The Battle for Constellation Begins.

[martinbayer]

"Now apply that to vastly more complex RLV operations.'

True - the only certain way to find out would be to actually try both approaches. I wish all companies currently engaged in suborbital as well as orbital vehicles the best of luck in their efforts.

Martin

 

[Orionblamblam]

"Now apply that to vastly more complex RLV operations.'

True - the only certain way to find out would be to actually try both approaches.

Indeed.

The problem, however, is a tendency on the part of not only "space fans" but also governments to choose winners *before* proper testing has been done. That's why if the US government was serious about the conquest of space (ha!), they'd simply set aside, say, four billion dollars... and say somethign like "the first US company to demonstrate a vehicle that can safely orbit a crew of four on 24 hours notice for less than $20 million in operational/recurring costs wins $2.5 Billion. Second company to do so wins $1 billion. Third comapny to do so wins $500 million."

Choose your own numbers.

If nobody comes through, the taxpayers aren't out a dime. If three comapnies come through, then the US taxpayer has one hell of a fleet... and if the companies over-ran their budgets, the only people who'll care are the stockholders.

Now, if the winning companies each have something like a dirt-cheap Falcon 9 knockoff using pressurized LOX/Kero and all-aluminum structure and a bland-as-water capsule, are you *really* going to complain if the 4th place company had a winged fully resuable spaceplane? Is the goal to have a specific vehicle type... or to best fulfill a role?

Honestly, I don't give a rats ass if the best vehicle lands with wings, on a tail of fire or under parachutes; if it's fully reusable or 95% of it gets thrown away, just so the damned thing works reliably well and on the selected budget.

 

[martinbayer]

I'd be fine with that approach, as long as the size of the purse would enable a company to pursue a true RLV. There is no doubt that they have the highest development cost, but if the purse is too small to cover that cost, you still might potentially miss out on enabling the solution with the lowest ops cost.

Martin

 

[Orionblamblam]

I'd be fine with that approach, as long as the size of the purse would enable a company to pursue a true RLV. There is no doubt that they have the highest development cost, but if the purse is too small to cover that cost, you still might potentially miss out on enabling the solution with the lowest ops cost.

The X-Prize did not cover the costs of developing the SpaceShipOne, not by a long shot. And Rutan knew that goign in. But he calculated that it was enough to get going, and once compelted, the vehicle (or a derivative) would be able to make money in its own right.

Same for an RLV. If an RLV is *really* such a world-beater, then it's worth doign regardless of a prize. But a billion dollar prize is a good kick in the pants to get going. If the aerospace community rigorously does the math and concludes that RLVs are a loser, then to hell with 'em. Go with what works, not ideology. Equally, if Boeing, Lockheed Northrop, whoever, crunches the numbers and determines that RLVs are the best approach, and that there is now a serious competition, they'll do *that.*

In the long run, competition and capitalism ("evolution"), not ideologically driven command economies ("Intelligent Design"), will determine what works best in virtually all circumstances.

 

[martinbayer]

Well, you said I should choose my own numbers, so I would choose them in such a way that I feel confident all promising options are ensured a fair shake in such a competition, but you may have a different risk/reward perception. Also, I would define the winner not on who comes in *first* under a set cost per flight number, but who comes in *lowest* under that number in a set amount of time. You could even have different award levels for different cost per flight ceilings. Sweetening the pot while at the same time incentivizing companies to go for the lowest cost per flight and giving them a known amount of time for program execution will allow them to take more risks and encourage more innovation, leading to a more optimum long term solution. And if the lucky winner is able to recoup most or all of their development cost or even turn a healthy profit, more power to them.

Martin

 

[bigvlada]

In his book The case for Mars Robert Zubrin presented several approaches to Mars colonization. The one Orionblamblam proposed is identical to what Zubrin calls Gingrich approach: a set of twelve challenges valued from $500 million to $20 billion with a goal to develop and execute private manned mars mission.

If the governments were able to build ISS together, it would be easier to form a consortium, company, whatever they want to call it and offer prizes for successful tsto, ssto and other technologies. If let's say G20 countries set a certain amount of money aside (let's say $100 million per government per year or voting and technology utilization rights can be proportional to money invested in this) and put it in a bank for a few years, it won't cost them a penny (and they can just leave if nothing is realized for let's say 10 years, but with a profit) and the potential reward is a usable system at a fraction of a real cost.

 

[mz]

A common misconception is to assume any RLV would be like shuttle, requiring things like extensive refurbishing between flights.
Performance for spaceflight has been demonstrated for decades but not the affordability.

I think what made air travel available to the masses were things like higher reliability and longer times between overhaul, meaning more air time and passenger miles per airplane per year.

Something similar needs to be developed for RLV:s.

My hope is on the suborbital operators. Those with massive standing armies will go bankrupt, while those that can go to leaner and leaner organizations with high flight rates with just refuel and go again [aka "RAGA"] operations will extract large profits.
In a sense, it's not the sleek spaceship that matters, it's what's hidden, the organization needed to run it...

I think military organizations have aimed towards that as well after some earlier problems, trading performance for things like cost and availability.

 

[Orionblamblam]

A common misconception is to assume any RLV would be like shuttle, requiring things like extensive refurbishing between flights.

An equally common misperception is to assume that any RLV *won't* require extensive refurbishing between flights.

 

[Orionblamblam]

I would define the winner not on who comes in *first* under a set cost per flight number, but who comes in *lowest* under that number in a set amount of time.

My interest in "first" is that it makes more of a race out of it. "Lowest" will be the long-term winner anyway, as they'll get more business. And if you have a set timeframe, might be that *nobody* can make it, if it's too short, and if it's too long, then the winner might be the actual first company, but they might not get paid for years.

 

[mz]

A common misconception is to assume any RLV would be like shuttle, requiring things like extensive refurbishing between flights.

An equally common misperception is to assume that any RLV *won't* require extensive refurbishing between flights.

I'm not assuming that they won't require armies, I'm just saying one can't deduct that they require armies from the single space shuttle example.

 

[Orionblamblam]

I'm not assuming that they won't require armies, I'm just saying one can't deduct that they require armies from the single space shuttle example.

There's also the Buran, for whatever that's worth. Plus, take a look at the proposed re-entry shielding that has come along: not a bit of it is "low maintenance."

 

[martinbayer]

"My interest in "first" is that it makes more of a race out of it."

And a race is *exactly* what I would want to avoid. I'm interested in the *best* solution, not a rush job or a quick fix.

""Lowest" will be the long-term winner anyway, as they'll get more business."

Not if they have a solution that would be $10M per flight cheaper than everybody else's approach, but they lose out because they are two months behind the third place winner and never even get to try and demonstrate their system, since the investors immediately pull out the leftover funding.

"And if you have a set timeframe, might be that *nobody* can make it, if it's too short, and if it's too long, then the winner might be the actual first company, but they might not get paid for years."

Setting it too short would obviously be stupid, since even the original X-Prize deadline had to be extended by the Ansaris by a year to allow Rutan to compete, so I'd rather err on the long side. With a known deadline companies can plan, and if they feel they can accomplish the program in a shorter amount of time, they can simply decide to only start activities and associated spending at a point in time that fits their schedule, so not getting paid for years would not be an issue.

Martin

 

[Orionblamblam]

Not if they have a solution that would be $10M per flight cheaper than everybody else's approach, but they lose out because they are two months behind the third place winner and never even get to try and demonstrate their system, since the investors immediately pull out the leftover funding.

If they are that close, and the investors have that little faith in the concept, then it was a loser anyway.

 

[mz]

I'm not assuming that they won't require armies, I'm just saying one can't deduct that they require armies from the single space shuttle example.

There's also the Buran, for whatever that's worth. Plus, take a look at the proposed re-entry shielding that has come along: not a bit of it is "low maintenance."

Actually, what about the new SHARP stuff like hafnium and zirconium diborides? I have no idea about their maintenance intensity.
Lockheed claimed the metallic TPS for the low loaded Venture Star would be low maintenance. Well, we know how these claims have credibility but I can envision the mechanism.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Actually, what about the new SHARP stuff like hafnium and zirconium diborides?

Promising, but such ceramic systems are brittle. They can be harder'n hell, but still brittle. If one panel/tile cracks, that could be a serious problem.

Lockheed claimed the metallic TPS for the low loaded Venture Star would be low maintenance.

The V* TPS was essentially what the X-20 Dyna Soar TPS was going to be... metal foil. Easily punched through by hail, birds, clumsy airmen, drunken pilots...

 

[martinbayer]

"If they are that close, and the investors have that little faith in the concept, then it was a loser anyway."

Obviously not if it would have been $10M better in terms of CpF than anybody else - once again, the only way to find out for real is to actually give them an opportunity to prove themselves and thereby win the prize. This is not necessarily an issue of investor faith, but of investors counting on the prize money as part of the overall business plan and hence RoI. But even accepting your premise of investor faith being the main driver, the last 18 months or so as well as the internet bubble before that have provided ample demonstration that investor faith and actual soundness of investments have at times precious little to do with each other, since perception rather than fact is sometimes dominating.

Martin

 

[mz]

Actually, what about the new SHARP stuff like hafnium and zirconium diborides?

Promising, but such ceramic systems are brittle. They can be harder'n hell, but still brittle. If one panel/tile cracks, that could be a serious problem.

Lockheed claimed the metallic TPS for the low loaded Venture Star would be low maintenance.

The V* TPS was essentially what the X-20 Dyna Soar TPS was going to be... metal foil. Easily punched through by hail, birds, clumsy airmen, drunken pilots...

I'm not *that* familiar with TPS requirements myself really. Certainly, if you have a bird strike, you should abort the ascent. Jets have occasionally bird engine problems as well, as we know.

I assume if less landed weight or cross range than STS is needed, then there are very different configurations available.
Some things are demanding for TPS and others not so.

I assume first stage TPS is trivial.

Say if you have a two stage system where the second stage tankage is integrated with the crewed portion. When the thing does a re-entry the loading is not very high per area since there are lots of empty tanks, meaning TPS temperature demands are potentially lesser (this is the basic gist I have gotten though it's unclear to me how the basic physics of fluffy re-entry vehicles work). On the other hand, TPS lightness demands are greater since you need a large area of it.

Or then you could have a small human capsule with a dense high margin TPS that is only exposed on orbit, think Apollo CM size or even smaller, as the crew don't have to live in it for many days. The shape is well validated. The rocket stages could potentially be really featherweight for re-entry and use metal TPS.

I'm personally no big fan of winged spaceplanes because of their weight and problems during ascent, but on the other hand the final runway landing looks attractive.

If you keep a capsule's mass low enough, you could fly it around and runway land it too with a parafoil. They've advanced hugely since Gemini.

In the engines and systems department, probably a lot could be made to increase ease of operations. Past designs have been very performance oriented, but now there will be applications for more operations minded designs... It just takes time to see what works and how, with minimum effort. Space launch won't get cheap ever if there have to be a thousand people at a launch.

For example, looking at the suborbital business, I personally don't see the Virgin Galactic operation as something that works in the long run (unless they manage to market themselves to somehow appear much better than the rest, for the same service *cough*) since they will probably have high operations cost. But I could be wrong, I don't know that much about them. The air launch system might prove to be a burden or it might give a lot of flexibility.

Armadillo Aerospace's rocket racer has already been operated by the customer without manufacturer interference. Of course it's very low in performance compared to anything for orbital launch, but anyway I think that's one aim for rocket systems - that it's just a turnkey rocket engine, almost like any other engine.

 

[Simon666]

The X-Prize did not cover the costs of developing the SpaceShipOne, not by a long shot. And Rutan knew that goign in. But he calculated that it was enough to get going, and once compelted, the vehicle (or a derivative) would be able to make money in its own right.

Rutan got someone to fund it for him. Development costs were estimated to be $25 million, funded completely by Paul Allen. Paul Allen probably knew he could afford to lose that money. Private companies however don't work that way and the banks lending them much less, certainly nowadays as you should know. 1 km/s is also around 7 km/s short of orbital velocity, and kinetic energy is related to the square of velocity, which means that SpaceShip One doesn't even have 2% of the required kinetic energy. So you're comparing apples and pears. I'm sorry, but your idea of just setting a prize and hoping the free market is going to do the job is libertarian daydreaming. However inefficient you think (and actually does) government works, only government (and not just any government, only US government has the resources) could do the job. Doesn't mean it can't subcontract privately.

 

[RyanC]

There's also the problem that many "commercial" space companies are run by idiots.

Take for example Space X.

They could have just bought RS-68; the most powerful LOX/LH2 rocket engine in the world, with 700,000~ lbf of thrust; and costing a mere $14 million.

Instead, they spent a lot of money developing their own LOX/RP-1 rocket engine called Merlin, which in it's latest incarnation is only 125,000 lbf.

So basically, Space X's plan for moving from Falcon 1 (600~ kg to orbit) to Falcon 9 (10,000~ kg to orbit), is to simply take nine Merlins and cluster them.

For their plans for Falcon 9 Heavy (20,000+ kg) ; the idea is to just bolt on two extra Falcon 9 First Stages; each with nine merlin engines; so that on liftoff, you have 27!!! engines working.

Space X could have vastly simplified the development of Falcon 9, if they had just bought RS-68 and put two of them into Falcon 9 -- and spent their money on detail design on improving the other aspects of the rocket -- like the ground support equipment, etc.

Instead, they spent it on reinventing the wheel (engines).

 

[mz]

There's also the problem that many "commercial" space companies are run by idiots.

Take for example Space X.

They could have just bought RS-68; the most powerful LOX/LH2 rocket engine in the world, with 700,000~ lbf of thrust; and costing a mere $14 million.

Instead, they spent a lot of money developing their own LOX/RP-1 rocket engine called Merlin, which in it's latest incarnation is only 125,000 lbf.

So basically, Space X's plan for moving from Falcon 1 (600~ kg to orbit) to Falcon 9 (10,000~ kg to orbit), is to simply take nine Merlins and cluster them.

For their plans for Falcon 9 Heavy (20,000+ kg) ; the idea is to just bolt on two extra Falcon 9 First Stages; each with nine merlin engines; so that on liftoff, you have 27!!! engines working.

Space X could have vastly simplified the development of Falcon 9, if they had just bought RS-68 and put two of them into Falcon 9 -- and spent their money on detail design on improving the other aspects of the rocket -- like the ground support equipment, etc.

Instead, they spent it on reinventing the wheel (engines).

Well, I wonder if Boeing / P&W would have sold him anything, or if they had, at what price? There's this thing called a monopoly, and then the oligopoly after that.

Douglas had not better develop the DC-8, just buy planes from Boeing? Or actually fold, where do we need so many manufactures anyway?

 

[RyanC]

Well, I wonder if Boeing / P&W would have sold him anything, or if they had, at what price? There's this thing called a monopoly, and then the oligopoly after that.

Actually, Boeing no longer owns Rocketdyne. Rocketdyne got spun off to Pratt & Whitney, which is in turn owned by United Technologies (UTC).

Douglas had not better develop the DC-8, just buy planes from Boeing? Or actually fold, where do we need so many manufactures anyway?

Neither Douglas nor Boeing actually maintained a large engine design team, except the usual small group of engineers who would be able to tell them if the specifications being quoted by Pratt & Whitney, Wright, Lycoming, General Electric, Westinghouse, etc were sane and within plausibility.

So I'm not seeing what you're trying to get at here.

Considering the huge startup costs involved in developing your own space launch vehicle, it just seems monumentally stupid to spend a large percentage of the scarce amount of money you get from investors on reinventing the wheel concerning engines, when there are so many feasible already available engines on the market -- and you could fund a development of an existing engine to meet your specifications -- it would be cheaper to go to Rocketdyne and say "look, we want an EVEN cheaper RS-68. Is there anyway you can knock a few more million off that price? We're willing to accept lower thrust and ISP. Here's a small amount of seed money to fund your studies."

 

[mz]

I'm going at the monopoly and oligopoly here: when the asking prices are too high, it's cheaper and better in the long run (you get to be independent) to do your own even if that means some duplication of effort. It's really basic economics.

Boeing vs Douglas: I was referring to airframes - why design a new jet if another company already has a similar one further along? Your engine analogies are not applicable since there were and are multiple commercial jet engine providers: P&W, GE, and if you want to go foreign, which is not prohibited in this application, RR, Snecma and all their alliances...

There are not / weren't recently really multiple US rocket engine providers. P&W is the only big game in town if you don't mind the pun. Aerojet, and some smaller ones. Northrop Grumman bought TRW and I don't know if they got the rocket stuff with it - anyway they haven't built much lately in that department AFAIK. And SpaceX makes stuff for themselves now. That's their idea. One of the reasons Kistler was seen to fail was to just subcontract everything to "the usual suspects" and thus end overbudget - if you are going to do everything the old way, don't expect radically better results either.


It is an interesting thought though - very few different rockets share engines. Some in upper stages but few in the first stage or booster / sustainer. How much could cost be diminished in that way? On the other hand, if there was a first flight engine mishap, the grounding would ground both launchers, negating the redundancy benefit.


Elon Musk got some key people from the TRW low-cost pintle demonstrator engine project and they started working. One of the things he seems to have realized is that people are important, not necessarily companies. Also IIRC he used Barber Nichols for some of the turbopump work. They had worked on NASA's FASTRAC or however it is spelled, a low cost engine in the nineties and could use that knowhow.

I don't think SpaceX is the best thing since sliced bread or that they will change everything (they are just a me-too in configuration to do that in my view), just that I see some logic and merit in their vertical integration approach.