Let's not repeat history so soon

The way to get costs down for launching things to space is to make all the parts reusable, right? It's obvious, isn't it? If you can reuse things, the launches must become cheaper, surely!

How can someone even THINK that that might be true? If this were 1972, it might be excusable, but we have 30 years of history that say it isn't.

Several years ago, I attended a lecture at MIT by Aaron Cohen, the first Space Shuttle project manager. He finished the lecture by saying [I paraphrase], "If you notice, the Space Shuttle did not achieve a single one of its top level requirements. If I had it to do over again, I'd look at those requirements a lot harder."

That is wisdom in its hardest won, most valuable form. The way to design a system is not by saying, "Here's what we want it to be (e.g. reusable)." The way to design a system is to first state clearly, "Here's what we want it to DO." Someone's favorite approach may be incompatible with their objectives.

Another example from history: expendable launch vehicles were long designed to maximize the fraction of their launch weight that they could get into orbit. That makes sense, right? Well, maybe not, if you look at how much the fancy engineering to achieve that winds up costing--$5,000 a pound to low Earth orbit in the best cases.

Within the last decade, a few people, notably Elon Musk of SpaceX and some others, started asking a different question: "How do I design a launch vehicle for lowest cost per pound to orbit?" It turns out that the design is much different. Using this new paradigm, the changes in launch vehicle design have only started to appear on the scene. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, when it achieves maturity, may give launch costs as low as $1,000 per pound to low Earth orbit (albeit only for huge payloads). Other approaches, not as far along, have visions of even lower costs, and for smaller payloads.

SpaceX has identified some savings that may be realized by recovery and reuse of their booster stages. I would never bet against them. But again, the vehicles were FIRST designed with low COST as the objective. Subsequent improvements to the overall business process are one thing; constraining the design to a certain approach with uncertain implications is another.

More on the politics of commercial spaceflight

We have said all this in previous posts, but this Aviation Week & Space Technology article really sums it up nicely: expensive government programs are being protected at the expense of more agile, more efficient and more productive commercial endeavors.

Some New Space activity on the Space Station

NASA has been doing some relatively quiet but important work on the International Space Station. They are investigating how to use robotics to refuel orbiting satellites. They have recently begun Phase 2 of the testing. A useful feature of the experiments is that some of the activities are controlled from the ground--thereby testing the effects of communications delays, bandwidth limitations, and limited perception.

The work is being managed by the Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. They have posted their vision of a robotic servicing mission. Sadly, they fail to mention that such a mission was already flown five years ago--albeit not by NASA. Here's a video from one of the spacecraft during the 2007 mission showing one of the two spacecraft inspecting the other.

Presumably this omission by NASA has to do with the competition for resources--"if we don't mention the DARPA program, maybe no one will remember."

You can follow the NASA program on Facebook.

Congratulations to China

With the Shenzhou spacecraft today docking with the Tiangong module,  China has now become only the third nation to accomplish this feat. Congratulations to the Chinese engineers who made this possible, and to the Chinese people!

Chinese astronauts going up again

It isn't "new space," but China will launch another manned flight including its first female astronaut. Let us wish them well.

A great gift idea, or a Trojan horse?

Today we learn of a previously classified gift--the US's National Reconnaissance Office has given NASA two brand new telescopes. The scientific community has identified the telescopes, which of course would be flown in space, as perfect for dark matter searches. That's awesome and I wish them well.

There is a "new space" aspect to this story, however. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times story, quoting the NASA official in charge of the new instrument:

"Dr. Grunsfeld said the repurposing of the telescope for dark energy came at a personal cost. He had long dreamed that the Hubble, which he and the other astronaut servicing teams had said goodbye to forever in 2009, might be visited again and upgraded one more time to do the dark energy work. That dream, he admitted, was now dead.'If for half the cost, you could turn this into a telescope, why would you do that?' he said."

Well, you might do it if you could use robots instead of astronauts, and if the Hubble became the perfect test bed for robotic space technologies.

You might go that route if you remember the track record NASA has of estimating the cost of telescopes. The latest, the James Webb Space Telescope, has increased in cost by a factor of 16 from its original estimate. So the "savings" promised by the NRO gift might be illusory. It's kind of like my wife telling me how much she saved when she went shopping.

In 2004, I was part of a group presentation to NASA on how the Hubble might be serviced with robots. The subject had some urgency, because the shuttle Columbia had just been destroyed with the loss of 7 lives. Like the previous shuttle disaster, Challenger, the future of everything that depended on the shuttles was in doubt. And the Hubble needed servicing in a big way--both batteries and gyroscopes were approaching the ends of their useful lives. 

The NASA reaction was predictable. "Robotic servicing is too risky." Hmm, compared to sending up humans in a vehicle proven to have a 1% chance of killing them?

Now 8 years later, no robotic servicing capability has been developed. And even NASA is now getting ready to walk away from the Hubble.
 

If robotic servicing is developed now, it would be a win-win: our overall space robotics capability would be enhanced, with valuable test and operational experience that would help all future space endeavors. And the amazing Hubble Space Telescope would continue to serve humanity, not being discarded like some other piece of space junk. Perhaps this is more compelling than spending an unknown sum to "civil-ize" the NRO gifts.

Space policy without a space vision

In an earlier post, Congressional opposition to commercial space ventures like Dragon has already been discussed. Despite the incredible success of the Dragon mission to ISS, Congress wants to kill it, for obvious reasons. Notice that the most outspoken Senator has a large NASA center in his state, one which is in search of something useful to do.

What should the US space policy look like? The President's science advisor has admitted that today's space policy is difficult to explain. Of course it is, because it has no vision behind it. There is no President Kennedy saying, "I see no reason why America cannot put astronauts on the moon in this decade, and bring them safely back to Earth."

The Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Commission, also known as the Augustine Commission, laid out in its report a reasonably detailed set of options for missions and systems, that would culminate in human exploration of Mars.

But does anyone agree with their proposed approaches? Does the White House? And the commission didn't really say WHY it's so important to have humans there rather than robots. Nor is there a corresponding research program, with a sufficient budget, to address the huge challenges confronting human missions to Mars:

• bone mass loss
• radiation effects
• eyesight degradation
• resource conservation and reutilization
• etc., etc.

On the outside, there are people who do have exciting visions for a robust, productive, profitable future in space. Jeff Greason, CEO of Xcor Aerospace, a member of the Augustine commission, has a particularly compelling and coherent one. But, again, what is the intersection between Jeff's ideas and a national space policy? Certainly one area of intense disagreement is the development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Jeff thinks it's unnecessary and wasteful, as do I. But the Congress is determined to fund one. You'll find it referred to in the budget as SLS, the Space Launch System. Doesn't help the commercial people, doesn't do anything for other space missions, only supports the one mission--going to Mars. The Augustine commission seems to have been chartered to support this project, rather than investigating alternatives like robotic on-orbit assembly.

But it doesn't really matter. Until there is leadership again, the government will take whatever dwindling resources it allocates to space activities and fritter them away in uncoordinated, unproductive ways--until the government is no longer a player in space at all.