The Rough Road to Space
The developmental road for NASA’s new launch vehicles remains rocky, with apparent continuing weight and cost growth in the heavy-lift vehicle design, to the point that the vehicle, now planned to be much larger than a Saturn V for which the Mobile Launch Platform or “crawler” was built, is now too heavy for the roadway on which it’s designed to travel. There is also no real solution to the vibration problems of Ares 1, the intended crew launcher.
A little over two and a half years ago, not long after unveiling NASA’s concept for satisfying President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, the then-new NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, gave a speech to a workshop on space exploration and cooperation in Washington D.C., in which he made an analogy: “The Crew Exploration Vehicle, the associated Crew Launch Vehicle, and later the Heavy Lift Vehicle, will be the 21st century space equivalent of our interstate highways. This is the core infrastructure that will enable us to travel from the surface of the Earth to the Moon, Mars, and the near-Earth asteroids.”
Sadly, the analogy fails in a way that would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Perhaps this analogy might make sense if the Interstate Highway System (IHS) were capable of handling only one four-passenger car at a time (with the passengers only employees of the government) a few times a year at a cost of billions of dollars per cross-country trip, and the cars had to be destroyed upon return.
But as anyone who has used it knows, the IHS supports millions of short and long trips per year, at very little cost per trip (paid for with a small tax on gasoline purchases) and with fully reusable vehicles. Moreover, its use is not restricted to government employees — the vast majority of its users are private citizens, making trips for their own private purposes.
Dr. Griffin is right that we need a functional equivalent of an IHS for space, in terms of making access to it affordable for not just government missions but private ones — and on a large scale. But the notion that NASA’s plans provide one is woefully misguided and misleading.
A key way in which opening up space differs from opening up the country to ground transportation is that the problem is entirely different. For the highway system, good vehicles already existed. What was lacking were smooth roads that would allow them to travel at high speeds, and service stations, restaurants, and motels along the way which could fuel and maintain the vehicles and provision their passengers.
Space is different. To paraphrase Doc Brown’s line about the future in the movie Back To The Future, where we’re going — into space — we don’t need roads.
There are no rivers to ford or bridge, no mountains to cross, no rocky plains or mud to smooth and harden for comfort, speed, and safety. With the exception of the occasional piece of space junk or micrometeroid, the path is clear and exceedingly smooth, particularly once out of the atmosphere.
No, what the space equivalent of the IHS needs is better vehicle designs. And not just a single vehicle type designed, developed, and operated by the government (the true mistake of the Shuttle was not its reusability, but the notion that a single government-operated system could satisfy all space transportation needs of the nation). The extraterrestrial equivalent of the IHS would be a robust infrastructure of a variety of vehicle types operating at high flight rates, if we want to have any hope of making it affordable to open up this new frontier.
And while we don’t need roads, part of the infrastructure that we would share with the IHS would be gas stations along the way to the various destinations: low earth orbit (at various inclinations), the earth-moon Lagrange points (places between the earth and moon where the gravitational pull of the two bodies cancel each other out), the lunar surface and, later, in Martian orbit. And the propellants that are warehoused in these stations will come eventually — if not initially — from extraplanetary sources such as ice on poles of the moon (if it really exists), earth-approaching asteroids and comets, or the Martian atmosphere.
Only such an infrastructure will make reusable vehicles practical. Not just for getting from earth to orbit, but from low earth orbit to higher ones, out to the moon, near-earth objects, Mars — and return from all those places, without throwing hardware away.
Such facilities would also provide life support, not just for those who work at them, but for itinerant passengers, including food and sleeping quarters, to break up space trips with a little comfort, making trips to distant locales more pleasant.
That kind of infrastructure would be a true space analog to the IHS.
But NASA, at least Mike Griffin’s NASA, has no intention or desire to really build an interstate highway system for space. Instead, NASA, in keeping with its tradition for the past half century, has opted to build a transportation system for NASA and its astronauts, and of little or no use to anyone or anything else. And maybe it’s not NASA’s job to build an interplanetary IHS.
But it ought to be NASA’s job to encourage the development of such an infrastructure, which would enable not only many private activities but dramatically reduce NASA’s own costs for space exploration and development. There are many ways in which it could be doing so. For example, it could incorporate orbital gas stations into its lunar plans and put out bids for delivery of propellant. It could be focusing on the development of the technologies necessary to build it, reducing the technical risk to the point that private funds can be raised for construction. It could be purchasing a lot more crew and cargo transport from the private sector, demanding reduced cost, thus nurturing a growing private space transportation industry with multiple providers so we aren’t dependent on a single means of getting into space.
But if NASA’s not going to do those things, if it is simply going to build another monolithic and costly space transport system for its own use, it should be honest, and at least admit that’s what it’s doing, rather than selling it under false pretenses.
– the true mistake of the Shuttle was…the notion that a single government-operated system could satisfy all space transportation needs of the nation
Absolutely. The DoD has had this problem for a long while too. At the beginning of the UAV development, DoD kept wanting “efficiency” in UAV development by creating one UAV that would do EVERYTHING for EVERYONE. So it had to support what the Air Force wanted a UAV for, and support what SpecOps wanted one for, what Generals wanted one for, what army troops on the ground wanted. And of course, the supposed “efficiency” is now lost under the outrageous SWaP constraints you’ve created.
In the end, UAVs were bought by individual teams, groups, and various elements of the military. Then each one could be specialized to that team’s goal, and they didn’t have to all have the same SWaP requirements. What seemed inefficient (“don’t try to mass produce one UAV for all clients, and don’t bother to coordinate anything about their payloads”) was massively efficient in the long run, because each one-off could be designed and built quickly, tailored to the problem at hand, without needing outrageous foresight.
Now if only the space market would respond in kind…
Compared to the Shuttle debacle, the current program is absolutely stellar (pardon the pun). There are still things the government is needed for in space exploration, so we need a NASA and will have to accept that it will do as government agencies usually do: spend more than budgeted and design systems that don’t work as well as expected. But at least they are going back to a proven design: make a big rocket that is essentially an ICBM, stick a simple vehicle on top of it, and light it off.
So far, private space efforts have been impressive, but are far from taking humans to orbit. Let us hope that changes. Cooperation between private enterprise and the government is the way to go.
I have become firmly convinced over the years that someone in the government read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” back in the day. Which would explane why NASA has no interest in real space programs designed to move mankind off of this world. Rather, they seek to provide expensive services to the government and corporations with enough money and political pull.
And I won’t even start with the distructive effects of cost-plus pricing on such programs.
Stellar? The Shuttle’s flown over a hundred times, and every one of those missions would have landed safely had a handful of decision-makers operated the vehicle within design limits (Challenger) or admitted that they really didn’t have a clue whether something was wrong or not (Columbia). It’s the only reusable space vehicle ever made. It’s the only launch system capable of carrying humans that has traveled into space 9 times in a single year. In its day, it advanced the state of the art of nearly every system onboard it, from life support to fuel cells to avionics to propulsion. The first time it launched was with a human crew, and it completed the entire operational envelope from launch to landing without a hitch, despite the fact that only the approach and landing had ever been flight tested.
Compared to that, the current program is not truly reusable (even as much as Shuttle is), will not operate as many times in a year, will not even fly on paper (pogo) in its current paper configuration, will not substantially advance the state of the art, and will not carry any more than a handful of people into space over the next 20 years.
Why did we build a Shuttle in the first place? Because putting a capsule on an ICBM was too expensive for anything but flagstaffs and footprints. 40 years later, what’s changed? Nothing. The most forward-thinking view of a lunar base is “McMurdo on the Moon”. What impact does McMurdo have on your life? Aside from the few times you see it mentioned in a newspaper or magazine, do you even think about it? Why will “McMurdo on the Moon” be any different?
Not so stellar at all, in my book. A real space program would acknowledge that the principal short-range goal should be to reduce the cost of getting into space, and that the Shuttle made some progress along that vector, but not nearly enough. Everything else is just a means to convert tax money into astronaut memoirs, and when you realize that NASA will fly fewer than 300 people into space in the next 20 years, you realize there’ll be precious few of those memoirs.
If you spent 300 billion dollars to fly the entire House and Senate to the moon over a 20 year span, everyone would cry about what a colossal waste of money that would be. But by NASA’s own admission, it won’t even be capable of that…although it will spend that much money.
Excellent article. I think you skip over the biggest impediment to really opening space up, the United Nation’s “Outer Space Treaty”. Besides the really silly concept that nations without any real prospects for going into space were signing treaties about restricting commercial rights in space (a nice and generous sentiment but truly moronic statecraft on the part of those who are pioneering space) there is the core problem that the treaty proudly illustrates in its constant mentioning of “co-operation” in space exploration:
while never once mentioning competition.
Areas are pioneered by competition, not cooperation. The Outer Space Treaty is so anti-American in how it approaches the next frontier that it boggles the mind. If we want to move into space, then the first step is to leave the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon will belong to whomever gets there first and is able to protect the borders they define. That is just a fact, no matter what anyone signs onto. I would love to see an all-out competition by American companies, NASA, China, Russia to get back to the Moon to start establishing sovereign territory and doing business. This is what is needed to spur the development of space.
I should have just put up Article II, which gets right to the point:
This is what stops the pioneering of space.
One little bit of trivia detail you might want to correct here… mainly an order of magnitude issue.
The Interstate Highway System supports not just millions of trips, but rather **BILLIONS** of trips each year. Yeah, this is minor, but it also goes to show how far the commercial spaceflight industry might be able to expand if the opportunity was there.
A more appropriate comparison is with the commercial aviation industry, where it is millions of flights that happen each year carrying billions of passengers (where one trip is counted as one passenger). I see no reason to doubt that given economic circumstances and opportunities in space, that such a similar passenger load could develop with interplanetary flights
I wholeheartedly agree that the comparison of the CEV to the interstate highway system is completely inaccurate. It is more comparable to perhaps nuclear submarine deployments, where multi-billion dollar machines are being used to send government employees to distant lands and places using advanced technology in a closed self-contained environment. Even then, I somehow get the feeling that the Navy does a much better job than NASA even with this. If only a NASA spacecraft had the turn-around time and readiness standards of a nuclear sub! I think it could happen, but not with this design.
Progress,
I’d like to point out that the U.S. Senate (thank goodness!) never ratified the Outer Space Treaty. It was an amazingly close vote, but some very forward thinking folks got together and did a massive campaign with their local senators and convinced them that there was some opposition to the concept. Pissed off the U.S. State Department to no end as well, and I should point out that NASA treats the document as if it was an enforced treaty even though it isn’t.
There is the “Moon Treaty” that governs the use of the Moon itself that was ratified by the Senate, and it is nearly as bad as the treaty that you are quoting. Still, there is a “back out” clause in that treaty where with only one year of prior notification the USA can simply tell the world “forget about it, we don’t care about this treaty anymore!”
The situation isn’t nearly so hopeless as it may appear, and private development of outer space can happen. The only real problem for U.S. Citizens is trying to fight the Sierra Club and other environmentalists who decry the pollution of the Lunar atmosphere. I kid you not on this last point, and that is the future of debate about space, not about how we are going to be getting there.
Robert,
The UN treaty status site claims that the Outer Space Treaty was ratified and signed by the US. I guess I was confusing internal UN shenanigans with US internal ratification. It also claims that the US’ status with respect to the Moon Treaty is ‘Non-Party’ without signature, whatever that means. Both treaties disallow sovereignty claims on the Moon and direct all efforts in space to be ‘co-operative .. peace …’ (the language looks identical for some of the articles) so it isn’t even cold comfort for me.
I do agree that private development of space can still occur (as space stations would clearly be sovereign/private entities) but I think putting the Moon off-limits is a major deterrence. The Moon is a prize worth trillions of dollars and could be the greatest force to draw private enterprise into space. As it is now, that prize is just taken off the table. Why would anyone even start making long-term plans to do something so expensive when it will not be legally well-defined? It makes them concentrate on shorter term projects in orbit, I would guess, which are much less lucrative. Throw the Moon in and, all of a sudden, a 40-year program looks like a solid private investment.
I like your analogy to nuclear subs, but I would just note that they were developed within an atmosphere of the most competitive nature imaginable. Life and death. There is nothing comparable in space, as it stands now and the treaties are all about kumbaya sessions.
I also worry much less about the enviro-whackos, these days. They will be cut to shreds by oil prices and their refusal to exhibit any sense, or love for Mankind, in that debate.
We always keep escape clauses in our international treaties (that I’ve seen) but we almost never pull out of them (Bush got raked over the coals for legally trashing the idiotic ICC, with people calling him a treaty-breaker even though it was all according to the treaty). I mean, we just went through that strange set of actions concerning the Arctic and Russia’s attempt to make sovereignty claims there. It would be nice if Bush would signal our intent to pull out of any sovereignty-restricting treaties for outer space and explain how we developed the West and how that model is going to serve our development of space. It sounds nice to me
As someone in NASA (The DSN to be specific) I have to say I agree whole heartedly. While the Space Shuttle has done quite well over the years it’s deffinetly NOT the way we need to go to actually expand into space.
I also agree with Progress brought up some good points that there are lots of stupid laws and treaties between us and more effective means of getting to space.
My favorite? The Mag Cannon. Yes, shades of Saddam’s “Super cannon” but in truth just a giant linear cannon for launching mass into orbit. This idea would allow us to actually build our highway into space by removing one of the largest wastes in the current model: getting into space.
If we could just build ships for space use only (like you see in Sci-Fi) we’d do WONDERFULLY! Building ships entirely in space with no need for atmospheric entry would do wonders for our manned space exploration. We’d also be able to build better space stations and get people up to them easier.
Another good plan is the space elevator idea. Sure there are lots of problems with it but litterally bridging the gap between space and earth has some major advantages.
In the end, as you said, what we really need is a way to get to space cheaper, more regularly, and by more people with less waste.
“the true mistake of the Shuttle was not its reusability, but the notion that a single government-operated system could satisfy all space transportation needs of the nation”
Uh-oh. This sounds a little like the philosophy behind the F-35 Lightning II, formerly the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter).
Do you think as the F-35 enters operation and ages, we will find that in fact it was a mistake to try and build a single system (with variants) that can function in so many different roles (AF, Navy conventional carrier, Navy/Marine Harrier replacement, etc)?
Also, Wikipedia has a cool article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network
“The Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN) is a collection of gravitationally determined pathways through the solar system that require very little energy for an object to follow.”
EJ – The Shuttle was a disaster. It flew a tiny fraction of its planned mission rate, and still we managed to lose 40% of the fleet. It soaked up an enormous amount of funds taking us down a path now, for good reasons, abandoned.
From the start, it was a political design, not an engineering design. It was justified by claims to reduce the cost to orbit of everything, which also required giving it a monopoly on launches – even for military/intelligence satellites.
If the Shuttle was so great, why haven’t other space powers developed similar technology?
Putting on my engineering hat, let me point out a few obvious problems with the idea:
1) It has to fly in multiple realms – launch, orbit, re-entry, hypersonic flight and subsonic flight to landing. This means lots of complex systems and dangerous phase transitions. The Shuttle is, basically, an enormously expensive kludge – a truly inelegant system.
2) It requires a human crew. That means the probability of failure must be dramatically lower (for political and human reasons) than an unmanned vehicle. Thus everything we put into orbit had to fly on a man-rated vehicle and be man-rated itself. This dramatically raised costs and reduced mission rates.
3) The manning requirement also caused a need for life support systems. More cost, more wasted weight, more potential for failure.
4) The hypersonic flight requirement requires an aircraft-like vehicle, just for the short time this space-ship is coming home. That vehicle required the invention of the fragile insulating tiles (because an aircraft couldn’t use simple ablation). It required atmospheric flight controls, and retractable landing gear. In other words, it put all sorts of absurd requirements on a space vehicle.
Now going back to a simple system for lifting people, with other systems for lifting cargo (many in the private sphere) is much better. The new manned system, if NASA doesn’t screw it up too much, simply uses a scaled up rocket (a ’60s technology), a capsule with long proven, simple reentry and landing technology (Apollo, Soyuz), and little else.
In Engineering, KISS is a good principle – something grossly ignored by the Shuttle politicians and bureaucrats who forced the Shuttle design.
When was the last study done budgeting such an interplanetary highway system?
NASA’s budget is currently around 16 billion a year, of which about 1 billion is currently for Constellation development. You think you could build a system of prop depots (and keep them supplied), not to mention developing the technologies and spacecraft required for all this? It would be bigger than Apollo in terms of money and investment. If Congress wants to give NASA this money, fine. Until then, they’re doing a damn good job with the gum & bailing wire they’re given.
Another problem with the IHS analogy is that, if a car broke down along the way, it would not render the road and its immediate environs unusable for transportation for eternity, or at least until we can invent something like kevlar nets to bring all the junk back down. Our last tango with better-faster-cheaper resulted in a lot of space junk crowing the “roads”, and the Chinese, of course, took out an entire swath with their recent ill-advised, chest-thumping demonstration of satellite kill technology.
What will we do to ensure that the private space cowboys do not litter their paths with heavy metal cowpies whizzing along at 7 km/sec in LEO?
John Moore – define “disaster”.
Didn’t fly but a fraction of it’s planned mission rate? 60 flights per year was abandoned back with the flyback boosters back in the 1970s. Shuttle was limited to 8 flights per year for bureaucratic, not technical reasons. People in the Shuttle business are continually shocked to learn that we actually flew 9 missions in 1985, even though it’s all right there on every list of Shuttle flights. Plans were to fly 16 missions in 1986. I don’t think we would have made it, even without Challenger, but another 9 or 10 seems reasonable. And given proper funding, that would have been sustainable as well.
Lost 40% of the fleet? Of course. Put 10 drunks in 10 cars, and you’ll lose 40% of the “fleet” as well. Don’t blame the vehicle for the mismanagment of th program.
What exactly is the path you are referring to that is being abandoned? Reusable vehicles? Winged vehicles? Horizontal landing vehicles? Parallel-staged vehicles? Some parts of the Shuttle concept will be mandatory for any future viable launch system (viable in a sustainable economic sense). Other parts were, as you pointed out, questionable compromises.
More importantly, CEV abandons any pretense of aircraft-like turnaround. That’s a huge mistake. It basically means that CEV will not be relevant to the needs of the anybody but NASA. It’s a dead end before it even gets off the drawing board, let alone the launch pad. Shuttle, of course, did not accomplish aircraft-like turnaround. But compared to what came before it, it was an important first step in that direction. Please don’t complain about the Shuttle flight rate until you look at the planned CEV flight rate.
You asked, if Shuttle was so great, why haven’t other space powers developed similar technology? Well, for starters, there was only one other space power, and that was the Soviet Union. They attempted to copy the technology, with extremely limited success (a single unmanned orbital flight). You’ll notice that the Soviet Union no longer exists. No other nation or group of nations has the capability to develop something like Shuttle, certainly not with existing budgets.
Any system that provides earth-to-orbit and orbit-to-earth transportation will have to fly in multiple realms: launch, orbit, hypersonic flight, and subsonic flight to landing. Every system that has ever performed that task has done that, from Vostok to Shuttle to the Chinese Soyuz-derived vehicle. Capsules with parachutes are one solution to the hypersonic+subsonic problem. Given the size limitations on parachutes, they are certainly not optimal for all missions, any more than the Shuttle is. ALL earth-to-orbit-and-back systems are kludges, by necessity. That includes CEV.
Did you know the Shuttle was capable of unmanned flight, including autolanding? There are still 3 pushbuttons in the cockpit to deploy the landing gear, but aside from that, no human presence is required. Of course the fighter mafia that controls the operation of the vehicle wouldn’t allow that function to be automated, but there have been multiple studies on conversions to operate as an unmanned cargo vehicle (incuding a “Shuttle-C” version that dispensed with returning anything save the SRBs and a jettisonable engine pod). Again, policy killed that. But everything you need is there, if you prefer that sort of thing.
Please don’t whine about the wasted cost and weight for life support systems. If you are going to put human beings in space, you are going to have a life support system. You can argue whether it is better to put that in a seperate payload (capsule) or in a crew cabin fixed to a launcher. In the end, it’s a mission-concept decision. Choose how you want to operate, and the vehicle designs itself to fit your concept. If you just want to go to earth orbit and back, that capsule had better be VERY modular, or it’s a dumb way to do it. If you want to go to the moon, detachable capsules make sense for some mission concepts.
I agree that atmospheric flight controls and retractable landing gear are absurd requirements for a space vehicle. But the Shuttle is not a pure space vehicle…it’s an earth-to-orbit-to-earth vehicle. Atmospheric flight controls and landing gear are the price you pay for rapid turnaround. If you just want to land a capsule and put it in a museum, you don’t need any of that. But if you had to put your car in a museum after a single trip to the grocery store, I wouldn’t own one, and neither would you.
Here’s another way to look at it…if capsules are better, why did the Russians abandon Mir for the ISS? You could build Mir with a simple, proven system (Soyuz) for lifting people, and other systems (Proton) for lifting cargo. You couldn’t build ISS that way…it was designed from the start to utilize all the extra capabilities that Shuttle provided that were unavailable anywhere else. Capsules may be simple, but a capsule on an expendable rocket is a fiendishly expensive way to get people into orbit. And despite making the capsule semi-reusable (10+ flights before retirement of each serial number) and using as much Shuttle-derived technology as possible to hold down the cost, Constellation is still fiendishly expensive. That’s roughly 16 billion 2005 dollars per year for 2 sorties of 2 vehicles (1 stick launch plus 1 HLV launch). This is progress?
Shuttle was far from perfect. But for something designed in the 1970s and first flown in the 1980s, it was revolutionary. Compared to what came before it, it was as advanced as say, a Ford Tri-Motor was to the Wright Flyer. Note that we don’t use Ford Tri-Motors to deliver the mail anymore…they are obsolete, and the Shuttle is rapidly becoming obsolete as well. But we didn’t go back to “biplanes using the latest Tri-Motor derived techology”, and we shouldn’t go back to concepts recycled from the 1960s, either.
Disaster? Try an engineers ego giving the wrong decision for an answer. Some lost their jobs when they spilled their guts about the truth. Many articles about the decision to launch when it was unsafe. When you can’t tell the truth baffle them with BS.
I have to agree with everything EJ articulated so well. The Shuttle is a fantastic success and an amazing concept. It’s not perfect by far and that’s obviously not the fault of the vehicle. For one, they could have used a little more funding at the right times so they wouldn’t have to make some bad compromises but that’s always been the case with NASA projects (and it’s always been the case that I want to fund them more
). But Constellation is the next thing and I hope it’s a great success as well. We are going back to a Saturn style launch system. It’s not necessarily backwards progress though. The original article is unnecessarily alarmist and yes, the interstate system analogy is ridiculous. We need to fund development projects more so that there are varying choices for launch and space vehicle hardware. I would like to see more work with the aerospike engine and X33 concept.