CxP LOC/LOM Numbers

I wasn't planning on doing any more blogging today, but I had a serious "what the hud!" moment earlier today, and thought it worth bringing attention to it. This is a presentation that was given by NASA back on July 2nd, and linked to by "anonymous.space" over in a comments section in Space Politics. Anonymous.space brought attention to three rather troubling slides: pages 26, and 62-65.

Basically, unless this source is bogus, or I'm completely misreading things, it's saying that even NASA admits that their odds of losing a crew or a mission using the Constellation architecture are far worse then they had originally claimed. In fact, at least for ISS missions, we're talking almost an order of magnitude worse. For ISS, they're claiming a LOC (probability of losing the crew on any given flight) of 1 in 231, with a LOM (loss of mission) of 1 in 19! If I'm reading this right, that means they expect right now that about 5% of missions to the space station will end up not making it to the station. For lunar missions, the LOC number is 1 in 170, and the LOM number is 1 in 9! That means of every multi-billion dollar mission, they've got an almost 11% chance of it being a failure. While some of these numbers have been improving, others have been getting worse.

To put this in perspective, the statistical reliability of most ELVs is rated at about 95-98%. One of the big selling points of Ares-1 was that it was going to be so much safer than any other vehicle that's ever flown. The claim IIRC from ESAS was that the odds of losing a mission were going to be 1 in 460, which is about 9x more reliable than any other vehicle that's ever flown. Not bad for a team that's hasn't designed, built, and operated a new launch in over 25 years. The Loss of Crew probability was supposed to be 1 in 2021 (both of these numbers can be found on the NASA ESAS Report website in chapter 6 on page 382). Now, I've made fun of them quoting four significant figures on reliability for something that hasn't flown yet (though I apparently misremembered the numbers--I thought it was 1 in 2106...silly me).

In other words, it appears that NASA is admitting that the Ares-1 is not going to be any safer than an EELV/EELV derived launcher would've been, and in fact may be less reliable.

Am I misreading something? If not, why hasn't anybody (other than anonymous.space) been discussing this? While it's true, things may get better with time, but so far the numbers have been getting consistently worse. And they're currently over an order of magnitude worse than what "we" were "sold" on. What the hud?!?

The "Gap" and Continued Light Blogging

I've got a couple of other posts I want to write about soon, and I'm about 75% finished with my final Orbital Access Methodologies post. But unfortunately, for the next week I'm not going to have much of any free-time at home or at work, so light blogging is going to continue for a while.

That said, here's a brief thought about "the gap", spurred on by Clark and Rand's recent posts on the subject. I really am not a fan of keeping the shuttle flying. It's time to let go. A lot of the subcomponents are no longer being made. It doesn't really keep us with access to the ISS because we'd still have to rely on the Russians for lifeboats. Sure, we could visit it once or twice a year, but is that really worth the billions it would take to keep the Shuttle flying? I don't think so.

Quite frankly, I'd almost rather see a gap than try filling it with a kludge like keeping the shuttle flying. The fundamental problem is that even though "commercial" companies like Boeing and LM and Orbital (and hopefully SpaceX if they can get their act together) have been providing the majority of US spacelift for the past two decades, there is no commercial supplier of manned orbital spaceflight in the US. That's the bigger problem, IMO than the fact that NASA can't access a space station that it really doesn't have much use for.

I'd rather see more focus on how NASA and DoD can help encourage and grow a strong and thriving commercial spaceflight (manned and unmanned) sector than how NASA can fix its broken internal spaceflight problems. Once the US actually gets to the point where it has a thriving manned orbital spaceflight sector, there won't be any gaps again in the future. A strong commercial spaceflight sector with a weak NASA is still a lot better than a strong NASA and a weak commercial spaceflight sector.

Anyhow, I've got to head to work. There's my $.02 for the day.

Whittington Again Demonstrates His Reading Compreshension Skilz

I know it's been a while since I've blogged last, but here's a gem from our favorite friend from Planet Strawman.

This morning he asked whether Obama's statement that he wants to revitalize NASA represents a flip-flop from his previous position of postponing Constellation. I had emailed him (after clarifying that I had no intention of voting for Obama) saying that "it is quite possible to both believe in gutting Constellation and at the same time revitalizing NASA. The two are not mutually incompatible at all."

Mark's response:

Gracious, while this doesn't come close to believing six impossible things before breakfast, as the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland suggests, it comes at least two impossible things close to it. The first is that one can revitalize the space agency by gutting its primary mission. The second is that Barack Obama cares a fig about revitalizing anything except the liberal welfare state.

Now dear reader, my first question is, where did I ever state that I believed that "Obama cares a fig about revitalizing anything but the liberal welfare state"?

Second, the term revitalize means to give new life or new vigor to something. If someone states that they don't think NASA's doing a very good job anymore of inspiring people, and thinks they're headed down the wrong track, why is it a flip-flop or inconsistent or crazy to believe that making major changes to what NASA is doing and how it's doing it could "revitalize" it. Quite frankly, if you're not happy with what NASA is doing, you're probably not happy with its primary program (VSE was a mission, Constellation is a program--there's a difference). Giving more money to a program like Constellation and expecting a different result seems closer to the definition of insanity in my opinion.

Update: Now, demonstrating his Psychology skilz, Mark declares that I went "ballistic" in this post...and that it demonstrates "blind rage, and hatred". All I can say is: heh.

I'm sorry for wasting all your time with this post. It's just too much fun to tweak Mark and watch him make an idiot of himself. I'll grow up.

Some Interesting Ideas From the Other Side of the Pond

I don't have time to go into detail at the moment, but I wanted to relay an interesting paper that Keith Cowing reported on NASAWatch today. Now, if I were someone at the ESA, I'd probably be taking NASA's grand plans about Constellation with an appropriate sized grain of salt right about now. But there were some good ideas overall:

• The report mentioned that our ISS experience shows the importance of having redundant transportation methods (ie imagine what would've happened to ISS if Soyuz didn't exist). I don't think that redundant transportation method should necessarily be another government-centric transportation system, but I agree wholeheartedly that monocultures are a bad idea.
• The report also mentioned that having a safe-haven in LLO is one of the best ways to increase the safety and flexibility of a lunar exploration program. Right now, most of the danger associated with lunar exploration have to do with operations on or near the moon. The current architecture does nothing to reduce those risks, but instead focuses on the much sexier earth-to-orbit transportation risks. Having some infrastructure in LLO can go a long way to fixing that, while also giving you some very interesting mission options. Now, I'm still a fan of the idea of Lagrange stations, and I think that in the long-run they'll dominate the traffic in the lunar half of cislunar space. I just think that there is a small, and critical niche filled by one or more small polar LLO stations. I've been planning to write up my ideas on this concept for over two months now, so can someone poke me in a few weeks if I haven't followed up on this thought?
• Unlike NASA they don't seem to be deathly afraid of on-orbit assembly when it makes sense. Of course, they don't have an HLV fetish that they have to rationalize...
  

There were a few other good points, but those three were the key ones that stood out to me. Of course they also seem to be missing the importance of propellant transfer, and they seem to be almost as clueless as NASA as far as commercial enterprise is concerned (both why it's important, and how best to foster real commercial involvment). But it was an interesting read if you have a few minutes.

Random Thought: Mass NASA Spaceflight Externships

I just had a crazy thought this morning, that while probably unworkable--we'd probably all be better-off if 99% of government policy proposals were sent directly to the paper-shredder--might be a way to start extricating NASA from it's current manned spaceflight morass.

The following ideas were what led me to this thought:

• With the way our government is structured right now, NASA's primary customer is not the American people, but Congress. And in spite of any high falutin' rhetoric about the common good, the reality is that Congresspeople are people just like the rest of us, and tend to see things from the filter of what benefits them most. In the case of NASA, Congresspeople care most about keeping highly paid aerospace professionals working in their districts (and hopefully therefore voting for them). If the shuttle program employed 6 people in a garage, do you really think there would be anywhere near as much passionate interest in "the gap", and "workforce retention issues"?
  
• That said, Congresspeople do have souls. They actually do care at least on some level that NASA is doing something that sounds plausibly useful--it's just that they want them to be doing that plausibly useful thing while employing thousands of people in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, California, and Utah.
  
• Constellation has a high probability of dieing sometime during this next administration. The only reason why it isn't dead now is that those Congresspeople are worried about having 10,000 unemployed aerospace professionals deciding to vote for their opponent in the next election for not protecting their jobs. But as technical problems, delays, and cost overruns start adding up (along with the realization that Constellation isn't going to be protecting most of those jobs), expect to see the knives come out.
• One of the single biggest costs in any aerospace project is payroll and related overhead. For instance, while I don't have exact numbers (and wouldn't be legally able to give them if I did) and even though MSS doesn't pay anywhere near as much as NASA does, I wouldn't be surprised if 1/2 to 2/3 of our expenditures to-date have been payroll and related overhead. The typical burdened rate for an aerospace engineer is in the $100-200k/year range.
• The idea of the Air Force or NASA running paid "externships" (where an employee or contractor of theirs works with some specific company, with NASA or the Air Force paying their salary in exchange for benefiting from the cross-pollination of ideas) has been gaining traction lately.
  

So, what if we cranked this idea to 11? What if instead of trying to make another multi-billion dollar shuttle-flavored boondoggle, Congress instead directed NASA to offer most of its shuttle workforce as "externs" for industry? Armadillo Aerospace and several of the smaller alt.space companies have demonstrated how much more you can get for a given amount of money if you don't have to pay your employees. Imagine if, phasing in over a period of a few years, all of the sudden it was possible to get skilled aerospace technicians and engineers, and not have to pay the full burdened cost yourself?

The benefit for Congress would be that those aerospace engineers would still be being employed, but they'd be working on projects that were actually being run more by market-driven companies, and not as much by the whims of an ossified bureaucracy. The goal would be to use this as a way to help promote aerospace development in those aerospace states. The same money would be spent, the same jobs would be protected, but the effort expended would be more aligned with what the market actually determines to be useful. With the availability of much cheaper labor, it would become much easier and cheaper to launch an aerospace startup than it currently is.

The benefit for the rest of us, is that as those former shuttle employees are divided up among a larger number of commercial enterprises, the incentive structure for the Congresspeople will shift more towards promoting the growth of a strong industry, as opposed to running centrally-planned megaprojects. Also, it might be possible to structure the program such that the externs gradually transfer from NASA payrolls to those companies over the course of a few years, freeing up that money for NASA to act more as a customer while also at the same time possibly allowing NASA to be more able to survive the coming fiscal environment. For instance, for the first year or two of the program, maybe NASA is paying for most or all of the salary of a given extern, but after that each year the company has to pick up another 20% of the tab until at some point the extern is no longer a government contractor but a commercial employee.

Now, even if this policy isn't entirely nuts, the incentives structure will matter a lot. First off, you don't want to make greybeards so cheap that nobody will hire new college students. One way of doing this would be to require a given company to hire at least one fresh college grad for every extern they get. Also, as some of those externs start retiring, some of the money that was going to their salary could instead be transfered to matching funds for hiring fresh college students. Second off, you don't want companies using this as a way to lay off their existing workforce and just mooch off of the state. So you setup some rule that as they lay their own people off, they little by little lose access to those externs. I'm not sure how exactly you would determine who is eligible for externs. Maybe some sort of lottery or draft like they do with many professional sports? I'm not sure.

Anyhow, it's a crazy idea, but I bet you if you took those 10,000 NASA employees, and instead had them working on commercial projects that it would close the gap a lot faster than pouring more money down the Ares-I rathole. Of course, interfering with the market always causes unintended consequences, the only question is would the end result be better or worse than the current status quo.

What do y'all think?

[Update: 11:37am]

One piece of feedback I got back offline was that this idea would look too much like a direct subsidy to ever work. Well, ignoring the fact that congress just passed one of the most pork-o-licious farm subsidy bills ever, I think there are some ways to deal with this concern. I think one way to frame this is as a "privitization" of the NASA manned space transportation industry. In all the debates about workforce retention, NASA and Congress continuously refer to these employees as "national assets". Well, if they're national assets, why not transition them over a few years from a 100% government owned and operated asset to one that is mostly commercially owned and operated? Just a thought.

The other thougt would be making sure that all aerospace (and even some non-aerospace) companies have equal access to benefiting from this externship pool. Ie, anyone can become involved, that way it isn't benefiting one specific aerospace company at the expense of all the others.

A Point Worth Repeating

Over on Jeff's SpacePolitics site, there is a discussion going on right now about a recent poll on the relevance of space. While much of the discussion was interesting as usual, I particularly liked the point made by a fellow 20-something by the name of James:

Those who support the current lunar program often forget the opportunity costs. There are better ways to spend the same money on developing space. I’m 24 - with the current Constellation program plan, I’ll be in my mid 30s by the time we get back to the moon. If we operate the system for a decade or two after that, as is likely, all I can expect in my career is to see 4 people land on the moon twice a year. That is not exciting - nor is it worth the money. Maybe by the time I retire we’ll be looking at another “next generation system”.

What’s the point of any of this for someone my age?

Two of the replies to his question more or less missed what I saw as the key point, and instead mostly fixated on the question at the end--taking it as a sign of greed, self-centeredness, shortsightedness, etc. Personally, I don't think for a second that James was being whiny or impatient or ADD (as our generation is often accused of). I think he's asking a very valid and timely question.

While I know it's somewhat vain to quote oneself, I think the point I made there bears repeating:

If our current approach to space development was actually putting in place the technology and infrastructure needed to make our civilization a spacefaring one, I’d be a lot more willing to support it. Wise investments in the future are a good thing, but NASA’s current approach is not a wise investment in the future. It’s aging hipsters trying to relive the glory days of their youth at my generation’s expense.

Patience is only a virtue when you’re headed in the right direction and doing the right thing. If Constellation was truly (as Marburger put it) making future operations cheaper, safer, and more capable, then I’d be all for patiently seeing it out.

While Constellation might possibly put some people on the moon, it won’t actually put us any closer to routine, affordable, and sustainable exploration and development. I have no problem with a long hard road, just so long as its the right one.

As I discussed in my previous post on John Marburger's speech, I discussed this important point. It's not good enough for NASA to just be doing stuff in space. Sending people to the Moon in a way that doesn't "reduce the cost or risk of future operations" isn't a very responsible way of spending tax dollars that are going to be paid in large part by James and my generation.

Gap Math

I'm somewhat curious about the math behind some of Griffin's comments at the Senate Hearing today:

“we are focusing initially on cargo because, I just want to be clear with everybody, we already have a mechanism for getting crews to the station with the Soyuz system, but unless we can bring some new commercial capabilities online, we really have no cargo resupply. So, actually, of the two, the most important COTS capability to me right now is cargo, and I must be honest about that.”

No cargo resupply capabilities? Now I may not have as many academic degrees as Dr Griffin (I only have two so far--an neither of them in how to Pile it on Higher and Deeper), but at least by my count we have two existing, proven capabilities, and three more in the works. Progress is just as real for cargo delivery as Soyuz. ATV just docked with the station last week. HTV is slated for first flight next year. Plus there are the two COTS competitors, and a possible third based on the SOMD cargo flights RFP. That hardly seems like "no cargo resupply" capabilities to me. If you can count a sole-source foreign crew resupply vehicle that doesn't meet the full needs of a fully-operational ISS, why can't you count existing and near-term cargo resupply vehicles?

I find it ironic that when arguing for adding billions of dollars to an already bloated Ares-I/Orion budget, flying NASA astronauts on Soyuz is an unbearable problem, but when the possibility is raised of using that money to fund a program that actually has a chance of shortening that "gap", the response is that it's a non-issue. Ho-hum really, providing a fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth provider of cargo transport to ISS is a far more pressing matter.

I also found it amusing that Mark Whittington relies on the following statement from Griffin as an attempt to handwave away such a contradiction:

Griffin doubts that “even with their [the COTS companies’] best efforts, even if more money were provided, that COTS crew transportation capability will arrive in time to be available after the shuttle retires or even by the end of the current contract with Russia in 2012."

The problem is that:

1. Exercising COTS Option D does not necessarily imply giving additional money to SpaceX or Orbital for performing Option D. In fact, Orbital has more or less stated that they aren't planning on Option D capabilities. SpaceX might be a reasonable choice (seeing as how they're designing Dragon for manned flight from the get-go), but Option D funding could be recompeted and awarded to any of a number of companies, many of whom would likely be flying on existing vehicles.
2. Ares-I/Orion is not going to be flying by 2012 either, no matter how many billions are thrown at the problem (well, maybe if you threw $10B+ at it over the next three or four years, but that's political unobtanium wishalloy). That's not an apples to apples comparison.
   

The question isn't if COTS Option D could somehow, in spite of not being funded till the last second, eliminate the gap which Griffin's poor decisions have created. The question is if putting more money into COTS is more likely to reduce that gap than putting an equal amount of money into Ares-I/Orion. The GAO seems to think that putting the extra money into Ares-I/Orion that Griffin seeks would most likely only increase the probability of a 2015 IOC for Ares-I/Orion to a more reasonable confidence level (85% or better), rather than the 65% confidence level NASA has been using to make their numbers look less bad. In other words, adding several billion dollars to Ares-I/Orion would only prevent the gap from growing even bigger than the current 4-5 years.

On the other hand, look at COTS. It's total budget through demonstration of capabilities A-C is only $0.5B. If you had $1B from a Mikulski miracle to invest in NASA, which do you think has a higher probability of shortening the gap of time when we have to rely on Soyuz for all manned flights to the ISS? Putting that $1B into a $20-30B program that already only has at best a 65% chance of flying by 2015? Or putting at least some of that into a much smaller program that is intending to fly two cargo vehicles by late 2010?

I'll be the first to admit that COTS isn't a risk free venture. NASA's intentionally avoided picking providers that use existing launch vehicles like Atlas V, in favor of ventures that have to provide both a cargo vehicle and a launcher. There's a non-zero chance that one or both COTS providers won't actually be able to deliver.

But the same can be said of Ares-I/Orion. It too is going with an all-new launch vehicle (which derives little more than the paint scheme from previous Shuttle hardware) that may or may not work right the first time. It too is using a team without a real track record--when was the last time MSFC designed and flew a manned launch vehicle? How many of its engineers were even around for the last time they completed such a program? The Ares-I/Orion program has also been running behind schedule (notice how the schedule seems to slip by at least one calender year per year of development?).

So, if you were a congressman or senator with a limited amount of money available, and you have two risky ventures to pick from to try and reduce the gap, what would you do? Would you place all your money on the one option where your money is going to be a relative drop in the bucket, and that even then has little or no chance of actually reducing the gap? Or would you invest at least part of your money in a much smaller program where it has a much higher probability of actually hastening the day when the US once again has manned spaceflight capabilities--and better yet, commercial manned spaceflight capabilities?

You do the math.

Additional Thoughts on the SA'08 Propellant Depot Panel

It's been long enough since I put up the presentations from the panel, that I figured it would be worth starting a new post to mention some of my thoughts on what we discussed on the panel. Some of these ideas are thoughts that were briefly discussed during the panel, and others are ideas I just didn't have time to bring up.

While the panel went much better than expected, I also noticed several things I could do next time to make it even better.

One thing is that I probably should have mixed audience participation, discussion, and presentation a little more thoroughly. Expecting people to stay awake through an hour of presentations right after dinner was a bit much--surprisingly enough most of the attendees did, but I think mixing it up would've been better.

Another thing that in hind-sight would've been useful is to set aside more time in the panel for actual discussion, particularly on points where one or more of us had a different preferred approach than the others. For the most part we all agreed on the importance of propellant depots, the benefits to commercial and governmental programs, and the fact that a lot of the technology either exists, or is on the cusp of existing. But we disagreed on some of the details, and much like statistics, it's the disagreement or outliers (and the reasoning behind them) that hold the most information.

Tugs or Reusable Tankers or Both

One point of disagreement was between myself and Dallas Bienhoff regarding the best way for handling prox-ops for propellant deliveries. I am a big proponent of using space tugs to offload as much of the weight and complexity of a prox-ops system to an asset that stays on-orbit and gets used a bunch of times. Dallas on the other hand disagreed with me on that point and suggested that a reusable tanker with autonomous rendezvous and docking capabilities was a better way to handle complexity and reduce cost. Both of us were advocating for reusing as much of the complicated prox-ops hardware as possible, but going about it in different ways.

To me, there are several benefit of having the tanks dumb as possible, with all of the complicated subsystems on the tug:

• Performance: the tug stays in orbit, and is very weight insensitive. By not having to relaunch the tug every time, you get a lot more propellant per pound of delivered mass on orbit. When you look at unmanned delivery craft right now, they typically have a really poor payload to drymass ratio. For a tug you want as high of a payload to drymass ratio as possible.
• Easier Open Interface Standards: It is probably a lot easier to get ITAR approval for openly publishing a very simple common interface specification if that interface spec is just a few handholds and a commercial, off-the-shelf quick-disconnect receptacle. That way, anyone who can launch stuff into your station's orbit can deliver propellants to your station, even if they're durned furiners. An Autonomous Rendezvous & Docking (AR&D) system with automatic fluid couplings would likely be a lot harder to get export approval for.
• Flexibility: The simpler the propellant module, and the less smarts it has built-in, the easier it is for people to just stretch it to whatever size best suits their launch vehicle. Unlike a reusable tanker which might require significant redesign to be used on a different launch vehicle.
  
• RLV Simplicity: Making a high-flight rate reusable launch vehicle is going to be hard enough already without trying to also make it into a satellite as well. For RLVs, you want a relatively dumb tank that never leaves the payload bay, but you don't want to have to have all the prox-ops stuff cut into your already very limited payload budget.
• Other Tug Uses--On-Orbit Assembly: Tugs are useful for lots of other things too, especially if they have arms. They can help in assembly of stations and large in-space vehicles. No need to make each and every space station or space vehicle component be its own independently operable mini-station complete with its own GN&C, power, etc.
  
• Other Tug Uses--Satellite Recovery: They can also perform satellite recovery missions. Imagine if there had been a tug already developed, and set aside on standby in case of a botched launch like the recent Proton upper stage failure. If done properly, the tug could've been launched on short notice on an otherwise empty upper stage. The tug could've then transfered the satellite from the malfunctioning upper stage to the still functional, and mostly full upper stage that delivered the tug. There are some very tricky technical details I'm glossing over, but its a capability that could become rather standard once you have tugs available. In case anyone from the DoD is reading this, yes, I'm saying that tugs are an important part of ORS.
• Other Tug Uses--Rescue Missions: They can perform rescue missions. Right now, one of the most hazardous parts of a lunar mission is the ascent, rendezvous, and earth return legs. Imagine if there was a staging point in L1, L2, or LUNO, instead of basing all lunar missions from earth's surface. You could store one or two of these tugs at the small staging/refueling base. If something went wrong with the LSAM US or CEV, you could send a tug in to help out. If you were using lunar ejector seats, and had to abort to orbit, this would give you a quick way of getting a rescuer to a stranded astronaut. This would greatly reduce your odds of losing a crew due to a LSAM/CEV rendezvous failure, or CEV propulsion failure prior to (or during) TEI.

And there are probably other ideas I'm overlooking.

On the other hand, Dallas a good point in favor of reusable propellant tankers, and I can think of some others as well:

• The more expensive propellant handling hardware your tanker needs, the better it would be to reuse it. For instance, say you don't think you can get first-orbit or even first-day rendezvous with your propellant depot. You might want to invest more heavily in insulation, zero boil-off systems, and other cryo handling hardware. You don't want to be tossing that away after every flight.
• You're eventually going to want to have smaller depots located on the other ends of your transportation system (ie in the lunar vacinity, around Mars, around Venus, etc). Some of these locations, especially at first, will need to be fueled from Earth. That means tanker modules are necessary. Once again, once the flight duration gets longer than a couple of hours, you're going to start wanting to add other bells and whistles. And those bells and whistles are expensive enough that not throwing them away after every flight is a good idea.

Dallas may have had some other points that I'm not remembering right now, but I think that both sides have valid points, and that the best option may be to do a little bit of both.

Full-Service vs. LOX-Only?

I had been somewhat surprised when Dallas (who works for the company that was the lead on developing and flying Orbital Express) suggested against using a tug. I was even more surprised when Frank Zegler suggested a LOX-only depot. Before I had met Frank over the internet, I considered LH2 to be an unmitigated evil, almost on the level of Nitrogen Tetroxide and UDMH. But he was one of the main people to talk me into thinking that Hydrogen isn't always evil, and sometimes can be tamed, and can make a lot of sense. So, when he sided with the sentiment that meiza and several other regulars here at Selenianboondocks have expressed--namely that your first depot should probably be LOX only--I was very surprised.

I didn't have time to bring up this point of disagreement at all during the panel, but here were some of Frank's points in favor of LOX-only depots:

• LOX is much easier to store and handle cryogenically due to its much higher boiling point.
• LOX is much denser, and thus you can store a lot more of it in a given size tank.
• LOX makes up the majority of the propellant mass than for any fuel combo you would likely use.
• Storing only one liquid is much easier than two, because you can eliminate the heat transfer from the warmer propellant (LOX) into the colder one (LH2). Even with a sunshield or a ton of MLI, you still have a significant heat source in the fact that your LOX is way hotter than the boiling temperature of your LH2. You probably never thought of LOX as a heat source, did you?

If these arguments sound familiar, its because they're the same ones that many of you have made over the years. I can see Frank's point, especially if you think that your main (or only) market is going to be "topping up" EDSes and LSAMs for NASA. I've never disputed these facts. But I still think that going all the way and providing at least one fuel to go with that LOX is a good step. These arguments probably aren't new, and probably aren't going to change anyone's minds, but in case you haven't heard my spiel before here's my case:

• Without modifying existing or future stages, they only have so much hydrogen capacity. Unless you launch a complete stage as your payload, topped-off to the brim, you're going to use some of that capacity getting to orbit in the first place. Which quickly cuts into your maximum payload you can deliver to your final destination (and also how much LOX you can actually use).
• For many payloads, prior to the time when reusable LEO-GEO or LEO-Luna ferries are available, the best way to use a propellant depot is to launch the payload on a refuelable upper stage, top that upper stage up in LEO, and then immediately go to your destination. If you reuse your upper stage as your transfer stage, the inability to top of the hydrogen as well effectively halves your payload you can deliver to other destinations. If you fly a separate refuelable stage that has a full load of LH2, you're greatly cutting into how big of a payload you can put into LEO in the first place. For instance, a Centaur stage with a full load of LH2 weighs about half of the payload capacity of an Atlas V 401 to LEO.
• If you can't provide both oxidizer and fuel, you can't reuse interorbital transfer stages/ferries.
  
• If you can't provide both oxidizer and fuel, you can't reuse lunar landers.
  
• If you can't provide fuel on-orbit, you can't make up for boil-off caused by unexpected delays, variance in the thermal properties and boil-off rate of your stages, equipment malfunctions etc.
• On a psychological level, going LOX-only allows people to continue to disbelieve in the feasibility and utility of propellant depots. Look at the mindset two years ago. It said that propellant transfer of any sort on orbit was deep, black magic, and that it should be avoided at all cost. Now that Orbital Express has shown that it is doable and not that hard for storable propellants, critics say "well, that's all good and fine, but cryogenic propellants are a whole different beast entirely." If we went to LOX-only depots, those same critics would likely say "well we knew LOX was doable all along, it's the hydrogen that's the unrealistic part--there's no way you could store that long enough to be practical." At some point I want to stop giving skeptics ammunition.
• More importantly, both Dallas and Frank agree that LH2 storage on-orbit is completely feasible. Dallas going so far as to say that for 1-2kW and 50-60kg, you could install a ZBO system that could completely eliminate boil-off.

I guess I'm still convinced that in spite of the added extra difficulty, that the real markets that I think there will be for propellants on-orbit will be much better served if you can provide fuel as well as oxidizer. But you can draw your own conclusions.

To ZBO or Not to ZBO?

Another disagreement (this time between Dallas and Frank) was on whether or not to go with a Zero Boil-Off system for long-duration cryo storage. Dallas seemed to think that not only would it not be that hard to implement, but that it would be very desirable, while Frank seemed to prefer passive storage techniques, and in fact considered ZBO to actually be a detriment! I think both sides have points, but that in a way they're somewhat talking past each other. And in the end, I think I side more with Dallas on this one.

Frank is right that ZBO systems, done the typical way, (without doing a proper passive-storage design and without settling propellants) is likely going to be an expensive development project, and a complicated system in operations. Frank also made the point that at least some of the boiled-off hydrogen is actually useful. That warm GH2 can be propulsively vented to cause the other propellants to stay in a settled orientation. It is still pretty cold, so it can be used to pull heat from the avionics away from the propellants. It can be used for prechilling lines and valves. It can be used to provide propellants for GOX/GH2 RCS engines. It can be combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to provide water. The single most important benefit for Frank and ULA is that first one--settling the propellants makes everything easier, and propulsive settling is by far the highest maturity and easiest way of settling propellants.

As Dallas pointed out, a properly designed ZBO system when added on-top of a good passive insulation system doesn't need to be that big and complex. 1-2kW isn't that much power. And especially if the propellant is settled in some fashion, running a cryocooler becomes even easier, because you can avoid two-phase flow. If your cryocooler works better taking gas in and spitting out liquid (or chilled gas), settling allows you to guarantee you're only pulling in gas. If pulling in liquid, subcooling it, and spraying it through the gas is more effective, settling allows you to pull liquid from a part of the tank where you know liquid will be, and to inject it into a part of the tank where you know it will be gas.

Lastly, there are other ways to settle propellants, and if you use them, you no longer need boil-off gases to provide the settling. You might still intentionally allow some LH2 to boil-off, for use in RCS engines for stationkeeping or to run fuel cells. But with a ZBO system, you have a choice.

A more convincing argument against the complexity of a ZBO system, that can be derived from Frank's presentation, is the fact that a good passive system can get boiloff rates low enough that you just don't care about them anymore. In those cases, a ZBO system might not buy you that much extra performance. Now, there's an argument against ZBO that I'm more willing to buy.

So, I guess the real answer may be--it depends. In situations where your propellant is expensive enough to deliver to, where deliveries are somewhat infrequent, and storage times are long, a ZBO system might make a lot of sense. But in situations where the propellant can be readily topped off from tankers on a regular basis, even though ZBO is doable and not that hard, it still might not be worth it.

Once again, draw your own conclusions.

NASA vs Other Markets

This last topic isn't so much a disagreement, as an area that I thought deserved a little more commentary. I think that all of the panelists would agree that NASA is unlikely to have a change of heart tomorrow, and completely overhaul Constellation to take more advantage of propellant depots. However, in spite of this recognition that NASA isn't likely to become a good customer anytime soon, most of the panel was still very NASA- and Constellation-centric. While there were mentions made by all the panelists about performance benefits that normal ELVs could get for delivering payloads to GEO and beyond, most of the discussion of benefits was focused on augmenting NASA's return to the Moon.

Admittedly, if NASA ever gets its act together and actually makes it back to the Moon, it will be annually consuming more propellant mass in orbit than the combined launch mass of all other launches combined, and if they were actually buying that from propellant depots, it would be a truly transformational event. But lets face it guys--it makes too much sense for NASA to willingly go along with it. Much like Zero-G demonstrated, while NASA might eventually be willing to abide by the law and purchase commercial services that they used to provide for themselves in-house, it will take many years to get them to change. As it is, it'll take NASA a decent amount of time before they can even take advantage of depots, even if they recognized the potential right away.

As I said in my presentation, it doesn't matter how critical propellant depots are for creating a spacefaring society, or how much better lunar exploration would be with propellant depots involved. If you can't find a way to get enough real customers to wrap a business case around, it will never happen.

That said, I also wanted to note that NASA and the DoD are actually doing some good things regarding propellant depots. First, they've regularly put out SBIR solicitations for technologies that could be relevant to propellant depots. Second, on the larger scale, they've funded actual technology demonstration missions like Orbital Express, DART, and XSS-11 to demonstrate useful related technologies. Third, even though Michael Griffin's NASA hasn't been doing much action-wise to enable propellant depots, Griffin has at least been a vocal proponent of the capability in many public forums. Fourth, NASA was at least interested in offering a propellant depot related Centennial Challenge--if they had actually been given any new Centennial Challenges funding in the past three years.

Even though I don't think either the DoD or NASA is likely to outright fund a propellant depot anytime soon (and personally I wouldn't want them to!), there are lots of things that can be done within the system to help move things closer to reality. Better, clearer ties can be made between the technologies needed for propellant depots, and the needs and desires of NASA and the DoD. Tugs and depots, for instance, are an important part of a truly Operationally Responsive space transportation infrastructure. By making that connection more and more in public, additional funding for research, development, and demonstration might become available. NASA also desperately needs good long-duration cryo storage and handling technologies in order to make ESAS work, and at least some of those technologies will also be useful for propellant depots. Propellant depots (especially commercial ones) might allow NASA to launch larger interplanetary missions than would otherwise be possible, etc. So while I think the key to propellant depots lies in markets outside of NASA, I think there's a lot of good NASA and the DoD can still due, even in spite of the political environment and constraints that both of them operate in.


Anyhow, those were some of my thoughts I wanted to discuss from the panel. Once I get the video from Henry, I might find a couple changes or additional comments to bring up, but for now those are my thoughts.

Comments?

[Update: 4/4 8:30AM PDT]
Here is the link to a thread on NASASpaceFlight.com where I have been discussing propellant depots with some of the other regulars.

Space Access 2008 Propellant Depot Panel

I'll update this after work with some commentary (and sometime in the next week or two, I'll see if I can upload a video of the session as well). But for now here are the four presentations that were given.

I started out with an introduction to the concept of propellant depots, a short discussion on some of the general technical and business challenges, and then an introduction to the panelists.

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Rand Simberg (of Transterrestrial Musings and also of Wyoming Space and Information Systems) gave a presentation talking about some more of the business and policy issues related to propellant depots.

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Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing discussed the work he's done over the past several years on propellant depots, and he also discussed in more concrete terms some of the advantages (both to ESAS and to commercial operators) of propellant depots.

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The final presentation was given by Frank Zegler, of ULA. He talked about their thoughts on propellant depots, and some related work they've been doing (and will be doing in the near future. Frank had some cool eyecandy for some of the hardware they've been building and testing lately for the new Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage that ULA is working on.

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Sustainability

A statement in this post by Clark Lindsey (and a further comment by Gary Hudson) on Hobbyspace reminded me why I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the term "sustainability" as it regards space exploration. I think the danger stems from how ambiguous the term can be. When you say "sustainable space development" to someone like Clark, Gary, or myself, it evokes concepts such as enabling a robust commercial spaceflight industry and acting as an anchor tenant for critical space infrastructure. But NASA uses "sustainability" in a completely different light. Under Griffinomics, ESAS is supposedly "sustainable" because Congress is unlikely to cut NASA's manned spaceflight program much compared to what it's getting right now, and therefore even if the architecture they pick is very expensive, it can still be perpetuated indefinitely off of bureaucratic inertia and parochial interests. Inspiring, huh?

A much better metric is the one given in Marburger's speech: namely is our architecture being developed in such a way as to reduce the risk and cost of future operations? In manufacturing, there's a concept called "continual improvement". Basically the idea is that in a healthy system, you should be continually reducing scrap rate, increasing efficiency, decreasing lead time, etc. I think the idea of continual improvement is a good one for space development as well. A healthy and effective national space program would be one that is continually investing a sizable chunk of its public funds into creating or promoting the creation of new technologies, techniques, infrastructures, and markets that make future operations (manned and unmanned) less expensive, lower risk, higher payback etc.

To me the difference between the idea of continual improvement and Griffin's idea of sustainability is the difference between innovation and inertia.

Marburger's Speech

There's been a lot of discussion over the past few days about OSTP Director John Marburger's speech at the recent Goddard Memorial Symposium, but there were a couple of good points that I felt deserved repetition, and I also had a few thoughts I would like to add.

One of the memes that John started two years ago is the concept of extending our nation's economic sphere throughout the Solar System. Early on in his speech, referring to the thriving commercial satellite market, John states that "Humanity has succeeded in incorporating Low and Geostationary Earth orbit in its economic sphere." While I think he's basically right, I'd just point out that LEO and GEO are still only on the fringes of our economic sphere. While there are a couple of (very large and profitable) niches that have been exploited in spite of the immature state of existing earth-to-orbit transportation systems, none of these markets really have succeeded in catalyzing further demand for other services in LEO and GEO. While lots of money is being made, and lots of useful services are being provided, we still have a long way to go before I'd really state that LEO and GEO are firmly within mankind's "economic sphere".

The most important idea from this speech is found in the next paragraph:

If we are serious about this, then our objective must be more than a disconnected series of missions, each conducted at huge expense and risk, and none building a lasting infrastructure to reduce the expense and risk of future operations. If we are serious, we will build capability, not just on the ground but in space. And our objective must be to make the use of space for human purposes a routine function.

He amplified this point a few paragraphs later:

Exploration that is not in support of something else strikes me as somehow selfish and unsatisfying, and not consistent with the fact that we are using public funds for this enterprise, no matter how small a fraction of the total budget they may be.

If the architecture of the exploration phase is not crafted with sustainability in mind, we will look back on a century or more of huge expenditures with nothing more to show for them than a litter of ritual monuments scattered across the planets and their moons.

I think that though this may not have been his intention, these quotes highlight most of my current frustration with NASA's current approach to executing the Vision for Space Exploration. Having NASA develop its Constellation architecture means that 20 years from now, it will be just as hard for a commercial entity to get to the moon as it would be if Constellation was cancelled tomorrow. Nothing that is being done "reduces the risk or expense of future operations" or "makes the use of space for human purposes a routine function." I'm glad that at least someone is trying to tie this all back to actual benefit to the nation. I'm also glad that John pointed out that the whole "NASA only spends less than 1% of the federal budget" line does not give NASA carte blanche to spend that money however it darned well pleases. That money is supposed to be spent in a way that furthers the national interest, preferably in a way that makes space more accessible for everyone.

Now, NASA isn't completely neglecting its responsibility to help reduce the risk and expense of future commercial, defense, and NASA operations. They are doing such things as COTS and Centennial Challenges. And people in power seem to be finally wising-up to the idea that COTS is the only real hope for reducing the gap, and the only way to economically services the ISS once the Shuttle is finally retired. But I do think that it's a big negative mark that the vast majority of the money NASA will spend over the next decade on Constellation has nothing to do with making the moon easier for everyone to access in the future.

There's been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a "Lunar COTS". Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won't have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they'll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space. The smart thing to do would be to start finding ways to develop or promote those commercial capabilities from the start. Things like funding research or sponsoring prizes for fielding the technologies needed for propellant depots. Acting as a customer for commercial services especially on-orbit propellants. Acting as a better customer for commercially attained lunar environmental data. Finding ways to promote translunar tourism and eventually lunar orbital (or Lagrange point) stations. Finding ways consistent with federal laws to act as an anchor tenant, to champion these new technologies, to fund demonstrator missions, and even to put money aside in escrow for being a leading customer for these new capabilities.

For a short duration before Griffin got in as NASA's administrator, NASA was actually acting in a way to more fully fulfill mandate to "promote commercial as well as international participation "to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests." Under the guidance of O'keefe and Steidle, NASA setup several billion dollars worth of "Human and Robotic Technologies" research to help develop and field the technologies that would allow it to more effectively achieve its exploration goals. It was set to operate its exploration architecture in a way to leverage to the maximum extent possible existing and future commercial capabilities. To act as though NASA can't do that is to ignore the fact that that was its very plan up until Griffin took the reins.

I guess the question boils down to what Marburger said: do we intend to extend humanity's economic sphere of influence to include the rest of the Solar System?

NGEC-2 Summary Part II: Speakers, Ideas, and Memes

In addition to the working groups, there were several speakers throughout the conference. While there most ideas presented at space conferences aren't particularly new, there were a few ideas from the various speakers (and from conversations I had at the conference) that I thought were worth mentioning. This may be a bit random, but I'm going to just list several of the ideas I found most interesting and new.

Buzz Aldrin was one of the breakfast speakers during the conference. Though I was sleep-deprived enough that I couldn't concentrate during most of his talk, he made an interesting (if not heretical) point about "astronauts". The "naut" part of astronaut, taikonaut, or cosmonaut, refers to "nautical"--coming from the concept of an astronaut as someone who knew how to navigate in space. Basically a pilot, an astrogator, someone who knows orbital dynamics, and knows how to fly spacecraft. His point was that not everyone who flies on a vehicle in space is an astronaut. I think he was saying this to try and distinguish space tourists from actual NASA astronauts, but I think his point is more interesting than that. For most space flights, you really don't need more than one or two astronauts. Most of the people who fly into space don't need to know how to navigate by the stars, or how to plot a trajectory, or how to null out the rotations on a vehicle. You might want a backup pilot, but not everyone who flies into space needs to or should be a fly-boy. Now, there's a bit of an emotional appeal to the idea of being able to call oneself an astronaut because one flew over 100km, enough so that it's probably still worth leaving that tradition in place for now--my point was just that those paying space travellers don't need to be trained or treated in the same way as a career spacecraft pilot.

Taber MacCallum of Paragon Space Development Corp gave probably the most interesting talk at the conference. Some of the earlier talks had copies of the slides posted on the NGEC-2 site, so I thought they were going to do the same for Taber's talk. Alas, as of the last time I checked, this didn't turn out to be the case. If anyone can snag me a copy of his presentation, that would be greatly appreciated. Taber and his wife were members of the original Biosphere 2 team, and he spent at least part of his time talking about lessons learned from that project. The biggest and most important part of his presentation was about the role of "leadership" in entrepreneurial ventures. He made the point that I've made in several instances that entrepreneurial ventures are high-stress, high-ambiguity environments. As I understood it, his point was that leadership in many cases boils down to emotional maturity. How we deal with our egos, with stress, with uncertainty, and with critical decisions. He made the interesting point that when a person gets identified too closely with a certain technical project or solution, it's often easy to allow the success or failure of that project to become intimately tied to one's self-worth. In such situations it becomes very hard to act objectively, and very easy to act in an emotionally immature fashion. I've seen this before (a lot) in myself, and I think that most readers could probably find examples in their own lives of such shortcomings. I know that when I've been championing an idea, and shoots holes in it, that sometimes I end up becoming very defensive, and will actively start blocking out evidence that contradicts my position. I usually calm down later, apologize, and get back to work. But it's a valid point--and an extremely dangerous one for entrepreneurs (or other people in leadership positions). As one person put later on in the conference, the single most likely thing that could hinder the development of commercial space is the personalities of the key players involved. Ironically, I think he might be right. While the technical, financial, and market obstacles are real and severe, the emotional, ego, and personality challenges may actually be more important in the long run. Just a thought.

Another interesting idea came up in the discussion in our lunar access working group about space ferries. One of the members of our team was an engineer at a major commercial satellite manufacturer. On several occasions, when discussing various alternative commercial means for delivering satellites to orbit or to GEO, I've had friends like Dennis Wingo bring up the risk aversion of the satellite manufacturers/launchers as an insurmountable show-stopper. As the logic went, launch costs are such a small percentage of the overall costs (and minuscule compared to the future revenue streams) that doing things that would reduce launch costs wouldn't really be very interesting to satellite builders/launchers, because the risk of doing something new would be too high. I had been repeating this conventional wisdom, when my teammate suggested a slightly different viewpoint. He agreed that satellite builders and launchers were very risk averse, by necessity. They really don't want to buy the first flight of some new transportation concept. Higher risks correspond with higher liability premiums. However, he made the point that after the initial risk has been reduced through a demo (or preferably two or three), that launch costs actually end up being very important. He said that while launch costs weren't the majority of the cost of building, launching, and activating a satellite, they were significant, and investors and customers really hammer on them to try and find the best deals they can. The fact that people are willing to launch on rockets with known worse reliability track records (Ariane V and Sea Launch for instance) in order to get a better launch cost should put to lie the idea that satellite builders and launchers are so risk averse that they'll never get involved in a new technology until after its been in service for a long time. One shouldn't assume that they'll be able to just sign customers up right from the start, but at least from what he was suggesting, the barrier to entry into supplying services to that market might be a little lower than I had originally suspected. Another idea that came up in the conversation was that the sooner you could convince insurers that your service provides a net decrease in risk, the more likely they'd be leaned on by customers and investors to take advantage of that service (in order to lower their premiums). Once again, just some more food for thought.

Another interesting point, brought up by Ken Davidian regarded the aging of the NASA workforce. At the time of Apollo 11, the average age of a NASA employee was about 29 years old. Now it's over 55. This has very important ramifications for the future of NASA and commercial space development, particularly with Griffin's statements on several occasions that NASA was going to be relying on more experienced engineers for Constellation, instead of hiring on a bunch of younger engineers for the project.

Unfortunately, I've been asked not to blog about one of the most interesting new ideas that I heard at the conference. Maybe at some point once my friend has had more chance to spread his meme from inside the agency I can blog about it without risking getting the idea tossed out as being "Not Invented Here".

Lastly, in addition to the working groups and the planned speakers, this conference ended up being a great chance for networking. I finally got to meet Grant Bonin in person (he's been trying to rope me into writing a commercial Mars transportation white paper for a while now). I got to meet a few people from the NASASpaceFlight forums. On Wednesday night, Tiff and I (and some friends from Santa Clara) got to go swing dancing in San Francisco, and we were able to arrange a meeting with Jake McGuire (who I've known from the sci.space.* newsgroups for over 11 years now). And on Friday night we had dinner with both Henry Cate's. For the conference, we were staying at the house of the one who hosts the Bay Area Moon Society meetings, and on Friday we had dinner with him and his wife and several of his kids and their families. His son Henry is the one who started the Carnival of Space last year.

I hope they have another conference like this next year. The work was fun, but I enjoyed getting to finally meet some of these people even more.

Next Generation Exploration Conference 2 (Part I)

Apparently unbeknownst to most people in the space blogosphere, there was a second space related conference going on in Silicon Valley this past week (at about the same time). This conference, the second "Next Generation Exploration Conference" was an invitation-only conference for young, "emerging global space leaders" put on by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate's "Commercial Development Policy" group (now headed by Ken Davidian), and by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. The focus of the working conference was commercial opportunities in cislunar space, and our goal was to put together a document overviewing some of the commercial opportunities in cislunar space, fleshing out some detail on the nearest term and most feasible of those opportunities, and making suggestions to NASA (and industry/academia) on what could be done to help enable those opportunities.

It was a lot of fun. I missed the first day (due to an important meeting we had down in Mojave on Monday and Tuesday) of the conference, but was able to make it there in time for the start of the working groups.

I was worried at first that with the sponsor being ESMD, and with the "alt.VSE" conference going on across town at Stanford at the same time, that there would be lots of pressure to turn the conference in a NASA-centric direction. In the preplanning discussions, I got chastised by one of the other attendees for suggesting that the Constellation architecture and Global Exploration Strategy didn't serve as much of a "point of departure" for the working groups, since it was pretty much irrelevant to commercial lunar development. I was worried that the desire to toe the NASA line would end up turning the conference into a brainstorming session for NASA-serving lunar businesses that 20 years from now might be feasible if NASA happens to get its architecture built and lunar base started.

Fortunately, Ken was able to find a way to focus the conference that was much more productive without degenerating into Ares-bashing, which I tend to be frequently guilty of. First, he made an important distinction between "commercialization" and "commercial development". I wasn't at the conference on the day he explained this concept, but as I understand it, "commercialization" is more or less taking some NASA-provided function, and contracting it out to the private sector. This could be things like "commercial" ISS resupply, where NASA is having the private sector serve it in a more cost effective manner than it could do on its own. "Commercial development" on the other hand is when a commercial actor creates a good or service to meet the needs of various groups, among which NASA may or may not be one of them. For instance, if a company were to develop a crew/cargo transport vehicle for servicing Bigelow stations as well as the ISS, that might be more of a commercial development. His point was that while commercialization was good, true commercial development was better. The other thing Ken did was to suggest focusing primarily on near-term projects taking the current status quo as the point of departure.

Anyhow, with that focus, we split up into working groups. I joined the "Lunar Access" working group, which consisted of several NASA employees (including several people from the COTS program), several university students, and a couple of people from "Big" aerospace, and one or two other representatives of the entrepreneurial space access community (including the guy at SpaceX who is in charge of most of their lunar business development).

We started out by looking at the long-term of what kind of commercial ecosystem we'd like to see in cislunar space over the next few decades, and then focusing back on transportation segments and business opportunities that were either feasible now, or that needed to be started in the near term. The big conclusion we came to was that the transportation needs of commercial lunar ventures (frequent access, low marginal cost, etc) did not line up very well with the planned Constellation architecture, and that therefore commercial lunar transportation would be important for a lunar ventures. We weren't necessarily suggesting abandoning Constellation, just stating that for non-governmental ventures, other transportation options needed to be available. So as I said, we worked back to the near-term to figure out what steps would need to (and could be) taken in the near term, and spent most of our time fleshing out the ideas that we came up with. I'll probably go into more detail in further blog posts, but the seven opportunities we found most interesting were:

• Developing off-the-shelf Automated Rendezvous and Docking systems
• Space Tugs
• Space Ferries (I'll go into the distinction between these two in another post)
• Propellant Depots
• Standardized Lunar Microlander Buses
• Testbeds for proving out technologies on orbit
• An ESPA-ring derived secondary payload system for lunar payloads
  

I was mostly involved in the second, third, and fourth ideas. So, we fleshed each of these ideas out, including putting some thoughts down into who could use these services, who might be actors in supplying or helping develop these services, what things NASA or industry could do to enable these opportunities, and what sort of time frame these things would likely occur in. It probably would help if next time they do this, they involve more business people, particularly among the mentoring/moderating staff (most of the people in my group were engineers). I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to find angel investors, VC managers, and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are interested enough in space, and interested enough in working with young people to help provide a more thorough business analysis. But, as it is, the results we were able to put together were at least rather informative. Once the finalized document we produced is ready, I'll post a link to it so you all can see more of what we came up with.

It's Not Important Whether You Win or Lose...

...it's how you place the blame. Or at least that's how a friend of mine at NASA once put it.

Apparently, in the wake of yet more news leaks about severe technical issues on Ares I, Mike Griffin decides to play the blame game (hat tip: Space Politics):

A: Let me get down to the bottom of it. There were winners and losers in the contractor community as to who was going to get to do what on the next system post shuttle. And we didn’t pick (Lockheed Martin’s) Atlas 5, in consultation with the Air Force for that matter, because it wasn’t the right vehicle for the lunar job. Obviously, we did pick others. So people who didn’t get picked see an opportunity to throw the issue into controversy and maybe have it come out their way.

I'm sure the guys in Denver are getting a hoot out of this. Of all the people who have a reason to be upset at the massive waste that is Ares-I/Ares-V, the LM/ULA guys I know have actually been rather politic about their complaints.

You see, they're too busy working on making a vehicle that's safe enough to fly people and affordable enough to do so entirely on the private market, without needing multi-billion dollar sole-source contracts from NASA. Of course, Mike may actually have a point though. If there is anyone outside of NASA HQ who is to blame for making Ares-I look bad, it probably is the Atlas V guys...

Just not in the way Griffin is insinuating...

The Perfect Storm?

Just wanted to post a link to a good article by Shubber over on Space Cynics.

Shubber's basic hypothesis is that the combination of economic pressures on the country, and NASA's current Constellation plans will likely lead to a cancellation (or at least gutting) of NASA's manned spaceflight program. While I sometimes disagree with the Space Cynics (or their tone), I think Shubber's hypothesis in this article is probably spot-on.

But I had a few comments I wanted to share.

First off, I share Shubber's amusement at those who think that we aren't in a serious economic downturn. I don't think I've blogged much about this, but I've pretty much been convinced for the last five years that the housing bubble was an unsustainable farce, and that when the market was finally allowed to clear out some of these malinvestments, that things were going to get ugly for a while. My problem has always been timing--when I am right, I tend to be right a little too far in advance (for instance, I figured that the tech bubble was a bubble all the way back in '97 or '98, even though it took another few years for the bubble to actually burst). Unfortunately, I think this downturn is going to be very hard on the entrepreneurial space industry as well. It wasn't just the collapse of the LEO comsat market that doomed the last wave of alt.space attempts--the general slowdown of the market at the same time was also a major contributor.

Second off, I think Shubber's point about Weldon retiring is also important. A lot of people who are defenders of Shuttle Derived HLVs (the Shaft, Longfellow, Shuttle-C, DIRECT, etc) like to fall back on parochial interests to save the day. The argument goes that the Shuttle program just provides too many jobs in important places to ever be canceled, regardless of if it makes any technical or economic sense. However, I wonder how true this really is. With Weldon retiring, will there really be anyone with clout on the manned spaceflight side of things that could stand-up to canceling or gutting the program? Especially if the funding is competing with bio-ethanol, entitlements, or funding the Great Important Super-Duper War Against IslamoNaziHitlerFascism?!!!!1!eleven!!1!

Third, while I agree with Shubber's overall point about the utility of the ISS, I think a caveat is worth mentioning. While I agree that ISS was very overhyped as far as its commercial potential, I think it also provides insufficient evidence on whether or not there is potential for commercial orbital research. Without frequent, reliable, low-cost access to space, there isn't any chance that orbital research can compete very well with terrestrial research, and ISS hasn't done anything to help solve that problem. Now, it may turn out that even with frequent access to an orbital facility (say weekly flights, ticket prices below $5M per person), that the case for orbital microgravity research just really isn't that compelling. But until we've resolved the access situation, I don't think we can truly pass final judgement on microgravity research.

My last thought deals with Shubber's last two paragraphs, where he says:

One thing that may give some of you heart, though, is that if NASA officially leaves the manned space game the door is wide open to you private sector proponents who have long claimed that they were the main obstacle to the successful private development of the sector.

… of course, if that wasn’t really the reason, then I suspect you aren’t going to be quite as happy about my prediction coming true as one might expect you to be.

I do have to admit that I did once think this way--that NASA manned spaceflight was holding us all back. I still think that NASA is hurting things, but mostly in the form of opportunity costs. By them blowing billions on playing steely-eyed rocket boys and Apollo reruns, they forgo the opportunity to really help the private space market blossom in a way that would benefit everyone in the long run. Just getting rid of them isn't going to change the financial difficulty of raising money for commercial space launch, and it isn't going to make the engineering any easier either.

That's not saying that the end of NASA's manned spaceflight program would necessarily be a total tragedy--just that it isn't going to really directly help private space development either.

Anyway you face it, we've got a long hard slog ahead of ourselves. NASA could have made some real progress during the window it had over the past four years, but that opportunity is pretty much gone. Whether NASA manned spaceflight goes on, or ends, it's still mostly irrelevant to the kind of work that needs to be done in order to become a truly spacefaring civilization.

Discussion of Dr. Griffin's STA Comments on ESAS

I've had several people in several places ask me if I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Griffin's comments to the STA this week (for reference the text of his comments is available here). While I don't have the time to go into every single disagreement I have with what he said, I think there are a couple of key points I would like to point out. In other words, I've come to discuss Griffin, not to Fisk him.

Missing the Vision

Dr Griffin starts his defense of the chosen Constellation architecture by framing it "in the
context of policy and law that dictate NASA’s missions." As he said on page 2:

Any system architecture must be evaluated first against the tasks which it is
supposed to accomplish. Only afterwards can we consider whether it accomplishes
them efficiently, or presents other advantages which distinguish it from competing
choices.

He then went on to discuss President Bush's original announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration, and the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. I agree that it is important to make sure you know up-front what yardstick your program is going to be measured by. However, I think one thing becomes quickly obvious as you read Dr Griffin's quotes from those documents--he entirely focuses on the technical implementation details, and never once mentions the actual policy goals!

Quoting from "A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for U.S. Space Exploration":

Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.

These goals are the yardstick by which any VSE implementation needs to be judged. The rest of the technical details of how the space exploration program is carried out needs to be viewed in the light of these three areas of US interests. It doesn't matter if a proposed implementation hits all of the other technical details, if it doesn't really further US scientific, security, and economic interests, it isn't really compliant with the goals of the president's Vision.

Going into a little more detail on these goals, the Renewed Spirit of Discovery document continues (emphasis mine):

In support of this goal, the United States will:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.

Once again, all of the specific technical details like the CEV, retiring Shuttle in 2010, etc. are all pursuant to these goals.

Lastly, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 (available here) states, once again with my emphasis:

The Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations.

Once again, you will notice that the key goals of this Vision, elucidated by both the President and Congress include not only science, but commerce, and in the president's case security.

I could go on about how Dr Griffin's focus on the parts of the Authorization Act that talk about heavy lift and shuttle derived ignored other sections in the act that talk about "encouraging the commercial use and development of space to the greatest extent practicable" (see Section 101.a.2. parts B-C). But I think the fundamental issue is that by focusing exclusively on just the technical side of the requirements, and not on the underlying goals, Griffin is missing the Vision.

Growth Potential

On page 7, Dr. Griffin starts making his case for the Constellation architecture with this somewhat ironic statement about the Space Shuttle:

Once before, an earlier generation of U.S. policymakers approved a spaceflight architecture intended to optimize access to LEO. It was expected – or maybe “hoped” is the better word – that, with this capability in hand, the tools to resume deep space exploration would follow. It didn’t happen, and with the funding which has been allocated to the U.S. civil space program since the late 1960s, it cannot happen. Even though from an engineering perspective it would be highly desirable to have transportation systems separately optimized for LEO and deep space, NASA’s budget will not support it. We get one system; it must be capable of serving in multiple roles, and it must be designed for the more difficult of those roles from the outset.

And then Dr Griffin goes on to try and justify an architecture based on building a duplicative LEO capable only launch vehicle first, and hoping that when that vehicle is finally done, that there will be funding for developing "the tools to resume deep space exploration"...

After that auspicious start, Dr. Griffin then reminds us that "the new system will and should be in use for many decades." Of course some of the historical analogies he draws could lead one to different solutions than it led him. For instance, he mentions that "In space, derivatives of Atlas and Delta and Soyuz are flying a half-century and more after their initial development." An interesting thing to note about Atlas and Delta is that the only reason why vehicles with the name Atlas and Delta are "still flying" a half-century after their initial development, is precisely because they are only derivatives of the original. In fact, the current EELVs have very little in common with the vehicles that originally bore their names.

On pages 8 and 9, Dr. Griffin concludes that (emphasis mine):

The implications of this are profound. We are designing today the systems that our grandchildren will use as building blocks, not just for lunar return, but for missions to Mars, to the near-Earth asteroids, to service great observatories at Sun-Earth L1, and for other purposes we have not yet even considered. We need a system with inherent capability for growth.

While I disagree with the direction Dr. Griffin is going, I do agree with his point in that last sentence. We do need a transportation architecture that has inherent capability for growth. I just don't think that the Constellation architecture really fits that bill.

The Promise of Commercial Space

Now, lest you think I'm going to spend yet another post hammering on Dr. Griffin, I'd like to quote a part of his speech that I really agreed with:

Further application of common sense also requires us to acknowledge that now is the time, this is the juncture, and we are the people to make provisions for the contributions of the commercial space sector to our nation’s overall space enterprise. The development and exploitation of space has, so far, been accomplished in a fashion that can be described as “all government, all the time”. That’s not the way the American frontier was developed, it’s not the way this nation developed aviation, it’s not the way the rest of our economy works, and it ought not to be good enough for space, either. So, proactively and as a matter of deliberate policy, we need to make provisions for the first step on the stairway to space to be occupied by commercial entrepreneurs – whether they reside in big companies or small ones.

I have to say that for all my disagreements with Griffin, he at least talks a good talk when it comes to commercial space. I full-heartedly agree with his point in this paragraph. When you think about it, even assuming everything works out according to his plan, Constellation is never going to be capable of supporting more than a dozen people off-planet at any time. While that may be a lot more than we have now, Ed Wright has a point when he says that that is a round-off error, not an exploration program. Basically, the only way we're going to see large numbers of people off planet, and the only way we're going to see the large-scale manned exploration and settlement of our solar system in our life times, is if the private sector can eventually play a much more expansive role in space transportation. As it is right now, so long as the commercial industry continues to play second fiddle to parochial interests and NASA-centricism, we're not really going to go much of anywhere.

So, the fact that NASA is at least doing something to help promote that day is a sign that they at least partially get it. A successful and thriving entrepreneurial space transportation industry is going to help them actually achieve their goal of extending human life throughout the solar system in a robust program of space exploration.

Griffin continues with more good comments in his next paragraph:

If designed for the Moon, the use of the CEV in LEO will inevitably be more expensive than a system designed for the much easier requirement of LEO access and no more. This lesser requirement is one that, in my judgment, can be met today by a bold commercial developer, operating without the close oversight of the U.S. government, with the goal of offering transportation for cargo and crew to LEO on a fee-for-service basis.

But here is where the conversation takes a dangerous turn:

Now again, common sense dictates that we cannot hold the ISS hostage to fortune; we cannot gamble the fate of a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollar facility on the success of a commercial operation, so the CEV must be able to operate efficiently in LEO if necessary. But we can create a clear financial incentive for commercial success, based on the financial disincentive of using government transportation to LEO at what will be an inherently higher price.

To this end, as I have noted many times, we must be willing to defer the use of government systems in favor of commercial services, as and when they reach maturity. When commercial capability comes on line, we will reduce the level of our own LEO operations with Ares/Orion to that which is minimally necessary to preserve capability, and to qualify the system for lunar flight.

While I agree that the government not only is the government being "willing to defer in favor of commercial services" is a really good idea, I think that this approach (of hedging their bets by coming up with a competing in-house launcher) is fraught with risk. Also, while on first blush, it may appear to be common sense to not "hold the ISS hostage to fortune", it is my contention that this line of reasoning not only doesn't hold as much water as it seems.

First off, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, including in Griffin's statements above, a commercial solution to ISS crew/cargo is going to be a lot more affordable than the in-house Ares-1/Orion solution. It has been mentioned before by people high up at NASA, that they really need COTS to succeed, because if they have to fly all the ISS missions themselves (especially if ISS doesn't get retired in 2016, which Dr. Griffin mentioned in this speech as a possibility), there really won't be anywhere near enough money to develop the lunar portions of the proposed Constellation architecture in time for the 2020 lunar return goal. You could say in a way that the existing Constellation architecture holds the rest of the Vision hostage to the fortune of COTS. If COTS doesn't succeed, there's no way NASA is going to be able to afford executing on the rest of the vision. If the supposed "backup plan" for ISS resupply won't produce acceptable results anyway if COTS doesn't turn out, NASA shouldn't be trying to make it a backup plan at all--they should invest more heavily in making sure that there are multiple COTS competitors and that they have enough resources to succeed. One of the single biggest execution risks for any COTS company is financing risks. And having a NASA "backup plan" that could potentially compete with them is one of the single biggest obstacles to be overcome in raising money for a COTS team.

Which brings me to my other concern. The danger of having NASA in-house launch vehicles and space access capabilities that can serve as a backup to COTS also allows them to directly compete with COTS if the budgetary situation goes sour. Think about it. If Ares-1 finally gets built and working, but Ares-V doesn't get funded, there's nothing for Ares-1 to do but service ISS. With how hard the esteemed congressmen from Florida, Utah, and Alabama are fighting to maintain the Shuttle workforce and infrastructure (even to the point of suggesting continuing to fly the Shuttle!), does anyone really think that they would just "stand down" at that point, even if there was a clearly superior commercial alternative? Not very likely. I'm sure they would come up with some technical reason why Ares-I was superior (after all, our probabilistic risk assessment says that Ares-I has a 1:2106.5923 chance of killing a crew, while our numbers show that they have a 1:500 chance--who do you want flying our brave astronauts?) and find a way to not actually stand down. The frustrating thing is that by setting things up the way NASA is doing, the NASA people don't even have to be malicious for such a result to happen--it's a natural and likely consequence of the perverse incentives that NASA and Congress are setting up.

So, while I personally think that Dr. Griffin really and emphatically believes in and supports commercial space development, I'm afraid that there's a high chance that some of his well-intended choices could end up coming back to haunt us.

Moon, MARS!!!! and Beyond

The last item I'd like to point out in Dr. Griffin's speech is one of the justifications he used for the "1.5 launch" architecture they selected. Dr. Griffin made the point that while he feels that Constellation needs to be backward compatible with ISS as a backup plan, it also needs to be forward compatible with Mars, because sometime in the 2030s, we're going to be going there. Now, I'm of the opinion that trying to guess what the best technical approach will be for a problem 30 years from now is somewhat of a fools errand. But that's just me I guess.

So, starting on page 16 he begins to layout his case:

On the other end of the scale, we must judge any proposed architecture against the requirements for Mars. We aren’t going there now, but one day we will, and it will be within the expected operating lifetime of the system we are designing today. We know already that, when we go, we are going to need a Mars ship with a LEO mass equivalent of about a million pounds, give or take a bit. I’m trying for one-significant-digit accuracy here, but think “Space Station”, in terms of mass.

Now, I'm not going to go into the fact that there are probably plenty of other approaches to Mars exploration that can change the equation entirely. That's a post for another day. For now, let's just run with that premise.

He then repeats the "everyone knows that ISS taught us that using 20 ton vehicles to build something big is a bad idea" catechism, but that's not what I'd like to discuss. The real gem is in this paragraph on page 17 (emphasis mine):

But if we split the EOR lunar architecture into two equal but smaller vehicles, we will need ten or more launches to obtain the same Mars-bound payload in LEO, and that is without assuming any loss of packaging efficiency for the launch of smaller payloads. When we consider that maybe half the Mars mission mass in LEO is liquid hydrogen, and if we understand that the control of hydrogen boiloff in space is one of the key limiting technologies for deep space exploration, the need to conduct fewer rather than more launches to LEO for early Mars missions becomes glaringly apparent.

It is true that one can draw that inference--that hydrogen boiloff means you should build as big of an HLV as possible. However, the conclusion I would draw is that if cryogenic propellant storage technologies are "key limiting technologies for deep space explortion", then the right answer is to stop trying to kludge around the problem--develop them! Don't use the existing state of the art in propellant handling and problems that are still 20 years down the road drive multi-billion dollar development projects today.

There are current technologies under development that could yield very low to zero boiloff of cryogenic propellants. There are multiple groups (ULA, Boeing, groups working with Glenn Research Center, etc.) pursuing multiple approaches to solving these problems. There are passive cooling and active cooling techniques. This isn't some high-risk technology like nuclear fusion. The technologies needed for cryogenic fluid management in space are mostly low-risk extensions of 40 years worth of research and development. More to the point, many if not all of these technologies need to be developed to make Constellation work for lunar trips anyway, and would still be needed for Mars trips.

Is 2030 really so close that we can't afford to do this right and actually develop the technologies we need instead of trying to kludge by with existing technologies?

Once you have the boiloff issue reduced or solved, that ~500klb of hydrogen ceases to be a headache, and begins to be an opportunity. That's a lot of demand for propellant in orbit, and it can be supplied commercially. You're already going to need propellant transfer technologies anyway if you have to launch the hydrogen in multiple launches, so what's to stop launching it in even smaller launches?

I guess my point is that if one of the key arguments for the 1.5 launch architecture over a more commercial one, or a less expensive shuttle derived one like DIRECT is hydrogen boiloff, I think their kludge around the issue isn't the right approach, and that they'd be better off just doing it the right way. Also, part of the reason why we have a federally funded aerospace program is to help prove out the technologies necessary for enabling the commercial exploitation of space, and actually solving problems like these would be much a much more responsible use of public funds than developing a kludge around point design like Ares V that doesn't advance the state of the art for the commercial benefit of the country.

Conclusions

I guess overall while there were some good points, there was also a lot of issues with Dr. Griffin's latest defense of Constellation. As discussed, I think that an a myopic focus on the technical details while ignoring the overall goals of the VSE has led to an architecture that isn't responsive to the key policy goals laid out by the president and reiterated by Congress (particularly with respect to promoting the commercial and security interests of the United States). I think that in spite of Griffin recognizing the need for growth and flexibility in any architecture, that he chose a rather brittle and inflexible one. I also think that while he showed that he does recognize the potential of commercial space, and the importance of NASA trying to promote it, I think that the way he's running COTS and Constellation will likely end up being highly counterproductive. Lastly, I think that in many cases, when confronted with a solvable engineering problem, Constellation has instead decided to kludge around the problem instead of properly solving it.

There are plenty of other issues I could've raised, but I figured these were some of the more obvious ones that I felt needed discussion.