Oct 21, 2011

Posted by in NASA, current

Modular NASA & their Space Launch System

NASA is challenging Congress to fund its Space Launch System—any configuration of a planned new launch system for deep manned space flight.

NASA is an organization with talented managers and an impressive track record from its birth in the 1950s to today. It pioneered new technologies, send probes and people to distant—seemingly unreachable—places.

But it needs to have clear goals, and a budget to match. Congress and NASA legion of critics have left the space agency in a foggy mess, with ever changing demands. So, NASA seems to have taken the best available tactic: coming up with a modular space launcher, and letting Congress make up its mind which version it wants to fund.

Of course, even this isn’t good enough for some people. Because by putting up orbiting fuel depots and using existing satellite launchers, NASA could do manned space exploration cheaper. This works great if human life doesn’t matter to you—because existing rockets like Delta and Atlas are much, much more dangerous than NASA’s designs for future manned launchers.

To meet the expected insufficient budget Congress will inevitably provide, NASA re-used existing technologies for its new launch vehicle: Apollo-style engines, shuttle-style solid rocket boosters, etc. (Not only is the technology old, but even the name is unimaginative: space launch system.) But no matter what you do, sending people beyond Earth orbit is going to be expensive. Either you are willing to do it, or not.

I expect Congress to cancel this new launch system, as it did Constellation before it. Congress is under the illusion that space flight can be cheap and handled by private companies. Some things can be done cheaper and still very well—as companies like SpaceX are showing. BUT, sending people into deep space isn’t something that Congress is qualified to give advice—or make demands—about. Congress should either provide sufficient funds, or surrender the future to the Chinese.

  • Clark S. Lindsey

    The Atlas V/Delta IV launch satellites costing sometimes well over a billion dollars a piece and that are crucial to US security and to the lives of soldiers in the field. As even Mike Griffin told a Congressional panel in 2002, there is nothing you would do for a rocket launching a crew to make it more reliable that you would not also do for rockets launching such important payloads.

    The “man-rating” term is long obsolete. It was invented to describe the conversion of ICBMs, for which getting 1 out of 3 on target was plenty good enough, to launch crew capsules for Mercury and Gemini. A crew module can have an abort launch system, but otherwise today there is no significant difference in safety and reliability between rockets built for launching spacecraft and crews, e.g. essentially the same Soyuz launches both. (Griffin wanted Ares I instead of an EELV crew launcher because he wanted a big heavy capsule and because he wanted to keep the SRBs in production until the Ares V could be built.)

    If manned space is not done significantly cheaper that NASA does it, there will be very little manned spaceflight. If it is not done safely, there will be very little of it. Most of the people involved in commercial human spaceflight want to go themselves. So human life, especially their own, is extremely important.

    Studies by Boeing and ULA, by a Georgia Tech team led by Douglas Stanley (who worked with Griffin on designing Constellation), and now by a NASA team all show huge savings in doing BEO missions with a fuel depot architecture over one with a super HLV. The missions can also start sooner and are more robust with depots. Opportunity costs are also vastly lower since those savings can go to develop crucial technologies such as in-space transports, landing and surface operations systems, in-situ resource systems, etc. These will otherwise all have to wait as the SLS eats up vast amounts of NASA’s limited funding.

    The tiny part of Congress that decides space policy is totally dominated by those with NASA centers and major contractors in their states and districts. Their sole interest is in maximizing jobs. In pursuit of that they have followed the dictates of the old SHLV mafia who cannot accept any BEO architecture that differs from Apollo. The funding crunch, however, may finally force new ideas to be considered.

    China’s slow-motion space development is not the future of spaceflight but a boring re-do of a 1960s space program. Leading means to do things with innovation and cost-effectiveness. Otherwise it is just stagnation and decay.