private space programs-are any realistic?
From where I sit, the good people at SpaceX seem very, very clueless about their venture. The first failure of the Falcon 1 booster was due to the (entirely inappropriate) use of an aluminum fastener. Their explanation: we thought the more expensive fastener would be better, despite NAS and NASA guidelines to avoid the use of fastener alloys prone to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in critical joining applications. (“The irony is we are replacing them with a cheaper component to increase reliability,” he said. No, Elon, that’s not irony, it’s bad reliability assessment and component selection.) The second launch was deemed by SpaceX to be a “successful demonstration” even though Stage 1 ran into Stage 2 after stage separation. They’re planning to launch a Falcon 9 (nine of the same motors ganged together in a matrix…yeah, no potential for resonant vibration or pump feed flow control problems there) next year, although their government customers (Air Force) have essentially lost faith in them, in no small part due to the lack of rigorous risk management, failure investigation, and accurate reliability accounting.
Now, in all fairness, in developing an entirely new booster system you expect problems like this to crop up, and in fact you’d be somewhat worried if they didn’t, because it means that you’re living on luck and sooner or later one of the things that have been going wrong all along, but not wrong enough to cause a detectable failure, are going to catch up with you. As with nearly every other field of endeavor you learn far more from your failures (or as the Navy likes to call them, “anomalies”) than your successes. So a few crack ups–even ones with relatively stupid root causes–are almost inevitable. Boeing made a dilly a few years ago with Delta II and interstage cables that were inadequately secured. But the SpaceX people seem to be waving this all off as nothing, no problem, it’s all just as we expected.
Needless to say, this is not the sort of risk management attitude that is going to successfully convey a manned vehicle into orbit safely and reliably.
Rockwell (now a division of The Boeing Company) built the STS Shuttle Orbiter. Rocketdyne built the Shuttle Main Engines (SME), Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) built the External Tank (ET), and then-Morton Thiokol, now ATK Launch Systems builds the Solid Rocket Motors (RSRM). Various other components were built by various companies, many of which have sense been absorbed into the Big Three, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin jointly manage the United Space Alliance, albeit with someone questionable effectiveness. Neither Boeing nor Lockheed has themselves demonstrated the capability to construct a new design lifting body spaceplane. (McDonnell Douglas spent quite a bit of effort on the DC-X “Delta Clipper” demonstration SSTO, but never took it to the next full scale phase, and Lockheed’s attempt at a spaceplane demonstrator, the X-33/VentureStar seems to have finally been deservedly buried after burning nearly a billion dollars in prototype development without producing a single scale flight article.)
Lockheed Martin is currently developing the “next generation” Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which basically an updated Apollo Plus (same mold line angle, even), launched on top of Shuttle-derived hardware (a five segment RSRM with a J-2 based second stage, or a Saturn S-IC-like RS-68-based first stage with the same J-2 upper) with a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous like Apollo; this is neither a real advance in the state of the art nor a commerically viable system; estimated launch costs are going to be in a close order of magnitude to a Shuttle launch, but also with considerably less payload capability, albeit nominally more mission flexibility.
Neither Boeing nor Lockheed can be said to have truely developed a completely commerical launcher; Atlas I-II and Titan launch vehicles are derivatives of Cold War-era ICBMs, Delta II was informally subsidized (via guranteed pay-or-play contracts with the Air Force) to assure geosynchronous and highly elliptical orbit capability for survellience satellite capability, and the Delta III & IV and Atlas IV-V were produced as part of the post-Challenger EELV with support from the Air Force to ensure availabilty of a heavy boost vehicle. Arianespace has developed an essentially commerical vehicle, but with heavy subsidy of the French government (hoping for independent orbital launch capability for military use). All of the Russian hardware is military in origin, including the Zenits used by the Boeing-led SeaLaunch Effort.
Of commerical space launchers, only Orbital Sciences can genuinely said to have developed and built (along with ATK) a completely commerical systems–the Pegasus and Taurus line of space launch vehicles–but both are solid motor propulsion vehicles for the main stages, based upon extensive experience with solid motor ICBMs (The Castor 120 first stage for Taurus is a commercialized version of the PK Stage 1). These are simply not scalable up to a man-rated heavy boost vehicle, and they are not competitive on a cost basis with the use of surplus Minuteman- and Peacekeeper-based space launch vehicles when those are available for use. OSC isn’t and doesn’t pretend or intend to be in the business of manned space launch, which has pretty much been an economic bust for anyone who has ever tried.
Only the Russians can be said to have an economically viable manned space launcher, and that claim based upon the evolution of a nearly fifty year old system, very cheap labor, and capable of deliverying only the very wealthy to Low Earth Orbit. This is a far cry from the Pan Am Space Clipper Shuttles of 2001, taking Heywood Floyd to a garishly outfitted Howard Johnson’s in a wheel spinning to the tune of the Blue Danube. (How do they get those speakers to work in the vacuum of orbital space, anyway?)
While experience and progressive develpment of rocket boosters continues, albeit at a somewhat halting pace, and despite the enthusiasm of dot.com billionaires, the fact remains that chemical propellants are energetically limited to a very modest exhaust velocity and resultant disappointing engine specific impulse (I[sub]sp[/sub]), and reentry heating pushes material capabilities to the limit for anything but a blunt-body reentry vehicle. It’s unlikely that chemical propulsion will ever be viable for ground-to-orbit transportation for anyone below the level of Donald Trump. (Orbit-to-ground is another issue, but if you could get the bugs worked out on a truely reusable and reliable reentry vehicle that required minimal refurbishment this would be a minimal cost to the overall transportation cycle.) Short of some breakthrough in high altitude, air breathing, supersonic-to-hypersonic-to-orbit and back craft, we’re going to either need some more energetic, efficient form of propulsion (fusion) or some other means to ascend to orbit (beanstalk) to make orbital transit a reality. Either of the latter options is decades away at the very least.
Sorry, but I’m not seeing any commerical manned space vehicle activity in my crystal ball in the the forseseeable future. A pity, as I’ve always wanted to vacation in Saturn’s rings, though I hear that they’re much more impressive from a distance (and color enhanced) anyway.
Stranger