I don’t have time tonight for a full review of the new space policy (just as well, as the details are still coming out). Instead, I thought I’d at least point out one item from the President’s speech that caught my attention.
To meet this goal, we will return the Space Shuttle to flight as soon as possible, consistent with safety concerns and the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The Shuttle’s chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the International Space Station. In 2010, the Space Shuttle — after nearly 30 years of duty — will be retired from service. [emphasis added]
When he first said that, I was distracted from thinking through the implications of it by the collective gasps and puckerings of my coworkers. But I did note at the time that it seemed to be the only portion of the speech Mr. Bush delivered with the same sort of forcefulness he has displayed in his foreign policy speeches since 9/11.
Given the current surplus of External Tanks, the lead time and delivery schedule, and the anticipated flight rate between RTF and retirement, I’d hazard a (personal and non-official) wild guess that ET production would be shut down perhaps two years prior to the final flight…which happens to be in 2008, the last full year of a hypothetical second Bush term. If he can carry out any of the incremental goals in this new policy, it’s retiring the Shuttle — it’s the first goal, it doesn’t require a huge increase in spending (not directly anyway), it will actually avert a huge expenditure on upgrades and recertification, it can be justified as freeing up money which will pay for the next step in the plan (avoiding controversial additional spending), etc. But the key fact here is that it is easily achievable for Mr. Bush: all he needs to do is to irreversably cut off production of External Tanks, and the Shuttle is dead before he leaves office.
This has me pretty well convinced that the 2010 cutoff date is certain: it’s easy, and it doesn’t depend on his successor or on Congress having loose purse strings.
It’s also a stroke of genius.
Put aside commercial and military efforts for a moment and look at NASA’s record. Looking back, we see twenty-years of aerospace projects billed as “Shuttle replacements” or “Shuttle derivatives” — none of which has succeeded. Oh, sure, the various projects have resulted in some interesting technology development, but no viable (or even flyable) spacecraft has resulted from any of them.
This failure is generally attributed to lack of ability, poor management, poor oversight, inadequate funding, or the like, but there is one common factor running through all of these programs: there has always been an easy fall-back position in the Shuttle itself.
The cost of project failure has not been the complete disruption of manned spaceflight. With the Shuttle to fall back on, “replacement” programs could take unreasonable technical risks, banking everything on revolution rather than evolution…and if they failed, oh well, at least they tried Something New.
This time, however, the Shuttle is going away. If NASA wishes to stay in the manned space game, they won’t be able to point to a few pieces of test hardware and a mountain of viewgraphs, declare qualified victory, and start over Monday morning with a spiffy new acronym and a blank .ppt — they no longer have the luxury of postponing the commitment to a new vehicle. Either NASA gets serious — and sensible — about a replacement, and devises a simple, workhorse vehicle it can build in short order without relying on gee-whiz technologies or bottomless wells of funding, or it risks losing the in-house ability to put humans in space.
Either path holds promise for the opening up of space…
“Either path holds promise for the opening up of space. . .”
Perhaps true, or in the alternative, this path allows the next President (presumably in 2008) to withdraw all funding for humans in space to pay for whatever budget deficit or social program tickles his fancy.
If private industry steps to the plate with a new HLLV, that would be good, yet I have trouble being sanguine that such result will occur. Overcapacity is rampant therefore what incentive is there to invest in new launchers?
I just don’t see commercial demand for anything bigger than 20 to 25 tons to LEO and 25 tons to LEO ain’t enough to build a moonbase, let alone go to Mars. Therefore, some future generation will need to persuade some future Congress to fund HLLV from scratch, after the “been there – done that” excitement has passed.
I was hoping someone would take the bait.
The two-pronged promise here is this: if NASA is forced to produce results on CEV (or whatever it is called today), we’ll have a manned spacecraft that isn’t a destination in itself, sucking up the budget and preventing NASA from doing anything else useful. It’s like trading in a Rolls-Royce for a Kia…sure, it’s not as impressive, but you can actually afford to drive it somewhere. But if NASA fails, or looks ahead and worries that it may fail, it may be forced of necessity to turn to the private sector to protect its prestige mission.
As for heavy lift, regardless of what private companies may do and regardless of the logistical need for it or the wisdom of the approach, there is a good chance that NASA may act to preserve its heavy lift capability once the Orbiters are retired. This could take the form of Shuttle-derived vehicles, or it could be a next-generation EELV, or something else entirely. It’s hard to imagine the agency not coming up with some justification for keeping the KSC, Marshall, Johnson, Stennis, and Michoud facilities from being mothballed or scrapped.
It looks like that more and more people are agreeing that NASA may have to turn to the private sector to protect it’s prestige mission.
Whatever NASA decides to do, a new SHLLV for manned Moon and Mars missions MUST have true engine out capability for safety reasons.
Okay, let me take some bait, now.
And if anyone is interested there is a firestorm going on at NewMars.com about subjects like these.
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Big picture, the Bush plan IS excellent. Nothing space nuts can’t work with, except for some tweaks here and there, and this one big sticking point, at least for me:
Between now and 2010 (2004 through 2010 inclusive is seven years) we will spend about $75 billion on the space shuttle.
And all we will get for our $75 billion is ISS completion. Thats it, space fans.
$75 billion and we get a lousy space station everyone already thinks is a dumb idea and which we intend to walk away from a few years after that anyways. Why? To keep those Euro-weenies happy, and fulfill some promises, right?
Simply put, I want more for my $75 billion than that. And we can do it if we stand down the orbiter today.
Stand down the orbiter today? Never fly it again? Oh the poor ISS! What about Hubble? (nevermind about that last point).
I hear the whines already.
Okay, so do some diplomacy. Go to our ISS partners and say:
“Lets make a deal. Agree to accept a delay in finishing the ISS and then the ESA can attach a module or two to the US moonbase. You guys can’t run the show, we won’t make you equity partners but if you pay your own way you can add an ancillary structure or two and we will sell you passage to Luna to get it there. Japan, we will transport some of your astronauts to the Moon, on one of our missions.”
“But first, cut us some slack on this ISS completion thing.”
Now, Colin Powell does his diplo thing and the ISS partners say “Okay” – – Shuttle is now grounded never to fly again.
That frees up $75 billion to spend between now and 2010.
Repeat after me:
That frees up $75 billion to spend between now and 2010.
Okay, large amounts of that are tied up in shuttle infrastructure. True. So leverage that with shuttle B or C. Not Ares, too complex to design/deploy in a few years. I like shuttle B because of the RS-68s but now thats getting too technical.
Design the payloads to mimic orbiter mass distributions to minimize engineering changes. Rand Simberg recently opinined that an SDV might cost “a billion or three” – – okay somebody keep track and doublecheck all the math.
But remember we are not paying to return the orbiter to flight status. So shuttle B development costs can be charged against that.
The CEV program proceeds exactly as President Bush proposed. No changes. Remember, shuttle B is funded ONLY with money that would have been spent flying the orbiter so that is already lost money.
I might suggest the CEV be designed to fly Delta IV =OR= shuttle B for flexibility.
Once shuttle B is ready (2008, 2009 at the latest?) fly a high operational tempo to finish ISS. Without tiles to refurbish between flights, without needing to pamper the orbiter I believe flight operations can go much faster. Plus, each shuttle B launch can lift far more than the orbiter. Carry TWO orbiter payload manifests per launch since shuttle B can carry at least twice the payload at a lower cost per mission.
Okay, so we will also need a technology to rendevouz unmanned ISS components with the station, but won’t we need that for CEV modular operations anyways?
Finish the station by 2010 and have a robust launcher capable of throwing a CEV to the Moon by 2011 or 2012, if its man-rated by then. Attach a CEV + landing module + upper stage booster to a shuttle B and we are at the moon. By 2012 or 2013, not 2015 through 2020.
Can we leverage the existing shuttle infrastructure to design/deploy shuttle B in time to finish the ISS by 2010 within a budget of $75 billion? Is Sean O’Keefe’s NASA up to such a challenge?
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Here is my bottom line. We will spend $75 billion between now and 2010 on the shuttle orbiter. When 2010 arrives, I want more for the taxpayers $75 billion than completion of the ISS and some photographs from the scrapped STS launch system. I want more for $75 billion that a T-shirt and some aggravated memories.
If the goal is to finish the ISS (and politically it probably must be) I believe we can finish it for less than $75 billion and we can spend part of that $75 billion on assets that will remain useful after 2010.
Sadly, after writing a heartfelt post, it appears my math may be way off.
How much of shuttle costs are flight operations and how much is fixed infrastructure appears to be a complex and arcane bit of accountancy. How much of NASA’s budget will be saved by terminating the entire shuttle program also appears uncertain.
In any event, there are other ways to finish the ISS besides the orbiter. That is the key point.
Sorry. My bad. 🙁
At least I am not throwing around that T word (trillion dollars!)
My numbers above are waaay too high. In very round figures maybe $5 billion or $6 billion per year? (some help here?) with 50% to 60% being fixed overhead for Kennedy Space Center employees and maintenance. Flight operations are but a fraction.
But its still seems too much to spend if all we will have to show for it come 2010 is a completed ISS and nothing else except some memories.
NASA accounting is hard to track. 🙁
How much was saved in 2003 with no flights since February? That should be easy enough to calculate.
This fixed overhead means high operational tempo (many launches per year) is needed to cost justify a shuttle derived variant. Delta IV is looking better and better but I still hate to give up those large payloads to LEO when its time to build that first moonbase.
Shuttle B (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zzs.html) is in many ways a re-engined Shuttle C. Shuttle C was taken to a high degree of design completion through 1992 (I have a set of the drawings, in fact), and was designed to replicate Shuttle payload bay accommodations. It would not cost as much as one might expect to get Shuttle C into flight, since a good portion of the work has already been done. (Note too that the cancellation of Shuttle frees up the original Orbiter tooling, which could somewhat reduce the cost of facilitization.) Even if it did cost $3B, or even $5B, how much money would be saved in the long run, as you point out, with even a one-for-one substitution for Orbiter flights?
Note too that Shuttle C wasn’t intended to have an open-ended production run…being powered in its original incarnation by SSMEs (later by the STME, which never reached production) meant that the number of flights was limited by the finite number of end-of-life SSMEs that could be thrown away. Using it as a short-term solution for ISS completion, in place of the Orbiters, would be deja vu all over again.
If a quick and dirty Shuttle C/B could be produced, as a stopgap allowing both the immediate retirement of the Orbiters and the completion of ISS, it could serve as the bridge to a better Shuttle-derived heavy launcher. Shuttle C was never intended to be a structurally efficient design (it was designed more for manufacturability, there being plenty of weight to play with without the Orbiter), and ongoing Shuttle operations placed a practical limitation on how radical a departure from the existing stack one could make, if such departures also entailed radical modifications to the VAB, MLPs, or LC-39. With the limitations of Orbiter operations and facilities needs removed, anything goes…not just Ares (another offset-engine configuration), but “Magnum” (inline engines, triple-tandem configuration) as well.
If you’ve got the need, and the money to pay for it.
“How much was saved in 2003 with no flights since February? That should be easy enough to calculate.”
Nothing. That money (and more) has been spent on retrieval and analysis of the wreckage, the overall crash investigation, and return-to-flight activities.
Ignore that $75 billion. Substitute $35 billion supported by this graph:
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040113/arms_satellite_1.html
That is how much America will spend on the shuttle between now and program termination. $35 billion and all we will get is a dumb space station. I still want more for my money!
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The X-factor missing from the shuttle C plan I describe above is whether the NASA team currently running the shuttle has the spirit and gumption to accomplish this. I believe that if the people running the shuttle program today were to somehow find the spirit and motivation to do what the MER team did (the PBS Nova show about Spirit/Opportunity revealed a breath-taking measure of dedication and commitment to the goal) then great things could be accomplished with the $35 billion set aside for the shuttle between now and program termination.
If they cannot accomplish more with $35 billion than ISS completion then Ares, MarsDirect and all the other glorious dreams we space advocates crave simply are not feasible until after NASA is dismantled and re-built. If this team can do more with $35 billion, beyond ISS completion, well, then there is lots and lots of stuff we Americans can accomplish. Right now. This shuttle C idea is only one among many – – you guys are the rocket scientists – – be creative!
Therefore, I now see the Bush plan as being more of a challenge rather than a decree. The plan is asking NASA’s old guard, “Can you do more with $35 billion than merely finish ISS? We don’t think so.”
I am infuriated with the idea that the US taxpayers will spend $35 billion and get NOTHING except ISS completion. But if that is the best the NASA team can do, I guess that is the best they can do.
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How to most accurately allocate Kennedy Space Center fixed costs can be argued but =IF= shuttle C can be flown at an increased operational tempo than the orbiter (and whether this NASA team can do that is the key question, IMHO) then all of those nasty annual fixed costs can be amortized over a larger number of flights.
Aren’t KSC employees paid about the same per year whether they launch 2 or 3 orbiter missions or 7 or 8 shuttle C missions. Compress more shuttle C launches into a given year and the cost per launch falls in addition to the savings from avoiding all those orbiter processing costs.
If 6 or 7 ISS assembly shuttle C launches occur in a given year then adding another launch to test a shuttle lifted CEV or to throw a HUGE robot lander at Mars would be incrementally small. On shuttle C you could send a small armada of orbiting micro-sats as well as a few landers. One shuttle C mission to Mars and another to blanket Luna with orbiters and robot landers!
George Bush will give the shuttle program a final $35 billion. While the exact plans are NOT set in stone after that $35 billion is spent then its lights out, forever, unless something glorious gets done with that finite amount of money.
To be real crude about it, the Bush plan can be summarized as a simple question being asked of the NASA old guard:
Do you guys prefer Viagra or amputation?