Space Access Notes: Day Two, Part One
I have a bit more time than I thought, here comes the notes for Day Two.
Jess Sponable
Jess was one of the main group leaders for the DC-X project (I think he reported to Pete Worden), and as such has been really interested in low-cost space transportation for some time. More than interested, he's actually been involved with succesful development programs, which is far more important than mere interest in my book. I missed most of his talk (from having stayed up too late the night before), but he did talk quite a bit about Air Launch's "QuickReach" vehicle. He discussed some of the technical issues and proof-of-concept testing that Air Launch has done over the past several months. They've really done a pretty good job of doing simple, relatively inexpensive demonstration experiments, and appear to be making good progress. I'm still a fan of more reusable systems than that, but for an expendable system, they do appear to be going about the development process in an intelligent manner.
Rick Homans: New Mexico Spaceport
I was really impressed with Rick personally. There's a lot of people interfacing with the alt.space community who you can tell haven't done their homework and don't really know what they're talking about. Rick wasn't one of them--he seemed both well informed and enthusiastic.
The interesting tidbits that he mentioned in his talk (that I wrote down) was that they're looking at having their launch site license sometime late this year or early next year. They've already been given over $100M to start the development process, and have had a pre-bid meeting for the construction contractors who want to bid on the port. They're actually going to be building two launch locations separated by about 5-6 miles. The first and bigger one will be for Virgin Galactic and other interested HTHL operators, while the later one will be for VTVL companies like MSS or Armadillo. I think that keeping a bit of separation is a good thing, because it reduces the maximum probable loss calculations a bit, which will make insurance cheaper. There has been some real concern voiced in the past by some of the groups that were looking at using the spaceport there, that once Virgin has all these multi-million dollar vehicles and buildings there, that it would make insurance for everyone else too expensive to make the site useful for them. But apparently they're thinking this through wisely. It'll be nice to see how things end up going.
He mentioned that they're hoping to have the HTHL facilities ready for use in 2010, but the VTVL stuff was less certain. He said they weren't going to be sinking as much time or money into that part of the spaceport yet, but that may not be a problem. It's not like MSS or Armadillo are really going to need multimillion dollar launch facilities anyway.
John Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace
Unlike many of the previous years, John didn't have a cute movie made showing off all the things they did this past year. Probably due to how busy they've been building and flying vehicles, but I'm willing to bet that being a dad now also may have had something to do with it. In spite of that, John still had a really cool presentation about where they've been, what they've learned, and where they're going. They're getting close to having a vehicle flying that they feel will be able to go after the Level 1 Lunar Lander Analog Challenge, and they're starting work on a much bigger vehicle to go after the Level 2 challenge. The bigger vehicle will be back to four differentially throttled engines mounted about halfway up the side of the rocket and canted outward a bit. In fact, the vehicle is about as big as XA-1.0 was originally going to be, with two 65" diameter tanks. He's looking at a mass ratio of 5 or 6 for the vehicle.
He's finally started having some good success with using film cooling combined with phenolic ablative chamber and a graphite throat. The performance hit isn't as big as one would think, and it seems to be working well enough for him to go after the LLAC.
He also mentioned that while he did try out a pistonless pump system a litte last year, that he really doesn't see the benefit for low pressure systems like their own. Since he switched to all-helium pressurization, they were able to abandon their servo regulator project (since you can flow a lot more helium through the same sized regulator as you can nitrogen). He also mentioned that his flight tanks spun by AMC up in Canada were costing him about $10/gallon. Which really isn't that bad at all considering that his tank pressure is almost 300-400psi. Their LLAC Level 2 vehicle in fact will run in blow-down mode, so it won't even really have any on-board pressure regulation equipment. It'll be interesting to see how well this works.
Longer term, post X-Prize Cup, he wants to take the vehicle through a set of boosted hops, and eventually take it to 100km, since it has more than sufficient delta-V. He also discussed some of their really long term plans, including doing an OTRAG style orbital vehicle based on a cluster of a whole bunch of their LLAC Level 2 vehicles. It's an intriguing idea, but I think that the devil's in the details, and with a 50+ vehicle cluster like that there are a lot of details.
John also tried to give us all a heart attack by suggesting a mixed LOX/kerosene monoprop for an SSTO orbital vehicle. He afterward mentioned that he was mostly saying it to see what kind of reaction he would get, but it still scares the heck out of me. George Herbert was sitting behind me during the talk, and he said that it reminded him of his April Fool's joke for last year: polyacetylozone, or HOOOCCH...
All that said, with the fact that John's keeping his burn rate under $500k per year so far, it looks like he'll be around for a long time yet. And it looks like we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with him this October.
Jess Sponable
Jess was one of the main group leaders for the DC-X project (I think he reported to Pete Worden), and as such has been really interested in low-cost space transportation for some time. More than interested, he's actually been involved with succesful development programs, which is far more important than mere interest in my book. I missed most of his talk (from having stayed up too late the night before), but he did talk quite a bit about Air Launch's "QuickReach" vehicle. He discussed some of the technical issues and proof-of-concept testing that Air Launch has done over the past several months. They've really done a pretty good job of doing simple, relatively inexpensive demonstration experiments, and appear to be making good progress. I'm still a fan of more reusable systems than that, but for an expendable system, they do appear to be going about the development process in an intelligent manner.
Rick Homans: New Mexico Spaceport
I was really impressed with Rick personally. There's a lot of people interfacing with the alt.space community who you can tell haven't done their homework and don't really know what they're talking about. Rick wasn't one of them--he seemed both well informed and enthusiastic.
The interesting tidbits that he mentioned in his talk (that I wrote down) was that they're looking at having their launch site license sometime late this year or early next year. They've already been given over $100M to start the development process, and have had a pre-bid meeting for the construction contractors who want to bid on the port. They're actually going to be building two launch locations separated by about 5-6 miles. The first and bigger one will be for Virgin Galactic and other interested HTHL operators, while the later one will be for VTVL companies like MSS or Armadillo. I think that keeping a bit of separation is a good thing, because it reduces the maximum probable loss calculations a bit, which will make insurance cheaper. There has been some real concern voiced in the past by some of the groups that were looking at using the spaceport there, that once Virgin has all these multi-million dollar vehicles and buildings there, that it would make insurance for everyone else too expensive to make the site useful for them. But apparently they're thinking this through wisely. It'll be nice to see how things end up going.
He mentioned that they're hoping to have the HTHL facilities ready for use in 2010, but the VTVL stuff was less certain. He said they weren't going to be sinking as much time or money into that part of the spaceport yet, but that may not be a problem. It's not like MSS or Armadillo are really going to need multimillion dollar launch facilities anyway.
John Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace
Unlike many of the previous years, John didn't have a cute movie made showing off all the things they did this past year. Probably due to how busy they've been building and flying vehicles, but I'm willing to bet that being a dad now also may have had something to do with it. In spite of that, John still had a really cool presentation about where they've been, what they've learned, and where they're going. They're getting close to having a vehicle flying that they feel will be able to go after the Level 1 Lunar Lander Analog Challenge, and they're starting work on a much bigger vehicle to go after the Level 2 challenge. The bigger vehicle will be back to four differentially throttled engines mounted about halfway up the side of the rocket and canted outward a bit. In fact, the vehicle is about as big as XA-1.0 was originally going to be, with two 65" diameter tanks. He's looking at a mass ratio of 5 or 6 for the vehicle.
He's finally started having some good success with using film cooling combined with phenolic ablative chamber and a graphite throat. The performance hit isn't as big as one would think, and it seems to be working well enough for him to go after the LLAC.
He also mentioned that while he did try out a pistonless pump system a litte last year, that he really doesn't see the benefit for low pressure systems like their own. Since he switched to all-helium pressurization, they were able to abandon their servo regulator project (since you can flow a lot more helium through the same sized regulator as you can nitrogen). He also mentioned that his flight tanks spun by AMC up in Canada were costing him about $10/gallon. Which really isn't that bad at all considering that his tank pressure is almost 300-400psi. Their LLAC Level 2 vehicle in fact will run in blow-down mode, so it won't even really have any on-board pressure regulation equipment. It'll be interesting to see how well this works.
Longer term, post X-Prize Cup, he wants to take the vehicle through a set of boosted hops, and eventually take it to 100km, since it has more than sufficient delta-V. He also discussed some of their really long term plans, including doing an OTRAG style orbital vehicle based on a cluster of a whole bunch of their LLAC Level 2 vehicles. It's an intriguing idea, but I think that the devil's in the details, and with a 50+ vehicle cluster like that there are a lot of details.
John also tried to give us all a heart attack by suggesting a mixed LOX/kerosene monoprop for an SSTO orbital vehicle. He afterward mentioned that he was mostly saying it to see what kind of reaction he would get, but it still scares the heck out of me. George Herbert was sitting behind me during the talk, and he said that it reminded him of his April Fool's joke for last year: polyacetylozone, or HOOOCCH...
All that said, with the fact that John's keeping his burn rate under $500k per year so far, it looks like he'll be around for a long time yet. And it looks like we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with him this October.
posted by Jon Goff at 9:16 AM
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