Selenian Boondocks

occasional blogger john hare

I have listened to some doomsday energy crap (gas $5.00 gallon and more forever, Japanese nuclear devastation, etc) in the last few weeks that started me thinking of alternatives again. It may be possible that one of the solar thermal generating concepts could find funding for terrestrial applications in the current mood. It may even be worth something later on out there.

A turbine engine intakes air and compresses it, heats it, and runs the expanded air through a turbine to extract the energy and run some sort of machine, often a generator. One of the solar thermal schemes has a fairly low pressure gas as a working fluid to do this job. I don’t have references for the original concept. The cool gas runs through a low tech compressor (possibly fiberglass or other in situ material) and then through an enormous solar heat collector before expanding through the (low tech of in situ materials) turbine to generate power. The exhaust heats the compressed gas in a heat exchanger before the compressed gas enters the solar collector proper. The somewhat cooled exhaust then  is sub cooled in shadow or heat sink before repeating the cycle. I think the original was lunar based.

I was unable to insert a cartoon sketch of the concept this time. In raw form, the same sysem using ambient air could be used here on Earth, and could possibly generate some investment or even revenue fairly rapidly in the current energy hysteria. The heat exchanger could be clear visqueen on a roof or hillside with a dark material under it, like shingles or dark rocks. A few leaks would cost energy, but not sleep. The turbine and compressor equipment could be  built from cheap fiberglass, or even wood.  The idea is to build so extremely cheap that efficiency is very secondary in importance.

While this is a bit off topic, it could create some in situ class experience with other peoples’ money, and might even generate a bit of solid rocket fuel of the green folding type for the right company.

Here’s another fun, somewhat provocative comment, made by a member of aRocket:

All of this discussion assumes that space exploration is, of itself, a valuable goal.  As I see it, the only real deliverable of space exploration is that it keeps that VERY SMALL percentage of the population not content with beer and football entertained.

I would argue that the only demonstrated net social value from space has come from defense and communication and for that, “going round in circles” is fine.

While space exploration is something that I find personally very fascinating, I’m definitely a member of the “not content with beer and football” crowd. I know that a lot of unmanned space exploration sorts like talking about how “you can get so much more science for the buck with robots”, but at the end of the day, even unmanned exploration is just a form of edutainment for most people. Sure, there are occasional side benefits that come up from these programs, but at the end of the day, it leaves you wondering why space exploration for exploration’s sake really deserves so much more government support than say exploration of oceans, or other National Geographic-like expeditions.

Now, I think that exploration could be done in a way that it was more meaningful to society than just another, rather expensive form of edutainment. Which was the point that Marburger made a few years ago:

If we are serious about this, then our objective must be more than a disconnected series of missions, each conducted at huge expense and risk, and none building a lasting infrastructure to reduce the expense and risk of future operations. If we are serious, we will build capability, not just on the ground but in space. And our objective must be to make the use of space for human purposes a routine function.

Exploration that is not in support of something else strikes me as somehow selfish and unsatisfying, and not consistent with the fact that we are using public funds for this enterprise, no matter how small a fraction of the total budget they may be.

If the architecture of the exploration phase is not crafted with sustainability in mind, we will look back on a century or more of huge expenditures with nothing more to show for them than a litter of ritual monuments scattered across the planets and their moons.

I just bring this up, because I’ve seen time and time again a lot of the wasteful decisions NASA makes is due to being myopically overfocused on maximizing the specific mission they are trying to carry out, without putting any thought into the big picture of how to make this relevant to the rest of us. In many ways this ties back to my first real blog post on this blog–your focus really does determine your path.

If your aim is to help humanity incorporate more and more of the solar system into its economic sphere, and to make space beyond communications, GPS, and weather satellites meaningful beyond mere edutainment, you’ll make decisions differently than if your only goal is to optimize some narrowly defined mission.

From NASAWatch/Spaceref:

“While it is true that prudent investments in science and technology will almost certainly yield future economic gains and will allow our knowledge economy to grow, it is also true that these gains can be thwarted by poor decision-making,” Chairman Hall said. “Americans expect and deserve better. With our unemployment hovering at over 9 percent, they expect us to reduce or eliminate those programs that are duplicative and wasteful and examine ways to advance real job creation and economic growth, not just spend their hard-earned money on what the government assumes is best for them.”

Hmmm…I can think of a few examples of massive projects that fit those descriptions. Like say SLS?

• Duplicative: In the near term, without any plan for BEO exploration hardware, SLS will be duplicating the function of commercial crew launchers–sending astronauts to the station (on MPCV), but at far higher costs.  If at some point an upper stage and actual exploration hardware do get funded (10-15 years from now), SLS will mostly be launching propellant–something private rockets are also capable of doing.  So, duplicative? Check.
• Wasteful: The development cost to the government of both the EELV programs and the two COTS programs are less than half one year’s worth of SLS funding, even at the lower projected rate that Obama proposed in his FY’12 budget, and even including the $300M increase in COTS funding. Those programs are giving NASA and the DoD four launchers, with at least some capabilities on both coasts, as well as two ISS cargo vehicles.  Even if you include the total government and private investment in developing those rockets, the total cost is far less than SLS alone will spend over the next 3 years, let alone to completion. Even if you insist on building an HLV, and even if NASA is the only customer (likely), these programs demonstrate that the expected $10B+ development cost for SLS is disturbingly high compared to the cost of developing vehicles for launching critical national security assets.  Wasteful? Check.
• Job Creation? Economic Growth? SLS is a NASA-specific products with no real outside commercial benefit, that will reuse obsolete technology in an effort to maintain as many existing jobs as possible. It is really just a zero-sum wealth transfer from the productive part of economy to politically-connected contractors. Actual economic growth and job creation come from creating new goods and services that provide for peoples wants and needs at increasingly affordable prices.  Innovation, both technical and entrepreneurial are what drive job creation and economic growth–not running government-directed design bureaus to produce products that are irrelevant outside of NASA’s needs.  Contrast this with EELVs, the COTS vehicles, Commercial Crew, and many of the technology programs NASA wants to fund, that serve multiple public and private needs, create wealth, and provide jobs that are backed by eventually self-perpetuating wealth-creating enterprises. So, Job Creation, Economic Growth? Not so much.
• Spending Tax Money on What Government Thinks is Best for Them? The big push for SLS development from the Senate (which has won it the nickname “the Senator Launch System”) and the even bigger push from the House, were led primarily by Congressmen from states that directly benefit from continued spending in this area. The ironic thing is that it’s pretty clear that even NASA doesn’t entirely want SLS, but you have Congressmen trying to legislate the design of a launch vehicle. To the point of Utah reps bragging about how language they put into the bill supposedly can only be met by using hardware procured in a non-competitive manner from bloated contractors in their districts (which I’m sure didn’t make any campaign contributions to help grease the palms of their Congressional enablers). There are few clearer examples of Congress forcing the government to build something that is more in the personal interests of certain Congressmembers than is actually beneficial for tax-paying public. Check.

Not trying to pick on Representative Hall.  I actually have a bit of a soft-spot for the guy, since he came out and spoke at the NGLLC awards ceremony.  Just pointing out that he has good advice, and it would be great if he consistently followed it.

I know I’ve written about this topic before, but I think it’s worth bringing it up again. When you combine the stupidity of ITAR as it exists with the difficulty of getting even a green-card for your typical foreign engineering student studying in the US, you get a particularly pathetic situation. While they’re in school, they can get plenty of training, they can even work on aerospace related research (there are certain exemptions in ITAR for research done at places like universities). But then when they graduate, they’re screwed.  They only have two options, either go home, or find a job outside aerospace.

This point was driven home to me talking with an India-born aerospace engineering student at the University of Michigan last week.  I was out there giving a talk on space entrepreneurship, and afterward this gal comes up to me to ask for help on what to do about work after graduation. She loves being in America, and doesn’t want to leave. She loves aerospace, and it has been her passion.  But wunderkinden in DC think that somehow preventing her from using her hard-won education to benefit our country is somehow protecting national security or protecting our borders. Conversations like this just make me sick inside. Here’s a talented young lady who wants to contribute to our society.  But because of a combination of stupid laws, that politicians aren’t willing to change for fear of looking “soft on defense” or “weak on immigration”, I bet there are thousands or tens of thousands of foreign-born engineering students facing similarly crappy choices.

I just think about my coworker Ian. Here’s an enormously talented GN&C engineer, who did amazing things at Masten, and is making a huge contribution at Altius. The only reason why he wasn’t screwed by ITAR and Immigration laws was because he was from Cuba, and due to Florida politics, Cubans have a much easier time getting a green card and eventual citizenship.  Had he been born on a different island in the Caribbean, it would’ve been official US policy to tell him to go take a flying leap and work for some other country.

I have to agree with @joestump’s tweet: “If Obama was serious about us out-innovating and out-building, we should be granting every law abiding immigrant w/ a degree legal status.”

In the end I was able to give this young lady a suggestion on how to proceed. I suggested that she find a job outside of aerospace (and outside of ITAR-covered technologies) that required similar skills to the job she wants to do inside aerospace. That way she could work for a few years until she could get green-card status, and then she could move back to aerospace. In her case it worked, but I wonder how often our shortsighted policies mean that we’re training engineers for foreign countries who would rather stay here and be Americans.

Something needs to change.

So, according to Rob Coppinger, USA has proposed to operate the Shuttle “commercially” as part of their CCDEV proposal. For a cool, $1.5B/yr over the next six years, they’ll provide two shuttle flights per year.

Personally, I think this is mostly a terrible idea. While offering fixed-price services, and moving to FAA regs is nice, I really don’t see how this fits with the spirit of CCDEV.  After all, USA is talking about taking over an existing government asset, and flying it temporarily through 2017, not providing a long-term commercial crew capability for ISS in the post 2016 timeframe.  And the budget ($9B over the next six years), is way outside the $6B NASA was going to give to commercial crew, or the $3B that the anonymous Senate staffer last week thought would be the real number.

But shuttle huggers, don’t despair.  If something like this goes forward, they could probably do this by taking money from the SLS and MPCV budgets.  After all, this would be offsetting some of the carrying costs that NASA would have to pay for keeping the Shuttle infrastructure in place.  By doing this, there also wouldn’t be any rush to finish Orion or the 70-100 ton version of SLS, because you could just keep flying the shuttle “commercially” for another year or two if commercial crew faces delays.  In fact, this would allow NASA to go straight for their beloved 130mT SLS and deep-space rated MPCV, because there would be no need for the intermediate vehicle.  They can take as much time as they want.

The only even remotely legitimate purpose for trying to rush SLS/MPCV was the worry that possibly all of the commercial crew providers would be running late.  It’s possible I guess, especially if they try and put all their money on just one or two providers.  But, under the current Senate-designed plan, if commercial crew does work, SLS/MPCV would be a giant budget-sucking white elephant for several years while actual mission hardware (EDS stages, landers, and/or habs) was developed.

But with this plan, you can just go straight to “exploration class” HLVs and mission hardware, without having to worry about the fate of ISS.  Something like this would allow you to keep your HLV infrastructure alive until you actually need an HLV without killing commercial crew.

And anyway, SLS and MPCV have big enough budgets that this would only be cutting out maybe 1/3 of the money they’d be getting over that time frame.  If the DIRECT fanboys are right, there may even be a straightforward way for NASA to still deliver on something like that within the budgets they’ve been given, even with keeping the Shuttles flying.

And if there are budget cuts, hey you have the shuttle still flying, you can just stretch out the SLS development even further.

If NASA tries to go this route, they should do so under the SLS budget, not the Commercial Crew one.

Wow. Selenian Boondocks officially passed the 400,000 site visits mark sometime this afternoon. For a blog mostly focused on such a small niche topic (space technology, politics, and business), it’s kind of cool to reach a milestone like this. Thanks everyone for all the support, especially when the blogging ends up being so light sometimes! I’ll try to keep cranking out the interesting reading.

So, a group of rocket engineers starts making claims about how they’re going to revolutionize the industry and deliver a vehicle for far less than has been the traditional norm. When asked how they are going to do this, they talk about stuff like “vertical integration”, “keeping stuff simple”, using a “clean-sheet approach”, and “borrowing the best practices from Silicon Valley”. Admittedly this team did pull several people who had lead successful rocket vehicle development projects in the past, but the team itself was untried and unproven.

What was the general response to these claims? Most in industry other than the fanboys treated their claims with healthy skepticism.

Eight years later, even after that company successfully nails a picture-perfect launch and reentry, people are still skeptical that in the end their prices are going to end up much cheaper than anyone else. Heck, even I’m still wondering if they’ll be able to keep the prices they’ve been claiming once they’re really into routine and reliable operations–and I’m about as close as you can get to a koolaid drinkin fanboy without having spittle in the corner of my mouth.

Then there’s this other rocket group. Like the first one, they haven’t actually demonstrated the ability to successfully design and build new rocket vehicles. At least not within my lifetime. They also start making claims about how by implementing some key industry suggestions (this time those found on “Page 38″ of last month’s HEFT report) they can deliver a new vehicle for far less than past experience dictates. Unlike the first team though, this team does have a track record. But it is a track record of 30 years of consistently overrunning budgets and getting major projects canceled.

“But it will be different this time” they say. “If we use the suggestions on ‘Page 38′, we can dramatically improve on the affordability of developing new rocket vehicles.”

Now, it’s not that the suggestions on Page 38 are bad. They’re not. They’re actually pretty good. Just like “using the best practices from Silicon Valley” sounds good too. I’ll admit that I’m kind of curious how on a $20B project they’re going to “Model, test and fly early and often” or “Use small lean projects with highly competent empowered personnel”, or how a project that is more or less designed by Congressional committee is somehow going to “Push decision authority to the lowest level. Trust them to implement and don’t second guess (over-manage)” [Aside: if Congress really intended to allow NASA to do that last one, they wouldn't be specifying the size of the rocket, what hardware it can use, and which contractors they have to maintain contracts for]. I’m also somewhat curious of how many of the items on that list CxP managers would claim they were already doing…

…but leaving all of those specific details aside, I just don’t get why this second group of people gets all offended when the net result from industry is once again healthy skepticism. Especially given their past track record. When you’re trying to get people to entrust you with a multi-billion dollar project that all past experience and your management claim is unlikely to fit within budget or timeline, is it really that offensive when people have a hard time swallowing that somehow one powerpoint slide is going to change everything?

I mean, it is totally possible that like SpaceX, this new team is going to surprise us, and totally knock this SLS project out of the park. Heck, maybe they’ll even come in far enough under budget that Shelby, out of the kindness of his generous soul, will decide to put the savings into commercial crew or propellant depot development. It’s totally possible.

But is it really rude to be skeptical about this outcome?

FWIW, there’s new blog posts on what we’ve been up to at ASM over the last few months, and on some validation on our concept for doing an ISS micro reentry vehicle.

I know all of you have been just dying to hear what I think about the Nautilus-X MMSEV vehicle that’s been discussed all over the blogosphere in recent days. Ok, probably not, but I figured I ought to get my opinions on record anyway.

I’ll start with my positive impressions first. Most importantly, I like the idea of using reusable in-space vehicles. One of the points I had intended to make with the MHD aerobraking series was that such technologies might lead to the day where directly returning to earth from the moon interplanetary space via a capsule is considered an anachronism. So, I’m a firm supporter of space architectures where the earth-to-LEO segment is totally separate from the in-space segment, and where the in-space segment favors reuse.

I’m also a fan of many of the technologies that the MMSEV was talking about, such as artificial gravity, actually dealing with radiation issues, etc.

But on net, my overall impression was that while interesting, this will never happen. At least not with the NASA we have today, and not on the budget they’re claiming. Unless I’m totally misunderstanding what all falls under “DCT&I”, $3.7B to develop that vehicle over five years sounds wishful thinking when you realize that Orion has spent more than that over a similar amount of time to get to PDR. Realistically, in a world where Orion and SLS are expected to cost over $20B more and take at least another 6 years to get to service, I really have a hard time believing that a vehicle that much more complicated, done by the same groups, is somehow going to be available that much sooner and for that much less.

I’m not trying to badmouth the guys who put their hearts and souls into this concept. I think it is visionary, and has many elements in the right direction. I just think that compared to where we are today, the budget and timeline numbers they’re claiming are overoptimistic, and that we’re not really anywhere close to being able to do something like what they’re talking about. More to the point, we’re not even to a point where we need something like what they’re talking about. While I’m a fan of NEOs and Phobos, reality dictates that most human spaceflight over the next few decades is likely to be focused in cislunar space. We may do occasional ventures beyond, but they’ll likely be riskier, smaller, and cheaper missions.

I hope we get there (to a point where we’re ready to build something like Nautilus-X) someday while I’m still young enough to appreciate it, but I think there are bunch of steps between here and there that need to be taken first if we’re going to be serious about not just exploring space, but making space part of “humanity’s natural environment”.

I was somewhat surprised that my earlier Dual-Fluid Depot post generated as much interest as it did.  I didn’t think there were many people who cared about depots who hadn’t read any of the papers by Frank Zegler, Bernard Kutter, or myself on the topic.  But I wanted to include an intro just for sake of thoroughness before tossing out this variation on the theme.  Now, I’m glad I did that.

With that introductory post out of the way I wanted to share a variant on the theme that I looked into about a week ago–using the 5m diameter DCSS instead of the Centaur as a baseline for single-launch depots.

I ran the numbers for this concept, and if you:

1. Did the “depot LH2″ tank as just a stretched version of the 5m diameter LH2 tank on the DCSS, using existing tooling
2. Used both the LOX and LH2 tanks from the DCSS as the “depot LOX” tanks

You could store somewhere between 100-103mT of LOX/LH2 (at a MR of ~5.8-6:1) using a depot based on existing stages and existing tooling.  This would give you ~90% of the capacity of an ACES derived depot, even if ACES never gets funded.

A couple of quick notes:

1. The existing DCSS 5m LH2 tank is load-bearing.  It actually connects at the bottom of the tank to the interstage, and at the top of the tank to the PLF.  This means that a depot LH2 tank built using the same structure, and with no payload on top, could actually replace a good chunk of the cylindrical part of the PLF for a depot flight.

   

2. One of the challenges that will need to be addressed is that with the tank built into the PLF diameter, you can’t put normal MLI on the outside of the tank, since normal MLI can’t take aerodynamic loads.  A deployable sunshield is one solution, but might only work at La Grange points.  Another interesting one being developed by Quest Product Development Corp (in conjunction with Ball Aerospace) is LV-IMLI, an advanced version of MLI that might be able to be up to the task. A third option would be qualifying a larger diameter, “hammerhead” style fairing with say 6-7m diameter.
3. You don’t necessarily need to use both the DCSS tanks as “Depot LOX Tanks”.  It is also possible to say use just the DCSS LH2 tank, and leave the DCSS LOX tank for use in storing Argon, Xenon, or some other SEP propellant.  This would make more sense for L1/L2 based depots.  You’d still be at somewhere around 74-75mT of LOX/LH2, but you’d also have about 28mT of liquid argon storage capacity.  And you could store up to 60mT if you used Xenon instead of Argon.
4. The 100mT number was assuming a target depot O/F ratio of 6.0, which is actually probably on the lean side.  The actual PLF volume is big enough to support a much bigger LH2 tank, so you could account for boiloff, etc.
5. You’d still use a CRYOTE-like module between the DCSS and depot LH2 tank to handle all of the actual depot operations functions such as power, control, rendezvous and docking, propellant transfer, etc.
6. DCSS LH2 tanks are less nice from a heat transfer standpoint because they have isogrid ribs on the inside that serve to lower the thermal resistance between the LH2 and the tank wall (more wetted surface area to conduct heat through–think of the ribs as “heating fins”), but the surface are to volume ratio of a squatter larger tank might make up for this somewhat.

Anyhow, this isn’t a thoroughly modeled idea, but it’s one way to get a 100mT capacity depot in a single launch using existing stages and existing tooling.  Whether you actually need a depot this big or not is open for debate, but I wanted to point out that it was possible, even if ACES is never funded.