Gravity Assist Competition

Or The Space Game, by ESA.

Minimize delta vee by moving the planets around (this changes the probe's arrival time at the planet). This shows my best solution so far, with some playing one evening, about 13 km/s

This is a nice javascript webpage where a probe is shot from Earth to Jupiter with gravity assists at Venus (twice), Earth and Mars. You try to achieve the lowest propulsive delta vee. You decide when the spacecraft arrives at each encounter and the program basically calculates the rest. It’s quite a nifty little piece of Javascript, the future of web applications is like this. It works fine with Chrome on Linux at least. Probably IE will have problems but who uses that anyway?

I’m ranked at #39 at 12.74 km/s… Far behind the gurus who get below 10 km/s readings! There are apparently some prizes for the top three, but I think people are in it for the fun of it.

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Humans Fast, Machines Slow

Rand Simberg talks about impedance matching. So I’d like to make a post of my comment there (I’ve always wondered why this obvious alternative gets mentioned so little…)

What to do when you arrive at Mars or Earth with your solar electric propelled vessel?

So, the problem with most low fuel demand velocity change schemes is that they only give slow accelerations. Low fuel high velocity change means solar or nuclear electric propulsion and aerocapture mainly.

High delta vee aerobraking is hard to do in one pass – it gets dangerous because of atmospheric variability and potentially other reasons.

Simple: detach a small capsule with the humans that goes directly to the surface (with only days of life support) and leave the untended craft to do multi-pass aerobraking. Hitting van Allen belts a few more times or taking a long time doesn’t matter that much with no humans onboard.

You could also potentially ultimately leave the long distance craft at some Lagrange point instead of LEO. (Cue some clever and complex maneuvers to save fuel – maneuvers that take long.)

Something similar could also be done when a long distance stack is assembled in LEO: send the humans there only after it’s through the belts. They can go with a smallish capsule again. Potentially at some Lagrange point, or in space without any fixed reference, just along the way. It could be dangerous though if the capsule doesn’t have much life support.

Many of these things have potential delta vee penalties as well as timing inflexibilities, but they could have enough other benefits that they should be considered.

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A Proposed US On-Orbit Propellant Transfer System

For the ISS. The shuttle would transfer unused hypergolics to the ISS propulsion module. ATV as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_Propulsion_Module

It was canceled and instead Progress and ATV are used directly for most boosting. Nevertheless the technology could be useful in developing hypergolic propellant depots.

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Far Away, Yet So Close

He who controls the [Earth-Moon Lagrange points/Phobos/Deimos/Lunar North Pole], controls the solar system.

Why?

Because in space, it is not the tyranny of distance that sets the rules – it’s delta vee instead.

Since there’s no resistance, traveling large distances just takes longer, but doesn’t necessarily require more propellant. Unmanned craft can take this long trip time just fine. This is completely different from the implicit mental models of everyday life or historical exploration, travels and colonization. Even places that are far away in distance can be close in delta vee, and vice versa.

The Earth-Moon Lagrange (EML) points have really low energy trajectories to all the other places, including low Earth orbit (or Earth re-entry). They’re the crossroads. They’re probably not controllable though, like you can’t control low Earth orbit either, it’s just a figure of speech* to stress their significance.

For example, Phobos and Deimos have really low delta vee needs from EML2. And they have really low gravity. This means that it’s cheap to send stuff to them, but perhaps more importantly, it’s cheap to bring stuff from them. Since a lot of space faring is limited by mass that can be brought to locations, a low energy source of material is a real paradigm changer.

The Lunar north pole’s peaks of eternal light are much closer to Earth, but the Moon is so heavy that it takes quite a lot of propellant to descend to and ascend from the surface. The good constant sunlight is an asset though. The area is limited so this is the best incentive so far for a “race”, though I’m skeptical of that.

This post was written partly inspired by Paul Spudis’ and Clark Lindsey’s talking about the importance of the Moon as an enabler for other stuff – I am somewhat less certain. (On VASIMR and JIMO I can refer to Kirk Sorensen who has good reasons for skepticality – the power to mass ratio needed is huge and that’s the really hard part, yet it’s rarely talked about. Space reactors are much harder than Earth ones because of the cooling problem.)

We must dismiss analogies that do not work, since space is a different medium. We must use completely different planning than for exploration on land or the seas, because of the completely different role distance plays. And we must also plan on advancing from exploration ultimately to infrastructure, colonization and self sufficiency.

*: From Frank Herbert’s Dune of course.

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NASA Fails to Renew

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Sayeth Orlando Sentinel.

Haven’t followed NASA’s latest movements. The Augustine panel had some potential but stuff seems to have withered down. The organization seems to be a wannabe monument builder without a job. People might want something more practical than monuments, at least I hope they would. Even when NASA has such huge talent and competence in many areas, it fails to function as a sensible whole in defining strategic human space flight. And then there are the legacy issues. One of which is that of Mike Griffin.

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Doug Stanley Backs Depots

Doug Stanley, the notorious ESAS leader has said some strange things (this is his option three, one being Ares I and two Ares V):

Eliminating Ares 1 and 5 and all shuttle infrastructure could save NASA future costs that could eventually be applied towards exploration by significantly reducing the workforce and fixed infrastructure costs. This approach would require “commercial” crew transportation for ISS and exploration missions, and would likely require propellant depots to compensate for the smaller commercial launch vehicles. This was not politically feasible in 2005, but perhaps could be today. Additional detailed cost analysis is required, however, to determine the true cost of a procurement that would require paying for two human-rated capsules and launch vehicles to refine the rather optimistic estimates of the Augustine committee.

Umm. The multi-launch scenario technical analysis in ESAS was a travesty. (One launch pad-> too many delays->multi launch not an option. Hello? And lots of other things, like the unbearable cost of manrating, which suddenly vanished a couple months ago when Doug last spoke…) And now Doug is turning around and saying it might be more politically feasible today? Way to wash your hands! So, politics tolerates more launch delays now? Or politics is sufficiently advanced to launch from more than one pad (or VIF)?

I’ve certainly heard stories from before ESAS of how Doug Stanley had been open minded to commercially launched capsules. So what was this nefarious political influence that caused the ESAS to be so bad and subsequently practically freeze most commercial progress for the next 5 years.

One quite obvious road was clear from day one when shuttle retirement was a real thing in the future: a simple capsule on an EELV for ISS taxi. Those rockets exist and fly and have a history. The sooner development is started, the better, the smaller the gap. You can use that for other purposes as well.

I do agree that more than just the Augustine panel report would be nice.

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Dual Propellant Expander

Or what you are going to call it, an unrealized proposal from Aerojet around 1984. PDF Found on NTRS.

The idea was to have two turbopumps (like on SSME), but instead operate on the expander cycle. Two heat exchangers, two turbines, two pumps. One for each propellant.

 

Both propellants go through a heat exchanger and an expander driving a pump

 

This is a LOX-hydrogen engine. Also this means that since there is the same propellant on both sides of the axle, in the turbine and in the pump, no elaborate seals are needed. Original intent for these engines was for in-space reusable stuff, that needs to be operated many times and for a long time without maintenance. Size was in the RL10 class, about 70 kN. (RL10 has grown though.)

Simplicity and margin were claimed

Think for example if you let a fired turbopump sit in space for a long time. Will some fuel leak to the oxidizer side through the seals? This could avoid that. (You can use helium purges too though but then you’ve got one more fluids you need to tank.)

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Xombie NOW

Live stream just went up at http://qik.com/video/312581

they should be flying at 45 past whatever hour it is now in your time zone. Now on the pad loading propellants and helium.

EDIT:

And they did it! Congratulations! Also great accuracy.

The live cellphone video of the second flight was shot from quite close: http://qik.com/video/3126566

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Lunar Lander Challenge 2009

Armadillo finally won L2 already.

Masten and Unreasonable are still flying for second place I think (I’m not 100% clear on the rules) today!

Spacetransportnews is the place to watch all this. (Or it has the links collected.)

It’s historical in a sense. These rockets will serve as the basis for reusable sounding rockets, possibly high altitude tourist vehicles and later orbital system lower or upper stages. When the operations are routine and landings safe, the cost per flight goes down orders of magnitude, compared to ordinary rockets.

A new era for rocketry is dawning.

 

Update: This is the twitter account to follow: http://twitter.com/mastenspace

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Delta IV Manrating

Skimming the document (thanks NSF, Florida Today). Cute how a launch without an upper stage at all in the heavy configuration works out for ISS (burn SM fuel for orbit):

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