credit: NASA / Flight
The big conundrum for NASA's Constellation programme is how do you design transportation for an exploration strategy that envisages a permanently manned lunar outpost when all your major procurement decisions are based on reusing elements of a largely reusable launch system that only flew to low Earth orbit?
With the blogosphere debate hotting up about alternatives to NASA's Constellation vehicles it would seem a good time to look at this issue, which I briefly commented on in my comment on this blog posting
The DIRECT team claim that their transportation system is better than NASA's Constellation and NASA has now come back and criticised DIRECT as more expensive and not as safe
I am not going to tackle safety and cost, both these issues have a notorious past for the claims that people have made and you wonder why anyone in aerospace would want to pontificate on such matters considing the history of space transportation
Instead my view is that both NASA and DIRECT have approached their transportation systems in a way that does not automatically ensure success for the mission that actually has to be done, let me explain
NASA has followed, as I said in my previous blog post comment, "a politically driven industrial footprint (Congressional footprint) strategy"
This differs from Apollo where the mission was cleatly stated, to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the surface of the Earth - its a sortie msision
I believe that although references have been made to past lunar mission studies as guidance for the development of Constellation the reality was that those have been paid lip service to and we are seeing evidence of that
During my interview with NASA launch project office advanced planning manager and former Apollo programme rocket engineer Phil Sumrall at the 3rd space exploration conference in Denver I asked him about the disparity between the 2,000kg cargo to the lunar surface with a manned lander capability he was offering and the 6,000kg requirement asked for by the agency's lunar architecture team. His reply was that they were doing their best and if he could only provide 2,000kg that was all the scientists were going to get
But surely that is round the wrong way? If you intend to go back to the Moon and beyond you should be looking to maximise your transportation capability to meet the science goals that are publicly proclaimed as the justification for exploration
As I said in my blog post comment, it is "mission requirement, payload requirement, transportation requirement that should have driven vehicle design".
So why have NASA's leadership, intelligent people, gone for such a strange method of vehicle development, that industrial footprint I mentioned, that denies the agency the complete capability its scientists beleive it needs?
Because of the raft of politico-economic issues facing them
The most obvious being the end of the Shuttle programme. Then you have the transition from Shuttle to whatever comes next (however this differs if you select a all commercial post-Shuttle transportation policy) and finally the costs in recreating an industrial capability to deliver the all new transportation system
Griffin was faced with a policy to go to back to the Moon, a NASA with a budget that had flatlined for years, a costly war on terror as a competitor for federal funds, the politically sensitive issue of job losses relating to Shuttle's retirement, other related technical and industrial losses due to the gap between Shuttle operating and the new transportation system operating and a need to justify the new lunar programme born of a controversial Republcan president to future administrations - phew
So, I would argue, who would blame them?
The trouble is, and maybe I am arguing from a gravity free, if-only-the-world-was-perfect position, you end up with what we have, a transportation system designed around maintaining that industrial base and trying to avoid politically sensitive issues, which only leads to people making untenable claims that everything is OK when your development schedule is undermined by Congress cutting your funds
The big mistake that DIRECT made is that they did not ask what the mission was, they simply took the Congressional directives of STS reuse and have attempted to design a better version of Constellation when they don't have the access to information that NASA's leadership has. That is not a strategy for success, you are, in my view, making the same mistake and compounding it - especially if you publcly attack NASA for not getting its sums right (fighting talk for engineers)
The most obvious example of the error DIRECT has made is that they are now having to rejig their designs for the lunar mission. Not very right-first-time and in the real world would add horrendously to the development costs
I don't like people who are critical and then don't put forward their solution, so its good that DIRECT have their ideas and for the same reason, I, in a future post, will have my own lunar achitecture proposal that I think would have met the lunar scientists goals - bet you can't wait!
;-)
Well, always thought it was strange that the VAB was built many years before they had any idea of how to spacewalk, rendezvous, land or exactly how big the rocket would be. They probably don't take their returns to the moon any more seriously than we do.
Great post, but a whole lot of missing information. Where in any article have you stated ALL the changes that Ares I/V have gone though over the last few years? Where is the investigative part of the story to see how ALL those changes have affected schedule and cost? Have you written up anything about Ares VI, which may be NASA's new baseline, such as cost, schedule, new infrastructure, safety. You do not like Direct, fine. What do you want in its place? One of the reasons that Apollo was cancelled was it's operating costs. What are NASA's projected operating costs of TWO new space vicheals?
I am eargly await these stories.
I don't think that the 6,000 kg was ever a "science" requirements. It was an internal NASA goal, so if NASA does not meet it, they are primarily disappointing themselves, not a user community.
I think I'm getting a little tired of these debates.
Basically one side has the money and the plan, and the other side just has the plan but no money to make it a reality.
NASA is determined to go their own route, so to me convincing them otherwise is as good as yelling at a tree for growing the wrong way.
Just my two cents...
Hmm, I have always felt that Direct was trying to design a politically compliant system. Unfortunately physics determines what can go where in space and what is required to allow that to happen. Congress, the administration and many commentators are often blissfully unaware of these constraints!
Several points need to be made concerning both the Constellation and the Direct programs:
1. Both are attempting to meet the same objective. They are going about it in slightly different ways though. NASA is figuring out how much can be done for the budget and Direct seems to be re-using much of the STS technology. Both systems require significant re-design effort, which will be expensive.
2. This country has a lot more experience with winged, re-usable vehicles than it does with capsules. Should be possible to parlay that experience into something new.
3. Capsules are just shifting "Standing Army" from the Launch activity to the Recovery activity - maybe: it is entirely possible that there will be two "Standing Armies"
4. For both Constellation and Direct every component of the system will have to be "man-rated". This alone is horrendously expensive but can be done. It would however, be much nicer if some parts of the system did not need to be "man-rated". I do not believe that the current "man-ratings" that exist on the shuttle components will necessarily transfer straight across to the new systems for either design.
So, both schemes have significant challenges facing them. Perhaps it really is time to advance the technology of space exploration by designing new vehicles; to wit:
1. A real Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle capable of lifting say 150 - 200 tonnes to LEO.
2. A small manned system for getting from Earth to LEO, same orbital characteristics as Item 1. above.
3. Assemble the Moon and/or Mars vehicles in LEO. Launch would then be from LEO to the Moon/Mars and recovery would also be in LEO.
This approach would separate the planetary issues from the space issues; vehicles can be built in orbit from components and sub-assemblies manufactured on Earth. These vehicles do not need to survive launch shocks from Earth and can be designed with that in mind. Parts of them will have to survive launch shocks from their respective target bodies but they are both significantly smaller than Earth and have either no or a very thin atmosphere.
I do not seek to minimise the challenges that will be presented by any of these proposals, everything we do in space is going to be dangerous. We have to minimise the danger and proceed.
One of the most significant challenges will be the administration and the Congress. The role of both arms should extend to defining the goal(s) and perhaps the timescales. The role of NASA should be to write a bullet-proof requirement so that the agency really knows what it wants. Industry's role is to provide suitably evaluated proposals and costs in response to NASA requirements.
It's a nice idea; but none of the agencies mentioned has the internal discipline or intestinal fortitude necessary to make anything like this happen.
I agree completely with Darnell Clayton. The Direct supporters have been sounding the same note for a while. It sounds okay to an outsider, but ultimately they are telling the NASA Administrator how to do his job. Short of being given the job, they've spoken their piece.
The "It's our way or no way" note is getting very old. So is the "I told you so" brayed at every new engineering challenge in the Ares designs.
Direct supporters are being naive about forcing change, as if having non-technical members of Congress or Presidential candidates dictate technical details to the NASA Administrator is a good idea. (They respond to polls not engineering data; should the Administrator choose architectures based on popular vote?)
Even if NASA miraculously adopted Direct, it would not be three months before the Direct supporters would wash their hands of the process because things wouldn't be done their way. (I suspect the costs and schedule would go up considerably as NASA indulges its penchant for ironing out every scanning electron microscopic detail.)
NASA opponents will hold these two years against whatever design ultimately makes it back into space, just as everybody holds the many politically-mandated redesigns of the ISS against its final cost. So at some point--probably within the next year or already--it will be better to get hardware built than wad up the sheet of paper and start over. NASA has done that too many times already with shuttle successors.
With regard to your charge of bass-ackwardism, Rob, I partially agree. But, as you say, this is not a perfect world. Put it this way for perspective: what kind of manned lunar program do you suppose would get through the EU? The constraints for NASA are not THAT tight, but they are still very real. So why expect NASA to do a time-intensive, cost-intensive, ground-up redesign? The money and time simply aren't there.