Spiral 1 is redundant

What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry when a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?

Yes there is a law that NASA has successfully used to support its not
invented here strategy, but the cost and time of Spiral 1 is an
enormously high price to pay for reinventing yet another wheel. Wheels
are useless in space.

Licensing or just buying Soyuz capability to ferry people to the ISS
for rendezvous with a real CEV optimized for space exploration would
move the schedule forward by several years and bring some excitement
back down to Earth. This would enable even more cost savings than
proposed by the Independent study for The Planetary Society which
recommends retiring the shuttle as soon as possible and speeding up CEV
development. Using this strategy a space based CEV could be operational
by 2010.

Study is readable he
http://planetary.org/aimformars/study-summary.html

The sooner we have real people making real voyages beyond LEO the
better!

"How inappropriate that this planet be called Earth, when it should
clearly be called Ocean." -- Arthur C. Clarke

wrote in
oups.com:

What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry when a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?

To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving US design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Yes there is a law that NASA has successfully used to support its not
invented here strategy, but the cost and time of Spiral 1 is an
enormously high price to pay for reinventing yet another wheel. Wheels
are useless in space.

The law will likely remain in place because US lawmakers see Iran
nonproliferation as being far more important than space exploration.

--
JRF

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"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:

wrote in
oups.com:

What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry when a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?

To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving US design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Yes there is a law that NASA has successfully used to support its not
invented here strategy, but the cost and time of Spiral 1 is an
enormously high price to pay for reinventing yet another wheel. Wheels
are useless in space.

The law will likely remain in place because US lawmakers see Iran
nonproliferation as being far more important than space exploration.

If Lockheed gets the contract, they will buy Soyuz under a "technology
transfer" agreement, jack up the price and sell it as american. They will
launch it with their "american" Russian-engined Atlas booster.

John Halpenny

John Halpenny wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:

wrote in
oups.com:

What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle
besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry
when a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?

To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving
US design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Yes there is a law that NASA has successfully used to support its
not
invented here strategy, but the cost and time of Spiral 1 is an
enormously high price to pay for reinventing yet another wheel.
Wheels
are useless in space.

The law will likely remain in place because US lawmakers see Iran
nonproliferation as being far more important than space
exploration.

If Lockheed gets the contract, they will buy Soyuz under a
"technology
transfer" agreement, jack up the price and sell it as american. They
will
launch it with their "american" Russian-engined Atlas booster.

John Halpenny

John, you and zzed60 are smoking crack. I can't think of a worse idea
to help space exploration then to use a program held hostage by a
Russian state-run agency. Yeah, that'll really help cost and
reliability. There's a reason Russian space vehicles are cheaper than
US, and it's not just the Russian cost of living. Soyuz is a very old
design with only two-system redundancy. That means a higher probability
of failure. Given, its longer flight history and better design margins
have given it better history than shuttle--but that's more of a comment
on how bad shuttle really is. An American designed and built capsule
will be more reliable, more expandable, and better suited to future use
beyond spiral 1, while Soyuz will be stuck in LEO forever.

There's no point in taking a shortcut to get to Spiral 1 if that then
makes further spirals untenable. That's cutting off the future for a
miniscule gain in the present.

Tom

wrote:
What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry when
a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?


Soyuz doesn't meet the specifications for Spiral 1,
or any other Spiral. Even Russia is working on a
Soyuz replacement.

- Ed Kyle

John Halpenny wrote in
:

If Lockheed gets the contract, they will buy Soyuz under a "technology
transfer" agreement, jack up the price and sell it as american.

If they put that in their bid, they lose the contract.

If they don't disclose that until after they win, they go to jail.

They won't take that chance.

--
JRF

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check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
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"Tom Cuddihy" wrote in
oups.com:

Soyuz is a very old
design with only two-system redundancy. That means a higher probability
of failure. Given, its longer flight history and better design margins
have given it better history than shuttle--but that's more of a comment
on how bad shuttle really is.

Soyuz and the space shuttle have equivalent failure histories. Soyuz has
two fatal accidents in 91 flights (#92 is in space right now) while the
shuttle has two in 113. Soyuz has four fatalities in 216 person-trips while
the shuttle has fourteen in 672.

Do the math; they all come out to around one in fifty, or roughly 98%
reliability. Statistically, they *are* equal due to the broad error margins
dictated by the small population size (rough rule of thumb: if a single
accident on either vehicle is enough to change the ranking, they're equal).
For the same reason, none of the previous manned spacecraft (Vostok,
Voskhod, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) can be said to have greater than 98%
reliability; none of them flew enough times to have demonstrated it.

The fact that Soyuz has flown since 1971 without a fatality is a red
herring due to Soyuz's low flight rate. Soyuz has had only 81 safe landings
in the 34 years since the Soyuz 11 accident, while the shuttle had 87 in
the 17 years between the Challenger and Columbia accidents.

An American designed and built capsule
will be more reliable,

That does not *necessarily* follow. If aviation history teaches us
anything, it is that reliability is maximized by 1) maximizing flight rate
(i.e. gain flight experience as rapidly as you can), and 2) minimizing the
cycle time between each generation of vehicles (to feed back operational
lessons learned back into design). The CEV spirals have *some* chance of
succeeding at 2), but not at 1); CEV will likely fly too infrequently to
allow for much operational experience to feed into the next spiral.

more expandable, and better suited to future use
beyond spiral 1, while Soyuz will be stuck in LEO forever.

Soyuz was originally designed for the USSR's failed N1 lunar program. Of
course, it has been repeatedly modified since then to optimize it as a LEO
space station ferry, and the Russians lack the money (and probably the
institutional memory) to modify it back. So your statement is probably
true, but probably not in the way you intended.

--
JRF

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"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...
To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving US
design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Wellll, yeah, Spiral 1 is an operational ETO transport. It's just not the
end of CEV evolution.

-Kim-

"Kim Keller" wrote in
:


"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...
To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving US
design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Wellll, yeah, Spiral 1 is an operational ETO transport.

Some people still believe that it will be, at least. The tea leaves I'm
reading say otherwise.

It's just not
the end of CEV evolution.

That's it's real purpose.


--
JRF

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Jorge R. Frank wrote:
"Kim Keller" wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving US
design teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Wellll, yeah, Spiral 1 is an operational ETO transport.

Some people still believe that it will be, at least. The tea leaves I'm
reading say otherwise.

The specification is reasonably clear. It has to be an operational
Earth to Orbit transport.

Whether it is intended to be *used* for operational Earth to Orbit
transport of people to say Space Station, is an open question.

I suspect that the ISS resupply / crew transport people and
Exporation Systems aren't seeing eye to eye on this.
Or, at least, haven't succeeded in requiring that CEV S-1
be The Station Transport.

This is actually sort of annoying on one level, but it leaves
the map open for commercial transports as well.


-george william herbert