Recently in Orion Category

Whatever the next US human rated spacecraft is it is likely it will be able to use the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM) that has been under development by NASA and the European Space Agency for more than two years now. The US Congress even directed NASA to develop such a mechanism with all space faring nations


credit: Geert Smet / caption: earlier US work has informed the European studies

Belgian company Verhaert Space is ESA's prime for the European work on this IBDM and at the CEAS 2009 European air and space conference in Manchester, Geert Smet University of Leuven graduate student spoke of his work that contributed to the ESA studies

His presentation revealed that the IBDM's origins is in the cancelled X-38 programme and that now the specification for the mechanism means it can dock or berth together vehicles as "small" as 5,000kg or as large as 80,000kg but the nominal spacecraft mass will be 21,500kg - enough for ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle or the Orion crew exploration vehicle

The planned Chinese space station is to be 60,000kg in mass. Or is it that 80,000kg would nicely suit the modules for a nuclear powered Mars ship?

Hyperbola is to address the Augustine panel final report in a series of posts in the coming weeks - as we're not going to see any Obama spaceflight policy decision anytime soon - but to kick off this blogs analysis here are a few interesting words from spacedaily.com contributor Jeffrey Bell, over to you Jeff; 

"Having read the whole report, my view is that it is strongly slanted towards the status quo and the real situation with the "Program of Record" is far worse than the Commission was prepared to admit publicly. 

[T]he worst example of this is the manipulation of financial data.  For instance, they always use the "GDP Deflator" as their inflation index for projecting program costs forward and backward in time.  As I showed over two years ago this index grossly understates the real increase of space project costs over time. NASA calculates their own "NASA New Start Index" which is higher than the GDP deflator and even higher than the Consumer Price Index you see in the news.

NASA had told Hyperbola its administrator Charles Bolden was not going to be available here in Daejeon, Korea but a bit of persistence goes a long way and over a few minutes after the heads of agency plenary session Bolden gave away some interesting details about his thinking on the future of US human spaceflight policy

What was surprising was the degree to which Bolden had clearly already decided that Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles were not going to be a part of that future. Despite this journalist's prodding about the interest shown in EELVs during the Augustine review Bolden was very clear, they were not man rated and multiple launch scenarios with LEO rendezvous and docking was just a no-no; so this was one former two-star US Marine Corp general this blogger decided it was not worth arguing with

But even before the EELVs were outright rejected Bolden was adamant beyond LEO exploration needed a heavy lift vehicle. One wonders what heavy lift vehicle exactly is being costed by the agency, Bolden was guided away by his minders at this point, but the other elements that Bolden was describing match very closely the Augustine summary report's option two; making the heavy lift vehicle the Ares V lite

And of course this also means propellant depots are unlikely to see the light of day evey 45min either

To date this blog has been expecting a decision on US human spaceflight policy before Christmas so that the new policy could be incorporated into the FY2011 budget. Remember when the FY2010 budget request talked of a second budgetary submission to Congress following the review? But if a decision is months off - well there is universal health care and a new Afgan war strategy to sort out first - then appropriations specifically for this new policy may not appear until FY2012. And what does that mean for the Augustine committee's $2.5 billion commercial crew proposal, or any commercial transportation initiative? 

So "Yes we can" now has less immediacy to it and for NASA it's now more of "Yes, in due course"

credit: IAF/KARI

So Hyperbola has finally touched down in Daejeon in south Korea, after a scorching reentry from the Oort cloud, or was that just the effect of the Korean spicy Kimchi pickle and the even more spicy red pepper paste, Kochu Chang, they put on most of their food?

Either way it is a countdown now to the start of the 60th International Astronautical Congress and the space agencies' plenary session, so expect pictures and pithy comment from this blog as the week unfolds with everything from grand human exploration visions to suborbital tourism

But it won't end with Hyperbola's Asiana flight out of Seoul next weekend, oh no, the international space theme continues with the AIAA/DLR International hypersonics and spaceplanes conference in Bremen, Germany next week

Much of the media coverage (linked too here and here) about the Government Accountability Office report on NASA's Constellation programme has focused on the funding angle and cost estimates but Hyperbola found buried on page nine the following:

"We have reported on several occasions that within NASA's acquisition framework, the preliminary design/non-advocate review--the hurdle marking transition from program formulation to program implementation--is the point at which development projects should have a sound business case in hand. NASA's Systems Engineering Policy states that the preliminary design review demonstrates that the preliminary design meets all system requirements with acceptable risk and within the cost and schedule constraints. NASA realized that the Orion project was not ready to complete the preliminary design review process as planned and delayed its initiation from summer 2008 to summer 2009. Furthermore, although NASA officially closed the Ares I preliminary design review process in September 2008, it deferred resolution of the thrust oscillation issue until the Constellation program preliminary design review in March 2010." 

And the GAO report's conclusion says "the failure to establish a sound business case has placed the program in a poor risk posture to proceed into implementation as planned in 2010." 

This journalist's question for NASA was, "why did the Constellation programme think that it could close its vehicles' PDR processes when so much remaining technical uncertainty meant that by other government definitions the space agency could not claim to have mitigated enough risk to confidently plan for the programme's next stages so they could meet budget and first flight targets?"

Flightglobal's story on this can be found here. Click through to the extended portion of this blog post to see NASA's full answer

·      Below is NASA's answer to Hyperbola's question about multiple efforts for docking systems that seemed to be springing up everywhere

As well as progress with the Orion crew exploration vehicle's LIDS NASA has informed Hyperbola that $15 million is to be spent on docking system work for the agency's commercial crew and cargo programme and last week the European Space Agency explained to this blog that it too was co-operating with NASA on a docking system that is called the Common Berthing and Docking Mechanism 


"[Low Impact Docking System] is the baselined docking mechanism for Constellation/Orion.

·         ISS has assumed responsibility for building a new docking adapter for the US [International Space Station segment]

o   Replaces the existing Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA) based [Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (APAS)] docking system used for Shuttle

o   ATLAS (remember that ATLAS stands for APAS to LIDS Adapter System) has been transferred from Orion to ISS and integrated into new project called Common Docking Adapter (CDA)

o   CDA Project has been asked to develop a new International Docking Standard, which would identify key technical requirements that would allow many different designs for docking spacecraft. If an agreement can be reached and the agency implements the standard on ISS, LIDS may be slightly modified to interface with the standard [emphasis added].

·         $15M in [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009] funding is being used to develop requirements for a new docking adapter and building components for a demonstration International Docking Standard

 ·         The docking standard is being worked by an international group including [Canadian Space Agency], ESA, [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency], NASA, and [Rocket and Space Corporation] Energia; the intent is to provide a standard for use by any nation or commercial company to provide the ability to dock spacecraft."

The blogosphere is all abuzz with the outcome of yesterday's final public meeting of the Review of US human space flight plans committee

Hyperbola, despite being in Washington DC this week and the US for the past two and a bit weeks, has been somewhat hampered in its efforts to monitor proceedings because of the EAA Airventure airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the AIAA 45th Joint Propulsion Conference in Denver and the AUVSI Unmanned Systems North America 2009 conference, right here in the USA's capitol city (and some tourism around Utah and DC's national mall)

Despite that I found the time to write an analysis piece for our print title Flight International which you can find here. I was interested in how NASA was re-examining Constellation and what the committee's comments were about the "program of record", to use the technical term, when the Ares rocket work was presented at the Hunstville, Alabama meeting on 29 July

Looking at the media coverage now the final public meeting has taken place, Hyperbola's reacton is, but is that news, we knew that already? We knew that Constellation, in its current form, was unaffordable, we knew back in June that opting for Delta IV was not a cheap option, but I would have to say that the best headline prize goes to the RocketsAndSuch blog

Examining the realistic options we know that Atlas V is ruled out because of its Russian engines, and Augustine panel member and former Boeing Space Shuttle programme director Bo Bejmuk thinks its margins are to close to call

Delta IV could do the job apparently but you have to man rate it especially the RS-68 engines, and so why not use the Falcon 9 Heavy, it and its Merlin engines have been designed with NASA man rating standards from the get go?

Some panel members do indeed think that "commercial" has some sort of magic wand to do it cheaper and faster but in the Aerospace Corporation's view, people who have actually looked at the numbers, that is not so - and Hyperbola agrees

If you choose a Delta or Falcon then you have to redesign Orion for those launchers, unless you want to start again? Why not use SpaceX's Dragon you might ask, well that has not been designed to be lunar capable and until now the intention is to go back to the Moon

This all might sound like an argument for Ares I but it is in fact an argument about why the alternatives are not as great as their proponents claim. And as Bejmuk said at the 29 July meeting, and I qouted in the analysis article referred to above, if the US is going to change from Ares to something else it is got to be something "overwhelmingly better"

credit: Lockheed Martin / caption: leveraging the investment

Go here to find Lockheed Martin's Orion promotional material and three new videos about the alternate missions it is proposing for the crew exploration vehicle and its service module, which have the title "Leveraging the investment in Constellation". The videos are here, here and here.

credit Lockheed Martin / caption: when one Orion crew exploration vehicle is simply not enough

Lockheed Martin is proposing alternate uses for the Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV) it is developing for NASA's Constellation programme

The image above shows two Orion's docked together for a near Earth object mission. Other alternate uses were given in a presentation by Lockheed's Brian Duffy at the AIAA 45th Joint Propulsion Conference in Denver, Colorado last week

Just as soon as Hyperbola gets the presentation it will post more

click on the image above to see a larger version in the same window browser

A concern expressed by this blog was that the Norman Augustine led review, all 90-odd days of it, would simply be too short to achieve anything and that the options this US Review of human spaceflight plans committee would come up with would just lead to another study 

Fortunately it would seem, according to sources brave enough to talk to Hyperbola, that Bolden will have a "forward plan" very soon after Augustine has briefed the US Senate and House of Representatives, dates for which are being organised now

This will follow the committee chairman's 14 August debrief to NASA administrator Charles Bolden and John Holdren, Office of Science and Technology Policy director - whose office kicked off the review on behalf of president Barack Obama's administration

The rapid timing for all this is apparently because political wheels are to be set in motion as regards the Congressional budgetary process. So it is nice to know everything but the engineering is driving the schedule

But fear not Hyperbola readers because this NASA announcement yesterday indicated that all would be revealed sooner than you think

The Aug. 12 meeting will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. EDT at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Amphitheater, located at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW in Washington. The agenda is:

1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Committee public deliberations:

Discussion of final options

Discussion of final report

Discussion of close-out activities

Hyperbola understands that all the Augustine materials will be made public on 12 August, and perhaps there won't even be set of secret appendices...

Coming back to this forward plan of Bolden's, some people have been getting quite excited about what Xcor founder and chief executive Jeff Greason's (pronounced Grey-son) propellant depot presentation means for the options that Augustine's committee could choose