The FAA: regulating business on the moon, Reuters
“The United States government has taken a new, though preliminary, step to encourage commercial development of the moon. According to documents obtained by Reuters, U.S. companies can stake claims to lunar territory through an existing licensing process for space launches. The Federal Aviation Administration, in a previously undisclosed late-December letter to Bigelow Aerospace, said the agency intends to “leverage the FAA’s existing launch licensing authority to encourage private sector investments in space systems by ensuring that commercial activities can be conducted on a non-interference basis.”
As a signatory to the UN Outer Space treaty, the US will be held responsible for sorting out the rights of government and private US companies that launch to, land and mine in outer space. I think this move by the FAA is the first step in sorting this out with in the US space community. Internationally, the treaty is a bit fuzzy as it states that “A State Party to the Treaty which has reason to believe that an activity or experiment planned by another State Party in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, would cause potentially harmful interference with activities in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, may request consultation concerning the activity or experiment.” I’m not sure another space-faring nation is going to necessarily honor an FAA launch licence extending to landing/mineral rights on the moon or other space body.
But as with Article XI of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, the US may pull out of certain parts of the space treaty if it perceives an intrusion on economic rights and security.
Down the road, private exploitation of celestial resources is going to be very hard to internationally regulate and it may end up being a case of first to land and mine, first to rights.
Yep, as soon as a private mining or other operation on the Moon becomes profitable, the OST will be put to the test.
Assuming Spacex builds their MCT which gets refueled with methane and Lox in Leo at first. Could it ever make sense for them to drop by L2 on the flight out to top off the LOX tanks. Couldn’t Musk Mars city’s MCTexpress become the ancher tenet for moon mining?
At present doesn’t reusable rockets make moon mining less viable?
If return MCTs use aero braking would it be possible to sling them to L2?
According to the chatter in the NSF forum. The MCT fleet will be assemble for the launch window to Mars every 2 years in LEO. Mars transit propellants, supplies & personnel will be transfer to the fleet just prior to Earth departure with MCT transports and MCT tankers.
There will be no stopping at L2. It takes almost as much delta-V to get to L2 as to Mars. The MCT fleet don’t need Lunar propellants along with the supporting Lunar & Cis-Lunar infrastructures required.
Stopping at L2 on the return doesn’t make sense. Since landing on Earth will allow maintenance on the MCT fleet. Going to L2 means 2 atmospheric interface maneuvers along with more wear and tear on the MCT fleet plus additional transit time. Also you would require Lunar and Cis-Lunar infrastructures to be in place.
Reusable rockets makes any Lunar and Cis-Lunar activities more variable by lowering the cost of setting them up.
Anything returning to the Earth’s surface has to be covered in a heat shield. That will be restricted to the capsule.
The rest of the transfer vehicle will either be thrown away or left at EML-1 or EML-2.
If you have a large enough surface area/perhaps an inflatable Shield together with fuel for propulsive shrusting, could you land a large cylinder on earth? Similar to a falcon first stage but shorter and wider? Redefine the word capsule?
Didn’t Musk say the reason you can’t return a second stage is engine efficiency? If you can refuel in space I don’t see why you can’t land a large cylinder/vehicle on earth if you want?
If you are returning directly from Mars there is no where to refuel. If you stop at EML-1 or LEO leave the transfer vehicle there.
The fuel required to boost that large of a spacecraft from Earth Orbit to lunar orbit (or L2) is HUGE and could take MONTHS in the Van Allen Belts. So this does not make sense. 1- using HUGE amounts of fuel to boost HUGE amounts of fuel.
2 – Humans would not survive months in the Van Allen Belts.
So it only makes sense to boost the huge spacecraft out of Earth orbit with the bare minimum amount of fuel to reach lunar orbit. Then the spacecraft should be fueled with lunar resources, checked out, THEN the crew would leave Earth and rendezvous with the craft in Lunar orbit for departure.
And by planning the departure correctly you could leave Lunar orbit to the Earth Moon lagrange point, then pass through the Earth Sun Lagrange point for a low energy departure. (not sure how frequently the alignment would be right for a Mars trajectory)
I would like to see some discussion of this in congress or from the whitehouse.
Baby steps… you wouldn’t have imagined something like this getting so much credibility just five years ago. We are starting to get relatively close to opening the infinite economy.
The fact you have bureaucrats looking at this is a good thing.
Yup tick tock goes the clock 630 Sunday evening maybe? 🙂
The ice on the Moon should be the focus of the entire Human Space Flight community. It is the key enabler for a human space infrastructure due to the inescapable requirement for massive space radiation shielding for space stations and spaceships. That is the elephant in the room nobody will talk about. The NewSpace tourist plan is a dead end. I wonder how longer before I am banned from this blog. Four other blogs have banned me for daring to criticize the Musk cult.
Four other blogs have banned me for daring to criticize the Musk cult.
Now I remember where I’ve seen you before.
“I have the death sentence on twelve systems.”
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
2 days and you were banned. Not bad.
I don’t think you are criticizing Musk just his maniac like obsession with Mars. Overall point for all capitalism based space endeavors should be the orderly settlement of the solar system which most likely starts with the moon and it’s ice. But if Musk want to send people to Mars then so be it. Maybe some one can capitalize on that and sell him lunar ice based fuel in LEO for his MCT.
I follow Musk’s tantalizing Mars plans on NSF L2 but agree that it’s the SpaceX + Bigelow *infrastructure* under development that’s most intriguing … collapsing the cost of a Falcon Heavy by reflying at least 2 and perhaps 3 cores will open multiple lunar paths *this decade*. I’d love to see them dream up a quick & dirty fleet of one way lunar lander w/ full tele-operation of solar powered rovers from Earth, at all lunar latitudes. That’s something a clever group of engineers could brainstorm quickly and one could fly agile custom payloads on each. Wow!
I’ll believe an MCT when I see it, 27 clustered engines, good grief. But the FH will not be vaporware much longer.
Moon? You want to go to the Moon then go to the Moon, who’s stopping you?
But you don’t really want to go to the Moon do you? You just want to complain about what other people want to do. Later tater.
http://www.spaceflightinsid…
Every wonder where they came up with the word “lunatic” lol
Now you know where my SLS church remarks came from, Note the scribes creating arguments to protect the religion.
“The Saturn V was only a qualified success; it was small.”
“A launch vehicle with several times the lift of the Saturn V would need Solid Fuel or pressure-fed boosters in the over-15 million pound thrust range.”
this guy wants boosters that produce more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V… well, he certainly doesn’t think small… just not rationally. it’s pretty obvious he has no idea what he’s talking about.. i’m literally twitching just thinking about the engineering that would have to go into the launch pad alone for such a monster rocket.
I gotta say, if I ran a blog/news-site, any commenter who comes in bragging about how many sites they’ve been banned from for Bringing The Truth, I would ban them instantly. I don’t care where they got banned, or why, and I don’t care if every word they say matches my deepest beliefs. The act of waving multiple-banning around as their badge of honour would be enough for me to ban them. Anyone else, making the dumbest comments, I’d give the benefit of the doubt, let them prove themselves useful or not. But I’ve never, in 30 odd years of forum reading, seen someone start like you who has turned into a useful member of any community.
I guess it’s a good thing it’s not your blog then. So useful. Thanks.
Come on Gary, you can surely do better than this? Let’s hear your evidence that Musk is ‘scamming billions of dollars and free NASA support for an uber-rich tourist game’. I’m willing to read your evidence. Put it up for a discussion or are you satisfied with hurling insults back and forth.
Cheers
Gary doesn’t require evidence, his is divinely inspired.
Bully. Ad hominem is all you got.
I just deleted a whole bunch of your troll-baiting crap. You are banned. Congratulations on #5.
And how does a giant expendable rocket that our government will be unwilling to pay to fly enough to accomplish much of anything help get your lunar radiation shields off the moon??
It’s not about moon vs Mars. It’s about developing capability. SpaceX is part of the picture in developing capability. They started the company with their own money and won competed proposals.
Marc’s point is a good one. There seems to be a little tunnel vision on the part of Musk watchers and a preoccupation with Mars at the expense of other possibilities.
SpaceX is developing capabilities that will have multiple uses and, almost certainly, multiple customers. If you have launch systems capable of lofting payloads to Mars, those same systems can service a lunar exploration and development program, probably funded (as the FAA now envisions) by private enterprise.
From the point of view of SpaceX, this makes a lot of sense as a profit center to help pay for Musk’s Mars effort.
Musk may be committed to Mars, but on his way, he will give us the capability–commercially available–to go many other places, and do so well before the first Mars ship departs.
It is all old NASA technology originally paid for by the taxpayer and now we are getting charged for it again. The engines, the friction stir welded stages, the toxic dragon heat shield and hypergolics, SpaceX got it all for free. Along with billions in free support. It is so far from free market capitalism it is a joke yet that is what is endlessly hyped. A kerosene burning hobby rocket has no real space capability compared to a large solid fuel lower stage and hydrogen upper stages. LEO is not space. It’s all public relations and the infomercial has been droning on for so many years the gullible and distracted are taken in and think it’s all wonderful. It’s the NewSpace Flim Flam.
That area that exists between celestial bodies and consists of a hard vacumn is outer space. Now you can keep trying to bully people into believing that LEO is not space but that will not change physics as we know them.
Actually it is about the Moon vs Mars. The SLS going direct to the Moon is the first step in harvesting lunar ice as radiation shielding for true space stations and spaceships. It bypasses LEO and dumps the NewSpace manifesto in the trashcan. Clusters of 60’s technology low thrust kerosene engines are not taking anything worth the trouble to the Moon. This is why the SLS drives the SpaceX fans nuts. It is just another version of making it all so wonderfully cheap like the shuttle was going to do. There is no cheap.
True. Space Exploration is putting it all down to get the Air Force contracts. That’s why they’re pouring cement on SLC-39b for the Falcon Heavy. The engines are TRW, the money tax money like anything else, and the goal is to put up NRO payloads. All this talk of commercial Mars, and now the moon, it’s childish. Space X is nothing more than a new aerospace company without the burden of pensions.
Yup with a guy in charge who’s life goal is to settle Mars.
Let him fly our spy SATs 🙂
My friend Tory spoke last night about reusability 🙂 Says he has an incremental plan to make his rockets reusable. Sounds like first step will be recovering engines only. He will reveal his plan in April.
Talk to him on twitter He will respond to many questions @torybruno
He said in his Stanford speech that he was surprised Spacex didn’t land last time and thinks they will this time plus wishes them luck.
His speech is very informative. Google it
I’ll look at Tory, though I know some history, Delta Clipper, the concept of reusable boosters in general, the need for single stage to orbit, trans-atmospheric, via high speed flight R&D in general. I am unhappy that yet another candidate has come along to re-learn the usual lessons. I am also very unhappy that 39b is being mauled. What happens if 39a has an accident? B with the crawler paths covered by the falcon heavy horizontal integration facility? That’s a big bet to plunk down on this strange little silicon valley character that talks a lot of Mars, but is doing the business all around the NRO payloads. I’m old enough to know BS from a snake oil salesman and that guy is really ringing my alarms, know what I mean?
Lewis we will never go any where in until we can do it affordability. You seem to imply that orion SLS is important. It is not. The thing that is most important is driving down the cost of space flight. There is a great race going on to build practical affordable durable rocket engines. They HAVE learned from the past. Like u I too believe we need a BFR only it MUST be an affordable reusable BFR that fuel is methane. Watch @torybruno and @Elon_musks space race to the future. Don’t worry about SLS
Again, once Elon is making bank putting up hardware for the uniform community, you’ll be back to wondering where the next step will come from, like after Columbia burned up, if unlike me you’re not dead of old age.
I’m not an SLS person. The only aspect of that thing that I find acceptable is the horizontal staging (if the sides were liquids with F-1b or rs-68 or something). In the mean time, I favor using what exists, Delta IV heavy, man rating that, and launching a lot, now. A lot meaning once every ten days with people.
I’m also of the orbital fuel station camp, that and I’d like to see a tug developed, an orbital tug not that stupid crackhead asteroid thing. I’d also like to see ISS put into the Pacific unless they are willing to change it’s inclination to something more usable. But I’m just a regular person so all that is probably a bad way to go.
None of this has to do with money. If this were really essential, this concept of cheap boosters and watching every nickle, I would say that it’s best to just cancel the whole thing and stick with robots. If money is really important, end manned space flight now and make it illegal to try again so people aren’t perpetually disappointed, send robots to do the science and that’s it. Though that is not the situation, is it?
NASA spends what is arguably an insignificant amount of the overall federal budget. A percent? Whatever it is, it’s nothing compared to DOD. Look at JSF-35. Historically, the B-2. Between those two airplanes that’s a trillion dollars and there’s a thousand programs like them. Nobody cares about that spending. Why is a minuscule fraction of that cost so important to the “taxpayer” or whatever entity this money is important to?
Musk is pretty smart. All he has to do is throw some B.S. to the square community, guys that won’t know any better, tell them about Mars, make stupid videos, crash a few rockets that were going to the bottom anyway into a barge and call it this great move forward… and then he gets into that real money. DOD money where the accounting is so out of this world that one billion is a hundred.
He may not know that Von Braun liked airplanes after all, but he sure as hell knows what kind of cash there is in DOD missions.
Ha! Why is Boeing twice what Space Exploration is? Maybe because Boeing has contracts for fifty billion a year, or whatever, for projects that are kept secret for security, or to hide failure, or that are obscenely unethical along with two generations of retired workers from facilities all over the nation working on half of everything under the sun, while Space X has only it’s crummy boosters, trw engine, and a couple thousand strung out people in their thirties chugging Monster drinks.
I don’t like my future with Space Exploration.
Look at Rutan. Rutan scored on that B-2, scaled composites. Then he gets married to that idiot Branson and they start talking about cheap, free market, blah blah blah. And when one of their toys vaporizes without the girth of the federal government to protect them, it all goes up in smoke.
I don’t want that! I want the X-20. These guys suck and I hate it!
People hate Space X, I think that they hate them because they’re not national. Maybe that’s what it all comes down to. Something so important shouldn’t be trusted to these infant companies.
So, basically, commercialisation of space all the way out to lunar orbit will happen, sooner or later. The pressure is just going to be so strong that NASA and its arsenal system sponsors (both political and infrastructural) will not be able to stop it.
I suppose that it’s just a matter of time before the first contracts are handed out to survey for minerals, propose surface exploitation targets and demonstrate cost-effective resource return strategies.
If it’s only a matter of time for the first survey, it will be a long time. Nobody has a capsule with a service module that can handle a lunar mission. The service capsule for Orion, they say that the European Space Agency is going to build it. Lander? Ascent stage? Bringing all that stuff back into the atmosphere? The next mission to land on the moon is Chinese, so far as I can see. All the talk going on in the U.S. is borderline psychotic.
‘I suppose that it’s just a matter of time before the first contracts are handed out to survey for minerals, propose surface exploitation targets and demonstrate cost-effective resource return strategies.’
That’s an interesting statement, as my interpretation of the FAA letter to Bigelow is only dealing with launch licensing at this time but, with US State Dept and Dept of Commerce, guidance on future considerations for actual lunar ‘land rights.’ In the future, how will US determine issuing authority for those contracts? I’m not sure that FAA would be the correct government agency to manage lunar mineral mining rights in the future (other than they won’t let a company land on some other companies’ lunar turf.)
Perhaps a new US Dept. of the ‘Exterior?’ (waay ‘exterior’) Also, at what point do you have OSHA review of private mining company practices in regards to worker safety on the moon? The government bureaucracy builders must be licking their chops in anticipation of the next 100 years.
Yeah, even if Space Exploration saves 30% by building boosters 30% bigger so there’s fuel to land them on a barge that costs whatever… it doesn’t matter because in thirty years (15 now) when they’ve retired 100% of their staff and had a few rockets blow up destroying a couple billion dollars worth of payload, they’ll be the same price as ULA anyhow. It’s all a bunch of hot air and then I’ll croak with all this crap as one chapter in five chapters of crap that I had to watch my whole life, little videos of Apollo here and there to make me cry before being put in a box under ground.
The whole thing sucks. It sucks and I hate it.
While SpaceX’s schedules suck, their pricing predictions seem to come in pretty close to what they end up charging. Likewise their payload predictions tend to slightly underestimate what they end up launching.
With that in mind, SpaceX predict their retail price for Falcon Heavy at less than $100m/launch for around 50 tonnes to LEO. For higher-cost NASA or DoD payloads, they charge more, call it $150m for round numbers.
If we imagine there are setbacks and they end up doubling those prices, they’ll be charging NASA $300m for 50 tonnes to LEO. Nah, screw it, let’s triple that double to $900m per launch. So around $18m per tonne. Awful, horrible, a complete failure, right?
[Actual price, commercial, should be around $1.8m per tonne for the expendable version. Half that if they recover the boosters. A third if they can recover the core. $600k/tonne, $600/kg, $270/lb. But I’m assuming worst case… then I’m doubling it, and then I’m tripling that.]
NASA has given Boeing a $2.8b contract to product the first two first stage cores for SLS, not including any prior payments for converting the ET production facility over to the new ET-based SLS cores. That’s $1.4b for each core stage. That doesn’t include engines (which for the first two are just salvaged SSMEs), nor the Shuttle-based SRBs, nor the upper stage, nor integration, testing or operations. Nor does it include the inevitable cost overruns.
That’s about $20m per payload tonne for SLS just for the first stage cores.
See the difference? I can jack up SpaceX’s retail launch price by six times, and the entire launch is still cheaper than cost of SLS’s first-stage core.
That, and that alone, is why so many people want Musk to succeed.
I wouldn’t advocate for SLS. I would look to something that uses the crawlers and the VAB, but only because I believe more in the management of those days than the one that exists now. I would say that F-1b is called for, that RS-25 needs to go away, maybe something can be done with RS-68. SRB should go away if only because control for them was inside the orbiter, so why bother with the massive redesign. The tank, there’s only the basic shape and color in common between that tank and a booster.
If I were running things, to be honest, I would have drawn on the example set by the initial examination of the F-1, the idea of modernizing that… doing that with the entire Saturn V stack including the service module. The LM too. Get all that back and then start where they left off with Apollo Applications.
That’s what Orion is, right? And the closer that this mess ends up being to that, the better the chances are that we’ll ever do anything.
So that’s where I am with SLS. I think that it’s just part of the disaster that was the Space Transportation System. Horrible. Awful. A failure on all accounts no matter what angle it’s looked at from. But that’s really hard, right? Everyone that was involved with United Space Alliance, all those people, can any of them admit what terminal failure they were involved in? No. So let’s bring some of that failure into the future, right?
It’s an impossible situation, mostly, but the solution is not to bring in some Silicon Valley guy who is lucky so far. If you want to let him make a few billion putting those school bus things up for the NRO, fine, that’s probably all he wants anyway.
He is not going to do the basic science, engineering R&D, and production needed to get a mission to the Moon, let alone Mars. I can understand little kids taking him seriously on that note, but not adults that should know better.
I think it’s important that thinking Elon Musk is going to set up a city on Mars, that is to be psychotic. I stand by that.
[Warning, very long post. You hit a couple of my pet hates.]
{sigh} I’m sick of this stupid meme. SpaceX took a minor engine program from NASA and developed an entirely new engine family (one of only two in the US in the last… 30 years?). Not recycled Russian engines, not converted 1960s designs, but an entirely new engine family. And then iteratively developed it through multiple versions, and continue to develop it today.
They’ve developed three major generations of launchers around their new engine family, and are working on a fourth system, a HLV. They constantly iterate and improve their designs (much to NASA’s confusion and horror.)
They developed the largest VTOL test vehicle in aerospace history; the first since the LM descent module to be based on hardware that will actually fly; and the only one in the world to be based on hardware that had flown previously, to develop new systems to integrate back into actual flown hardware.
Simultaneously, they used actual commercial launches to develop first stage recovery procedures, using each failure to iterate new designs and new systems.
And now they’ve put those paths together to try to recover a launcher first stage. Culminating in the near miss in January. If they succeed, it will be the first time anywhere that anyone has recovered a first stage fully intact.
Additionally, they developed a domestic space capsule. The first new recoverable system in the US since 1981. (**) But they are doing it in stages, first as a cargo carrier, and now they are working on a manned system. They took a novel NASA materials program and developed a new practical heat-shield, something NASA’s primary contractors couldn’t do for Orion (instead reusing Shuttle tiles.)
(** Edit: Apologies, Boeing has flown the X-37.)
And while doing all that, they’ve drastically lowered the cost of launches. They’ve brought back commercial launches to US soil after the two big players, Boeing & Lockheed, essentially abandoned the entire market to foreign players. The entire global space industry is suddenly working on new launchers, and even when they don’t say it, everyone is looking at SpaceX as their primary competition.
Now, in addition to the manned capsule, the HLV, and recovering/reusing the first stage, they are working on yet another engine family, a large methane/LOx engine. And using that to develop an entirely new SHLV.
Oh, and now Musk wants to build a giant satellite network and has set up an R&D lab for that.
What do you want from the guy? Anti-gravity? Warp drive? What does he have to actually do before people like you say, “Well, okay, that’s actually good”?
Want pure research? When SpaceX did their first upper atmosphere deceleration burn of the first stage, as part of the F9R development, NASA wanted to observe because no-one had ever done it before and NASA wasn’t sure it was even possible. It’s a big deal for Mars missions because we’ve already hit the mass limit of non-retro-burn reentry systems. The hypersonic environment the F9R is firing in, is similar to the conditions (speed and density) during a Mars reentry.
Of course, for SpaceX it’s not pure research. If NASA was doing it, it would be a pure research program, with a bespoke system developed solely for the retro-fire test. For SpaceX it was just the sort of stuff they do every day.
NASA wants to do a manned Mars mission one day, eventually. They’re wanted to do it since the end of Apollo, and this issue has been known the entire time. But they haven’t tested whether you actually can fire a retro-rocket at hypersonic velocities in Martian-density atmospheres and for four decades the robotic program has operated on the assumption that you can’t.
Musk wants to send lots of people to Mars. His people did the retro-fire test as a small side-step in a completely different development program, performed during a regular commercial launch using their regular commercial launcher.
And then they did it again.
“I can understand idiotic politicians being taken in by that argument, but not adults that should know better.”
Obama asked for something like that back in 2010. Cancel Constellation, put all the released funding plus an extra $1b/yr solely into technology development, including a new generation large hydrocarbon/LOx engine family on the scale of F1. And as a backup to Commercial Crew (just-in-case), a more conventional program to develop a cut-down version of Orion, immediately nicknamed Orion-Lite. Although he never said it out loud (and he should have) it was the first administration since the ’50s to admit that NASA and its contractors don’t know how to do this stuff and need to build (now rebuild) that knowledge from scratch.
Of course, then Congress happened.
No. Not even close. Orion is a perfect example of how not to do development. Take a bunch of engineers and managers who have never in their entire careers developed anything remotely similar, and expect them to be able to even design, let alone build, such a system in a single step. It’s the same thing that happened with the Shuttle, and why it was the failure it was.
Apollo was preceded by Gemini, that by Mercury, that by the unmanned program (leading up to Saturn 1), that by the US ICBM programs, that by the IRBM programs, (dozens of different missiles), and for the Nazi’s their own V2 program, which followed the V1. And all that came from the ’30s work from Goddard, Tsiolkovsky and Von Braun. Continuous path from those first guys playing with what we’d now consider little more than toys, through four decades of nearly continuous work until it reached the point where they could design Saturn V, the Apollo capsule and the LM.
That iterative development path was entirely broken for the Shuttle. A giant reusable space plane, a side-stack launcher, an entirely new engine family of an entirely new type. And none of it based on the small amount of space-plane research that had been done (X-15, etc.) And all without a single stepping stone program. It’s astonishing that they got it to fly. It’s extraordinary that it operated for more than two decades. That was the power of the previous iterative development path, it actually built Rocket Scientists.
Since the Shuttle, the US hasn’t successfully built a single manned launcher. Not so much as a capsule. And they’ve struggled to build any new launchers, relying more and more on old systems, even recycled Russian engines. At NASA and the major contractors, no-one exists today who has a history like the guys who worked on Shuttle designs in the early ’70s. All gone.
Look at SpaceX’s history (and Blue Origin, to a lesser degree), and you see a miniature version of the programs that led to Apollo. Incremental development, continuous refinement and changes. Real working systems at each major steps. Each step leading to the next, becoming bigger and more ambitious. Engineers learning how to be Rocket Scientists.
Look at Orion (and SLS) and you see the Shuttle program, yes. But when you look at SpaceX, you aren’t seeing the failure of the last 45 years, you are seeing the path of the 45 years before that.
They are doing exactly what you want, to develop Saturn V, Apollo capsule, etc, but they are copying the path, not the hardware. Not making the mistake that you and every Apollo fetishist makes, of trying to copy the end result without understanding how those guys got there.
You don’t like Orion? I didnt’ know about the heat shield, though it makes sense; they’re all bothered to make it reusable, as usual. I have gotten a real close look at the escape rocket. It’s clever. Cheap because it already existed. Nobody noticed and so it was actually made. I’m alarmed about the absence of a service module, that it’s supposed to be made by French people or something…
Anyway, there’s a lot of error in your thinking. The engine, the TRW engine, they really didn’t do much with it. They buy the turbopump from the same company that originally designed it, before the shuttle flew, so it’s not so new and shiny. Reshaped the nozzle a bit? Played with the chemistry of the ablative smeared on the carbon? New serial number scheme? Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
I built a little boat from a set of plans. I did a great job building it. Still have it. Wouldn’t have happened without the plans.
Developing a family of engines? The upper stage is pressure fed alone. Seen that before.
Why doesn’t he put the F-1b in his new family? Then he wouldn’t have all that complicated plumbing, that and people like me would think that he’s cool! No F-1b? Because his firm can’t engineer an engine without plans and sub-contractors? Weird, he said that they’re not like that.
So I guess that if it’s clustered little TRW engines, looking Russian, designed before the shuttle flew, it’s not leading to a new Saturn stack. Hypersonic grid fins? Huh. Getting cheapers plans from the Russians on that hypersonic stuff I guess.
Gonna use slush methane in another engine? They could probably pay Lockheed for some data on that. Or do it all over again, print logos and sell t-shirts. I’m sure if they give a bit extra nobody will say where it came from.
Building up a new satellite system that’s lower in altitude using cheaper rockets? Yeah, pay for a city on Mars by giving people a new way to check their facebook status; I heard that one. We’re doin’ Iridium over again with the whole launch bubble? Groovy. I’ll buy stock, sell short, at least get some of the money flying around.
The Lunar Module was the last VTOL? DC-X? It was brief, a fairly inexpensive learning experience. I’ve read from several sources that it was draconian management that killed DC-X prematurely. The beancounter-saturated overlord system issuing performance reviews laced with mandatory overtime through a fire hose. Or maybe data analysis said that it was just not viable?
I might go for draconian management. Some happy medium between that and pumping hundreds of millions into former shuttle guys.
Gemini didn’t precede Apollo in the way you imply. Gemini flew while Apollo was under construction to develop docking, long-duration, and extra-vehicular techniques. Webb, unlike the bizarro managers of today, understood that they had to be doing something related to progress, that issuing memos and releases about Apollo under construction would have meant failure. Gemini was a stretched Mercury for learning technique, not engineering. Dead astronauts and a lost mission motivated engineering improvements of the Apollo spacecraft.
The X-15, amazing super-star that it was, was hardly independent of the shuttle. It was the X-15 program that convinced engineers that the shuttle didn’t need air breathers, for starters. Remember the gigantic steel structure to lift the shuttle on the back of 747 to save the money of jet engines? LOL!
It’s probably the children of those guys that wrote the lease on 39B.
You know, another aside, if the X-20 would have gone off on that Titan III, the world would be right today.
The X planes used to be a parallel process. They show their face from time to time, get cancelled by lunatics. Now? One flight every couple years? Microcraft and those little ten second burns? I don’t even know anymore. There’s that one that looked rounder, but it’s giving Pegasus a nice job now and then. Made the Orion escape system cheap, so cool that they already have one on display.
Musk going to contribute to any of that? Doesn’t have much to do with launching generation whatever of keyhole, so I doubt it.
The fundamental problem that people like you have: you don’t mind being stuck here that much longer. In the end, when it’s just a big two-decade (from now) festival to score the NRO money, I wont’ say that I told you so. Well, I wouldn’t say it if I were alive. I’ll be dead from old age of course so resisting temptation will be a piece of cake.
“Anyway, there’s a lot of error in your thinking. The engine, the TRW
engine, they really didn’t do much with it. They buy the turbopump from
the same company that originally designed it, before the shuttle flew,
so it’s not so new and shiny. Reshaped the nozzle a bit? Played with
the chemistry of the ablative smeared on the carbon? New serial number
scheme? Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it.”
What do you mean by that? That the current Merlin 1D is the TRW engine? Have you noticed that they brought the turbopump in-house, simplified it, beefed it up, started manufacturing it themselves, and still ended up with a lighter engine? They’re NOT buying it anymore. And what is that “ablative” thing are you talking about? There’s nothing ablative on the engine since the original design of the engine was ditched, even before the first start of the Falcon 9.
Excellent post. Thanks. Since we’re still in the cradle its not surprising that we have to take baby steps.
My take? I blame Hollywood and American exceptionalism. (Full disclosure British Go Skylon etc 🙂
The US has to have the biggest BFR on the planet. Not the most efficient or cost effective. Space X at its core is using a Russian KISS model. As with the Russians they dont have megaBucks to throw at megaPrograms with megaProblems.
YMMV.