CEV to be made commercially available

In article ,
OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
remainder of the architecture really is Apollo Part II.

...Jeff, if it gets us back there, then who gives a flying ****?

Unfortunately, it *won't* get us back there. It might get a few NASA
astronauts back there... but not many, and not for long.

The problem with Apollo Part II is that it almost certainly ends the same
way Apollo Part I ended. So what's the point?
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Jeff Findley wrote:



It's only a lack of
even moderate imagination that makes the 2nd stage expendable.



It could be the loss in payload capacity that a recovery system would
entail versus the cost of just tossing away the stage.
Although I get a feeling that they've got something in mind for those
stages once they are in orbit.
Space station modules? Engine modules for the Mars ship?
Having reusable LOX/LH2 engines in orbit gives one advantages....


NASA clearly lacks that imagination, as their lunar mission architecture
requires only a single docking in LEO before departing for the moon. They
lack the desire to do any orbital assembly (beyond a single docking). The
second stages of the stick will do nothing more than create a light show as
they reenter earth's atmosphere and burn up. Your wishful thinking will not
change this, just as the same wishful thinking never resulted in a single ET
being taken to LEO.



KISS- Keep It Simple, Stupid! :-)
The less things involved in getting from point A to point B, the more
likely you are to make it to point B.

Pat

In article .com,
wrote:
Which is why they should be buying launches, not developing new launch
vehicles.

Yeah. Great. So... who has a commercially available heavy lift launch
vehicle?

Boeing and LockMart, to name two, have proposals for them that are every
bit as ready and available as NASA's White Elephant. (I've decided that
that name is clearly suitable only for the heavylift launcher; the Stick
is the White Cane. :-)) Why, you could even have -- gasp! -- competition.
You know, free enterprise?

NASA ought to work on enabling technologies and techniques to open up space

They did that in the '60's. Job accomplished.

Which job was that, exactly? Not long-lived, low-maintenance rocket
engines. Not effective altitude compensation. Not in-space assembly, at
least not to hear the NASA cheerleaders tell it. Not robust, fully
reusable, low-maintenance reentry TPS. Not long-lived high-Isp in-space
propulsion. Not workable recycling life support. Not spacesuits with a
reasonable working life and decent dexterity, never mind such useful
extras as minimal prebreathing and low emissions.

NASA did some useful stuff, in the early 60s in particular, but nowhere
near what's needed to open up space.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article . com,
Jake McGuire wrote:
Most commercial transportation seems to come out somewhere in the
neighborhood of 7 times fuel costs. Or at least airlines and trucking
companies do...

Note, though, that magically (say) doubling the fuel capacity of an
airliner would not double its operating costs; most of them don't scale
with fuel use. Rockets ought to have *lower* ratios than airliners, in
fact much lower, because they are so much more fuel-intensive, and fuel is
the easy part.

...maybe $100 per pound if you can get payload up to 10% of dry mass.

You should be able to do better than that. The DC-Y proposal put payload
at about 15% of dry mass; it was an aggressive proposal, yeah, but it also
had all the dry-mass overheads of LH2.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
And providing your vehicle is 100% reusable, and needs very little
maintenance between flights- similar to an airliner.

As I said: fully-reusable highly-developed hardware, greatly streamlined
operations, a high flight rate, and somebody other than NASA in charge.
Quite a challenge; probably wouldn't happen with first-generation hardware
even if the designer was allowed to give operating costs priority over
development costs. You'd need a couple of generations of evolution before
fuel costs started to really show up in the operating costs. But not
fundamentally impossible -- just takes a lot of work, in an area where
very little effort has been expended to date.

Ideally it would be SSTO and take of and land horizontally like an
airliner does to avoid the costs of elevating it on a pad for launch.

You can also avoid the handling hassles by going with vertical takeoff and
vertical landing. The bad choice is to take off in one orientation and
land in the other. As Jeff Greason said a couple of years ago (roughly):
"There are very few technical approaches that are uniformly bad, so there
*must* be a good application for VTHL, but I tried and tried and I can't
think what it would be..."

...you might end up
with something the size of the Star-Raker to get a Shuttle-sized payload
into orbit: http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld047.htm

This we could live with. What matters is cost, not size.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Jeff Findley wrote:
[...]

The hard problems are things like:

2. Cumbersome, low pressure EVA suits and gloves
3. Better EVA tools


There is work on this:

quote
"We need to design some pretty revolutionary spacesuits if we're really
going to realize human exploration of other [planetary] bodies," says
Dava Newman, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By
combining an old idea with the latest technology, Dr. Newman and her
team are trying to build a better spacesuit: the BioSuit, a
form-fitting "second skin," designed for lunar and Martian living.
/quote

which is from http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1020/p13s01-stss.html on
the Christian Science Monitor's website (and from USA Today).

/dps

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

KISS- Keep It Simple, Stupid! :-)
The less things involved in getting from point A to point B, the more
likely you are to make it to point B.

Also, the fewer things involved in getting from point A to point B, the
fewer things need to go tits-up before getting to point B, or back to point
A, becomes impossible :-)

Henry Spencer wrote:

Price of LOX in 2001 was about $.67 per gallon.



If I've done the conversion to sensible units correctly, that must be a
small-quantity price. It's much less in bulk.



You better tell NASA that, because that's what they say they're paying
for propellant-grade LOX on the Shuttle:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...en+pound&hl=en

"The Shuttle uses two types of liquid oxygen. 1. The oxygen loaded into
the External Tank, 141,750 gallons (1,350,000 pounds), is produced at
Mims, Fla., by liquefying and separating air. The oxygen is trucked to
KSC in 6,000-gallon tankers. As in the case of hydrogen, Shuttle
servicing requires more oxygen than the actual capacity of the oxygen
compartment. About 250,000 gallons (2,580,000 pounds) are used in all.
Small quantities are also used aboard the orbiter to provide its
breathable atmosphere. The current price of oxygen is 67 cents per
gallon. 2. The purer type of oxygen used in the Shuttle PRSDS requires
327 gallons (2,340 pounds) per mission for a four tank set and is more
expensive, $2.85 per gallon. About 800 gallons are used in all for PRSDS
loading due to prechill, boil-off and ground storage tank dumping. Fuel
cell oxygen is produced in Orlando, Fla., by the same process as the
propellant oxygen. Because it must be of higher purity, however, a more
modern plant in a locale with low atmospheric contamination is required.
The plant is used solely for this purpose during a production run, and
the curtailment of other operations is among the reasons for the higher
cost. Fuel cell oxygen is shipped in 4,000-gallon tankers."
....since a gallon of LOX weighs 9.527 pounds:
http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html we end up with a 2001 price of around 7
cents per pound, or 15 cents per kilogram.
You state that the 1 kg of kerosene is going to need around 3 kg of LOX,
that's a total LOX cost of around 45 cents to add to the cost of the
kerosene.
Kerosene runs about 6 1/2 pounds per gallon, so assuming that oil prices
drop some day (yeah, and monkeys are going to...) to where kerosene runs
about $1.50 per gallon, we end up with a cost per kilogram of kerosene
of around 23 cents per pound, or around 50 cents per kilogram.
So when we add or cost for the 1 kg of kerosene and 3 kg of LOX together
we end up with around 65 cents per the 4 kg of propellant mixture.
Now, I don't know the total amount of energy latent in this mixture,
but those would be some ballpark real-world figures to work with in
regards to cost of propellants.

Alan Anderson wrote:

Surprising, no? Do the math. Kinetic energy of 1 kg at orbital
velocity is only about 75 megajoules. Burning a gallon of kerosene
yields nearly twice that.


Using that as a basis, we need more than 75 cents worth of kerosene, and
around $1.00 worth of LOX to get 1 kg into orbit from an ideal energy
viewpoint.
And that doesn't take into account increased LOX production costs that
may have accrued since 2001 due to rising energy prices.

Pat

John Schilling wrote:

Cheaper than that if you build your own LOX extractor on-site, which is
worth doing if you're using it in rocket-propellant quantities.



Better tell NASA that; they're buying theirs and having it trucked in at
6,000 gallons per truck from Mims, Florida- 15 miles away.
At least that beats the LH2, which gets trucked in all the way from New
Orleans- 670 miles away.
http://www.hydrogenus.com/advocate/ad53hrac.htm

Pat

OM wrote:


...Amen, brother. Let's face it - unless you're building a superbox
for some gaming geek, flashy and exotic *never* gets the job done.



The X-33 should have taught us that lesson.

Pat