F-22 production termination is premature

[93143]

Well, this is fun, but it's starting to feel like we aren't really talking about the F-22 any more...

For the record, I think it's a mistake to cancel it, and I hope the United States doesn't have cause to regret it later... Canada was very lucky we didn't have to fight WWIII with BOMARCs and Voodoos...

IMHO, we should focus first on getting a cheap, small cargo/crew capable launcher for LEO ready. Then when getting to LEO is affordable and routine, we can decide on what else to do.

That's a reasonable position to take.

However, I personally think NewSpace will have that covered shortly, as much as can be done without long-shot tech development, so NASA should leave the ISS to them and blaze a trail outward.

Waiting for NASA (or anyone, for that matter) to come up with a revolution in LEO transport could take quite a while. I'd rather get out of LEO and do something interesting, especially when we already have a system that could do the job with minor modifications, and we're about to lose it.

Let's face it; the cost to LEO isn't coming down massively until someone invents a fully reusable SSTO. The best idea going is probably Skylon. Like any SSTO, Skylon is useless for operations beyond LEO (even GTO satellite launches require an upper stage), and its payload is tiny compared with what would be necessary for exploration hardware. Absent a huge technological leap like Polywell or M-E drives, I don't see anything coming that could do the exploration job significantly better than Jupiter.

This is why I dont like NASA developing launchers. They have had a horrible record of failed or half failed attempts.

That's because they've never been funded properly (except for Apollo, which was a crash program). It's not their fault. Now they've finally got an idea they can execute quickly and cleanly without a huge plus-up, and you want to pull the plug?

And I think that Soyuz has had a lower rate of fatal accidents than the shuttle with a lower cost per launch as well.

1.75% versus 2.02%, as of a few STS launches after Columbia. Statistically insignificant. Soyuz has also had some close calls that didn't turn fatal...

It is stil to expensive and it is not progress.
Ultimately Constellation is a step back in every aspect. DIRECT just as much, but maybe a bit cheaper.

I don't agree. In some areas (mostly downmass), it is a bit of a step back from Shuttle capabilities, but mostly it offers a dramatic increase in payload capability and the possibility of going beyond LEO. Don't think Orion isn't an advance over Apollo just because it's capsule-shaped. It's a good shape for the job it does.

Also, the SSPDM concept is an interesting one, that gives Orion all the capabilities of Shuttle (except downmass of course). A bigger version designed for the full size of the PLF could be a very useful and versatile multi-mission module...

DIRECT estimates that at a reasonable flight rate (more than a half a dozen launches a year or so; DIRECT's plan calls for twice that), Jupiter would cost less than $4000 per kg to orbit. That's better than the projected numbers for the Falcon 9, and it's based on very well known quantities (STS costs).

While not a technological advance SpaceX has developed much more for a fraction of the money that the paper rocket Constellation has cost so far.
Sure, they are not perfect and they will have failures and more failures. But they are learning and they are ultimately going to make profit.
Constellation will only cost money.

Ares was just a bad idea in the first place, foisted on NASA by an administrator who thought his ideas were automatically better than anyone else's - and was willing to distort the analysis to make things come out the way he wanted them to. Also, a large part of the cost of Constellation has been wasted fixed costs because they can't get properly started until STS is out of the way.

Yes, NASA is a bit inefficient right now. I think it's fixable, given the right leadership (that can figure out who needs to get fired), adequate funding and a clear goal everyone can believe in. Apparently something like a third (IIRC) of the work done on Apollo was voluntary unpaid overtime...

The only way SpaceX will make a profit on exploration missions in the near or medium term is if the government pays them. No one else will - a few billionaires might pay for trips to the moon, but that certainly won't cover their costs...

So how is buying launch services from SpaceX fundamentally different from buying them from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ATK, USA and the rest? The company profits from the money the government is paying them. That goes into salaries and bonuses and whatnot, and is eventually rolled back into the economy.

Now we have two questions: what do we want to do with our human spaceflight program, and what's the cheapest and quickest and least risky way to do it?

If the answer to the first question is "stay in a holding pattern in LEO until we figure out how to make it cheap", then NASA might be better off getting out of the launcher business altogether. If it's "explore the solar system", no commercial entity except ULA is anywhere near being able to support that goal, and even they would require more "spiral development" to really get a robust capability. Jupiter is low-hanging fruit.

[93143]

Incidentally, I think having a propellant depot to fill in support of NASA exploration missions could serve as a substantial market impetus to improve launch costs to LEO, much more so than anything we're doing now...

[TallDave]

Did you guys see the relative costs on the wiki comparison?

If SpaceX can really deliver that, that would seem likely to make more applications cost-effective, and exploration less costly.

The only way SpaceX will make a profit on exploration missions in the near or medium term is if the government pays them. No one else will - a few billionaires might pay for trips to the moon, but that certainly won't cover their costs...

Yeah, there's no spice routes in space. It's a public good, and one of questionable value.

Even with water I don't see how the Moon can ever be anything but a waste of money. Mars or Venus at least have some hope of being marginally habitable at some future point. I'd rather see more exploration and terraforming experiments than another Moon landing ("Just think, you can tell your kids you were watching when Man walked on the Moon... again."). I'd also like to know what's going on with the Pioneer anomaly.

[93143]

Did you guys see the relative costs on the wiki comparison?

If SpaceX can really deliver that, that would seem likely to make more applications cost-effective.

Yes, I saw it. The Falcon 9 Heavy looks to come in a bit below the Jupiter at $3300/kg versus $3500/kg. If they can deliver on that, which isn't a given. Regular Falcon 9 would be more expensive.

Of course, NASA is forbidden to compete commercially...

[TallDave]

I was actually looking at the GTO. The difference is much larger there.

$7500 vs $51,000 for the Shuttle? Wow.

[kunkmiester]

I'd also like to know what's going on with the Pioneer anomaly.

Eh?[/list]

[93143]

I was actually looking at the GTO. The difference is much larger there.

$7500 vs $51,000 for the Shuttle? Wow.

Yeah, Shuttle isn't well suited for high-orbit launches.

Jupiter-246, on the other hand, is specifically designed to get optimum EDS performance, and takes a slight penalty to LEO payload to do so. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it could beat that Falcon 9 Heavy number...

Not that you'd use it to put stuff in GSO... even if you could find someone who wanted to orbit a 40-ton comsat, NASA isn't allowed to sell launch services... and GSO isn't a particularly useful place to put a space station...

EDIT: According to DIRECT, the old J-232 from v2.0 (using RS-68) was supposed to get below $3000/kg to LEO at 12 flights per year, or just over $4000/kg at 6 flights per year. J-120 was a bit higher. (Keep in mind that they use the same core and boosters, so they share a good chunk of the economies of scale.) The $3500/kg figure is an approximation from memory; I can't find the presentation it was from, but I believe it was for the J-130 (SSME). Of course since the J-130 has about 75% of the performance of the J-246, whereas the J-120 had only about 45% of the performance of the J-232, the number may not drop significantly when you add the extra SSME and upper stage...

[IntLibber]

Did you guys see the relative costs on the wiki comparison?

If SpaceX can really deliver that, that would seem likely to make more applications cost-effective, and exploration less costly.

The only way SpaceX will make a profit on exploration missions in the near or medium term is if the government pays them. No one else will - a few billionaires might pay for trips to the moon, but that certainly won't cover their costs...

Yeah, there's no spice routes in space. It's a public good, and one of questionable value.

Even with water I don't see how the Moon can ever be anything but a waste of money. Mars or Venus at least have some hope of being marginally habitable at some future point. I'd rather see more exploration and terraforming experiments than another Moon landing ("Just think, you can tell your kids you were watching when Man walked on the Moon... again."). I'd also like to know what's going on with the Pioneer anomaly.

Water means cheap rocket fuel in space to refuel with. LH2/LOX depots in LEO supplied from lunar ISRU facilities means the cost to send anything to Mars drops by half, even if you only want the LH2 for your VASIMR system. You'll still need LOX for your Mars Lander, so launching the Mars Lander into LEO dry will allow it to carry a lot more supplies and equipment.

This means the moon is the only place in space which makes economic sense to colonise and industrialize. Lunar South Pole is now the Saudi Arabia of NEO.

[kunkmiester]

To expand somewhat on IntLibber:

The moon has 1/6th the gravity of earth. I'm not sure that the fraction works well, but with that massive drop in gravity and no air, it's tremendously cheaper to ship something to orbit from the moon, than from Earth.

So, for future missions out of our planetary system, we'd build factories, mines, and farms on the moon, and despite how much that'll cost, it'll be much cheaper in the long run for supporting Mars missions and other ideas, than it would be to ship the same material from Earth.

[DeltaV]

I'd also like to know what's going on with the Pioneer anomaly.

And the Flyby Anomaly.

[Skipjack]

RLV/SSTO is a unicorn

I hear NASA (as Burt Rutan called them NaySay) talking.
There have been many reasonable studies for RLVs and even SSTO RLVs

Waiting for NASA (or anyone, for that matter) to come up with a revolution in LEO transport could take quite a while.

NASA is indirectly and directly responsible for this mess.
1. They fail to build RLVs due to politics and polticialy motivated decisions.
2. To cover their shameful failures, they use the lame excuse of "RLV is impossible with current technology". Everyone believes it (since NASA says it after all) and that is the end of any seriously funded development on that matter.
2. They offer heavily subsidized launches on the shuttle and refuse to buy from 3rd parties (until now that the shuttle is retired).

This caused a climate of stagnation in Space launcher development.

the cost to LEO isn't coming down massively until someone invents a fully reusable SSTO. The best idea going is probably Skylon. Like any SSTO, Skylon is useless for operations beyond LEO (even GTO satellite launches require an upper stage), and its payload is tiny compared with what would be necessary for exploration hardware.

Skylon is an interesting concept, but not the only concept for an SSTO- RLV. In fact some might argue that there are simpler ways to achieve a simillar goal (e.g. VTOL concepts).
Still, it is true that any RLV will have comparably smaller payloads. To me this only means that you will need more flights, orbital debots and assembly, etc Thats all.
Or, you build different launchers for different purposes.
After all, you dont use a delivery truck to go to work every day, do you?

Either way, RLVs can do the job, or at least part of the job just fine.

Absent a huge technological leap like Polywell or M-E drives, I don't see anything coming that could do the exploration job significantly better than Jupiter.

I dont agree. I do see the benefit of Polywell and M-E drives and that is one reason why I am on this board. I do however think that RLVs are possible without this technology.

That's because they've never been funded properly (except for Apollo, which was a crash program). It's not their fault.

Read up on the X33 please. NASA scrapped it after massive cost overruns. The cost+ contract system employd by NASA is unsuitable for this kind of development nowadays. It worked during Apollo days, but not now. NASA needs to employ fixed cost contracts and competitions with milestones.
Also read up on the DC-X to see how political decisions got a good project cancelled after a minor setback. The DC-X was cheap compared to what the paper rocket Constellation has cost so far.

Now they've finally got an idea they can execute quickly and cleanly without a huge plus-up, and you want to pull the plug?

I doubt that they will select DIRECT.

I don't agree. In some areas (mostly downmass), it is a bit of a step back from Shuttle capabilities, but mostly it offers a dramatic increase in payload capability and the possibility of going beyond LEO. Don't think Orion isn't an advance over Apollo just because it's capsule-shaped. It's a good shape for the job it does.

It is technologically not a big step foreward from Apollo and IMHO a step backwards from the Shuttle. I am speaking technologically.
Also the development cost is way to high for what is achieved with this. Ares would still be very expensive too.
DIRECT might be cheaper, but one would have to see how much in the end.

Jupiter would cost less than $4000 per kg to orbit. That's better than the projected numbers for the Falcon 9, and it's based on very well known quantities (STS costs).

If you need that many heavy payloads, which is rarely needed other than for "exploration". Also the cost for Falcon 9 launches will come down after a while. The initial launches will be more expensive (still cheaper than anything else that is available right now).
Please also forgive my skepticism towards the price predictions for DIRECT. I doubt it will be as cheap in the end. Also factor in the initial development cost. Space X needs to make a profit. DIRECT does not.

Yes, NASA is a bit inefficient right now.

An understatement.

The only way SpaceX will make a profit on exploration missions in the near or medium term is if the government pays them.

But they dont need NASA to pay them for exploration missions in order to have a profitable launcher. The most expensive part of making their Dragon capsule manned is the escape system. The cost for this is some 300 million USD. That is all they want NASA to pay for (other than the launches themselves). A ridiculously small price compared to anything NASA could come up with.

So how is buying launch services from SpaceX fundamentally different from buying them from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ATK, USA and the rest? The company profits from the money the government is paying them. That goes into salaries and bonuses and whatnot, and is eventually rolled back into the economy.

SpaceX is cheaper.

If the answer to the first question is "stay in a holding pattern in LEO until we figure out how to make it cheap", then NASA might be better off getting out of the launcher business altogether.

Exactly what I am saying.
Otherwise anything we do is going to be temporary like Apollo. Nothing that has a lasting effect.
Even the ISS already has an expiration date, due to the expense of getting supplies into orbit. That is what I call a waste of money!

Incidentally, I think having a propellant depot to fill in support of NASA exploration missions could serve as a substantial market impetus to improve launch costs to LEO, much more so than anything we're doing now...

I agree on that one. I think that this can be perfectly well done by SpaceX, e.g.

Even with water I don't see how the Moon can ever be anything but a waste of money. Mars or Venus at least have some hope of being marginally habitable at some future point.

The moon would be a stepping stone and testing ground for new technologies.
E.g. it would make a very good refueling station and launch base for interplanetary missions.

Yes, I saw it. The Falcon 9 Heavy looks to come in a bit below the Jupiter at $3300/kg versus $3500/kg. If they can deliver on that, which isn't a given. Regular Falcon 9 would be more expensive.
Of course, NASA is forbidden to compete commercially...

Again, these are the initial launch costs. According to Elon Musk, they will come down as time goes by and they are planning to at least partially reuse their launchers. Also, the initial development cost of Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 heavy is miniscule compared to the development cost of any NASA launcher. If you factor that cost in, then there is NO WAY that they can be cost competitive. Space X has to earn their development cost somehow, after all, NASA does not.

[TallDave]

Water means cheap rocket fuel in space to refuel with.

Building a processing plant to make fuel from water sounds way too expensive to be worthwhile anytime soon, if ever. It's going to cost a lot of energy to make the fuel, so you'll need a huge investment in solar panels. Has anyone ever run the numbers on this?

So, for future missions out of our planetary system, we'd build factories, mines, and farms on the moon, and despite how much that'll cost, it'll be much cheaper in the long run for supporting Mars missions and other ideas, than it would be to ship the same material from Earth.

Sure, but why put them on the Moon? Anything you could do there you could do somewhere closer for a lot less.

The moon would be a stepping stone and testing ground for new technologies.
E.g. it would make a very good refueling station and launch base for interplanetary missions.

Maybe a fuel stop. Other than that, I don't see a lot of advantages for the Moon over any randomly chosen point in space. It has at least one sizable disadvantage: it's at the bottom of a gravity well. Energy to get in, energy to get out.

The logistics of maintaining a lunar base anytime soon are just horrible. It will almost certainly be much cheaper to do those things somewhere else. I would rather see resources used for something less symbolic and more useful than returning to Luna before abandoning it again for another half-century.

[jnaujok]

Maybe a fuel stop. Other than that, I don't see a lot of advantages for the Moon over any randomly chosen point in space. It has at least one sizable disadvantage: it's at the bottom of a gravity well. Energy to get in, energy to get out.

But it's a gravity well only. No atmosphere makes a huge difference. Consider the 300+ foot tall Apollo Saturn V rocket it took to get that tiny capsule and lunar lander to orbit. The giant third stage to get it to the Moon. Then consider it took only a single rocket motor on the LEM to take it back to orbit, and another single motor on the command module to get them back to Earth.

What's the big cost difference? The atmosphere gets rid of the entire first and second stage stack, the lower gravity ditches the third stage. Launching from the moon means a small rocket gets you orbital or beyond. That means more mass to orbit. Since you lose all that advantage if you have to manufacture on Earth, then lunar manufacture of components makes sense, long term.

Consider, the actual change in energy of the Shuttle from ground to orbit is around 565 million newtons, yet the shuttle launch generates just shy of 5 Billion newtons to do that. Where does the other 4.5 billion newtons go? Mostly to heating air as the shuttle pushes it out of the way. In fact, half that energy is needed and gone in the first 90 seconds, just to get a lousy 10% of the way to orbit. What happens in that first 10%? Answer: We have to plow our way through 95% of the atmosphere.

Moon = no atmosphere, means a 80%+ savings in energy expended to reach orbit. Add that to an orbit that's already 8 times cheaper in energy to reach, and you're talking about a savings of 40 times, or 40 times the payload for the same expense. If we go with a 100 metric ton lift capacity for Ares V, then launching an Ares V from the moon means 4,000 metric tons of lift capacity.

To put that in perspective, the complete ISS is about 350 metric tons. So, you could launch 10 of them from the moon in one Ares V shot. That's an awful lot of capacity to just ignore the possibility of using the moon for more than just fuel.

[TallDave]

True, but otoh you would need a lot more fuel to land on the Earth if it had no atmosphere. Smaller problem on the Moon of course, but no problem at all at a space station.

Plus, you can move your space station, change its velocity and direction, etc. The Moon is wherever it is and has whatever speed and direction it has.

To put that in perspective, the complete ISS is about 350 metric tons. So, you could launch 10 of them from the moon in one Ares V shot. That's an awful lot of capacity to just ignore the possibility of using the moon for more than just fuel.

Sure, but the cost of launching from a random point in space is... zero.

[Skipjack]

Smaller problem on the Moon of course, but no problem at all at a space station.

Sure, but the cost of launching from a random point in space is... zero.

That is absolutely not true. You know space is one thing most of all: Empty!
So there is no materials (ok, very, very, very little) for making fuel out of, or for making habitats out of. Water on the moon can be used for making fuel and for storing solar energy for night in Fuel Cells. You can also make water for consumption by humans. All that would cost a lot of money if it had to be transported somewhere. Also when it comes to building something (e.g. a spaceship), then I would assume that doing that on solid ground with a little bit of gravity is easier than doing it floating in space (I might be wrong here, but I do imagine that). After all, you can drop a hammer and it will land at your feet and not end up crashing into a window of the spacestation, or a supply capsule or something like that. I would not underestimate this. A little gravity like on the moon also allows people to stay up there longer. It just makes sense.
You can also provide radiation shelter for your workers easier on the moon than you can orbit. I think that the fact that there is plenty of water on the moon is really helpful for space exploration and I believe it is one more reason to return to the moon. Before we do anything though, we have to get into orbit (cheaply). You have to learn to walk, before you can run.