Delta IV Heavy and Beyond

Mark S · 2004-09-02 00:13:39

I found this interesting link during my web surfing about Boeing's http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/spa … pdf]future plans for the Delta IV.

The debate of "Shuttle-derived versus clean-sheet booster" comes up again. If Boeing is willing to pump in the development money, it's certainly a possibility. I'm already intrigued by the possibilities.

If a heavy-lifter can be assembled from parts of smaller rockets already in production, it can be economically justified (whereas Shuttle-C et al will not likely see much profit.) Boeing could do a modest upgrade (uprated engines, more SRM's. lighter fuel tanks) or they could do something drastic and match the Saturn V.

My gut says that we do not need to match the Saturn, and that 80 tonnes to LEO will be sufficient.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on an upgraded Delta. I have some ideas of my own that I will elaborate on later. For starters, does anybody see problems with demolishing now-retired Pad 36A in the near future to build a pad for Delta IV Super Heavy?

comstar03 · 2004-09-02 01:21:09

If the Delta IV has a variation of a booster for the central core and a carry payload like the shuttle or energia or Ariane V derivatives , then it could carry different structured payloads.

Including a cargo pod derviative of the shuttle cargo bay that could be used to house robotic droids for space development.

Euler · 2004-09-02 01:54:23

I am a bit skeptical of Delta IV derived vehicles being a good HLLV. The Delta IV series is optimized for missions to GEO, so it would probably not be optimal for assembly in LEO. Also, it is usually not good to try and cluster too many boosters together. A cluster of boosters will generally have much lower performance than a single booster of the same size, and the additional parts increase the chance of a failure.

Still, there were some interesting ideas. Improved engines, Lithium-Aluminum materials, and denser fuels (slush hydrogen?) are all improvements that could also be worked into the smaller Delta vehicles. The X-feed seems like a very interesting and logical idea that could be really useful. It would be nice if the had some cost estimates for these ideas, both for R&D and additional per flight cost of implementing these ideas.

It looks like the biggest that we can get without major infrastructure changes is about 50 tons with a 6.5-m payload fairing. This might be big enough to implement plan Bush and should be given serious consideration, though an option that is a bit bigger would probably be optimum.

I am less convinced of the practicality of the derivatives. Clusters of 7 CBCs? That need a whole new infrastructure anyway? If we decide we need something that big, we can probably do better.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 05:20:00

The Delta-IV could probobly do payloads up to around 50MT allright economically, but higher than that I have my doubts... Configurations with more than two CBCs may get awfully expensive per-flight, and paying big money to build Boeing a new launch pad doesn't sound like a good idea to me... 6.5m tanks, 4X 1.5m SRMs, perhaps build the thing out of Li/Al alloy and use the special "high octane" fuel, all well and good and would aproach 50MT. But new launch pad, new infrastructure, new factory, new RS-68, etcetera... mmm not thrilled about that. As for the giant Saturn-V class X-Transfer mega-Delta, how is that a growth option? Everything about it is different from the Delta-IV, and I worry that it will cost big money to develop, particularly with the extra plumbing and new super engine.

40-50MT would be plenty to launch any near-term mission, with 4X flights able to accomplish an Earth & Lunar orbit rendevous Lunar mission comfortably, able to launch JIMO or large ion-powerd tug, or large Military payloads... Since Boeing isn't flying any Deltas for anyone hardly, have them do what they do best, build lots of little rockets cheaply and bolt them together into a medium launcher... but an HLLV, thats silly.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-02 06:02:14

I believe the launch pad 36A was for atlas 2 and thats probably means lockheed owns the pad not Boeing. Just a guess on the ownership part.

As for the Delta V in combo or clustered to get to Mega ton of lift requirement. That has been on their drawing boards for or pretty much since the Presidents announcement of the vision in late January.

Delta or atlas rockets are good for cargo but would need to go though a complete redesign to be man rated and still the capsule portion of said rockets would still need to be developed. Since the last capsule designs were so long ago it would mean a redevopement and learning process, which means many years of added delay before they could ever be flown to LEO or to any other point of interest.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 07:49:06

I am wondering how much lift capacity a single Atlas-V or Atlas 5m or Detla 6.5m core could lift without SRBs... the Atlas-V is probobly almost strong enough to lift the orbital CEV on its own with no booster rockets.

Simply put, when man rating a booster, how reliable is reliable enough? The Delta-II has worked 297 of 300 flights, and as far as I know 100% of Atlas rockets have always worked. I think that all but one Delta-II flight would have been surviveable too with a launch escape system and a decent reentry heat shield.

Install some extra vibration and temperature sensors on the engines, use the minimum number of engines possible, a booster engine kill switch in the cockpit, and include a good robust launch escape rocket and that ought to be close enough for man rating, especially if the SRBs can be avoided and you only have to rely on one RS-68/RD-180 and a single RL-10/RL-60.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-02 08:27:43

I agree with the concepts of using either rocket, so what is the hold up for their own developement of the Capsule then to go with them.

ANTIcarrot. · 2004-09-02 10:48:22

The real problem probably won't be man rating the rocket, but man rating the launch facilities and procedures. NASA's hit and miss obsession with safety could wreck the launch utility of the most reliable rocket.

ANTIcarrot.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-02 12:03:03

I noted that the Boeing concept is like laying out a wing by flat aligning each component next to the others in a line or row shape. This would make it unstable in high cross winds. Placing them in a triangle shape with the payload centered at the top would lead to a more stable launch vehicle.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 12:14:40

Huh? you mean Boeing's OSP, CEV, or the Delta-IV HLV? Cross wind?

SpaceNut · 2004-09-02 12:22:26

Starting from the Delta heavy pictures in the link at the top of the page all the way though until you get to the Next generation are all that shape. Stacked side by side.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 12:43:03

Ahh you mean a rocket being wider on one side than another... No that isn't too much of a problem for a rocket, as it basicly just flies upward. Just make sure you don't launch when the wind is too strong, but they do that already.

BWhite · 2004-09-02 14:29:42

If a heavy-lifter can be assembled from parts of smaller rockets already in production, it can be economically justified (whereas Shuttle-C et al will not likely see much profit.) Boeing could do a modest upgrade (uprated engines, more SRM's. lighter fuel tanks) or they could do something drastic and match the Saturn V.

A Thiokol 5 segment RSRM with an LH2/LOX upper stage could throw 35K to 40K (pounds) to LEO far cheaper than any other potential USA booster.

4 segment RSRM cost $30 million (a well established price based on sales for the STS program)

Add a handful of RL-10s or Musk's Merlin or the RL-10 follow on and you are in LEO at $1500 per pound or less.

An awesome light-medium shuttle derived option.

Going with shuttle C & follow on SDV with a BIG cryogenic upper stage gives a wide range of options.

5 segment RSRM plus liquid upper for about $50 to $60 million;

Shuttle C - - 2 RSRM + ET + RS-68 with cargo carrier with total RS-68 depending on payload.

Various sized ETs?

Then inline SDV with 2 5 segment RSRM and a big liquid upper stage for 150 - 200 MT payloads.

= = =

Thiokol RSRMs have a 99.5% success rate and 100% post Challenger success rate. Why start from scratch?

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 15:13:09

Well, thats nice Bill, but even if it could reach the hypothetical 40,000lbs, that still is going to require any Lunar mission to be cut into too many little pieces. Somthing on the order of forty metric tons would permit a much more comfortable mass margin to permit bigger surface payloads, larger crews, and would have utility to launch other NASA and future USAF medium-heavy payloads.

The ~50MT Delta-IV upgrade is a little closer than than it sounds too, that all the componets and materials exsist today, the only difference is the bigger 6.5m fuel tanks. No new engines (maybe RL-60), no new launch pad, no new infrastructure. Use of commertially available Weldalloy Lithium-Aluminum tanks on an uprated Delta-IV HLV that retains the attach points for 1.5m SRMs and possibly the "high grade" Liquid Hydrogen. $250M a flight sounds like a very reasonable cost for essentially zero development.

There is also a safety issue involved with large solid rocket engines; that they simply cannot be shut off... Had the Challengers' boosters been liquid fueled, and the booster engine nozzle began to fail, this could have been detected by engine housing sensors and the engine automaticly shut down, followed by Shuttle RTLS maneuver. Solid rocket engines are reliable, but I think it is questionable if any kind of rocket can reach the magic 99.9% reliability, so you must plan for the worst and design the vehicle so the crew can survive 99.9% of missions, and a booster failure is inherintly safer with a liquid engine than a solid one.

As for Shuttle Derived, there is a real question as to how much will it cost to develop? How much really? If it costs $2Bn to design a new light/medium launcher around the Shuttle SRB, with the required launch pad changes and such, that would make up the difference for dozens of Atlas-VB mounted crewed CEV shots... As for Shuttle-derived as HLLV, the notion that it could reach payloads exceeding 120MT is probobly wishful thinking (barring use of NTR upper stage), and thus makes a MarsDirect style mission using it shakey due to weight creep. Not that it isn't a good idea, but particularly if the development cost is very high, would it really be better than going clean-sheet if a much more powerful launcher would cost the same per-flight?

Finally, the biggest question of all for Shuttle Derived, is the army of engineers at the VAB and Pad-39 competant at operating launch vehicles efficently? It is hard to look at the Shuttle program as anything else but a make-work program that maximizes cost intentionally, and this is no longer sustainable... Are the managers willing to change their ways and do away with large swathes of long-time employees? ...Boeing's Delta and Lockheed's Atlas rockets are operated for a profit after all, Shuttle is not.

BWhite · 2004-09-02 15:29:41

Finally, the biggest question of all for Shuttle Derived, is the army of engineers at the VAB and Pad-39 competant at operating launch vehicles efficently? It is hard to look at the Shuttle program as anything else but a make-work program that maximizes cost intentionally, and this is no longer sustainable... Are the managers willing to change their ways and do away with large swathes of long-time employees? ...Boeing's Delta and Lockheed's Atlas rockets are operated for a profit after all, Shuttle is not.

Why should we believe Boeing is immune from this same disease? As you posted earlier, no one except Uncle Sam buys Delta and it appears Atlas gets sold commercially by a group that also sells Russian/Ukrainian.

Might the occasional Atlas get sold commercially as window dressing to toss Lockmart a bone?

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 16:08:39

Well, we know for fact that this has been entrenched in NASA because that has been the entire Nixonian post-Apollo space doctern, to maximize NASA employment, and reinforced by the usual buracratic self-preservation common to large agencies, defended from real competition, and backed by many powerful politicans because of the large employment & state taxes.

Versus the possibility that Boeing or LockMart might get excessively greedy... where they can be constrained on a system-level basis by legally binding contract (more or less), where there IS competition between Boeing and Lockheed (where there is conspiring with Shuttle via United Space Alliance), and EELV prices are not that outrageous things considerd, an Atlas for ~$100M that has excelent reliability versus a ~$50M Russian R-7 if you take into account how little Russians are willing to work for.

BWhite · 2004-09-02 16:26:08

Well, we know for fact that this has been entrenched in NASA because that has been the entire Nixonian post-Apollo space doctern, to maximize NASA employment, and reinforced by the usual buracratic self-preservation common to large agencies, defended from real competition, and backed by many powerful politicans because of the large employment & state taxes.
Versus the possibility that Boeing or LockMart might get excessively greedy... where they can be constrained on a system-level basis by legally binding contract (more or less), where there IS competition between Boeing and Lockheed (where there is conspiring with Shuttle via United Space Alliance), and EELV prices are not that outrageous things considerd, an Atlas for ~$100M that has excelent reliability versus a ~$50M Russian R-7 if you take into account how little Russians are willing to work for.

Ah, but what about the call for DoD downselect to one EELV?

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 16:56:08

Market forces... communications sats are getting bigger and less numerous, and are being launched more and more on foreign rockets with their low labor costs. Speaking purely from a financial standpoint, it does make sense to eliminate one line, though from a military prespective if one rocket had a vatal flaw, or a componet shortage, or worst and the pad was destroyed by a launch mishap it does make sense to keep both.

But say that Congress did order that the USAF pick one, and the less efficent Delta line was eliminated, would Lockheed suddenly go "whoop, we must have messed up a decimal place, its going to cost $1,000M not $100M per flight?" I doubt it... Lockheed wouldn't suddenly be able to jack up the price. And there would still be the power of contract, which NASA isn't really bound by.

If Boeing can build 20 Delta cores per year at their factory, say they could make... say... 15 of the "uprated" 6.5m Li/Al model, that would permit five Delta HLV flights per year. If NASA and the USAF both use EELVs exclusively, Atlas for small USAF satelites and NASA CEVs because of their higher intrinsic reliability plus Delta for larger heavier payloads for both agencies. There could be more stuff to launch than one rocket line or the other could support.

What I want to see is Lockheed's answer to the Boeing "Delta growth options," and if the Atlas line could be easily modified to hit the 40MT target, and how many of these uprated Atlas-VB cores could be built per year.

BWhite · 2004-09-02 17:02:16

In my RSO (rather smug opinion) - - unless the federal government stops being the "single payer" for crewed spaceflight (manned spaceflight is so 20th century sexist) none of this discussion really matters much.

If the VSE is go as we can afford to pay we need to get the private sector to pay more so we can go faster.

Bigelow's space hotel is the only private sector application for crewed spaceflight I am aware of that has a realistic chance of becoming real.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 17:58:15

"Bigelow's space hotel is the only private sector application for crewed spaceflight I am aware of that has a realistic chance of becoming real."

If you are pinning your hopes on Bigelow and space tourism, then AltSpace really IS doomed...

No private medium launch vehicle... Even the Falcon-V would not lift a Soyuz, and it is still quite vaporware

No manned orbital vehicle even on the drawing board for a reasonable development cost, just sub-orbital joy ride dealies with no heat shields, OMS engines, etc.

No huge, sustained market of millionaire space tourists... only a few could cough up the cash, and they wouldn't be doing it more than once most likly.

No experience in manned spaceflight, space operations, or orbital construction anywhere outside of NASA and to a little extent the Russians. Kind of hard to build a space station of signifigant size if you aren't good at this sort of thing.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-02 18:05:18

As far as VSE being bad because its "go as we pay," I don't think its really setting in just how much money NASA would have if Shuttle and ISS programs went away...

Seven Billion United States Dollars... in one year. Eight billion with a $1Bn raise for NASA.

That is enough money to develop the basic orbital CEV. In just one year. One... Spend the next years' billions on the Lunar lander, the Atlas-VB or Delta-IVB, and a Lunar telescope... The next year on the inflatable Lunar base, rovers, bulldozers...

It all adds up. Fast.

Euler · 2004-09-02 20:26:15

If Boeing can build 20 Delta cores per year at their factory, say they could make... say... 15 of the "uprated" 6.5m Li/Al model, that would permit five Delta HLV flights per year.

The Delta IV upgrades would still use the same 5m CBCs that are used in other Delta IV launch vehicles, though they might use upgraded, more efficient engines. They would use a bigger (probably RL-60 powered) upper stage, with a 6.5m payload fairing, and a few small GEMs(Graphite Epoxy motors) would be added on. Using the denser slush hydrogen would also help.

I thought the most interesting proposed upgrade is the X-feed idea. It looks like it will add about 5 MT of payload by itself, though if you plug numbers into the Rocket Equation, it seems like it should add even more. Also, it will yield a proportionately larger increase to the payload for launches beyond LEO. I don't know how expensive or dangerous this modification would be, but it seems like a cool idea.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-03 07:12:01

The thing that gets me is all the existing contacts for the shuttle flights. They have no loop holes to shut off or for reduction of production qoutas and Nasa has no provisions for Labor force reductions when the shuttle was no longer flying.

I presented such arguments for doing so, estimated cash savings and was sort of told it can not work that way in so many words. When I realized that we were going into major rework of each orbitor and for the main external tank shedding foam problem resolution that was taking so much time.

GCNRevenger · 2004-09-03 08:58:13

Ahhh only the payload faring is larger and has higher Isp engines, though that still isn't a very big modification to reach 40-45MT. It could likly be accomplished for under a billion... if 30MT payloads are sufficent, the basic current HLV model can haul 30MT with only the addition of GEMs.

Not sure i'm real keen on the Crossfeed system... more plumbing weight, more complexity, more failure modes. Stick with descrete stages.

SpaceNut · 2004-09-07 09:37:26

Interesting how Expendable could yeild so many launches to the moon with little modifications to what we already have.

Quote from Colonize the Moon before Mars
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/221/1

Existing technology can be used to get to the Moon (see “Soyuz to the Moon?”, The Space Review, August 2, 2004). A lunar landing mission might cost $120 million for an Ariane 5 booster. If each mission cost another $120 million for the Soyuz, service module and everything else, then that would be $240 million per flight instead of $5 billion per flight. That means that a $50-billion level of commitment from Earth can afford over 400 flights every two years. Of course, that level of commitment could be optimally spent in much better ways. By creating a lunar cycler, a station at L-1, an orbital fuel depot, in situ utilization of lunar oxygen and possibly lunar water, there could be a vibrant community on the Moon.

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