NASA's Uncertain Direction
Make NASA Great Again: A Memo to the New Administration, Futurism
“So [George] Abbey thinks the architecture of NASA’s future plans should be thoroughly examined and redrawn. It won’t even require a budgetary increase – just a smarter allocation of the currently available funding. For instance, he suggests scrapping the SLS program altogether. There’s too much redundancy in the heavy-lift rocket market – SpaceX is working on their Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin is busy developing the New Glenn booster, and United Launch Alliance is drawing up plans for a Vulcan rocket. He also thinks a simple scaling-up of Boeing’s already-proven and successful X-37 would create a serviceable replacement for the decommissioned shuttle fleet – a spaceplane that could be fitted for crewed flights and that also has the ability to transport matériel into space for orbital, in situ assembly.”
NASA under Trump is still waiting for marching (and launching) orders, Washington Post
“The Trump administration’s “beachhead team” for NASA showed up Monday. So far, according to Lightfoot, everyone’s just getting desks and phones and computers assigned. There has been no command from on high to change policies about communications – nor any attempt to take down the agency’s extensive online discussions of human-influenced climate change or other scientific issues.”
Funds for exploration of Moon, Mars should be raised abroad, Roscosmos
“To fund preparations for the exploration of the Moon and Mars an international cooperation campaign will have to be launched and private investors invited to participate to raise the money required, the chief of Russia’s state-run corporation Roscosmos, Igor Komarov, has said. It emerged in the spring of 2016 that the Russian Rocket and Space Corporation Energiya and the US Boeing were developing a joint project of a lunar orbital station in two versions: either two small living modules or one big module. An SLS super-heavy carrier rocket being developed by NASA is expected to be used to deliver the station’s elements and the crew to the Moon’s orbit. In case of a multi-modular project, they are intended to be launched together with a US spacecraft Orion, which is also being developed by NASA.”
A souped up X-37 would duplicate the dream chaser , you could do both as part of a commercial crew/Cargo for ISS beyond 2028 if this is the plan?A deep space X-37 has been proposed by NASA COMPASS as a delivery vehicle for the Titan submarine to Kraken Mare but this to could be done by a deep space dreamchaser. Both of these ideas require competitive bidding…….
You really wouldn’t want a deep space X37. Once out of the atmosphere, the wings and re-entry shielding are excess weight. I have heard mention of a larger X37. The main benefit of that is to bring large hardware back to earth.
The Titan proposed Submarine is way to long to fit in an EDL capsule so………https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/… Use a lifting body to land it
The deep space X37 is to deliver a proposed Kraken Mare submarine that is way to long to fit in a capsule EDL https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archi…
See Figure 4 for probe geometry
Hadn’t seen the sub proposal before, thanks! I have heard of the Mars glider but nothing moving forward.
The X37 mention seems to be as an example. I’m not familiar with re-entry and atmospheric characteristics at Titan, but I would think it’s considerably different than earth (like Mars is) which would make for a completely different design (such as requiring huge wings for any stability). Would probably be cheaper to make a larger re-entry vehicle and let the sub drop by parachute or rocket into the ocean.
I agree a Titan entry vehicle would be very different from the X-37. But Titan is probably the most benign environment for entry and atmospheric flight in the solar system. A huge scale height in the upper atmosphere, high density in the lower atmosphere and low gravity are a delightful combination.
Helluva thing when George Abbey becomes the Voice of Reason after all those years as the Eminence Gris of the Astronaut Office!
$18B a year is a lot of money; wisely used it could have taken us pretty much anywhere we want to go in timeframes as short as decades.
But that’s not what happened.
And it is easy to say “scrap SLS”; I’ve said it myself, many times. But like a lot of things there are ramifications, not the least of which is what to do with the employees (a number I can’t find; how many are working on SLS?). There’s also a prodigious physical plant at Michoud, and elsewhere; what to do with that bitchin’ super stir-welder, for instance?
There’s more: SLS launch facilities, equipment to move the rockets around- the list is very long as the program is quite deep. And once the public finds out that NASA has written off this boondoggle, the $500 hammer will seem positively appealing.
I have the sense that NASA is far too deep into SLS to do anything like walk away. More likely is a slow death: a couple of launches, maybe, and then assuming the success of FH, a launch rate that allows NASA to move on.
There may be some other options such as putting the Orion on top of FH. FH Still has limitations so I’m not sure it can meet heavy lift requirements such as carrying construction equipment to the moon. However, if it’s cheap enough and the payload can be split up (which is probably wise in the event of a launch accident) then FH would seem to be the way to go. Requirements should be provided such that anyone else wanting to provide heavy lift can compete.
Seriously. Orion is the longest pole in the tent. Why not evolve Dragon and/or CST-100.
You would think the cheapest payloads for SLS would be to serially produce the proposed skylab-II out of SLS propellant tanks,That would keep the friction welder busy all year two shifts per day. Place one at L2 another another in DLRO another at Phobos another at Diemos.Do this over seversl decades and commercial crew/Cargo to all of them that would really keep commercial space busy.
All have been uneconomical for decades. “if NASA were handed SLS/Orion, they could not afford to operate them”. Incredibly expendable architecture is a budget breaker too.
Redirect the work. It will not require a budgetary increase — just a smarter allocation of the currently available funding.
SLS/ LV24/25 lost out to CxP due to costs. Its completely expendable and has zero commerical/DOD payloads. DOA for cargo and insufficient flight rate and solids means no crew.
Congress was told this decades ago, in fact, Shuttle lost out to Titan III (shutdown due to costs!) unless if flew 28x per year. Instead, they build useless walls and decades old expendable technology, feeding the ‘alternative facts’ to false news sites.
HLV/depot: Oxymoron: higher flight rate, smaller LV reduces $/kg. Absurd: 100mT *10 flights=1000mT/yr– a *single* LV !?
Mars DRM 5: “The mission uses essentially all expendable rocket and vehicle components, and does not leave any useful components in low Mars orbit or Earth orbit for use by the next mission. Thus, there is no advancement in safety or capability from one mission to the next. The architecture would require the design, development, and construction of at least 10 different types of expendable vehicles during the decade before the first mission” NO COMMON HARDWARE!!!!
http://www.thespacereview.c…
Gas Stations – “Anyone can make propellant, and anyone can deliver it. The orbital reservoir will allow for different quantities from tanker vehicles both small and large. The payload itself is cheap, so even low-reliability launchers could potentially be used. Because most of the mass necessary to get to the moon is propellant (though Boeing would never say so), a space gas station might *would* eliminate the need for a heavy-lift launcher altogether, increasing the launch rate of smaller, cheaper vehicles, which in turn could cut costs for getting to the moon and, eventually, Mars.”
http://www.nextbigfuture.co…
“When NASA proposed on-orbit fuel depots in this Administration’s original plan for human space exploration, they said this game-changing technology could make the difference between exploring space and falling short. Then the depots dropped out of the conversation, and NASA has yet to provide any supporting documents explaining the change,” says Rohrabacher.” $57B cheaper than SLS.
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
“Solids, added by Nixon, were a major mistake. What we really need to do is get behind a re-useable first stage” Shuttle designer Max Faget
Question. NASA gets $18 B/yr to accomplish all it does (space, science, aviation, etc.) and the military (all aspects summed) gets way over $100 B/yr to protect a nuclear armed power from the (/or interfere with) rest of the world. And if you add up the past 50 years of just this budget discrepancy you get sick to your stomach. Are humans really always going to be this stupid?
Apparently.
Sadly, we probably are in too deep on SLS to cancel without destroying professional lives for so many dedicated engineers. My thought would to use SLS for one-up Aldrin cyclers, fully stocked with food, water, and air, circling in a figure 8 from Earth to around Luna and Mars, thus giving these giant boosters a purpose. Afterwards, phase SLS out and have our NASA folks manage the Cyclers before private business sees the potential and buys them or puts up their own. If you read my “Crater” series, I have the moon cyclers in use. Anybody who builds the necessary space craft can, for a fee, catch up with them, dock, go aboard and go along for the ride. But it is Buzz’s idea!
The shuttle has been around for four decades, and most were the operations phase not in the design and build phase. SLS and Orion allowed the the next generation to gain valuable experience in the design, build, and test complex rockets and systems to take the next Giant Leap Forward.
So let’s stop pretending that SLS/Orion are the systems for Mars and Beyond, and take the remaining hardware elements to fly a few technology demo or science missions since the flight rate will likely never provide the required demonstrated reliability.
SLS doesn’t represent a giant leap forward, I don’t think. It’s an assembly of known technology. Nukes would be a giant leap and I favor just that. Most of us recognize Orion for what it is – a short run out somewhere and an Earth return vehicle. It is not enough without a large habitat attached to it to go to Mars and would be Apollo redux to go to the moon. I am not, by the way, for human missions to Mars using chemical rockets. The moon is where we will make Earth great again. There’s business to be done there.
The shuttle was a complex rocket that failed to meet its $100/lb goal remarkably made operational despite locating the crew on the side with shedding foam near the heat shield.
SLSOrion are expendable and expensive, they are not sustainable. The next generation was provided a wonderful opportunity to understand the design, build, and test decades old technology, to be retired, in order to take the next giant leap forward. Sorry for the confusion. The decade old vision is clear:
“For future, sustainable exploration programs, NASA requires cost-effective vehicles that may be reused, have systems that could be applied to more than one destination, and are highly reliable and need only small ground crews.” https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/55…
An L2 staging point for the Deep Space Voyager will demonstrate that crew and hardware can survive the long journey to Mars in full GCR and microgravity. Technology and science missions to asteroids, the moons of Mars, and to L2 mostly avoiding gravity wells will provided demonstrated reliability of the deep space transportation infrastructure, which includes the challenge of landing heavy objects through the Martian atmosphere, which ‘mooning’ cannot provide.
The Earth/lunar resources arrived from asteroids- hence the need to extract ‘in-situ’.
The propellant is needed ‘near Mars’ not in a lunar gravity well. The lunar surface blocks half the GCR and is 1/6th g, so it does not prepare NASA for beyond L2 vs practicing on a significant number of highly interesting destinations. Other data welcomed.
There is no reason to send humans anywhere if there is not profit, jobs, art, and prosperity as a result. Robots will do, otherwise. The Ferengi were on to something there sans the art. That latter is my job so I would go.
In some respects, SLS was re-developing legacy technology so there is some value in that. I would like NASA to work on the R&D of cheap, hi-rel engines for the commercial world to use as well as new technology. Rather than NASA provide transportation, they work with the commercial world to validate concepts that benefit US companies. Sort of like DARPA.
Or NACA.
In other words, you want Trump to resurrect Obama’s original 2010 proposal? Seems unlikely.
Elon Musk, who is also something of a showman, might be able to convince Trump that it was his (Trump’s) idea all along. We live in a world of alternative facts.
Agreed. NASA should be all about new technology & mostly out of the ops business.
So, why not re-purpose SLS to launch a nuke upper stage? That would be a fun development, and current chemical upper stage is in limbo so no sunk costs in that.
Yes, I like that.
Because research into new technology is being prevented because of SLS. Just as it was prevented by Constellation before it.
You can’t have SLS/Orion and new development. You have to pick one. And since the only use of SLS that anyone can come up with is when combined with new technology, really it’s the new technology you’re finding a use for, not SLS. Hence SLS is simply in-the-way of the thing you actually want.
(For example, Griffin killed off the Prometheus nuclear reactor research program in 2005 to channel funding to Constellation. Obama proposed directing Constellation funding back to new technology, which might have included Prometheus, but Congress forced SLS/Orion back into the budget, and so any new tech dev was killed before it started. Over a decade of potential development wasted for that single program alone. God knows what other things we’ve lost because a handful of retards in Congress want some Saturn V masturbation fantasy.)
What business do you have in mind? And are you talking about something more than selling LOX? Something that could actually be the first step in a sustainable presence, something akin to the historical manner in which humans forged trading posts to villages and finally to our great cities?
I’m wondering how Luna could ever be anything more than a very distant Antarctica- an essential research outpost, yes, but how does it become anything approaching self-sustaining?
That is to be discovered but there is Thorium, Helium-3, a variety of rare earths, nickel, gold, and moon rock jewelry which MIGHT make a commercial presence possible IF transportation costs are tenable.
Thorium is relatively common in the Earth’s crust (India has large reserves) and helium-3 is easily manufactured by neutron irradiation of lithium to produce tritium, followed by tritium decay. Neither is particularly expensive.
It’s just my opinion, but so far as I know the only thing that has been transported to Earth from space at a profit is information.
I’ve yet to hear anyone propose a single way that a lunar presence would ever be anything more than a research station- that is, something akin to a settlement, a place where trade attracts residents. Not a bad thing. But reality bites.
The problem with this kind of sunk-cost fallacy is that it ignores opportunity costs. In this case, what a horrible waste to incredible talent to have then working on a useless system for the core years of their professional lives.
I know… but if there was a purpose for this giant Rocket – the Cyclers as an example – it wouldn’t be a waste.
Except compared to FH, Vulcan, and NG, it isn’t really a “giant” rocket. The 103 & 130t versions is significantly larger than those three, but the 130t isn’t even scheduled until after 2030, and realistically, since even the broad design decisions aren’t close to settled, it’s likely mid-2030s at the earliest. Realistically, you are only talking about the 70 tonne version, compared to 40-50t alternatives.
And for the amortised price of a single SLS launch, you could buy dozens of alternative launches. So 70 tonnes-equivalent versus a few hundred tonnes-equivalent. Whatever “purpose” you propose could be better done by using next generation commercial HLVs.
And that, of course, assumes that the real monster rockets, SpaceX’s ITS and BO’s New Armstrong, both fail or at least fail-until-beyond-2030.
SLS is a waste of talent as well as a waste of money. It has zero redeeming features.
NASAs budget is pretty small compared to everything else. Why can’t politicians just leave you guys to do your work?
Because the Politicians R Us.
It is odd to find something on which George Abbey and I agree…
Still, with a limited budget, could we press forward on BOTH the DreamChaser and the X-37? That would give us two possible paths to success.
And it would be great if we could similarly pursue two heavy lift vehicles, certainly the Vulcan and the New Glenn are not in that category. So we are left with Falcon Heavy and one other – probably not something as speculative as SLS. That design came from a Senate cloak room discussion and not from requirements. Maybe a scaled up Atlas?
When you consider that two development projects (space plane and heavy lift rocket) are both consortia (commercial companies, DoD, NASA) this tells you that we have moved away from the “Make NASA Great” paradigm and into specific goals. Commercial companies and government can both contribute – but we should NOT be trying to recreate past glories, we should NOT be trying to pick a winner and pour resources into them.
History has moved on and NASA is a part of the future – but the goals are important. Let’s see which program can out perform the other.
Do you agree with abbey’s points he made in Lost in Space— Washington Examiner?
X-37B isn’t. (Well, you could stick a couple of guys in an IVA-suit and extra-duration PLSS. But not for any real purpose.)
But Boeing proposed a larger X-37C (2/3rds longer/wider) which could carry humans. Since it’s a completely different scale vehicle, continuing to call it X-37 is sneaky, a way to hide the complexity of the development as an “upgrade”.
Two proposed versions of X-37C. Mid crew capsule, with rear docking adaptor. Or forward crew capsule, forward pilot windows, and top docking adaptor:
http://www.membrana.ru/stor…
Suggested two-person pod for X-37B:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gaw…
And a size comparison:
http://i0.wp.com/www.spaces…
The primary difference between the X-37 and Dreamchaser is the DC is a lifting body while the X37 has a wing-and-fuselage configuration. The lifting body was developed in the Sixties to avoid sharp leading edges which become hot during atmospheric entry. However high temperature composites are now available and permit conventional wings to be used. The thin delta wings of the X-37 permit somewhat higher lift and lower drag, while the separated tailplanes provide much longer lever for control of pitch trim than was possible for the Shuttle. On the negative side, the narrow fuselage of the X-37 allows only a single row of seats and the most efficient seating layout with the hatch at the back does not allow for a windshield. Of course it can land autonomously….
There are other proposed uses 🙂 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archi… I wonder if Dream Chaser could deliver Kraken Mare submarine to Titan?
I’m not getting something. mr. Abbey thinks we should return to the moon, but also favors a space plane…..for what? It won’t get us to the moon. What am I missing
Time for Augustine III to revisit and review the current program; recommend cancellation of SLS due to lack of funds to reach stated goals (Mars), Recommend re-purpose the Orion (again), and some blah blah blah blather about tech demo and research for moon base.
Oh, and fix all the pot holes on NASA property.
Crewed X-37?
I doubt we’ll see NASA launching crew via a side mount ever again.
However, in order to guarantee the long-term survival of humans via colonies in space, those colonies have to be self-sustaining. To achieve that, they need to have some value to us now, value which encourages new development even if major government space agencies lose interest or funding.
By self-sustaining, I mean as a business model, not necessarily technologically self-supporting (that can come later). The colony must be able to survive when those who funded the colony lose interest. Where enough value is present to draw new investment and people, even without formal government “Vision”.
So the long-term goal is best achieved by looking for much shorter-term value. Focusing on the long-term “Vision” alone, tends to result in short-term programs that aren’t self-sustaining, short-term development that is destined to stop the moment the political winds shift, leaving nothing but museum pieces and footprints in the dust.
Everyone still does not seem to see and understand that the foundation question that needs to be answered and lobbied, to get through all thick egocentric skulls holding the purse-strings. That question is WHY. Only a succinct and sustainable answer to that question will humanity really be able to begin, en-mass, to move off Earth; which is what we all here want to see and be a part of. The means will follow once the answer to the question is accepted and we get wrapped around the axle all too often by the zig-zag path our government usually follows. My attempt to address this question is here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/a…
I’d like to read that piece but something called viglink or perhaps Disqus is adding so much crap to the link that the page can’t be found. I’m stumped.
Looks like this and won’t resolve; even making an attempt to clean it up into proper format won’t work:
https://redirect.viglink.co…
Ahah. I just figured out what Abbey’s up to there. Shut down SLS/Orion for eating a third of NASA’s HSF budget in support of no affordable mission. Give MSFC the project of developing a man-rated stretch X-37 on as little of that freed-up budget as negotiable, to keep them busy and out of trouble working on something sorta nice to have if they ever deliver it but NOT vital to JSC’s mission. Apply the rest to JSC incrementally commercializing Station and gradually shifting its focus outward using commercial launchers.
Sneaky. Aside from it not addressing the de-bureaucratization reform also needed at JSC to succeed, I actually sort of like it.