Apollo mistake on steroids
In the fall of 2004, NASA sponsored studies by eight different industry teams into their designs for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which was to be used by NASA for both earth-to-LEO crew transportation and for deep space exploration. CEV is basically what later became Orion. The teams included Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and Orbital Sciences that had designed, built and launched orbital rockets relatively recently while NASA had not developed any new launch system since the Shuttle in the late 70s. Most of the other teams also had extensive hardware development experience.
They carried out extensive trade studies in a six month time and then were cut to four teams that carried out further studies.(t/Space, which made the cut, differed from the other teams in actually building and demonstrating several hardware components with its study money.) Links to the report files for these studies can be found here. That link comes via a post at Transterrestrial, which also has a link in the comments to the CEV page at Astronautix.
Astronautix author Mark Wade notes that although there were big differences in the various CEV designs, they shared a number of features including :
/-- Four seats or less and weight in the 9 ton range
/-- Could be launched on existing rockets (e.g. Atlas V, Delta 4) or derivations of them.
/-- Deep space missions to Moon/Mars would use the Earth-Moon L1 point for mission assembly operations.
When Mike Griffin became NASA chief in 2005, he threw all these studies out and initiated the 60-day Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS). Out of ESAS emerged an exploration architecture that was very similar to that which Griffin had promoted prior to coming to NASA, as in this Planetary Society sponsored study (pdf).
The resulting architecture differs in most all of the features that were determined to be key by eight different, highly experienced industry teams. The Orion vehicle now had to carry six people and it had to act as both the space habitation module and reentry vehicle (as opposed to the Soyuz type of approach which separates these functions). This meant a big and heavy vehicle that needed a new launcher. Lunar missions would use lunar orbit rendezvous rather than the L1, reducing the amount of mass that could be taken to the surface.
Mark notes that in the rush to get to the Moon, the Apollo designers threw out mission architectures that in retrospect could have been done faster and resulted in more capable systems for the long term.
Incredibly, NASA made the same mistake again, fifty years later. The same approach was used. First, proposals from industry were solicited. In both the Apollo and CEV cases these were imaginative, innovative, and incorporated all of the lessons of hundreds of millions of dollars of advanced research funded not just by NASA, but also by industry and the US Air Force. Superior contractor designs using the Soyuz-type separate orbital module or a winged spaceplane approach were made in both cases. In both cases the contractors were thanked, and NASA then proceeded with its own in-house government design. This was then suitably tweaked until it will passed the Congressional pork test.Some things never change.
After the Apollo decision, it was apparent that a two-man Apollo or Gemini direct lunar mission would have been much more logical, economical, and less risky. In the CEV decision, it was apparent that a design with a re-entry vehicle and service module under 8 tonnes that could be launched by an existing heavy-lift EELV rather than NASA's shuttle-derived hardware would be much more economical. But again the decision was made primarily on political grounds, and to keep NASA government jobs.
Posted 02/17/10 | 01:56:49 by TopSpacer | Filed under: Space policy
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