Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 05:12:02 From: Space Digest maintainer Reply-To: Space-request@isu.isunet.edu Subject: Space Digest V16 #015 To: Space Digest Readers Precedence: bulk Space Digest Thu, 7 Jan 93 Volume 16 : Issue 015 Today's Topics: Fabrication (was fast track failures) Let's be more specific (was: Stupid Shut Cost arguements) Marketing SSTO Moon Dust For Sale Space Questions and more.. Welcome to the Space Digest!! Please send your messages to "space@isu.isunet.edu", and (un)subscription requests of the form "Subscribe Space " to one of these addresses: listserv@uga (BITNET), rice::boyle (SPAN/NSInet), utadnx::utspan::rice::boyle (THENET), or space-REQUEST@isu.isunet.edu (Internet). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 06:05:59 GMT From: Gary Coffman Subject: Fabrication (was fast track failures) Newsgroups: sci.space In article ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright) writes: >In <1993Jan5.212935.21012@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman) writes: > >>Having design engineers apprentice on >>the shop floor for a few years *before* they get to design a product >>would do a world of good for our manufacturing sector. It certainly >>has for the Japanese and old school Germans. > >You mean like that horrid know-nothing, Wernher von Braun? ;-) I have absolutely no idea where you get such absurd ideas. Von Braun is the perfect example of a wartime technologist. He took enormous risks and spent cubic money to bring a critical system in on schedule. That's admirable in wartime, but not in the commercial arena. You'll notice that after Saturn achieved it's Cold War objective of oneupmanship against the USSR, it was promptly dropped because no other missions could justify it's expense and there was never a hope of recouping it's development costs. Shuttle was the "low cost" system that was touted to replace expensive expendibles like Saturn. When Shuttle proved not to be so low cost after all, it was too late to go back to the already dead Saturn, and Congress refused to fund development of a launcher to replace Shuttle. So now we have a capable, but expensive, launcher in operation. We should never again make the mistake of killing our only operational system in favor of a paper spacecraft that hasn't established a solid track record of meeting it's performance and cost goals. Thus I champion continuing to fly Shuttle until there are proven systems on line to replace it. Neither the paper DC-1 nor the proposed Soyuz on Titan have that track record yet. They may never have that track record and some completely different system may be needed to replace the capabilities of Shuttle. Meanwhile Shuttle continues to maintain a presence in space for the USA that does worthwhile missions. Unlike Allen, I am completely convinced that killing Shuttle now will not cause any money to be reprogrammed to his pet schemes. The only results of killing Shuttle would be 7,000 Florida aerospace workers on the unemployment line, workers in Houston, California, Nevada, Mississippi, Alabama, and other places on the unemployment line, all hope of recouping Shuttle development and infrastructure costs gone forever, a long hiatus in US manned spaceflight if not it's permanent termination, and more money for the VA and Clinton's national health care program. I find that scenario personally unacceptable. Gary -- Gary Coffman KE4ZV | You make it, | gatech!wa4mei!ke4zv!gary Destructive Testing Systems | we break it. | uunet!rsiatl!ke4zv!gary 534 Shannon Way | Guaranteed! | emory!kd4nc!ke4zv!gary Lawrenceville, GA 30244 | | emory!ke4zv!gary@gatech.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 07:28:39 GMT From: Gary Coffman Subject: Let's be more specific (was: Stupid Shut Cost arguements) Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1i2lnqINN50b@mirror.digex.com> prb@access.digex.com (Pat) writes: >Gary, > > The operating methods of any stackable vehicle are going to > significantly different from a recoverable single stage vehicle. And the operating methods of any reusable vehicle are going to be different from any expendible. The only reusable spacecraft we have experience with isn't cheaper per pound to fly than some expendibles, just ask Allen. DC is *supposed* to be much better, but then so was Shuttle at the same point in it's development. > You keep arguing that the russians have high costs for their > stackables, and that ariane has high costs subsidized by the government. The Russians do have higher costs than the ones they are quoting during the current fire sale. As their economy converts from communism, those costs will begin to show in their export products. I'm not saying their costs are higher than ours, but they could be, it depends on how salaries go in the new economy. Arianne's development costs were subsidized by the ESA governments, mainly France in it's nationalized aerospace industry, and operational pricing is in large part political. That's not to say that their real costs are higher than ours, but they may be. Long March is in the same situation, but worse, because the economy producing it is still shifting costs in hidden ways. The *Chinese* probably don't even know the true cost of the vehicle, and they certainly aren't telling anyone else. They're willing to operate at a loss just to get foreign exchange. > I know you believe that cheap stackables can be done, but those > are the same paper designs you condemn DC for. I don't condemn DC for being a paper design. All new vehicles are paper designs at some point. What I do condemn is the idea of giving up an operational system in the *hope* that the paper vehicle will meet it's promise on schedule and on budget. That would be like telling Delta to quit flying all it's current aircraft today and laying off all it's personnel today because there's going to be a cheaper aircraft available in 5 or 10 years. Once you dismantle an enterprise, it's extremely difficult to ever bring it back to life. > Shuttle could have lower costs then NASA currently has, > but it still needs a tremendous infrastructure. The OPF, > the VAB, Tilting bay, the crawler/transporter. Launch towers. Of course Shuttle *already* has this infrastructure, and it's paid for whether Shuttle continues to use it or not. The only costs you can save are salary costs at the Cape, Houston, Stennis, etc. Now those salaries represent the real core of NASA. So if your objective is to destroy NASA, saving that money for HUD or the VA is the way to do it. > The DC will not need much more infrastructure, then a > airline hangar. Henry, alan and I all believe that eliminating > all this structure and cost will make up for any lower > vehicle lift capacity. And it likely will in competition with MLVs if it works, but not with HLVs or Shuttle for the missions they are best suited to do. Currently there aren't that many missions needing heavy lift, seven people on orbit, remote manipulation, long duration experiments, or payload return. Shuttle does it with less than 8 launches a year. DC may put Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Pegasus out of business, but it doesn't have the capacity to match Shuttle or a true HLV for the times they're needed. DC may free Shuttle for more such missions by relieving it of the need to fly less demanding missions. That's good. Once we have Freedom in operation, even less need will be found for Shuttle, and it can be phased out. But there will still be missions where there's no viable substitute for heavy lift and only the Russians still have an operational very heavy lift vehicle. It may make sense just to contract with them, but I'd like to see the US develop a new generation VHLV designed from the ground up to achieve the lowest possible cost per pound. We've never tried to do that so we don't know how cheaply it can be done. > Please demonstrate how Lockheed could eliminate all these costs > from commercial shuttle operations. I don't think *Lockheed* could do it (reduce, not eliminate, these costs), but Rockwell might, and Delta likely could. The government has civil service, tons of rules, and mountains of paperwork that a commercial firm would not have. Remember, most of Shuttle's costs are salary costs for those folks filling out the forms, and the lawyers inventing the forms, and the layers of managers overseeing it all. The guys and gals actually touching the hardware are only a small fraction of that army. Contrast UPS with the US Postal Service to get an idea of the kinds of economies a private operation could offer. Gary -- Gary Coffman KE4ZV | You make it, | gatech!wa4mei!ke4zv!gary Destructive Testing Systems | we break it. | uunet!rsiatl!ke4zv!gary 534 Shannon Way | Guaranteed! | emory!kd4nc!ke4zv!gary Lawrenceville, GA 30244 | | emory!ke4zv!gary@gatech.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 09:02:30 GMT From: Nick Szabo Subject: Marketing SSTO Newsgroups: sci.space A good point was made about accounting costs in the Shuttle vs. SSTO cost thread: what we are trying to find from the data determines what accountingg method we should use. To replace the Shuttle the amortization+operation cost of the new system should be less than STS's mean operational costs + the amortization costs of any new orbiters, facilities, and improvements beyond the current. To get a historical perspective on what SSTO's costs might be, _if done like STS_, we need to compute the total cost of STS, including amortization of the c. $30 billion STS development costs. When pondered in this light, SSTO doesn't look too good does it! Keep in mind that STS promised cost/lb. breakthroughs every bit as dramatic as currently promised for SSTO; when proposed STS was compelling for the same reason SSTO is compelling today. Cleary, we do not want to do SSTO like we did STS. I suggest SSTO strategy should be very different, almost the opposite of the strategy used for STS. STS combined astronaut and satellite launching; there should be two very different SSTO vehicles for these very different markets. Shuttle was designed and built by a commitee from NASA and the DoD for the vague, sweeping purpose of lowering launch costs; SSTO should be designed not to lower launch costs for everybody, but to provide large service improvements to specific markets, for example reducing the cost and increasing the reliability of delivering satellites to orbit. Shuttle was a single design centrally planned; SSTO should come in several competing varieties. STS was an entire "system" that needed new launch pads and was part of a centrally planned strategy that included a a uniquely sized, dependent set of payloads (Spacelab, Galileo, Magellan, Hubble, etc.); SSTO should stand on its own as a launcher in the current infrastructure, launching current payloads better. For example, a satellite-launching SSTO should be designed around current comsat/upper stage pairs; an astronaut-launching SSTO might be designed around Apollo, Soyuz, or the Shuttle cabin. Alas, currently the program is headed in direction of the swamp which bogged down the Shuttle, with strong lobbying for NASA to take over the project as a new Clinton start-up. This is great politically -- I came up with this idea well before the election, when it first looked like the Democrats had a fighting chance -- but it could be a disaster functionally, as it puts SSTO down the same bureacrat-hobbled path that made Shuttle amortization+operational costs over an order of magnitude higher than promised, after inflation. Furthermore, most SSTO designs show astronauts going up and deploying satellites like the Shuttle, with serious loss of mass for the payload on the one hand, and limited complement or lab space for astronauts on the other. Automated satellite deployment has been used since 1957, fer cryin' out loud! Astronauts either have better things to do, or nothing at all, in which case ferget 'em. Which market should SSTO go for? Clearly if there are several SSTOs for several different purposes, there is no one answer. So far, the replacement of STS has been a major goal. However, the astronaut market has a serious drawback. It is a market of civilian space agencies and ephemeral political winds. These agencies up until now have insisted on having a central role in designing and "man-rating" astronaut spacecraft. Perhaps we can change this habit, both through politically efforts and by the marketing of astronaut-SSTO to multiple space agencies. For example, two competing astronaut SSTOs could provide commercial astronaut services to a wide variety of government space agencies, including many countries that currently have no access to spaceflight other than via government agencies of Russia or the U.S. The market for satellite launch, civilian and military, is much larger and more reliable than the astronaut market, and probably should be the focus of the first commercial SSTO. If SSTO can deliver cost reduction as promised, the subsisized and glutted launch markets won't hurt it nearly as much as they have small rocket companies promising small improvements. Dramatic launch costs reductions, even a factor of two to four, make economically viable large new markets, including cellular phone and direct broadcast satellites, economical private-sector earth imaging, etc. An ELV launch operation subsidized by 50% would soon be spilling red ink in the $billions, while the SSTO folks rake in the profits! Given the vast market potential of large cost/lb. reductions, we should concentrate far more on making SSTO launch cost reduction a technical reality, and far less on add-ons such as satellite repair, astronaut capsules, etc. The goal is to _reduce_ costs, not to drive up costs by adding on side paraphanalia. We want to bring big improvements to the current market, not pretend like STS that we can design an all-encompassing, expensive "system" that is supposed to change everything for everyone. Once SSTO is built and reduces costs for the large markets, then we can add on the other nifty stuff as economics and politics permit. I think we will find that the best add-ons will be radically different than the Shuttle-style paraphenalia we envision today. SSTO's improvements for the current space market should stand on their own. SSTO should not depend on any other new project for its rationale or its success. -- Nick Szabo szabo@techboook.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 06:39:00 GMT From: Gary Coffman Subject: Moon Dust For Sale Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro,alt.sci.planetary In article <1993Jan6.183139.3779@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes: > >Of course, the preceding reasoning assumes that the sole function of >the entire Moon program was to produce those rocks as a product. I >think there was just a BIT more to it than that. Using the same >logic, one could say that we paid $67 billion to develop Tang. And worth every penny. Yum, yum. :-) :-) Gary -- Gary Coffman KE4ZV | You make it, | gatech!wa4mei!ke4zv!gary Destructive Testing Systems | we break it. | uunet!rsiatl!ke4zv!gary 534 Shannon Way | Guaranteed! | emory!kd4nc!ke4zv!gary Lawrenceville, GA 30244 | | emory!ke4zv!gary@gatech.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 06:23:05 GMT From: Gary Coffman Subject: Space Questions and more.. Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Jan6.042912.1@acad3.alaska.edu> nsmca@acad3.alaska.edu writes: > >When DCX flys, why not use it as a way to lift a small payload such as the >"solar Sail Race" contestants into space? That is if the contestants are >unmanned.. Because DCX can't achieve orbit, it's not designed to do that. It's a small test vehicle intended to prove out certain SSTO concepts in a suborbital vehicle and isn't planned to be flown above 30,000 feet. The entrants in the solar sail race will be unmanned. The flight time to Lunar orbit will be weeks if not months. No planned sail can carry enough life support for such a long flight. Large solar sails may someday be useful for carrying non-perishable cargo about the solar system, and the race is a way of proving out the concept. It should really be viewed as a race between snails, however. Gary -- Gary Coffman KE4ZV | You make it, | gatech!wa4mei!ke4zv!gary Destructive Testing Systems | we break it. | uunet!rsiatl!ke4zv!gary 534 Shannon Way | Guaranteed! | emory!kd4nc!ke4zv!gary Lawrenceville, GA 30244 | | emory!ke4zv!gary@gatech.edu ------------------------------ End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 015 ------------------------------