Pork in Space!!!

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I dont often get the opportunity to write a post about rockets in a political forum but it seems that NASA has decided hook me up...

3 days ago NASA unveilded their proposal for the "Space Launch System (SLS)" the theoretical successor to the shuttle and launch booster for the Orion MPCV. While my inner geek is suitably excited by the thought accelerating 65 tonnes of American and Canadian ingenuity to 7.8 km/s through the careful application of math and explosives my rational side is disappointed.

Having followed the various proposals I feel that the final choice betrays a systemic flaw in NASA's organization.

Once upon a time, the Ares rocket was going to carry American astronauts to the Moon and Mars. It had two five-segment boosters based on Space Shuttle's SRBs and a liquid (LH2/LOx) core stage using engines taken directly from the Shuttle program. The program never got past the design phase because the cost of re-engineering and manufacturing new Shuttle components for a single-use "throw away" booster would have required NASA to stop funding other projects like the ISS and Mars rovers.

Skip forward a decade...

A number of influential Senators have realized that with the end of the Shuttle program a boatload of jobs in their home states are going to disappear. As such they demand that NASA do something to keep these workers employed. NASA administrators, worried that the Senators will cut the purse strings, comply. The Space Launch System is Ares back from the dead.

As a Low Earth Orbit Support Vehicle the SLS is stupidly over-built and unlike the Space Shuttle it is not re-usable. Needless to say, this does not bode well for future launch costs. If the rocket were being touted as a Lunar/Mars mission booster it would make more sense but NASA's budget contains no funding for such missions.

The result is a Heavy-Lift Booster with nothing to lift.

In conclusion I suspect that this decision was driven more by politcal considerations than sound engineering. As a result it will funnel yet more public funding away from pure science and possibly undermine other projects that would otherwise have a greater chance of success.

Further Reading:

http://spaceflightnow.com/

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/nasas-space-launch-system-unveiled-analysis-6432937

http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=32029

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

NASA needs to diversify its supply and technical streams. DoD has no problem keeping funding because every single district of the US Congress has jobs related to it. NASA is largely limited to a few major areas, so all the other reps can can it without a problem.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Until the above announcement everyone had assumed that NASA would steal the DOD's Delta Booster (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB5_j1RYMYg) and modify it for manned use, thus solving this very problem. Instead ATK (http://www.atk.com/) succesfully lobbied for a requirement that NASA use thier engines.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Bastids.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

As I said, I was following the policy debates and it's been depressing.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

On an unrelated note, I learned in astronomy that there isn't enough mass in the Universe to propel a chemical engine vessel to the nearest star.

[the-s3ntinel.livejournal.com]

And yet Voyager 2 will go that far. (By stealing some of the gas giants' kinetic energy, rather than using its puny chemical engines.)

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

It will be retrofitted with an AI sometime in the future and sent back to Earth. The other one gets blown up by a Klingon ship for targetting practice on space junk.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Not in a human lifetime no.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Neil deGrasse Tyson said the 800 billion bail-out exceeded the entire combined budget for the 50 history of NASA. Go figure.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

It did.

Which just pisses me off even more.

On a personal note, Wihile I consider my self to be a "fiscal conservative" I'm not against government spending so much as simply I expect a lot of bang for my buck.

If a program isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, why the &^%* are we spending money on it?

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

For the same reason you're maintaining all those jobs in military industry. Every new war introduces some new fancy gadgets that go Kaboom, and there are thousands of guys who work to build that stuff, and for what? To facilitate the more efficient killing of people and destruction of "enemy" technology. And whenever someone comes up and says, "but how about we cut some of those expenses?", a horde of whining voices starts howling and reminding that "there are thousands of jobs out there, you wanna leave those people on the street, EH?"

All that money could've gone for far more useful things, but maybe in another parallel universe, not ours.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The original space program itself was to prevent the USSR from taking its initial technological advantages in space into weaponizing space, not knowledge for knowledge's sake.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

And how do you propose to resolve the systemic anomaly?

[the-s3ntinel.livejournal.com]

Assiduously? No, wait...

Concordantly. That's how.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

viz a vie, you.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

The "systemic flaw" as I see it is that political concerns are being allowed to decide questions of engineering. This does not bode well for the future of the project or NASA. (You can't legislate reality)

In this case I would say that the Senate is exercising way too much direct control over the project (requiring NASA to use specific engines from a specific company) thier constituents happy. When all they should be doing is setting the goals and the budget. I.E. "President wants to send people to Mars, here's some cash now make it happen"

As to how to fix it, that's the 64,000,000 dollar question isn't it?

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Your title reminded me of this...

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[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

That was intentional ;)

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

It's 2011.

Where's my fucking space elevator???? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator)

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Manufacturing technology for carbon nanofibers are three orders of magnitude too short for a space elevator cable at the present time.

If we really want to get to space in a big way today, we need to stop being chickenshits and start building nuclear thermal rockets.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

...I fail at unit conversion: nine orders of magnitude.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Project Orion, all the way.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more along the lines of Project Timberwind (use a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen propellant) than Project Orion (nuclear bombs as propulsion). Americans seem to have a bit of "A-Bomb Guilt" that would make Project Orion-style systems permanently unfeasible politically.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

From an engineering geek's perspective NERVA/Rover (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA) was the real tragedy. We actually built the thing and had flight ready hardware sitting in a warehouse all through the 70s.

Rocket engines are evaluated on "Impulse" which is the ratio of Thrust created for a given mass of proppelant every second.

We had functional 800 kg/s engines in the 60s

The current "state of the art" barely more than half that (400-450 kg/s).

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but 400—450 s I_sp is hitting the physical limit for chemical rockets: you can't do any better than reacting hydrogen with oxygen. We've hit a dead end.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

The theoretical limit is around 512. (using mono-atomic hydrogen and ignoring mechanical losses)

That said, there will always be mechanical inefficiencies, and we use LH2 because it is more stable. The end result is the current limit to the high 400s. There are ways you can cheat (high mass fuels that break down on combustion) but the fundimental limit remains because half your proppelant's energy (give or take) is going into maintaining the reaction instead of pushing you forward.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Ask Dr Kaku.

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[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

The space elevator will never been made. Once someone crunches the numbers for a catastrophic failure of one any project to build one will be canceled.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

"People cannot fly like birds. This is preposterous. There are so many things that could go wrong..."

Oh wait.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

If there was a plane whose crashing would strewn wreckage over thousands of miles with impact at upwards of several thousands of miles per hour then you'd have a comparison.

If a cable breaks and the elevator is below the break it could conceivably be smashed into the Earth at incredible speeds. If anyone is going up on it and were above the break they could conceivably be slung out into an impossible to recover orbit.

I think our best bet as far as space elevators go is to construct one on the moon first. Make it a stable point for lunar settlement. Anything we could chuck into orbit with the moon could easily be brought down while anything we mine from the moon can easily be brought back. It'll help us get our designs down pat and can be made from material like Kevlar (easily made and cheaper than carbon fiber) and if it breaks there's no environmental impact concerns.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

OK, that's not comparable. Is "We can never talk with other people at the other side of the world within seconds, that's impossible" also another incomparable case? Name your terms, Mister.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Of course, you keep going back to technical issues rather than disaster planning.

You're simply not understanding what is being said.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. It's either because you're not explaining well, or I'm just too dumb.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

What he's saying is that it's not the engineering issues that present a problem.

The problem is that if anything goes wrong it'll go wrong in a big way. Like asteroid-hitting-the-earth big.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

That was a lot clearer, and I feel a bit less dumb now.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

No worries.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Bah, let the Tea Party in Space save us from NASA socialism. In the distant future when the Chinese Star Empire rules space we'll be glad they did.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

And that's just the tip of the problem, as usual.

[zzerzonat.livejournal.com]

One of my friends visited Florida space museum (or spaceport) a while ago and while viewing the moon programm rocket he told what he thought (and he is a business guy):

"It's unbelivably uneconomical to biuld something like that"

So I guess it is a well known fact that such projects can only be politicaly motivated.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

So we need more political motivations?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

"It's unbelivably uneconomical to biuld something like that"

Ineffecient, certainly.

Uneconomical, that depends.

Going to space is incredibly expensive for that very reason but keep in mind that every single Communications and GPS satelite got boosted up by something similar.