Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
NASA Heading Toward Compromise On The Future Of Human Space Flight
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Private Companies To Play A Big Part In Space Exploration
Space
Flying high
Sep 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition
America’s government has no money for its human-spaceflight plans. The private sector has plenty
THE past, despite the disclaimer often found on advertisements for financial products, often can be a guide to the future. In the early days of flight, the American government awarded a series of guaranteed contracts for carrying airmail. This stimulated the growth of air travel to the point where passengers could be transported affordably and reliably, and was the root of airlines such as United and American. Those who wish to travel into space argue that the government should now be doing a similar thing for spaceflight, with its aerospace agency, NASA, playing the role of the post office. This week, there are signs that it might be about to.
At the behest of the president, NASA has been undergoing an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans. On September 8th the review committee delivered a summary report. That the agency does not have enough money to return to the moon is no surprise. What is more surprising is that the Augustine report (named after the committee’s chairman, Norman Augustine) argues that NASA should stop travelling to the International Space Station in particular and to “low Earth orbit” in general. It should let the private sector do that instead, and focus its own efforts on more distant and difficult tasks.
Five years ago the idea that the private sector might have been capable of transporting cargo and people reliably into low Earth orbit was viewed as crazy. Much has happened since, and two things in particular. One was that Virgin Galactic, an upstart British firm, said it would develop a space-tourism business based around a craft that had cost only $25m to build. The other was that an equally upstart American entrepreneur called Elon Musk, flush from his sale of PayPal, created a company called SpaceX (whose Falcon rocket is pictured above, dropping its first stage on its way into orbit). He said he wanted to make it cheaper to launch people into space and wanted, ultimately, to send a mission to Mars—but that he would start by launching satellites.
We have lift-off
It would be an understatement to say that both ventures were treated with scepticism. But they have now come far enough to be able to thumb their noses at the cynics. On September 3rd SpaceX signed a contract worth $50m with ORBCOMM, a satellite-communications firm. The deal is to launch 18 satellites for ORBCOMM’s network. Meanwhile, at the end of July, Aabar Investments, a sovereign-wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi, bought a 32% stake in Virgin Galactic for $280m. Aabar was not just interested in space tourism. It was also keen on a proposal to use Virgin’s White Knight launch system to put satellites into low Earth orbit. Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic’s president, said that one of the things which attracted Aabar was the fact that White Knight (an aircraft which lifts to high altitude a rocket that can then take either passengers or satellites onwards into space) could be flown from Abu Dhabi.
Adam Baker of Surrey Satellite Technology, a British firm, knows a great deal about the economics of launching the kind of small satellites that Virgin’s system might put into orbit. At the moment such satellites must either piggyback on the launch of a larger satellite or be launched rather expensively on their own rocket. A satellite costing only a few million dollars to build may thus cost $20m-30m to launch. Dr Baker says the challenge is to get the cost of a small-satellite launcher down to a few million, and he is so excited by the possibilities that he is leaving his employer to join Virgin Galactic.
Dr Baker reckons that costs can be cut if the launch rocket uses the satellite’s guidance computer instead of having its own, and if the satellite’s built-in rocket motor is bolstered to do the work now performed by a launch rocket’s upper stage. That would mean satellite and launch rocket would have to be designed in tandem, so customers could not shop around for different launch vehicles. But Dr Baker is gambling that the system will be so cheap that this will not matter.
Over at SpaceX, developments have been just as interesting. Last year the company was given a $1.6 billion contract to send cargo to the space station. (Orbital Sciences, a firm that has been around since 1982, was awarded $1.9 billion to do the same.) This was the first time NASA had included private launch vehicles in its planning—the reality being that with the space shuttle about to retire the only other option was buying space on Russian rockets. The Augustine report now makes it more likely the government will dispense with NASA’s services entirely in low Earth orbit and ask private firms to deliver crew to the station, as well as cargo.
Overall, the report is a healthy dose of reality for NASA. It warns that the agency’s goals need to match its budget, and that it needs to internationalise its efforts, in order to make the most of its investments. For similar reasons the report tells NASA to extend the life of the space station. Abandoning the station in 2015, as is now the plan, would probably impair America’s ability to lead international partnerships in the future. Spending a quarter of a century building something and then scuttling it looks bad, even if the useful science that has been done on board could be written up on the back of a postage stamp.
Finally, there is the moon. Should NASA go back? Mr Augustine’s committee offers several possibilities. It does not rule out a return, but does describe something called a “Flexible Path” for exploration. This might involve sending people to the moon, but might also involve visiting asteroids and other places of interest. In other words, human exploration of the solar system does not have to be fixed doggedly on the moon first and Mars later.
Such flexibility sounds appealing. But in the case of NASA, which struggles to maintain funding for long-term projects because of short-term political juggling, it is a mixed blessing. If the committee’s recommendations are implemented, the agency might still get much of what it wants, albeit more slowly than it would like. But there is a danger that without deadlines and an agreed budget, it will end up very rapidly going nowhere at all.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Exxagerated Cost Estimates Could Sink Human Space Exploration
show details 9:30 AM (10 hours ago) |
Junk Cost Estimates Supplied to Augustine Committee Threaten to Sink NASA's Human Spaceflight Program
The Mars Society has examined copies of the cost projections being used by the Augustine Committee in currently considering the future of NASA's human spaceflight program. These estimates, generated by the Aerospace Corporation, a US Air Force funded policy oracle, have no scientific basis and have clearly been composed to make the case that human space exploration is unaffordable.
Examining the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates we see they claim an insane development cost of the Ares 5 heavy lift vehicle of $35 billion dollars, and assign a development cost of $28 billion for a somewhat lower capacity Shuttle-C type launcher. Both of these incredible estimates are about a factor of 7 higher than what is generally believed in the industry to be necessary for the development of such systems. In fact, in testimony delivered directly to the committee ( Video; Slides), SpaceX president Elon Musk offered to develop a heavy lift system for $2.5 billion, and I myself have seen Lockheed Martin presentations which estimate their cost to develop a heavy lift (150 tons to LEO) launcher at $4 billion.
The cost projections for all other systems are similarly bloated, or worse. A particularly nonsensical example can be seen in the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates for future ground operations. As the charts correctly note, these today amount to about $300 million per year to support the flights of the highly complex Space Shuttle. Following retirement of the Shuttle, Aerospace's cost estimates have ground operations cost triple to $900 million by 2012, and then continue to rise to $1.8 billion by 2022. This sixfold rise in ground operations cost would be difficult to explain in any case, but in the absurdity of this instance is outstanding since during the entire ten year 2012-2022 period in question, there are NO heavy lift flights at all for the ground operations to support. In other words, the Aerospace Corp's estimates have NASA's ground operations costs rising sixfold over Shuttle flight support requirements, spending $15 billion over ten years, in order to launch nothing.
Rather than basing their projections on actual grounded estimates of development costs for different types of hardware, what the Aerospace Corporation appears to have done is to regard each program element as an "activity" which each need to be funded continuously at multi-billion levels per year. The program is then arranged so that no flights beyond LEO can take place before around 2023. So, with a budget of about $3 billion per year (equivalent to 30,000 employees on payroll) the Ares 5 development program is allowed to run for 12 years, bringing development costs to the spectacular $36 billion level. Why, in this day an age, a launch vehicle development program needs to run 12 years (or require 30,000 people) is left unexplained. In contrast, the Saturn V development, done at a time when much more still needed to be learned about launch systems, took only 4 years to complete (Contract awarded in 1962, first flight in 1966.) Summing up all such activities the net result is a program which costs $14 to $20 billion per year (140,000 to 200,000 employees) and which does nothing at all for a decade.
The Augustine Committee may believe that by accepting such estimates they can push the Obama administration into supplying more funds to NASA. However the program they propose is so unattractive that the more likely result is that they will simply cause cancellation of the human exploration effort. Indeed, presented with a choice of accepting the Committee's recommended plan of spending a quarter trillion dollars over 15 years in order to do a year 2025 human rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, retrenching to a purposeless ISS-visit only astronaut program, or just bagging human spaceflight altogether, the administration could hardly be blamed for choosing one of the latter options.
Americans want and deserve a space program that is actually going somewhere. In order for that to happen, a radically different methodology to that being accepted by Augustine Committee needs to be employed. Rather, a real goal, worthy of spending serious money on, if necessary, needs to be selected. That goal can only be humans to Mars. Then a minimum cost, minimum complexity, and, critically, fastest schedule plan needs to be selected to achieve that goal. In order to minimize schedule and cost, such a plan should avoid advanced propulsion, on-orbit assembly, or other futuristic ideas, and instead get the job done in the manner of the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct missions by employing a strategy of direct transportation to Mars of required payloads using an upper stage mounted on the heavy lift launcher.
Once a plan is selected, request for proposals (RFPs) for development of each major hardware element needs to be put out to industry, with the completion date on each timed to make them all available in concert. So for example, rather than viewing the heavy lift vehicle (HLV) development as an "activity" to run for decades funded at $3 billion per year, with initial use anticipated sometime in the 2020s, an RFP should be issued offering up to $5 billion for development of an HLV with a specified capacity with work to be completed within 5 years. (This is not a particularly novel method of procurement - many major NASA and military systems have been developed in precisely this way.) If such an RFP were offered, all the significant aerospace industry players would bid, and, the HLV would be developed by the winner for under $5 billion. If each of the other primary elements of a Mars program (hab module, Mars ascent vehicle, trans-Mars injection stage, aerobrake and lander module, surface power system) were also bid out in similar fashion, the result would be a humans to Mars program costing under $40 billion, with first flight possible before the end of Mr. Obama's prospective second term.
That is the option that needs to be presented to the president.