CEV development cost rumbles

The 23Feb04 issue of Aviation Week reports that NASA is telling Congress
that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the space agencies latest and
greatest orbiter replacement, will cost $15B to develop. Earlier NASA
estimated that the Orbital SpacePlane (OSP), last year's super-duper orbiter
replacement, would cost $10-13B (todays bucks). NASA keeps turning the crank
and coming up with the same numbers. The development cost of the original
orbiter was about $14B in today's money.

None of this is surprising because, even though the orbiter was designed
over 30 years ago, spacecraft technology hasn't changed much at all. The
CEV, the OSP and the orbiter all use the same technology, namely, Apollo
heritage technology. So when measured in constant dollars, the development
cost for these vehicles will be about the same, despite significant
differences in size and weight. Why? Because the cost of airframe structure
is a relatively small part of the development cost. It's the complex systems
(avionics, environmental control/life support, guidance, navigation,
communication, flight computer/software, hydraulics, thermal control, RCS,
APS, etc.) that determine the development cost and these systems are
essentially the same regardless of the size of the vehicle. There have been
no major breakthroughs in these complex systems during the last 30 years
that will cause a significant decrease in theirdevelopment cost.

Later
Ray Schmitt

"rschmitt23" wrote:

There have been
no major breakthroughs in these complex systems during the last 30 years
that will cause a significant decrease in theirdevelopment cost.

Nor is it written anywhere that there ever will be such a
breakthrough.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

rschmitt23 wrote:
that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the space agencies latest and
greatest orbiter replacement, will cost $15B to develop.

I know that this would not be a popular suggestion, but how much would it cost
to build new shuttles nearly identical to the existing ones ?

How much more would it cost to add in all the improvements NASA has wished it
could do (electric APUs etc) ?

How much more would it cost to replace SRBs with liquid fueled flyback
boosters ? (or whatever technology is deemed best to replace the SRBs) ?

How much more would it cost to rework the engine area to make it simple, fast
and cheap to remove/replace engines ?

Would there be any significant advantage in having the SSMEs attached to the
ET instead of actual shuttle ? (either as a capsule with its parachutes for
re-usability, or using disposable engines).

Instead of dreaming of a totally radically new vehicle NASA has no idea how to
build, wouldn't it be more realistic to just build new and improved shuttles ?
If you start with the base model and then add each new improvement, at one
point, you will reach the "sorry, we can't afford this" level, at which point
your new shuttle's designed is finalised with only the improvements you can
afford ?

Yes, I know all the tooling for shuttle is gone. But the tooling for CEV
doesn't exist either. However, there are a lot of things about Shuttle which
are still manufactured (tiles, engines and I am sure countless other
components that are regularly replaced).

John Doe wrote in :

rschmitt23 wrote:
that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the space agencies latest
and greatest orbiter replacement, will cost $15B to develop.

I know that this would not be a popular suggestion, but how much would
it cost to build new shuttles nearly identical to the existing ones ?

About $2 billion a copy, plus the fixed costs of getting the line going
again.

How much more would it cost to add in all the improvements NASA has
wished it could do (electric APUs etc) ?

Electric APU alone is in the $550 million range, IIRC.

How much more would it cost to replace SRBs with liquid fueled flyback
boosters ? (or whatever technology is deemed best to replace the SRBs)
?

In the range of $3-5 billion.

How much more would it cost to rework the engine area to make it
simple, fast and cheap to remove/replace engines ?

No idea.

Would there be any significant advantage in having the SSMEs attached
to the ET instead of actual shuttle ? (either as a capsule with its
parachutes for re-usability, or using disposable engines).

No. SSMEs are expensive. Throwing them away would be ridiculously
expensive. Developing a recovery capsule would take years, probably
hundreds of millions of dollars, and would add weight to the stack. RS-68s
would be cheaper but the Isp is significantly less, so performance would
suffer.

Moving the SSMEs to the bottom of the ET would mean reworking the MLPs,
TSMs and the flame trenches on the pads. It would also significantly change
the thermal/acoustic environment at the base of the SRBs.

--
JRF

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"John Doe" wrote in message ...
How much more would it cost to replace SRBs with liquid fueled flyback
boosters ? (or whatever technology is deemed best to replace the SRBs) ?


NASA replowed this ground in 2001-02 as part of the so-called Space Launch
Initiative (SLI) effort. The SLI folks spent time and money on studying a
shuttle replacement consisting of a fully-reusable two-stage vehicle with a
large flyback booster. The development cost was an estimated $30-35B (in
today's bucks). Sean O'Keefe had several independent studies made to keep
the SLI folks honest and these came up with essentially the same numbers.
Not surprising. When I worked on the original shuttle Phase A effort
(1969-70) at McDonnell Douglas, this two-stage monster was our baseline for
awhile and our estimated development cost was $37B (in today's money).
Again, not surprising that these numbers agree despite over 30 years of
separation, because the technology remains the same.

How much more would it cost to rework the engine area to make it simple,
fast
and cheap to remove/replace engines ?

Don't know.


Would there be any significant advantage in having the SSMEs attached to
the
ET instead of actual shuttle ? (either as a capsule with its parachutes
for
re-usability, or using disposable engines).

Each SSME costs about $50M to manufacture (current dollars). NASA spends
about $200M per year (current dollars) to maintain the SSME inventory. The
shuttle flies, on average, 5.5 times per year. So 15-18 SSMEs are flown each
year. So NASA is paying about $11M per SSME flown. If you can build an SSME
substitute (e.g. Rocketdyne's RS-68 that powers the Delta IV CBC) for less
than $11M per copy, then you might consider strapping a few of these engines
to the bottom of the ET and dumping them into the Indian Ocean along with
that tank.

BTW, NASA studied a similar configuration in the late 1970s when it became
evident that the shuttle could not meet the USAF requirement to place 32,000
pounds payloads launched out of VAFB into a polar reference orbit (100 nm
altitude circular orbit at 90 deg inclination). NASA and Martin figured out
how to beef up the structure in the bottom of the ET to attach liquid or
solid rocket boosters to give the shuttle more lift for the launches to
polar orbit.


Instead of dreaming of a totally radically new vehicle NASA has no idea
how to
build, wouldn't it be more realistic to just build new and improved
shuttles ?
If you start with the base model and then add each new improvement, at one
point, you will reach the "sorry, we can't afford this" level, at which
point
your new shuttle's designed is finalised with only the improvements you
can
afford ?


What improvements? As I mentioned at the start of this thread, there have
been no "improvements" made in spacecraft and launch vehicle technology
during the last 30 years that will produce large reductions in either
development cost or operations costs. Why? First, because the technology is
difficult ( especially in the high temperature materials area, where I spent
about 15 years of my aerospace career) and we have been in a region of
diminishing returns since the early 1970s. And, second, there just hasn't
been much R&D money spent during the last 30 years on this technology. For
example, there has been only one new high thrust engine developed in the
last 20 years, namely, the RS-68, which, BTW, is a legacy engine that relies
heavily on technology developed in the late 1960s for the excellent
Rocketdyne J-2S engine, which, in turn, was a simplified version of the
venerable J-2S engine that powered the 2nd and 3rd stages of von Braun's
Saturn V ELV.

Yes, I know all the tooling for shuttle is gone. But the tooling for CEV
doesn't exist either. However, there are a lot of things about Shuttle
which
are still manufactured (tiles, engines and I am sure countless other
components that are regularly replaced).

"rschmitt23" wrote in message
news:h6T0c.24678$aZ3.5432@fed1read04...


technology
during the last 30 years that will produce large reductions in either
development cost or operations costs. Why? First, because the technology
is
difficult ( especially in the high temperature materials area, where I
spent
about 15 years of my aerospace career) and we have been in a region of
diminishing returns since the early 1970s. And, second, there just hasn't
been much R&D money spent during the last 30 years on this technology. For
example, there has been only one new high thrust engine developed in the
last 20 years, namely, the RS-68, which, BTW, is a legacy engine that
relies
heavily on technology developed in the late 1960s for the excellent
Rocketdyne J-2S engine, which, in turn, was a simplified version of the
venerable J-2S engine that powered the 2nd and 3rd stages of von Braun's
Saturn V ELV.

Oops, that should be "J-2" engines, not J-2S, on the Saturn V.

"rschmitt23" wrote in message news:ChP0c.24596$aZ3.13941@fed1read04...
The 23Feb04 issue of Aviation Week reports that NASA is telling Congress
that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the space agencies latest and
greatest orbiter replacement, will cost $15B to develop. Earlier NASA
estimated that the Orbital SpacePlane (OSP), last year's super-duper orbiter
replacement, would cost $10-13B (todays bucks). NASA keeps turning the crank
and coming up with the same numbers. The development cost of the original
orbiter was about $14B in today's money.


According to Jenkins, NASA had spent something like $28 billion
plus (FY2000 dollars) on STS development by the time the first
launch took place in 1981. Total program costs had risen to
$114.6 billion by the end of 2000.

None of this is surprising because, even though the orbiter was designed
over 30 years ago, spacecraft technology hasn't changed much at all.
...

Development cost is mostly about the cost of design, testing,
validation, and qualification. Spacecraft technology choice
is a relatively minor cost determinant during the development
phase.

- Ed Kyle

"ed kyle" wrote in message
om...
"rschmitt23" wrote in message
news:ChP0c.24596$aZ3.13941@fed1read04...
The 23Feb04 issue of Aviation Week reports that NASA is telling Congress
that the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the space agencies latest and
greatest orbiter replacement, will cost $15B to develop. Earlier NASA
estimated that the Orbital SpacePlane (OSP), last year's super-duper
orbiter
replacement, would cost $10-13B (todays bucks). NASA keeps turning the
crank
and coming up with the same numbers. The development cost of the
original
orbiter was about $14B in today's money.


According to Jenkins, NASA had spent something like $28 billion
plus (FY2000 dollars) on STS development by the time the first
launch took place in 1981. Total program costs had risen to
$114.6 billion by the end of 2000.


Here's the breakdown for STS cost covering the 1970-82 development period
(in FY2000 dollars, aka $Y2K) taken from NASA's annual budget documents:

Orbiter: $14B
SSME: $3B
ET: $1.3B
SRM/SRB: $1.3B
Facilities: $3.4B
Total: $23B

The details are in Chapters 28 thru 44 of my recent book on U.S. manned
spaceflight in the 20th century.
I can't find my copies of Jenkins' books and I don't remember what cost
categories he included in his total.

BTW: my figure for total STS program cost (1970 thru 2000) in $Y2K is
$115.6B (see Chapter 44 of my book).

Later
Ray Schmitt

"rk" wrote in message
...

I think I'll disagree, at least with respect to a lot of the avionics,
particularly computers/digital electronics.

Going back to Apollo technology, there you had engineers designing custom
CPUs
from gates for a custom instruction set with essentially no design tools
along
with the software to support it. The program memories were hand woven in
a
semi-automated process. Clearly we've come a long way since then.

For Shuttle computers, again we see CPUs and bus protocol devices (and
there a
lot of data buses on the Shuttle) designed with relatively small scale
integration. Today that job is much easier and 1553 protocol devices, as
an
example, are available either in a hardened chip or as a "soft core" that
can
be put in a corner of a relatively small IC. For the main engine
controllers,
there was a lot of work and risk involved in the plated wire memories.
Today,
that is a no-brainer, with hardened/hi-rel memories of very high density
available off the shelf, that are relatively trivial to use, even in
hostile
environments.

Along with the relative ease of design, the volume, power, and mass have
also
been reduced considerably while the reliability has gone up by a large
amount.

For the past 30 years, it's been common knowledge that the cost of any type
of system that uses general purpose or special purpose computers is driven
by the high cost of software development, not by hardware cost. This was
true in the Apollo era and it's true today. Case in point, Boeing's struggle
to develop the ISS software far exceeds the cost of the computer hardware on
the space station. Certainly the ISS computers are a thousand times faster
and have 10,000 times more fast memory and a million times more mass storage
capability that the Apollo era computers, including the shuttle flight
computers. And the cost of developing a debugged, verified and validated
line of computer code may have dropped somewhat during the past 3 decades,
what with all of the spiffy automated software development tools we have
now. But the size of the ISS software is measured in millions of lines of
code, while the Apollo and shuttle flight software has or had considerably
fewer lines of code.

Later
Ray Schmitt

On or about Mon, 1 Mar 2004 19:27:09 -0800, rschmitt23
made the sensational claim that:
What improvements? As I mentioned at the start of this thread, there have
been no "improvements" made in spacecraft and launch vehicle technology
during the last 30 years that will produce large reductions in either
development cost or operations costs.

My opinion is still do at least Orbiter Mark II. Start with a design for
which we know what's good, bad, and ugly. Or 30 years from now we'll be
saying what a shame...the Saturn V never really got refined, nor did the
shuttle orbiters. I know about the upgrades program, and how different
the vehicles are now than when they were built, but still, to refine the
design without the restrictions of well, not being able to build one *new*
might be a good idea. For god's sake, Columbia was a freak accident, now all
of a sudden the shuttle is a deathtrap we need to sweep under the rug ASAP?
Bleh.
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