Fighting Innovation at Pad 39A
New Uses For Launch Pad 39A: Threatening The Status Quo
“While news stories focus (inaccurately) on a contrived rivalry between space billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, entrenched interests in Florida are seeking to keep new players away from using launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center. These efforts could well backfire and cause these potential employers to pick locations other than Florida to conduct their growing commercial space activities.
Predictably, It is the possible commercial use of pad 39A that has caused a lot of concern for the powers that be in the Cape Canaveral are specifically United Launch Alliance (ULA). ULA launches Boeing’s Delta II/IV family and Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V under a de facto monopoly on EELV-class missions sanctioned by the U.S. government. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin pose a threat to this status quo – especially when they bring their decidedly new ways of doing things and lower costs to the half century old rocket launching world of the Space Coast.”
– Letter from Rep. Wolf and Rep. Aderholt Regarding NASA’s Leasing of Pad 39A
– Memo From Rep. Aderholt Staffer Mark Dawson: “NASA Launch Pad 39A; what’s the big deal?”
Well said. And here I was thinking you were losing your edge over the years, not seeing the real story behind the stories.
I hope NASA does not shoot itself in the foot. Again!!
while the “establishment vs. innovator” tagline always makes for a good story, this really seems like a WAY more complicated situation. First – Keith fails to mention that Pad 39B – the SLS pad, has been intended from the outset (since the cancellation of constellation anyway) to be a multi use pad. As Keith does point out the flight rate is expected to be only a couple a year for SLS at most meaning there will be plenty of excess capability for other users. Who came up with this idea? Not SpaceX or Blue Origins – NASA did. NASA are the ones who are trying something no one else has done before – a large scale multi use launch pad.
There’s nothing innovative about companies – be them startups or entrenched monopolies – fighting to gain an edge over each other, or to keep the other from gaining a competitive advantage. That’s been going on since the dawn of commerce, and that’s what seems to be going on here. The only wrinkle is that NASA is now in a tough spot, where it has to choose between “picking a winner” vs. letting a unique asset like LC-39A rust into the ground.
[edited to fix my mistake attributing the article to dennis instead of keith]
Dennis didn’t write the article, Keith did. And you’re missing the point.
oops. thanks for the correction on that, not sure how i got the idea it was dennis.
how am i missing the point though?
thanks for the correction on my mistake. so, to your second point, KEITH’s thesis appears to be: “entrenched interests in Florida are seeking to keep new players away from using launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center.” My assertion is that the situation has nothing to do with entrenched vs. innovator. If the articles are to be believed, and at least the NBC one has statements from all three companies so it appears legit….on one side you have SpaceX, the other side you have Blue Origins and ULA. Its simply three companies, all competitors, trying to out maneuver each other.
The article is about pad 39A. Go ask NASA if they will allow commercial operators to use 39B. They will either not answer your question or say no.
I cede your point that the article is not about 39B and 39B is only tangentially related here. As far as 39B goes, I guess i’m not really in a position to go “ask NASA.” But a 5 minute web search turned up fact sheets for “Ground Systems Development and Operations Program” that says “A key aspect of the program’s approach to long-term sustainability and affordability is to make processing and launch infrastructure available to commercial and other government customers” and one for Launch Pad 39B that talks about the pad being available for a variety of launch vehicles.
Go ask NASA. I have.
I don’t think it’s sufficient to consider launch rate alone when discussing pad use. Different LVs are integrated and tested different ways. So, the real metric is how long does a given LV type, in whole or in part, have to be occupying the pad? I’ve yet to see numbers for SLS that show how long a pad is tied up from the moment it is first involved in a launch. And any malfunctions, of course, have the potential to extend that period.
In an awful lot of the political commentary on this issue the writers seem to assume that any and every LV can be launched from a “multi-use” launch pad. That would sure be nice if it were true. I wonder if anyone has actually gone through the exercise of determining just which LVs, current and in design, actually can use, or need to use, pad 39A and/or 39B. The other side of the coin is: are there any LVs currently slated to use pad 39A or 39B (because it was available) that don’t actually need to, and can be launched from a smaller, currently operational pad. This whole thing may be a non-issue from a technical standpoint.
The idea of a multi-use pad since I first heard the phrase, probably over a decade ago, is really about growth in access to space. Think of this much like an airport that wants to see it’s gates used, that want’s to see growth in air travel. An airport wants to see growth in air travel, but not just a particular airlines growth. And should an airline not produce, or it be more likely that other airlines will make better use of a “gate”, then an airport should stand at the ready to get new entrants.
The use of a Pad that has no-one laying claim to it right now, would be to explore this spaceport business model. If it were to turn out that current vehicles would not have any use for the pad, that does not preclude that new entrants might have a use for the pad. If the new entrants co-developed their ideas along with the spaceport operator, with the goal being the maximum total number of launches (of any launchers), then we would begin to avoid making dedicated, expensive, under-utilized Pad (gate/runway) infrastructure.
I was addressing the fact of differing technical requirements for various launch vehicles and the technical capabilities of the pad in question. Neither the hardware nor the processes are one-size-fits-all, and updating a pad to accommodate one particular LV will make it unusable for other LVs. I’m questioning which potential users have actually determined if they can use pad 39A, before and/or after any specific updates to it. Basically, I’m saying that there really is no such thing as a multi-use pad in the sense that anybody can use it for any LV type.
What you’ve stated above applied to airports, where most passenger aircraft models have basically the same technical requirements at a terminal gate, and therefore “multi-use” can be a factor in the business model. But even with airports this is not universal. For example, the A-380 required a completely new terminal/gate design, so it can only land at those airports which have installed A-380-specific terminals. Also, many cargo and military aircraft require extra long runways for both landing and takeoff, and are therefore restricted as to where they can land. One of the problems with the Concorde was non-standard technical requirements.
Launch vehicles differ from one another to a much greater extent than commercial aircraft do in terms of technical and hardware requirements.
Your capturing the degree of difficulty in the concept. Nonetheless, the choice here is how to proceed with an available launch site. An RFI is one way to proceed – by exploring this multi-use option. The responses may say that some non-multi-use, traditional idea is better, for the resons you point out. Yet some responses may say here is why and how it can be done, especially how. With that they can make a decision on something beyond the RFI.
I would be willing to bet – we’ll see – that the venn-overlap/combination of who (how many parties) has an interest in working within or towards a multi-use concept (that estimates increased launches overall from KSC), and what is affordable for NASA/KSC to pursue in tight budget times, will out-weigh any more traditional idea of working towards getting a single user onto the site. That is, if considering the same factors (cost, risk, investing / interested parties, quantity of potential launches).
You can’t change technical facts by using a different selection process. NASA went straight to a single user solution for a reason — I think we can safely assume that’s because of the technical situation that I’ve outlined. If offering the pad as a multi-LV facility to multiple users was at all viable, NASA people would certainly know it, and would presumably have chosen it as the way to go, since it would represent both greater income potential and reduced risk of low use. It seems to me that only certain people attached to Congress have argued for a multi-user contract — another example of sticking their collective nose in where they don’t know what they’re talking about. Unless this is another move on their part to support SLS while road-blocking the alternatives.
There is historical precedence, by way of analogy, for how dedicated, single-user infrastructure is favored over multi-use, shared infrastructure. The distinguishing factor is the maturity of the industry. When industries are not mature, both the industry and the government tend to favor single-user infrastructure. Eventually the industry grows (as that was the metric being favored) and the question arises of how the capability can be expanded further. Inevitably this brings in new ideas, blocked by the extant player. After the battles, multi-use, shared infrastructure arises. A look at how a shared, multi-use 39A (and other infrastructure) could be achieved would be opportune, in keeping with an understanding of where we are today, but especially where we want to go. Time will tell if the maturity was there yet to move to this paradigm.
Analogies that I believe apply include early single-user rail development vs. shared rail-line requirements and regulations today. Early telephony arrangements (a favored monopoly like Ma’Bell) vs. the requirement that switches and the backbone be open and shared (the big anti-trust battle of the 70’s). Even air travel had dedicated production lines (Boeing making an airplane only for United) that eventually the government decided should be open -for the health of the airline industry as a whole. We see shades of this in Orbital suing (under anti-trust) over not being sold RD-180’s.
“This whole thing may be a non-issue from a technical standpoint.” Now that’s an interesting point. Makes me wonder if Blue Origin, with zero experience launching rockets of this class, has actually done their homework to prove that they can even build and operate a multi use launch pad. Doesn’t seem likely that they’d have invested the engineering work given that they have their hands full testing their suborbital stuff in TX. Perhaps that’s where ULA comes in, but then why would, as the articles suggest, Blue Origin be the operator and ULA be the tenant?
It makes bringing the pad to a usable state Blue Origin’s problem instead of ULA’s. They can let Bezos finance the overhauling of the pad to be useful to things that aren’t shuttles without any risk to ULA. If the pad does become usable, ULA has a new launch site. If not, they still have other sites, so no skin off their back. Of course ULA is thrilled to support Blue Origin’s bid; it’s better for them than SpaceX getting it, and Blue Origin’s not going to become their competitor for many years.
Wrong pad. Also, the concept of a 39A as a multi-user Pad is about opening a 3rd possibility, not “picking a winner” or “letting it…rust into the ground”. It’s about enabling as many winners as possible.
Wouldn’t it be best for space flight if the new cheap guys set up shop in other places so the porkers have to go head to head with the cheaper more innovative companies???
Seems to me as the good old boys fight for their fat that they get farther and farther behind each day?
Next week the steel company I’m with will be setting 12 large tanks each 100 feet tall in a building structure. This is done with a good size Crane and men in 150 foot man lifts. Standard stuff!
What if falcon r booster could land on its launch pad and get all its fuel from connections at the base of the rocket. And vertical intergration could be done simply by having large Crane pluck the second stage and payload off a rail track. Just seems to me that things could be much simpler and cheaper.
Doesn’t spacex hold down their rocket anyway?? Couldn’t the Crane hold the rocket till just before launch? ?
Couldn’t something like this be standardize to fly different rockets in a size class??
Standardized launch pads for recoverable rockets????
George Swift
What if Pad 39 and VAB never existed and they had to start from scratch. What would look like for SLS (or ARES V)? i.e. like what they did at Vandenberg for Shuttle (though derived from pad first built for MOL), http://www.collectspace.com… (***very*** different than what is in FL).
If they are smart, they will avoid KSC entirely.
I disagree. While there are disadvantages to the political entanglements that come with using KSC, there are and will continue to be substantial advantages in close cooperation with NASA.
SpaceX is dependent upon NASA not only for funding, but also for technical support and expertise. This is even more true now than it was previously, as SpaceX’s revenue stream diversifies. SpaceX needs to technical expertise NASA has in manned spaceflight and will also need experienced astronauts going forward. Those astronauts are likely to be largely on the NASA payroll, at least during the early years of their manned flights.
Additionally, SpaceX’s long-term goal of manned flight to Mars will require tight cooperation with NASA for a host of reasons.
Flying manned missions from KSC makes excellent sense for SpaceX.
I’m sorry but I cannot agree. If SpaceX needs expertise, they hire it, whether it is engineers or astronauts. They feel strongly that everything should be in-house and accept NASA oversight only to the degree necessary to receive NASA funding. Also, to be frank, NASA does not have much expertise in designing and fabricating spacecraft and launch vehicles for human spaceflight. This work has always been done by contractors, Orion/SLS is behind the commercial crew programs in its timeline, and the last major HSF development program was decades ago. Flying manned missions from KSC makes sense only if CX-40 is too busy and Shiloh unavailable, or if NASA is paying and insists on it, which to date they have not, or if KSC commercial space launch activities are moved from DOD to FAA jurisdiction.
I’m sitting on the fence with this issue. While NASA’s vehicle design capabilities are of little use to SpaceX and others, oversight is a mixed bag. In some areas NASA oversight is a royal pain, but in others it can be a saving grace. I don’t think it’s adequate to generalize about it.
However, there are other NASA facilities and capabilities that will be of immense importance to SpaceX et al once more ambitious programs begin. At the top of the list is the world tracking network and TDRSS, as well as data communications relayed from NASA BEO spacecraft. This is a capability that no one else can afford to duplicate.
Immediate access to established and proven emergency recovery procedures, in conjunction with the US Armed Forces, is another consideration. More than one NASA astronaut would have died without this, probably including Gus Grissom and Scott Carpenter during Mercury.
Once we start looking past the LV and spacecraft hardware, there are a lot of good reasons to remain tied with NASA, which I suspect will mean remaining tied to KSC.
I don’t disagree that the DOD has the only really long-range air search and rescue capability, but the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Orion approach of dedicating an aircraft carrier and a few additional vessels for every landing is simply too expensive to be feasible, particularly when one has to meet NASA requirements. It’s no surprise that all the commercial vehicles land on, well, land.
Agreed. My point is that NASA has access to and precedent with DOD that individual commercial companies don’t. It might take years and too many dollars to establish any alternatives, particularly if each company goes it alone. Granted, I’m making assumptions here.
And if any flight should go ahead without having made adequate emergency arrangements and then gets in life-threatening trouble, only NASA/DOD is going to save the day in time.
If people are fighting over launch pads, there are two more in the pad 39 complex. Pad’s 39C and 39D were all prepped. Probably not to the point that A & B were but there is probably an argument to be made for starting from clean sand as it were….
I just looked on Google maps and though you can’t see the road to the other pads today, in the 60’s the grading was done…
The area originally designated for pads C and D is currently wildlife refuge so would present the same obstacles as the Shiloh site sought by SpaceX. SpaceX would perfer Shiloh since it is completely off KSC property and thus does not fall under NASA authority for ground access or Eastern Test Range (DOD) authority for launch regulation.
Won’t be any wild life after an asteroid of comet hits, spaceflight has priority over environmentalism! If we sit we all die from resistant bacteria and viruses, don’t imagine for a moment when we die the Animals will be spared. Logistically if you want to look to the environmental concerns, climate change is going to put the whole launch area under water right, so what’s the worry if it’s all going to be future ocean?
I wonder about the numbering system–anyone know? Where did ’39’ come from? And why ‘A’, etc, not 40, 41, etc.?
http://www.afspacemuseum.or…
LC-39 A and B were built (for Saturn V) before 40 and 41, which were Titan III pads. All the Saturn V pads were considered part of the same “launch complex” as were 17 A and B (Delta) and 37 A and B (Saturn I), although this convention was not followed with Cx-40 and Cx-41, (Titan III) which used much smaller mobile launch platforms and used the same assembly building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Ever look at the cape from space, there’s about 8 or more abandon launch pads, with the new super concrete a pad could be built on one of those early Mercury sites quickly. Besides most of the systems have to be rebuilt at the main pad, while the crawler was cool for it’s day it’s time for a re-design on that. I propose using the already concrete covered southern launch sites just south of the Mercury Astronauts Memorial.
It’s ridiculous to fight over one launch site when there’s already a bunch of abandon ones nearby, build to suit, don’t try to adapt to outdated technology, once upon a time that’s what NASA did they built exactly what the needed and that’s why there are so many abandoned launch pads.
According to last nights dream, 3d automated modular construction is going to make space ports unnecessary. The craft they were building was designed for deep space and it looked from it’s design to fly to altitude then vertically thrust, reminded me of or tortoise shell or horseshoe crab, real or not it’ll make a good science fiction story. I had thought that to get to the Moon of Jupiter or even to Mars would always take a water shroud, but apparently it’s possible to create your own magnetosphere around a ship, probably the substructure of the ship is designed to route the field, and it would be wise to be able to shift the polarity based on the charge of approaching CMEs. I can’t imagine how you would do something like that with out gravity control, to create the energy and field density needed for such a system, although as I think about it, you would be able to create repulsor fields and deflect charged particles along with micro meteors, so you might not need a moon sized mass to create giant toroidal fields. Of course that begs the question, how much effect does gravity have on CME’s if it’s about as much as gravity effects light, then EM field shielding or water shrouds would be required, also having the ability to repel other objects of larger mass would be wise if you are in-fact creating a gravity well in your ship.
Who should design systems to deflection radiation on spaceships NASA??????
Sounds like a job for Nikola Tesla, seeing as he invented just about everything else electrical that’s useful. Too bad he’s not still alive; this would be right down his alley.
After reading up some on Elon’s MCT plans with help from tinker someone NASA? sure needs to get going on the active radiation shielding thing Steve!
I strongly agree George. Active shielding keeps showing up, to greater or lesser degrees, in NASA road maps, strategic plans, NIAC proposals, etc., but as near as I can discover, no progress has been made, and I can’t find any evidence that anyone at NASA, or anywhere else, is actually working on it. I would very much like to be wrong about this.
Clearly it’s a complex and expensive area of experimentation and development. Maybe this is leading everybody to hold off and hope that someone else will find the initial essential steps. And it’s not something that’s going to be solved quickly, or with a Eureka! moment. Once someone actually builds a viable system it’s going to take a lot of difficult and time-consuming testing, first on Earth and then in space to prove it out. It’s the same situation as they went through with ion drives, which required several years to do a handful of essential life cycle tests. The longer they wait to start, the longer it will be before we have successful results (as the budgets continue to dwindle). If it should turn out that someone in industry solves this on their own, instead of as a government program, the governments are going to end up with egg on their collective faces and the future of international commerce will likely undergo radical changes (unless the governments effectively confiscate it through excessive regulatory legislation, which again could cause major economic upset).
That all sounds pretty extreme and science-fiction-like, I know, but we’ve seen time and again how much a single new technology can affect the whole world, either openly or covertly.
While I’m very much in favor of investing in the hard sciences, I find it baffling that the world’s science communities and governments will spend $billions every year on programs (like ever-bigger particle accelerators) that might yield what would for many years be abstract knowledge, yet spend little or nothing year after year on something like developing active shielding that could change the world in major ways almost over night.
Note that’s your view from your end of the pool. There are far too many valuable topics of research to list here, and active shielding is only one of those topics. Just because active shielding is of interest obviously doesn’t make it of interest anywhere else. I’m all for investing in such research but not at the expense of other research that produces “abstract knowledge.” Feel free to roam the history books to see what fruit “abstract knowledge” has borne. Relativity–both General and Special–are pretty darned abstract; yet I’ll bet there are very few that read NASA Watch that aren’t using GPS. Does anything get more abstract that quantum physics. Care to speculate on what quantum physics has brought to the world and economies? Already, one side of the aisle in Washington has made hints about funding research along such lines, and that is a bad idea. This idea, that research into active shielding is somehow more valuable than other research and should be funded at the expense of more “abstract” research is just as bad. Research into active shielding should be funded and should be done, as should much other research, a large amount of it abstract. Abstract research shouldn’t suffer because there is no immediate profit seen or because people lack the imagination to see that it might some day be valuable.
Abstract research, it is rather abstract when you don’t specify the topic of said research. So far as government, or basically the public getting behind any type of research, most people want something to look at after a few hundred million dollars has been dumped here or there. If there are no ends how do you expect the common man to justify the means. I say Giant rocket and Moon and the public gets that, I say unified field theory via string theory and MHD breakthroughs and, the public says I paid for what? They’ll love you for their hover-boards, but not always for the abstract computations that made it possible. This is why it’s important to put the abstraction into the scope of a functional deliverable from a business perspective. I say abstract away just align some of the milestones with short term products. Also consider how much non abstract astronomy was done in proving relativity, through chasing eclipses around the globe.
That’s hogwash. The reason the “common man” has issues with what you call “abstract research” is because at least in the US, there is a high degree of scientific illiteracy among the population. For the record, there’s no such thing as “abstract research”. There is fundamental research, applied research, but alas no “abstract research.” There is no alignment of fundamental research with short term products. That type of research would be applied research. If you want applied research, find a scientist interested in whatever flips your skirt up and pay him to do the research.
If you want applied research to flourish then you better stand behind fundamental research as it’s the fundamental research that provides the impetus for applied research. Further there is absolutely no way to tie fundamental research to “short term products.’ That is not the purpose of fundamental research: never has been and never will.
You sound as if you stand with those in Congress that wish to do exactly as you want with NSF funding and other research funding, i.e. have non-scientists tell the scientists what they will research. Further you have completely ignored everything that has been the fruit of primary, i.e. fundamental, research. You’ll note that fundamental research re: general and special relativity came before applied research. So much of the applied research done today is the result of primary research done well before the applied research projects were even imagined. Alas, it does seem as if Congress and people like you will shackle primary research in this country and just drive it elsewhere. Other countries are not so shortsighted.
To be clear I was using the implied terminology that you were presenting quoting you
“I’m all for investing in such research but not at the expense of other
research that produces “abstract knowledge.” Feel free to roam the
history books to see what fruit “abstract knowledge” has borne.
Relativity–both General and Special–are pretty darned abstract; yet
I’ll bet there are very few that read NASA Watch that aren’t using GPS.
Does anything get more abstract that quantum physics.” So to be very specific for people like you I’m speaking of research of abstract knowledge, seeing as the word research by the standard definition
“Research and experimental development (R&D) comprise creative
work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of
knowledge…”
Research means the acquisition of knowledge and thus using the terms research and knowledge together is effectively poor English. You coined your own “abstract knowledge” I just used it in English, no matter what type of research it is, it is covering something, with the goal of determining something. Again to make a literary point, abstract research, would be effectively Theoretical research, to which I am guessing you are ascribing primary research. Primary research if you look up the definition still has quantifiable deliverable results. As a scientist, I grow frustrated at the endless canceled projects that purely theoretical approaches tend to generate. While it may be great for padding the personal pocket book it’s been collectively killing energy, and space flight research. There is a place for observational science, and so much of the observational science that has been done is sitting in dusty archives waiting to be digitized to provide relevant data to many applied science problems. Congress funds primary research you can’t have secondary or even tertiary research without identifying the subject, positing some theory and proving that theory all of which requires varied steps of research. Congress would like people who say we’re going to develop fusion to deliver, rather than research until the money runs dry. Even “Other countries” reward scientists who achieve their set goals, and most of other countries goals can be quantified into the areas of computer technology through quantum physics, communications, energy, and weapons research. In America, scientists can and have moved from project to project accomplishing nothing for decades until they publish something wholly useless then teach or retire. As a scientist of any sort you cannot expect on the basis of intellect that you will be paid by people who must labor 150,000 dollar a year salary till you die without publishing a single useful reliable fact in all that time. In essence America does not like dictators of any sort, a dictator demands something offers everything and delivers nothing (pain, heartache and disappointment) Yes primary research will be on a tight leash until prosperity can exceed greedy, bankers, politicians, scientists and con-men. Fix something man kind has a problem with and you can rationally write your own ticket, but you must be business minded because for all of Tesla’s primary research he ended up broke, if only he had held on to some percentage of his royalties or deferred them for a period could have accepted the royalties and reinvested them back into the company.
Tesla was pretty well an applied sciences man, so was Edison, so you speak of relativity, thus Einstein, he spent a few decades in a patent office, looking at and gleaning insight into applied sciences, before he made his leaps, and even in that he used sounding boards such as his wife to get to provable conclusions.
If you wish to talk about theoretical science, lets talk about using Bosie Einstein condensates and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement to communicate over vast distances. Is it possible that two distant apparatus of the appropriate quantum resonance might be able to communicate in some unusual manner?
Read more carefully. I was using Steve Whitfield’s words, “abstract knowledge”, as the basis of my terminology.
Weak joke erased
Tesla modeled things in his mind, and then built them using mathematics to solve the issues with construction, he was a physical experimenter like Edison, but Tesla often got there faster through analysis, vs Edison’s fast and furious trial and error. Tesla wasn’t often privileged enough to higher a fleet of minions like Edison did, he worked alone quite often, when he wasn’t entertaining Mark Twain. Hopefully with the advent of advanced computer modeling people will get back to building functional experiments rather than letting the theoretical prevent them from ever trying. Of course computers are only as good as the data given them, and in the area of MHD nobody has really cracked that nut, if they did, we’d have direct power from nuclear fuel rather than tea pots. Also spent fuel would be spent down to zero!
I agree with your comments. I remain hopeful for outside-the-box discoveries not dictated solely by popular theory. Time and again I have both witnessed and read about cases where a person or group was not aware that something was “impossible” according to theory, so they went ahead and did it anyhow (I’ve done it myself). To various degrees this too is a valid method of functional experimenting.
For many years no one made any progress on reducing the cost of lifting a kg to space, largely because it was felt that it couldn’t be done without some sort of technical breakthrough. Once SpaceX illustrated otherwise, several players quickly found ways to save money.
I choose to believe that most current technologies are perpetually at a crossroads and can either expand their capabilities or spawn something new against common expectations, if we are willing to invest the time and effort (and money, of course). Further, I think this has been true since humans first began employing technology and will continue to be true for as long as we are technology users.
There are quite a few options, you could crowd fund the research, if you got the backing from a few universities and perhaps a government lab. They might match the funds to a certain point, but you’d have to be able to prove something to scale either as a mock up or what you hope to prove by experiment moving forward. Let’s just go ahead and say 1:64, could you shield your favorite hotwheel perhaps the enterprise would be a handy stand in? The reason I’d go so small is that an experiment that small would fit at the end of Texas A&M’s cyclotron, and also be light weight enough to fly up to the international space station with other experiments. The purpose of using an object along with a plain old sensor is because looking at sensors can be boring. So I’m sure there’s those who could sort out all the Mev calculations, and to some degree this is a very complex MHD problem.
So lets look at what nature has done and see if we can break it down, the earth’s magnetosphere gets it’s strength from a couple of known sources, the spinning of it’s solid core in a molten liquid environment, and to some degree the solar wind charges this system. The density of the earth’s magnetic field leads me to believe that there is plasma in existence between the liquid part of the earths’ core and the solid part. Plasma has some MHD properties that interact with magnetic fields. We do know that plasma is formed when the solar wind hits the Earth, but I haven’t seen anything giving information on specific energy being imparted to the earths’ magnetosphere. So we want to build an apparatus that has a spinning metal core/ sphere with a north and south pole, in a liquid metal bath, the speed of rotation has to be enough to cause friction great enough to turn the liquid metal to plasma,or the liquid metal will need to be heated along with the solid ball to a point where the friction could begin to cause a plasma to form at the barrier between the solid metal and liquid metal. I’m seeing multiple supercooled neodymium magnets helping to hold the ball at the center of the mercury container. So basically once you get such a system running it would then be a matter of pumping in electricity to create a larger and larger field. A stable system will shield your hotwheel, an unstable one might knockout the lights. You’d need some physicists, mechanical engineers, computer simulation experts, control systems engineer, meteorological engineer, geologists, and then an astronaut advocate with a few degrees in those areas to carry out the experiment in space. Tesla coils are great at creating static electric fields, in some instances they interact with EM fields, it seems that a very large Tesla coil alone would not be enough to deflect charged particles, but since there are already very large and small powerful coils available why not stick one at the end of a cyclotron and measure the particle deflection across the spectrum. Look for a decrease in the number of upsets in a 90nm quad core processors, as well as the alpha, beta, theta, gamma, that we humans need to be worried about.
I realize we are off topic but your post seems important. Where are others that can get such an experiment going??
I’d say this is entirely on topic seeing as wherever you place your launch systems you might also want to have your research facilities near by, the logic for this is that you can then more cost/time efficiently use your engineering and labor manpower and materials. One issue NASA has faced since the Saturn 5 program multiple engineering groups quite often working at odds to one another. Early in the program it was easier to manage all the groups due to clear militaristic command chains, as NASA progressed through the late 70’s into the 80’s things got looser, and so did oversight. You might have 5 engineers with the same title working on grants on a similar problem, with no final deliverable results before program cancellation. This culture still continues inside NASA as of 2004, when the cockpit Avionics program was canceled (CAU). This 5 year plus multimillion dollar program was focused on developing next generation cockpit avionics for the space shuttle program, meanwhile another engineering group was already gaining traction in building a “cheaper” launch system that was cost competitive with the Russian launch system. We now know this system as “Orion”. The horrific destruction of Columbia could not have come at a worse time, it provided a convenient excuse for those advocating private contractor space flight, and those supporting launch systems other than the space shuttle. As we all know NASA had sponsored a few different contractor competitions to find an alternative, as the aging infrastructure at the cape, along with ever greater segmentation of research and spaceflight funds to different groups basically were dooming any safe operation of the current shuttle system. It must be considered that the massive overhaul of the cape launch towers, sensors, and computer systems as well as rehab of the VAB and constant maintenance on the crawler were not something that government was willing to fund.
So the hope is likely that a private spaceflight group might help foot the bill to bring things up to date at the cape, in my impression it’s better to do what the original engineers did, and that’s build to suit in an empty location this along with many other reasons were why they were very quick to tear down one of the shuttle launch towers just in-case congress back pedaled and decided perhaps there was something good in the shuttle system. So pre hydrophobic coatings one could possibly make an argument that moving to Wichita, Kansas or Hutchinson, Kansas near the Cosmosphere and Space center would save money in infrastructure maintenance cost and thus offset the cost of preventative maintenance that has to be done at the cape, however with the new coatings it’s possible to completely prevent corrosion, if the material is VU durable enough it may eliminate the need for painting.
Back to the question, where are the others, well to start there’s the grass roots group The North West Nuclear Consortium headed by Carl Greninger you can search it on the major search engines and find it. This is an example of starting small and independent in your Garage on weekends and evenings, then as a teaching venue then growing into something more, the goals are results, and research oriented deliverable, not just demonstrations for kiddies. Plus student researchers are free, sometimes they will even pay you(university level typically)! Of course you must offer something factual and tangible in terms of certification rigor and use in a resume, much of that can be found on the internet in the varied forms of course design.
So far a cyclotron access, you can purchase hourly beam time at the Radiation Effects Facility at the Cyclotron institute of Texas A&M
university. At the same University is the Nuclear solutions Institute. Who else, well some people who work at JPL might be aligned with such a project, as well as some working for the DOE at Idaho National Laboratories. Penn State has a Radiation Science and Engineering center that could be included.
So basically you promote said project across most of the national labs, and research universities, hit the blogs and even attract some of the recently retired too soon back out of retirement. I’m sure there’s a few venture types out there that would give amicable contract guidelines, especially after being burned by so many green environmental black holes. Search this article
NASA wants revolutionary radiation shielding technology.
While I have my reservations about working on a NASA lead project, due to the consistent yanking of funds before project completion I respect their engineers and talent, and would gladly work with them.
I just realized that a plasma not gravitationally confined would tend to rise unless confined by field lines.
I believe those pads are on the AirForce side and property of the AirForce
If they are than a lease should be acquired, that is if it’s even sensible to build on a hurricane coast atop sand, I personally would want a strategic business plan completed prior to signing any agreements, of course there is the just plain cool factor of being at that historic location, that could lead to international investors.
Another good location for a brand new space port at the same latitude would be near the South Texas Nuclear power plants or near Port O’Connor Texas or South of San Antonio near the Choke Canyon Reservoir, building would be mostly unconstrained for a space port there, but it looks like water might be an issue, also it would be important to do a survey of the underground caverns left since that area is also covered in oil derricks.
The fallacy here is the assumption that a launch pad can be efficiently shared between multiple programs using multiple LVs. A launch pad looks imposing but is almost never worth more than a single launch of the LV it services, and making one complex serve two different LVs will end up costing more than building separate pads.
The real value of LC-39A is that it is developed land (no environmental impact) and on the coast (no land overflight). My guess is that SpaceX would demolish the existing service structure and probably not use an MLP or crawler. They might even reduce the pad elevation to make it accessible to a rail-based erector-transporter. The real obstacles are ground access (under NASA control) and range control (under DOD). SpaceX would be happy to use 39A if these were transferred to Space Florida and FAA.
The current service structure on LC-39B is useless for any launch system other than Shuttle. Even for the similar SLS at LC-39B it was demolished. The fuel tankage may be useful but the LOX tank has no refrigeration system and Falcon does not use LH2 or the large quantities of MMH and N2O4 required by Shuttle.
The crawler and MLP system was chosen on the spur of the moment over 40 years ago. It is slow, expensive to operate and maintain, and leaves the LV unprotected on the pad. Finally, there will be endless schedule conflicts even if launches are rare. If one LV has a problem and another takes its place in the launch sequence it could require weeks to roll back, reconfigure and roll out.
With separate pads for each LV, both can be prepared simultaneously and if one slips the other can take precedence in a matter of hours.
You indicated …”and making one complex serve two different LVs will end up costing more than building separate pads”. Can you point me to the report and analysis of that for the Pad 39A situation?