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September 12, 2009

ULA papers for AIAA 2009

As quoted by Chris Bergin:

[Proposed Heavy Lift] launch vehicles require extensive development with costs ranging into the tens of billions of dollars and with first flight likely most of a decade away. In the end they will mimic the Saturn V programmatically: a single-purpose lifter with a single user who must bear all costs. This programmatic structure has not been shown to be effective in the long term. It is characterized by low demonstrated reliability, ballooning costs and a glacial pace of improvements.

The use of smaller, commercial launchers coupled with orbital depots eliminates the need for a large launch vehicle. Much is made of the need for more launches – this is perceived as a detriment. However since 75 percent of all the mass lifted to low earth orbit is merely propellant with no intrinsic value it represents the optimal cargo for low-cost, strictly commercial launch operations.

These commercial launch vehicles, lifting a simple payload to a repeatable location, can be operated on regular, predictable schedules. Relieved of the burden of hauling propellants, the mass of the Altair and Orion vehicles for a lunar mission is very small and can also be easily carried on existing launch vehicles. This strategy leads to high infrastructure utilization, economic production rates, high demonstrated reliability and the lowest possible costs.

This architecture encourages the exploration of the moon to be conducted not in single, disconnected missions, but in a continuous process which builds orbital and surface resources year by year. The architecture and vehicles themselves are directly applicable to Near Earth Object and Mars exploration and the establishment of a functioning depot at earth-moon L2 provides a gateway for future high-mass spacecraft venturing to the rest of the solar system.

That's right. Enough with trying to repeat Apollo. It's time to create a useful in-space infrastructure.

BTW, these innovative proposals are a result of formation of ULA, which is a pleasant surprise for me. I was concerned about the perceived monopoly when the launcher business was split out from Boeing and LockMart. But now it's clear that neither of the parent companies would ever dare to present anything like ULA does, because they suck on the big Ares/Orion tit, and dependant on it.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 10:36 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 373 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Current NASA algorithm:

     do {
          waste taxpayer money
     while (!commercial moon-capable alternative)

As soon as SpaceX or another competitor is running reliably, NASA will write a contract for delivering moon supplies.

Really, I don't know why we aren't lofting cheap microsatellites towards the moon and Mars:  network it, geo-map it, and start building a corpus of [geological | astronomical | meterological] data over time.

Loft some cheap robots and easy-to-assemble human habitats.

Once that's done, the tech should be in place to loft humans to the newly built moon base.

Posted by: Jeff Garzik at September 12, 2009 04:10 PM (KqRZJ)

2 Boeing won initial contract FIA on the strength of the proposal of the network of small[er] satellites, and what a disaster it turned out to be. Apparently the synthetic aperture in the visible spectrum is not as easy as it looks. Eventually the radar part was split away into something that can be implemented, but I'm afraid for high resolution optics we'll have to use heavy birds for quite a while yet.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 12, 2009 04:55 PM (/ppBw)

3 Another thing, Jeff - there is no viable cislunar economy at this time, so everything that's happening there occurs because government injects money. This is true for so-called "commercial services", which are merely less wasteful way to use the same government money than the current overly wasteful way (with the cost+ contracts).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 12, 2009 06:13 PM (/ppBw)

4 (re government funding)

Quite true...  the military and civilian spaceflight programs of past and present have been almost entirely dependent on government funding.

Given the relative costs of the technology at the time, I'm not sure there were viable alternatives in the past.

Present day?  Perhaps I am naive, but I sincerely believe that technology is cheap enough to permit matching of the right business plan with investment funding, sufficient to get a commercial venture going to the moon or Mars.

I think the moon is much more viable as a target for commercial ventures.  Given the distance, results can be seen in a matter of days, rather than months (Mars).

Posted by: Jeff Garzik at September 14, 2009 12:26 PM (KqRZJ)

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