MSS May and June 2005 Update

Hey guys, this is just a quick update on what we've been doing at my day job, since it's been way too long since we posted our last update. We'll be adding pictures as we have a chance to take them and upload them. I had been delaying things a bit until we had an assembled engine to show, but we got sucked into other work enough that I just kept putting it off until our Business Development guy, Michael Mealling, offered to write the blog post if I'd just send him a summary. Hopefully I'll do a better job of keeping the updates more frequent in the future.

For those who haven't been following the MSS blog, we are currently developing a 500lbf vernier engine for use in a Vertical Takeoff/Vertical Landing rocket vehicle. I've been the one in charge of most of the CAD work, the igniter development work and the engine design and fabrication work (though our intern, Ian, has done a lot of the actual shop work for the engine and igniter work), and my coworker Pierce has mostly been in charge of the trailer and remote test site work.

Quote Wall

Back when I was at the university, one of the fun traditions that several of my friends had was what they called "the quote wall". The quote wall usually consisted of a piece of white butcher paper was taped up to a conviently visable chunk of wall, and they would write on it any particularly pithy or funny quotes they heard. Also, if someone flubbed a sentance in an amusing way, they'd often get written up. Sometimes people would write up intentionally silly things just to get people to scratch their head and chuckle.

It's been a while since I've had a real quote wall, and I've had one too many total gems lost to humanity by not writing them down, so I'm going to start a "quote wall" on the blog. Basically if I see a particularly fun quote, I'll post it here, with a link to the source if it was something I heard online.

Starting off today's quote wall is a comment from Radley Balko's weblog, The Agitator:

Watching two stupid people debate is much like watching two ugly people kiss. You cringe, avert your eyes (briefly), and hope to God they'll stop, for the love of all that's decent. And yet you're compelled to keep watching.

Return to the Moon Conference?

I've been debating whether I want to fork out the cash to go to the Space Frontier Foundation's Return to the Moon Conference this year. This is one of the premier conferences for discussing various lunar projects, markets, and technologies. In a way, it's kind of a lunar equivalence of SFF's yearly Space Frontier Conference. I've been involved with the Moon Society for two years now, and was a speaker at the RTTM conference last year, where I gave a short presentation about the importance of incremental markets to the commercial development of the moon. However, like my boss Dave, I'm wondering if I really want to go this year.

After quoting from the email that I also received, Dave went on to bring up a very important point regarding NASA:

NASA is not going to return us to the moon. They never got us there to begin with. Sure they got a few test pilots there. But that isn’t you, me, or anyone we actually know. NASA has spent over 40 years wasting our time and money, interfering in astronautical technology markets and generally making life difficult for those of us trying to get off this rock. If NASA makes it back to the moon, expect it to be just like Antartica, a small research station that only a select few get to go to. Then they think they are going to Mars. Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one before.

I think that this is an important point that harks back to my earlier post about how your goals determine your path. Especially with the recent rumor that Keith Cowing published about NASA deciding to go with a 120 tonne Shuttle Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle for providing much of the lift for the VSE, you realize very quickly that Dave's right. Unlike what some have been saying, this VSE program really doesn't look like it will lead to the settlement and commercial development of space. It may not be entirely useless to that goal, but it may actually end up being worse than useless, depending on how things are executed.

So with that in mind, I'm not as overly stoked by the NASA-centric spin that they seemed to be giving in their email. However, I may still go just because there are a few private companies working on lunar related projects that may be worth seeing, and our Business Development guy, Michael Mealling will also be speaking there about Space Value Networks. That at least should be interesting. If I get the chance to go, I'll blog what happens there.

Crew and Cargo

Dan Schrimpsher pointed out in comments to my monculture post one of the interesting ideas that has gained a little too much traction lately at NASA--the importance of not having cargo and crew on the same vehicle. Apparently, most people now believe that one of the big reasons why Shuttle is so expensive is that it tries to be both a delivery truck and a passenger van. While there is some real grain of truth in that idea, I think it is missing a subtle point that I'll try to explain below.

The technical problem I see with the shuttle isn't that it combines crew and cargo per se. The technical problem that I see with the Shuttle is that it tries to be an earth-to-orbit crew transport, while simultaneously trying to be a heavy lift cargo vehicle while simultaneously trying to be a science lab, while simultaneously trying to be a space motel, not that it has both crew and cargo onboard. Most other manned vehicles to date have also carried some cargo. Soyuz carries several hundred pounds of cargo, Apollo did too. I'm not sure about Gemini, but imagine it had the capability. The ability to bring some cargo with crew is important, a Toyota without a trunk would be a relatively useless vehicle.

In fact, to me, a cargo delivery ship is begging to have at least two or three crew members on board to make the whole thing simpler--automated deployment of satellites without any people there to help is a major expense in the design of satellites for example. Cargo jets do fairly well mixing cargo and a little bit of crew, while passenger jets do well with lots of passengers and a little bit of cargo. I think it's when you try to combine large amounts of crew, huge amounts of cargo, and long-term habitation facilities into a vehicle that it starts getting bloated.

Another part of this belief in a separation between cargo and crew is the belief that a crewed vehicle needs a higher safety level than a vehicle that is just for hauling cargo. I'm not sure how true this really is. How much happier would the people underwriting satellite launch insurance be if they knew that even in a bad situation the satellite will probably land intact and just be launched again? Guess what, when insurers are happier, eventually they start charging lower premiums. Who really would want to fly their expensive satellite on a vehicle whose designers wouldn't trust flying themselves on? There isn't much of alternative now, but that speaks more to the immaturity and lack of alternatives in the current launch industry than anything else. Whatever you're flying, the ability to do an intact abort with the full cargo and crew complement (and the vehicle too if possible) is really important to actually making a profit in this field.

There are some additional nuances to be mentioned, but I think that I've said enough to make my point here.

This is me and little Jon at the house. He's a bit bigger now, but this should give you some idea. As I mentioned previously, he just turned 6 months old yesterday. He's recently started laughing a lot, rolling over on his own. He's still very small for his age since he was born about six weeks premature (that's what we get for taking a vacation out in Utah to visit the family that close to the due date), but he's starting to catch up. Anyhow, just wanted to put a picture up, so this wouldn't appear like a purely space related blog.

Monocultures

Dan's most recent blog entry, which was a reply to my last post, got me thinking about something. One of my biggests problems with NASA, that I didn't realize until someone else pointed it out was their emphasis on singular solutions. There is always the space shuttle, the space station, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, a Lunar Base.

As an aside, this kind of reminds me of my reaction when a coworker of mine who has been married for several years tells me that he and his wife have decided that they want to have a kid. It's good they decided to do so, I think they'll be very glad they made the decision. But just one?

Getting back to the original point, there's something inherently disturbing in a vision that is so monoculture. Such systems are inherently fragile. What happens if you have an accident with your single version CEV? Will all manned US spaceflight get put on hold for another two or three years like the last two times? Hopefully not, because in spite of NASA's fetish for monomania, there may very well be commercial competitors in the near term.

Another problem with such monocultures is that they tend to scare away new engineers. It took nearly 20 years to go from the start of one gigaproject (Shuttle) until the next one started (the Space Station), and now another (CEV). How many kids would be interested in working for car companies if there were only one national car model, and it only came out once every decade? This is a serious problem due to what is often called the "greying" of the aerospace workforce. While the average age for engineers at my company is only about 26, we're definitely an exception to the rule. Many of the larger aerospace companies, and NASA are looking at having many of their key engineers retiring over the next few years, without any accompanying surge of new blood in the field.

Lastly, this sort of monculture is incapable of enabling the actual settlement and development of the solar system. To become a truly interplantery society, we need a situation where there are dozens of different spacecraft design flying people to orbit, dozens of settlements and stations in various earth orbits, several dozen communities on the moon, maybe some on Mars and Venus, and the asteroids. Not just one of each.

I could go on flogging this dead horse, but I think you can see my point.

Your Focus Determines Your Path

I have been recently thinking and arguing a lot about NASA's new uberproject, commonly called the Moon, Mars, and Beyond initiative, or sometimes the Vision for Space Exploration. I've argued on several instances that I don't think the direction that Mike Griffen is currently steering the space program will actually lead to the settlement and development of the solar system. After quite a bit of discussion, I realized that your perspective on what constitutes "space development" or "space exploration" will greatly impact your opinion on how to best go about achieving those goals. In fact, this is a fairly valid general point: your focus determines your path.

If you think that having a small McMurdo-on-the-Moon style lunar science base is space development, then your opinion on what is an ideal method to accomplish that will differ quite a bit from someone like me who doesn't see the moon as settled until there are dozens of settlements and hundreds of thousands of people living and working there.

If you're only planning on sending a few people a year to a small government camp, with no intention of ever opening the moon up to commercial exploitation, building a big Shuttle Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle may make a perverse amount of sense. If on the other hand you actually want to make money on the moon through say, lunar tourism, you realize that the only way you'll ever get the costs low enough is if you have some sort of reusability built into your transportation system. Which means biting the bullet with on-orbit rendezvous, docking, propellant transfer, and vehicle assembly.

If your goal is to get back to the moon as soon as reaonably possible, you might decide to just give a big contract to a large government contractor, and pull enough technical expertise back into NASA to manage the project and see it through. You might think in such a situation that it would be irresponsible or risky to give money to smaller, unproven aerospace companies. However if your goal is to actually promote the settlement of the solar system, you quickly realize that unless most of what happens in space are market-driven activities nothing much will happen. You might realize then that trying to catalyze the development of a vibrant and innovative commercial space sector is important. More important then getting new US flags on the lunar surface, more important than maintaining pointless make-work-scheme-for-nerds jobs in key congressional districts, more important than finding out if microbial life ever existed on Mars, more important than sending a cool, glitzy, next-to-useless probe to the Moon before 2008, more important then subsidizing bloated overmerged government contractors, more important than keeping wind-tunnels open in Virginia, Ohio, and California, and yes, even more important then keeping a aging space telescope still sending back pretty pictures for peoples' screensavers. If you realize the importance of catalyzing the commercial space sector, you might even find that in so doing you'll actually get where you want to go quicker than by just throwing more money down the BoeLock hole. There are few paths between any two locations that takes longer than a shortcut.

Let's do it right this time Mike.

Taking the Plunge

Well, I've finally decided to take the plunge and start my own blog. I've been intending to start a blog since before I even knew what a blog was, but it has taken me a long time to get much further than the protoblog that I had on my old university account or. That site is going away sometime in the near future, so I figured it would be good to finally get somewhere else on the internet that I can call home.

As the name of the suggests, one of the main topics of this blog will be my thoughts about the development of space, particularly regarding our nearest neighbor, the Moon. But I'll also post stuff from time to time on other topics that interest me, which could be anything from technology to religion to political theory to pictures of my family.

To give a little background on myself and my family, I'm a young engineer working for a small aerospace startup based out of Santa Clara, California. My wife Tiffany is a wonderful Oregonian who is sufficiently older than me that we should hopefully drop at about the same time. We have two sons, Jarom and Jonathan Spencer, though Jarom died only a few minutes after childbirth. Jonathan though is a happy, peaceful little guy who turns six months today. He's been a wonderful blessing in our lives, but at the rate he's being corrupted, he'll probably end up an engineer like his dad. In addition to being an engineer, I'm still finishing up a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University, out in Provo, Utah. All I have left to do is finish my thesis project, but that has managed to become one of the banes of my existence.

At my day job, we're building rocket propulsion test hardware for eventual use on a reusable Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle. As one of my professors put it, it is dangerously close to getting paid to have fun. Most of my work related posting will be there on the company's weblog, but I'll put up some eyecandy or links occasionally on this site. Like this picture of our teststand we're building:



And here's a picture of one of our previous igniter designs we've been developing:



Both of those are a little bit dated, but I'll have pictures of some of our newer work up on the MSS blog as soon when I put up the May 2005 progress report.

Anyhow, we'll see how this whole blogging thing goes.