Another Sad Day in Rocket Land

I assume most of the people who read this blog also read Clark Lindsey's Space Transport News site, so most of you have probably heard the news about Matt Bowes' death. We only heard about it this morning from Matt's parents, and it hit us all pretty hard. I think I may still be in a bit of shock myself.

Matt was a good guy. Talented engineer. Very sharp thinker. Funny. Enthusiastic. Full of energy and drive and ambition. He reminded me a lot of myself at his age. When he sent Michael and I his resume this summer, I thought it was a cool opportunity to show someone the ropes. When I was going through college, nobody would hire me because of my age. I never really got the opportunity to hold a real engineering job until several months after I graduated from BYU with my Bachelors. I figured here was a chance to give someone the break I hadn't gotten at that age. I didn't get much of a chance to work with him, as I took off to defend my thesis only about a week after he got here, and got back only a few weeks before he left. But he made a real contribution, even if he made some of the same mistakes I would've made at that age. I didn't sweat it too bad at the time--he had actually done pretty darned well for an 18 year old working with a real engineering company, and I figured he'd have plenty of years to smooth over some of his rough edges. Well, or at least develop them into full-blown quirks like the rest of us. But he's not going to get that chance. At least not on this side of the veil.

It's been a tough summer here in Mojave, at least as far as losing friends is concerned. Between Glenn May dieing in that accident at Scaled, and now Matt passing along, there have been plenty of reminders of the fragility of life, and how special it really is. Ironically enough, shortly after the Scaled accident, Matt and I were cornered by a TV cameraman there at Voyager, and I think I said something along those lines at that point--that life is fragile.

I'm not sure what else to say. I'm really kind of depressed at the moment, even in spite of the fact that I know I'll see him again someday, along with all the rest who've gone on ahead. God be with you my friend, 'til we meet again.

DIRECT v2.0 and Orbital Propellant Transfer

Several people have already brought up the DIRECT v2.0 architecture paper that was rolled out at AIAA Space 2007 this last week, as well as the snazzy new website that the DIRECT team just launched. I just wanted to give a few of my own thoughts.

First off, I really got a kick out of the "safer, simpler, sooner" subtitle. Isn't it ironic how hollow ATKs claims about the Shaft appear these days. Oh well, there's no idea too stupid for an entrenched bureaucracy to fight for to the bloody end.

Ross, Chuck, the Metschans, Antonio, and the others deserve a good deal of respect for putting together a rather solid case. As I've said in the past, I think having NASA develop any new launch vehicles is a big mistake--launcher development and operations are NASAs core incompetencies after all. However, politics is the art of the attainable, and the DIRECT concept shows how NASA could develop an architecture that is not only more affordable, more robust, and more capable than the planned architecture, but more importantly is a lot more friendly to commercial cooperation. NASA's current concept of commercial and international collaboration--the notion that commercial space entities and foreign countries should eagerly wait with bated breath for the construction of a lunar outpost before any serious involvement--is a sick joke.

I was only very tangentially involved with the DIRECT team's v2.0 development, but I'm glad to see that some of the memes I've been trying to spread took root in their latest development.

The biggest and most important of these improvements over v1.0 revolves around orbital propellant depots. I may sound like a "Jonny-one-note" on this topic, but I'm still convinced that the ability to store and transfer cryogenic propellants on-orbit is one of the key enabling technologies needed for a spacefaring society. Ross and team did a very good job of highlighting how important such technologies can decrease the odds of losing expensive missions, enable a much more capable NASA lunar architecture, and provide a massive increase in demand for commercial launch services.

As I've mentioned many times previously here, with the current architecture, a delay on the Ares I launch will more or less doom the multi-billion dollar hardware already on orbit. The time pressures likely to exist in trying to get off a lunar mission within 14 days of the first launch greatly increase the odds of making fatal mistakes like have been made in the past. Now, it is probably possible to build stages that can last longer on-orbit without excessive boiloff, but by having the ability to "top-off" the tank, this issue completely goes away. At worst delays would necessitate launching some more fuel before leaving.

The ability to "top-off" the EDS in orbit, or to transfer propellants launched on one launch to the earlier launch can both greatly increase the payload capacity of a 2-launch mission. The problem with doing a 2-launch mission without propellant transfer is that it's very difficult to evenly divide a lunar mission into two roughly identically sized launches. One of the two launchers will end up launching substantially lighter. But if you can transfer propellants, you can now pretty much divide the payload evenly, because you have an infinitely divisible medium that can be transfered back and forth as needed. More importantly, with propellant transfer and dry-launch techniques, a single Jupiter-232 mission could perform the same mission as a much more expensive Ares-1/Ares-V combo.

On a related note, by having propellant transfer capabilities and infrastructure in both LEO and L1/LUNO, several design decisions can be revisited. Right now, with the fragile, no-orbital-infrastructure approach taken in ESAS, if the CEVs engines don't light for the Trans-Earth-Injection burn, the crew is probably dead. Even with an ISS-like base on the surface, unless they have a bunch of backup vehicles, there's very little chance of a successful rescue mission being mounted in-time. Issues like this are part of what drove the CEV back to using hypergols instead of higher performance cryogenic combinations. Once you have some infrastructure in space, such issues become inconveniences instead of fatal mishaps. If your engine doesn't light, you just redock with the L1 node, and wait for a rescue, or possibly try to effect a repair. Or maybe you could transfer propellant back to the lunar lander and head back for the surface, etc.

The most important benefit of the latest DIRECT architecture is the development of a potentially massive new LEO launch market. As I see it, there really are only two major potential markets out there for LEO delivery services that actually have the potential to generate demand for the dozens to hundreds of flights per year that would enable RLVs to really shine--personal spaceflight and propellant deliveries. And by designing a NASA architecture that intentionally takes advantage of such developments to the maximum extent possible, NASA could really help promote and catalyze the development of a robust commercial LEO launch industry. As the Centaur team pointed out over a year ago, even 2-4 moon missions per year would provide a several-fold increase in the demand for commercial earth to orbit launch services. And because propellants are even more finely divisible than people are, such a market could be very helpful for early orbital RLV operators.

But beyond the NASA demand for propellants, having NASA as an anchor tenant could be very useful for making propellant depots a reality sooner rather than later. As I've discussed in previous posts, propellant depots suffer from a chicken and egg kind of problem. Nobody is going to want to privately fund a depot before there are customers for such a depot, and nobody is going to want to fund businesses can act as customers for depots until the depots exist. It might be possible to break this chicken and egg problem without NASAs help by either finding a way to get a minimalist depot built for the low enough cost that someone would be willing to take the risk, or by trying to codevelop the depot and one of its potential customers...but both of those approaches are very uncertain from a business and a financing standpoint.

With NASA as an anchor tenant however, it becomes a lot easier for other businesses to then spring up that can take advantage of the new capabilities. Businesses such as cislunar tourism, or possibly changing the way upper stages are done today. For instance, a Falcon I upper stage refueled in LEO could deliver its full payload to GEO or LUNO, or even interplanetary trajectories. In fact, a Falcon I refueled in LEO could provide almost half the GEO capability of an Atlas V 401 (for a tiny fraction of the price). A Centaur stage refueled in LEO could put a Sundancer sized module into Lunar Orbit, etc.

But some have expressed concern about the idea of putting "risky technologies" on the critical path for NASA's return to the moon. They seem to believe that it would be best to take the lowest technical risk approach from the start, and then only add on things like propellant depots as after-the-fact performance enhancements. I think this view is shortsighted for several reasons, but first I'd like to draw an analogy. Back in the early Apollo days, there was a big debate over the mission architecture. One of the mission architectures that had a lot of favor originally was the "direct ascent" architecture. That architecture avoided the need for orbital rendezvous (which at that point was just as unproven and risky as propellant transfer is today), but at the cost of requiring a much larger NASA developed vehicle (NOVA). Had NASA not taken the smart move of putting "risky unproven technologies" like orbital rendezvous on their critical path, the Apollo program probably would've failed. As CFE points out in his latest blog post, if the Apollo program had taken the further technical risk of developing EOR technologies such as propellant transfer, they might have even been able to avoid the program cancellation that came from trying to run two very expensive launch vehicles.

If the ESAS architecture, by avoiding "risky unproven technologies" like propellant transfer, was able to provide a basic lunar transportation infrastructure for a couple of billion over a couple of years, it would be one thing. But in spite of avoiding any technology that really has the potential to make ESAS even remotely useful, they're still looking at spending $60-100B and the better part of two decades to develop a bare-bones lunar transportation architecture that's only a little more capable than the one fielded by NASA 40 years ago. What's the point in "avoiding technical risks" if it doesn't actually allow you to do things in a cheaper, quicker, or more sustainable fashion? By taking such a hyperconservative approach, and by abandoning most real new space technology R&D, NASA's setting itself up for stagnation over the next decade or so.

In life, and particularly in engineering, there are some risks that end up being riskier to avoid than to meet head-on and overcome. For NASA, orbital propellant transfer is one of them. So, I applaud the DIRECT team's latest release for its emphasis on this technology that's been neglected for far too long. The rest of the report is pretty good too...

Google Lunar X-Prize

It's been a long time since I last blogged. Between being busy at work, starting into another book series with Tiffany (one of our favorite traditions is reading good books together), and trying to raise two increasingly active and silly little boys, I haven't had much chance to provide a lot of bloggy goodness lately. It also doesn't help that my favorite topic to discuss online also happens to be closely tied to my day-job, so sometimes propriety forces me to say less than I would like to.

All that aside, I wanted to give a couple of thoughts about the recently announced Google Lunar X-Prize. While there is a chance that my company may participate in this competition at some point, we aren't formally involved with the competition yet, so I figure I can still give a few thoughts on the matter.

So far, most of the response in the blogosphere has been, shall we say, mixed at best. The three biggest complaints I've seen are that an orbital X-Prize would've been more useful, that there really aren't any useful markets that this prize could help promote, and lastly that the prize is far too small for what it's asking for. I don't think that these opinions are invalid, however I have a couple of thoughts I'd like to discuss.

First, lets discuss the complaint that an orbital X-Prize would've been more useful. The claim is that this prize really isn't doing much of anything to really open up space development, because its ignoring the earth-to-orbit launch problem, and that therefore the prize is irrelevant at best. While there is some truth to this line of reasoning--the technical immaturity and unaffordability of existing earth-to-orbit launch services is probably the single biggest impediment to commercial space development--I think there are several other things that need to be considered:

One, it has been nearly three years since Scaled Composites won the original X-Prize for suborbital space launch. While I fully expect that at least two or three (or maybe more) of the existing companies targeting the suborbital tourism market will get there, and more importantly, be financially successful at it, it's likely to take far more time than most of us had previously imagined. The engineering challenges of developing a reusable suborbital vehicle are impressive, and the market and more importantly financial challenges are even more daunting. I think that several of the competing companies have structured their business approach such that they can have the endurance neccessary to see this through (XCOR being an excellent example). But the reality is that we may be lucky to see any of the competing companies actually offering personal spaceflight services before the end of the decade. The companies most likely to be able to build a commercially successful orbital launch vehicle are these suborbital companies. The larger space companies, while they have the technical competence and the financial staying power necessary, are also all very risk averse and are not well structured for executing on a first-generation reusable orbital transport. I could go further into why I think that the emerging suborbital companies are more likely to develop the first generation of reusable orbital space transports, but that's a post for another time. The main point though is that there are very few companies or groups that are even remotely ready to tackle the challenge of developing affordable and reliable reusable orbital transportation systems. A few of them will likely be there eventually, but I think an orbital X-Prize may actually be dangerously premature at this point. By encouraging emerging space companies to move faster than they're really ready for yet might end up causing an alt.space equivalence of the Apollo Program--premature over-optimization of globally suboptimal approaches. The approaches most likely to win such a prize if offered now may very well not be the optimal result that would develop naturally without a prize.

Two, an orbital prize by necessity needs to be a lot bigger than even the $30M that Google is putting up for this prize. Even if the requirements were only say 2-3 people to LEO twice in a week, the prize would likely need to be in the $100M range to be really effective. As it is, there already is an existing prize for reusable orbital transportation: the $50M, Bigelow Aerospace sponsored America's Space Prize. Now, there are several things about this prize that make it far less likely to be useful than it could've been, such as the large minimal crew size, the long minimum flight duration, and also the ban on using any government development funding (note this last one is one of my biggest concerns about the Google Lunar X-Prize). However, I doubt that the prize would've been won even if those restrictions had been more reasonable. That maybe just be my opinion, but $50M just isn't a huge amount of money, and you have to raise the money to compete in the first place. A successful orbital space prize would need a lot more money than Google was willing to offer, and a lot more than the X-Prize is ever likely to raise.

Three, there's more to opening up space to commercial development than just the earth-to-orbit launch problem. While that may be the 800lb gorilla in the room at the moment, I'm not sure how much there is that we can do to accelerate the solution to that problem at the moment. I think it will be solved, but as I said, it is going to take a while. In the meantime, its perfectly reasonable to start working on some of the other problems and technologies needed to be solved before we can become a spacefaring society. The ability to autonomously land stuff safely and reliably on planetary surfaces is one of them.

The second major complaint ties in with my last point on the first complaint. There really are several potential "follow-on" markets that can be encouraged by this prize. Several of them will for the near-term at least revolve around potential government markets, but that doesn't mean that they aren't markets, or that they won't eventually spread out to more commercial customers. For instance, as I mentioned above, it may very well be that competitors for this prize may end up maturing some areas of space technology that open up the possibility for them to provide services to future government projects such as other unmanned planetary landers. I have some further thoughts on this, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Also, depending on the approach taken, competition for this prize may help private companies develop some of the subsystems, technologies, and techniques necessary for future manned commercial landers. It'll be very hard to make a business case close on commercial manned lunar landers at this exact point in time, but many of the long-range navigation, communication, and landing technologies developed for this prize may be directly applicable to future projects. By gaining experience with developing spacecraft that can operate in the cislunar environment, can land autonomously, can perform maneuvers in deep space, etc., these companies will help position themselves for the commercial opportunities that may open up when the earth-to-orbit transportation becomes more affordable. While the propulsion system and scale for a manned lunar lander is likely to be very different than the subscale robotic landers that will be involved in this competition, many of the non-propulsion disciplines will be directly relevant.

The last complaint revolves around the size of the purse. Many prior commercial and government low-cost lunar lander efforts have estimated the cost of such an undertaking to be in the $40-60M range, with the launch portion of the project being a large component. I have a few thoughts, though they aren't entirely original:

One, there's nothing that says that a prize competitor has to actually turn a profit on the prize itself. Scaled spent over $25M to win the $10M X-Prize, and as several people have pointed out, there are often groups who will spend tens of millions to compete in events, some of which don't even have a cash prize! The real key is that the total value delivered to the team and its investors/sponsors has to exceed the cost by a sufficient margin. For instance as one commenter quipped, it might well be worth $50M to Bill Gates to have the winning rover broadcasting with a big Microsoft logo on its side while winning a Google sponsored prize. Also, potential commercial and governmental follow-on markets can sometimes justify spending more than the value of the prize to win it (see: SpaceShip One). There may also be some potential sponsors who would be willing to provide money "just to say they did it". So, just because it may cost more than the prize is worth to win it, doesn't necessarily mean that nobody will try or even succeed, in spite of spending more than "the prize is worth."

Two, most of the comments that have come to these conclusions have assumed that the competitors will purchase launch services for the competition in the traditional fashion--ie that someone is just going to buy a slightly discounted Falcon 1 flight from Elon, or purchase a secondary payload slot from ULA, or buy a Dnepr launch from the Russians. While I agree that in order to be successful in this competition, competitors are almost certainly going to launch on existing launch vehicles, I also highly doubt that the launch "purchase" transaction involved is going to go the way that most people are assuming. I'll leave it at that.

Three, some people have been assuming this prize can't be won because for some reason they think a company needs to have an orbital launch vehicle to compete. It's true that none of the alt.space companies are successfully flying things to orbit right now, but as per point two above, I think that's pretty irrelevant. This isn't a launch prize, its a prize for a lunar lander/rover. I'd give at least 95% odds that whoever wins this will fly on an existing launch vehicle, and not try to roll-their-own.

Anyhow, those are some of my thoughts on the main complaints. I do have some of my own worries about the prize, particularly about the form of the final rules, the short timeline, and particularly how they handle the rules about limits on government income for competitors, but my overall opinion is positive. I'm of course biased as heck, being a certified and certifiable lunar enthusiast and being an engineer at a VTVL rocket developer, but I still think it's a good idea.

I'm following in the Moon's shadow

by guest blogger Ken

Sorry to corrupt Mr. Cat Steven's song there a bit, but it came to me last night after seeing "In the Shadow of the Moon" at the Frontiers of Flight museum here in Dallas.

Wow. That is one heck of a documentary. The cleaned up footage is phenomenal, and more beautiful than anything I've seen to date. They note at the end that there wasn't any CGI, but there was some processing, or something like that. The film also noted that it was a carbon-neutral production.

The sense I got from the audience was that it was maybe about ten minutes too long, but in all honesty I can't think of anything that it would make sense to cut. The credits are pretty good too, and got me all riled up to go post a snitty comment over at the Cosmic Log, in relation to the Google story. Not about the Google effort, which I think is great, but rather the nattering nabobs of negativity that seem to spring up whenever something positive is announced.

At last, Buzz's long pause on the ladder is explained, something that I didn't know before. Lots of personal details carry the story along in a positive and often funny way. As I said, the stock footage is glorious and it is fascinating watching the LOX vent swirling down the side of the Saturn as it ascends past the tower.

The footage on the Lunar surface only served to deepen my conviction that I must go there. I'd be perfectly happy in the miserable job of base administrator, suffering the slings and arrows of corporate fortune so that the teams can focus on getting their work done in turning the Moon into a productive part of the world's economy. I'd even be happy cleaning the toilets and plumbing, as that bio-stuff is going to be worth a fortune in cislunar space.

There were a lot of grayhairs at the event, though a few of the younger generations as well. We also got to check out the "Earth from Space" exhibit before it goes up for general view tomorrow. That 'Magic Planet' is pretty cool.

Which reminds me that I need to go load all of my space exhibit stuff in the car for our NSS of North Texas display at FoF tomorrow. We just got four boxes of freebies from JSC. Woo Hoo! Plus we've still got a bunch of leftovers from the ISDC, so everyone is going to go home happy tomorrow.

Go see "In the Shadow of the Moon" as soon as you can. This is one movie that is worth paying full price to see, without question. I'll definitely be seeing this one again, and I'm not even really a big fan of the whole Apollo program.

(Sorry, but it's true. Apollo is history for me, though I have been told that I was propped up in front of the TV to watch as a 2-year old. I grew up with the Space Shuttle and saw that it wasn't the answer with Challenger. Any kind of space interest was put on hold after that as I dealt with other life issues, at least until my first new year of space - 1999, and don't even get me started about the odyssey in 2001...)

A quick piece of really cool news. Over time NSS-NT has donated a number of space books to the library in the play area at Frontiers of Flight. It's really cool and looks like an airplane (way to go Civil Air Patrol!). Most of the books there are in pretty good shape, but all of the space books we've donated are beat all to crap. (those that don't 'walk') Assorted covers gone, spines bent, pages torn and wrinkled. "Viaje a la Luna", "Space Station Science", "Pajama Sam On The Moon", all of them. Talk about some heavy-duty duty! I couldn't be happier, as that means they're being read a LOT. Time to round up another round of donations.

Ad Lunam, y'all