Author Topic: SSTO Thread  (Read 182233 times)

Offline spacedem

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #460 on: 12/20/2008 05:23 pm »
Jim, do you think VentureStar was possible?

In particular, was the BF Goodrich TPS workable?  I wonder if it would have done the job for an SSX-like vehicle...

Offline Jim

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #461 on: 12/20/2008 06:17 pm »
Jim, do you think VentureStar was possible?

Just as the shuttle was, but will it be economical?

Offline Smoothie

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #462 on: 12/20/2008 06:43 pm »
Jim, do you think VentureStar was possible?

In particular, was the BF Goodrich TPS workable?  I wonder if it would have done the job for an SSX-like vehicle...

From what I have read the TPS was the best thing to come out of the whole program.  It just waits for a vehicle to use it now.

Offline Eerie

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #463 on: 12/20/2008 06:47 pm »
Just as the shuttle was, but will it be economical?

Well, it had no boosters and no ET, a true SSTO, so the only question is how expensive its maintenance would be...

Offline Jim

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #464 on: 12/20/2008 07:22 pm »
Just as the shuttle was, but will it be economical?

Well, it had no boosters and no ET, a true SSTO, so the only question is how expensive its maintenance would be...

and the size of the payload may have been small

Offline mlorrey

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #465 on: 12/21/2008 05:24 am »
Just as the shuttle was, but will it be economical?

Well, it had no boosters and no ET, a true SSTO, so the only question is how expensive its maintenance would be...

and the size of the payload may have been small

Payload was 10,000 kg right? Not small. Not as much as Shuttle, but still in the heavy lift arena. The frequency of heavier loads is so low that there really is no need for using a reusable launcher with that payload capacity. Lets look at how frequently Shuttle used its maximum payload capacity. You have any stats on the average payload carried by Shuttle? Even Hubble was only 11,000 kg. My scanning the stats at astronautix says most cargoes were between 6k-13k kg, anything over 10k kg involved multiple payloads, except for TDRS and military missions. The largest payloads were the TDRS satellites for NASA itself at 22k kg (these numbers do not include classified military payloads, for which there are no public stats).

Shuttle was never used for launching SDI battle stations, the main excuse back in the 80's for keeping it, and it only took 20 years to get around to its other main mission, building ISS, and shuttle will be retired upon its completion, if not sooner.

There really is no market need for a launcher over 10k kg payload, the frequency of need for such payloads speaks for using big low production rate expendables.

I agree Jim, that preserving the skill sets of NASA personnel is crucial. However that does not necessarily mean you have to keep people around, so his conclusion disputing my arguments is not supported. Thats what documentation is supposed to be for. We lost a lot of knowledge after the saturn program was cancelled because most records were destroyed and not archived. Any competent engineer documents everything about what they do, there is absolutely no excuse for engineers not documenting things out of some paranoid sense of job security.

Furthermore, Jim decrying the lack of skills being taught in our universities also speaks to a lack of documentation: those engineers should be seeing it as their sacred duty to document every scrap of knowledge they create and to teach it to the next generation. So dont give me arguments about keeping people around the cape as the only way to preserve that knowledge, thats hogwash. When I take a job, i see one of my primary duties to be so effective at what I do that I work myself out of a job. That includes documenting everything so if something happens to me, someone else can take up where I left off.
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Offline mlorrey

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #466 on: 12/21/2008 05:41 am »

Thus, you can blame Walter Mondale for the failure of STS (and the loss of one if not both shuttle crews).

No, you can blame a NASA management that made safety decisions (if you want to call them that) in a lackadaisical fashion, and in both cases against the advise of the sme’s on the teams. In the case of Challenger, they even disregarded an ATK Technical Bulletin that specifically told them not to fly the SRB’s below a certain temperature. They just flat ignored it, as if to say “Huh, who do they think they are? We’re NASA. They can’t tell us what to do.” NASA management quite simply *chose* to ignore the people who actually knew what they were talking about as if, because they were NASA, and for no other reason what-so-ever, they knew best. The laws of physics wouldn’t dare contradict them.  The CAIB was *very* clear in it's condemnation of NASA management in this regard.

Well yes, but WHY did we have such a design in the first place? I agree launching Challenger in too cold climate was wrong and arrogant, but was that design arrived at in the first place out of economical cost cutting? If it was decided on for saving money on development, bingo, back to the penny pinchers.

That said, you completely ignore the Columbia disaster which IS the fault of Mondale and his cost cutters, who forced NASA to ditch the hot frame design which would have never suffered damage from some mere foam.



… NASA should use its funds to stimulate private industry to make these things happen with both prizes and contracts once one or more parties achieve the goals set.

NASA cannot use its funding for anything except what the Congress specifically authorizes. It has absolutely no wiggle room in that regard.

Of course. Frankly I think congress as a whole would be for such a proposal, although the handful of powerful senators and congressional committee chairmen who get their power from NASA money flowing to their districts I think would kill such proposals long before they reached a floor vote.

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Both prizes and contract competitions stimulate private capital to invest in ventures at a much higher level than currently.

That takes much deeper pockets than most venture capitalist have available. There are probably only a small handful of such people in the world. Even the conglomerates with much more funding available won’t do it because they have stockholders to answer to who insist on a relatively secured return on investment. Stockholders are not in the habit of authorizing the expenditure of, for example, $5,000,000 to win a $500,000 prize, with no guaranteed $10,000,000 contracts for the winner. It’s a nice idea, but it is not a money-maker. If it doesn’t make money for the investor, the investments don’t happen.

You didnt read what i said. Firstly the efforts of Elon Musk  and Burt Rutan disprove some of your arguments, however, I was never talking about a piddly 10 million dollar prize for something that takes 10 billion to win. Paul Allen spent 30 million to win the 10 million dollar X Prize. He saw that as a decent payback because he also gained his stock in The Spaceship Company as well, plus whatever else he's got cooking with Scaled Composits or Virgin Galactic. The stock is going to pay him back a huge profit eventually.

But no, a 5 billion dollar project should have a prize of a billion dollars or more for being the first to achieve the goal. The investors get some immediate payback plus equity in the venture that gets to exploit that technology and market into the future. The government gets to see its goals reached for 10-30% of the full cost of achieving the goal, and the full cost of achieving the goal is minimized *safely and effectively* by capitalists who understand the numbers about minimizing risk in both terms of lives at stake and money invested.

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As for Obama, I do not expect his team to have this level of vision. Obama wrt the wider economy, seems more New Deal oriented, so the old NASA-as-jobs-program paradigm will IMHO be retained.

There is no such thing, except in the minds of a few detractors, as “the old NASA-as-jobs-program”. There is the current condition where because of idiotic lack of real planning and ideological goals rather than goals of excellence and common sense, where we stand to decimate the only highly trained space workforce we have. We did that once, back when Saturn was shutdown. NASA, stupidly, fired them all believing that they could just rehire them when Shuttle was ready. That was stupid, really stupid, because not even one on ten came back. They had other priorities, like food, mortgages, families, so they went elsewhere, to more secure jobs. It took NASA over twenty years to rebuild the majority of the skill sets it lost by that move, and to this very day there are still things we did routinely back in the day that NASA still has no clue how to do.


Sorry, Jim, I meant my previous comments in my previous post for clongston here. You dont need to keep paying a paycheck to perserve a knowledge base, a competent engineering team will document everything they do, and a competent management team will preserve that stored knowledge as hard won intellectual capital.
« Last Edit: 12/21/2008 05:43 am by mlorrey »
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Offline clongton

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #467 on: 12/21/2008 02:04 pm »
Mike:

I never indicated that the Shuttle design was optimal. That wasn't part of the equation. I was speaking about the immediate cause of the loss of the two crews. I contend, and the STS workforce will agree with me, that in spite of the suboptimal design, Shuttle *IS* safe to fly - when flown safely!

We agree on the Challenger. That is laid directly at the feet of an arrogant NASA management. As for Columbia, I contend the same thing. It wasn't Mondale's fault that NASA management *chose* to NOT image Columbia with the Hubble in spite of the fact that their safety organization officially recommended it after the high speed cameras clearly showed the foam hit. Had they done so, it is likely that the hole in the leading edge would have been seen and the crew would have remained aboard ISS for an extended time, saving their lives. The contention that Mondale influenced the tile-type TPS has nothing to do with NASA management's arrogance and stupidity. That's what caused the loss of Columbia's crew, not the TPS.

You speak as if I were recommending keeping the workforce around moving piles of dirt from one place at the cape to another until something useful comes along. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could be further from the truth. If that's all there is to do then furlough them - plain and simple. No, I'm speaking of rearranging the entire implementation and transition plan from STS to CxP in such a way that the majority of the workforce can be retained, and actually be working at stuff that CxP will actually need done. That's not a jobs program, because I do not advocate "making work" for them. I advocate them working a revised CxP transition schedule. I advocate downsizing the workforce, mostly thru normal attrition and retirements, and furloughing the rest, until you have a workforce that is properly sized to the tasks. But I want the schedule rearranged so that CxP actually gets work done that needs to be done. If that means that some of it is ahead of schedule, then so be it. But it's got to be stuff that would actually need doing. That is not a jobs program. That's being smart about retaining the skill sets and skilled labor in the industry. As a business owner, you should know that it is *always* less expensive to retain a skilled workforce thru lean times, if you can, than it is to fire them and then replace them later with people, while very smart people, who don't have a clue how to do this stuff. I want the CxP program rearranged to retain the workforce in that manner. Not welfare, and not a jobs program - real work.

Regarding your observations about documentation, it has to involve a lot more than "here's how it's done". It also needs to include "design intent". "I did it this way because .....". Here's where the designer's lifetime of experience comes into play and totally colors why the end result is what it is. It also includes why he or she did not do it differently, and includes all the failed attempts with a different methodology and the analysis of the failures with the resulting lessons learned. It keeps the new people from making the same mistakes all over again that the original designers made as they progressed toward the final design. This design intent knowledge would easily exceed the volume of "here's how to do this" documentation many times over. I run across this all the time in my own industry. We have tens of thousands of volumes of "here's how to do this" documentation, but it still requires the presence of someone who's been doing it for years to explain how to implement that to the new people, and more importantly: why. All industries recognize the validity of that. That's why most large companies of any size have mentoring programs that they gladly spend millions of dollars on. I'm sorry, but just having "good documentation" falls far short of the requirement. You need people around who have been doing it for years to explain it to the new people. Ten minutes spent with a highly experienced person can replace weeks of studying documentation.
« Last Edit: 12/21/2008 03:19 pm by clongton »
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Offline sbt

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #468 on: 12/21/2008 02:56 pm »
<snip> a competent engineering team will document everything they do, and a competent management team will preserve that stored knowledge as hard won intellectual capital.

I take it then that you believe that the Apollo era NASA team were incompetent? Because the Shuttle era team were unable to pick up all the skills from what the 'old guys' had written down.

In the real world things don't work like that.

For a start, whilst I'm no NASA engineer, I can't document the stuff I've picked up over time that suddenly comes to mind when I'm tackling a problem – I can't document stuff I don't know I know. Neither can I document the personal relationships that allow me to communicate with my nearest colleagues, particularly the mutual respect that is only built through seeing them in action year by year.

Nor do I have the time to document every last thing when I'm working on a fixed timescale set by outside forces – either I do the work with basic documentation or I document in incredible detail the work I would have done if I wasn't busy writing and the end user doesn't get what he needs. Neither would my successors have the time to read decades worth of documentation to pick up where I left off – they would either do the work without reading all the material or apologise to the end user about the project that failed because they never left the library.

Finally documenting a skill learnt through practice is of only limited utility. I can run my eyes across a list of military equipment and spot the mistake in a couple of seconds. I can, and do, document the issues but it still takes someone new to the job tens of minutes to make the same check – they lack two decades of experience.

Rick
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Offline indaco1

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #469 on: 12/22/2008 12:01 am »
Not a matter of want but what we can afford.  RLV to replace EELV's and Shuttle are out of the question

While I agree that there isn't enough demand for a Shuttle/EELV sized RLV out there, there's nothing that says RLVs have to be Shuttle or EELV sized. 

In fact there's a lot to be said for having first generation RLVs be a lot smaller than an EELV.  At least as small as 5 tons to orbit, possibly as small as 1 ton.

But admittedly it would take some changes in how things are done in order to close the case on a small RLV like that.

~Jon

Drag losses are much worst with small veichles.

A small RLV is even more difficult.
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Offline mlorrey

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #470 on: 12/22/2008 12:39 am »
Not a matter of want but what we can afford.  RLV to replace EELV's and Shuttle are out of the question

While I agree that there isn't enough demand for a Shuttle/EELV sized RLV out there, there's nothing that says RLVs have to be Shuttle or EELV sized. 

In fact there's a lot to be said for having first generation RLVs be a lot smaller than an EELV.  At least as small as 5 tons to orbit, possibly as small as 1 ton.

But admittedly it would take some changes in how things are done in order to close the case on a small RLV like that.

~Jon

Drag losses are much worst with small veichles.

A small RLV is even more difficult.

Well, yes there are 'sweet spots' to scaling different sorts of designs. Huge vehicles require more structural support due to mass of what needs to be held up (something that is cheated by Atlas and Falcon by prepressurization of tanks, of course, and no reason not to figure out more such cheats).

I'm not too worried at the present time. Given further developments in polywell fusion, I think within a decade we'll be building the first fusion propelled SSTO RLV, with airline level mass fractions, capable of surface to surface Earth-Moon transit. That may sound a bit overoptimistic, and it may actually be so, but what i've seen so far has me hopeful. I would not be surprised to see Bussards theoretical performance fall short, but not significantly more than other technologies do.
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Offline Archibald

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #471 on: 12/22/2008 07:34 am »
Quote


A hot structure would have allowed it to meet its performance objectives. Instead we got an aluminum structure covered with foam and a brick chimney that doubled the maintenance man hours required to turn it around each flight. A 5,000 USD per kg payload cost was turned into 20,000 USD per kg by this fact alone. Doubling the maintenance man hours due to TPS maintenance cuts the sortie rate by half and as a result to revenue to cost models quadruple the per unit price ($/kg payload).


Other failures: the SME design was too bleeding edge for a viable 'airline' style operation. Try running a taxi service with Formula 1 engines, it doesnt work. It would have been cheaper to design the engines to be inexpensive single use items. That would cut the shuttle turnaround maintenance costs and time by another 25%.

If you redesigned and rebuilt Shuttle with a hot frame and inexpensive single use engines today, you'd have a viable system. IMHO it should have been totally redesigned and rebuilt as such after the Challenger disaster.


Not sure about  the hot structure (Titanium tend to be horrendously expensive to manufacture). But (on the subject of cheaper engines) they thought about using J-2S instead of SSME.

They called that the Mark 1 / Mark 2 "phased" shuttle.

Mark I was to have J-2s and ablative heatshield... Mark II would have been upgraded with reusable heatshield and SSMEs.

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #472 on: 12/22/2008 08:11 am »
Mike:

I never indicated that the Shuttle design was optimal. That wasn't part of the equation. I was speaking about the immediate cause of the loss of the two crews. I contend, and the STS workforce will agree with me, that in spite of the suboptimal design, Shuttle *IS* safe to fly - when flown safely!

We agree on the Challenger. That is laid directly at the feet of an arrogant NASA management. As for Columbia, I contend the same thing. It wasn't Mondale's fault that NASA management *chose* to NOT image Columbia with the Hubble in spite of the fact that their safety organization officially recommended it after the high speed cameras clearly showed the foam hit. Had they done so, it is likely that the hole in the leading edge would have been seen and the crew would have remained aboard ISS for an extended time, saving their lives.

What the frack? Columbia was not on an ISS mission; it was in a 28.5 degree inclination orbit and there was no possibility of it ever reaching ISS. And Hubble was not capable of imaging Columbia; its pointing system is designed for celestial objects and cannot track a co-orbiting object.
« Last Edit: 12/22/2008 08:23 am by Jorge »
JRF

Offline KelvinZero

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #473 on: 12/22/2008 08:33 am »
Drag losses are much worst with small veichles.

A small RLV is even more difficult.

I understand why that would make a small SSTO more difficult. What about a multiple stage RLV?

I have been wondering if there would be anything to learn from a small fully reusable multiple stage system with high flight rates.

Offline mlorrey

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #474 on: 12/22/2008 09:32 am »


Not sure about  the hot structure (Titanium tend to be horrendously expensive to manufacture). But (on the subject of cheaper engines) they thought about using J-2S instead of SSME.

They called that the Mark 1 / Mark 2 "phased" shuttle.

Mark I was to have J-2s and ablative heatshield... Mark II would have been upgraded with reusable heatshield and SSMEs.



Titanium airframe with inconel and such. As I recall reading, cost would have been 2-3 times as much as what we got. They still might have wound up using RCC for the leading edges, however if they had and Columbia still happened (foam airstrike), I doubt the titanium would have had problems standing up to ingress of hot gasses.

Conversely, having a hot frame would have allowed such a higher turn around rate and sortie rate that a loss of one crew would not have been seen as such a huge disaster. Still a tragedy, but not something that would bring everything to a halt.

Then again, I tend to like something I once read about the old Roman law wrt bridge and building contracting: you got paid half on completion, the other half if it was still standing 40 years later (and something about execution if it wasnt or something, not sure about that one).

IMHO anybody who makes a decision that directly causes a LOC should be prosecuted. I just don't understand how a bureaucrat (or a cop for that matter) can just walk on a wrongful death.
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Offline Archibald

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #475 on: 12/22/2008 11:11 am »
Hubble was not capable of imaging Columbia; its pointing system is designed for celestial objects and cannot track a co-orbiting object.

Hubble no, but (dumb question probably...) what about a KH-11 or KH-12 ? Any chance ?
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Offline Kaputnik

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #476 on: 12/22/2008 12:19 pm »
Titanium airframe with inconel and such. As I recall reading, cost would have been 2-3 times as much as what we got. They still might have wound up using RCC for the leading edges, however if they had and Columbia still happened (foam airstrike), I doubt the titanium would have had problems standing up to ingress of hot gasses.

Somebody asked, somewhere on the forum, how much longer Columbia would have lasted with a titanium structure rather than Alu. IIRC the answer, from CAIB, was about 15 seconds. Not enough to make any appreciable difference whatsoever to the crew's chances of survival.
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Offline Kaputnik

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #477 on: 12/22/2008 12:21 pm »
Just as the shuttle was, but will it be economical?

Well, it had no boosters and no ET, a true SSTO, so the only question is how expensive its maintenance would be...

and the size of the payload may have been small

Payload was 10,000 kg right?

On paper, maybe. The payload was reducing more and more as the design got into deeper trouble. A externally mounted payload in a shroud, rather than in a PLB, was a last gasp effort to squeeze more performance out of the concept. Who knows what the actual paylaod might have wound up being.
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Offline mlorrey

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #478 on: 12/23/2008 06:18 am »
Titanium airframe with inconel and such. As I recall reading, cost would have been 2-3 times as much as what we got. They still might have wound up using RCC for the leading edges, however if they had and Columbia still happened (foam airstrike), I doubt the titanium would have had problems standing up to ingress of hot gasses.

Somebody asked, somewhere on the forum, how much longer Columbia would have lasted with a titanium structure rather than Alu. IIRC the answer, from CAIB, was about 15 seconds. Not enough to make any appreciable difference whatsoever to the crew's chances of survival.

Thats debatable, and not that simple. I doubt the 15 second figure. Prior experience people go by for example is the plasma damage X-15 suffered on one flight when a test scramjet cause some serious damage simply from the shock wave plasma at hypersonic speed. You'd only get such damage in the internal airframe if the airflow actually caused hypersonic shock waves to be generated INSIDE the wing.

Plasma cutters achieve their cutting not just from the plasma but from the velocity of the ionized gas. If the speed of the plasma is too low, all you wind up doing is heating the metal up over a broad area. Hot enough to melt/cut aluminum like butter but nowhere near enough to cut titanium. I can melt aluminum with a lighter.

It takes the nozzle cup to generate shock waves and supersonic flow of the plasma to achieve a cut.

If the hole in the leading edge was large, you'd get shock wave impinging within the wing structure and you'd get cutting. If it wasnt so big, or just a crack, youd just get an ingress of plasma with no shock waves.

Also, keep in mind that even the existing wing has inconel behind the RCC leading edges.
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Offline kevin-rf

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Re: SSTO Thread
« Reply #479 on: 12/23/2008 01:31 pm »
Thats debatable, and not that simple. I doubt the 15 second figure. Prior experience people go by for example is the plasma damage X-15 suffered on one flight when a test scramjet cause some serious damage simply from the shock wave plasma at hypersonic speed.

The X-15 was an inconel airframe was it not? Not titanium...

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