NASA Holds Competition to Develop Space Vehicles

BlueCup writes to tell us that the US space agency is holding a competition to develop space vehicles NASA doesn't have the time or resources to develop. The winning companies will get $500 million and NASA will merely lease them as the need arises. From the article: "NASA hopes the private-sector vehicles can bridge an expected gap between when the space shuttle fleet is grounded in 2010 and the crew exploration vehicle is flying in 2014. A thriving commercial space transportation industry also can offer researchers, and others, opportunities to send payloads into space without relying on NASA's crowded space shuttle schedule or worrying 'that the government will decide next month or next year not to launch,' Griffin said."

really?

[mnemonic_]

Name it. The Buran? Nope, not well-tested and uses 70s technology. Soyuz? Yes, it's undergone upgrades throughout the years but might an original design in the 21st century be better? The Soyuz is as conventional as any other rocket system. Yes, it works, but it is hardly the best. It's good current technology; NASA wants something that pushes towards the future. Note that all of the finalist companies are start-ups.

And I can't believe a post got modded +3 without listing a single specific. Oh well, who needs evidence to be "insightful"? Evidently, not the mods.

Re:Resurrect Apollo

[Anonymous Coward]

the apollo capsule could not attach to ISS for the exact same reason that the shuttle could not attach to skylab. Different pressures.

Apollo - 5 PSI pure oxygen
Skylab - 5 PSI pure oxygen
Space Shuttle - 12-15 PSI oxygen nitrogen mixture
International Space Station - 12-15 PSI oxygen nitrogen mixture

despite what you think, they are not so dumb at NASA.

Re:Great for a one shot vehicle...

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

In addition to what node3 said, there's also the whole trick about bringing it back. SpaceShipOne never got above 1km/s. LEO is nearly an order of magnitude greater (7.8km/s). Energy goes by the square of the velocity, so LEO requires 60 times as much energy.

And then you have to shed most of that velocity to get it back; that's equivalent to absorbing and re-radiating all the fuel you burned putting it up.

It's a long, long way from the X-Prize to commercial orbital vehicles.

Griffin said it.

[Baldrson]

"It is well past time for NASA to do everything it can to stimulate commercial space transportation ... and I'm trying to do that."

Right on, Mr. Griffin. [geocities.com]

Introduction

Americans need a frontier, not a program.

Incentives open frontiers, not plans.

If this Subcommittee hears no other message through the barrage of studies, projections and policy recommendations, it must hear this message. A reformed space policy focused on opening the space frontier through commercial incentives will make all the difference to our future as a world, a nation and as individuals.

Armadillo

[Reality Master 101]

If you're interested in what John Carmack is doing these days, he's made a bunch of interesting posts on the aRocket [exrocketry.net] list, specifically about developing an OTRAG [wikipedia.org] modular rocket engine vehicle. He recently made this post (he has specifically given premission to reprint his words in the past, BTW). Exciting stuff. Carmack is the only one who I have any confidence in that will be able to go to orbit cheaply.

---------------------
Peter Fairbrother wrote:

> >> First, $100 million isn't enough, several people have tried
> >> and failed at $100 million projects.
> >
> > Failure has not been limited to $100 million projects. I suspect the
> > failures you speak of are where people tried to build $1 billion
> > vehicles for $100 million price tags.
>
>Yes - and a reasonable LEO launch system needs a half-billion-dollar
>vehicle. You can't really do it more cheaply. Reread the minimum mass to
>orbit thread, and then remember we need a decent payload as well.

We have been discussing the modular OTRAG designs for a reason --
they offer an incremental, scaleable, low cost development path to
inexpensive access to LEO.

I'm completely confident that "per-tube" costs can be under $10k, and
they might get below $5k. You should be able to get 10 - 20 pounds
of payload to LEO per-tube, depending on final Isp and mass ratios.

The size, scope, and complexity of the individual modules is lower
than the work we are currently doing at Armadillo, so development and
tooling expenses are modest. Module design and production can be
improved incrementally to decrease costs, like any mass produced item.

A few screw ups on the way to orbit are probably inevitable, so you
might need to produce several hundred tubes before entering revenue
service, but it still looks like it could be done in the low tens of
millions of dollars, even being rather pessimistic. You could even
buy a few pacific islands for yourself if you really needed to. That
is a long way from half a billion, let alone ten billion.

A system like this won't get to $100 / lb to LEO, but it will
outperform a conventional expendable upper stage on a hypersonic
booster, even disregarding development costs, plus it scales to a
wider range of payloads.

The real point though, is that billion dollar reusable space booster
developments are just fantasy projects at this point. You might as
well posit that you will develop anti-gravity in your garage. If you
were to say something like "The next generation of space vehicles
will prove out an elastic market for space launch, at which point my
ten billion dollar project will look like a sure thing to the smart
money investors" it might be a little more credible, and only have
more standard business and technical arguments against it, instead of
being just nuts.

NASA always goes with the lowest bidder

[Orion Blastar]

that is why space shuttles are always having problems, they are design flaws. I wonder what it would have been like if they went for the best quality instead of the lowest price?

All I can think of was a Sci Fi TV show called "Salvage 1" [imdb.com] where some Junkyard turned junk into a space ship and went to the Moon to salvage the equipment that NASA left there. That is when I think of NASA asking anyone to build a space ship.

Re:How about the Russians?

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

I already read about this in Popular Sciencea long time ago. It's actually a very good thing I believe. They set timelines and requirements in each plan with each tech company to design new spacecraft tech. They get so much money each step of the way after they've demonstrated their ideas and product, often through actual testing. This is a good way to not only prevent overspending but it also encourages private sector innovation from a variety of sources, very well qualified people. The startup companies work like hell to get their idea to work, and they pay for the early stages of work in the hopes that NASA will accept their design or someone else will. I like that NASA is staying ahead of the game on this. It's a great strategy.

Re:How about the Russians?

[QuantumG]

As opposed to the current form of NASA spending: whicher congressman has the most "pull" gets the contract for his buddy who happens to live in his district, who then overcharges up wazoo.

Nah

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Probably the latter. Chairmen who have to answer to shareholders will choose short-term small profits over long-term huge profits everytime.

The problem isn't long term over short term profits, people everywhere make 30-year investments all the time. Its called buying property, and no one is saying thats a bad idea (unless you're in a bubble area). In fact with decent initial investments, everyone can make a good living while the space mining program gets off the ground (nyuck nyuck). The big problem is reliability of that investment. No one can say for sure if all that money isn't going to go spiralling down the drain, and the reason for that is cost to orbit. It doesn't matter how much value you are returning, when the cost to get up there reduces that value below current prices. Remove cost to orbit issues, and space is wide open.

But the wealth is up there, insane treasures beyond the dreams of Midas. Lets take for example the relatively close Amun Asteroid [matter-antimatter.com], about $20 trillion dollars worth of useable materials. I recall one geologist said it was something like three times the total amount of metals mined in the history of the human race. And that is just one SINGLE asteroid. How many million or billion more are there, in our system alone? The first to economically tap into that reservoir will revloutionise human existence, to the extent that our current economic issues would become moot. What price can you put on a car or a computer if they are manufactured in orbit for pennies by robots?

Re:really?

[RocketGeek]

> For specifics, I was impressed with the H2O2 and
> "shredded tires" fuel of Spaceship One

Just as a factoid, SpaceShip One doesn't use H2O2 (which is Hydrogen Peroxide) as oxidiser, it uses Nitrous Oxide, also known as "laughing gas".

Nitrous Oxide is self pressurising, which is where it scores over other oxidisers (although you take a performance hit because the specific impulse when using Nitrous Oxide is lower than with say Liquid Oxygen). With Hydrogen Peroxide as the oxidiser, you'd need to use a pressurisation tank, most likely of Nitrogen. You still need a pressurisation tank on very large Nitrous oxide powered hybrids, because the pressure drop during the motor burn becomes significant for a large motor, but for smaller hybrid motors, it's less of an issue.

Also, the shredded tires is a media over simplification. The actual fuel is a rubber-like compound, most likely HTPB (which is Hydroxyl Terminated Poly Buta-diene), hence the fact the media probably just call it rubber, because it is such a mouthful!

I've got some more information on hybrid rocket motors and how they work, which I'm slowly building up at:

http://www.ukrocketman.com/rocketry/hybridscience. shtml [ukrocketman.com]

If you're interested in hybrid rocket motors (and they are incredibly simple, as well as chaper and safer than solid rocket motors and liquid rocket engines), then hopefully it may be informative :-)

Re:Remember VentureStar?

[necro81]

I don't deny that VentureStar had a number of other problems going against it, some technological, many beaurocractic. But, I think one of the real problems that killed VentureStar and the DC-X was the simple fact that attempting single-stage-to-orbit is really ambitious. We've done very well in space flight by realizing that we don't need to carry everything up into orbit and back. That is the primary reason why rockets have stages, why there was a separate command and lunar module during Apollo, and why the shuttle uses booster rockets. By dropping stages along the way (reusable or otherwise), we reduce the amount of energy we need to reach orbit. Compared to a conventional rocket, an SSTO craft has a smaller percentage of its launch weight as payload.

I think the approach used by Scaled Composites for SpaceShipOne is right on the money - use a heavy lift aircraft to bring the spacecraft up to launch altitude. Doing so has several advantages: an aircraft tends to be simpler to develop and maintain, it can use jet fuel and breath atmosphere rather than hauling a more exotic fuel with an oxidizer, and the several miles of altitude that the spacecraft gets lifted to are the hardest ones of a space launch. Although the SS1 concept hasn't reached orbit, one could scale up their scenario and see that they'd have a significantly higher percentage of their launch weight as payload.