New Mars Forums

To cull some more useful bits of this article:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacetra … l-05v.html

First, the Orbital Space Plane. During the Clinton administration, NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas had begun a program called X-38 to develop a crew capsule that could launch astronauts to orbit atop a medium lift launch vehicle, thereby allowing space station crews to be rotated at much lower cost than is required for a shuttle flight.

Since the Johnson Space Center is the primary NASA center with expertise in crewed flight systems, it made sense for the project to be assigned there. But apparently for political reasons, Mr. O'Keefe decided to move the program to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Claiming the X-38's estimated price tag of $1.6 billion was too high, he cancelled that program in midstream and set up the Orbital Space Plane program in Alabama in its place.

The actual expertise of the Marshall Space Flight Center is in launch vehicles, however, and without the necessary experience, costs rapidly escalated out of control, with the estimated program budget growing to over $15 billion by the fall of 2003.

Congress balked at funding this boondoggle, and the program collapsed with nothing accomplished and close to a billion dollars of the taxpayer's money down the drain.

So my state bears some blame--thank Dennis Smith and Dan Dumbacher for that.

NEP bites:

"...JIMO would almost certainly fail before it reached the planet. Furthermore, as a result of the weight and the huge mass of the 150 kilowatt reactor and xenon propellant, the spacecraft couldn't be launched into space on any existing rocket."

The overcomplex moon plan:

Spiral 2: Begin short duration lunar missions. To achieve this objective, the plan proposes the following design for a transportation system.

First, NASA must develop a Lunar Surface Ascent Module (LSAM) to carry astronauts to and from the Moon's surface, a medium lift vehicle (MLV) capable of launching it, and an Earth Departure Stage (EDS) capable of delivering either the CEV or the LSAM separately from low Earth orbit to low lunar orbit.

Carrying out a mission would require four separate launches—one MLV for the CEV, one for the LSAM, and one for each of two EDS vehicles.

These four components would all be put into low Earth orbit. The manned CEV would then rendezvous with one EDS, and the empty LSAM would rendezvous with the other EDS, and each would be driven separately from the Earth's orbit to lunar orbit.

The CEV would then rendezvous with the LSAM in low lunar orbit, after which the crew would transfer to the LSAM for an excursion to the Lunar surface of 4 to 14 days.

The crew would then ascend in the LSAM to rendezvous with the CEV in lunar orbit, transfer back to the CEV, and come back to Earth. (If this all sounds terribly complex, that's because it is. More on the implications of that complexity in a moment.)

Wait for it...

The ESMD plan requires a plethora of additional recurring costs and mission risks for the sole purpose of avoiding the development cost of a big new rocket—a heavy lift vehicle (HLV). Yet, since one goal of the Vision for Space Exploration is to get humans to Mars, an HLV will need to be developed anyway.

So on a cost basis, the ESMD plan will lose twice over, since it requires new hardware for Spirals 2 and 3, and then even more new hardware for Spirals 4 and 5.

Furthermore, in addition to imposing maximum mission risk for lunar explorers through its own excessive complexity, the ESMD plan will also increase the risk to Mars explorers, because the ESMD lunar plan will not test the Mars mission hardware.

Rather than enable human Mars exploration, the plan as presently defined would be a massive and costly detour; it would delay such missions for many decades.

The wind-up:

The plan's fourth major flaw is that it is fundamentally technically unsound. It goes to great lengths to avoid the necessity of developing a heavy lift vehicle, employing (as described above) an astonishingly complicated mission architecture involving four rocket launches and four space rendezvous for each lunar mission—what we might call a "quadruple launch, quadruple rendezvous" (QQ) mission architecture.

Using some reasonable estimates based upon the masses of the primary components of the Apollo mission, it can be shown that it is technically possible that a QQ mission could be launched on four medium launch vehicles. But is it technically wise? Note the following factors:

i. Each mission requires four MLV launches.

Ii. Those four launches must be done quickly, since the EDS and LSAM vehicles are carrying cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and the manned CEV is launched last.

Iii. Each mission requires four critical rendezvous operations.

Iv. The crew flies to the Moon separate from the lunar module.

Point i speaks to the cost of the program. Using multiple MLVs to launch what could be a single HLV payload is not cost-effective. It is a basic feature of rocket economics that larger boosters are more economic than smaller boosters. The larger the launch vehicle, the less it costs to put each kilogram into orbit.

And the pitch...

"Fortunately, the way to solve this problem is simple: Develop a heavy lift vehicle (HLV) that allows the entire mission to be launched with a single booster, just as was done for the Apollo missions."

Retards-R-Us

"Regrettably, in designing this mission architecture, the ESMD planners had to act in conformity with the direction of the technically unqualified Mr. O'Keefe, who enunciated a preference that the program be conducted without heavy lift vehicles. Such politically dictated technical decision-making is unacceptable; it is a formula for programmatic catastrophe..."

"Thus we encounter again the fundamental problem with President Bush's policy. By postponing the program's goals until far in the future, important capabilities that could be used to achieve those goals will be lost before the time comes for those goals to be attempted. Under the current plan, Spiral 1 might succeed, at maximum cost, in producing a CEV in ten years."

"But in the meantime, the heavy lift vehicle components embodied in the shuttle program will have been lost. As a result, in 2014, NASA will actually possess a smaller fraction of the hardware needed to send humans to the Moon than it does today."

In closing:

"It is unreasonable today to spend ten years to develop a CEV, when in the 1960s we did it in five, or sixteen years to reach the Moon, when two generations ago we did it in eight."

"Embarking on the program in such a dilatory way will cost us the heavy lift hardware of the shuttle, which is something we can ill-afford."

Since my worthy opponant admits that EELV is a poor choice for Mars--that is a tacit admission than EELVs to the moon are a wasteful distraction

Speaking of ice ships
http://www.ckk.chalmers.se/people/thomm … astronaut/

Look at the Mars transfer vehicle. Not what you proposed--out of the Millenium Project--but ice is used as it is.

BTW Some at Marshall want clean sheet HLLV--and with UTC having bought Rocketdyne, Pratt went from being against to being for HLLV. So stay tuned.

Our orbiter is underslung beneath the stack on ascent. Buran wasn't IIRC. There was some talk about having our orbiter fly heads up--from an old copy of Journal Of Spacecraft & Rockets.

http://www.rus]www.rus-sell has some nice models of Buran, Proton and the like that I have links to over at the REAL SPACE section of:

http://www.starshipmodeler.net]http://www.starshipmodeler.net

Artwork and models of HLLV's

http://www.starshipmodeler.net/cgi-bin/ … hp?t=25310

The Model kits:

http://www.rus-sell.com/1:288+Models/ca … og650.html

Pay attention. The tech in DC-X could very well be useful as a moon lander. NOVA was a direct ascent model--with a lander/mainship a lot like DC-X...remember? Lunar Orbit was better for the time--but DC-X tech would make for a good lander--at least in part.  NOVA and single dock HLLV payloads can put a craft near the lunar poles. EELV would be stuck at the equator.

The hypersonics people are part of NASA and I don't want to see them die.

That is not an Anti-NASA statement. In my alternate universe scenario all 14 of the shuttle astronauts would have lived. Buran flew heads up -out of the foam-which would fall down--and Zenits were the strap-ons. If an orbiter had been downed--we'd still have an HLLV in Energiya and EELV's in the Zenits.

This STS would have replaced all the Titans, Atlas rockets, with a single Zenit being better than most/all single core EELVs now flying. The Energiya cores would have been good wet-stage station materials like ET's...so you have a truly modular system.

That is why I loved Ener-Buran--and wish we had built it and Columbia was in Gorki park. Faded--but intact.

And before you get started on the Energiya bankrupted the USSR myth--remember this. N-1 cost as much--and that did not bankrupt the USSR. Instead, the Soviets grew in power--beyond parity in fact.

What bankrupted the Soviets was getting bogged down fighting muslims in parts of the world where they had no business.

Sound familiar?

Neo-hercules:

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/tks_foll … lowon.html
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/angara.h … ngara.html
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/angara3. … gara3.html
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/angara10 … ra100.html

It is a lot like nanotechnology. Buckling down and building bigger rockets sticks in people minds, so they invent BS ways to get around it--like EELV assembly--warp drive, Delta II delivered nanotech swarms to build foam moon-bases and other such crap.

If we had flown Energiya Buran--and the Russians had flown Columbia--we would be much farther along.

To start with--we would have the Zenits as EELVs back in the 80's and retired the older designs. We could have launched space station modules in place of orbiters that would be sent to dock with them. The side mount would allow for orbiter sized X-43 tests at speed--and I think the hypersonics people would have been better off.

I would have been happy if the X-33 had been the Rockwell design. That was conservative.

DC-X fits into VSE as a good lander--what the NOVA lander could have been.

The suppository/cough-drop aeroballistic rocket that was to become the VentureStar prototype was a joke. Anything but that.

That is a fair critique of most of his sayings. We wouldn't even have a space race were it not for Korolov exploiting Stalin's need to have to bomb now rather than waiting to shrink the warheads.

The R-7 was the HLLV of its time--and people also bashed it. It was a true space booster sold as an ICBM--rather than the other way around.

The one thing Bell needs to understand is that the larger human-rated launch vehicles made automated probes happen. They still make that Vostok capsule as a materials research sat--and as a spysat too in the past.

Had our first ICBM been Minuteman--and the first Russian ICBM been Topol-M--we wouldn't have spaceflight of any real kind. Thankfully the big liquids came first--which saved our behinds.

If Bell thinks a good Europa lander can be launched by that crutch of a Delta II, he is out of his mind. I want an HLLV to put a good Solar foci scope 500-800 AU out to get some really good extr-solar planet pictures. HLLV's are best for that.

You can thank McNamara for that. OSP was to cost 13 billion by some estimates, which means you have Buran costs for less utility. There was a reason Hermes wasn't pursued.

Capsules are best suited to coming in from the moon--so wings look to be out, unless we see some flybacks.

Midsized orbiters without SSMEs and large fly-backs without the heatshield can be done. STS had both and this combo hurt.

A simpler Buran style orbiter is less vulnerable to weight creep than very small mini-spaceplanes. Even David Leestma was quoted in Av Week about how ELVs don't take non-axial pitch loads very well. There is nothing weak about that arguement.

For now it seems to be capsules and EELVs--with the 39 series pad to go extinct unless the new NASA chief sticks to his guns.

Falcoln V will be in the SS-9/Tsyclon R-36 or SS-18/Dnepr R-36 M class. (around Delta II Tittan II or thereabouts)

Zenit will put 13 tons in orbit, and is second only to UR-500 Proton. This puts Zenit ahead of many single-core EELV's, ahead of Ariane 4 into light Ariane 5 payloads.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com]www.russianspaceweb.com

Buzz advocates the use of External Tanks, as well as Gene Meyers:

http://www.spaceislandgroup.com]www.spaceislandgroup.com

This infrastructure will be lost if we go to EELV.