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If I have my facts stright, the Energia core was produced in Russia (the prosthetic limb factory) while the boosters were built in the Ukraine (where Zenit is buit right now.)
Moving production to Michoud would have its ups and downs. American labor is more expensive than Russian labor, and it would add to the cost if the booster cores had to be flown by M4 from Louisiana to Baikonour (and if a new assembly building had to be built.) However, Michoud has the skilled workforce and the equipment to do the job. Perhaps the same people will be working side-by-side on Energia and SDV.
I'm a bit curious as to the insulation on Energia's tanks. Is the rocket a double-wall design with insulation between the inner and outer tank walls? Or is it applied directly to the outer skin, as on the shuttle ET?
That's some good sleuthing. Do you know if the Energia tooling was retained? My feeling is that the answer is probably similar to that for the RD-0120: the tools exist, but facilities will need to be fixed and new equipment purchased. It's also possible that custom tooling was never developed for Energia, because prototype vehicles are generally built one at a time rather than on an assembly line.
If Energia could be put into production in its current form, and if the facilities could be cheaply repaired, it would be a perfect solution for any possible "Bush Moon Initiative / SEI 2." That's not to say an SDV shouldn't be built. It would be wise to have two different HLLV's of similar capacity so you could preserve competition and continue the program if one booster is grounded.
I prefer the Atlas to the Delta, but the goal of the project is an OSP that will use either booster. This is to preserve competition and to have a fallback in case one booster is grounded after some catastrophic failure.
An expendible Big G could be made even lighter if the payload module is reduced in size, of if the aft passenger compartment is shrunk. However, I think NASA would object to putting the docking port in the heat shield. Even if the concept worked on its single test flight, that's no guarantee that another breach wouldn't happen. Could Big G be modified with a docking tunnel in the nose?
Just imagine a Big G (the final descendant of Mercury) atop an Atlas V. A modern-day Mercury Atlas. John Glenn would be proud.
From looking at the Zarya (Super Soyuz) study, I've inferred that capsules are lighter primarily because 1) wings are heavy, 2) capsules are small and volumetrically efficient, and 3) heat shielding adds a lot of weight. Zarya came out too heavy because the entire capsule was surrounded in heat resistant tiles.
I like lifting bodies because the wings are kept small, and the fuselage can be made relatively small and volumetrically efficient (not as good as a capsule, but better than an aircraft.) The lifting re-entry minimized requirements on the TPS, making it ideally suited to reusability.
In light of a major policy change, it would be expedient to delay OSP and re-scope it to support both ISS and lunar needs. My belief is that Boeing and LockMart should build two different OSPs and should retain ownership of both. The Boeing design, based on Boeing North American's Apollo, would be better suited for the moon. The LockMart design, based on Martin's old X-24, would be tailored to serving as a manned ISS ferry.
Going to the moon should not be viewed as a setback for us die-hard Mars junkies. Although the moon is different from Mars, it is still an arena for maturing the technologies that will take us to Mars, including the booster rockets, life support, and nuclear power that are essential for Mars exploration to succeed.
dgagauzov: Thanks for posting the pic, except that I can't see it. Can you put in the link to it, or post it again?
As far as the 5-seg SRB, the Air Force probably didn't have anything to do with it. It looks like it was mostly a Thiokol effort, with NASA supervising. With the shuttle grounded until Sept. 2004 at the earliest, it is premature to talk about integrating it with the shuttle. With the larger SRBs, the shuttle is a very different animal that follows a different trajectory and experiences different loads. All this must be carefully studied before the launch decision is given. The new SRB is still a wise investment, especially if this gathering sentiment for building a shuttle-derived vehicle materializes.
Mars is one of the options being considered by Congress and the administration. A Russian-American moon base is also being investigated. The future of the space program will probably be an international effort, and it will hopefully have some greater goal in mind. Several prominent congressmen have expressed their desire for NASA to move on to exciting goals beyond earth orbit, and the administration is hearing them out.
NASA officials said that the 5-segment SRB will add 23,000 lbs to the shuttle's payload capacity. Although shuttle payload is limited by the weight of the orbiter on re-entry, it would increase payload to ISS. More importantly, it makes the shuttle-derived cargo rocket more capable by a similar amount of payload.
Russia has had "Mars on the brain" for a long time. Nuclear power and electric propulsion have also been prominent features of their assorted Mars plans. Every year or so, Energia corp. dusts off their solar-electric Mars plan and tries to generate interest, to no avail. In terms of life support, the Russians have unparallelled experience, but the life-support loop has not been closed to support a voyage to Mars.
It is hoped that Russia's nuclear-electric Mars plans will mesh with the Bush administration's own agenda that promotes nuclear-electric propulsion. However, Russia also wants to create a moon base, and the idea has some support from the administration. The next six months will be a critical time for determining the course of manned spaceflight, but the Russians will no doubt have a large say in the final decision.
Orbital Sciences estimated that the HL-20 could get back to KSC after about within the first two minutes of launch. If it aborts between 120 sec and 420 sec into launch, an ocean splashdown is necessary. Still, these options are better than he shuttle emergency option in the same scenario (put your head between your legs, kiss your butt goodbye.)
As far as OSP engines, they will probably be similar to the Shuttle RCS and OMS. Not a lot of thrust is needed, and off-the-shelf is good. The RS-84 kerosene engine is a positive technological feat, but it has no bearing on the currently-envisoned OSP system. Although the Saturn's F1 will be marginally more powerful than RS-84, the new engine is smaller, reusable, and dispenses with the asbestos insulation of the F1. Perhaps the new engine will be used in a flyback first stage or in an all-new heavy lifter.
OSP's four seats should not be a problem. The plan is to carry three on the Soyuz and four on OSP, so there should be seats for everybody. Still, I'd like to see OSP have the ability to carry six to eight in an emergency (i.e., the Shuttle is fatally damaged and its crew has taken refuge at ISS.)
In the recent issue of Popular Science (the centennial of flight issue,) Peter Diamandis of X-Prize fame predicts that gravity shielding (think of Podkletnov's anti-gravity experiment) will enable routine space access and that future spacecraft will use means other than rockets for propulsion.
Am I the only one who thinks that Mr. Diamandis is a little "out there" on this prediction? Dr. Podkletnov's work has yet to be duplicated by other scientists, so I still harbor some doubt (mixed with some healthy optimism) about the usefulness of his gravity-shielding experiments.
A lifting body need not glide back to base if the launch is aborted. It could simply ditch in the sea, suspended by its landing parafoil. You'd probably lose the vehicle, but such is the price of rescuing the crew and saving weight on heavy wings and turbines.
Five-segment SRB ready for test firing
Apparently the development has been going on for some time. Perhaps NASA is finally serious about shuttle upgrades. Having a tested 5-segment SRB means that the SDV, if built, will be a more capable rocket. NASA should commit itself to a new round of SDV studies to see how the 5-segment SRB and lighter payload shrouds will increase the payload.
In the Borowski et al plan for exploring Mars, the tether is replaced with a truss that also supports the ship's hydrogen tank. The reasoning is that because the shuttle tethered experiment broke, the Mars Direct tether would break. It's not a totally coherent argument, but I wouldn't like to be sitting in the hab if another tether break does occur. Also, the Mars Society's Translife project rejected a tethered design in favor of a different design that spun along its axis, partly becase the tether was seen as unreliable. Plans such as Benton Clark's "Concept 6 / Straight Arrow" had artificial gravity, but provided it by placing the crew in two modules that were connected by a rigid tunnel and spun in a circle.
As for ISS, a recent interview of an official at the Russian Space Agency (in the Oct. 13 edition of Aviation Week) stated that ISS would be used until at least 2016. When its time is up, the station should be burned up. The Russians have proposed using Salyut & Mir derivatives for Mars flybys (most recently, the Marpost station,) but a new spacecraft would have to be fabricated in place of using old ISS modules.
Building the Mars spacecraft would be easier if we could eliminate the artificial gravity. Most serious engineers have rejected Zubrin's idea for spinning the hab and booster joined by tethers, and have focused on heavier solutions. Besides, even Mars Direct calls for zero-g on the return leg of the trip.
To date, we haven't surpassed Polyakov's record of 438 days in space. And even when Polyakov got back, they didn't make him do any productive work like Mars astronauts will have to do upon landing.
I feel that there should be a program where a crew of three or so spends 250 days on ISS, returns to earth, and re-acclimates to 1g. After they've recovered and contributed blood samples and bone density tests, they go back up to ISS for another 250 days. A separate series of tests would isolate a crew of six inside a functional Mars spacecraft mockup (docked to ISS) for 500 days or so to look at how well the crew would function as scientists and technicians and see how the group behaves.
In a recent article on the IEEE Spectrum website, James Oberg and others advocate re-scoping the ISS to support Mars exploration. A splendid idea, IMHO.
There is much to be learned about how the human body would react to 2.5 years of weightlessness and Mars gravity. Can people work effectively after so much time in zero-G? Can a group of six people work together in a confined space for a year and not go nuts or kill each other? ISS also lets us test the life support systems that will be needed for Mars.
If we have an asset, let use it. Use ISS to do a dry run for Mars. ISS is not good for assembling the Mars spacecraft, but it will take much of the uncertainty out of the first Mars landing.
ISS only has a finite life span. As the equipment ages in the radiation environment of space, the life of ISS decreases. I thought I heard somewhere that ISS was supposed to last 20 years; I don't know if that includes the time for assembly. My concern is that the station will already be slated for retirement by the time a six-person capacity can be added.
And ISS will be retired when its design life dictates; as we learned with Mir, operating the station for too long beyond its design life is an invitation for disaster. Sure, the lifetime estimates for Mir were excessively conservative; but by 1997 it was clear that the station needed to be retired.
The first humans-to-Mars mission will probably be an international venture (using the same ISS partners) that will launch sometime just prior to the de-orbit of ISS. I'm saying that it will happen sometime between 2025 and 2035. The impetus will not be some bold geopolitical competition, and scientific exploration will probably not be the primary reason. The purpose of the mission will be to sustain a human presence in space and keep the ISS colition together after the station reaches its end.
What's the status on the flyback core for Angara? A flyback booster would be a major technology coup for Russia. It would also make space launch more routine. I personally like their scissor-wing solution to flying the booster back.
From what I've read in recent issues of Aviation Week, the baseline OSP design will be either a capsule or lifting body. Wings have been all but rejected. The baseline booster is going to be a Delta or Atlas Heavy, but a single-core Atlas 552 is also under consideration.
Right now, I have lifting-body leanings. If the OSP will be used for emergency evacuations as planned, it will be beneficial to re-enter at a benign 1.5 g's instead of between 2 and 4 g's for the capsule. Reusability is also a big factor. Reusable capsule designs (like the Russian Zarya) have been quite heavy, making the weight of a reusable lifting body seem justified. I believe that the projected flight rate will be the deciding factor of whether an expendable capsule or reusable lifting body is more economical.
A lifting body should be safer than the shuttle and more resistant to the type of failure that doomed Columbia. Should something go wrong, though, the crew could ride out the fall
in a heat-resistant crew compartment and then use jet fighter-type seats to punch out before impact.
I expected the X-37 to be a contender at first, but the X-37 will not fly in space until 2006. OSP is supposed to fly unmanned by 2008. Clearly there is not enough time to make the transition. The accelerated time schedule means that OSP will be built with current, well-understood aerodynamics and materials. I believe that both HL-20 and an enhanced X-38 should be studied, as well as Apollo and Big Gemini capsules. The only area where a big technological breakthrough should be incorporated is the thermal protection system. Clearly we can do better than the current shuttle TPS.
Question: Back in 1993, when a one-module "Option C" space station was on the table and Russia was being wooed into the space station project, why didn't anyone propose using an Energia to launch the "Option C" ISS?
I can't begin to say how stupid it was to pass this opportunity up. It would have been far easier to restart Energia production in 1993 (vs. doing it in 2003,) and cheaper than doing the development on the SDV from the original Option C plan. It would also be an easy way of combining American and Russian abilities, by launching a mostly American-built station on a Russian rocket. Not to mention the cost and schedule benefits of putting the entire thing up at once.
Space is a place for everybody. If we restrict space access to only governments, that ideal will never be fulfilled. This goal will be met when buying a ride into space is as simple as buying an airline ticket, and a trip to the moon is about as exciting as a trip to New York City.
Having four separate thrust chambers in the RD-170 is a good start on dedundancy, but all four chambers are doomed if the common turbo machinery fails. Using two RD-180s gives you twice the redundancy in this area; four RD-191s gives you four times the redundancy. I can't help but remember back to Apollo 13 when they lost a second-stage engine but were able to continue the mission because they still had our good ones.
As for the RD-0120, I think it would not be worth using if the tooling was destroyed. The RS-68 is already in production and it offers more thrust anyway. I don't know how much redesign would be needed to mount four RS-68's to the Energia. It might be better in the end to scale up the Delta IV core by a factor of four and use that instead.
My feelings on the idea of a heavy lifter all boil down to economics. The total cost of vehicle development, construction, and operations must be weighed against the effectiveness of the booster. With an SDV, the development cost would be minimal, construction cost fairly low, but the operations would be somewhat pricey. With Energia, it is unknown whether development and construction would be low or moderate, depending on how much tooling was destroyed prior and during the hangar collapse (and I'm loathe to believe optimistic assessments by Energia officials--back in 2001, they boasted that they'd be resuming development of the booster only to back away from that announcement.) Cost of rebuilding the infrastructure would be moderate to high depending on the damage, and operational cost would probably be similar to the SDV.
With a new design, the development costs and the cost of building a new infrastructure will both be high, but the production cost could be made cheaper than either SDV or Energia. And advances in engines and materials would make this new booster more capable.
Clearly, there is a tradeoff here between using the old heavy lifters and a new one. My belief is that the added abilities and safety margins that can be built into a new booster justify the investment.
One Energia problem that I never noticed until now was the lack of redundancy in the booster engines. Although the RD-170 series engines did go through a long test period to work out all of the problems inherent in a high thrust engine, the potential exists for an engine failure. In the event of engine failure on an Energia booster, control would probably be lost and the mission aborted.
The problem isn't extremely difficult to remedy. Replace the RD-170 with four of its single-chamber derivative, the RD-191. Again, this would mean more re-design. We would want to avoid re-designing the rocket until it no longer looks like an Energia.
NASA's requirment for crew escape looks to be a difficult hurdle. I recently asked a NASA engineer who works in cockpit design and instrumentation what he thought about putting encapsulated ejection seats in the shuttle. Essentially, he sid that there's just no room to put four seats on the flight deck. The crew actually has to fold down the rear two seats just to access the aft crew station. And any ejection system would have limited utility (below 100,000 feet or Mach 6.) Essentially, the seats would be dead weight that prevents any actual work from being done inside the cabin (including docking the orbiter.) I suspect that ejection seats for OSP will be rejected by the contractors for the same reasons.