How We Utilize Space: Slow Pokes and Converts
Budget Pressures Prompt ISS Partners To Justify Costs, Aviation Week
“NASA needs to get out of the business of running the competition and selecting experimenters and researchers to fly on ISS,” Bolden says. “We realize if we truly want to enhance the utilization, we’ve got to cast our net as wide as we can in bringing people aboard to do experiments.” But Florida-based CASIS has yet to identify any proposals worth funding and has been dogged by public relations issues, notably the resignation of its CEO after less than six months on the job. If CASIS can sort itself out, “then our proposal would be that we expand it even more broadly so you don’t just have academia and the partner organizations doing the research on station,” Bolden says.”
Kelly once against Obama space plan, now open to it, MSNBC
“MSNBC: Do you think that private companies going into space will work? Do you see this as truly the future of space flight ?
Mark Kelly: You know, initially i didn’t. I was not a big fan of this plan that the Obama administration had early on. But just seeing how it’s developed over the last few years, to see companies, as an example, Spacex, how close they are, they’re going to deliver cargo to the space station next week. That’s amazing. They’re going to ultimately be able to deliver people to the space station. So I see the decisions that were made were very innovative. So they can be a little bit disruptive but ultimately I think this is good for our country and I think it’s good for the state of florida as well.”
I like Mark. Back when he was against the Administration’s plan, at times when he had a lot of attention and could have been more outspoken, he was reserved. And now, here he is admitting that he felt differently in the past and has changed his view. That’s pretty cool of him. Maybe others will follow his example.
Go Kings Point!
He’s being honest and that is something to be encouraged.
Keith,
I absolutely agree about his honesty. We have been seeing entirely too many well-known people over the last year who have been touting the party line, or the opinion of a “group” to which they belong. Now, here we have Kelly saying, “this is what I think.” I find this encouraging and very refreshing.
Steve
http://articles.orlandosent…
This is what I’m talking about. He is being more than just honest, he is being persuasive.
“I think every experimenter knows one of the worst contributors to their
experiments sometimes not working—protein-crystal growth or materials
processing—is some astronaut jumping around on a treadmill,” Bolden
says. “We need standalone or other platforms in orbit we can put
experiments on that will not be bothered by humans for long periods of
time.”
Finally, the man speaks the truth! But now NASA’s talking about bringing tourist on board???
Multiple specialized, stand alone space stations are the future, not the ISS. Its time to end the ISS program after 2015 and move on towards an age of larger cheaper and more specialized space stations.
Marcel F. Williams
Marcel,
Sorry to disagree (disagree in part, anyhow), but I still say we need to keep the ISS, for several reasons that I won’t trouble you with again. As for “Multiple specialized, stand alone space stations,” that makes a lot of sense to me. But, given the money situation and the reluctance of Congress to live in the 21st century, I would have to think that they are not going to fund “larger cheaper and more specialized space stations” because they will automatically translate that to “more expensive to build and operate,” whether it’s true or not.
If we’re going to add “standalone or other platforms in orbit” as Bolden suggests, the logical place to put them is in close proximity to the ISS. In other words, the ISS becomes the town hall around which out first orbital space science community will grow. The close proximity of all the elements will be cheaper to operate, since they can share resources, and you have a much safer environment since in the event of an environmental failure there’s lots of neighbors close by.
I could go on with proposed advantages that you may or may not agree with, but the concept of a clustered science community just makes good sense to me, and, with a little thought, it offers alternatives for how the ISS is used and how it is funded. The added platforms/stations, I think you’ll find, will each have to be either larger or specialized, not both; we won’t get money to make any that are both, once again because of the way that Congress thinks. Personally, I would argue for more, smaller elements because we’ll get more additions more quickly that way, and smaller units will cost less to build, launch, maintain and operate, and will more readily be modified to new purposes when required.
If we were to start out with a complete plan for the finished community, then it could be acquired more quickly and economically, and be more effective both during building and after completion. The individual elements should be dockable at need with all-common interfaces, and all share a communication system, whether docked or kilometers apart.
And I say again — keep the ISS! It’s long past time to stop throwing things away that still have potential use. As near as I can tell, the extreme operations cost for the ISS that you keep complaining about exist for two main reasons: 1) there are a whole lot of on-the-ground activities, not directly related to operating the ISS, that get charged to the ISS every month (it’s like the contractors who charge their office supplies and overheads to their cost-plus contract accounts); and 2) the whole ISS logistics plan is archaic (everything, including clothing, is single-use then scrapped, and brought up from Earth. Seriously working towards self-sufficiency should be the next big push in space activities, in my opinion; it’s many years overdue). Even if the ISS eventually just becomes a symbolic headquarters for the space science community, it is a symbol, an international symbol of encouragement, tying the space science community together into a single community. As long as it presents no danger, leave it in orbit, where it was put at immense cost. At most, we might consider raising its orbit, otherwise, operate it properly and leave it be.
Steve
The ISS was the product of the world’s severely limited space cargo launch capability. Once the SLS is operational, NASA and private industry will be able to have substantially larger and cheaper space stations placed into orbit with much larger internal volumes than the ISS.
Perhaps placing a Bigelow Olympus BA-2100 near the ISS might be able to save the ISS as a useful laboratory since the Olympus can continuously accommodate as many as 16 people.
However, recurring cost for space stations, maybe even the ISS, could be dramatically reduced if scientist were able to remain in orbit for several years at a time instead of only for a few months.
The SLS should be able to launch a reasonably sized rotating space station with a single launch, with habitat modules extended a few hundred meters from the axis of a rotating structure by cables to produce artificial gravity. If appropriately shielded, such space stations could allow humans to remain in orbit continuously, for years, without any serious deleterious effects to their health.
Such G-stations could be located near both large and small microgravity laboratories so that scientist can easily work on their experiments in microgravity environments while also being able to quickly return to the comfort of a nearby facility that has the convenience of a simulated gravity environment.
In other words, placing 7 people into orbit on a single commercial crew launch to an orbital space facility for several years instead of for only a few months could save a lot of money in annual recurring cost.
Marcel F. Williams
Marcel
We have a better chance of build something like this faster than we will ever have of building SLS.
When musk said HE made the decision to go with 9 engines, not less, wasn’t that like obvious he made that choice to get on with it??? You guys are funny sometimes.
Tinker
All this talk about number of engines. Engine out capability has me thinking about your falcon 7 core/ one Merlin2 per core 3 stage to orbit HLV again.
This one. Only with Merlin 2 in place of the 9 merlins
“justatinker
1 hour ago
DTARS:
You might as well make your Falcon 6 pack into a 7 pack, a core stage with six strap on Falcon stages. That’s 63 Merlin engines with four staging events. The outer six boosters cross tank fuel/oxidizer and drop off in pairs as they empty. The fourth stage is the center core which is air-lit just before the last two strap on boosters are shut down and jettisoned. This configuration exceeds the payload capacity of SLS at 150 tonnes to LEO (doing ‘back of the envelope’ calcs) and doesn’t even need an upper stage (the core stage is the ‘upper stage’ and makes orbit). Better throttling of the Merlin engines would make a configuration like this feasible because it provides for a slower climb through the lower atmosphere, unachievable with solid boosters. It’s the same cross tanking scheme I used in my mega launcher applied to the Falcon 9. It wasn’t until I ran the numbers a couple of times that I realized I hadn’t taken the core stage thrust into account (although I did account for it’s fueled mass).
So, mull over that. And thanks, DTARS, I wouldn’t have bothered to tinker that up if I hadn’t seen your post.
Cheers:
tinker”
At launch it would have 6 merlin2s all firing at once right?? With cross tanking determining when each pair of stages dropped off right? Well could such a vehicle have engine out capability??? Would the cross tanking pumps have to change directions on the fly to change staging events to get it to orbit? 6 engines seems like a pretty good number to get you to orbit with possible engine out capability to me. Then you light your center core for BEO boost right???
Guess if you have engine out, your center core engine could lite early with cross tanking back to the central core maybe.
The central core could be hydrogen if you want it for clean Space Real estate right????
SLS first stage with two merlin2 falcon heavies bolted on the the first stage all liquid right???
Would you bolt the cores together in an H pattern or have all the strap-ons hug the central core? Wouldn’t H pattern be easier/simpler/cheaper?
Safer, all liquid
Simple, only seven engines including your BEO stage
Engine out capability?
With truss platform over the cluster able to lift huge heavy/volume loads.
Small cores, easy to manufacture
Could be manufactured in same plant as the falcon 9, falcon heavy.
With three staging events to Leo the first to events should happen at relatively slow speed so recovery and reusability should be pretty easy to do with same system Space will soon be using on it’s falcon heavy one year soon.
Maybe Horizontal integration for the two pair 3 core clusters.
With fast simple mating to center core on pad.
Have engine trouble before launch, roll out a back up cluster, tested ready to go lol
Built by Spacex under cots so a tenth the price of SLS and much sooner than never, leaving NASA with money to do cool stuff this decade instead of flushing it down the SLS jobs program.
Maybe heavy lift isn’t good for launch rate, But is you share cost/manufacture with your small and mid size LVs seems to me could become affordable sooner than later ????
Doesn’t take a rocket scientistt
Lol just thought I’d think about what might/should happen after this launch! Lol
Parallel lines
Marcel,
Thanks for your response. There are a few items about which I feel certain that you and I will continue to disagree, so I won’t bring them up again.
To be honest, I think it’s a major mistake to make or propose any plans that require SLS. Like many people, I firmly believe that SLS will be canceled long before it’s finished, and even if it did get finished, many years from now, there is no money for using it and no firm plans to do so, so it would be many more years before it would actually be used for any missions. Even if SLS could “launch a reasonably sized rotating space station with a single launch,” something I still don’t see, the extreme price tag that would accompany using SLS for anything at all means that the cost for supplying the station(s) which you propose would be much higher than the cost of a current ISS cargo supply mission, the very thing that you challenge at every turn. The cost of cargo would be essentially the same but the delivery cost using SLS would be a great deal more. And I think we have to be realistic and admit that if the US is going to finish and use SLS, then SLS is the only LV that NASA will be using, because 1) Congress will insist on it, and 2) there will certainly be no money to support/operate additional LVs, which means that we either pay a fortune for any and every trip to LEO, or we continue to pay for the Russians/Soyuz to ferry cargo and US astronauts, which means that the many billions spent on SLS will be completely wasted except for giving us the false prestige of having a BFR, at the cost of having pretty much nothing else whatsoever.
On another topic, as a matter of clarification, when you say, “if scientist were able to remain in orbit for several years at a time instead of only for a few months” do you mean the exact same people would be living in the stations you propose continuously for a period of several years? If that is what you’re proposing, then I respectfully suggest that you give that idea some more thought. The idea that a small group could live under those conditions for “several years” (or even a single year) and remain both healthy and sane is full of unproved assumptions — assumptions that could result in catastrophic consequences if they turn out to be wrong, even to the point of costing lives.
Without going into specific cases, I strongly suggest that we take as an absolute given that any plans/proposals which attempt to move forward at the rate that we seem to be discussing here must include testing and contingencies throughout, from start to finish. There are still too many critical unknowns involved with long-term space habitation to go full steam ahead, particularly when we’re talking about making major changes to the proposed living environment(s). To be realistic, I think we should be planning and proceeding incrementally, in steps calculated to minimize risk, loss and waste whenever something doesn’t work out as expected. That concept is one that NASA has always had right.
Another problem I see with people living long-term (years) in space at this point in history is basically political. To embark upon a long-term habitation program, Congress would have to agree to multi-year, fixed-rate funding for it, something that is not easily acquired. Further, firm legislation would be needed to fix this funding in law so that it wasn’t rescinded at the next election. Too much would be at stake for the program to suddenly be without money or put on the chopping block. It also occurs to me that it might not be at all easy to find science people willing to live for years cooped up in a space station. It’s not the same situation as those people who have said they would gladly spend four years on a Mars mission. When you get fed up with things or people on a space station, you can’t go for a walk outside to calm down (although you certainly could cool off).
Overall Marcel, I think we have the same, or at least very similar, top-level goals in our respective thinking, but there are still major differences in how we each envision attaining those goals. But, you know, I think we’re getting closer all the time.
Steve
Nixon should have never terminated NASA’s heavy lift capability. Fortunately, the SLS will give America back its heavy lift capability for both the government and private industry. And if NASA is smart, they’ll allow it to be versatile enough in its configuration to be utilize in a similar fashion as the Delta IV is used. Boeing has proposed SLS configurations that don’t require SRBs at all and can lift 20 tonnes into orbit by simply using the core stage plus fuel from the Service Module to achieve orbit.
The SLS will be built because its not the President’s baby, its the Democrats and Republicans in Congress baby. And they agreed with the Augustine Commission that America needed heavy lift capability. Plus China and Russia our also developing heavy lift rockets. Why? Because HLVs make doing things in space a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Funding for the SLS/MPCV is only about $3 billion a year. Constellation funding was supposed to be over $5.4 billion by this time. So NASA is saving over $2.4 billion a year by choosing a much more efficient architecture. NASA estimates that the recurring cost per SLS launch will be close to that of the space shuttle except the SLS should be able to launch more than three to five times as much payload to orbit per launch than the shuttle. That’s a dramatic reduction in cost per kilogram placed into orbit.
If scientist can’t live in an artificial gravity space station or transhab for three years or more then we better forget about going to Mars:-)
Marcel F. Williams
Replying to Marcel:
“Nixon should have never terminated NASA’s heavy lift capability.“
Marcel,
I can only assume that you mean Saturn V with this statement, since it was the only heavy lift LV that NASA had. Saturn V was built for a single specific task and would not have been a good solution for continued use, unless NASA was going to do nothing but more brief Apollo-type missions at high cost, which would have been pointless. These days, when sustainability and reusability are major issues for both LVs and spacecraft, I would have thought it was obvious that the Saturn V was not a viable option for continued use. For starters, its skin is extremely thin (you could just about punch holes in it with your fist) making it very vulnerable, so it wouldn’t last for more than one use or more than a few days. And the Saturn V was very expensive both to build and to launch. Specialized tooling unlike anything ever used again was designed and built for building the Saturn V. Basically, the Saturn V got its high thrust by being huge, as opposed to being efficient, which is not the right way to go. It was a work of art in its time, but it was outdated by the time it was used.
“The SLS will be built because its not the President’s baby, its the Democrats and Republicans in Congress baby.“
This may well be true; I’ve had similar thoughts. But it’s a damn stupid way to run a space program, and I maintain that Congress is NASA’s and space’s worst enemy.
“Because HLVs make doing things in space a whole lot easier and cheaper.“
This is an unsupported opinion, and I think you’ll find that a lot of people in the know would not agree. I wonder how anyone can make this statement when we have no experience by which to measure it. And to be honest, for every plan that you can propose using a HLLV, I can propose an alternative approach that doesn’t use a HLLV, and I can give reasonable arguments for showing that it would be cheaper and less risky not using a HLLV.
“Funding for the SLS/MPCV is only about $3 billion a year. Constellation funding was supposed to be over $5.4 billion by this time. So NASA is saving over $2.4 billion a year by choosing a much more efficient architecture.“
I don’t know where you’re getting your numbers from, but they don’t match what I’ve seen printed. Comparing SLS, or anything else, to Constellation I think is meaningless because 1) we’ll never know what its actual cost would have been, and 2) it was a very different concept than SLS, not apples and apples. (Plus that fact that, in my opinion, the whole Constellation concept was foolish, not practical.)
“NASA estimates that the recurring cost per SLS launch will be close to that of the space shuttle“
Again, not a valid comparison. I have to assume that you mean the Shuttle launch stack minus the Shuttle itself and the SLS stack minus the MPCV. If you say that NASA estimates this I won’t argue it, but I’d sure like to see the numbers that they estimated for SLS and be able to compare them to whatever the actuals turn out to be. This also ignores the fact that at the end of a Shuttle mission you still had the Shuttle, but at the end of a SLS mission you have nothing.
“That’s a dramatic reduction in cost per kilogram placed into orbit.“
It’s amazing what you can do with numbers. I think you’ll find that, if you take all of the costs involved into account, this statement is not true.
“If scientist can’t live in an artificial gravity space station or transhab for three years or more then we better forget about going to Mars“
I raised a point about something critical that we don’t know (something about which people continue to make unsupported assumptions), and you deflect it with humor rather than address it. Why is that? We need to work with established facts, not wishful thinking. Anything less is negligence and may well get people killed.
Marcel, over the months you appear to have been somewhat on again, off again about SLS, and now you’re on again. Or have I misunderstood? I ask because there’s one very basic problem that I’ve yet to hear any SLS supporters deal with, and that’s the fact that there are no planned missions using SLS and no money with which to do any missions using SLS anyhow. So, if we go the distance and complete building SLS, it will be the only thing that we have. It will be many years, probably in excess of a decade, before we can even begin to use it to do anything. In other words, American HSF will disappear completely for all those years! What about all of the people whose jobs it is to operate and support missions? Do we keep them on the payroll doing nothing for all those years, or do we lay them all off and then hope to magically find trained people to replace them years from now when we (hopefully) start flying HSF missions again?
Perhaps there are factors that I’m not seeing, or plans that I’m not aware of, but from where I sit, things seem mighty clear. When I analyze the pros and cons of SLS, the negative aspects far outweigh the positive possibilities; SLS — as a machine and as a concept — is a mistake; a mistake with a very large price tag, both in dollars and in time and opportunities lost.
Steve
Steve,
Re: Free flying stations clustered around ISS.
How would that work in practice? Each platform would have a different density which would cause each to deorbit at different rates, causing them to drift apart. (Quite quickly, I would expect.)
[By “density” I mean the ratio of mass to cross sectional area, whatever that’s called.]
Each would need not just a periodic boost into a higher orbit, but much much more often a regular shunt from whatever orbit it drifted into, back into the original cluster. Something which micro-gravity experiments are not going to like.
I can’t see you ever ending up with a free flying cluster that is close enough for EVAs (which I think is the image everyone has) and shared comms (which you specifically mention.)
More likely, you would have a constellation of platforms in the same orbital inclination as ISS, but all doing their own thing, usually thousands of km apart and dozens of km higher or lower (hence orbiting faster or slower). Thus a spacecraft capable of reaching one could reach all. And
theoretically, something like Dragon (and certainly Orion-on-SLS) could visit one platform with enough propellant left to then go on to another (like the ISS).
Platforms might occasionally pass within a few hundred km of of each other, but, like a NEO passing Earth, this would only lessen the trip time between them, not the energy cost.
Marcel,
Just to reiterate my usual question. If NASA prices operations at ISS at $3b/yr, why would they price multiple larger stations less? I mean, how do you expect it to cost less to build new stations than it costs to operate the existing station?
(This is not to say I don’t think there are ways of lowering costs. COTS/CCDev has showed that. It’s just that what you have been proposing wouldn’t do that.)
“And the Saturn V was very expensive both to build and to launch. Specialized tooling unlike anything ever used again was designed and built for building the Saturn V. Basically, the Saturn V got its high thrust by being huge, as opposed to being efficient, which is not the right way to go. It was a work of art in its time, but it was outdated by the time it was used.”
But once built, those tools exist and are paid for. And there was nothing to prevent incrementally improved engines over the following decade, in place of the shuttle’s development.
Paul,
As a general principle, I very much agree with the idea of incrementally improved designs, but for the Saturn V specifically I couldn’t see it. It was the first of its kind, and basically a rush job, and any changes to “improve” it I think would have given only very slight gains. I just didn’t see it as an evolvable machine, which was fine at the time, since it was not (to the best of my knowledge) a program goal that it be evolvable; its only goal was to do Apollo flags and footprints missions before the Soviets could.
The next logical step in LV development, in my opinion, was not an upgraded Saturn V, but rather something completely different (for different goals) which they could take their time designing and testing. Someone high up must have agreed with my thinking, since subsequent LVs for both manned and unmanned missions were other designs, not Saturn upgrades.
Unlike Marcel, I didn’t envision any need or use for a heavy-lift LV at that point in time. The Apollo program was a one-shot thing in terms of goals and there were no logical (or sanctioned) follow-on programs that would have needed a HLLV like Saturn V, and even if there had been, I think we would certainly have needed something with much better ratios than Saturn, which managed to lift three astronauts and supplies for less than a week, plus the LM, some low-mass experiment materials and, later on, a bare-bones lunar rover. To set up a lunar base, or to go anywhere past cis-lunar space, or to set up infrastructure/facilities anywhere would have required a LV with much better payload lift capability than Saturn. Also, consider that almost all of the more developed proposals for Moon and Mars missions at that time used parts of the LV and/or spacecraft hardware as temporary or starting accommodations and storage, as well as a power source. The CSM was not a good candidate for doing that, but the Apollo CSM was what Saturn V was designed to accommodate. I bring this up to make the point that considering the LV alone is not adequate thinking; we have to look at the capabilities of the whole package. For example, if we plan to sit a spacecraft down on the surface of Mars with the intent of using it as a hab, lab, or other function, what do we have to do to it so that it will survive the dust storms? If keeping it from being sand-blasted means adding significant mass, then the whole concept, including using a Saturn V, goes down the drain.
As for the Saturn tooling, I have never been able to find a number for its life (the number of pieces it was good for). There wasn’t a whole lot of official “looking ahead” going on during the space race, so it may have had a limited life so as to save time and money.
My basic objection here is with the idea that if you have a HLLV you can do anything. I firmly reject the idea of designing cutting edge missions to accommodate the available hardware. The proper (and only safe) way is to first design a mission to achieve your goals, and this will give you your hardware requirements, from which you then either choose or design and build the hardware necessary to meet those requirements. You can’t put the cart before the horse, or one of them is going to break.
Steve
It would have been helpful if ISS had been used to actually learn more about living on a space station. Ie, how to lower the cost of those next gen stations, instead of faffing around with protein crystals. It’s stunning that it costs $3b/yr to merely operate a completed station.
Paul,
I’ve been harping on this point for ever. I think it should have been the absolute first priority from the time that the first ISS expedition began. It amazes me how many people either don’t think about learning to “live” in space or assume that we already know how to do everything we need to do. And yet, after all these years, people on the ISS for months at a time can’t even do simple, everyday things like wash their clothing and wear it again, or take a proper shower. The average person enjoys more and better amenities on an impromptu weekend camping trip in the woods than professional astronauts do in the one of the most advanced hi-tech facilities ever constructed. I think it’s just plain good luck that we haven’t had major medical problems on the ISS. We have no business proposing new stations/habs, lunar bases or a manned missions to Mars until we learn how to live healthy, sane and safe in space.
Steve
I’m not in complete agreement with Charlie Bolden. Yes, NASA should and needs to cast its net as widely as possible, ensuring that prospective researchers in industry are aware of the nation’s resources, particularly for NASA, the ISS. I think this is a government function and there are plenty of people at NASA capable of telling this story.
There might be some firms in the R&D recruitment field that might have been useful to NASA to help develop and disseminate the story, but I do not see how a previously non-existent firm with workers who had little applicable background, like CASSIS, can help NASA. NASA is on a learning curve because they threw away a lot of their prior expertise. CASSIS is on an even sharper learning curve getting little guidance from its boss, NASA.
One of NASA’s prime issues in ensuring researchers have access to ISS is simplifying and expediting the integration process. So far there have been few signs of this. At least some people, like Uhran, talk as though they’d like to see it happen, but lack of accessibility and a 3-5 year integration process will not work. This needs to be fixed. It should have happened a long time ago.
NASA is in the business of space utilization; NASA has experts in many science and tech fields and expertise in space utilization. NASA has been a source of R&D funding for space utilization. An inherently governmental function IS encouraging national industries and companies to develop and grow new capabilities, so there is nothing wrong with NASA ensuring there is competition and in having a voice in selecting experimenters.
Bolden seems to be espousing a favourite opinion of some of the engineering side that NASA should just design, build and operate systems and need not concern itself with how the system is used. This is a particularly naive and chauvinistic “engineer’s attitude”. That is why, in most industries, the engineers are a tool for making the system function, but rarely are put in charge of things like business development or marketing because they think the main job is a technical one. The main job is economic and business expansion. An important job is communications. Engineering management, engineering integration, and engineering design are part of the fundamental supporting infrastructure.