Using Commercial Launchers and Fuel Depots Instead of HLVs

This propellant depot could have been built so (relatively) easily using the space shuttle fuel tanks.

A large, 130 lift capacity HLV would be an absolute overkill for the things for the things America might find itself doing in space (should our esteemed members of Congress suddenly put the well-being of the country above their own). But a 60-80 ton lifter might be nice to have, for lifting bulkier payloads.

Also, since the shuttles will be no more, we could use an Earth orbit-limited (or not) pressurized spaceship (for 3-5 astronauts) with a robotic manipulator which could serve as a construction/repair/maintenance rig. You know, the role the shuttle currently plays.

And let's start talking about the next space station, which would house these astronauts, as well as perhaps serving as the fuel depot.

And now that that's out of my system, let's have President Obama giving a damn about America's space program. He has a lot on his place but it doesn't take that much to come up with a plan better than his previous non-plan.

This sounds like the wrong approach. It does not spend enough money, keeping enough people employed producing small volume, individual launch and orbital vehicles.

Oh, you... :)

Great ideas. You know, the interesting thing is, all those could be done by private industry anyway:

- In early Boeing documents, an 85mt to LEO was proposed as an evolution of the Delta IV Heavy. It would use seven CBCs (common booster cores), an evolution of the RS-68, and Al-Li tanks. Heck, if a 3-CBC arrangement could lift 23mt to LEO, imagine what could be done with seven, in addition to modern, lighter tankage. Also keep in mind, man-rating an HLV is a very silly proposition.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/delde94t.htm

- An OMV/Space Tug is a great idea. Companies like MDA could possibly work their way up there, with systems like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Infrastructure_Servicing
I would also posit that it needn't be manned, but robotic, like the X-37B.

- Bigelow Aerospace, 2015. 'nuff said.

- I say we stop asking political administrations to do what's right, and look to private industry to do what makes sense.

One word: Diameter.

Yeah, fuel depots are great. But what's a better idea is a HLV of substantial diameter and volume(which no Medium Lift EELV is) that also docks with said fuel depots.

Would a EELV with a diameter equal to the SLS or Ares V require a cheaper and easier design effort than a full fledged HLV? I rather doubt it. Just trying, and a Heavy Lift EELV could emerge by accident pretty much.

And Stan... no more space stations. The current one does nothing important. I grew up loving NASA. I was their target demographic in the 80s and 90s, ate it up and became a scientist myself (Computer Science).

But if NASA is going to spend another decade orbiting earth studying micro gravity and doing ridiculous "living in space" research, frankly, shut it down. Honestly coming to nasawatch everyday is becoming the "look for resistance to the HLV plan" hobby. Every day it is one vested interest or the other, backed up by the first NASA Administrator who says NASA can't do things.

People call the Congressional plan pork. I call it a kick in the pants. I was in 9th grade when the X-33 appeared in the paper. I'm in my late 20s now. What's happened since? X-33, Orbital Space Plane, Constellation, DIRECT, and that's just a start. Leave it NASA and it's entrenched interests will argue about vehicle, destination, size, costs and so forth for another fifteen years. It did the smart thing: it took the decision out of the hands of people who have been unable to deliver a vehicle (or so much as a plan for one) in twice the time it came up with Apollo. And it isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not sticking to one plan, and instead the "chosen" plan of the day spawning three dissents that are out to kill it.

The objections to the HLV plans are particularly ridiculous. My favorite one is saying NASA won't need it until the 2020s. Wouldn't that simply repeat Constellations problem of building too-many vehicles at once? Yup.

The HLV getting built, and it will because that is the law, over NASA objections says a lot about what NASA has become. That people want to build space stations and perform more experiments involving crystals and the human body in microgravity, rather than put man on another world says a lot about NASA.

Americans deserve better. If the next 10 years of research at the ISS, and whatever NASA does after the ISS, looks like the non-construction part of the Space Program the last 10 years (the construction aspect actually being very important work), then shut the whole thing down. It isn't worth it.

Wow,

Everybody seems to be missing the point in all this,

NASA at this time is nothing but a job shop!

That's right!

Nothing but a White collar welfare program.

If you have any ambitions or seriously want to do something with your career--you'd better go elsewhere.

We wont be going anywhere anytime soon, yeah they MAY build a HLV but whats the point?

> One word: Diameter.

I'm pretty sure there is only one NASA mission planned for the largest fairing in the world (5.4m Ariane 5), and none for Delta IV Heavy. And the science community just recommended NOT doing missions that big because they are too expensive to afford.

How can an organization that can't afford the most expensive hardware in the world afford something more expensive?

HLV is the correct way to go; the economics support the largest vehicle you can build,it makes no sense to build smaller vehicle and piece lift the payloads to orbit, the processing and launch costs would be enormous (it would be great for the contractors); if the ability to lift 150 tons into orbit exists, it will be utilized; who says that you have to lift one payload at a time;

the only thing that make sense for private industry is profit, how much can you milk the government for, look how much we have to pay for parts relative to the rest of the industry, get rid of that racket and the vehicles would be 1/4 the cost;

Honestly, that's a matter of preference for payload, rather than a comment on the vehicle itself.

Let's take the Mars Science Laboratory for example (I will never call it Curiosity). How many years has that been kicked around and constructed? 5 or 6 now? And how many are they launching? One, utilizing the ingenious skycrane system and hosting a whole host of important new diagnostic tools.

I think the MSL is great. I think it'll do great science. But I wonder, maybe a more cost effective, and perhaps greater scientific return could have been made by using the Mars Exploration Rover (Spirit, Opportunity) as a common platform, modernizing its systems and research tools, and building (and deploying) a whole lot of them, maybe on one HLV per visited planet. Imagine the scientific return of six MER on Mars instead of one? And is there any serious technical hurdle that would prevent MER from working on any but the most extreme environements (Venus, Io) in the Solar System, access to sunlight notwidsthanding? Doesn't seem like it.

So maybe instead of reinventing the wheel every time a probe is deployed, NASA can get into the common-platform business like the auto industry did decades ago. They could spent more time and money on what theprobe is carrying, rather than how is it going to survive more than a few days, how is it going to get there and how (if necessary) going to land.

The ability to launch >>150 tons also existed
40 years ago. It was destroyed because we couldn't afford to use it. All that's left is three really cool lawn ornaments.

Your knowledge of economics is abyssmal.
It's cheaper to develop something that
has a modest initial capability then grows
AS YOU CAN AFFORD TO USE IT. And it's cheaper
to operate something in volume -- spreading
fixed costs across many flights/users.

Oh, and btw... propellant is easy to launch in tiny pieces. In fact, as Mike Griffin repeatedly said, it's a perfect market for emerging launch vehicles.

The messages I took from this presentation:
-- Life-cycle cost is lower because it's mostly using mature systems with no development cost
-- Risk is lower because it can use multiple alternative LVs that fly more often, and thus no single LV failure can set back the program by 3-5 years.
-- Labor is better deployed, because launches occur at a steady 4 times/year instead of once/year or less.

I like the idea of keeping an unmanned robotically-managed depot. Saves on funerals if the whole thing blows up some day, and that in turn saves enormously on safety-engineering costs. I do think ISS will be maintained past 2020, as a political symbol if nothing else. Nobody wants to be the administrator who turned off HST or ISS; look what a mess we're in since Griffin turned off STS.

Many people seem to think the only way to keep jobs is to keep doing it just like STS. But if we do it with EELVs, and a lot more of them, that'll boost employment too.

It depends on what you;re lifting, and the presentation makes exactly the same point that Werner Von Braun, during the Apollo studies, and other folks before him made:80-90% of a payload, right now, is cheap mass, just due to the rocket equation! The Central Limit Theorem tells us that cost approaches infinity as reliability approaches 100%. If you are willing to replace an occasional failed launch, costs come down, by a large extent. Indeed, this trade is the entire basis of modern communication and computing theory and industry. Why send 80-90% of your mass into space on super-expensive high-reliability rockets if that payload mass is super-cheap and easily replaceable? A 130MT wet lift only has 13-26MT of expensive stuff in it, which can go up with Ariane V capabilities, or more. Indeed, you, in future, would hope to leave that expensive bit in space, and re-use it. Low-cost fuel launch, storage, and payload re-use, in the end, has a high chance of coming out economically ahead.

We don't even build massive skyscrapers or cruiseships using transport systems that carry around 130 MT pieces. Why do it with spaceflight?

There was a reason that Von Braun said that he wasn't into Heavy Lift as a solution, long-term.

As long as Side-Mount is involved, I'm game.

Heavy Lift means sitting on the ground for a decade and then getting one or two really fantastic launches.

Commercial/depot plan would mean spending at least half of the next decade putting lots of things in space.

Heavy Lift, right now, looks like expensive welfare for the tech industry.

"Nothing but a White collar welfare program.

If you have any ambitions or seriously want to do something with your career--you'd better go elsewhere.

We wont be going anywhere anytime soon, yeah they MAY build a HLV but whats the point?"

I think you are right..
I think that Nasa and Bolden have in mind to buy an Hlv from Spacex with fixed price as Elon Musk is offering...

Nasa cannot lead the future..sorry,,too much dragging..too slow..too many complications

I hope to decide fast what they want,,to build the shuttle derived hlv as congress wants,scrap everything..
or give Spacex some help to build in 5 years a merlin 2 powered kerolox hlv?

JonathenN comment is spot on,
In a addition you could have sovereign sells of copy's of MER, a nation could have its own science team.
the USA could offer a MER as part of a package deal if a nation bought a weapons system from us.
creates additional EELV business as well :)

Why the @#!$% are we planning to build HLVs when there are so many viable medium-lift vehicles already available? Just loft smaller payloads more often. More flexible, less cost, and more reliable than a massive rocket-to-nowhere.

One word: Diameter.

Another word: Irrelevant

I have asked this question time after time with little response. What are the payloads that require large diameter?

Lunar habitats?

Nope, you can use inflatables.

Lunar Landers?

Nope, you can use the fuel depot and or orbital assembly. The Altair class lander was nothing more than the First Lunar Outpost lander updated with no real set of requirements driving the monster size. If you have an outpost style architecture you can use much smaller, shorter duration landers.

What are the big payloads?

Mars? Yep, and that is what drove the Ares V-VI style vehicle. With fuel depots, lunar ISRU, and orbital assembly, the requirement for the large launch vehicle is eliminated and a sustainable exploration system enabled.

> HLV is the correct way to go; the economics support the largest vehicle you can build

Your understanding of economics is so mundane that you've got it backwards.

Did you consider that competition lowers prices? And lack thereof raises them? How do you think that affects a government procurement?

I think you're "a couple years short of a business degree" if you know what I mean.

> 80-90% of a payload, right now, is cheap mass, just due to the rocket equation! The Central Limit Theorem tells us that cost approaches infinity as reliability approaches 100%. If you are willing to replace an occasional failed launch, costs come down, by a large extent. Indeed, this trade is the entire basis of modern communication and computing theory and industry. Why send 80-90% of your mass into space on super-expensive high-reliability rockets if that payload mass is super-cheap and easily replaceable?

Makes sense to me!

The "HLVs are cheaper" thing makes perfect sense in and of itself but it's not an "in and of itself" situation; one or two HLVs per year is not cheaper than five mediums, _if_ you have twenty other mediums launching for various things.

The whole idea of the semi-privitization, COTS, etc. etc. scheme is to share the cost burden.

That's not technologically exciting but it's absolutely brilliant if you realize the #1 problem is the unreliable funding, erratic decision making and political nonsense that comes from being soley dependent on, and so tightly correlated with, D.C.

"Indeed, this trade is the entire basis of modern communication and computing theory and industry."

Absolutely.

This company SGI used to own their own CPU company, called MIPS, and they would design their own CPUs for supers and workstations.

But the problem is that chips are very complex to design, and that some of this work has to be done at the fabrication stage. If you have control of your chip fabrication, you can do a lot for their performance that you cannot do if you subcontract. (Or so I'm told, I'm a programmer.)

Their competitors, Intel and IBM and the like, manufactured so _many_ CPUs by finding other customers that the economies of scale worked so much better.

IBM is great at this. The IBM 750, used in the Mars Recon orbiter, is also used in the Apple G3 systems, the Nintendo Gamecube, and is rumored to be used in the Wii.

That right there is about a hundred million units sold, which easily pays down any investment in design, and a modification of it run through a special manufacturing yields a perfectly good chip for a Mars mission.

How much would these cost if they had to craft custom chips at NASA?

It's $200,000 per board to leach off the consumer industry. Do it yourself and you're in the millions.

IBM's applied this to supers as well, building some using slightly revised consumer grade PowerPC chips from the 90s; using modern manufacturing they can make very small ones, cram them together with great density and achieve a very high performance per square meter of floor space and per kilowatt.

This even though it might be intuitive that the fastest chip available would be more efficient use of silicon...

Then back to the SGI. I have an Octane2 and a G3 iBook, and the Octane2 can render about 80% faster than the newer (1999) iBook. But it eats about 10x the power. So the Final Fantasy movie had the artwork made on Octanes, but actual production rendering went to off-the-shelf Pentium IIIs...

The whole big picture super matters.