NASA's Inconsistent Policy For Launching Large Payloads
NASA chief explains why agency won’t buy a bunch of Falcon Heavy rockets, Ars Technica
“Since the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket in February, NASA has faced some uncomfortable questions about the affordability of its own Space Launch System rocket. By some estimates, NASA could afford 17 to 27 Falcon Heavy launches a year for what it is paying annually to develop the SLS rocket, which won’t fly before 2020. Even President Trump has mused about the high costs of NASA’s rocket. On Monday, during a committee meeting of NASA’s Advisory Council, former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale raised this issue. Following a presentation by Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, Hale asked whether the space agency wouldn’t be better off going with the cheaper commercial rocket. … One difficulty with Gerstenmaier’s response to Hale’s question is that NASA does not, in fact, yet have any “large-volume, monolithic pieces” that could only be launched by the Space Launch System.”
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I just wonder what the NASA excuse will be when the BFR is flying, and able to deliver 150 tons to the lunar surface at around $20-30 million a flight. It will have a cargo area that is twice as wide, twice as high and twice as long as the Shuttle Orbiter, much larger than the SLS faring.
How much do you want to bet that NASA will claim its “too big”. (LOL)
I’ll believe that when I see it.
No one is answering the real question: why does it cost so much? It isn’t the technology?
This is a non-answer, but I don’t think there is _an_ answer. When NASA spends $50 billion on a project, it’s really spending $10,000 on a few million different steps and tasks. Many, possibly most, may not be necessary. Many, possibly most, may be done in a very inefficient way. But when people want one answer to why it costs so much, I don’t think they don’t want to hear list of a million, apparently minor, problems.
Many mouths to feed.
Plus the costs of NASA’s micromanagement, with reviews that approve reviews that approve the many processes on the flow charts they are using to build it.
I said, “a few million different steps and tasks. Many, possibly most, may not be necessary. ” Quite a few of those reviews are on that list. I’ve been told that ten or twenty years ago thing were different, but I’ve been in design reviews where much of the agenda did consist of reviews of reviews.
And that didn’t even cover the results of the review; just presenting the number of internal reviews conducted, the number of action items they generated and the number of those action items which were still open. Then having the reviewers say that was about the right number of internal reviews and the expected number of them had been closed. That’s worth verifying, but you don’t need to fly in a review panel and do this in front of a room full of engineers (who are all billing the time to project.)
The parts of the review that actually dealt with the technical details, and even the fact that people had to put together presentations (which is a good way of putting their ideas and plans in order) were useful. But at the reviews I’ve been involved in, the useful parts were a small fraction of the whole. But if you say that, you’ll probably get black marks for not understanding the process and taking it seriously enough.
Yes, they would indeed be part of the millions and millions of steps. Kinda like when Vice President Gore talked about the 10 pages of regulations that government has for a government bought ashtray.
http://www.newsweek.com/vic…
“Al Gore is showing me this ashtray. It is a standard, regulation federal “ash receiver, tobacco, desk type” and Gore has 10 pages of regulations to prove it. He flips through the specifications, giggling. “Can you believe this?” he says. “It’s incredible. This is what you have to do if you want to sell the government an ashtray…Now, here’s my favorite. This is the specification for how you test it.” You put the ashtray on a plank, “a maple plank. It has to be maple, 44.5 millimeters thick.” And you hit it with a steel punch “point ground to a 60 percent included angle” and a hammer. “The specimen should break into a small number of irregularly shaped pieces, not greater in number than 35.” Gore is losing it now, bellylaughing. “But wait! Now we get to the specification of the pieces.” To be counted as regulation shards, they must be “6.4 millimeters or more, on any three of its adjacent edges…”
Unless kept on a short leash bureaucrats will do what they do best…
You point out that things were different at some point in the past.
What is your sense, then, of how the situation developed? Some will respond by assigning some sort of pecuniary motivation, or job security, or the like; but this category of responses rings hollow.
Why? Well, the public employees in my experience are motivated largely like anyone else: a love of the work, and the jo; and in the public sphere, many are blessed with a sense that they are ‘in service’, and therefore paying the price of lower salaries.
So, no, I don’t think demeaning motivation is useful.The folks doing those $10,000 jbs are trying to do a good job.
So, where? Is there some characteristic of governmental serve at work here/ A sense that yo, an employee, are a stand in for the country, and that you are assuring quality in their name?
Some here will offer apocryphal stories that generate huge generalizations. And I recognize that the question is one for a sociologist’s PhD, where actual data could be generated. I know that we necessarily generalize from experience.
Still personal experience doesn’t seem useful, at least in answering the basic question: how does this monstrous review of review of review grow?
Its the normal aging of an organization. The pioneers leave and bureaucrats take their place, always adding paper work, new procedures, new approval steps, etc. until you spend more time getting approval to work, and documenting your work than actually working. And of course there needs to be additional workers to review your work and approval your requests which then have to have their work reviewed, evaluated and approved.
You also get to a point where you probably have to put in a request in triplicate to get organizational approval to simply replace a burnt out light bulb on your desk light 🙂
I should correct myself: I’ve been told things were different twenty or thirty years ago, not ten or twenty. I seem to have lost track of time…
When it comes to the review process, the only negative thing I’d say about the people involved is that they like positive reviews. Sometimes reviews become pointless because they want to convince the reviewers that everything’s fine. That can make a review more a performance than a extra pair of eyes taking a critical look at something.
In terms of spacecraft systems, I think the quantity of things being reviewed has increases substantially. Some of that is added requirements and checks; that’s a list that they add to every time there is a problem and a way to prevent it in the future is identified. But it’s also because the systems themselves are more complicated. For example, some of the Galileo spacecraft’s microprocessors had all of 16 kbytes of memory. Given that limitation, there wasn’t a whole lot of flight software to review. You could probably step a reviewer through the code line by line, in the time it would take to just summarize the software requirements for a modern spacecraft system.
That means there really is too much for a single review panel to handle. That leads to multiple reviews at a lower level, and then a review of the reviews. Really, I think that probably should be changed to multiple reviews and then a streamlined compilation of the results. But that would be a profound change in the process.
I do.
Even if you really did want a list of a million little things, I’m not sure I’d have time to type it all. (And I probably only have personal experience with a few thousand of them. And I’d probably get people mad at me for mentioning some of them…)
But I’ll toss out some of the Cassini ground software development as one example. We needed quite a bit of software to plan the observations and make sure that plan would actually work (e.g. not collecting more data than we could record or send back.) In the case of three fairly large and elaborate software tools, we didn’t end up using them (or, in one case, only used a fraction of the capabilities built into it.)
Software development during cruise followed the official process of collecting requirements, documenting and reviewing the requirements, developing a plan, etc.
In practice, the requirements were a wish list that no one prioritized, the whole thing was overly ambitions, and the actual features were really needed were a small fraction of the whole. In two of the three cases, we never used them. They weren’t delivered in time, someone just cobbled together something which gave us the critical functionality (in one case, over the Christmas holidays.) When the official product was delivered, it had so much overhead from unneeded features that it was too slow to use. So everyone just stuck with the home-grown workarounds. In the third case, we got it in time and it worked (although it was pretty beta and awkward to use at first), but most of the capability involved things we didn’t really need and never used. Given the number of people involved, that amounted to a few dozen person-years that went nowhere.
Are you saying- well, what are you saying? That common sense is missing?
Or could it be that nobody really knew exactly what was needed so they accounted for everything imaginable?
That seems inevitable with the kind of scattered development you get with typical NASA projects. Hence the layers of “oversight” intended to provide coordination, but ending up just adding another entity(ies) that everyone else has to try to coordinate with (and get around.)
I guess I was describing an example of a problem, and didn’t really say anything about how or why it happened.
In two of those cases, I’d say they were thinking in terms of delivering a finished product. I don’t think the idea of an early delivery of core capabilities and adding features was really there. Of course, that’s from memory of something that happened about fifteen years ago. (In the third case I mentioned, the one we actually used, lots of changes were made over years, but I’m not sure if that was originally envisioned.) When people need something, and that core capability isn’t available, they will invent home-grown alternatives and work arounds. Once the do, and get used to that, it’s really hard to get them to shift to over to the official software tools (or whatever.)
Another thing that comes to mind, and applies to more things than ground software, is the way requirements were handled. This followed the usual practice of collecting requirements, reviewing them and handing them over to engineers to develop something satisfying those requirements. The way NASA handles this, there isn’t much room for prioritizing the requirements (I don’t think the standard database they use even has a field for that.) Once reviewed, changing the requirement is a big deal, and failing to deliver something which doesn’t satisfy the requirements is considered a failure. And the users (the people who generated the requirements) aren’t really in the loop anymore.
That means that if something which seemed easy but turns out to be difficult, there’s no good way to go back to the users and say, “Are you sure you really need this?” There’s no way to tell if a requirement is something 90% of the users desperately want, or something one guy said would be nice to have. And, because of the way the system works, if it isn’t mandatory many people think it shouldn’t be listed at all. So lots of “nice to have” things creep in because people know they have zero chance of getting them unless they are official requirements.
In the case of the Cassini software, the requirements were set while the users were still figuring out how we were going to do things and what we’d need to do it. Especially in a case like that, I think you need a close, closed loop between the users and the developers. The system is practically designed to be open loop, with a flow from users to requirements to engineers, with very little room for feedback on how a requirement impacts cost or schedule.
“a flow from users to requirements to engineers”
The breakdown of this process is endemic to design of any sort.
“Our minimum Gateway core payload is too big for anything but SLS” is a reasonable political prediction, yes, regardless of how small the gap between SLS’s 26 mT to TLI and a competitor and how undefined the actual Gateway hardware still is.
Mind, it’s politically unrealistic to propose any SLS competitor that’s not well ahead of SLS in development, and preferably already flown. Forget BFR in this discussion – F9H is what’s on the politically-practicable table right now.
If Elon Musk starts the BFR flight tests next year it will be well ahead of the SLS.
Once BFR reaches orbit, it’s on the table, politically speaking. Not before. (And that won’t be next year.)
Nope, probably the next year after, which will still be before the SLS makes its first test flight using the small one off (70 MT to orbit) prototype. And that assumes the SLS flight doesn’t slip further.
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX will launch its Mars spaceship into orbit as early as 2020
“Speaking on a launch industry round-table at the Satellite 2018 conference, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that the company intends to conduct the first orbital launches of BFR as early as 2020, with suborbital spaceship tests beginning in the first half of 2019.”
Remember, just as with the reusable boosters, no one knows just how much work has been done by SpaceX on the BFR. Without NASA involvement and using its own money they could be very far along. The Raptor Engines for it were first announced in 2010 with the first test firing in 2016.
https://www.nasaspaceflight…
Its also been testing its composite tanks.
http://www.businessinsider….
Hops next year, not orbital flights. And, “as early as 2020” not “guaranteed in 2020”.
Not to discourage enthusiasm; it’s great things they’re aiming to do, and they do indeed look capable of ultimately delivering.
But the first rule of projects remains, it’ll take longer and cost more than you think going in.
Klyde Morris has an interesting point about the often overoptimistic expectations here:
http://www.klydemorris.com/…
What was actually said was “I’m not sure you could even break some of those pieces up into those smaller pieces to get them on a smaller rocket.”
To me, it sounds like there are not enough details to make a decision on the required sizes of the payloads. He thinks some may be too big to fit on FH.
What’s being taken as a refusal to use FH instead of SLS is probably more like the payload designs are too immature to make a decision.
That makes no sense. The fact that they don’t actually know what the design will be means it can be designed to be launcher agnostic.
Gerst is trying to use circular reasoning: LOPG is going to be designed around SLS, therefore it will be too big for anything except SLS.
The same logic that Mike Griffin used for the Orion. It was design for the Stick (Ares I). So ended up with Orion stack that even the Delta IV Heavy couldn’t lift for basically a crewed Earth reentry capsule.
Except Mike Griffin picked the architecture he liked from the ESAS study (Ares I plus Ares V) and sold that to Congress. Congress, of course, loved it because it preserved as many shuttle jobs in as many Congressional districts as possible (i.e. $$$).
Makes one wonder what Congress would have said if he’d pushed for a more flexible path using EELVs, developing fuel depot technology, and etc.
https://www.nasa.gov/explor…
Pretty much every commercial satellite manufacturer makes their satellites “launcher agnostic”. The fact that NASA refuses to do this to this day is infuriating.
Some of that isn’t the satellite manufacturers making the satellites “launcher agnostic.” It’s the launch vehicle manufacturers writing similar prayer books. SpaceX wanted to be able to Boeing 702 communications satellites, and that bus existed long before the Falcon 9. I haven’t seen the design requirements, but I’m pretty sure having compatible interfaces and a suitable launch environment was intentional.
Many of those standards were written by (or adopted by) the original US Government EELV program. According to their Falcon 9 payload integration documentation, the payload adapter uses the standard EELV 62 in bolted interface.
I wonder just how interchangeable the various launchers really are. It’s (relatively) simple to handle electrical requirements, I suppose, but I’m thinking about other issues: vibration levels, and vibration levels at various points in the trajectory, for instance. Characteristics of separation; the “joltiness” experienced when various parts are expended, and others.
That sounds right. The vibration environment is the most different or difficult to deal with. At least that’s what I remember from early Juno development (when the project was asked to design for launch on either a Delta or an Atlas.) It’s also what I’ve heard from people working on Europa Clipper (with SLS baselined but being designed to keep an Delta IV Heavy as an option.)
The real problem with vibration is that each launch vehicle shakes at different frequencies. That’s well characterized, and launch service providers can provide a spectrum of amplitude versus frequency. My understanding is that mechanical engineers deal with that by shifting the frequency of the payload’s resonant modes. They don’t eliminate them, just shift them to avoid the particular frequencies the launch vehicle will shake especially hard. If you want to be able to fly on multiple launch vehicles, that means more frequencies to avoid. And that complicates the mechanical design.
I wonder about the actual amplitude of vibration, and I mean measured in how much a thing can be expected to be displaced. How much for instance does the centerline of a rocket move when it is in those first few furious minutes? Are we talking fractions of an inch or feet or? (Yea, still stuck on old units).
Gerstenmaier is using politically realistic reasoning – absent political intervention from a much higher level, he will have no choice but to tie essential parts of Gateway to SLS.
What we see here is him putting as good a face as he can on that unpleasant reality.
If we don’t like that unpleasant reality, beating up on Gerstenmaier won’t fix it. Working to make that higher-level political intervention happen is what might actually help. Just sayin’.
How on Earth is that going to happen when people like Gerst are creating the very propaganda that supports SLS?
I think you’re grossly mischaracterizing what Mr. Gestenmaier actually said here.
Read him carefully, with understanding of the political constraints, and it’s clear he’s planning on doing what he must RE SLS, while also allowing for commercial options that could continue Gateway even in the event of SLS failure.
An example: The fact that he even mentions the possibility of crew reaching Gateway other than on Orion is quite telling in context. If he were actually the SLS propagandist you say, he’d never admit the slightest possibility of any alternative to SLS/Orion for that job.
He’s in a tough spot.
“too big”.
Now THAT is a turn of events that I just did not see.
Subdividing the “Gateway core payload” is the obvious answer, of course, but when asked why not the answer would be something like “those decisions were made long before F9H, and making changes is cost-prohibitive”; or “explaining those architectural changes is way down in the weeds, I’m afraid”.
For certain payloads still in the design phase, it actually would be kinda silly to design only to the FH payload fairing. At least scaling up to SLS fairing size would make for larger spacecraft where that size would be useful. Even if SLS might not be alive to fly it, other launchers will be.
Possibly, but then the existence of such payloads would justify continued work on SLS. As long as BFR (or New Glenn, or whatever) isn’t operational and certified, NASA will want a viable launch vehicle whose development is under their control. Otherwise, they would be betting that mission with the big fairing requirements on the success of a project they have no control over. I might think the odds justify that gamble, but lots of senior government managers don’t approve of gambling with taxpayer money.
Of course, we see what happens when things ARE under their control. Perhaps they don’t want things under their control at all….
IF BFR flies an orbital mission in 2020-2021 like Shotwell says that puts it years ahead of an SLS flying with a paypoad fairing. Given the likelihood of an early satellite deploying BFS to service Starlink etc. betting on the non-certification of BFR is iffy at best.
Really? Couldn’t a payload built for SLS be mounted on a larger-diameter commercial rocket using a payload adapter?
It could, depending on how big the payload was. Five meters is about biggest diameter currently available, and I don’t think you can go too far beyond that. But that might be ok if NASA managed the contract to develop the adaptor. My point was that, for something like this (big agency priority, large budget and high profile) NASA would not want to depend on something beyond their control. They can’t count on some private company deciding to develop something, following through on that decision, and successfully developing it. Therefore no such external development is going to be baselined for this deep space outpost gateway whatever.
I believe SpaceX has hinted that a bigger F9H fairing is doable – IF someone else pays for it. As with F9H cross-feed, it’s not part of their in-house development plan – that’s of course shifting fast to BFR/BFS.
Their Fairing 2.0 for F9/FH has already flown; slightly wider & longer, lighter, optimized for recovery, and capable of being stretched. With USAF giving SpaceX $21 million for vertical integration work ISTM a Cagegory 3 fairing is almost a lock.
An honest answer by Gerst to Wayne Hales question would have been something like “we are given money to develop the Shuttle based SLS, keeping that capability and the people we mostly had before, and that keeps those stakeholders happy, and they are not giving us money to buy Falcon Heavies, or to have money left over for other things, or to use any vehicles for that matter that might come along that do the job, or to do as we might as far as how, between vehicles and payloads. And that’s why Wayne.
Next question.”
Worth reading the original Eric Berger piece at arstechnica
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
Wayne Hale of course asks the fifty billion-dollar question: Why use SLS at all for Lunar exploration?
Gerstenmaier then actually lays out about as sensible a Gateway transportation policy as NASA might practically get away with under current political (Congressional) mandates to use SLS: Ship the major pieces out via SLS, then use F9H (or other commercial boosters) for routine servicing, cargo, maybe crew vehicles other than Orion.
This could then easily morph to smaller post-core Gateway assemblies also going out on other-than-SLS boosters, as SLS’s bottlenecks become more obvious. An optimal program? No. The best one plannable under current political constraints? Quite likely.
Yes, it could be done much better without SLS at all. But Gerstenmaier would only have that planning option if someone else at a higher level brokers a Congressional deal allowing it.
Duh, That’s why I already linked to it at the top of this post.
Ayup. And if we tell them twice, more will actually do it…
In 2-3 years, the BFR (or whatever name it is given later), will be available to launch such currently nonexistent monolithic (or as I tend to call them “integral” objects), built on the ground as single item “wide loads”, up to 150 tons worth, into LEO, for a tiny fraction of the cost of a single SLS launch, not even mentioning the cost share of SLS development.
If NASA does not start developing such wide loads, and does not migrate to the use of private launch vehicles fairly soon, it will be left literally in the dust of BFR departures to the Moon and Mars and other locations.
However, I do hope that the private companies will also develop the capability of having reusable upper stages for their behemoths that can launch even wider loads, (up to 50% wider than the launcher), in super-hammerhead configurations. For the BFR upper stage, this would mean a 4th version with truncated stage (no payload section at all), with full front and sides thermal protection for entry, but able to launch payloads up to about 13.5 meters across. Although this would require use of a large, disposable fairing, it would allow for an even wider variety of large payloads to reach LEO, where they could then be used in various in-space or surface locations. Think of a lunar ferry that is 13 meters across with folded legs. BFR-based cargo vehicles and tankers would be able to move these objects to where they are needed.
Beyond this width, barring a New Armstrong that is even wider than the BFR, we will have to learn how to assemble and fabricate “monolithic” structures in space after launch.
Think Big!
John S.
You could put a 12 meter diameter expendable upper stage on top of the BFR Booster with the original SpaceX ITS specifications. They did procured a 12 meter prototype LOX tank.
But for the foreseeable future with the BFB & BFS in service. There will not be any Lunar lander other than a BFS variant. No one will pay to developed a specialized robust Lunar lander that have no other applications that cost more than the BFS. With the exception of the smallish (about 6 tonnes) Blue Moon lander from Blue Origins.
John you just will not need those wide fairings..
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I’ve been looking into this exact question, with some expert help. First, a quick data dump…
– F9H payload to TLI, core expended, strapons barge-recovered, ~14 mT.
(You can get a bit more payload expending all three boosters, but SpaceX won’t likely want to set up to mass-produce that many. Core-expended F9H seems to us the optimum balance for government-customer deep-space missions.)
– Add a single-RL-10 transfer stage as part of the overall F9H payload to low LEO parking orbit, and TLI payload goes to ~21 metric tons.
(Somewhat non-intuitively, subbing a larger LH2 U/S for the current F9H U/S yields very little benefit for very large extra cost. Apparently F9H is well-optimized as-is – go figure!)
(Under reasonable price assumptions for F9H core-expended and a ULA-supplied single RL-10 Centaur, cost/lb to TLI goes *down*. Even including the likely-significant extra cost to pay SpaceX to add LH2 payload servicing arrangements to their pad, it’s a near-wash.)
– F9H improvements in the pipeline (EG block 5 and Merlin 1D++) and potential (cross-feed) could improve payload by 10%, possibly a bit more. IE, ~23+ mT to TLI – within 10% of SLS’s 26 mT.
(Our read on F9H cross-feed is it won’t happen unless a major customer wants it enough to pay for it.)
Of course another question is why build the LOP-G at all. It’s the classic example of a $30+ Billion solution looking for a mission to justify it. I could maybe see a EM L1 Gateway, one in lunar orbit makes no sense to anyone but NASA and the ISS partners. Far better to spend that money on a lunar lander capable of delivery to lunar orbit on a FH.
Did LOP-G (ugh – I prefer “Gateway”) get a location while I wasn’t looking? Last I looked, NASA was still carefully not pinning down what orbit it would occupy.
At least one Lunar orbit might make sense, mind – check into DRO, Distant Retrograde Orbit.
Me, I’m agnostic among DRO and the various EML candidates.
DRO is a relic from the ARM mission, but then so is the DSG. NASA wouldn’t even be clinging to it if they weren’t so desperate for a mission for the SLS.
In a larger long-term context, a Lunar gateway station makes huge sense, and is exactly what NASA should be pursuing, regardless of SLS politics – but more on that RSN…
I agree with this but only if it doesn’t cost so much that it prevents the development of a large lunar lander. In and of itself, going round and round the moon isn’t much better than going round and round the earth. We’ve been stuck in LEO since the early 1970s, which is almost as long as I am old! I most certainly don’t want us to be stuck in lunar orbit until I’m dead (which will hopefully be several decades from now).
Gerstenmaier has some very interesting things to say about lander development options in this recent Goddard Symposium panel discussion:
http://www.ustream.tv/recor…
Agreed, a Gateway station makes no sense on its own; it needs to be part of an overall transportation system. And one aimed as soon as possible at being a low-cost reusable local-propellants transportation system.
I’d start with a propellant depot supplied by earth because there are still many unknowns when it comes to in-situ lunar fuel production. In my mind without actual tests on the moon we’re never going to know how effective this can be. Lunar dust, in particular, is extremely abrasive so I put little faith in equipment designed by aerospace engineers (even though that’s my degree). The aluminum Mars rover wheels currently in use on Mars being one example of an aerospace engineering “optimization”.
But, yes, when the economics become favorable, propellants supplied from lunar in-situ production is an obvious change.
I suppose a lander is required no matter what sort of boosters are used. Even in the case of BFR; that’s why folks tow small cars behind their Winnebagos.
Actually in the case of the SpaceX BFR, the second stage (the spaceship) is planned to be the Mars lander. I see no reason why it could not also land on the moon. VTVL vehicles are quite the versatile vehicle.
I’ve never understood the point behind lunar distant retrograde orbits. They are reasonably stable (for decades or centuries) but you can get better stability from an Earth-Moon L4 or L5 orbit. I can’t see any advantages in delta v to or from other orbits, and possibly some disadvantages. Am I missing something?
Yes, there are no good pure lunar orbits.
But a high Earth orbit, or even a EM L1 orbit could have good potential in terms of a departure point for the Interplanetary Highway. But I wouldn’t really consider it a lunar gateway station then, but a Solar System one.
What makes the EM L1 attractive is the ease of which high acceleration electromagnetic launchers would have in delivery lunar products to it.
I’m not being glib when i say: DRO is associated with the Moon. This is politically advantageous.
Technically speaking, it seams unconnected from useful moon exploration or commercialization.
Have posted elsewhere that the LOP-G could be replaced with a stock SpaceX BFS in orbit around the Moon.
Yes! I’ve also made this argument, though less elegantly.
Regarding the unmodified Falcon Heavy, the Ars Technica article said:
“SpaceX has not publicly stated the TLI capacity of the Falcon Heavy rocket, but for the fully expendable version of the booster it is probably somewhere in the range of 18 and 22 tons. This is a value roughly between the vehicle’s published capacity for geostationary orbit, 26.7 tons, and Mars, 16.8 tons.”
It’s wise to be careful of doing planning based on what appear to be best-possible-case marketing numbers.
The intentionally conservative Falcon Heavy numbers I have give roughly 16 metric tons to TLI fully expended, versus roughly 14 mT core-expended. (Myself, I’d say fully-expended is not cost-effective.)
Those numbers assume both the current Block 4 boosters and no propellant crossfeed.
Add in the in-the-works Block 5 boosters, at planned performance, and you get something approaching 10% more. Add in the not-unless-someone-else-pays crossfeed, and you should get a bit over 10% more.
Add both of those together, and you’re up into the lower end of Berger’s estimated range.
The “large volume, monolithic” pieces Gerst is referring to are the hab/propulsion and and logistics modules for the Mars Transport part of the Deep Space Gateway and Transport program that he publicly rolled out about a year ago.
Those items are being sized to use the planned 8.4 meter OD SLS Cargo Version payload shroud, with a starting launch in 2028, IIRC.
So, Gerst’s current architecture for sending humans to Mars needs more throw weight and a larger payload shroud than Falcon Heavy plans to have (as of today).
Could NASA do the Deep Space Gateway and Transport plan with Falcon Heavy and other non-SLS expendables? Sure. If Gerst is directed to do it by Congress and/or the Trump Administration. Or if he is allowed to do a cost and schedule trade study starting with a clean sheet of paper for both launchers and beyond Earth orbit crew vehicles.
“The “large volume, monolithic” pieces Gerst is referring to are the hab/propulsion and and logistics modules for the Mars Transport part of the Deep Space Gateway”
4.5 meter diameter for the Gateway. The Power & Propulsion Element has a max mass of 7,500 kg, FH can toss more to TLI, and PPE is already speced to fly on an unnamed “commercial vehicle” in recent NASA docs. Guess Getst didn’t get the memo.
As for the NASA Mars trasport, they can wave “bye” as BFS passes it on the way to Mars – BFS having no need for a Gateway.
Given BFS there’s no/ little need for a Gateway, either.
It is nothing less than a national tragedy to see how far NASA – once the brightest hope for our nation – has deteriorated. Putting down the Falcon Heavy or BFR when all you have to show is the expensive imaginary SLS? Really?
NASA was never the brightest hope for the nation, although there may have been a common delusion that it was. What’s happening now is the inherent flaws in socialist space have become blindingly obvious. But those flaws have been there the whole time.
The arguments are moot in the discussion of NASA versus SpaceX.
Anyone who bets against SpaceX has lost. NASA is the space exploration ancient that refuses to retire. Its time is over.
Every time SpaceX announces an adaptation or evolution of one their launch vehicles, the critics in the cheap seats cry “Foul! Failure! It will never happen!”
The real issue is, things HAPPEN at SpaceX. They do not happen without ginormous and unaffordable tax payer investments in NASA. Yeah, I know that SpaceX (and others, happily) have taken NASA funding for much if their R & D – but SpaceX has something to show for it which makes SENSE.
Has anyone heard of the JWST? $500 million now inflated to over $9 billion, and still may not fly? How many microsats, which could be combined to form an even larger telescope, launched on a couple of Falcon Heavies, be built and operational with incredible redundancy, for $1 Billion?
Don’t tell me it “Foul! Failure! It will never happen!!” Landing two strap on boosters returning from hypersonic flight was certainly impossible. Remember?
SpaceX hardware is not centered around a white elephant, colossal booster with no meaningful payload which does not advance the human colonization of at least cislunar space. SLS is a political gambit for votes and jobs. Nothing more.
If I were Trump – and I am not a Trump supporter – I’d shut down SLS, devolve NASA into pure R & D centers, and move every last stinkin’ bit of what NASA supposedly does now to the private sector.
But, that is my view of a rational universe, where money can’t be manufactured at the push of a button, and fiscal responsibility is the first building block of any effort.
It is nearly all private now. They mostly only do office work and oversight. They even don’t design anything. They just RFP.
https://www.nap.edu/read/63…
In 1996 estimated time and cost of a liquid booster fly back system for STS was 4 years and $4-5 billion. Twenty years later SpaceX developed a whole flyback system in basically the same amount of time for an order of magnitude lower cost in NOMINAL dollars.
Congress was the one that wanted SLS. It was penis envy, nothing more. As for spacex, we’re still waiting for them to launch a crew. http://Www.robert-w-jones.com
As for SLS/Orion, we’re still waiting for it to launch anything at all. When’s that first crew flight again?
Years and years in the future. They need to build a new MLP for it and a new upper stage.
And they are still waiting for NASA to figure out how to certify the Dragon2.
https://www.theverge.com/20…
“However, SpaceX and Boeing won’t be able to start flying astronauts regularly to the ISS until their vehicles have been certified by NASA. For that to happen, each company has to conduct a crewed test flight, carrying astronauts to the station like they would for a regular mission. SpaceX and Boeing are both targeting 2018 for those test flights, but the GAO report identifies a number of reasons why the vehicles won’t be certified until the year after.”
And there is the fact that NASA is not good at dealing with the constant upgrades that SpaceX does to improve performance.
“Additionally, the company is in the middle of upgrading its Falcon 9 to a new version of the vehicle called the Block 5. The upgrade includes five major changes to the rocket’s design, and the GAO report claims that there may not be enough time for these changes to be implemented and reviewed by NASA before SpaceX’s first uncrewed flight test of the Crew Dragon in late 2017.”
Quite honestly I think that Elon Musk has already written Dragon2 off as a learning experience which is why he is focusing everything on a NASA free BFR. He probably has no more personal interest in the Dragon2, with its use of yesterday’s technology than in the launch of a comsat. Its just another contract to fulfill and he has turned all his attention to BFR.
Amusing factoid. Most of the Falcon 9 major upgrades was requested by NASA for man-rating. Which is funny since all previous crewed launchers will fail to make the new NASA certification process. That includes the SLS exempted from man-rating process.
Time will tell if you are right on the schedule. But don’t forget that NASA also has a tendency to slip its schedule as well. Look at how far the SLS’s first flight has slipped.
But I suspect even a full size version of the BFR doing test hops will get folks attention, and get them to start asking questions, even if NASA is able to get the test version of the SLS off the ground.
Ah, but SLS’s future slips are irrelevant to the current politics of offering substitutes for it.
The many schedules slips for the Ares I were a factor in it being replaced by the non-existent COTS and CCP commercial systems.
I wonder just how much of today’s program Gerst is directly responsible for? Is he the guy who was too scared to continue flying Shuttle and thought nothing of shutting it down without even a thought of seeing whether any improvements could be made? Is he the guy who failed to ensure requirements were properly defined and vetted for Constellation, Orion, asteroid missions or Gateway? To what extent was he responsible for the designs of the spacecraft and rockets that don’t seem to be able to achieve program goals? Was he behind the mission to Mars campaign? Is he the one who ordered the budgets taken from science, history and education so they could be put into operations because they weren’t getting enough of the money all ready? Is he the guy who thinks NASA should have no role in science, history or education? Does he think the program is progressing in a positive manner or is there an ulterior motive to try and destroy as much of the old NASA as possible to try and replace it with something different and unrecognizable? I wonder if he is directly responsible or does he enable people with bad, poorly thought out ideas? Or maybe he has had no roll at all and he just observes? I see a near continuous treadmill of people coming and going but he seems to have been the one constant. He has now been in place and seen the demise of much of the human space program. It is not improving.
“thought nothing of shutting [STS] down without even a thought of seeing whether any improvements could be made?”
Unless you know this directly, claiming that deep consideration – even if one-sided – wasn’t part of the equation is preposterous.
I hope monolithic means a 8 meter one piece space telescope. SLS or BFR could launch it. A spun cast mirror might work, but they are taken. Corning can make a thin lightweight mirror with actuators to push or pull the mirror into the needed shape. It is standard practice. If 3M HST had this it could have been fixed from the ground. If astronomers think it is worth it. Over twice the Dia. Might be lower cost. No fold. W ebb is only 6.5 meter and hex. This is 1 piece.