Space Access Update #91 2/7/00
Copyright 2000 by Space Access Society
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We've once again spent some months thinking. With the White House
proposal for next year's federal budget due at Congress today, the
time has come to write. It's a Presidential election year, with
only one thing certain: There will be a new Administration coming
into office one year from now. Old policies have run their course,
and new ones will, even before any new Administration takes office,
begin to emerge from this year's budget battles, for better or
worse. Here's a pocket version of our views on "better".
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Contents:
- The Next Fifty Years, or, Why Cheap Access Matters
- The Last Five Years: NASA Gets Handed The Ball, And Drops It
- Eleven Months Till 2001 - Now What? SAS Policy Recommendations
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(SAS's eighth annual conference, "Space Access 2000", will be at
the Holiday Inn Old Town in Scottsdale Arizona April 27-29 - see
http://www.space-access.org for details)
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The Next Fifty Years: Why Cheap Access Matters
We don't generally go into the details of why we spend our days
pushing for something as obscure and unsexy as radically lower space
transportation costs - our supporters help for a whole range of
reasons, from the romance of exploration to infatuation with the
technology to a desire to make money. We'll confess to a streak of
all of these ourselves. But we do have, forgive us, more
universally compelling reasons for what we do.
The next fifty years will be, uh, interesting. Nobody can know the
future, but we have spent some time looking at where current trends
will likely lead over the rest of our Boomer lives. Not to mention
major parts of the lives of our children and grandchildren...
- The Good News
The good news is, world population growth is slowing. Previous
estimates of twelve billion people by 2050 have been scaled back to
around eight to ten billion - split the difference and call it nine
billion for now. This is mainly due to the historic tendency for
people to reproduce more slowly as they get more affluent; the world
as a whole is getting richer faster than we expected a few years
ago. Chances are by 2050 we'll only have about 50% more people than
now. Malthus was wrong; absent ecocatastrophe we won't starve.
- The Other Side of the Coin
The - bad? - let's say, interesting - news is, unless the computer
and communications revolutions go away, by 2050 a vastly higher
proportion of that moderately higher world population will have the
education and the desire to compete for the raw materials and the
energy resources needed for first-world affluence. It's not news
that our lifestyle is energy and resource-intensive. Eco-agonizing
aside, the consequences of this bear some examination.
First, some rough numbers. Of the six billion people now on this
planet, perhaps one billion have the education and assets to get
themselves a first-world lifestyle. But you won't keep the rest
down on the farm once they get a satellite internet link in their
village. Of the likely nine billion people of 2050, a majority - a
large majority - could have the knowledge to aspire to current
Western wealth levels. Will those aspiring multiple billions have
the assets? And if not, what will they do to get them?
To let the currently rich economies keep growing and accomodate all
the new arrivals too, we're faced with the need for on the order of
a ten-fold increase in world energy and raw materials inputs over
the next fifty years. That is a whole lot of ore and oil.
- Down The Current Path
Absent fundamental changes, the alternatives are grim:
- We in the West can leave our children to a future of working ever
harder for less and less as competition for slow-growing clean
resources intensifies and prices rise. No matter how much we put
into our 401-K's now, if there's little to buy with it, we'll grow
old poor.
- We can aquiesce in the strip-mining of the planet and stay
nominally rich in an increasingly unliveable world. World resources
aren't as limited as the Club of Rome thought, but they do come at a
price. For just one example, China has a huge population and is
determined to grow, but their chief domestic energy resource is
large amounts of very dirty soft coal. Sulfur and soot aside, we
still don't know what that much more CO2 will do. Multiply that
example by the entire developing world, and we have a problem -
ultimately, we're all downwind.
- We can teach our children to wage war for a disproportionate
share of world resources, at risk of losing our souls if we win and
of growing old poor if we lose. If we survive the wars, that is.
- What To Do?
Despair not - there is a better alternative. It's what we in the
West do best: Miracles. Also known as the technological leapfrog, a
fundamental advance that totally changes the equation. We have in
the past repeatedly made the pie so much bigger that everybody ends
up better off. We can, and will, and indeed must, do so again.
There are numerous possibilities for cleanly extracting many times
more resources and stretching them farther over the next fifty
years. Information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology
will all likely be of some help, and any of them might - might -
provide the revolutionary breakthrough that will let us be a rich
people on a clean peaceful planet two generations hence.
- Out of the Cradle
But we already know a clean way to provide a manifold increase in
energy and resources for this planet, and that's going off the
planet for them - orbital solar power, Lunar and asteroidal
minerals. Both are currently uneconomical almost entirely because
of the current astronomical cost of space transportation. Space
transport costs remain high in large part for organizational not
technical reasons. We have the engineers and the technology and the
management methods to solve the problem, but to date we've applied
these assets halfheartedly when we've applied them at all.
The stakes are huge, and personal - we boomers will grow old in
secure comfort only if the resources are there to make a large part
of the world rich. We would be fools if we let bureaucratic inertia
prevent us from developing one of the surest paths to those
resources: Radically cheaper space transportation.
The time to start was ten years ago. We tried, but our efforts got
sidetracked.
The future is coming fast and it has no pause control. The time to
start again is, now.
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The Last Five Years: NASA Gets The Ball, And Drops It
In 1988, a bunch of us met in a private home in southern California
and came to a surprisingly unanimous conclusion: The technology was
there to build reusable spacelift vehicles that could radically
reduce launch costs.
We attached a number of "ifs" to this conclusion, almost all
regarding organization rather than technology, almost all boiling
down to observing the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in all
aspects of the project - despite the strong tendency of the US space
bureaucracies to do the complete opposite. Keep the requirements,
organization, design, and operations simple, and keep the design
"savable", that is, inherently capable of intact mission abort at
any point (and thus testable in small increments). (For more on all
this, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/SSX.html)
To make a long story short, we got the SDIO Single-Stage-To-Orbit
project started in the early nineties, and despite the project's
truncation by the then-Democratic Congress, DC-X flew in 1993,
proving out much of what we'd advocated. We began pushing hard to
get some sort of spacegoing followon to DC-X reinstated - we hoped
built by the same proven team under the same proven organization
using the same promising design.
- And the Handoff is to NASA...
Alas, in 1994, the Clinton Administration ordered that henceforth,
all reusable launch vehicle development would be done at NASA, all
expendable in DOD. Our grave misgivings about NASA were what led us
to aim the SSTO project at SDIO in the first place, but at that
point it was NASA or nothing - we decided to support NASA and hope
for (and work for) the best.
The renewed SSTO project, now called X-33 (and much altered from
SDIO's KISS approach), became the centerpiece of a NASA five-year
plan aimed at generating the data needed to support a national
policy decision on Reusable Launch Vehicle development by the year
2000. X-33 was to be a project to build a half-scale prototype of a
single-stage-to-orbit Shuttle replacement and fly it by March 1999.
- Analysis of the Fumble
A digression: It's well known that X-33 has been in trouble almost
from the start, but there's been a lot of smoke blown on the subject
of why. Here's what we've seen actually happening with the program
over the past five years.
In 1994, when the NASA X-33 competition was first contemplated,
Lockheed Corporation put some effort into promoting their "Aero-
Ballistic Rocket" as an alternative. Lockheed claimed that this
vehicle was a sure enough thing that the government should skip the
test-vehicle stage and pay Lockheed six billion dollars to go
straight to a production cargo-carrying version of this rocket.
The Aero-Ballistic Rocket was the direct ancestor of the current
Lockheed-Martin X-33 and its proposed Venturestar Shuttle-
replacement followon. It was a wingless lifting-body reusable
single-stage rocket vehicle powered by "linear aerospike" engines.
It looked somewhat like a plump pumpkinseed with the back end cut
off square and small uptilted fins on either side. Lockheed was
full of hints that ABR was a piece of cake, that all the critical
technology was already in hand from "black" projects they'd done in
recent decades. They took this line both while they were trying to
head the X-33 project off, then while they were bidding for X-33.
It was, alas, untrue, as we'll see.
- Technical Details
The advantage of a lifting-body is that it doesn't (shouldn't) need
wings to maneuver during orbital reentry then land on a runway; it
thus saves the weight of wings - minimum vehicle weight of course
being critical to a succesful Single Stage To Orbit vehicle. The
disadvantage is that the vehicle shape is such that propellant tanks
can't be the optimum circular cross-section shape that minimizes
tank weight for a given mass of propellant - any tank shape that
doesn't have a round cross-section will tend to try to balloon out
to being round anyway as soon as it's pressurized; preventing non-
round tanks from doing this requires heavy reinforcement. What
lifting bodies gain from omitting wings they more than lose again on
heavier tanks, at least with traditional tank construction methods.
Lockheed claimed to have solved the tank-weight problem, via "multi-
lobed" tanks that combined partial circular sections with clever
internal bracing. Further, these tanks were to be made out of
graphite-epoxy composite rather than aluminum. The result was
supposed to be complex-shaped tanks that would conform to the
lifting-body shape while being just as light as conventional
circular-section tanks. We'll come back to this.
- A Broken Play From the Start
Lockheed (by this point, Lockheed-Martin) won the X-33 competition
with their by-then renamed "Venturestar" lifting body rocketship.
One of the reasons NASA gave for selecting this bid was that it
*required* more new advanced technologies [and thus higher risk] than
any of the other vehicles bid. So much for the KISS principle.
A year later, X-33 project management was in chaos, and X-33 vehicle
weight was growing fast. The chaos was acknowledged to be a result
of the project contracts having been spread over half the country to
gain political support for the bid; X-33 was a small centralized
"Skunk Works"-style effort in name only. Project management was
duly re-consolidated in southern California.
The weight growth however was from more than just bad management.
Lockheed-Martin apparently grossly oversold how complete their
design work was when they bid for X-33 - after they'd won, and also
after they'd already designed and ordered the propellant tanks, NASA
discovered that their vehicle shape would be dangerously unstable
during reentry and landing. They had to change the vehicle shape
significantly. Part of the weight growth was additional standoff
structure between tanks and the reshaped vehicle skin. Part of it
was enlarged tip fins plus added vertical stabilizers. Part of it
was the need to add dead-weight ballast in the nose to compensate
for the additional weight aft.
Weight growth, of course, means performance loss. X-33's ability to
make the Mach 15 spec was abandoned years ago, and the Mach 13+
required to make it to the primary Montana landing site has been in
doubt for a while now. Any further weight growth, and X-33 will be
strictly Single-Stage-To-Utah - which means it will fall well short
of the target reentry aerothermal stress levels, as it can't go much
over Mach 10 without overshooting the Utah landing site.
- Blowing Smoke
One canard put forth by X-33 apologists has been that, oh well, the
other bids no doubt would have run into similar problems; such
problems are inevitable. To which we say, demonstrably untrue:
Rockwell's bid used the "winged body" shape that had been NASA's
preferred approach for a decade or more, a shape that thus had been
far more thoroughly tested than any three other configurations.
McDonnell-Douglas's bid, meanwhile, had gone through its
reentry/landing instability thrash the winter *before* the X-33
downselect - we still have a viewgraph of some of the configurations
they looked at before settling on some significant stability-
enhancing changes, months before the downselect.
And of course, part of L-M X-33's weight growth was the "multi-
lobed" propellant tanks growing considerably heavier than promised.
Neither Rockwell nor McDonnell-Douglas bid these; both used proven
circular-section tanks. X-33's graphite-epoxy "multi-lobed" liquid
hydrogen tanks have ended up over twice as heavy relative to the
weight of propellant carried as the Shuttle's 70's vintage aluminum
circular-section tanks - yet an X-33 tank still split open in test
last fall. Going over to aluminum will make the problem worse; X-
33's aluminum multi-lobed liquid oxygen tank is nearly four times as
heavy relative to the weight of propellant carried as Shuttle's
aluminum circular-section equivalent.
- Single-Stage-To-Uselessness
The ultimate irony here is that X-33's (and the rapidly-diverging
Venturestar design's also) stabilizer fins have grown to the point
where they're bigger (and presumably heavier) than the wings on
Rockwell's "winged-body" entry. X-33 is a lifting-body space
vehicle that not only fails miserably to solve the heavy-tanks
problem that's stopped past lifting-body proposals, but also manages
to negate the primary remaining lifting-body advantage by being so
unstable it requires wing-equivalent stabilizer fins anyway.
The Aero-Ballistic Rocket/Venturestar configuration is very much
turning out to be, doing SSTO the hard way.
Did we mention that the new advanced engines included in this (and
not the other two bids') X-33 are behind schedule, over budget, and
over weight? They do seem to be working OK in test so far, though
we haven't seen any actual performance numbers. Oh, and we're not
very impressed with the incremental nature of the X-33 test program
at this point - the vehicle has to make it from southern California
to northern Utah on the very first flight - not much chance to fly a
little, fix a little, fly a little more - X-33's first flight is all
or nothing.
On the whole, X-33 could serve as a textbook case on how not to
develop a useful aerospace vehicle.
- Bench NASA?
Five years ago, NASA ignored both our advice and the lessons of
history in setting up the X-33 program and selecting the prime
contractor.
Now it's five years and a billion dollars later, and judging from
the results so far, handing NASA sole responsibility for RLV was a
major mistake - a waste of most of that time and money. As we come
up on a year after it was originally supposed to fly, X-33 looks
like taking at least two years and hundreds of millions more, even
as its much-touted package of new technologies is becoming obviously
irrelevant to any practical space vehicle.
X-33 apologists have been saying this proves Single-Stage-To-Orbit
is impractical with currently available technologies. We say,
nonsense. What this proves is that if you deliberately pick the
most difficult available vehicle configuration, bid by a contractor
that turns out to be having problems delivering *anything* on time,
budget, and spec lately, and managed by an agency apparently
determined to ignore every lesson ever learned in America's rich
history of successful X-vehicle projects, you'll likely waste a good
chunk of money and time.
With X-33, NASA seems to have demonstrated conclusively that, as we
feared from the start, the agency is so beset with internal agendas
and bureaucratic bad habits that it is no longer institutionally
capable of applying the KISS principle to any high-profile project.
- NASA's New Plan
Meanwhile, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
told NASA in 1999 to come up with the promised year 2000 space
launch policy recommendations. The resulting Integrated Space
Transportation Plan (ISTP, not available on the Web, at least not
anywhere obvious), unveiled in late October, largely ignores the
industry input solicited under STAS (Space Transportation
Architecture Studies, contractor and NASA reports still available at
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codea/codeae/sta_study.html) over the
previous year.
ISTP ignores just about everything but internal NASA agendas. The
package reads like a turf-division deal between Johnson Space Center
and Marshall Space Flight Center - under this plan, JSC would get
major Shuttle upgrades plus another five years before NASA again
even considers replacing Shuttle, while MSFC would get all the
space-launch technology projects it wants ("Spaceliner 100"), as
long as they're so advanced there's no danger they'll produce any
alternative to Shuttle for at least twenty years.
What would US taxpayers get? When asked "who is the customer?" at
the ISTP unveiling, the answer from NASA was "...we must meet NASA's
requirements."
- Bench NASA
After five years of sole responsibility for developing reusable
launch technology, NASA apparently has no clue either how to
practically advance the state of the art, or even that there is any
customer for the technology outside of NASA. NASA is funded by US
taxpayers to support US defense, commercial, and scientific space
technology needs, for the ultimate benefit of the US public, but the
agency doesn't seem to remember who's paying the bills, or why we
pay them - NASA acts as if they exist purely for their own
bureacratic sake.
The policy of assigning sole responsibility for reusable launch to
NASA has become an obvious failure. The waning months of this
Administration are an appropriate time to start working out,
What Next?
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Eleven Months Till 2001, And We're Still Stuck On This Rock -
Now What? SAS FY 2001 Policy Recommendations
- On NASA X-33: If Lockheed-Martin truly believes X-33 is still
relevant to anything other than saving corporate face, let them
prove it by paying for all additional costs from this point forward.
NASA should support them in this if Lockheed-Martin chooses to
continue, but without spending any further taxpayer dollars on the
project. If indeed Lockheed-Martin is serious about Venturestar as
a genuine commercial project, and if indeed they believe X-33 still
has any relevance to the much-changed Venturestar design, let them
put their own money where their mouth is.
Otherwise, it's time to shut X-33 down as being an expensive lesson
in what not to do in pursuing cheaper space launch.
- On Federal loan guarantees for space launch projects: We oppose
any measure that would have the effect of picking and subsidizing a
"winner" or winners from among the variety of companies planning
low-cost launch projects. All such measures we have seen to date
have, for all practical purposes, been aimed at some specific
company. We do not oppose Federal support for commercial low-cost
launch ventures in general, but we have yet to see legislation
introduced that would provide such support on a level playing field.
- On Federal support for development of low-cost reusable launch
technology: Available funds should be increased modestly, should be
focussed on a variety of relatively small projects aimed at flight-
demonstrating a variety of different near-term payoff approaches,
should not be confined to projects proposed by the existing major
firms, should not be allocated by just one government agency, and
should be allocated by organizations and to organizations willing to
pay attention to past lessons on successfully advancing the
aerospace state-of-the-art via X-vehicle projects.
Specifically, we would like to see more funding for NASA "Future-X"
flight demonstrator projects, and also for similar projects in
appropriate (IE not hidebound-bureaucratized) agencies under DOD.
Competition is good - the recent policy of one specialty, one
center, eliminating intra-government competition, has greatly
reduced incentives to succeed, by reducing the danger of losing
funding to another agency in the event of failure. Instead,
agencies have taken to defending failure by claiming the job was
impossible anyway. Absent competition, who can prove otherwise?
Ideally, we would like to see, between NASA and DOD over the next
decade, one new start per year of a one-to-two hundred million
dollar-class reusable launch flight demonstrator project, with the
goal of giving all credible players (and not just the existing
majors) a chance to show what they can do.
There are a wide variety of credible approaches to cheap space
transportation. But commercial investors so far will not pay to see
which might fly and which won't; the payoff is too uncertain and too
long-term. The Federal government can, for no more per-year than
NASA spent on X-33, separate the wheat from the chaff, to the point
where a few years from now commercial investors (and government
procurement officials) will be able to make sensible low-risk
decisions on low-cost reusable space vehicles.
- Shuttle: The NASA Space Shuttle should be maintained and operated
on missions of national importance until its variety of functions
can be replaced by various more specialized lower-cost vehicles.
Routine NASA space transportation services should end up
commercially contracted for, just as NASA currently procures routine
air transportation services. NASA isn't allowed to operate its own
airline - over the long term, the agency should also be moved away
from operating its own spaceline.
In the short term, a flexibly-launched (on EELV, Shuttle, or future
reusables) Crew/Cargo Transfer Vehicle (CCTV) should be rapidly
developed as a supplement to and potential emergency replacement for
Shuttle, in order to, at acceptable cost, assure NASA's ability to
meet its manned-space commitments.
Shuttle upgrades should be limited to addressing immediate safety
concerns and to providing operating cost and/or capability
improvements that will pay for themselves in the short term.
The current prohibition on Shuttle competing with commercial launch
providers should be continued indefinitely, to avoid disrupting an
emerging industry that is currently fragile and in the long run is
vital to the nation's economic security and national defense.
- NASA's massive "manned space" Shuttle-Station establishment in
general needs to be brought to heel. They currently consume half of
NASA's overall budget while providing at-best dubious results.
Meanwhile they far too often act as the hypertrophied tail wagging
the NASA dog. For one example, the nominally separate branch of
NASA that deals with advancing space transportation technology seems
totally unable to make plans that don't give priority to the manned
space empire's requirements over those of US industry and US defense
agencies. X-33 and now ISTP both suffered badly from this.
- NASA's space technology centers need to pay far more attention to
the practical needs of US industry. On March 3, 1915, the Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (later the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics or NACA) was established by a rider to the Naval
Appropriations Act, "..to supervise and direct the scientific study
of the problems of flight, with a view of their practical solution."
*Practical* solution. Workable solutions *now*, not ultra-advanced
whizbangs in twenty years.
A working rocket engineer recently told us he has file cabinets full
of old NACA reports that he uses every day - they're models of
concise, accurate, useful information. He says that reports from
the first few years after NACA became NASA are still useful, but
after the early sixties things went downhill, badly.
NACA was vital to the success of the US aviation industry. To the
struggling US low-cost launch industry, today's NASA is no such
asset.
One example of the sort of work NASA ought to be doing but isn't:
Most current rocket engines were intended to be thrown away after
one flight, and thus reuse of them has not been explored and
documented. Reports on the practical reusability of various engines
- relight procedures, throttling potential, number of cycles,
minutes of burn-time, wear and recommended maintenance intervals for
various parts - would be immensely useful to reusable launch
designers, however tedious and unglamorous they'd be to generate.
NASA's spaceflight technology centers have lost sight of this "NACA"
practical industry support function, and need to be led back toward
it. If they prefer sexy ultra-advanced decades-off technology work
so much they still refuse to do the NACA job, the task (and the
funding) should be given to someone else.
*end*
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Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions
in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in
any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety.
________________________________________________________________________
Space Access Society
http://www.space-access.org
space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein