Space tourism smear

Why does the article suddenly reminded of Clarke's 1st Law?

Posted by Dave Salt at 11/18/09 16:52:28

I first was annoyed by this drek article. Then I decided that it is so ridiculous that the best thing to do is ignore it... henceforth ;-)

Posted by Charles Lurio at 11/18/09 17:04:23

I just wonder what the point of writing the op-ed was. Why write it at all? Have people been pestering the authors about space tourism a lot? Are the authors as dead set against space tourism as they sound, or are they trying to dampen pressure on ESA to aid the development of space tourism?

I was an annoying op-ed, but they are entitled to their opinions. I just don't agree with them :-).

Posted by Tom D at 11/18/09 17:50:28

Oops. I meant to write "It was an annoying op-ed".

Posted by Tom D at 11/18/09 17:51:39

Obviously, the authors felt their case was strong enough that they didn't have to point out the absolute dearth of private airplane and yacht manufacturers and operators. I've been in one of those private airplanes. It could even go cross-country on a tank of gas! We just took off, circled in the area of the airport, and landed. And apparently the damn things are more dangerous than airliners! No wonder nobody makes the damn things - I'm glad the free market put a stop to all that.

Posted by Roga at 11/18/09 19:02:50

Sorry, I meant "It couldn't even go cross country..."

Posted by Roga at 11/18/09 19:03:27

"anyone with that sort of money to spend should be capable of carrying out basic due diligence on the company they are dealing with"

You would be surprised. The Bernie Madoff scandal is one example: rich people are more gullible than you think.

I have heard misrepresentations of Virgin Intergalactic's business in news channels in the past. They often equated it to Dennis Tito's flight, brandishing it as a badge of supposed wealth, when it isn't in the same category even for that (Dennis Tito didn't pay 200K, he paid nearly 100x as much). Now, this isn't any fault of Virgin Intergalactic which seems like a serious business to me, with solid engineering people with proven credentials behind that effort, but other companies which claim to sell space access are less reliable and there are many cases of this being so in commercial space history. Some of it is not that recent either. There have been shysters in the business even before the first V2 was launched. But then again that is true for any business.

Posted by Godzilla at 11/18/09 19:10:47

I think that far too often the pundits who deride space tourism think of companies like Galactic Suite, who not only promised cheap access to orbital spaceflight but also promised "orbiting hotels" along the line of what Bigelow Aerospace is making.

If this is what they are thinking about (and several European companies have come forward with similar huge promises but vaporware for what they can deliver), I'd have to agree with their attitude. In a great many ways, things like the X-Prize and the Lunar Landing Challenge have pushed potential start-ups to actually bend metal to show they are something more than just a way to scalp investors in a scam.

It is also unfortunate that some folks hear about huge money to be made in spaceflight, and that scam artists are using the reputation of legitimate companies to make themselves look impressive. I'll also agree with the above posts: scams are hardly anything new and happen in any industry. I do see "new space" having the potential to be the next hot investment for Wall Street, where this could be fertile ground for scams and crackpots.

At the moment, too many people are losing money making spacecraft that it is hard for a scammer to say "look, I lost less money than the competition!" It is hard to be showy and a spacecraft manufacturer at the moment.

Posted by Robert Horning at 11/18/09 20:00:06

/"Fredrick Engstrom was the director of launchers at the European Space Agency (ESA) from 1994 to 2001; Heinz Pfeffer was the head of future launchers at ESA. "/

They say they're not talking about suborbital but orbital yet they don't give a single example of any company or individual who's trying to sell orbital manned spaceflight for 200.000 USD never mind 20.000 USD and instead muddle the water with broad statements ripe for misunderstandings. Even #self-censored# IOS which many view --to put it politely-- as both extremely risky and extremely unlikely to fly suggest a price of about 800.000 USD per person so it seems Mr. Fieldbrook & Mr. Pepper must be writing about someone else.

Who? Do they simply need a better spam filter on their e-mail? If that's it then could they please post any such spam for everyone's general amusement? It would be amazing if that kind of space spam already exists.

Be it through misinformed idiocy or pure malice it looks like Mr. Engstrom & Mr. Pfeffer have managed to libel themselves. I'm a bit surprised Space News were cruel enough to publish it.

At least ESA is giving NASA a run for their money when it comes to employing the most thickheaded imbeciles (truly their own description hidden between the lines of the article) in upper positions... yay, go ESA go... -_-;

Posted by Habitat Hermit at 11/18/09 20:15:42

I (not surprisingly) totally agree with Clark here.
Sorry ESA- folks, but that was just lame!

Posted by Elmar_M at 11/18/09 21:30:32

Hi Dave,
This certainly gives some clue as to why the ESA Future Launchers program has been such a failure. It might help if they hired managers who actually thought that something better than Ariane 6 ELV is feasible.

Hi Godzilla
"You would be surprised. The Bernie Madoff scandal ...."\

If the authors were saying, "Watch out for shady operators in the space tourism business", that would be perfectly reasonable. It would be like saying that one should look out for shady operators running investment funds, which, as you indicate is what investors are well advised to do. But the authors are instead asserting that all space tourism operations are a hoax which is equivalent to asserting that all investment funds are Ponzi schemes. Neither of those assertions are correct.

The central message of the article is that space tourism is inherently impossible. That is patently false. Their scurrilously broad insults to all those who are working hard to make space tourism a reality is contemptible.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/18/09 21:57:57

I am curious about how much of this is ARCA showing up the ESA in terms of getting a launch vehicle for a fraction of the price that the ESA would be willing to build a similar vehicle.

Just as SpaceX is shaking things up in the USA, I'm sure that ARCA is raising questions about how much the major European nations (the "partners" in the ESA) are spending on the ESA budget for similar launch services. Could this simply be a pre-emptive strike at trying to dismiss the Romanian effort here as vaporware?

Posted by Robert Horning at 11/18/09 22:54:02

Chemical powered rockets have been around for over half a century, and yet not much progress has been made on making launches cheaper. I agree with the authors in the sense that chemical propulsion isn't very feasible for mass access to space and that some other technology is needed to truly open up the heavens.

Posted by VWN875 at 11/19/09 00:12:50

"Chemical powered rockets ..."

There is no weaker argument than "if it could have happened it would have happened by now". There is no grand force that insures that correct decisions will be made, especially when large amounts of funding are required. You have to look at the actual details of what did and did not happen to understand why launch costs have not dropped.

Sure, if some technology was discovered that was inherently cheap, i.e. an anti-gravity device built with wood and paper glue, then it would be easy to obtain the little bit of investment needed to build test systems and do all the multiple trial and error iterations needed to perfect it. But most new technologies are not inherently cheap. A 42 inch flat panel plasma TV, for example, is not inherently cheap. The reason such TVs now cost in the $1000 range instead of $15000 as they did initially, is because enough investment money was found to fund the iterative cycle of developing improved models and implementing mass production.

This iterative development process for RLVs never got going in that 50 year period. While a big market for TVs exists, space development has the chicken and egg problem that potentially big markets such as space tourism won't grow till there is low cost access to space but you can't get funding for vehicles that can lower the cost of access until you prove there is a market. The Kistler K-1 had exactly this problem despite the fact that it was designed by top engineers of the Apollo program.

Funding for the Shuttle was found but only after its design was so compromised by requirements from both NASA and the military that it was left fatally flawed. NASA should have started with a small, much less ambitious system and then proceeded through several prototype testing and design iterations to eventually get a vehicle that was robust and reliable with fast turnaround.

For most all of that 50 year period, it was always easier to get money from managers like the authors of this article for a marginally improved ELV. If left up to such managers, and there are plenty of them not only in ESA but in NASA as well, there would never be the necessary investment found to prove them wrong.

Fortunately, private developers of space vehicles, both suborbital and orbital, have a real chance to generate enough money to fund their own iterative development cycle and finally obtain fully reusable and robust vehicles that can fly often and produce low cost spaceflight through the economies of scale that other successful technologies achieve.

- C.

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/19/09 03:57:02

The argument you wrote should be printed along side the anti-tourism article. It opened my mind more toward the possibility of spaceflight expenses coming down, but unfortunately it seems most of the articles regarding spaceflight in the press perpetuate the idea that only government employees can foot the bill for inhabiting the stations above. In any case, I always find it odd when people try to actively stand in the way of those who are trying to develop better and cheaper launch technology. Being skeptical is one thing, but calling the people doing it criminals is another.

Posted by VWN875 at 11/19/09 07:13:03

Clark, an excellent and calm response - have you submitted it to space news? Or do they not publish comments that have already been published elsewhere?

With people thinking like this heading NASA and ESA, no wonder there's so little progress - it's impossible to get funding for any reasonable technology program. (just derivatives or superexpensive stuff)

Posted by gravityloss at 11/19/09 10:37:15

"...have you submitted it to space news?"

Thanks for the compliment on my piece but I really think top reps of the companies working on space tourism projects should respond in Space News since they are the ones being slandered. Names like Rutan, Whitehorn, Greason, Eric Anderson, etc. come to mind.

They may instead just blow off the op-ed as an insignificant rant but I think there are still many in the mainstream aerospace industry, i.e. the ones that dominate the Space News readership, who will have their biases confirmed by it. So it really should be strongly refuted.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/19/09 12:14:20

". A 42 inch flat panel plasma TV, for example, is not inherently cheap. The reason such TVs now cost in the $1000 range instead of $15000 as they did initially,"

Try $50K, during the dot-com boom, it was part of the ostentatious spending that defined bad companies.

Posted by anon at 11/19/09 13:38:59

I rarely chime in here but I like to read this site. I have been a pretty enthusiastic alt.spacer for 10+ years but I don't think comparing the semiconductor industry to rockets is too germane. I have a lot of aerospace/rocket experience and now getting into nanotech and there are completely different principles and methods that drive things.

One day we may have cheap rockets relative to our wealth but we still need a collection of mini breakthroughs to see any kind of completely reusable launch vehicle come about. What Paul Breed wrote about on his blog concerning air drag and what kind of vehicle you need to make orbit was a good piece. The folks slandering alt.space were a bit harsh, but by no means do things look optimistic for 100 dollar a pound orbital costs. Yes there are a few technologies and experiences that will carry from sub orbital to orbital. For example, ground handling since that problem in the abstract really doesn't care if its 30 km or orbit. But reentry of stages that have high velocities is a major issue. And a reentry system has to be darn good if rockets are to fly like airplanes. Much better than anything known......

Now certainly companies/academics/government should try to work through these issue. Just as of now, there are still barriers imposed by yes...the rocket equation coupled to material limitations that make a true RLV out of reach.

Cheers, Alex

Posted by Alex at 11/19/09 17:22:49

Hi Alex,
There's nothing I said that's specific to the semiconductor industry. Any technology that requires substantial investment initially has the challenge of overcoming skepticism and raising the funding to get the iterative improvement cycle going.

The bigger the investment needed, the harder it is to raise that investment. This difficulty is only multiplied when the potential market won't exist until you have that technology working.

Supersonic airliners and business jets, for example, face a very similar problem as RLVs. One can site all sorts of flaws in the Concorde, e.g. range too short and passenger capacity too small, and produce new designs that overcome these and have a chance at success. Yet because of the large investment needed to give them a try, coupled with the higher skepticism generated by the Concorde, it has been extremely difficult to get another SS project off the ground.

This contrasts with airliner development where there were several early attempts, at passenger airliners that fell way short of practicality and cost effectiveness. Eventually the DC-3 came along that put all of the right features and performance together to finally produce a winner. RLVs need to get into a similar "survival of the fittest" iterative process that works out the problems you mention.

Right now, a lot of these problems can be tackled with suborbitals. E.g. XCOR and Armadillo have developed engines that are being fired hundreds and eventually thousands of times without an overhaul. Rocket engines that are as robust and reliable as turbojets will contribute greatly to creating robust and reliable vehicles.

For the past 50 years, it has always been the easy call for those in the funding approval chain, to select a slightly better ELV than take the big risk on RLVs. The success of suborbital RLV will increase the confidence in orbital RLV and attract investment as well as allow the suborbital companies to self-fund their own orbital systems.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/19/09 17:56:22

Hi Clark, I don't think air planes are too good an analogy either. People knew in the early days that with known materials they could achieve a structurally sound vehicle if they simply "figured out the path to get there". They knew thermo and how much energy they had to work with too. With rockets, engineers really pushed to a lot of walls. There certainly is still room for clever engineering but the "room for improvement" is not as it was for a 1920's aerospace engineer building planes.

I think the need for breakthrough technology is higher than you suspect and that is where a lot of effort should be put.

Cheers, Alex

Posted by Alex at 11/19/09 18:42:09

One of the "breakthrough" technologies that might make a difference for interplanetary spaceflight (not so much for ground to LEO flight) might be the development of devices like the Polywell reactor. Even if you stick with a convention nuclear reactor design (you can make these safe enough to launch from the ground on the Earth so the fuel doesn't necessarily spread radioactivity like Chernobyl... and that doesn't preclude obtaining Uranium from the Moon or a metal-rich asteroid), vehicles can be built to cut the time significantly from a Hohman Transfer Orbit typical for most robotic probes that go to Mars and instead reduce one-way travel to Mars on the order of less than 60 days.

If you are looking for areas of rocketry that could have genuine break-through technologies, it is stuff that will go between planets rather than going from the ground to LEO. That is still a ripe field that can be plowed with new and creative ideas that still have yet to be proven... yet are still completely within the realm of current knowledge of physics.

As far as getting cheaper access to LEO from the surface of the Earth, I'd hardly call the Space Shuttle to be a glowing model of cost effective travel to orbit... or even the Russian Soyuz program to be oriented toward cheap access to space. Still, in spite of the success of SpaceX to somewhat drive down the costs, there still is the economic reality that the number of customers is not going to change even with a huge cost savings.

In the case of aviation, when the price for a cross-country ticket for commercial aviation was $1000 in the 1940's, as the price dropped there definitely was an increase in the number of customers. Ultimately with the South-west Airlines cost-cutter fares of $199 for travel across the country in 2009 dollars, people are certainly flying that wouldn't have with the equivalent of $20,000 price fare of yesteryear. Southwest Airlines can still make a profit due to the sheer volume of passengers that flies on their planes, and actually make more than United did with their $20k price fares of yesteryear.

So the question is out there: Can "new space" companies be able to see a similar kind of growth in overall revenue in spite of cutting fares? So far, all I see is SpaceX undercutting the competition and driving out profit simply by being the "new kid on the block". The "old space" companies hope SpaceX gets a case of smarts and that SpaceX will eventually raise launch fees to be more in line with the older space launching companies... as the market doesn't seem to be there for many more launches than has been happening. If there are only 5-20 launches per year for commercial space, this mostly explains the current costs for getting to LEO.

In a way, that is precisely what these guys from the ESA are trying to hint at, without really saying it. They are suggesting that companies that try to enter into the commercial space market simply won't make a reasonable profit unless they are charging the kind of prices that traditional launchers are currently charging. Perhaps that may be true... assuming that only governments and the big, major satellite launchers like comm sats and photo survey sats are going to be the only kinds of payloads in the future.

Posted by Robert Horning at 11/19/09 22:35:26

Hi Alex,
Well, I just don't see where any profound breakthroughs are needed, especially for two stage to orbit. Where was the profound flaw in the Kistler K-1, for example? No design review ever found any. It was designed by some of the best engineers of the Apollo program including George Mueller and Max Faget. There is nothing in the design in terms of materials, engines, etc. that is particularly leading edge (as compared to, say, the Skylon's heat exchanger) yet it meets all the performance requirements for orbital operations. It was only the lack of funding that kept it from flying.

The K-1 is not my ideal RLV, e.g. it doesn't allow for incremental testing, but it is exactly the sort of design I would expect to see in the early period of development of a new technology.

The normal development process for new technologies is to try multiple designs with multiple combinations of features and performance. This process needs to happen for RLVs but, as I continue to emphasize, there are the funding hurdles. The higher the funding hurdles, the slower the evolutionary survival of the fittest process.

For RLVs, the money must be found either from govt sources, angel investors, or intermediate markets. Fortunately, the NewSpace firms are getting contributions from all three. Thus, in the next few years we are going to see a variety of suborbital RLVs plus the orbital SpaceX Falcons (which they hope to make at least partially refurbishable). From all these a lot is going to be learned on how to build low cost, robust and reliable RLVs.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/19/09 22:59:36

With the exception of the manned "space tourists" that are going up with folks like Virgin Galactic and proposed for companies like Armadillo, what is the genuine market here for commercial space here?

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but rather try to prove the point about the markets available with this new realm of space travel.

The "workhorse" vehicle NASA used for a great many years for sounding rockets was the Scout vehicle, which cost on the order of what is today about $10 million per launch. Hard numbers are sometimes difficult to get for this program, as the Air Force used them sometimes to train their missile operators (by actually launching something rather than sitting in a missile silo waiting for the BIG DAY to arrive) and covering the cost with the training budget and flying NASA payloads. Interestingly enough, the Scout was an NACA program that was "inherited" by NASA and kept alive until the 1990's.

Other sounding rocket program also existed that were a bit cheaper than even the Scout program. Certainly the idea of spending on the order of $1m per flight to Virgin Galactic for a dedicated flight doesn't seem too terrible under such a viewpoint, nor do ideas such as using Spaceship two as a booster stage for yet another smaller vehicle to launch into LEO supporting payloads on the order of a few dozen kilos. That would be for payloads where a Falcon 1 launch would be overkill (which has a 500 kg payload).

Still, other than projects that would have used vehicles like the Scout and other sounding rockets, I'm curious about what other projects might come forward if the budget for going into the exosphere could be significantly reduced. I suppose a great many others are curious about that same question.

Posted by Robert Horning at 11/20/09 08:07:40

Hi Robert,
"...what is the genuine market here for commercial space here?"

Space tourism is certainly genuine. It's clear from the current sign up rate, despite the fact that no vehicle has even been rolled out yet much less started flying, will exist at some level. The big question is how many people will fly per year at a given ticket price.

The other promising market involves science and R&D (e.g. testing equipment intended for orbital spacecraft). Alan Stern is convinced that it will be quite large and even larger than space tourism. He doesn't get to this by simply taking the current number of sounding rocket flights and moving them to the new reusable vehicles. In fact, many sounding rocket flights, especially those going significantly above 100km, will continue. Rather he expects the new capabilities offered by these vehicles - low cost, frequent flight opportunities, human tending option, safe, quick and reliable return of payloads - will inspire lots of new ideas and attract many new participants to suborbital science. There are lots of potential users from the atmospheric science community, for example. Recent indications are that the new NASA administration is going to give vigorous support for using the suborbital RLVs.

As you say, using the suborbital systems for launching small payloads to orbit is another possible market but it will take a few more years to develop the boosters. This will also require that the micro/nano-sat market grow significantly beyond its current size.

The more markets the better. In the early years of personal computers, home use got most of the publicity but it was their use in business - word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - that really accelerated industry growth. The science market may do the same for getting commercial RLVs off the ground.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/20/09 09:07:55

Hi Clark, I am not tremendously familiar with the K-1 vehicle but I don't believe it had structural and thermal margins that would make it "gas and go" 10+ flights. That is really the crux of it. Margins are an interesting to analyze since you can't point to a specific point and say "that is where things will go wrong". But rather on average various things will break and the vehicles need constant scrutiny. (Sometimes its obvious where things will fail, but you get my point.) For example the pumps have fewer stages and are more prone to damage. The plumbing is weaker and less able to take vibrations and impacts of perhaps non ideal landings etc.
In a sense chemical rockets can be rebuildable with given technology but not truly reusable. Now this is not to say there are non rocket technologies that could change this, for example robotics for inspecting heat shields etc. But that level of automation does not exist yet but likely will one day.

But that is my point. There a bunch of little breakthroughs we need before we can see airline type flight rates for an orbital vehicle. I can't prove this to you in a deep way nor will I say publicly the places I have worked and or observed to make these conclusions. Obviously I don't really know the answer to this because nobody does. What often goes through the minds of the big aerospace is that many of this was tried before and people ran into walls. And many governments around the world where cost mattered hit walls with material limitations.

Of course the alt.space people should keep on trucking. Who knows maybe their internal R&D will make some of the breakthroughs I think are necessary, but at the least they will help build markets and excite people.

Cheers, Alex

Posted by Alex at 11/20/09 09:24:40

Hi Alex,
I think we are actually agreeing in many ways, I'm just not getting across the manner in which we are agreeing.

What you are calling "little breakthroughs" I'm calling the incremental improvements that come as a company and an industry gradually iterate through new designs and enhancements. Innumerable improvements throughout a complex system like a rocket is what eventually will make it robust and reliable. This will make the vehicle capable of the high flight rates that bring down costs.

It's only now that this cycle of incremental improvement is starting for RLVs. It will take several generations of vehicles to get to an orbital RLV that can fly-return-refuel-refly (or re-attach and refly for TSTO). You don't get to that sort of system in once step. The Kistler K-1 certainly was not such a vehicle but it was definitely a huge improvement over the Shuttle. It's the the sort of early generation system, in fact, that should have been NASA's initial RLV rather than the huge overreach that was the Shuttle. What would be learned from a vehicle like the K-1 would then be applied to an improved, more robust 2nd gen vehicle with faster turnaround, etc.

The K-1 won't fly but a lot will be learned from suborbital vehicles. In a Space Review article years ago, I examined this issue:
http://www.thespacereview.c...

In the intro I talk about all the phases of an orbital mission that a vehicle must endure, e.g. takeoff, subsonic flight, supersonic, hypersonic, vacuum, etc. I've only become more convinced since then that suborbital RLVs will contribute tremendously to the knowledge base needed to deal with many of those phases.

"In a sense chemical rockets can be rebuildable with given technology but not truly reusable."

I just don't see any physics basis for this assertion. There's no reason at all that engineering will not succeed in bringing robust reusability to all the sub-systems involved in an orbital RLV. We just need to get the iterative process going that will allow that engineering to proceed.

Tests of the engine intended for the XCOR Lynx, for example, indicate that it can be fired hundreds and perhaps thousands of times with no significant wear. Is that a "breakthrough" or just he consequence of incremental improvements as the company has built a dozen or so engines? I think it is the latter. Such incremental improvements in all the components of RLVs will make them similarly as robust. In turn the entire vehicle will become highly reliable and allow for airliner style operations.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/20/09 11:32:33

Hi Clark, I am not tremendously familiar with the K-1 vehicle but I don't believe it had structural and thermal margins that would make it "gas and go" 10+ flights.

I AM very familiar with these margins and in fact the whole system was designed to be "inspect - reload payload - gas & go" with a 10 day total turnaround time. The engines are good for 10 flights between overhauls too. The original design driver for this was the thousands of Teledesic satellites that were of course never launched. The entire vehicle cleared CDR and was in construction when the telcom bubble burst. The second go-around for NASA COTS got caught again in the global finance meltdown that started in 2007 just as we were going to market, even though the public face of this was not outed until later in 2008.

RLV's with 50 flights/year capability currently have no market to justify the investment in the capability. SSPS and larger scale orbital tourism (100's of people per year) are the only potential markets out there at the moment that could be potential game-changers. Either or both of these new markets getting some investment traction would justify restarting the K-1 program. Until then launch costs will keep going up instead of down. SpaceX's price for an ISS cargo delivery has doubled since 2006 and OSC's is even higher.

Posted by Chuck Lauer at 11/20/09 11:43:38

Hi Chuck, I really can't comment on your company, but I do contest that lack of funding etc is the driver behind not getting an RLV design into an actual RLV. My suspicion is an exponentially diminishing structural margin is the killer and history has not given good results. I do understand in some cases economics has given the "wrong" incentives. That is not the case though for all governments/companies around the world since 1960, but the physics has not changed since that time. Have the engines for example been tested for full durations 10+ times with getting beat up for harsh landings between each test? Or was the tps tested at in proper conditions, beat up and retested 10+ times? How much real testing was done?

Since I don't know the results of these questions, I can't comment strongly and maybe you have something here.

Cheers, Alex

Posted by Alex at 11/20/09 14:09:21

Hi Clark,

My assertion about chemical rockets not being truly reusable with current materials and robotic infrastructure is a suspicion. Not a fact and I should be clearer about that. I could be wrong and hope I am wrong....

I won't comment on your XCOR engine example in any detail but I will say building heavier robust rockets for suborbital flight is not the same as for orbit.

To address what I mean by breakthrough vs incremental improvement. For sure there is a smooth continuum between the two. I should be more specific in my language and use examples, but that is certainly a muddy point. I consider a breakthrough to be something more fundamental and scientific that crosses disciplines. SO for example a breakthrough would be a new material that say uses carbon nanotubes to reinforce a known composite and doubles the strength in certain applications. An incremental improvement might be finding a refrigerator valve that moves peroxide very well and is cheap. Or a new geometry for a cooling passage that reduces stress.

I guess instead of stating how one may or may not fail. Perhaps I should state how I would direct funds if given the opportunity. In general I would fund research that is of a more pure nature with the deliverable being "understanding" without too much initial regard for an immediate application. One example is research in pure material science. Perhaps the results would be more useful for somebody in biotech doing proteomics or who knows what. I would also fund problems in robotic automation for anything from fabrication to metrology of small and large scale systems. And as I said before, heat shields are a big problem so research in heat exchangers/high temperature ceramics is also on that list. Of course there are many more. In my opinion and purely my opinion, this kind of research will more easily lead to RLV's than simply trying to build and test rockets with what we have now. Of course even with some new tanks, materials, pumps testing a vehicle and improving it are important, but the room for improvement will be farther out and I believe we need it to be.

This isn't to suggest that suborbital companies are wasting their time. The economics still isn't there. I am sure you know about elasticity of demand and it may be possible to bring costs low enough to the elastic point with current limitations. But even with all the incentives and markets in place, we still need some improvements on the fundamentals of technology before we will see payload costs on the order of fuel costs.

Cheers, Alex

ps-I don't know the hard numbers off hand for the margins of a modern jet liner. If somebody could link that, I would find it interesting. I have been of the belief that it is over twice any orbital rocket and these sorts of things tend to have an exponential effect on robustness. Jet liners do lose rudders and fall apart in flight. It happens rarely but my guess is that with the same level of engineering care, and the vastly reduced margins, the failure rate will be much too high.

Posted by Alex at 11/20/09 14:50:12

Hi Alex,
Well, let's call a truce for now. I can only argue so long in trying to overcome your suspicions. We'll just see how things go. The wonderful aspect of the private suborbital companies is they are pretty much self-funded so they can proceed along their development paths without having to talk money out of upper govt management filled not only with people having suspicions but with those who want money to go to other projects.

The suborbital projects will be the first time such development paths have been followed. The space age started with converted missiles and subsequently it has been extremely difficult to get money to fund alternatives. Never in the US, Russia or any other country was there a program that started with a basic low performance reusable or partially reusable system and then proceeded along an iterative cycle of improvements and enhancements. The DC-X project should have initiated such a program but internal DoD politics prevented it from continuing there and at NASA it got totally sidetracked by the wildly overreaching X-33.

Regarding engines, yes bigger engines offer bigger challenges but there are no fundamental reasons they cannot also be highly reusable. The RL-10s on the DC-X/DC-XA proved to be very reusable and robust and they were not specifically built for that. As Henry Spencer recently talked about on another forum, many of the big engines in operation are quite capable of reuse. Big engines simply need to have high reusability included their design requirements.

I should note here that an unstated assumption in all I've been writing is that some degree of performance can be sacrificed for enhanced reusability and simpler operations. If adding margins to an engine reduces its ISP by a percent or two, so be it. It's OK to put a lower amount of payload into orbit if this is more than made up for by multiple flights at an overall lower cost.

Regarding breakthroughs, large or small, I certainly agree they can help. A big difference between the Lynx I and Lynx II, for example, is their use of a proprietary composite material for the LOX tanks. However, in general, necessity is the mother of invention and via the iterative development process, needs will spawn better ways and methods. Simply waiting around for great new breakthroughs to happen is no way to run a rocket program. A lot can be accomplished with whats on hand.

Regarding ultimate costs, I don't know how low they could go with rockets. Other transportation systems seem to plateau at 4 or 5 times the cost of their fuel. Elon Musk believes the Falcons can get well below $1000/lb if they achieve reusability. Since the stages fall into the ocean, their reusability involves a lot of refurbishment. A fly-return-refly system could clearly do better than that. Seems like low hundreds of dollars per lb is reachable on the decade timescale without really big breakthroughs.

Ultimately, of course, costs will depend on flight rates. As you indicate, elasticity of demand is key. For spaceflight there has to be a bootstrapping process in which the ability to offer lower cost attracts new customers, inspires new applications, etc.

Since there are many who "suspect" that there is no such elasticity, that has been another big hurdle to getting the money to build RLVs. Chuck's RpK effort, for example, failed to get funding not because the bankers thought the K-1 would not work, they more or less assumed that it would. It was the lack of a guarantee that NASA would give them an ISS services contract that ultimately blocked their investment. They certainly had no faith that other markets would pop up to take NASA's place.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching the suborbital guys over the next few years. I expect they will get a lot closer to orbit that you suspect.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/20/09 17:13:10

Hi Clark, I recommend:

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonl...

This is some very nice analysis on liquid engine cooling that covers a lot of the issues in a very meticulous way.
I will agree to disagree with this. All we both have on orbital RLV's are
suspicions. (I also have a lot of theoretical understanding of rocket
propulsion that guides my suspicions, but that unfortunately is not all that germane here.)

I don't agree with what you said about breakthroughs. The point is not to sit
around and idle, the point is to go and innovate elsewhere and make a breakthrough that will contribute to societies overall level of technology.

What you wrote about SpaceX is not consistent. Elon belief hinges on re
usability and he will likely get sub $1,000 per pound which is around my guess of what can be done with current technology. Changing to a different recovery architecture changes the payload fractions, the amount of structure and hence more margin and smaller upper stages. The two really can't be compared unless you are saying you duplicated his first stage but made it stronger.

But more importantly don't let that article implicate everyone in government or old school aerospace is not for supporting funding for RLV suborbital rockets. In the worst
case scenario they will develop robust suborbital vehicles that may not lead to orbit. That is still something of value and government has put out both prizes and innovation grants for such companies. And as you point out, XCOR developed a new material for LOx tanks. That is an excellent example of a focused group making breakthrough via internal research.

As with any competitive industry there may be some working against alt.space but for the most part things are pretty good and reasonable.

I also have no intention of sitting back and watching space become more accessible. I intend to develop technology to better mankind in a general way that will indirectly lead to more robust rockets.

Cheers, Alex

Posted by Alex at 11/20/09 22:17:08

Hi Alex,
Thanks for the link. I'm certainly not going to get into an argument over the detailed challenges of liquid fueled engine design. You no doubt know far more about that than I do. I'll only note that both technology and perceptions change over time. Not so long ago, any bi-propellant liquid fueled engine was considered dangerous and far from achieving turbojet like robustness and reliability. Burt Rutan, for example, was scared away from liquid fueled rockets for the SS1 by some videos he saw of them exploding. Now I think he most likely would select an XCOR/Armadillo/etc type of engine.

Today the goalpost has been moved past medium thrust engines, which now have been proven to be capable of high reusability and reliability, and it is big ones that supposedly can't achieve that. I think it is just a matter of time till that perception changes as well.

This sort of thing happened with the DC-X. Before it was built, the goals of VTVL operation with a large LH2/LOX powered vehicle, re-flying the vehicle with no overhauls of the engines and other components, demonstrating 24 hour turnaround, and doing all this with a small team on a very small budget were all considered far-fetched. After the project succeeded at achieving all of that, then its achievements were held by many as obvious and no big deal. It was Clarke's Law in action.

It's important to keep some perspective and see that real progress has been made on RLV technologies and a lot more is coming in the next few years.

"...the point is to go and innovate elsewhere and make a breakthrough that will contribute to societies overall level of technology."

That's great and more power to you in your efforts to contribute to that. I'm just saying that the most effective way to improve reusable rocket vehicles is to build and fly them. A rocket vehicle is a systems engineering challenge and the important lessons to be learned come when a whole system is operating. Real world stresses and demands will show the strengths and weaknesses of its design.

At the low level subsystem and component level, for example, there is a lot of overlap between suborbital and orbital. Fast turnaround reusable suborbitals will push those subsystems and components to the max and show where they need to be improved, where margins must be bolstered and conversely show where good enough is good enough.

"What you wrote about SpaceX is not consistent."

Sure it is. The Falcon sort of recovery/refurbishment will not achieve the cost reduction ultimately achievable by a fly back, or even a parachute back to land, first stage. Elon chose the ocean return route because on the budget he had, it was a sensible approach to take. (He looked at the K-1 but couldn't afford the several hundred million dollars needed to get the project going again.) The K-1 is just one of many viable designs that do not require ocean return.

Sure, maybe when all else is held equal, a fly-return-refuel-refly system will result in smaller payloads but, as I said earlier, faster and lower cost turnaround can make up for that. (It would also help if someone develops a space tug that could act as an effective upper stage for RLVs.)

I definitely agree that the Space News op-ed doesn't represent the whole industry or all of govt space programs. Many good things are happening now, e.g. NASA's growing support for science/R&D with the suborbital RLVs. I'm quite optimistic and looking forward to seeing lots of progress ahead.

Sounds like you will contribute to this progress. I hope at some point you decide to go work for one of the RLV companies and help them build the vehicle that becomes the first real DC-3 of orbital access! :-)

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 11/21/09 02:37:06

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