Tiny, Speedy, Cheaper?
Smaller, Quicker, Secret, Robotic: Inside America’s New Space Force, Wired
“From huge, slow and expensive to tiny, speedy and cheaper, Atlantis’ and the X-37s brief proximity last summer represented a passing-of-the-torch for the world’s leading space power. The era of big space missions is fading. “Small” is the new watch-word for America’s orbital force. But as the X-37 and a host of other new spacecraft demonstrate, small doesn’t mean less capable.”
The “smaller-is-better” space revolution wasn’t inevitable. It resulted
from a complex interplay of politics and economics, plus a chain of
engineering crises that claimed some careers and even a few lives. What
follows is a brief recent history of America’s space force from the end
of the Cold War to today, with a glimpse into the future as old
spacecraft waste away and smaller, quicker, cheaper and more robotic
systems take their place.
YET we still build SLS and Orion ????
Amazing!
with out SLS and Orion the US wont be going anywhere in space beyond LEO
That is soooooooo wrong !!
It is so simple
Cargo dragon
Dragon rider
Red dragons on mars and moon
use dragon landing tech and rockets to make bigger human landers for the moon/Mars
robot missions help test hardware
get some boosters up there for fuel depots.
USE ISS TO HELP BUILD RAILRAID
Build and test your capabilities in leo and the moon.
take tourists when you can.
do leo junk programs to clean up leo for safety.
when you need heavier lift bundle your boosters together falcon 7 core as tinker said.
learn to fly spinning ships in leo
horizonel launch for cheaper.
more reusable parts
falcon recoverable whatever
have nasa do r and d on rail launchers or guns to get fuel up there maybe.
I’m an old construction super you have to build things that last if you want to create capability.
Robert I was a mars guy and believed Robert Zubrin when he used to say that only a country can send us to another planet and I also agreed with him when he said bigger rocket means less price per pound for a mission.
Well I have since learned that the best route is not to build rockets for a mission and then it ends. We have to have grander mission or goal which is to get into Space, make man a global species as Elon says and let all missions robotic manned moon mars deep space all help to pull that goal off!(lol I thought all these years that was NASAs goal lol)
I don’t know how to do any of the details, many of the rest of you do. But I do know that more or less the way I just described is the ONLY way we will have any sustained space future at all.
I have questioned Obama for not demanding BEO new space missions plans now. That s why I started typing my silly mission plans to the moon and mars on here way back. dragon drill missions all that.
We have the money to build our way to space in a new way which will create human space flight. We don’t have the money to burn up giant rockets and pretend its the sixties again.
Inner Solar System RailRoad
PS I don’t think that loonies and martians and deep space should be completing either they should all be part of the grand plan!
Doesn’t take a rocket Scientist
Just a little common sense and people working TOGETHER
🙂
Using NASA to bootstrap the lead doesn’t work if it burns up all the resources. Put your money in your sustainable affordable equipment using the FREE market to be the tip of your spear.
Should Mr. Obama get a second term. The most important thing he can to do to save HSF is to cancel SLS and Orion
Competing patterns of thought. “Just get the biggest hammer you can buy” vs. “craft the best tool for the purpose bordering on building it out of unobtainium”.
Simply a matter of patience, skill and determination … as a people not a mob.
Far more cost effective to make them simpler, robust, and on an assembly line instead of huge, complex, and one-off unaffordable, unsupportable ‘systems’. The Air Force is using its intelligence and succeeding where NASA is failing.
The Air Force is using its intelligence and succeeding where NASA is failing.
Wasn’t the X-37 originally a NASA program?
As was most of the VTOL work now being used in would-be NewSpace landers. As was the restartable rocket engine that led to SpaceX’s Merlin engine, as was the new PICA heatshield material for the Dragon capsule. And no doubt a bunch more.
And yet with all this research, NASA is trying to recycle shuttle parts, often actual used shuttle parts, to build SLS.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Yeah, NASA seems to be reasonably good at small-scale research projects. But then they seldom seem to lead to operational capabilities, at least on the HSF side, because all the operational dollars are sucked up by hugely expensive and wasteful mega-projects run by incompetent management that has never known anything but shuttle operations.
When the Bushies got into office, they killed off a lot of “harebrained” Clintonite projects. Then they focussed on minimalism with Stiedel’s spirals, pissed off the Shuttle primes, did VSE, then got Griffin to take ESAS to do the super simple CxP for ultimate gluttony of the primes. In a nutshell thats it – details missing.
Those projects, among them X-37, were attempts across the board to do “dangerous things”. The X-37 is a “shuttle without people”. Long ago the USAF found (with the MOL program) that doing without humans for military space improved the program – this is just a follow on.
Which is ironic, because the Shuttle’s gargantuan size … was due to DoD / USAF needs.
With a fraction of the resources, X-37 can spend more than a year on orbit. It’s the recoverable equivalent of the Mars rover for a military orbital presence, where they can get much of the capability of HSF via teleoperation … for a tiny fraction of the risk/cost/footprint. Ironically, it also allows them to better understand the military application of space for both manned and unmanned.
To greater and lesser degrees, the other X projects that were canceled also did this – changed the game.
Perhaps they weren’t harebrained either.
add:
dogstar – yes, there’s lots more detail to the story. I could write a book on just this area alone.
As to OSP office’s role, you might wish to reference this interview with Gary Hudson. Gets into the X-37 midway down.
Boeing is still trying to sell the X-37C as a follow-on too.
The fixation with lifting bodies (and capsules too!) is about novelty, not total operations cost.
My point about the cancellation of the X projects was to address your design culture observation – those projects were to begin such. The design culture gets eliminated by reductionism, like practiced by the Bushies.
The idea that we already know the answer – repeat Apollo/Saturn. So everything else is waste – kill it.
As opposed to doing a handful of smaller scale projects, bring them to operational status, accurately measure total CONOPs cost, then once you know the proven answers, scale/deploy a longer term system with that knowledge, budgetting in also a follow-on system upgrade with the same design culture maxim to try a bunch of things yet again, as things change.
Its actually far, far cheaper. But cowardly space won’t let you. They don’t believe that we are at a crossroads / transition to economic space, they just think all you need is a simple BFR to threaten with, thus the reductionism and avoid the waste/noise generated by opponents to confuse them.
That was only half the picture. The X-37 was originally a NASA program. It was a flying, subscale prototype for the slightly larger winged vehicle Boeing proposed for the manned Orbital Space Plane program. Combined with a flyback booster it could have been the prototype of a fully reusable two stage launch system. Unfortunately OSP management lost sight of the goal of RLV technology development and decided to go with a capsule because it reduced development cost. Then the whole OSP was dropped for the grandiose Constellation that did away with practicality altogether.
Aerodynamically the X-37 was an evolution of the Shuttle, keeping the delta wings with their high crossrange and soft transition from hypersonic to gliding flight but putting them amidships to avoid the Shuttle CG problems, adding V-tails for much better pitch control, making them all-moving to eliminate hinges that were so troublesome on Shuttle and eliminating the vertical tail which is in the wake of the fuselage during entry and of little use.
And what does NASA have today? The Dream Chaser, based on a Russian design, which has nowhere near the L/D or the volumetric efficiency of the X-37, with a fuselage that is impractical to pressurize and which probably cannot land without a parachute. However there was a nice looking mockup built by some university students.
We no longer have a design culture. Wings and fuselage have such different design goals that it is impossible for one shape to do both jobs well. But NASA has had a fixation on lifting bodies since the 60’s. Yes, it is just barely possible to fly without wings. But who would want to?
I had heard scuttlebutt back in 2010, when I was working as
a contractor at MSFC on Constellation program, that the government was considering
bring NASA under the DOD. I wonder how that would work out? Probably would
rattle a few cages and pull a few chains. Hum… probably just rumors.
DOD and NASA have different missions. To respond in battle, DOD needs and has a rigidly hierarchical command structure. That kind of organization is completely counterproductive in research and development. NASA should be combined with DOE, NIST, NSF, and NIH in a new Department of Science and Technology.
And yet DARPA is, and always has been, part of DoD. DARPA has been extremely successful at a wide range of research and development projects.
When I first used the internet, it was called the ARPANet, because DARPA (known previously as ARPA, but always under DoD0) not only created it, it ran the network as it expanded to a huge scale. All the fundamentals of the internet as we know it today were established under DARPA.
So keep that in mind as you read this discussion — all the fundamentals of the technology that allow you to read this web site today were established by DARPA.
No sir. I know its popular to “slice and dice” up government agencies, but it’s irrelevant to improving things. And any attempt to “redesign” here would likely lead to yet another management layer being added to NASA – at least historically that is what happens.
The origins of NASA dysfunctionalism is the understanding that political dysfunctionalism can be used … to get your way in a government agency – and its the same in all government agencies, the biggest they are, the greater the problem.
Politicians use dysfunctionalism as their stock in trade. They seem to forget that this infection spreads to everything they touch. Doesn’t matter the brand of politics all work the same.
So you need to isolate the contagion to limit it. James Webb understood this best. He was the barrier.
Nowadays, Congress and POTUS would never stand for such. Nor would all you political space advocates who put politics first, space second. Back then, fear of the Soviets kept this nonsense under control – couldn’t get too partisan.
Now anything goes. Because of that, nothing can go. Many things “run” erratically or not at all. Some want to kill it because of this malaise. They’d just make a worse one.
If you want to fix a military, you reassert duty, mission, and command – e.g. consummate military professionalism . If you want to fix a Defense Department, you conduct a review and restructure its “components” around serving military needs. Likewise, you want to fix NASA, you have a public debate on duty, mission, goals, means, and agree on the next ten years (guided by Decadal Survey). Note – agree not decree. Not an election to be mobbed but a honest consensus.
You then fix NASA to suit, apologize to those in the past who’ve been wrecked by this lack for past decades, and promise to never cross the political/agency boundary again.
NASA’s problems are a reflection of us – we don’t do our duty to our country and each other to the degree we should.
A matter of civil discipline. Akin to military professionalism.
How about eliminating GEO-SPATIAL, then letting USAF Space Command assume ‘mapping’ responsibilities — THUS: Up- grading technology all around, while reducing “old technology” at G-S?
THANK YOU, Jerry. To amplify your view – It has been my considered opinion that NASA – which still uses ANALOG data telemetry for some missions is three to four generations of technology BEHIND the USAF!
The USAF has (past and present) its horrible examples in space too. They fair over all no better than NASA.
I believe they’ll find there are definitely limits to this approach. All problems have an inherent complexity and if you try to go below this level you’ll simply fail – period.
There are so many factual errors in that article it’s almost beyond belief. The whole thing is a apples to oranges comparison and the author obviously knows very little about the subject itself. Doesn’t Wired have editorial standards anymore?
Although I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment of the article, I find the initial comparison between the Shuttle and the X-37 doesn’t illustrate what the author thinks it does. The X-37 isn’t a cheaper version of the Shuttle at all, regardless of what the author would like to believe. Before we compare development and operations costs, let’s make some other comparisons first:
– Shuttle was a crewed vehicle, which requires ECLSS, consumables like food and water, and additional layers of redundancy and safety that and an unmanned mission like the X-37 doesn’t require.
– Shuttle was a far larger and heavier vehicle, and could deliver much larger payloads – roughly school-bus-sized – to orbit, compared with the X-37’s pickup-truck-bed-sized cargo bay. Heck, the original X-37 concept was planned to be delivered to orbit in the Shuttle payload bay.
– X-37 benefits from preexisting technologies, like the thermal tiles, that had to be developed from scratch for the Shuttle program. That’s clearly going to affect development costs.
In short, comparing the X-37 to the Shuttle is like comparing apples to goats. Sure, both are reusable orbiter concepts with wings and a payload bay, but the similarities pretty much end there. It’d be like comparing my Toyota Corolla to a semi-truck…sure, the Corolla is cheaper to buy, operate, and maintain, but if I’m trying to haul several tons of cargo from point A to point B, the Corolla clearly isn’t the vehicle for the job. Similarly, while the X-37 has much longer loiter times and is cheaper overall, the Shuttle had capabilities that the X-37 can’t touch, like a much higher mass-to-orbit, and ability to support a human crew…the X-37 isn’t going to be delivering new modules to the ISS anytime soon, for example.
That was my exact reaction to reading the article. A totally worthless piece of “journalism” by an author who doesn’t have a clue about the subject he is writing about.
“sure, the Corolla is cheaper to buy, operate, and maintain, but if I’m trying to haul several tons of cargo from point A to point B, the Corolla clearly isn’t the vehicle for the job”
Unless you have no choice because you can’t afford a semi you can only afford a Corolla.
The admittedly less capable X-37 seems to be ramping up, while the much more capable Shuttle is being prepped for museums.
The article is fanciful to say the least. But saying the X-37 is smaller than the Shuttle is missing the point. The X-37 was not originally intended to be an operational design. It was a subscale prototype for a manned reusable vehicle Boeing proposed for the NASA Orbital Space Plane program. Assuming DOD is hit with the inevitable budget cuts being talked about I frankly doubt DOD will continue to operate it.
It’s good to see someone sticking up for the track record of the smaller-faster-cheaper NASA missions. So many people seem to think it’s obvious a 10 out of 16 success rate is bad. It’s not. It’s good if each of those 16 tries was much, much cheaper than the mega-missions those dollars would have gone to otherwise. If you spend $200 million each on 16 missions and 10 are successful, that’s a cost of $320 million per success, which is far better than $2 billion per mission with a 99% success rate.
Successful results per dollar is the only meaningful statistic to look at, not the ratio of successful to unsuccessful missions.
Wait a minute, i am confused. It is sounding like you said 3.2bil is cheaper than 2bil.
$3.2b to fly 10/16 missions is cheaper than $20b to fly 10/10.
Ie, sometimes it’s better to have a system that is 1/10 the price, but fails half the time, than to pay ten times as much for a guaranteed success.
Do the NASA missions “DAWN” and / or “DEEP SPACE” mean anything to readers here? The clean, ion propulsion technology used on both missions was developed in the mid- to late- 1960s at a XEROX Electro-Optical Systems, Inc. [EOS] facility – now owned by Northrop Grumman in East Pasadena, CA.
That technology is now in its third generation [!] of Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL] mission controllers at La Canada / Flintridge, CA — Grand-children of the original JPL employees who received, accepted then ‘tweaked’ with only one minor engineering adjustment, before successful DAWN and DEEP SPACE missions were launched in more recent years in our lifetimes.
BRAVO ZULUs and “well dones” to those at EOS who put careers on the line!
No matter who writes about X-37, or how much, “no one” understands it.
bullll !!!!
I bet you understand it just fine yet I have not clue ?????????????????
Any litte bit you can do to help my ignorance would be greatly appreciated!
Lets say you want a space plane to demonstrate with. Yet only budget for a few LV’s. Wouldn’t you jump at the chance of an abandoned project you could repurpose?
Dream come true.
So you do your demos … they do what you claimed to Congress … they let you do another … story continues to build in like kind … they give you even higher hurdles … you exceed them. And budget grows even tighter.
Before you had gotten hung up on how to do a space plane to begin with. Because this time, that wasn’t the problem, all the budget … went to application of space plane plus getting it there (e.g. high cost was LV).
Now, to get the results in practice … what do you need? Lower cost LV. That is “operationally responsive”. Perhaps even a reusable “rocket back” booster?
Then you can do same … on much lower budget.
Or … you can “upscale” capabilities … bigger vehicle … can do greater scope …
This is the crossroads you’d be at.
Oh, and dogstar is right about the X-37 being an evolution of Shuttle. A successful evolution.
But do we want to believe in evolution?
Thanks that did helped
“The X-37 was originally a NASA program, a Boeing subscale prototype for the manned Orbital Space Plane program.
OSP management went with a capsule because it reduced development cost.
OSP was dropped for the grandiose Constellation that did away with practicality.
X-37 was an evolution of the Shuttle…X-37 benefits from preexisting technologies, like the thermal tiles, that had to be developed from scratch for the Shuttle program.”
The USAF saw through NASA’s stupidity and picked up where NASA left off.
This in a nutshell reflects the stupidity of NASA management over the last 7 years. Why evolve from existing capable systems when we can throw it all away and start anew with fifty year old technology. Griffin, Gerstemayer, Geyer – the 3 G’s, maybe they ought to be brought in for court martial, drawn and quartered?
OSP management went with a capsule because it reduced development cost.
Which proved false as many of us pointed out.
The “cheap way” was X-38 at the time.
MSFC went with what it wanted and justified it after the fact.
OSP was dropped for the grandiose Constellation that did away with practicality.
OSP was dropped because it undercut Shuttle primes.
The USAF saw through NASA’s stupidity and picked up where NASA left off.
No. AF always had an interest in X-37. What they didn’t/may not still have is the budget to do a program all by themselves.
What did the AF get out of X-37B? They got to field a space plane and gain experience in demonstrating what they could do with it – a big win for them.
As to who to blame at NASA, shoot MSFC. Not Gerstenmaier.