will be history within 15 years if it flies at all- remembered as a pimple on the leprous butt that was Shuttle. Sensible designs will outlast it- as they did Saturn.
NASA is actually creating deliberate barriers to companies to stop them from competing with their foolish concepts. For decades they blocked alternative access to the space station to preserve Shuttle. Now with that horrid design shown to be the boondoggle it always has been, they act with incredulous desperation that they have no timely replacement. Well DUUHHH. This sort of short sighted "management" is typical. Meanwhile we have an American launch vehicle business that is desperate for new missions and it is starved deliberately down and forced to compete with limitless-funding government-developed vehicles. If this was done with aircraft in the early 20th century we would have delayed aircraft development for decades.
I myself welcome onerous budgetary restrictions. It forces people to make hard decisions and not squander resources. Maybe with the right managers in place they will make the optimal choices. This is a possibility of course - I did not say it was probable. But with fat budgets the stupidest, least efficient concepts are still viable. Witness Shuttle.
Direct is neither fast nor cheap. It also requires dedicated launch facilities, dedicated launch crew, dedicated manufacturing and transport systems. It will launch maybe twice a year. The crews will be inexperienced, hardware will evolve at a snails pace and costs will make Shuttle look like a bargain. It is unaffordable.
Stop thinking about reinventing everything and use what is already there and paid for. There are crews out there that could absorb lunar exploration launch schedules without a blink. The EELV launch systems were engineered for rates five times that of today. If you are concerned about having to lift 80 metric tons there are strategies for evolving Atlas that get all the lift you need for 20% of the present course or DIRECT. The rockets would be flying years before the lunar cargos were every ready to fly. They would rack up dozens of paid flights and be proven workhorses before a crewman even set foot on them. Isn't that better than some one-off low rate vehicle with no track record? You cannot even compare the real world reliability of these two options. This was all presented to NASA and summarily ignored several years ago. The Delta and Atlas have state of the art engines, avionics, structures and are made in state of the art, highly automated factories. NASA is even using Atlas avionics for their near term demos for cryin' out loud. All the machines and people are available right now- but you have to get past your preconceptions to allow yourself to pick up the phone.
Orion is a hugely mismanaged rathole since NASA does not really know how to prioritize requirements. They want more crew than Apollo but that takes volume and mass. Then they INSIST on a conical design which is just about the most inefficient shape imaginable. It sucked in the 1960's when NASA overrode all the great designs and came up with that horrid thing off the top of their heads. Then Orion starts to get too heavy for the lame ARES so they chop diameter to reduce mass thus totally eliminating crew growth capability. This will cripple its use for Mars operations. They should ditch the freaking ARES rocket- it is just a crummy design that they are trying to glorify as the best thing possible. If NASA would just GET OUT OF THE WAY the contractor could execute and do it well. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Launch Alliance know how to do this stuff- they do it every day. Most NASA personnel have not designed and made anything physical that has flown in their entire careers. It is a fundamental disconnect of who has the know-how and who is running the show.
Orion in its present incarnation is going nowhere besides LEO and maybe a few days in lunar orbit. The whole lunar exploration architecture is just plain wrong and will not accomplish anything meaningful. It is too small, too expensive and whole pieces of technology needed for exploration are being completely ignored. There are cheaper, faster and more expandable architectures that encompass not only indefinite lunar stays but full scale Mars exploration and indefinite occupation. The beautifully animated NASA architecture CANNOT do these things. CANNOT.
They should start by eliminating most of the Orion service module- it is not required for ISS operations. A slightly modified Centaur vehicle on top of a garden variety EELV can do all the delta V and maneuver that is required for ISS crew logistics. The service module is only required since the ARES rocket does not have the ability to place the Orion in a true orbit- it dumps it in a suborbital trajectory that intersects the Pacific Ocean. The big motor on the Orion service module is mostly there to get you to a real orbit. Atlas or Delta would put you completely into the right orbit and the delta V to ISS would be small enough to use small thrusters to achieve. That cuts development of Orion in half and allows a focus on the capsule itself.
The Congress and the American people should be up in arms about the billions that are being squandered by the present NASA administrator. He and his henchmen have made decisions based on their own personal prejudices and political maneuvering. There is not a shred of technical backup for it. None. The sooner the whole architecture is pitched out as the bad idea it is the better. Everyone should know there are far better alternatives and most of that hardware is flying right now. Alternatives that we can all be proud of and can actually afford.
What I suspect is that JPL is being singled out for a kind of punishment. The present NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, is infamous for violating clear government ethics rules to manipulate and coerce his own personnel and that of major subcontractors. if you do something threatening to his ideas he has no hesitation to call up the CEO of your company and demand that these innovations be silenced. Since most upper management these days have the will of a noodle they will comply to sooth his ruffled feathers. They should be reporting him to government ethics personnel. He is shameless in his willingness to demand that people kowtow to his will. The main problem is that he is a pretty crummy manager and his technical ideas are sophomoric. But he demands loyalty to these foolish ideas under threat of dismissal or loss of contracts. His behavior is that of a spoiled child- which would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.
There is considerable tension between certain elements of NASA- and JPL is not on the list of teams that NASA headquarters likes. By way of example they were excluded from competition for lunar rovers despite being the absolute center of experience in this technology. Why? So that more favored teams with trivial experience could have a prayer of winning one.
Everyone should know that most NASA activity these days is being manipulated in this way via completely illegal and unethical procurement behaviors. Formal trade studies are manipulated and their leaders are borderline incompetent- many are clearly not neutral and are hardly even shy about their pre-conceived (and mostly dead wrong) notions. THey will defend to the death their decisions even as new data becomes available that wholly undermines their conclusions. Teams are told that they will not be considered in a competition before it even starts- completely in opposition to Federal Acquisition Regs. Why? Because it is clear that they will be the runaway winner and are not on the list of favored suppliers. Winners are often not subject to even the most basic technical oversight to determine if their concept will have a chance in hell of working. This is ignored since they are on the favored list. Of course it MUST work- the idea came from the GODS at headquarters. Strict operational and design mandates are written off in order to allow a loser design to proceed. Often a design feature mandated by some over-enthusiastic NASA engineer is forced into the design by coercion even though the subcontractor KNOWS it will not work. Then after a year's worth of work finally proves this they can remove what was a dumb idea on day one. This costs tens of millions of dollars in redesign and years of time. This only can happen when subordinate NASA personnel mimic their leaders and apply heavy-handed, unethical pressures to the subcontractor.
In other words there are no rules any more. Design definition and optimization are effectively ignored. It is simply the whims of a few rather dumb individuals that guide the design and procurement process. They will be gone- hopefully soon. Believe me most of aerospace industry cannot wait until Mr Griffin and his stooges are history. But the legacy of their incompetence and hubris will linger for decades. Their contamination of the legacy of the free and unfettered exchange of ideas between NASA and its subcontractors and the scientists who are supposedly the purpose behind such things as lunar exploration will take years to clean up.
Many successful businesses could not have been bootstrapped without a source of exterior funding that did not demand immediate returns. This is of course the reason for existence for VC companies. But their resources are almost entirely devoted to software and consumer product companies which have shown explosive growth in the past decades. The space launch business, even we could deliver payloads to LEO at $1000/lbm, does not show the signs of such explosive growth and hence does not normally warrant high risk investment. In fact the reasons for going to space, unless you are the military or a scientist, are pretty limited at present. Perhaps the only real growth potential is space tourism. This may be a pretty limited thing for many decades to come. But in any event the limited amount of this "blue sky" money is never used to make real progress. Instead it repeats the past. Gah!
Now if you had say $20B burning a hole in your pocket you could totally revolutionize the entire launch infrastructure. Heck even $7B would get you a very long way. That kind of money would allow true next generation vehicles to be built that would blow your mind. They are not more elaborate- they are simpler than what flies now. Its just that they leverage what we have learned over the past decade and translate it into real machines. You would not believe how small they can be.
These next generation vehicles permit economical exploration of the moon and set the stage for Mars. Architecture studies that we did showed that in less than three years after start of the project you could place a complete lunar base capable of supporting dozens of full time staff with two or more peripheral exploration bases and multiple orbital bases in different inclinations or occupying L1. That kind of architecture permits real exploration. Not like the anemic and downright unimaginative stuff coming out of NASA these days.
BTW the NASA vision for exploration is just about the opposite of where we should be going. Those vehicles are incredibly inefficient and expensive. But because no one wants to criticize NASA for fear of losing some other contract the entire industry is mum. On the inside everyone knows that the designs are total crap. This should not be surprising since they too were "conceived" by people who had no previous experience with designing rockets! They will use the term "manrated" to defend their crummy designs- that is a total smoke screen. You can pump costs into a machine by demanding that every molecule of metal that went into it is inspected but that will not make your machine better when it is a bad design. That is the lesson of Shuttle.
The best thing for them really is for someone to supply the man lift and cargo capacity before they finish and show that reasonable precautions on a good design are sufficient for flying a crew. But I suspect that will never happen.
People can take a lot more that 5 g's. Especially if they are transient. Pilots can remain concious and in control of an aircraft at 9 G's for extended periods measured in many tens of seconds. If you are a passenger and don't mind blacking out for a few seconds you can take much more. And this is with minimal work to reduce the overall height of the person so that pressure head problems are minimized.
I would shoot for a terminal speed at exit of 10-15,000 ft/second with the exit ambient pressure as low as you can get. The object you are launching has to have some sort of propulsion on it so it is pointless to make the thing just the payload. Besides this makes the system much more flexible ( one presumes you might want to go to slightly different inclinations too) and the size of the launch tube and energy delivery is much smaller. To make this really effective you do need to be able to launch about 60-160 mT to this velocity though.
Remember that very light cylindrical structures, when pressurized, can take enormous axial loads so long as they are not subjected to big bending forces. UNfortunately you get those bending forces from the aeroloads you generate on a regular rocket. Your ground cannon may not. Lets say it doesn't. So take a structure 18 ft in diameter. Pressurize it to 100 psia. It can take in excess of 20 G's axial without too much trouble. The vehicle you are pushing scarcely is bothered. Humans might need a load alleviation system. If you can hold 20G's the tube is only like 20 miles long- not too horrible for the folks in the late 21st century to make.
Anyway I think something like this will come to pass- probably past mid century though. BTW the use of pressurized structures is also a good thing for the launch tube supports- it can cut mass enormously. No practical rocket for example can fly without the benefits of internal pressurization.
But know this: the technology for getting to orbit and beyond is not tapped out. There are so many directions for improvement that it represents enough work for thousands of engineers for decades. Structures, engines, avionics, fabrication even aero can all be hugely improved. But they are trapped in near stasis by lack of resources. NASA, who used to take on these technological challenges, has become consumed with making rockets that replicate already existing capabilities and going to the ISS to do ant-farm science. It is basically a jobs program where the jobs are fancy but not too hard. Since they have most of the resources for development and are wasting them on old crap these great advances are stalled. But they are so obvious to anyone with any real insight that they will be addressed slowly and steadily- probably by the Chinese.
As for the corporate "masters", your assessment, while totally understandable, is absolutely wrong. First of all no one is making much money on launching rockets. LM and Boeing management would love to get rid of the space launch divisions. They are packed with risk and produce very little money. Boeing has not made a cent on the Delta III and IV. They are billions in the hole. LM just had their first year in recent memory where Atlas broke even on operating costs- but they are still hundreds of millions in the hole.
The space launch business has nearly dried up. There are a few commercial launches but those mostly go to the Russian- built vehicles like Proton or Zenit. You can have a decent capability and pay the engineers a few hundred a month. The successful American vehicles are left with government business. Profits on government services are strictly limited- no one would ever invest a lot of money on that biz given the poor rates of return.
The ability to develop new machines is then strictly limited by small amounts of money that are available. We make slow but steady progress - but only because the financial math doesn't justify much more. It is extremely annoying when folks out of the blue come up with hundreds of millions and then piss it away on showboating ( Spaceship 1- what a joke) or repeating the past (Conestoga, Roton, Beal, SpaceX et al).
We are all space enthusiasts and would love to see some next steps made. It is within our grasp to make vehicles that can make real lunar exploration an economic possibility. And believe me the NASA CLV and CaLV vehicles are NOT the way to go. You could scarecely pick a less effective path. It will be a miracle if even one makes it to first flight. So instead of making educated next steps all the major resources are squandered on crap. Wouldn't you be a little pissed off too?
I personally would like to see some people on Mars before I die. At the present rate of development that is not going to happen. It could though. We could be on Mars in 15 years with a serious exploration effort if we took the right paths. So keep all this in mind when you get all excited about some newbie's attempt to lift 1000 lb to LEO.
The bottom line on space flight is that if you plan on moving enough mass to orbit to make a profit the machine cannot be a performance pig. WIthin the engines and most other systems are objects that are highly stressed- and simply adding mass is normally not a solution. You are compelled to make elegant and efficient designs. That will cost more than the hardware in your espresso maker.
BTW Atlas V reduced costs to LEO by 50% from previous vehicles. A little known fact. And you can actually buy one and launch it next year if you want. Whether Elon can even match that is yet to be seen.
Lets be realistic- Elon is yet another rich guy who has a fascination with an expensive hobby. He is an outsider who had no prior spaceflight experience. And like most newbies he confused the booster operation with serious spaceflight. The smoke, noise and flames always does that. Yes a booster is necessary but it is only a first step. Reinventing it with some mediocre rocket engines will not push us to another level.
True progress in spaceflight is all about the performance of the upper stage and its in-space capabilities. If you don't make progress there then all the wonderful space missions we all want to see done are out of reach. Elon should have picked up the phone and called the Atlas team. For a fraction of the money he has spent he could have gotten a long-duration Centaur that could have opened up commercial manned missions to lunar orbit. His kind of money and attitude could have really made a difference. And he wouldn't have to create a new team to do it. He could have stood on some shoulders. You get farther that way. You just have to readjust your pride settings and focus on the real goal.
Every damn "space entrepreneur" does the same damn thing- and they mostly piss away hundreds of millions of dollars to do what has already been done. There is not a thought about what to do next. This is mostly because it is much, much harder to do. If these guys gave it a moment's thought they would just go see the experts. We are as smart or smarter than they are- but don't have the luxury of millions in VC or buyout money burning a hole in our pockets. If you add money, an enthusiastic customer and a mission trust me- we will deliver some amazing machines. Essentially they could add their innovations and ideas to ours- and get something better than either could do alone
And its not like we are sitting around doing nothing- the next four generations of launchers and upper stages are already in conceptual design. But there is no mission yet that needs these new capabilities. Cost reductions to $1300/lbm to LEO can be done with present technology but the investment is significant. With present launch rates there is simply no business case. But if you wanted to make a commercial lunar orbiter that could be done in less than four years for less money than you think.
The weird and perversely funny thing is that another newbie- Mike Griffin - is doing exactly the same thing as Elon but with taxpayer money to build a few more mediocre vehicles with a virtually newbie team that has never designed a rocket. It is highly probable that they too will follow this painful path. But education is a good thing I suppose. But we could have gone so much farther as a NASA-industry team. Sad.
Just because they get to fix a huge failure that showed up almost immediately on flight 1 does not guarantee success on ANY subsequent flight. Look up the flight history of the now-defunct Delta III. Or the subsequent failures of the Ariane V. Believe me this team is just starting on a long and winding road that MIGHT lead to success depending on the inherent capabilities of their designs. If they made slap-dash design decisions they will pay for those over and over again. It could easily cost $100M or more to get to reliable operations.
That is why demonstrated reliability cannot be replaced by calculation. Spacex bragged about their high reliability but it is all on paper. Successful rockets have tens of thousands of hours of debugging of problems built into them. You just never see it. Nothing can replace hours in the air. And they come slowly and at great expense.
Elon is now going to learn firsthand why spaceflight is so damn expensive. It is not the lack of innovation or intelligence at Lockheed Martin or Boeing- it is the brutal reality that nature imposes on lack of attention to detail and ignorance. It ain't the metal in the rocket - its the know-how in the people. We have to dig down to root cause on even the most innocuous anomaly - hence we know a lot more about flaws in parts than damn near anybody on the planet. But this knowledge is pricey.
However- just because you launch from somewhere north of the equator does not mean that it is super inefficient. You can perform inclination changes at the transfer ellipse apogee and energy is minimized. This is done on most spacecraft launches. The transfer ellipse can be made "supersynchronous" ie with an apogee above geosync to minimize the final energy to circularize at geosync at zero inclination. The Proton launches from >50deg N and accomplishes its injection with multiple upper stage burns.
You should also know that performing the upper stage burn in one step as is done by Ariane ( injection to LEO combined with injection to transfer ellipse) can be rather inefficient - this is why Atlas does the final injection to transfer ellipse during a second burn as the equator is being crossed. Also note that NASA does not launch military or even scientific satellites on Shuttle. They subcontract that to the Delta or Atlas ( or Pegasus ) launch vehicles. The actual launches are done by Boeing or Lockheed Martin and overseen by NASA. Costs for these launches are quite reasonable and are roughly 1/5 the cost per pound to LEO of shuttle.
Launching to high inclinations is also quite simple using Atlas or Delta. You fly south out of Vandenberg AFB in CA. You can also fly up the coast of the US with some doglegs to avoid populated areas. The latter approach is what would be done to go to ISS with cargo using Atlas or Delta.
It is true that current Russian rockets are cheaper than European or US made vehicles. However they are running out of performance for next gen payloads and don't have much room to grow without a lot of changes. It remains to be seen what will happen in coming years. With the new Ariane able to lift two 6 ton payloads to geosync they are probably pretty competitive. And the Proton is grouded right now after suffering a failure of their upper stage somehow.
If you are somehow of the belief that a CLV will be available in anything less than the 7 year span presently proposed you are sadly mistaken. The maturity of CLV and HLV hardware can hardly be compared. Essentially ALL HLV hardware has already flown. And that under higher loading conditions than would be seen on HLV. CLV is a powerpoint presentation.
The use of hardware such as a main engine or solid on one configuration can ABSOLUTELY be used as justification for showing demonstrated reliability on a subsequent configuration. You yourself are assuming this when you suggest that CLV hardware development supports CaLV. The key is that CLV and CaLV hardware is a single-purpose system that has no use outside of NASA. It will have inherently low launch rate and will suffer for it. Making a lot of hardware and flying it is the only way to acheive significant reliability gains above present levels. A few extra seconds of operation is trivial beside this effect.
It is possible that no one will have bought an Atlas HLV before 2012. My point is that even if that were the case NASA could finish its last design/test and fly many of them with dummy payloads for a fraction of what they will spend on CLV. They would have a cheaper vehicle with a larger industrial base with more performance and much higher demonstrated reliability. Your only argument is that it might help an even lamer vehicle in some obscure way- a pathetic argument but one NASA can make since they are spending taxpayer money with abandon.
You seem to think that there is a lot of Shuttle hardware that is moving over untouched to CLV and CaLV. This is a joke right? Even the SRB's are now different in a significant way. If NASA plays by their own rules every case will have to be redesigned to show positive margins due to the new 5 segment configuration. The existing cases are worth their scrap metal cost. ET is being resized and has a totally different load path which will force complete new designs. Even the SSME is being modified to reduce costs and that means a complete requal. The avionics and software has to be redone from zero. I'm not mentioning all the blank sheet of paper designs done by a "team" that hasn't ever designed an upper stage! They are wanna bees. And though they have talent they will have to pay for their mistakes like the rest of us. Witness Musk's crew- they are being burned at every turn. The only thing that will be the same from Shuttle is the paint on the SRB and the ET color.
And let us be frank about Shuttle hardware. It works because of a standing army of tens of thousands of people and a bottomless pocketbook. If this were an even playing field Shuttle would have been scrapped long ago. It is a mediocre design. But the principle problem is not the metal. Its the leadership. It is common knowledge that Griffin and his henchman Horowitz are egoists of historical proportions. Utterly unwilling to look at alternate viewpoints and intolerant of criticism. It is their way or the highway. That alone will set NASA up for a failure. If a team is intimidated to surface problems because of fear of retribution it is a recipe for disaster.
Don't believe me? Within the past months these guys have directly intervened to suppress the presentation of AIAA papers simply because they showed how EELV's and their derivatives offer an alternative to their scheme. I mean how threatening is an AIAA paper? But these pathetic souls see themselves threatened and will lash out to suppress dissent. Everyone MUST BELIEVE. Still believe that NASA has the wherewithal to go to the moon or Mars with this attitude? Think again.
And what did these papers show? That simple EELV derivatives can be made that can lift in excess of 80t to LEO. No new engines. No new Launch complex. Schemes for expanding that to 140t were also shown. I personally
If NASA feels the need for a new VIF then fine- the whole complex 41 was built for less money than the present cost for tearing down and rebuilding Cx39. Multiple VIFS with clean pad was baselined for this precise purpose. The cost a new VIF would be something like 10% of what NASA plans on spending on ground systems.
The time to orbit is a nearly trivial dial with respect to safety during ascent. What is more important is how many times you have flown that hardware. If the number is small then regardless of your desirements and analysis the vehicle is unproven and has a low reliability. By 2012 the EELV fleet will have many dozens of flights under their belts and CLV will have zip. At planned flight rates they will NEVER overtake the EELV fleet. Failures these days rarely come from calculated events - they come from icing, foam, o-rings and other such weird stuff. Systems interactions that cannot be analysed effectively and cannot be predicted with any confidence today. If it don't fly much it ain't really safe.
What is a major effect is that the CLV does not really place anything in a true orbit-it goes to a 30x160 TRAJECTORY. Which means that if you don't do something you end up in the eastern Pacific. It requires a burn to be performed by another stage- the CEV propulsion system which is not operating on the ground. The addition of this separate new system is a major detriment and very large cost element. With modern EELV's the command module element could be placed directly into orbit without this final stage. The delta-V for LEO ops is small and can be readily obtained with augmented hydrazine supplies and a few more thrusters added to the Centaur or Delta upper stages. That one feature is probably worth $100M per launch.
An existing Atlas V HLV can lift in excess of 30 metric tons to LEO. Actual delivered useful payload. The tare weight of shuttle is not relevant to the performance discussion. The use of the arm is. Concepts where the payloads are placed in trail with ISS by EELV's could drastically reduce the number of shuttle flights at the bare minimum. Then a single Shuttle flight can make multiple assemblies. My put is that for the cost of 1 or 2 shuttle missions a completely autonomous system could be developed that would allow for elimination of the Shuttle for assembly. In some quarters $2b goes a long way. You will eventually need this capability anyway.
Multiple proposals for down mass from ISS have been proposed that replace Shuttle capability and are clearly superior in terms of cost, risk and timeliness- all rejected without a shred of logic.
Your argument on CLV supporting CaLV is pretty hollow. FIrst of all there is a brand new upper stage engine and essentially new solid being proposed. Both unproven. And don't give me all that similarity stuff with four segment- once you change the grain load all bets are off. Not to mention a new roll control system and upper stage vehicle with all new systems. The supposed low cost SSME for CaLV will get no benefit from CLV and it too is essentially unproven. Especially in a five cluster. Even the upper stage elements for CaLV are different from the CLV upper stage- at least at present. The amount of common hardware between the two is limited to the solids - pretty slim pickings.
It's not me with the rosy glasses- its the folks trying ANYTHING to wring more life out of antiquated shuttle hardware. The bottom line is that it would be hard to make a system that would be more expensive, riskier and less flexible for future ops. Lets call a spade a spade and adm
The turmoil has only begun.
Develop CEV command module on a strict commercial competitive procurement with a single mission: ISS. Forget about major exploration of the moon or Mars on storables. The rocket equation simply doesn't make it practical. When you have the time and have regained your senses go and mod the Centaur or Delta upper stages to make them into the CEV propulsion elements. They exist NOW and are superior to the storable junk that is now being developed.
The Earth departure and Heavy lift should also be reopened to commercial competition instead of the horrible NASA monopoly they appear to be. In fact the rediculous 1 & 1/2 exploration architecure should be abandoned as the unaffordable crap that it is. Dual identical 60-80t LEO vehicles are a far more sensible approach with direct lunar inject and lunar orbit rendezvous and no LEO parking orbits with their horrible consequences.
There ARE alternatives to this madness- and they are far better and cheaper than the NASA grand plan. IMHO the Mars, outer planet and stellar science missions should get first dibs on the money- Manned flight should take whatever is left over - after all we don't want to forget the hood ornament on the car of true exploration.