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Commercialization

Revisionist Thinking About X-Vehicles

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 19, 2013
Filed under , ,

Can lightning strike twice for RLVs?, The Space Review
“In a speech the following day at the conference, [Mike] Griffin said that X-vehicles in general can do several key things essential in aerospace development, including proving out technologies before getting locked into vehicle configurations, determining what the requirements should be for future vehicles, and demonstrating systems engineering. He lamented, though, the lack of X-vehicle development today. “It is a lapse of government science and technology policy at the very top levels that has caused our aggressive pursuit of X-vehicle programs to lapse,” he said. “I would do anything to bring it back to the forefront of public thinking.”
Keith’s note: Gee, Mike … who was it that killed everything that Craig Steidle wanted to do at NASA? There was certainly a whole lot of x-vehicle type thinking in Steidle’s plan. And Steidle’s plan was killed so as to create your government-designed “Apollo on Steroids” (your exact words)? Am I missing something? Pot-Kettle-Black, Mike?

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

8 responses to “Revisionist Thinking About X-Vehicles”

  1. BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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    Yes, seems to be a lot of that going around. Other examples include rewriting the reasons for who cancelled STS and why it was cancelled, why Cx was cancelled, how MPCV / Orion is going so well, how the Asteroid mission’s going to save the Earth, sorry add to science, sorry test out new spacecraft, oh um, um. Oh heck, it a cheap mission for SLS and MPCV and we can’t afford anything else.

    • Chris Pino says:
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      But we can always take comfort in the fact that the Marshall Full Employment Launch Vehicle (MFELV) will never fly which will free up future dollars. I also expect dollars will also be freed when the powers that be realize that a boots and flag mission to Mars would end up being a boots, flag, and grave mission as we do not have a clue how to shield the crew from all those nasty solar particles. They may realize as well that no one has ever flown a human mission without having real time control over everything from the MCC – Mars is too far for real time command and control.

      It saddens me that none of the current political leadership understood/stands that the point of the lunar plans were to create a research environment that would enable the science required for meaningful Mars missions, discovering how to harvest the rare earth elements and He3 from lunar regolith, and building a telescope on the dark side of the moon (nod to Pink Floyd)..

      Its not just Seidle’s work, with which I had a lot of issues, we are abandoning. More importantly, in my rarely humble opinion, is the depressing abandonment of the visions of Harrison Schmidt, Dennis Wingo, and Bill Ready. It saddens me that Mike Wargo had to spend his last years at NASA watching his hopes and dreams be drowned in a rising tide of unobtanium.

      • Mark_Flagler says:
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        When and if SLS is canceled, we can expect Congress to subtract its funding from the NASA budget. It would be nice if it freed up funds for worthwhile efforts, but with the Congress we have, especially the House Science & Space committee, there is little hope of that. I don’t expect a realistically funded NASA until the demise of the Tea Party wing of the GOP.

  2. muomega0 says:
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    In this case, Griffin is correct that pursuit of the RLV has lapsed for decades but more specifically, the technology and funding needed to enable the vehicle.

    Shuttle: 60 flights/year. Review the NASA goals in 1990s:
    “Operate the Space Shuttle to achieve mission goals”
    “Develop affordable technologies”
    “Demonstrate an RLV”
    http://www.hq.nasa.gov/offi

    Ironically, operating the shuttle was not demonstration of an RLV.

    Flight rate reduces LEO $/kg. Smaller LVs than shuttle technology achieve the goal of higher flight rate. Further R&D is essential if an RLV will come to pass, a goal worthy of a great nation.

  3. Geoffrey Landis says:
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    The difficulty with NASA doing X-vehicles is that the reason to fly them is to try new things and learn from failure. However, NASA is not allowed to fail.
    If you’re only allowed to fly a vehicle when you have certainty that it will work, it’s not an X-vehicle.
    –interestingly, there IS one NASA X-vehicle currently flying in space: the X-37. Unfortunately, the only way to get this vehicle flying was to transfer it to DARPA, where it became X-37b.

  4. dogstar29 says:
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    Mike Griffin, who championed the gargantuan, throw-away Constellation, an advocate of X-planes???? ROTFL.

  5. Vladislaw says:
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    Consider the nail head hit Keith because you nailed it. He said he “laments” about no x projects … maybe he should have thought about the x ares instead paying to redesign it a dozen times… we know we do not even have to mention the Ares 1x .. that was a disaster for what it cost and it didn’t test any new hardware anyway.

  6. Mark_Flagler says:
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    Griffin has reversed course so often, on so many things, that it’s very hard to take him seriously.