Getting into orbit is not the problem. Returning from orbit is.
For all the jokes and criticism of the shuttle heat tiles, I haven’t heard of any private group that has come up with a viable alternative. NASA spends gazillions of dollars and staff-hours on ensuring that the tiles are perfect. How does that translate into cheaper, safer, more frequent private missions?
Until a firm solves that problem, all talk of private orbital flight is specious.
Thanks for the correction, I’d missed that part. It does seem they’re further along than Scaled Composites.
It’s not that hard if you don’t insist on the thermal shield being reusable. All other spacecraft use ablative shields that dissipate heat by melting away.
Also there’s a metallic reusable thermal shield that was developed for the NASA X-33 project, which is much more durable than the Shuttle’s ceramic tiles.
good catch.
yes I meant manned vehicles. There are a large number of organizations/countries that have put up unmanned satellites. A few of those have even brought them (or parts of them) down again intact. But no one (except NASA and now Russia) that I have heard of is even trying to build a manned vehicle.
It’s hard for me to get excited. At best they’ll replicate the Mercury missions of the early 1960s. And if they do manage to do it cheaper, it’s only because they’re the beneficiaries of all the research that NASA has already done and the expertise that exists among NASA’s contractors. If they did something NASA hasn’t done yet I’ll be impressed.
As a matter of fact the Chinese have already sent up an astronaut into orbit.
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
An interesting government report on the Big Dumb Booster concept can be found here. According to it, McDonnell Douglas had a design in 1967 which could carry a 100,000 lb paylod into LEO at a cost of some $270/lb, which works out to about $1620/lb in today’s money. IIRC, the shuttle’s payload cost is more than ten times that.
Based on that, and other information in the report (which is admittedly over a decade old), it seems to me that the costs could be brought down. Not to the point where an orbital flight was within reach of most people, but certainly far cheaper than the current costs for space tourism are now ($20 million for a flight on a Russian rocket).
Maybe. I’ve been a Big Dumb Booster fan myself, but when you read the report what you get out of it is[ol]It might make the booster itself cheaper, but no one knows if this savings might be offset by increased costs elsewhere. (launch faciliites, payload considerations, etc.)
[li]In any event, the first generation satellite launchers were developed from ICBMs because that was what was available immediately. Then the US decided that a reusable Shuttle would yield comparable savings while advancing the technology more. (NOT, as it turned out; but that wasn’t forseen in 1972). So the question would have to now be reexamined from scratch. [*]Even if launch costs were lower, payloads such as satellites and probes would probably stick to the “expensive and few” paradigm anyway.[/ol][/li]The devil is in the details.
In short, NASA knew it was an Edsel, but because Nixon told them that it was what they were going to get, and damn the consequences (at this point tens of billions of dollars and 14 dead astronauts), we wound up with it.
Also, don’t bet that “expensive and few” would be the only birds sent up. Telecommunications are vastly more important now, than when the report was written, and I’d be willing to bet that if launches were dramatically cheaper, we’d see the cellphone companies moving into the satellite phone business rapidly, since it’d be cheaper to put up birds than stick ugly ass antennas all over the place. Not to mention providing internet service via satellite.
The development of the Shuttle is far more complicated than that article would have you believe. The history of the development of the Space Transportation System (STS) is as convoluted as a John le Carre novel, but the impetus toward a (partialy) reusable semi-lifting body shuttle as a do-all workhorse for American space transportation came from many areas, including the reduced public interest and budget for manned space programs, the lack of interest in further lunar missions, the desire to mature the technology of spaceflight to live up to von Braun-ian fantasies of fleets of spaceplanes zipping around, and of course to make NASA a major player in the nascent commerical space launch business. To that end, the U.S. government not only crippled funding for expanded Apollo missions just when the Saturn V was becoming a mature production-level launch vehicle, but also curtailed the use, and therefore investment in developing, expendable heavy launch vehicles like the Delta II. This turned out to be a major mistake not only due to the payload-per-pound-to-orbit cost of the STS but also because it created a situation where the U.S.'s only heavy lift vehicle was taken out of service indefinitely. Thankfully, the Titan ICBMs that were taken out of service were mothballed for just such a purpose and served admirably, if expensively, for the purpose of heavy lift, giving some breathing room to get the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program rolling.
As for the STS, of course NASA and the prime contrators bidding on the Shuttle exaggerated its capabilities, though not on the detail level as much as the highlighted claims would lead you to believe. Not one prime contractor ever pledged to “40 or 50 flights a year,”–this was pure hyperbole on the part of high level managers and politicians hawking the Shuttle–and the notion of a fully reusable vehicle with a fly-back first stage was trounced in the first phase of proposal as being hazardous, taking longer to field, and too expensive in upfront development costs, regardless of the savings on the back end. Flyback boosters have been considered from time to time (as has a recoverable and reusable External Tank) but the cost of development versus the pricetag of ongoing Shuttle missions has always been prohibitive. Proposals that required large development or dependence upon revolutionary technology like nuclear thermal propulsion or the linear aerospike engine have never received more than token development funding despite significant proof of concept demonstrations. The most interesting proposal for the STS was the Chrysler Aerospace SERV, which was a fully reusable SSTO design, some of the details of which were later used in the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper X program.
The tradeoff for conservativism and cost of Shuttle launches is that the Shuttle came in on budget and, except for problems with the thermal tiles, almost on time. For a program of this scope, using new thermal protection systems, an untested re-entry mode, and with the allowable safety margins at small fractions, this is an astonishing acheivement. What is even more impressive is that despite how complex and sensitive the Shuttle is and the loss of Challenger and Columbia, it has been a surprisingly reliable vehicle, albeit one that has to be babied to the point of absurdity. The rate of loss (2 losses in 120) is framed by the realistic failure rates predicted by engineers of between 1:50 and 1:100. Program managers promising 4 sigma reliability were pulling these numbers out of their posteriors; no technical person would ever make such a statement about a complex system with so many uncontrolled variables. But this was NASAs given mandate, and they had to say whatever was necessary to stay alive. Given those pressures from the public and the Congress, is it any surprise that they exaggerated the capability and reliability of their one major, life-sustaining program?
Regarding the telecommunications industry, that balloon has already been inflated and busted. Cheap launch costs of fully commerical vehicles seemed to promise the grounding for sub-billion dollar access to space, but these vehicles never materialized, and after a few costly failures of multiple deployment heavy lift vehicles and the lack of interest in satellite phones and expanded space telecommunications infrastructure many companies like Iridium went belly up or sold their interests for pennies on the dollar. There are no indications of an increased demand that would justify re-expanding that industry at this point, and of course investors are going to be twice-shy about throwing money into such a risky venture.
Talking of Big Dumb Booster is somewhat disingenous for two reasons; first of all, no American aerospace company has presented more of a BDB development beyond what are effectively napkin drawings, and as Lumpy notes, when it comes to cost the devil is in the details. (The SpaceX Falcon 9 doesn’t count because it is both more complex than a BDB, having, as it does, nine engines chained together and the attendant fuel flow and resonance problems that brings, and because their propulsion technology is still immature and of undemonstrated reliability, given the lack of to-orbit success of the first two Falcon 1 launches.) The Russians, on the other hand, are experts at building to the BDB ideal; however, they trade off payload capability, safety, and accept a higher degree of calculated risk, though overall reliability has been comperable to the more complex and sophisticated American vehicles and better than the French. A direct comparison of costs is also somewhat misleading; the Russians use the massive Soviet-built launch complexes that are 40 years old and long since amoratized, and the amount of clean-up, environmental remediation, and fly-down hazard abatement is substantially less than American efforts. For an American BDB to work you wouldn’t just need a new launch vehicle, you’d need an entirely different, risk-acceptance paradigm to launch support. This isn’t wrong, but it does mean telling the taxpayer or investor that he has to expect to lose a payload once in a while, something that is entirely unacceptable in the American mindset.
While we don’t have BDBs, we do have relatively reliable an inexpensive medium payload commerical access to space using solid rocket motor-based launch vehicles, like the aformentioned OSC Pegasus, Taurus, and Athena vehicles. The DoD has been doing space launch using retired Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBM-based systems for years at launch costs measured in the $10M-$40M range, so it’s not a brand new industry. Using a kick motor or low sustained thrust payload stage motor, these are entirely adequate for placing the current generation of telecommunications satellites into necessary orbits, and yet we’re not seeing any big upswing in telecommunications satellite providers.
Anyone promising medium lift access to space in the <$10M range is pulling your leg and sticking one hand in your wallet. It costs half that much alone just to get a rocket built up on pad and provide launch support. Until someone starts making rocket motor cases out of bamboo and propellant from lawn clippings, or comes up with some truely reusable, low-refurbishment transportation system, there’s going to be a lower limit on how cheap you can make access to space, and nothing on the horizon–even rocket launch vehicles built by former Internet entrepreneurs–has shown great promise in bringing launch costs down by orders of magnitude.
Iridium went belly up (and was bailed out by the Feds) because they were stupid. The original rate plans for the phones were an example of Byzantine thinking. Your per minute cost varied with what country you were in and where you were calling to. Iridiums phones also have a 4 minute window in which you can talk. After that the sat moves out of range and you have to redial the call. Globalstars don’t have that problem (and they also don’t have the problem Iridium has with it costing ~$10/min. to call the phone from a landline), and while they’ve had financial problems, they didn’t get saved by the Feds. The various Imarsat phones don’t have the problems that Iridiums do (though their per minute costs are slightly higher) and the companies producing the units (including handsets) are quite profitable. Give them cheaper access to space, they’ll no doubt put more birds up as the military and scientific researchers love to be able to access the internet in remote locations. As do news organizations, now that I think about it. Most of the reporting from Iraq/Afghanistan in the early days of the war was done via satphones. No doubt they’d eagerly sign up for a relatively inexpensive system that allowed them to transmit video news stories via high speed satellite internet connections.
Tuckerfan, you’re missing the point. It wasn’t just Iridium that went belly up; in the late 'Nineties and early 'Double Oughts, it was the entire consumer-oriented telecommunications industry that deflated. The problems that led to this were two-fold: the anticipated cheap and highly reliable commerical access to space that was being promised by smaller aerospace contractors (mostly) failed to materialize, and the demand for satellite-based cellular and Internet communications was far less than expected. The lack of demand exacerbated the effect of cost and risk of available launch systems, and a few key launch failures made investors highly dubious, especially given the over-inflated predictions of market activity. Harland and Lorenz’s Space Systems Failures has a section that goes into detail about this, but essentially, the availability and low cost of land-based cellular, especially in the U.S. and the high population density Europe, undercut a broad market desire for consumer satellite communications.
In short, for the price of even a cheap launch and satellite you can outfit an entire major metropolitan region with cellular transmitters and repeaters with several orders of magnitude more bandwidth, more flexibility in coverage, and of course you can readily maintain and upgrade the ground based system whereas a communications satellite, once launched, is out of reach. Personal satellite communications is and will remain for the foreseeable future a niche market for travellers outside of normal cellular coverage.
As for cheap (sub-tens of millions of dollars) launch costs, this just hasn’t been demonstrated. In order to achieve this requires more than just a cheap, simple launch vehicle. Just as a car needs more than just an engine and fuel–i.e. tires, paved roads, replacement parts, a fuel distribution infrastructure, a system of governance of the rules of the road, et cetera–a successful space launch requires far more than just a booster. Specifically, you have:[ul][li]transportation logistics,[]ground support and handling equipment,[]launch facility hardware and management,[]launch operations support,[]mission assurance and reliability assessment (the guarantor will insist),[]payload integration and testing,[]post-launch configuration and orbit parking, system V&V, et cetera.[/ul]And you have to get it right, the first time, with some degree of blind trust that all of the environmental acceptance testing has been done to the right levels, that some undetectable but critical manufacturing flaw or unconsidered failure mode hasn’t manifested, and that some known but unavoidable hazard like a lightning strike, orbital debris, or a migrating Canada goose doesn’t get in the way of a successful launch. A cheap, “dumb” launch vehicle is just one small part in cheap access to space that would pave the way for commerical private space efforts. [/li]
Regarding the development of the Space Shuttle and why it is both compromised and yet, came in on budget and does most of what it was pledged to do, see Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions.
Stranger
Commercial/Consumer Spaceflight will probably initially come about in the form of ballistic transport.
Simplified: You launch for an orbit that intersect the surface of the earth at your Destination rather than an orbit that remains above the surface indefinitely.
I find this unlikely. It costs you almost as much to get to a true suborbital or so-called “fractional” orbit as it does to get to a stable Low Earth Orbit; hence, why so many retired ICBM systems (Atlas, Titan II, R-36, Minuteman, Peacekeeper) are used as the basis of space launch vehicles. In the early days of rocket propulsion many predictions were made of commerical antipodal rockets, but despite eighty years of advances in the field it hasn’t come to pass. Even commerical supersonic aircraft have been an economic failure (or at best marginally profitable), and these are air-breathing propulsion systems that don’t have to cope with the issues of substantially reduced efficiency of rockets versus air-breathing jets, re-entry heating and airframe thermal stress, high Mach avionic control, et cetera. And there just isn’t a demand to get from Point A to Point B in one hour rather than sixteen hours at two or three orders of magnitude difference of cost.
So exoatmospheric ballistic delivery of a customer from one point to another remains the purview of mass destruction weapon systems, not commerical travellers.
Stranger
As someone who worked in both the cellphone and satphone industry, I’m well aware of the deflation issues. Cell towers are becoming increasingly difficult to get approved. Seems people don’t like them cluttering up the landscape, but they hate like hell not having coverage. Even in major cities, there’s areas where a phone will drop a call because the buildings block the signal. With the FCC set to auction off the spectrum currently reserved for TV, cellphone companies are going to be forced to make the switch to new equipment, and even if they just mount new gear on their existing towers, that’s still a pretty hefty chunk of change they’re going to have to be laying out. (And they will have to do it, or face being left in the dust, as companies such as Google have already indicated that they intend to get into the market when the spectrum goes up for bid.) Cox communications (who originally started Iridium) are presently looking at setting up blimps which would hover over cities to provide cellular coverage because of the hassles of getting towers and repeaters installed.
Bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue, either, given that the various satellite TV companies can funnel huge amounts of programing down from orbit, and present satphones can uplink at 128K or better.
As for being unable to service the birds once they go up, so what? Every satphone provider has backup birds that they can move into position in a short period of time. If you’ve got cheap launch capabilities, it’s not that big of a hassle to send up a few spares. One wonders if the spare birds are considered “inventory” for tax purposes? Certainly the spare parts currently kept by the telecoms and their subcontractors are.
The environmental regs might be a problem, but given how eagerly states have jumped to help the private space companies like VirginGalactic build launch facilities, I can’t imagine that they’d be unwilling to do the same for a company just sending cargo aloft.
“Getting it right the first time” is a bit of a stumbling block, I agree. The solution to this, it seems to me, is for the start up company (which, admittedly, would have to be funded by one of the internet billionaires) to discount the first launches to a dramatic extent. If it costs almost nothing to put a bird up, but there’s a 30% chance that it might not make it there, companies would be willing to look at using the vehicles to send up non-critical items. Heck, if the billionaire’s feeling really generous, he could offer to send up hardware for various non-profit research groups (like universities) for free, simply to be able to demonstrate that they can successfully put things in orbit on the cheap, reliably.
Note I’m not saying that this will happen, only that it could happen. Research into low cost spaceflight hasn’t been funded to the extent that the internet has. While throwing money at it doesn’t mean that the costs will come down a significant degree, at present, we’re not really certain as to how much it can be brought down by using things like BDB, because no one’s been willing to pony up the money to do the research! Just having that done would help establish the direction to lowering costs. It may turn out that unless someone comes up with a space elevator there simply is no to get things up in orbit cheaply.
Which reminds me, orbiting solar farms would become viable if the launch costs were low enough. Given how bad the environment’s getting, the need for more energy, and NIMBY attitudes, I can well imagine the idea taking off (pardon the pun). Certainly, as things are now, the military is investigating the idea.
Many nations have sent up astronauts. But only two countries have built manned spacecraft.
Uh, no. The Chinese built their own.
Floating blimps for cell coverage are a long way from the cost of telecommunications satellites. And regarding your statement, “As for being unable to service the birds once they go up, so what?”, the “so what” is that a single failure, whether due to a manufacturing defect, orbital insertion problem, impact with orbital debris, spike by solar radiation, or any other event that causes the satellite to be non-operation, it is a complete loss to the owner. Even newer models of telcom satellites cost several hundreds of millions of dollars, and a single loss can eat away profitability to negative margins. The current bandwidth to satellites is based on the relatively small number of subscribers. Unlike ground based cells which limit overlap and transmit long-range signals over landline, a satellite-based system is going to have broad coverage and will have to relay from satellite to satellite. There are significant bandwidth restrictions that prevent expanding to the same level of coverage as conventional cellular. There is a vast difference between broadcast downlink and client-to-client uplink.
First of all, a launch vehicle with 70% reliability would never be approved by any guarantor or government regulatory agency to be flown. The hazard of debris fly-down, environmental impact of flight termination, and the current awareness of the hazard of increased orbital debris make it necessary to demonstrate a high degree of reliability just to get approval to fly. This isn’t an activity where some billionaire can launch a rocket out of his backyard without anyone’s say so, regardless of how much cash he flashes around; aside from the technical issues of making a rocket fly, there is a large amount of reliability and logistical issues to be satisfied, and all of these cost money. And I don’t know of anything send to orbit that is considered “non-critical”. SpaceX has already offered to fly Air Force hardware for essentially the cost of launch operations, and after the two failures with the Falcon 1 the DoD has backed out and gone back to conventional Minuteman-based vehicles. In short, nobody wants to fly with a company whose effective motto is “We’ll Get You There Cheap And Maybe In One Piece.” The cost of failure is just too high. (It’s also noteworthy that SpaceX has been denied access to VAFB launch facilities because they can’t meet range safety requirements.)
No doubt that a modular launch vehicle family, vehicle processing, and logistics could be made cheaper by a dedicated program to accomplish high production, moderate cost access to space. But doing so would require a major development program, analogous to the development of the Minuteman or Peacekeeper ICBM systems. Had the Saturn family of launch vehicles continued production this might have happened. But this would be a multi-billion dollar effort beyond the means of a private party, and would go beyond the LV itself and into the entire CONOPS structure. The cost of access to orbital space is more than just the vehicle, and as we’ve seen even on that particular item enthusiasts like Musk are prone to dismissing real issues and costs. I’d like to see cheap access to space as much as anyone, but the marketing hype of companies like SpaceX, Rotary Rocket, et cetera isn’t matched by their achievements.
“Orbiting solar farms” have major technological hurdles to accomplish before even demonstrating proof of concept and are not, at this point, even worthy of consideration as an impetus to commerical spaceflight. The level of investment required to bring such a program to fruition, assuming the technical issues could be resolved, would be in the tens of billions or higher. Such an industry might follow inexpensive space launchers, but it won’t be leading it. This is pure science fiction at this point.
Stranger
And yet, telcoms and other corporations still find it worthwhile to put birds up.
Only in places like the US and Europe. In other parts of the world, it’s cheaper and easier to have the signals relayed from tower to tower, without hitting a land line. Right now, a great deal of innovation in cell phone technology is being driven by the needs of folks in developing nations. Air time credits are now a form of currency in many parts of the world.
Which apparently Globalstars birds can do.
Such as?
True, but it can be done, and is done.
And that was just a hypothetical number thrown out as an example.
True.
Nothing is “non-critical” to the military. However to an academic institution, the possibility of getting something to orbit for nothing when the alternative is not getting anything into orbit at all, might be enough for them to take the risk.
Back before the Challenger explosion, it was a requirement for NASA to make space on the shuttle available to research organizations to send experiments up. The units had to be small and compact, and the most an astronaut could be expected to do with them, is flip a switch on them. IIRC, that program got killed as a result of the Challenger disaster. There is apparently, however, still a demand for it, as Rutan’s said he’s been bombarded with requests from universities and the like to be able to put small payloads for research purposes on VirginGalactic flights, as the cost savings outweigh the fact that it’s only 15 minutes of microgravity.
And that, could simply be because SpaceX doesn’t have enough people to handle the blizzard of paperwork that comes with dealing with the government.
I agree that it’s a real mess and we geeks would be better off if the billionaires combined their efforts, rather than going off in all different directions. At least that way we’d wind up with something a bit cheaper, rather than what we have now, which is a bunch of different rockets blowing up on the pad, as it were.
Hey, I didn’t say that they’d drive it, only that they’d take advantage of it. Lower cost flights might be enough to get Congress to take the idea seriously and put some money into the necessary research (some of which is going on now, but at a low level of funding).
Only on highly reliable vehicles, like the Delta II, with insurance to cover a replaement. Arianespace, the French rocket launch company, has had a long haul of both making their booster family reliable, and then convincing the market of its reliability after some very expensive early failures. I don’t think anybody will be willing to insure a Falcon flight until they can demonstrate a few successful flights, especially given that the failure modes that caused problems with Falcon 1-1 and 1-2 were the result of totally avoidable issues that would have been highlighted in any normal review of a space launcher. The unwillingness of SpaceX to submit to independent validation and verification, or invite someone like the Aerospace Corporation to give a thorough vetting of their design and launch process management speaks volumes as to their naïvite.
The bandwidth restriction of satellite communications is obvious; with ground-based cellular, there is minimal overlap between static cells, hence the same frequency band can be used independently in each cell to handle a group of calls (via code division multiple access). With a broadband satellite receiver, you have more callers sharing the same effective bandwidth, requiring more complex multiplexing schemes and limiting the overall number of users, and of course the system is dynamic, switching loads between one satellite and another as they pass into and out of range. It simply doesn’t scale like a conventional cellular system.
What criteria do you consider adequate for an acceptable rate of risk, then? 90% is generally considered to be the minimum acceptable, and most successful mature launch systems tend to hover around or exceed a 95% success rate. Any “cheap” system sufficiently reliably to see widespread use needs to match or exceed this number, both in terms of successful delivery to orbit and minimizing liability in the case of flight termination.
sigh I always get weary when space enthusiasts who know nothing of the actual process of managing a space launch scream at this “blizzard of paperwork”. Yes, there is a lot of paper, documenting where parts come from, how they’ve been tested, that all the hardware and software is either of known legacy or has been tested, et cetera; and a lot of reviews, like pedigree reviews, test readiness reviews, flight safety reviews, independent readiness reviews, et cetera. The reason we have all of these is from the experience of failure, and what it takes to achieve an acceptable level of success and capture errors before they become failures.
No doubt some of this process–perhaps even much of it–is a waste of time, but I’d be hard pressed to say which part of it could be excised. I’ve witnessed major finds–ones that could have terminated a flight–being exposed at all of these. This “blizzard of paperwork” is the result of the experiences that made the Titan II/III family and the Delta II the most reliable American boosters ever built, and believe it or not, the Russians, despite their lower expectations of reliability and lower launch costs, have very similar processes to review pedigree and flight readiness. This “blizzard” also makes it possible (although by no means easy) to trace back over what was done, when and how, and frequently determine the probably critical failure mode leading to a flight failure or termination. Attempts to scale back the amount of paper have always resulted in a loss of critical information, and although I wish it were possible to excise some of the more useless information, there’s nothing like going through a box of acceptance test data or a stack of design analysis reports and finding a “Eureka!” item where someone forgot to cross a “t”. As engineers, even when we fail, we like to know when and how we’ve failed so we can add information to the database of lessons learned.
Stranger