Lockheed Martin's Flawed Comparison Between Orion and Dragon
The right tool to go to the moon, op ed, Tony Antonelli (Lockheed Martin), Politico
“Contrary to the iconic scene from “Apollo 13,” we don’t aspire to dumping a box of parts on a table and trying to make it work. Let’s take the Dragon. You could add more backup computers, strings of communications, the ability to fly for days after loss of air pressure, and the ability to navigate in deep space without GPS and return to the Earth without the help of Mission Control. But it would no longer be a Dragon. It would be some new, untested vehicle that is bigger, heavier, less understood, and less capable than Orion, which the best engineers and scientists from around the world have designed for the sole purpose of opening the Moon and Mars to humanity. Specific technologies are needed to go to deep space. NASA knew this when it designed Apollo more than 50 years ago; there’s a reason it didn’t send astronauts to the Moon in Gemini or Mercury spacecraft.”
Keith’s note: This is silly. A Lockheed Martin vehicle named “Orion” has flown once. Once. And when it flew it was a stripped down test vehicle with a fraction of the capabilities that the final version will have. An Orion has not flown since 2014. By the time it flies for a second time in 2021 (maybe) there will have been a gap 7 or more years. Humans will first fly on it in 2023 (maybe) – 9 years after the first flight. The SpaceX Crew Dragon has flown twice – once with a crew – and it will fly again (with a crew) in a few months and then 4 (or more) times before Orion carries its first crew. SpaceX will have vastly more operational experience with crewed Dragon vehicles before Lockheed Martin flies its second (uncrewed) Orion.
The Crew Dragon is based directly the fight-proven hardware developed for Cargo Dragon which has flown more than 20 times (reused on many of the flights) and will fly half a dozen more times before Orion carries a human crew. By the time Orion starts to fly SpaceX will already have an extensive body of cargo/crew flight experience upon which to draw for possible upgrades. Lockheed Martin will have virtually none. Unlike Orion, which is built along the standard old aerospace model wherein each vehicle is unique thus making upgrades more complex. Indeed it has already evolved from a cargo-only vehicle to a crewed vehicle (quite an increase in complexity). Indeed, SpaceX adopted classic consumer product thinking when it designed Dragon such that its spacecraft are designed – indeed expected – to be upgraded based on flight experience.
Stating that a theoretical Crew Dragon variant designed for lunar missions would be “bigger, heavier, less understood, and less capable than Orion” is something a big aerospace company PR shop wants you to say – hoping that readers (legislators) who do not know better will fall for it. If anything, when compared to the SpaceX Dragon family and its possible derivatives, Orion is “bigger, heavier, less understood, and less capable” than Dragon. Dragon is also much, much cheaper to fly than Orion and it always will be. And with regard to the difficulties of making new Dragon vehicles NASA has picked SpaceX’s Dragon XL variant to service and supply the Gateway. NASA and SpaceX are already doing what Lockheed Martin’s op ed is afraid of.
There seems to be some desperation amongst the SLS/Orion team these days. It is chronically over budget and years behind schedule and no one knows when it will actually fly. Indeed the SLS/Orion system is so problematic that the Artemis architecture it was supposed to be anchoring has been constantly changed to make up for its performance problems (Gateway, transfer stages) and delays (adding commercial launches and components). Just a few days ago the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration posted an op ed in The Hill which made some similarly misleading claims (see “You Can’t Exert National Prestige With A Rocket That Does Not Fly“). As one NASAWatch reader aptly put it “SLS is a national liability, not a national asset.” You can expect more op eds like these from big aerospace as the election nears, the pandemic rages, the economy dives, and SLS slips further to the right while its imaginary budget evaporates.
Oh yes – although it is not part of the SLS/Orion project the other capsule being made by big aerospace, Boeing’s Starliner, did not exactly wow its customer on its first flight.
Don’t forget that NASA has also authorized SpaceX’s Dragon XL to service and supply the Lunar Gateway.
Also, besides Dragon, what does Lockheed Martin and Boeing think that company down in Boca Chica, Texas is doing with all of those “water tanks” rolled out to test to bursting? They’re getting ready to FLY this “water tank” and then turn it into a fully reusable manned / cargo space ship above anything they can come up with.
Has anyone else noticed that the preliminary Dragon XL design looks like it would fit nicely inside the cargo Starship’s fairing?
Yes, and have room, and the spacelift, needed to take an Orion along as well all the way to the Lunar surface and then return both to Earth. If NASA is worried about the Starship landing it could just release them both on the way home for their own independent re-entry.
FAA issued NOTAMs for Starship SN5 yesterday, SN6 is stacked in the High Bay and a new set of lower fins arrived last week. No less than 4 nose sections fresh off the presses too.
This op-ed is a reply to Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam’s Washington Post op-ed Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moon.
I’m no fan of SLS/Orion, but I have to say I’m disappointed with the Zubrin/Hickam proposal too, and reading around, my feeling is not unique among space enthusiasts.
Zubrin/Hickam is proposing we modify Dragon and use FH to do lunar missions. Can this be done? Yes. Can this be done cheaper than SLS/Orion? Also Yes. Is anybody interested in doing this? No, not even SpaceX themselves, the Lockheed guy got this part right at least.
This proposal has some value 4 years ago, but time has moved on, SpaceX is now focused on their next generation vehicle, Starship, and NASA is funding this new development under the HLS program. Proposing a modified Dragon for the Moon is only a distraction right now, it would be much better if the advocacy focuses on supporting Starship and the HLS public private partnership instead.
Well…if Orion went away, one phone call to SpaceX and a little money might put a Dragon…or anything else…on a Falcon Heavy to anywhere. We’ve not ever seen Elon Musk turn down money when offered.
Not sure he’d do it for NASA though, too much paperwork, but when crew Dragon goes fully operational I’m sure that some things will happen as far as foreign countries, corporations, and rich folk are concerned that none of us here have thought of yet. Starship might be too big to transfer crew to a Bigelow module in Lunar orbit, for example.
Also, let us not forget that the Air Force is funding the development of a larger payload adaptor for Falcon Heavy.
I agree. The team that works on the Dragon2 is completely separate from the Starship group. Show SpaceX the money and they could probably send a refurbished uncrewed Dragon2 around the Moon in a demonstration mission in less time than it would take NASA to do the RFP. Unlike the SLS/Orion the FH and Dragon2 exist and have already flown in space.
Thomas… I think SpaceX should do exactly that… an uncrewed Dragon around the Moon and home . If nothing else than an excuse ( wink, wink ) for Elon & Co. to show us this was a capability designed in all along , especially concerning the PICA-X heat shield. Besides adding to the Falcon 9H booster inventory.
SX gains nothing – and hurts itself – putting a stick in NASA’s eye.
Come on, this is SpaceX we’re talking about, completely separate groups for Starship and Dragon? That’s how old space do it, I’m pretty sure everybody in SpaceX wears multiple hats. This can be seen for example from the recent SpaceX flight software group AMA, they not only do software for Dragon and Starship, they do software for Starlink too, because all the projects share code between them. I’m sure it’s the same for other groups too.
In terms of construction of the Starship Elon Musk has been hiring and training a whole new workforce in Boca Chica to build it.
If Orion went away, but that’s a big if. Even the Zubrin/Hickam proposal avoided talking about the cancellation of SLS/Orion, they just said NASA should “save” SLS/Orion for other missions like Mars, whatever that means.
The reality is congress is not going to cancel two big job programs when millions of people are out of job, that’s just not on the table. But after handing out trillions of dollars, congress may be persuaded to up NASA budget for a few billion so that we can get HLS fully funded, this would benefit SpaceX much more than a lunar Dragon mission.
Congress doesn’t need to cancel anything. Continue the SLS/Orion program, but appropriate more funds for the lander program and for SpaceX to do a design study for a Moon Dragon service module. The critical path for actually landing on the moon is the lander. Artemis 1 & 2 could happen tommorow and we still wouldn’t be able to land on the moon.
Having SpaceX do a back up plan will give SLS/Orion some competition. The idea would be full steam ahead on the landers. Once the landers are ready, NASA does an assessment of SLS completion (Have they done Artemis 1? How far off is Artemis 2?). If it would still be quicker to have SpaceX build the MDSM, then that is what we use to go to the Moon.
However this is the difference between SpaceX and Boeing and Lockheed. SpaceX has its own, privately funded (corporate investment) follow-on development for Dragon/Falcon9, Boeing doesn’t for Starliner and Lockheed certainly doesn’t for Orion. No imagination or investment from either Boeing or Lockheed. Both only consider federal (our hand is out) contracting.
SpaceX has received very little federal funding for Falcon-Heavy or Starship compared to ULA Vulcan and Northrups Omega. And the difference in funding for Dragon-2 vs Starliner is already well known.
Yeah, LegacySpace is still desperately trying to shore up their position by insisting that their product is expensive (open-endedly so) and late (open-endedly so) because it is better, rather than actually trying to deliver a working product on a good time-scale.
Don’t get me wrong. Boeing, NG and LM have all produced great things for NASA in their time but the last time they did so for NASA HSF was three to four decades ago. Since then, their organisations have got too used to getting money for nothing except paper studies and pretty-sounding excuses for cost overruns and schedule deferments. I genuinely think that LegacySpace currently cannot deliver for NASA because of how their organisations have evolved since the end of the Shuttle. This is a malaise that will not be cured until the money faucet is shut off, forcing their organisations to make economies and regain a mindset of delivering on schedule and on budget in order to survive.
I think the last gasp of an innovative NASA was the DC-X.
No, that was acually a DOD program. When NASA took it from DOD they ran it into the ground while making a mess of the X-33 and X-34 programs it inspired. The last innovative program NASA did was the Space Shuttle…
It didn’t exactly inspire the X-33, it competed against it…embarrassingly well with a relatively tiny budget.
If you check the dates you will see it predated the X-33, although NASA did it’s best to ignore it both then and in its role in the history of the X-33 program. I was fortunate enough to be invited to see the DC-XA fly and it was a sight to see, launching, hovering and then landing. I lived near Organ NM at the time and was often awaken by them testing its engines at the WSTF. When NASA selected the Lockheed entry for the X-33 it was pretty much end for any hope to develop the DC-X further.
It predated the X-33, but mainly existed to develop and demonstrate VTOL operations and use of off-the-shelf components and automation to reduce costs. The RLV program that the X-33 was under was started a year before NASA took on the DC-X, and there was direct competition between the two, with the DC-X inconveniently already flying hardware for a fraction of the budget. I see little in the X-33 that could be said to be inspired by it.
The entire Access to Space study that led to the X-33 was inspired by the press the DC-X was getting as a possible SSTO RLV. As for the X-33 itself, instead of picking the McDonald-Douglas RFP entry based on the DC-X, which was the least risk technically, NASA ignored it and picked the Lockheed entry which the most risky in terms of technology. I recall at one of the Southwest Regional Spaceport meeting how many of the experienced WSMR engineers with decades of rocket design experience were just shaking their heads on how NASA was duped into selecting the same Lockheed design that DOD had rejected years earlier as being impractical and sure to fail.
And to add insult to injury, under the 1995 Space Policy, pushed by NASA, the DOD was then prohibited from working on RLV designs, assigning the task to NASA, and limiting the DOD to only developing ELV designs, resulting in them funding the EELVs for military space access.
I worked on the X-33 proposal at MDAC-W. We thought that we had a winner, but miscalculated what NASA actually wanted, namely a flying testbed for new technology, specifically new engine technology. And NASA wanted a VTOHL vehicle like the Space Shuttle not a VTOVL vehicle like our X-33.
We touted our experience with VTOVL landing technology (DC-X/XA) and that our X-33 vehicle had a huge heritage from years of hypersonic flight testing of military maneuvering re-entry vehicles (MaRVs). NASA accepted this and responded that there was no reason to spend X-33 money to repeat this research. So our proposal was downscored as not sufficiently innovative. NASA was not looking for a low risk X-33 vehicle, but rather wanted to research new, risky technology. Our project management and marketing people misread the tea leaves.
So interesting to see all the comments about the X-33. I am a total layman, but an enthusiastic fan. I followed the X-33 development, and of course the DC-X. When the DC-X tipped over on landing and was destroyed it was cancelled. I thought at the time that was probably premature, it looked like someone was just waiting for an excuse to cancel it, and that fireball was the excuse they needed – although i think there had been rumours of cancellation before that, can’t remember exactly. Anyway, watching the X-33 develop, they set up live cameras in the factory that you could access on-line, I used to check them out frequently. However, after about two weeks, the cameras never showed much change. Then we heard that the composite fuel tank had ruptured, and they were trying to figure out what to do. And that was the end of that! Well, after a few more months actually.
Easy to do given what Administrator Goldin and NASA PR were saying at the time. After all when was the last time a VP was present when a new NASA X-Plane was ammounced? Pity they selected the wrong one.
https://science.ksc.nasa.go…
LOCKHEED MARTIN SELECTED TO BUILD X-33
Vice President Al Gore today announced that Lockheed Martin has been selected to build the X-33 test vehicle, a one-half scale model of the Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) which will be used to demonstrate advanced technologies that will dramatically increase reliability and lower the costs of putting payloads into space.
NASA screwed the pooch on X-33. You’re right that they picked the proposal that had the most new technologies in it. That, however, was a recipe for a programmatic disaster. It drove up the risk of the program dramatically, for no real reason other than NASA wanting to play in as many sandboxes as they could.
Luckily, both Blue Origin and SpaceX have proven that VTVL is a viable way to operate reusable liquid fueled stages. The fact that they largely did this despite NASA is telling.
“NASA did it’s best to ignore it “
NASA ignored or congress informed NASA to ignore it?
Like when Shelby said if fuel depots get mentioned again he would cut the funding for the entire section.
On the subject of the DC-X, with years of hindsight, I think that the best post-shuttle ‘flagship’ HSF vehicle would have basically been an evolved DCX (with either a cargo or a crew capsule on the front, similar in concept to the Dragon) riding up to the top of the atmosphere on something not unlike the Falcon-9 CCB. In other words, a fully-reusable crew vehicle.
You could develop an expendable cryogenic upper stage and launch using clusters of the CCB for cargo launch.
FWIW, I think that the problem was a dogma in NASA that VTOHL was the only way, even though the shuttle replacement would not have to meet the DOD’s cross-range requirements the way the shuttle orbiter had to. Maybe they didn’t want people to think that they’d gone down a wrong path with the Shuttle?
Which is exactly what both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are building. Jeff Bezos BTW hired many of his original engineers from the old DC-X program to start Blue Origins, but they then lost years chasing the SSTO approach before he changed direction.
I suspect the main feature of the Lockheed X-33 design was that it wasn’t based on either the DC-X or the Shuttle, as the Rockwell entry was.
On top of that dogma, there seems to have been a strong element of hostility toward others “trespassing” in their territory. In essence, “NASA knows what they’re doing and everyone else should sit down and let the professionals work”. As a successful project from outside NASA’s direction and taking an approach they’d dismissed, the DC-X was seen as a threat.
SpaceX has gotten a similar reception, with NASA’s response ranging from apathy to outright criticism of them daring to work on things other than NASA projects. Can you imagine the outcome if SpaceX had run into financial problems shortly after the first successful landing and Falcon 9 had ended up getting transferred to NASA?
Agreed. During the majority of the space shuttle program, NASA was quite hostile towards any launch start-ups. When any investors would ask NASA what they thought about a start-up, as part of their due diligence before investing, NASA would spew a ton of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the new startup.
The above is one of the big reasons why it took the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to create two new launch companies that didn’t immediately fail due to lack of investment.
Of course, NASA has changed too. Without NASA picking SpaceX as one of the companies to develop a commercial cargo vehicle (and launch vehicle) for ISS, SpaceX would likely have folded because of the many failures of Falcon 1.
How the legacy companies got where they are, unproductive by design, how what was once good wood got corrupted with termites beyond repair, does not get enough discussion and analysis. To cure the malaise we need to figure out just what happened. When SLS and Orion are canceled there will be a lot of sad, angry faces in NASA and its contractors, and congress, with even the non-combatants wondering just what hit them, and what is going to happen next. If we haven’t understood how we got nowhere after so many billions for NASA and its contractors, we are just as likely to head nowhere again, just in a new direction.
Cost plus is what happened. Once congress got that instilled into FAR contracts it was over.
For what it’s worth, the HMS Titanic was built on a cost plus contract (although a different term was used at the time). In the investigations after the sinking, this was pointed out as an advantage. The builders had no motives to cut corners, since it would actually hurt their profits.
In any case, there are valid uses and places for cost plus contracts. Using them as a default is certainly a problem, since they are a bad idea under many (most) circumstances. But that’s hardly the only problem with traditional aerospace contractors and how they do business with the government.
“But that’s hardly the only problem with traditional aerospace contractors and how they do business with the government.”
But it is for the lack of innovation, no productivity, schedule and mission creep and the absolute gouging of the American taxpayer. COTS showed how much can be accomplished in both faster and less expensive hardware development.
Get rid of cost plus and move to fix prices there is nothing that NASA is doing that is so absolutely critical that it needs cost plus. Any that do need it are a tiny minority of projects and not the bulk of NASA’s limited budget.
Part of the cause of lack of innovation is the lack of competition these days. Back in the day, there were a lot more companies building aerospace hardware for the government. But over the years, the US has allowed merger after merger to the point where there are arguably only two aerospace companies left that are large government contractors (Boeing and Northrup Grumman). How can you have true competition when there are only two companies left?
For launch in the US, it was even worse, ULA held a monopoly on (medium to large) government launches. For far too long, ULA’s parent companies refused to let it innovate. Innovation takes money, which cuts into profits. And why should you innovate when you’re guaranteed sweet US government launch contracts? Heck, they even had a guarantee that they’d get $1 billion a year even if they didn’t’ launch anything!
I’ve been on the receiving end of a business culture obsessed with the idea that “cost plus” BAD “fixed price” GOOD! Both can be good or bad depending on how and for what they are used.
For fixed price to work you need fixed requirements. If you don’t know what you want, or there is no clear path to get there, fixed price is lunacy. Every time you change your mind, the contractor will rightfully be standing there with a change order that makes your “fixed” price anything but. If you’re still in the R&D phase with no idea if what you are asking for will work, then you can fix a price, but you have no idea whether that price will buy you anything you can use. COTS and CCDev worked because we know how to do LEO, and they kept the requirements fixed and to a relative minimum. Get X kg of cargo and/or Astronauts to the station, safely. (The “safely” bit did cause some headaches, but even that had some clear criteria to judge success.) I’ve had my fill of fixed-price projects that went completely sideways.
If you are willing to manage a Cost-Plus contract carefully (and that’s a big “if”), it can be the right tool for the job, especially if there are big unknowns in a project that you don’t want to have factored into a massive “contingency” line-item in the fixed-price bid. It makes sense when you are low enough TRL to know you will need to try and fail a few times to get something to work. (Does anybody think Starship is being built as a fixed-price project?) What if your project needs to work around another project’s schedule, and that schedule is in flux? How do you estimate your budget and schedule before you even start?
With Cost-Plus, you set targets and milestones, and you monitor the heck out of the contractor to verify they are spending your money wisely. That seems time and again to be too much to ask of project managers, who seem to hand out rewards and bonuses with one hand only to lash out with the beating stick with the other when their superiors yell at them for missing deadlines and blowing budgets that a minute ago they were ignoring. That’s a failure of management, not the management system.
Keith, you are totally on point with the “maybe” in regard to Orion. There are no guarantees the current iteration of Orion will ever get off the ground. As my late father often said, talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. I feel the actions of SpaceX far outweigh Lockheed Martin’s farcical words.
Let’s take the cargo Dragon. You could add seats, control panel, life support system, launch abort system, and a mechanism for docking not just berthing. But it would no longer be a Dragon. It would be some new, untested vehicle that is bigger, heavier, less understood, and less capable than Starliner, which the best engineers and scientists from a proven aerospace company with decades of experience have designed for the sole purpose of opening low Earth orbit to commercial human transportation.
I see what you did there.
Of course a lot of the people are now dead, or at least not active any longer, but I recall back when Orion was going to service ISS, the Constellation Program Manager and Deputy telling Norm Augustin in 2008 that they would be flying Orion regularly in 2011 so they’d hardly skip a beat when Shuttle was forced to close. Sally Ride said the Augustine Committee had investigated and she thought Orion might be ready in 2017, though 2018 was more likely. Well they have now missed that date by half a decade. And remember when Orion was advertised as “safe-simple-soon”? Was that a different Orion?
The safe simple soon thing was the reason they had to “rush” past the possibility of developing an airstrip to airstrip spaceplane orbiter. They said let’s do it this way to maintain momentum in spaceflight and not have too long of an after-shuttle pause.
It actually was a different Orion. When the constellation program was cancelled and SLS was chosen (one of the many “Ares V-lite” variants that was considered, even though it carries forward little from the Ares V program), the original version of Orion was cancelled too, because SLS couldn’t handle it. So Orion-lite was done instead. The original version of Orion was quite a bit larger and more ambitious, as well as having greater crew capacity.
I don’t remember Orion being downsized as a result of the Constellation cancellation and the shift to SLS. I remember several rounds of Orion downsizing when Orion and Ares 1 were chasing one anothers’ tails. Orion kept getting smaller, lighter and losing capabilities while Ares 1 could not carry the mass and the Ares upper stage kept growing to try and get more into orbit, until the SRB booster could no longer carry it. SLS has excess perfo4rmance by comparison with Ares 1 so I don’t think you actually have any knowledge of loss of capabilities as a result of SLS.
It was poor management by NASA, which was the system integrator for Constellation. I interviewed for a job in the Constellation requirements definition office and found that not a single individual, including the ex-astronaut named as the manager, had ever done any kind of requirements management or performance analysis and none ever had any serious applicable experience. The office was a bunch of neophytes-the blind leading the blind. The ex-astronaut manager was clueless and the people he had selected for his office were more useless. And the Program Management was just as clueless for putting people like this in charge. A lot of us had serious hardware, requirements, performance analysis, and systems integration experience on Apollo, Shuttle, ISS and even on the Russian program and yet they did not want any experience in their organization. So contractors like Lockheed did not help but I have always placed the blame straight on NASA.
Ares 1 wasn’t trying to throw any version of Orion into a lunar transfer orbit with just one launch. It was always a “crew only” vehicle. Ares V would have launched the big [edited], which would have docked with Orion in LEO before moving to a transfer orbit. Now that Orion launches on SLS directly, it had to be downsized so that everything could fit on one 95 tonne to LEO launch rather than one 180 tonne to LEO launch Ares V launch + one Orion only Ares 1 launch.
And SLS Block 1 still can’t make it work. That’s why LOP-G exists, and why it’s in such a weird, high orbit. That’s as far (delta-V wise) as SLS could toss even the new, smaller Orion Lite + propulsion module. Unlike the Ares V + Ares 1 plan, SLS block 1 (and even block 1B, I think?) can’t hit low lunar orbit.
Orion was never “safe, simple, soon”. That was Ares I.
Ares I and Orion were part of the same, “safe, simple, soon” idea. At the time, it was replacing our ability to get astronauts to ISS after the Shuttle was retired. The whole package, including both Ares and Orion, was part of the “safe, simple, soon” was the planned solution. Without Orion, Ares I wouldn’t have had any way to get astronauts to ISS. So Ares by itself was not a “safe, simple, soon” solution to the problem.
No, “Safe, Simple, Soon” was ATK’s advertising slogan for what became Ares I. They even had a website set up with that name. Lockheed had nothing to do with it because they hadn’t won the Orion contract yet. Lockheed has never promoted Orion as “Safe, Simple, Soon”.
https://web.archive.org/web…
Regardless of who invented or used the term, Ares could only be called “Safe, Simple, Soon” in the context of doing _something_ safely, simply and quickly. That something was launching astronauts to ISS once the Shuttle was retired. So the whole “Safe, Simple, Soon” idea is meaningless unless Ares was considered part of a larger system, i.e. one including a capsule for it to launch. That’s Orion. So Orion, or something like it, was inherent to the claim of “Safe, Simple, Soon.”
No, it isn’t really ‘regardless’. Lockheed never once called Orion “Safe, Simple, Soon” as Richard claimed. “Safe, Simple, Soon” was ATK’s promotional pitch to try to win the launch vehicle contract against growth versions of Atlas V and Delta IV. The launch vehicle for Orion was never Lockheed’s decision, if it were they almost certainly would have chosen their own Atlas V Heavy (this was pre-ULA, remember.) Once the contracts were let, the “Safe, Simple, Soon” nomenclature faded away. Lockheed was never involved with it and never used it.
Let me try again. Whoever said it, “Safe, Simple, Soon” must have made sense in some context (assuming it wasn’t just a meaningless slogan.) If it meant something, then Ares would have been able to do something “Safe, Simple, Soon” all by itself or do something “Safe, Simple, Soon” as part of a larger program. In context, getting astronauts to ISS was what NASA was looking for (which Ares could not do on its own.) Even with other goals in mind, what could a launch vehicle without a payload do on its own? So it sounds like we’re down to two possibilities. “Safe, Simple, Soon” was just a meaningless slogan, or “Safe, Simple, Soon” was meant to imply it would be “Safe, Simple, Soon” in combination with something else. Like a payload, say a capsule taking astronauts to ISS, like, say, Orion. So was it a meaningless slogan or was it implicitly about Ares in conjunction with something Orion-like?
After almost three years of investment by SpaceX at Boca Chica the FAA has just now decided to review the license for Boca Chica. Wonder why…
https://www.borderreport.co…
EXCLUSIVE: SpaceX facility under FAA review after changing rocket tests in South Texas
Residents, environmentalists charge SpaceX with ‘bait and switch’ to community
You wonder why? I don’t. Your linked article explains that the residents are angry about the testing that has been occuring, and they are justified in doing so.
But I seriously doubt the FAA will anything more than say, “Yup, looks good.”
Elon Musk made them generous offers for their homes when he changed directions. The majority took the offers and relocated. Brownsville is one of the poorest regions in the nation, it would be sad to see all those jobs go elsewhere over a handful of “not in my backyard” holdouts.
In the article it quotes true FAA as saying that the current uses are in compliance with the existing permits, what they need to look at is the request to put a full launch facility for Superheavy at the location.
And they most likely will decide that launching Starship and Superheavy doesn’t impact the environment much differently than the already permitted launching of Falcon and Falcon Heavy and that no new studies are needed.
That article is written by people who are upset at SpaceX, and is quite skewed..
Removing all possibility of a large heavy hydrocarbon spill in a wetland area, replacing it with a cryogen that would have only very local and temporary effects? Anyone raising a stink about that is not doing so for the sake of the environment.
And the acoustic data etc. could be imported from the completed EIS in place for the LC-39A pad at KSC, now under construction in another coastal marsh.
Seems to me when legacy space (did they also call it arsenal space?) always talks about how Orion has capabilities to go beyond the moon. But I see it as a highspeed re-entry vehicle. If going to Mars then need a habitat module which ***nobody*** is talking about, well they are but you have to dig deep to find such. I’ve not done the numbers myself but I have read there is less space inside Orion per person than the Shuttle orbiter. There’s no room for a trendmill, and no bathroom so you have to poop and pee in front of everyone else.
I wonder if legacy space during the decades has downsized infrastructure (people and facilities that do hands-on work like welding and wiring cables to connectors) so now it takes very long time to build stuff. I have no connections to SpaceX but I wonder if Musk got the right people to build infrastructure to build things, or at least able to buy stuff (someone needing to buy a $500 signal converter should not endure same bureaucracy to buy a $50,000 interface converter).
Yea, no one will be living in an Orion capsule for the years long trip to Mars and return. It is nothing but an oversized Apollo capsule with an underpowered ESA ATV for a service module. Undersizing the SM and it propulsion system was not smart-it was only for political reasons and it compromises the entire potential for the vehicle.
Hey, that’s “Apollo on steroids”.
But it’s more like Apollo after one too many bags of Cheetos.
Somebody is sounding desperate.
If an Orion ever makes it to the moon, it’ll be delivered in a SpaceX Starship as payload.
And “there’s a reason [NASA] didn’t send astronauts to the Moon in Gemini” is hilarious – because they almost did!
http://www.astronautix.com/…
This is why legacy aerospace companies can’t keep up with SpaceX, despite their many “decades of flight history” – because they’ve forgotten it all! The people who work there now are not the people who did Apollo.
Not merely forgotten, monetised, shelved and discarded.
Big difference between NASA managed and NASA contracted.
Well to be totally honest, you have to remember that Congress mandated NASA use SLS. It is the unholy Frankenvehicle specified and designed by Congress themselves to keep certain favored aerospace companies fully funded.
The sunk cost fallacy rears its ugly head again and again with the SLS program. Any rational review of the program at this point would recommend cutting and running. Horribly expensive to build and launch with a marginal mission set, all expendable components, and a decade late.
The mind of NASA produced SLS/Orion.
The mind of Elon Musk produced Falcon/Dragon
NO.
The mind of NASA did not produce SLS/Orion. SLS was foisted on NASA by Congress to protect certain heritage companies.
This constant conflation of NASA with procedures and companies they are forced to work with is really irritating.
But do not forget it was NASA Administrator Griffin who created the precedent of using Shuttle Heritage hardware with his Ares I, Ares V and Orion spacecraft that were part of Project Constellation. All Congress did was to keep the bulk of the existing pork flowing to Old Space with a variation of it. That is why there was no rebidding of the contracts for Orion and SLS.
I don’t think that Orion has any legacy shuttle hardware in it.
No, but the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles Shuttle based.
The Shuttle OMS engine is now its main engine.
That’s a change. The Europeans were supposed to supply that as part of the SM. I guess they are providing the structure, the solar panels, and the RCS. Great job. Great job.
ESA is building the Service Module, but it is using surplus Shuttle OMS engines.
Yeah, but they were supposed to supply propulsion at first.
I would imagine Griffin was told exactly what he would have to push if he was made NASA administrator. The space shuttle had already been flying for almost a decade when Griffin worked on the FLO lunar plans and they did not include SRBs. Griffin had pointed out that there were the wrong rockets to use. But Orrin Hatch insisted that the SRBs would have to be utilized.
Lunar Base Studies – 1992: First Lunar Outpost (FLO)
https://space.nss.org/lunar…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Not really. Administrator Griffin basically tossed all those NASA studies out and made the plan he wrote up for the Planetary Society Project Constellation. Unforunately the link to that study is no longer on the Planetary Society’s website, but this Space Review article discusses it in the context of naming him NASA Administrator.
https://www.thespacereview….
Getting to know Michael Griffin
by Jeff Foust
Monday, March 14, 2005
Well, the Augustine Commission told NASA to separate cargo and crew. That is the whole reason of Ares I and Ares V. Since these were the recommendations from the tragedy of the Columbia break-up, Administrator Griffin had to abide by them. Curiously, this core recommendation has been dropped, and the plan now is to launch astronauts on the Heavy Launch Vehicle after all.
Using shuttle heritage parts made all kinds of sense back then. I mean, all the tests and human rating stuff had already been done, this was flight proven hardware. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, it did not turn out that way.
I just noticed a double meaning there: “NASA did not produce SLS”. We can debate who’s idea it was, but it is clearly true than NASA has not produced a SLS. And they will not do so until one is stacked and on the pad sometime in 2022.
He does make several correct points in passing. What he fails to mention are…
1) As Keith pointed out, Orion’s main ride to space, SLS, is still a paper rocket.
2) Tony’s Prius to pickup truck quip not only isn’t a fair metephore, it also is ironic since the Tesla Cybertruck will be operational before SLS/Orion.
3) As someone else here pointed out, the cargo Dragon was built from the ground up with crews in mind, making the jump from that to Crew Dragon an easier jump. What makes Mr. Antonelli so sure that crew Dragon, aiming for LEO, isn’t also designed with deep-space in mind? SpaceX is aiming for Mars after all.
4) Again…Orion has no landing legs, airlocks, or landing engines for operations on the surface of the Moon. So it isn’t a Lunar surface spacecraft either. We still need to build those. It is also too small for long-duration crewed spaceflight. So, as far as unsuitability traits for crewed Interplanetary exploration are concerned it and crew Dragon are really more alike than they are different.
5) All of us can clearly see who he works for.
Well, SLS isn’t a paper rocket. The first one is on the test-stand (finally) for test-firing and then delivery to the launch site.
I recently heard a conversation about that between two fairly senior people in the field (one retired from JPL but still active in the field and one from APL.) It was a question of whether Starship could be considered for a robotic planetary mission. One of those people said Starship was just a paper rocket. The other replied that SLS as also a paper rocket but it was being considered despite that. The rest of the conversation went something like,
“No, SLS isn’t a paper rocket.”
“I’ll believe that after the Green Run test.”
“Ok. Whatever.”
Personally, I’m not willing to consider either one a “real”, available rocket until it’s actually flown to orbit.
Maybe, but if I’m handicapping, I’ll look at the track record of the companies.
Agreed. I’ll look at the recent record of the companies.
SLS supporters were fond of calling Falcon Heavy a paper rocket right up until it first flew. Turnabout is fair play.
The first of the first stages is ready for test firing. It may not be a paper rocket, but right now it is an experiment. What happens if something fails during the green test? Do we wait another couple of years and assure that the only SLS ends up rusting in missile park?
Ha! Spacex is legacy space. All the NASA guys that were let go under Obama are now at SpaceX. Well, I’ll qualify that, all the guys worth hiring are at SpaceX. If Lockheed was so good they’d be landing rockets. Something Arriane, the Russians and the Chinese would desperately like to do. Reusuable rockets aren’t only good for peaceful purposes. A reusuable rocket with multiple conventional warheads moving at 5 miles per second seems like it would be useful. Only SpaceX can make that happen today. Don’t tell me the skunkworks hasn’t thought about it. Lockheeds statement is pathetic.
The point the op-ed may have been trying to make is Dragon is not capable of going to the moon, but that’s what Orion is designed for. Dragon is not designed for the thermal, radiation, reliability and navigation of such a trip. Sure it can be made to, but then it’s not really Dragon but rather a new spacecraft.
The problem is, that’s not true. The adaptations required to use Dragon on lunar missions are minor, mainly related to life support endurance and the need for some kind of additional propulsion.
It already has the addition propulsion with the Super-Dracos, which was why they were built into it. Nice idea really. If you need to use them for an launch abort you don’t need them for orbital insertion or landing. If you don’t need to use them for launch abort you are good to go without any additional launch weight.
The SuperDracos only have around 600 m/s of delta-v, not enough to enter and leave lunar orbit. You’d need a service module of some kind.
All the SuperDracos need is more propellent.
And more plumbing. There isn’t an easy way to enlarge the current tanks. They’d have to add tanks (presumably in the space currently used for payload) and the plumbing to connect them up to the SuperDracos. Also, the SuperDracos would need to be restartable. That feature went away with the redesign following the April 2019 ground test explosion.
I forgot about the valves. The only payload they lose is outside the main craft in the trunk. They would have a difficult time getting to anything back there enroute to the moon.
Actually, it was designed for that. At one point, SpaceX was planning on a two-person, around the Moon trip. The current Crew Dragon may or may not have all those capabilities, but the original design certainly did. Things like thermal control are frozen in at an early state. Navigation? What about it? Navigation to the Moon does not require much in terms of on-spacecraft hardware. Most of what you need is on-ground tracking, trajectory analysis and orbital correction maneuver planning. Nor does Orion have any significant radiation protection, as far as I know. They are using the same approach as Apollo: Keep the trip reasonably short and don’t fly when a solar flare is likely (and we can do a much better job of predicting that today than we could in fifty years ago.) Sending a Crew Dragon to the Moon might take some upgrades to the current design, to get it to the originally planned specifications. But it’s definitely not building a whole new spacecraft.
The thermal environment is vastly different than in LEO. You are in the sun for days on the trip to and from. Thermal control is more than adding blankets. Heat rejection and internal cooling of components is a basic part of the design].
Regarding navigation, GPS may not work that well in deep space. What ranging capabilities does Dragon have? Is it accurate enough to enter lunar orbit? How accurate can Dragon determine it’s position in deep space and on the far side of the moon?
It is very likely that Orion requires higher radiation hardened parts and increased redundancy. Getting above the Van Allen belts exposes the spacecraft to higher radiation levels and more single event upsets.
The Dragon is built to handle the thermal and radiation environment, and navigation is done using ground tracking. There’s no magical interplanetary navigation equipment that Orion has and Dragon lacks.
Again, Dragon was originally envisioned being used as the return capsule for Mars missions and a commercial lunar free-return mission was still planned well into its development. All it needs for lunar missions are life support consumables, propulsion, and a place to go.
Given that the Dragon2 was originally to be used for both landing on Mars (Red Dragon) and the Moon (Gray Dragon) I suspect those capabilities are already built in. Remember, Elon Musk has tweeted that Dragon2 could still land on the Earth with its Super-Dracos, except that NASA was not comfortable with it so they use the parachutes, originally intended to be a backup system as the primary system instead. BTW that battle with NASA also appears to be the moment when he decided to dump the Dragon series and go full speed with the Starship/Super Heavy independent of NASA. It would be nice to see the Dragon redeem itself and show its deep space abilities.
At this point it’s probably best to just put those resources into getting Starship flying. A Falcon Heavy Dragon launch isn’t cheap enough to do just to prove they can.
They could deploy a Dragon from a Starship on a free return trajectory, but the Starship making the same trip would render the Dragon largely irrelevant.
Having designed electronics for deep space, I doubt he has those capabilities “built-in” since that would required unnecessary design and development costs in addition to added weight.
Elon Musk really likes to over build his systems, and use them for multiple purposes. But maybe someone with tweet him on it an find out if they are already built in.
That isn’t obvious to me. I conventional, radiation hard design would be more expensive and higher mass (and, probably, power.) But Dragon uses multiple processors running in parallel, with a voting system and automatic reboots of processors which experience single event problems. That’s not a conventional radiation hard design, but it does accomplish the same thing.
NASA spacecraft have also done unconventional things to get the results of radiation hard electronics without the mass, cost and power. Cassini, for example, intentionally used radiation soft mass memory and aggressive (for the time) EDAC software, since that allowed more storage for the same mass and power than radiation hard storage. That worked well over the whole mission (which was almost twice the design lifetime.)
Yes, thermal control is a basic part of the design, and Dragon 2 was originally designed to operate in low Earth orbit _and_ deep space _and_ the Moon. Because thermal control is such a basic part of the design, that would have been frozen early in the development process and the current Crew Dragon almost certainly retains those original capabilities.
For navigation, you do not need GPS for navigation to the Moon. Start trackers, sun and limb sensors are fine, when supplemented with ground-based tracking. For the ground based tracking, all the spacecraft needs is a radio. That’s how robotic, planetary missions do it, to better than 1 km precision from half way across the solar system. Crew Dragon already has all it needs to navigate a trip around the Moon and back. (Landing might be different, but we aren’t talking about that, and for that matter, Orion can’t land.)
As for higher radiation, again, SpaceX designed Dragon 2 for that environment. And, no, deep space isn’t all that worse than low Earth orbit. Remember, ISS does pass through the Van Allen belts, when its orbit crosses the South Atlantic Anomaly, and into something worse than deep space when it crosses onto open field lines at high latitudes and during space weather events. Dragon is most definitely capable of handling that.
Orion is not capable of an Apollo-like near lunar surface orbital mission. It is under-powered, does not have adequate energy to enter a low lunar orbit which is why they need a “Gateway” space station in a high orbit where the Orion can rendezvous and astronauts can transfer to the lander. Then the lander has to be made more powerful, with more energy, and more sophistication and complexity and danger in order to make up for Orion. It requires a new and expensive piece (Gateway) that will delay the landing. And makes the landing and later ascent from the moon more dangerous for the crew. Its really the most stupid approach that could have been taken.
? I wish mom and dad didn’t fight so much. And there he goes throwing her down a flight of stairs over the same old ‘rocket argument’. Why can she just agree with him?
SpaceX has Old Space running very, very scared.
Yes, and that makes it dangerous for Elon Musk as they will do their best to magnify any issues he runs into with Starship/Super Heavy.
You see this desperation in all Lockheed involved projects now, turning science into advertising.
NASA was supposedly going to do Orion with minimal oversight and interference. Instead:
– when Shuttle and ISS ramped down NASA had surplus staff, they decided to add many to Orion oversight. Many design and requirements issues that had been decided on were reopened by the new people.
– Ares I kept having to cut Orion payload mass, causing redesigns. (Plus there were real concerns by the Orion staff that had worked on Titan and Atlas that there were severe problems with flex in the Ares booster. Plus it’s not clear that if there was a booster explosion that Orion could get far enough away to ensure that the parachutes wouldn’t be set on fire by debris.)
– shifting to SLS caused even more redesigns.
– then the ISS program decided to give the ESA an out for not meeting their commitment to fly cargo to ISS by supplying (part) of the Orion service module instead, causing another major redesign.
And SLS keeps moving to the right, stretching the schedule even more.
Give SpaceX the same $10B+ that you’ve flushed on Orion and see what they can produce.
I leave for a few days and look what I miss. Yeah, I think that LM is running the risk that they’ll pull a Boeing with Orion and find some huge issue on its first flight. The big aerospace companies in the US have gotten away from the philosophy of “fly early, fly often” and instead rely heavily on years of analysis and simulations to get the vehicle and first flight right the first time.
Unfortunately, that has its own risks. Analysis and simulation can only get you so far. In theory there is no difference between analysis and simulation and a real flight. In practice though, they’re not the same.
As Boeing’s Starliner’s first test flight has shown, it’s never good form to slam the competition before your vehicle actually flies.
The “fly early, fly often” approach started going away with ballistic missile development in the 1950s. Those are, by definition, not reusable and can only be flown once. As I understand it, that’s what started the shift to massive analysis and subsystem tests, and a few test flights to validate the design.
I also read a history about NASA in the 1960s, which mentioned that this was a source of some contention. The NASA people who came from NACA really didn’t like this approach, and were strongly in favor of lots and lots of incremental testing. The NASA people with a ballistic missile background were all for heavy development work followed by all-up tests. That history I read also mentioned a difference in terminology: “Flight tests” and “test flights” were not really synonymous. The former implied a flight where you did some tests (e.g. expanding the flight envelope) while the later meant the flight itself was what you were testing. The idea of all-up tests won out due to pressure to make the Apollo lunar landing deadline (among other things.) There just wasn’t time for a few dozen incremental tests of the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft.
Agreed. And our space program has suffered greatly because of the adoption of the expendable, ballistic missile, style development approach. SLS has it in spades.