There Are Rockets – and There Are Vehicles

Watching the armadillo 201 m hop
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2009_10_24/2009_10_24_boosted_hop.wmv
NASA’s Ares-1X
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
and
Masten Space’s Xoie L2 flight
http://twitter.com/NGLLC09

Two of these are elegant controllable reusable vehicles, able to take off fly and land in various weather conditions and corn fields. One is not.

Masten Space 180 second vehicle Xoie just before attempt

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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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Good News Everyone

From Hobbyspace, highlighted by Transterrestrial Musings:

The program of record (i.e. Ares I/V/Orion/Altair), which exceeds the expected budget substantially, will no longer be in the options table but kept separately just as a reference.

Yes!

The historic words have been spoken. Now for a better future for NASA, for spacefaring and for humanity.

The Augustine panel has been good beyond my wildest imaginations. (My imagination is extremely pessimistic.)

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Transparency of the Augustine Commission

Watching the NSF forum closely, the nicknames Antares:

Commission folks reading this thread (on topic, see ) need to request the Bullman study (MSFC) and the response to the Bullman study (not MSFC, ahem). The latter exists only in draft because some managers are… yella, to put it in G-rated terms. They both contain proprietary data and would be useless under a FOIA.

and Pad Rat:

“OSP-ELV Human Flight Safety Certification Study report”, dated March 2004. The soft copy I’m looking at has no document number, curiously.

The response document, “Collaborative ELV Response to the HFSCS Report”, exists in draft form only and thus has no document number assigned to it.

I have heard that the response document did find its way to the transition team, but I know nothing more than that.

Stay tuned for Ares on an EELV after all! This commission could be different than ESAS who got all their data from NASA (no wonder their launchers looked so good!).

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EELV:s again

This time the Aerospace Corporation deems them suitable for launching Orion, tells a Nasaspaceflight.com article . Via Clark Lindsey.

I’ve gotten bored of all this a few years ago. When Griffin was in power, absolutely no change was considered.

From a quick look at the article, the Orion seems to have slimmed down considerably from the ESAS days (probably because of Ares I performance problems). The black zones myth has also been dispelled. Oh my. What do Doug Stanley and Mike Griffin say to that? Will there be  a congressional hearing about where the billions went, and why? Of course not, it’s space policy so no blunder or incompetence is technical ever – it’s all just happy equal opinions. The end part of the article is just bites from Griffin’s speech saying how the government doesn’t give enough money to NASA.

Seems also NSF is the only news outlet on the ball (I don’t really follow them all though, don’t know what’s been up at Florida Today for example). They got information weeks earlier but requested answers from the NASA side as well and got comments on this before making it an article.

Good work, Chris Bergin, the sources, all the people writing articles, as well as the forum people. I think the site was founded in 2005 so it’s been a swift rise to the top. Internet papers didn’t get any Pulitzers in the recent awards ceremonies, but in some specialist categories they might deserve good awards.

Perhaps space journalism prizes should be founded and given out every year.

In my view the CEV is still quite big, and thus the launcher alternatives are limited. Projected LEO versions of Apollo seated as far as six people. Though if Orion’s service module is refueled in orbit, the monolithic liftoff mass might be reduced considerably. The key is to have so light elements that you can use multiple launchers – which then on its own helps to ensure  improvability for the whole architecture since it’s not stuck with one solution from here to the end. The EELV launching is already a step in that direction, and miles better than Ares or Direct.

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NASA’s near future

I’ve been an opponent of Ares I for quite a long time (not from the beginning though, but I have become more of an optimist since, regarding better  ways). In light of these things, it might seem that the huge political and bureaucratic machine that is NASA can finally start turning around. Mike Griffin in his time changed the direction of NASA very quickly by firing a lot of leaders and starting the development of the Orion capsule and the Ares rockets based on the ESAS three month quick study. On the other hand, ESAS’ conclusions somehow ended with the industrial base not changing significantly. Still solid rocket boosters for example. So one can question, did the direction really change in that sense?

But if there’s a real change, it could very well be that an Orion (or some variant or derivative of it) could fly on an EELV. It is strange to an outsider that the ESAS (with references to unpublished appendices) claimed how EELV:s are less safe and more expensive than Ares I. Then there’s the whole “black zones” kerfluffle, that warrants its own entry, if true. Basically and oversimplified, NASA said the EELV:s need new upper stages since they have tiny engines in second stages which need vertical trajectories. The vertical trajectories are a problem in case of an abort, since they result in high G loads on the way down. But some people say the EELV guys were not consulted on this, and that they could easily fly shallower trajectories. Maybe I’ll post more about this some day with better references.

There are rumors around that a new NASA administrator has been chosen. While I do not think an EELV solution itself for US manned space access is smart in the long run, it is pretty good in the short run (next five to fifteen years). What is much much more important is that if there are multiple launch providers and the payloads are switchable between rockets, then that is a field where improvement is very easy and cheap, since one can introduce new launchers to the “launcher mix” without jeopardizing the whole “program”. (The program mentality is one big problem as well.) NASA is the biggest worldwide player in tonnage to orbit, by a huge margin. They have the bucks, and thus they control the spacefaring development of the world.

A lot hinges on the new NASA administrator choice. (Unless Griffin was really a puppet too.)

Expect to hear little

I expect mainstream aerospace journalism to be as apathetic about all this as before too. It seems there are relatively few technical people there, and hence they don’t recognize the whole existence of the difference between technical solutions, they are all equally good. To them, it’s just a political definition if Ares I works or not. Even programs like NASP, people like Rob Coppinger somehow think failed because of “politics” – I find they failed because of grossly unrealistic and unjustified technical assumptions right at the beginning. That again warrants a separate post (there are books about it already).

So, if you’re a politician, a space business person or a technical person working on the space sector, maybe you should read something else than the postmodern relativist lazy mainstream media if you want real insight… And probably actually at least many of the experts have already moved to other medias.

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Conceptual Design at NASA

The Constellation program has been going on for about 3 years. Kicking off with the ESAS study of a few months, it still hasn’t settled very much about the architecture. Even the number of solid segments and liquid engines on the Ares I and V launchers are uncertain – issues which mean a lot for the infrastructure. A high launcher means VAB rebuilding. A heavy launcher means new crawler ways. Everything seems to be reassessed constantly.

Ed Kyle has documented the Ares I and Ares V history, while I discussed the future of Ares V here, the picture is from that post’s presentation. At the moment the design has moved along from the first configuration in January, having added half-segments, more core length and a sixth RS-68. No move to HTPB rubber in the boosters yet or composite wet parts EDS IIRC.

Ares V Evolution, Muirhead Jan 2008

People from inside NASA have lamented the lack of conceptual design skills there, since the design keeps changing too much because of flaws being discovered.

There’s the classic story from Apollo, when Wernher von Braun simply didn’t believe the mass numbers the spacecraft people gave him, and vastly oversized the Saturn V – and it turned out that eventually all the performance was needed.

But the leaps in capabilities were huge back then. Now rocketry is routine and there is already one example of a lunar architecture to compare to. Not many new engines need to be developed for example, and a lot of the hardware is derived from STS and other flying systems.

So how is it that an agency getting 15 billion dollars a year is failing to pin down the mass numbers any better? Over ten ton sudden shortfalls in LEO mass seem to be a lot. Of course, it is a hard problem, and it’s easy to carp from the sidelines, but still…

What will the payload landed on the moon be? What propellants are used? What is the Altair’s or Orion’s mass? And work back from there to TLI mass and ultimately to launch from Earth, all with generous margins. And it has seemed that a certain cycle has formed. First a solution on Ares I is based on some logic linking it to Shuttle hardware, infrastructure or Ares V with common elements, which should save a lot of money and time and keep the workforce etc etc. Somewhat later, rumors about a severe performance shortfall on either launcher start circulating. Then after a while NASA announces a new configuration where the commonality is disrupted. And again forward we go.

The decisions made earlier are not supported anymore because new facts (performance problems) were realized later. But these decisions can’t be revisited. (Flying Orion on an EELV is one.) ESAS is referred to as having looked at all that, discarding it. Yet when some changes happen in Constellation, ESAS is mentioned as “only a 90 day study, how much can you expect from it?”. The consistency of decision justification is lacking. Ability for honest introspection is a rare thing for persons or organizations. I am just an outsider and don’t really know what’s going in inside there, maybe all is just exaggerated, but it looks troubled to me. How much can there really be progress if nobody knows what the launchers will be like in the end anyway?

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Ares I is in a Bit of a Trouble

Nasaspaceflight.com’s Chris Bergin finally wrote the article on Ares I’s thrust oscillation mitigation options. There are three main ones: new pulsed brake rockets, a damper between stages and a tuned small mass damper in the SRB. All three could be applied. They also increase mass and thus reduce performance.

Ares I’s thrust oscillation coupled with the whole rocket’s already looming possible underperformance and the Orion spacecraft mass growth drives towards a possible no win situation. It’s a bit hard to know about the margins.

There is only one earlierdocument making a clear picture of the masses, performances, margins and
reserves out there:
Brian Muirhead’s presentation from 31 Jan 2008. (Thanks to Renclod on Nasaspaceflight’s forum for finding it.)

So it seems there could still be some good margins left. The whole information coming from NASA through unofficial channels is always somewhat garbled, although less so than through PAO.

It’s next to impossible to judge how grave the situation is. When some component (say, a stage) is over
target mass, some manager reserve can pop up and increase the allocated mass considerably. Thus the need for presentations like Muirhead’s which show everything: performance targets, absolute limits and margins and reserves, not only for the launcher but for the payload as well.

(Sorry for the broken line breaks, it’s Opera’s incompatibility with WordPress, I’ll use only Firefox for these posts from now on.)

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