CCtCAP Commercial Crew Announcement – Soon?
CCtCAP Commercial Crew Announcement Expected Soon, SpacePolicyOnline
“NASA declined today (August 18) to confirm rumors that it will announce the winner(s) of the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCAP) contract by the end of the month, but anticipation is mounting. Whenever it happens, it will be a major step forward for the commercial crew program and achieving the oft-stated goal of restoring America’s ability to launch American astronauts into space on American rockets from American soil. A NASA spokesman replied to an email query this morning by saying only that NASA still expects to make an announcement in the late-August, early-September time frame, as it has been saying for months. NASA officials are not allowed to discuss the selection process before announcing the award(s), even to say who submitted bids. Expectations are that at least the three companies being funded under the current phase of the program – Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCAP) – did so.”
– Who Will Win the Next Round for the Commercial Crew Program?, Earlier Post
– SpaceX Hater Article Disappears From Forbes Website, Earlier Post
NASA Closes On Commercial Crew Selection, Aviation Week
“Almost five years after beginning its search for a U.S.-developed spacecraft to carry humans into orbit, NASA is poised to award at least one contract to its industry partners in the Commercial Crew Program.”
Does it even matter anymore which provider is selected since ISS might be decommissioned in 2020, as none of NASA’s partners have expressed serious interest in keeping it orbiting beyond. Just a handful of flights to restore U.S. national pride until NASA is ready to send a crew to some asteroid – possibly.
It’s a scenario that beggars belief from the country that beat the old U.S.S.R. to the Moon. I see SpaceX, not NASA, as the only beacon of hope for a lasting human future in outer space in this mess.
Not really. SpaceX is giving a kick to commercial spaceflight around the globe. But there will be no commercial spaceflight beyond earth orbit. Therefore it’s only us to vote for human spaceflight in future times.
NASA needs to hire Spacex for BEO, moon missions, asteroid missions to pay for Musks Mars program. We don’t need Orion SLS. Waste of money and time.
as far as I know, Orion is the only capsule able to return from interplanetary flights.
Musk has already said that the Dragon TPS will withstand reentry from Lunar and Mars trajectories.
And all that doesn’t take into account the giant Raptor methane engine, the super-heavy launcher it’s to push and the MCT vehicle. Raptor component tests have already begun at NASA Stennis
From Spacex:
“…Dragon Version 2 spacecraft, the next generation spacecraft designed to carry astronauts to Earth orbit and beyond.
…This system also enables Dragon v2 to land propulsively on Earth or another planet with the precision of a helicopter, making possible interplanetary trips that would otherwise be constrained by ocean landings.
…Dragon v2 will be capable of delivering American astronauts to the space station and beyond with incredible
…Dragon v2’s robust thermal protection system is capable of lunar missions, in addition to flights to and from Earth orbit”
That’s good to know. But question: did SpaceX say anything in that statement, about rad-protecting crew (& elec.)? (see my comment to Chris H, above)
The Dragon is obviously too small to live in for months, so a habitation module would be needed for flight beyond the moon. Radiation shielding is not particularly suitable for an inflatable structure, although an inflatable shell filled with water rather than air could provide radiation shielding. The mass of the water would have to be carried into orbit, but this could be done as part of the “fuel depot” strategy.
Pretty sure Musk has said the Pica-X heat shield is capable of Mars return velocities. It’s based on other heat shields used to return samples from BEO. And Orion doesn’t exist except as a nifty looking test article, so technically, it can’t handle *any* re-entry profiles. At least not now.
But remember also that it isn’t just a competent heat shield that a deep spacecraft will need. There will be also be an equally critical matter of providing significant radiation protection – for the crew members as well as the electronics. Once outside the Earth’s magnetic field, they’ll need more than just a really nice TPS, to keep parts & people inside from getting “cooked” in another unpleasant way.
The Orion (and its upcoming test article) will at least be testing out new methods of crew protection in that respect. To be fair though, and given his stated end-goal to Mars, I’m assuming (and hoping) that Elon already has a team on the task to rad-protect his “Red Dragon” or V3, or whatever it’ll be called.
Musk is an entrepreneur and not a wizard. He has to obey physical laws and the laws of business. He once may offer a voyage to moon and mars – if one will pay him. He may need more time and more money as now foreseen but still the point is, someone has to pay him. Will there be anyone? Don’t forget, you will not get your money back. You will just invest it in science and business.
Orion won’t be testing any new methods of crew protection. If I’m wrong, please enlighten me with the facts. In addition, it’s too heavy for it’s chutes now so how is it going to test without adding mass.
Dragon uses redundancy as the means of addressing electronics reliability not rad-hardening which are extremely expensive and means you can’t stay technologically up to date.
Just a few points.
Cheers
Hi there, BCFDU!
No, NASA’s not planning to do a fully armored capsule for this test flight. This is more of a small experiment, as part of NASA’s “Exploration Design Challenge” set up for high school students to research and design ways to protect astronauts from space radiation.
From the NASA site: “The HS teams were asked to design shielding to protect a radiation detector on Orion as it flies through the Van Allen Belt, a dense radiation field that surrounds the Earth. Because the belt begins 600 miles above Earth, no spacecraft built for humans has flown through it in more than 40 years. Orion EFT-1, which will travel to an altitude of about 3,600 miles on its flight test, will spend a significant portion of its four-hour mission exposed to the effects of the Van Allen Belt.”
As of now, this competition of schools across the country got whittled down to one team from a school in VA, as the winner. I have no idea what their experiment is going to be, although I imagine it won’t be all that heavy. Personally, if it were me (and the weight allowances were forgiving), I’d have picked two or three dissimilar concepts, just to increase likelihood of finding a successful shielding approach.
Professor, wouldn’t the problem of rad-protecting the capsule (and therefore increasing it’s mass) be eliminated or at least partially mitigated by not using the capsule to live in? A rad-protected habitation module just makes more sense, leaving the capsule for ingress/egress only.
Or, if you want to get fancy, imagine a capsule docking, and then a rad layer extending and inflating *around* the capsule during the trip….if Bigelow can inflate a gumdrop, maybe they can figure out how to inflate a donut.
Actually Jeff, rad-protecting a hab module would be a great idea. Then one would think that all we just need then for the capsule is to rad-hard the on-board electronics.
However… it occurs to me that more than just the circuitry needs protection (outside of humans). Radiation isn’t just bad on electronics and humans, it can do some nasty things on other objects and materials onboard as well. For instance, a good dose could affect the integrity or even chemical make-up of some of the plastics and synthetics, such as hoses, seals, or even the crew seats and controls (can touch-screen tech – which seems to be the “In” thing these days – be itself rad-hardened to handle a solar blast?).
In the long term for future spacecraft, and depending on how well we can progress on a good rad-protection system that’s not a weight-hog, we may want to cover both capsule and any hab-module (so you’re fancy idea actually has some good merit — provided you can safely retract it for capsule departure).
That “test article” is waiting to launch in December.
And if the test article survives, it will then be tentatively qualified to handle that return velocity. Until then, it’s just another test article awaiting launch, and Hesanger’s comment above is not accurate.
Snidely, you are correct: we’re going to have to shield people in a hard radiation environment. But Hesanger’s comment addressed only the “…return from interplanetary flights.” That’s what I was addressing.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of the high velocity return of Orion.
Then by your logic any BEO Dragon or even Dragon 2 is the same. Just an unflown article or less.
On the contrary; Dragon has flown several times and the TPS has proven itself capable of handling LEO reentry velocities. While it hasn’t departed LEO, it’s further along than Orion, which has yet to fly. So, by that logic, it’s not an “…unflown article or less.” It’s flown. Orion has not.
The Dragon is still unproven as far as reentry at direct entry return speeds. The Dragon 2 hasn’t even launched yet,
I would ask you if you are willing to bet the farm on that….. but I would hate for you to be homeless in the middle of winter.
It’s an “article” alright, not a real Orion.
See my comment to hesaenger above.
I highly doubt that considering the trouble they are having with avocoat.
Not sure that’s correct. The Moon isn’t a planet and Orion’s heatshield can’t withstand anything greater IIRC.
Cheers.
“Orion’s heatshield can’t withstand anything greater”
Commenters keep saying that, but i have never seen an article which supports that statement. I’m beginning to think it’s an internet myth.
Hey, Doug, we heard you the first time. 🙂
The Orion heat shield is based on what is alleged to be the same material – trade name “Avcoat” – used on the Apollo heat shields. I say “alleged” because the formulation actually used is not entirely equivalent to the Avcoat of old owing to the original formula containing at least one, and possibly more, ingredients that are now forbidden for industrial use by the EPA, which didn’t exist during the Apollo era. So “Avcoat 2.0” is, itself, a legitimately questionable basis for a supposedly Apollo-equivalent heat shield.
My understanding is that Avcoat – even the original stuff – ablates at a significantly greater rate than either the NASA-developed PICA material used and proven on the Stardust mission or the PICA-X variant SpaceX further developed for easier manufacturability. Given that Apollo heat shields were always intended to be one-shot affairs and that the Dragon V2 is expected to be good for at least 10 re-entries before needing a major refit, I’m inclined to believe this difference in ablation rates is real.
That means, among other things, that an Orion Avcoat-based heat shield capable of withstanding an atmospheric Earth re-entry at the 37,000 mph or so speeds that a Mars return trajectory would require, would have to weight more and be thicker than a heat shield only sized to allow survival from a lunar return (25,000 mph) or the comparatively sedate return from LEO (17,500 mph).
This is a problem because Orion is already overweight for its parachutes. The chutes can’t really be made any bigger so there is still a serious question of what becomes of the crew of a Mars-return Orion after re-entry.
The capsule weight issue might be amenable to some finessing by building a seriously cheese-pared heat shield designed for exactly as much ablation as is needed to leave a remainder within Orion’s parachute deployment survival limits. But would you want to fly on something with margins that critical? I sure wouldn’t.
Regrettably, the December “Orion” mission is only going to get the capsule up to about 20,000 mph or so. That’s still only 80% of lunar return speed and barely over half of Mars return speed, That leaves the question of whether or not the current Avcoat-based design will even be good enough to survive a lunar return, never mind a Mars return, open to some degree.
The main reason this test isn’t going to be completely dispositive of this issue is that Orion and its re-entry accellerator motor already weigh so much they are up against the Delta IV Heavy’s lift capacity limits. A bigger, heavier such motor would be needed to accelerate the test article Orion to even lunar return velocity.
If the test article actually burns up on re-entry then the answer to the question of “Can the Orion heat shield, as currently designed, withstand a lunar return?” will be a fairly resounding, “No!” But I doubt we’ll get anything quite so clear-cut by way of an answer. I hope a detailed autopsy of the heat shield is done so that calculations done from theory can be adjusted, if necessary, to conform with the physical results of the test.
i’m given to understand, from the results of the extensive heat shield materials trials NASA did back in 2008, that the reformulated AVCOAT was both better at resisting heat loads and also not prone to cracking in curved areas (as PICA was).
“an Orion Avcoat-based heat shield capable of withstanding an atmospheric Earth re-entry at the 37,000 mph or so speeds that a Mars return trajectory would require, would have to weight more and be thicker than a heat shield only sized to allow survival from a lunar return (25,000 mph) or the comparatively sedate return from LEO (17,500 mph).”
i understand that this is your claim. i’m asking if NASA (or an independent source) has verified this to actually be the case. is the current Orion heat shield unable to handle Mars return speeds?
So far as I know, all the Avcoat heat shield testing has been done by NASA, in-house. Some of the press coverage associated with the heat shield’s arrival at KSC and its subsequent attachment to the Orion test article mentioned that, as I thought, the EFT-1 test is largely to see if theory and calculation match reality as far as the heat shield is concerned.
This USA Today piece from last year is one place in the mainstream press where it has been reported that the Avcoat-based Orion heat shield has been subject to cracks appearing during fabrication. I had also seen posts on space blogs about this going back a year or two.
I couldn’t find anything about alleged cracking of either PICA or PICA-X heat shields. If you have a link or two, please post.
The USA Today story just says that “A heat shield material has shown a tendency to crack.”
that’s a very vague statement. which heat shield material? it also doesn’t say the cracking happened during fabrication. i can’t find anything to support that statement.
the closest is this paper:
http://enu.kz/repository/20…
which says it modeled the formation of micro-cracks during reentry and concludes that the formation of these cracks and their propagation poses no risks to the integrity of the heat shield.
my conclusion must be that the USA Today story doesn’t know what it is talking about.
aha. not necessarily cracking, but gaps / potential weak spots in the PICA at the joints between panels, it seems particularly in the seams on the rounded edge of the heatshield were a concern. (page 15)
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov…
fascinating summary there.
there are a lot of reports of the many heat shield tests NASA did, available online. i had to wade through a bunch of them to come across that summary.
The context of that statement you pulled out was a paragraph about the possibility of this cracking problem affecting the test flight “next year.” The entire article was about Orion and it appeared in 2013 which makes this year the “next year” that was referred to in the text. The cracking reference was clearly to the Avcoat heat shield for Orion.
Your first link to a paper on simulating re-entry-time crack propagation in an Avcoat heat shield is interesting, but not yet relevant. When the Orion test article actually flies, then a post-re-entry heat shield will be available – hopefully – for examination to determine how good that simulation was. Any cracking the heat shield has experienced to this point, however, has to be formulation- or fabrication-related. I see no reason to declare the USA Today report bogus based on a paper about something else entirely.
Your second reference was also interesting, but, as you were gracious enough to note, the problems cited did not include cracking. I think the source of the problems that werenoted was the decision to use butt joints where one piece of PICA adjoined another. This arrangement allows hot gases unimpeded access to the understructure. Using rabbet joints would overlap one piece of Pica with its neighbors and still allow for adequate expansion/contraction margins. At full re-entry temperatures the margins would be effectively zero.
For all I know this is what SpaceX does with the PICA-X it uses for heat shields. PICA-X is apparently a lot more easily machined than NASA’s original PICA.
SpaceX has had plenty of time to examine five PICA-X heat shields that have returned from LEO. SpaceX seems confident about the ability of its heat shields to handle up to full Martian return velocities. I’m inclined to think they know whereof they speak.
I thought LockMart’s decision to chuck PICA in favor of attempting to raise Avcoat from the dead was nutty when I first heard about it and it seems even nuttier now.
ok, but if what i’ve found isn’t relevant, then what is?
where is a source confirming a cracking problem with AVCOAT?
this isn’t about SpaceX at all.
the decision to use AVCOAT instead of PICA was made by NASA – based on hundreds of tests and trials of the materials!!
The Orion heat shield is, probably, only capable of withstanding lunar return speeds – barely. This is a matter of some dispute as Orion, while having the same shape as Apollo is considerably bigger. There are cube-square law considerations that work against a bigger capsule. A thicker, much heavier heat shield would be needed for a Mars return.
The alleged “test” flight of Orion in Dec. is pretty much an Ares 1-X-like sham. The “Orion” will lack many internal systems and be quite a bit lighter than an all-up unit with crew aboard. Its flight path will only take it out far enough to build up a re-entry speed in the 20,000 mph range, quite a bit short of even lunar return velocity never mind asteroidal or Mars return velocities.
“Orion heat shield is, probably, only capable of withstanding lunar return speeds – barely.”
Commenters keep saying things like that, but I have never seen an article which supports that statement. I’m beginning to think it’s an internet myth.
SpaceX sees as its purpose precisely as going beyond earth orbit. It is putting its money where its mouth is and making investments and plans. They see LEO as just a money source for their real goals. Bigelow is working hard for Lunar and Martian bases. You state “there will be no commercial spaceflight beyond earth orbit.” as if your unsubstantiated assumption is actually an unassailable truth.
“But there will be no commercial spaceflight beyond earth orbit.”
.And you know this for a fact because…?
Space Adventures has already sold two $150M seats for a Lunar flyby: http://www.themoscowtimes.c…
And subsequently nixed the mission.
Roskosmos made disgruntled noises about not being consulted. I’m not aware that counted as “nixing” the mission. Got a link?
Regardless, the fact that Space Adventures sold the tickets demonstrates that BLEO demand exists.
Read the article. And 2 tickets that might have been sold to BLEO does not constitute a demand for a market.
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
Agreed but it is enough that it might be worth looking at how cheaply one could modify one’s capsule for the BLEO environment and thus make this mission flyable. If it can be done, then others will slowly start coming forward, much as the LEO market has developed.
FWIW, I think that Falcon Heavy ought to have just about enough TLI mass budget to throw a BEO-modified Dragon onto a trans-lunar free-return trajectory. I’ll leave it to SpaceX’s engineers to determine whether they could make a crewed Dragon reasonably BEO-safe without making the flight unprofitable and doing so whilst staying within the mass budget.
Commenters on NSF have noted that Roskosmos has done pretty much the same thing before with ISS tourist flights: “This is utter nonsense and we’re having nothing to do with it” is a Russian negotiating tactic translated as “So Comrade, how much is it worth to you to actually make this happen?”.
Now, SA’s alleged missteps, and/or the chilly political climate may well have killed off the mission, but unless and until we get an official statement from SA *themselves* that they’re abandoning the mission, we don’t know for certain.
“And 2 tickets that might have been sold to BLEO does not constitute a demand for a market.”
Respectfully disagree. There was a customer, there was a provider, and a transaction took place, IOW a market. There was a market of AT LEAST TWO. Now, hypothetically if SA had successfully completed the Lunar mission, there could have been additional followup customers. I don’t know that there would. You don’t know that there wouldn’t. Also, it is at least plausible to think that a lower-cost architecture (Falcon Heavy/Dragon2?) may attract a greater demand.
Then you are clueless to the “keeping up with the Jones’s” syndrome. Once billionairs are in LEO what is next?
“I wanna go higher” ….
BIgelow Aerospace presented mulitple options for commercial flights beyond LEO.
“Family of Tugs:
The documentation also portrays a family of tugs that could be used in conjunction with Bigelow habitats for use beyond Low Earth Orbit.
The fleet consists of the Standard Transit Tug, the Solar Generator Tug, the Docking Node Transporter and the Spacecraft Capture Tug.
These tugs could be used to push the various Bigelow Habitats – and other payloads – to specific destinations in LEO, L2, Cislunar space and beyond.
The four tugs are designed to be grouped together in various combinations, depending on the mission requirements. Notably, they are sized for launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
The tugs could be launched independently, prior to rendezvous with other elements in LEO to form a complete transport system. Each of these tugs share propulsion, docking and avionic systems.”
http://www.nasaspaceflight….
If the ISS is decommissioned in 6 years time there are many people in NASA who will want a new LEO spacestation. In about 3 years time SpaceX will be running manned flights to LEO and Bigelow will have a commercial spacestation in orbit.
There is time for NASA to take a long term lease on say a Bigelow BA-330. Attach a science module and a new micro-gravity laboratory exists. A 4 docking port module creates an exploration gateway spacestation. Where as a repair module with robotic arms makes a construction spacestation.
The module can be finished and launched after the habitation module is in orbit.
Today in Europe Germany is the only country willing to support the station; China will have its own station and Russia maybe too. Will there really be another international station?
China’s plans are more like the US Skylab station flown in the early 1970’s The first Bigelow Alpha station in 3 years will totally obsolete China’s timid designs.
Russia is simply collapsing, so don’t expect much from them.
IMHO The ISS will not be replaced by an international spacestation. The USA will build its own.
I think it’s unlikely the ISS will be decommissioned in 2020, since NASA announced in January it wants to keep the station running until 2024.
https://www.nasa.gov/missio…
Germany definitely wants to keep the ISS running past 2020
http://www.bbc.com/news/sci…
that’s a pretty significant commitment from a major ISS partner… so it will most likely keep going until 2024, possibly 2028
And the Russians?
Russia is not absolutely vital once CC is up and running. There are issues that the US and it’s other partners will have to overcome however they are not insurmountable.
Cheers
There is no propulsion on the ISS except for that provided by the Russian segment.
that’s not entirely accurate. both the Russian Progress and the ESA’s ATV modules were also capable of re-boosting the ISS to a higher orbit. the Space Shuttle, when it was still in use, also did re-boosts. the USA has kicked around the idea of a separate propulsion module for many years, and it looks like a VASIMR propulsion module will be added to the ISS in 2015, which will be able to boost the ISS’s altitude far more efficiently.
It’s completely accurate. The ATV was attached to the Russian segment, and obviously the Progresses are too. Everything else you mention is powerpoint.
No, it’s not accurate. the Zvezda module wasn’t providing the propulsion.
way to completely ignore the Shuttle re-boosts, as well lol.
the VASIMR module for the ISS isn’t just a powerpoint anymore. Ad Astra is fabricating the hardware for it now.
There is an important difference between the verbs “is” and “was”. I used the verb “is”.
Very well. Zvezda still is not providing all the propulsion. The ESA’s fifth ATV, the Georges Lemaître, currently IS providing the re-boost capacity for the ISS.
The Russians have a theoretical plan to keep the ROS flying after ISS is de-orbited (OPSEK), so it stands to reason that they’d be in support of keeping ISS going through 2024 at the least.
However, there are some practicalities that all these parties are going to need to address at some point. Come 2024, Zvezda will be almost 40 years old, and along with Zarya (which the US owns) will have spent 26 years in orbit. The youngest section of the solar arrays will be 15 years old, which happens to be the end of their design lifetime.
If Bigelow manages to get its stations to orbit and one of the commercial crew partners completes a spacecraft to get people up to them, then how much expense in keeping ISS flying will be justified?
Still waiting.
Cheers.