At this rate, Starship may fly real payloads before SLS does…
I am astonished that NASA will let a private company recover capsules. I understand that Space-x needs to be able to recover capsules since, from your link, they sill support “anyone who wants to go into space”.
Although NASA has paid close attention to Crew Dragon development, this is nevertheless a very different model than, say, the Apollo program. NASA is paying for a service that SpaceX is providing. It’s up to SpaceX to provide all the support infrastructure, including recovery. SpaceX needs to demonstrate that they can do things safely, but aside from that NASA doesn’t get to dictate how SpaceX does things any more than you get to dictate how an airline provides their services.
One could argue whether or not Apollo would have been better served under this model, but it’s certainly the superior model today. As demonstrated, private companies are more than capable of providing launch services for both cargo and crew. NASA can dramatically lower their mission costs by using them. It’s unfortunate that they’re still using Apollo-style development for SLS and Orion.
Now this is interesting:
NASA to consider use of private rockets for first Orion lunar mission
Orion is a big crew capsule for lunar missions (not to be confused with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which will ferry astronauts to the ISS). A demo mission is supposed to launch next year, but the rocket which would carry it (SLS) is pretty clearly not going to be ready by then. NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, put out the option of using “off the shelf” launch capability to launch Orion instead.
There are really only two American rockets that have the lift capability: Falcon Heavy and the Delta IV Heavy. But the Delta has a long lead time–36 months was the number that’s come up previously. In contrast, the Falcon Heavy can easily launch by then.
And from the rumor comes this tweet:
It sounds like SpaceX either got a whiff of Bridenstine’s plans, or maybe they felt the winds changing and that the time was right.
Falcon Heavy may be able to launch in time but there are certainly challenges. The Orion capsule is big and would need some kind of custom mount to the rocket. It would probably also change the aerodynamics enough to revisit that aspect.
On the upside, this does not require man-rating FH, because the EM-1 mission is unmanned. Though if it works out well, perhaps SLS will simply be canceled and FH will be the new Orion launcher. In that case, I’d expect the crew to ride up on Crew Dragon (which should be ready by then) and transfer to Orion. Again, no man-rating of FH required.
To be fair, SLS/Orion/Ares is/was really a Congressionally driven jobs program. At least SpaceX is moving expectations to a better direction than round and round.
SpaceX has finally got Crew Dragon (almost) to the point where it’s capable of launching astronauts to the ISS. Their next big thing is supposed to be a much larger human-rated vessel currently known as Starship which is supposed to ride to orbit atop a super heavy-lift rocket. With Crew Dragon, the SuperDraco thrusters provide an abort option to swiftly and safely carry the passengers away from the rocket if something goes wrong. Does anyone know if Starship will provide a similar capability, or is it going to be too heavy to have an abort system?
Man, if SpaceX launches Orion, that’s going to be another big nail in the coffin for SLS.
SLS simply has to go. If we have our space exploration architecture based around a rocket that costs a billion dollars per launch and only launches every year or two, it’ll slow down new space development dramatically. And if SLS were scrapped, NASA would have billions of dollars per year to work on advanced exploration concepts like nuclear propulsion or other advanced deep space drives.
Also, having multiple private, reusable launchers means easy availability and short lead times. Couple that with low cost launches and NASA could start doing riskier missions where the cost of failure is low, and could also start using more special purpose payloads. The whole economics of building and flying space hardware changes when you can launch it for $50 million instead of $500 million and lead times are months instead of years.
NASA should get out of the space launch business entirely. And it should move to commercialize ISS or otherwise figure out how to get that albatross off its back. With all that money and manpower freed up NASA could then focus on what it does best - planetary exploration, deep space hardware, and other things that have no commercial aspect to them.
I haven’t seen a plan for a launch abort for Starship. I don’t see how you could possibly do better than the engines it already has, but I doubt if they have the kind of thrust required to pull the thing away from an exploding booster.
Of course, the shuttle didn’t have launch abort either, and it was strapped to the side of the freaking fuel tank. So I don’t see that as a show stopper, but of course NASA could determine its own safety standards for the shuttle, and may not grant the same privilege to SpaceX.
We are still in very early days with Starship - a vehicle that has undergone three major design revisions in three years. They’re still building the Starship equivalent of the old grasshopper test vehicle, so we are still many years from Starship flying people. Ignoring Musk-time estimates, I’d say we’ll be lucky to see the test vehicle flying in 2019, and full construction on the actual starship and heavy lifter to not start until 2020-2021. We might see full test flights of the whole stack in 2023-2024, and full capability orbital flights with people onboard by 2025-2026. And to me that still sounds like a very aggressive schedule. It would not surprise me to see manned launches pushed out to 2030 or even later.
As a reminder, the COTS demonstrator that just flew was first contracted in 2006, 13 years ago. Falcon 9 was three years over schedule before its first flight. Falcon Heavy was supposed to fly in 2011, then 2013, then 2015, and it finally flew in 2018.
This uncertainty is why NASA is hedging its bets with SLS. It’s entirely possible that there won’t be another heavy lifter in its class for another decade, and maybe never if SpaceX can’t get funding, or has a major incident in development, etc.
I thought they could disconnect the tank and boosters and glide to a nearby airstrip.
Well, the ‘Return to Landing Site’ abort was widely considered to be nearly impossible. Some astronauts said that it was little more than busywork to keep the astronauts occupied until the inevitable crash. And disconnecting from the tank assumes the tank isn’t the thing that blew up.
The truth is that it was crazy to hang a manned vehicle on the side of a large fuel tank, and that decision really led to both shuttle disasters as it not only made the shuttle vulnerable to a tank failure, but it also meant that chunks of ice coming off the tank could smack into the orbiter. There were other failure modes of the stack that could have damaged the orbiter and possibly made it unflyable. A capsule with a parachute system is a lot more robust than something that has to fly to a runway and land after a failure in the air.
I don’t think NASA would have ever approved that design if they weren’t involved with coming up with it in the first place.
Then NASA doubled down after the shuttle and tried to man-rate one of the solid rocket boosters and put a capsule on top of it. I guess keeping people employed at Thiokal/ATK was more important than safety, as the thing didn’t have a survivable abort mode if the rocket blew up in the first 60 seconds, and the vibrations from the solid rocket motor were severe, and even potentially fatal to a crew. NASA granted itself safety waivers for the design, despite already having lost two shuttles.
The political demands to keep using old shuttle parts to keep the manufacturing facilities open and people employed has been the millstone around NASA’s neck ever since the Shuttle was scheduled for retirement.
What of the survival / safety suits the astronauts were complaining about? Were they going to ditch at sea? Bail out?
You mean in the shuttle? The first two shuttles, Enterprise and Columbia, had two ejection seats for the pilot and co-pilot. But those were for the test flights and we not planned to be used with a full crew. The other shuttles didn’t have them. And anyway, they were probably useless as there was only a small time window where the SRB’s were gone and yet the shuttle was still low enough for the ejection seats to be used. Any earlier, and the astronauts and/or their parachutes would be fried by the exhaust or flaming bits of exploded SRB.
There was a bailout protocol, but again it was only usable in a limited scenario - specifically an abort or some problem during return where the shuttle is above 20,000 ft, in good flying condition but too far from a runway to land safely. Ditching in the ocean was not considered survivable, or very unlikely to be survivable. So in that case, the shuttle could then be put in a gentle descent, giving time for everyone to bailout down a long pole that would have been extended out far enough to keep them from hitting shuttle parts after release. By no means could this be used for any kind of launch failure involving an exploding rocket.
I agree with this. First there was the Constellation program and now SLS. After that gets cancelled they’ll start some other program to use RS-25 engines to get people to space for many billions of dollars.
Be more practical and economic to sell the RS-25’s to NASCAR.
Might even get me to watch it.
I’m sure that Starship will have some number of abort modes, and which will cover more ground than the Shuttle ever did. More importantly, though, its very design should reduce the risk even further.
As far as I know, the Falcon 9 has only suffered three significant loss-of-payload failures:
- CRS-1, an ISS cargo mission, suffered an engine out failure. The rocket did not explode, and in fact the primary payload made it to orbit just fine. The secondary payload did not make it, essentially due to being low on fuel (an 8-engine burn is less efficient than a 9-engine burn).
- CRS-7, another cargo mission, exploded mid-flight. The cause was a failed internal strut holding a high-pressure helium bottle. The uncontrolled bottle tore open the second stage tank. Interestingly, the Dragon capsule payload survived the explosion, but the parachutes were not programmed to deploy. The capsule transmitted good telemetry up until it impacted with the ocean.
- AMOS-6 was destroyed on the ground (before launch) by a subtle interaction between supercooled liquid oxygen and the lining of the internal helium bottles. The payload was completely lost.
Two of these failures were essentially caused by the helium bottles–this is a failure mode which will be completely eliminated on Starship, because it uses autogeneous pressurization–that is to say, it doesn’t use high-pressure helium, but rather gasified propellant (either oxygen or methane, depending on the tank). This should reduce internal tank complexity greatly.
Another failure was caused by a loss of engine. Starship, with its even greater number of engines, has an increased ability to cope with an engine-out failure. Furthermore, the failure would not have caused a loss of crew–just, perhaps, an early end to the mission.
The one catastrophic in-flight failure was still remarkably gentle, as the payload was able to separate without significant damage. Liquid fueled rockets in general fail more gracefully than solid fueled, and although fireballs can be spectacular, they are not nearly as damaging as high-speed chunks of burning solid fuel.
It may well be that Starship can survive at least some fraction of booster mishaps, separating from the booster and then landing back at the launch site. Perhaps some extra shielding between the booster and second state will be necessary to prevent engine damage. I’m curious what SpaceX comes up with here.
Awaiting static test of Falcon Heavy, hopefully today. If successful, perhaps a launch on Tuesday, 4/9 around 6:30 PM followed by 2 of the boosters landing 8 minutes after launch. The other, middle booster is to be captured on the barge a few hundred miles off shore.
Here’s a photo of the twin boosters landing side by side from the other Falcon Heavy that was launched last year, Feb. 6, 2018. These rockets are the height of 22 story buildings returning to The Cape Canaveral Air Force Station a few miles from where they were launched.
It happened:
Looks like science fiction stuff.
Wow. Where did they get that 10% extra thrust? Were the engines de-rated for that first flight? Or did they make improvements somewhere?