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Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?



 
 
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  #61  
Old November 19th 17, 11:28 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,018
Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

Jeff Findley wrote:

In article ,
says...

Were liquid flyback boosters for the Shuttle ever realistic?

YES

http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf

Recovery costs would be dramatically reduced, along with
propellant costs. LOX is $0.10 per kg and Kerosene is $0.40
per kg, whilst Polybutadiene and Ammonium Perchlorate costs
well over $2 per kg. Recovery from the sea, versus landing
at an airport, makes the SRBs way more costly than LRBs, the
SRB has far lower performance than the LRB with the LRB
being nearly twice as efficient, the cost of refuelling and
handling the SRB is 10s times more costly than LRB, the
ability to throttle the LRB makes things far safer for the
LRB than the SRB, structure weight is far lower for the LRB
than the SRB, increasing payload to orbit, haha - this is
just the short list.


You are completely ignoring development costs.


Magic Mookie Math and 'Asshole' Accounting (where he pulls numbers out
of his ass) frequently ignore lots of things.


NASA never received
development funding for liquid fly-back boosters. And with NASA's cost
models (especially back then), it would have cost many billions of
dollars to develop. The politicians were never willing to fund that
kind of development, especially with the huge political support that
ATK has always enjoyed.


ArianeSpace studied the idea of replacing the SRBs on Ariane 5 with
liquid flyback boosters. They concluded the development would take 10
years and be hideously expensive (and EU cost models tend to be much
worse than NASA's).


Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs. Politically, it
was hard to disentangle the shuttle program from the support of that
supply chain. This was not something expressed loudly in the press, but
I am arguing the pressure was there, behind closed doors.


This was pretty much common knowledge at the time when they were doing
the original development work. SLS was originally scheduled to get
liquid boosters to replace the SRBs around 2024. That development
slid to the latter part of the 2020's and it now looks like the
'internal plan' is to use a new ATK SRB called 'Dark Knight' rather
than liquid boosters based on the J-1B motor.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw
  #62  
Old November 20th 17, 12:20 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,307
Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

In article . com,
says...

On 2017-11-19 09:45, Jeff Findley wrote:

Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs.



It is obvious that this was the case for Ares/SLS. Desire to replace the
business lost with Shuttle retirement.

But since NASA didn't "feed" ATK in the 60s and 70s, abandonning Apollo
wouldn't mean lost business for ATK.

Would be interesting to look through the decision correspondance to see
how ATK won the business and how hard a pitch it had to make or whether
the pitch was made by the military or politicians.

If the decision was largely reliant on "influence" to help ATK, I have
to wonder if the "too expensive to develop" liquit fly-back boosters was
just an excuse to justify the SRB decision.


Actually it would have been quite expensive to develop liquid fueled
flyback boosters since there really wasn't any suitable LOX/kerosene
engine at the time. That and winged vehicles aren't exactly trivial to
develop. Reusing shuttle avionics might have helped a bit, but you'd
still need to tweak the programming quite a bit since "things that are
different just aren't the same".

Also note that Aerojet Rocketdyne is not only pitching AR-1 for Vulcan,
but they're also saying it would work for advanced boosters for SLS.
AR-1 is to be their high thrust oxygen rich staged combustion
LOX/kerosene engine. Cite:

http://www.rocket.com/ar1-booster-engine

AR-1 is the engine they should have been developing for decades.
Starting when Russia started selling their RD-180 for use on Atlas first
stages.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
  #63  
Old November 20th 17, 12:42 AM posted to sci.space.policy
William Mook[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,840
Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

On Monday, November 20, 2017 at 3:45:50 AM UTC+13, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Were liquid flyback boosters for the Shuttle ever realistic?

YES

http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf

Recovery costs would be dramatically reduced, along with
propellant costs. LOX is $0.10 per kg and Kerosene is $0.40
per kg, whilst Polybutadiene and Ammonium Perchlorate costs
well over $2 per kg. Recovery from the sea, versus landing
at an airport, makes the SRBs way more costly than LRBs, the
SRB has far lower performance than the LRB with the LRB
being nearly twice as efficient, the cost of refuelling and
handling the SRB is 10s times more costly than LRB, the
ability to throttle the LRB makes things far safer for the
LRB than the SRB, structure weight is far lower for the LRB
than the SRB, increasing payload to orbit, haha - this is
just the short list.


You are completely ignoring development costs.


Not really. The Lockheed study I cited, and others surrounding it, covered development cost and timing rather thoroughly.

NASA never received
development funding for liquid fly-back boosters.


That is true, which is why they were never developed. The advantages of LRB vs SRB remain.

And with NASA's cost
models (especially back then), it would have cost many billions of
dollars to develop.


True. However, the rebuilding of the SRBs in the end killed the Shuttle programme.

https://www.space.com/6285-space-shu...gh-costs..html


The politicians were never willing to fund that
kind of development, especially with the huge political support that
ATK has always enjoyed.


Politicians are put in power to make people think they have power. They don't. It is the ruling oligarchy that calls the shots, and space travel doesn't fit into that paradigm.

In fact, the deep state of our owners are generally opposed to the 'moonshot mentality' of the 'cornucopians' among the non-owners, who come to believe any problem can be resolved with technology.

Fact is, the oligarchy itself creates artificial scarcities to justify and maintain their power. Anyone that challenges that is dead meat. So JFK was killed, the great adventure into space then became the moon programme as nuclear propulsion was killed, then the Shuttle programme as the booster programme was killed, and eventually no programme as the shuttle programme was killed, eventually history will be re-written as the public was encouraged to question the validity of the moon accomplishments in the first place.

Consider, at the very moment we landed people on the moon, the American people began to question our presence in Vietnam, our impact on the environment and the justice of our society as our cities erupted into long hot summers of protest.

I lived through all this. I recall distinctly, in November 1966 Comedian/Activist Dick Gregory wrote of his protests of the Gemini 12 launch. He said that despite everything he felt about what was wrong with this society, despite all the money wasted that could be better spent on things more important than space, despite all that, as the mighty Titan rocket ascended into the heavens, he felt against all desire to do so, a sense of excitement and possibility that caused him to pray for the safety of the astronauts and take pride in the fact that men could do such things!

This reported in the Thanksgiving issue of Life Magazine at the time. Gregory asked an important question that transformed the nations thinking at that time, "If we can send men to the moon, why can we not end poverty stop crime get at the root of drug abuse and end war?"

This question resonated across all races, all income levels all levels of education and political values. Why can't we? Everyone seemed to say.

This general awakening of the population to making demands of their government and of their communities and of themselves to achieve their dreams and not be dominated by their fears - is the essential element of space travel that means it MUST be marginalised by the deep state. Those who rule over us must make of space travel a trivial and trivialising operation until that oligarchy is no more, or our spirit of adventure is no more. Its one or the other, you can't have both.


Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs.


This is precisely right. The Space Shuttle and NASA generally became a captive of the military establishment following the death of JFK and the election of Nixon. This is explicitly part of the record.

Politically, it
was hard to disentangle the shuttle program from the support of that
supply chain.


After LBJ got into power, this is correct. JFKs vision was to create an alternative to the military supply chain in advance of starving it and eliminating its power - along the lines Eisenhower mentioned.

He wrote extensively as Senator, and as President about 'the moral equivalent of war' that Space Travel and research afforded. That we could attain the benefits of war, to the degree there are benefits, in peace, and in a way that permitted cooperation with our enemies in a vast new field of exploration and possibility, and made of science a great boon to humanity, instead of a great problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40

This was not something expressed loudly in the press, but
I am arguing the pressure was there, behind closed doors.


https://www.c-span.org/video/?c45329...ion-conspiracy


Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.


  #64  
Old November 20th 17, 03:09 AM posted to sci.space.policy
William Mook[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,840
Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

On Monday, November 20, 2017 at 11:28:33 AM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Jeff Findley wrote:

In article ,
says...

Were liquid flyback boosters for the Shuttle ever realistic?

YES

http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf

Recovery costs would be dramatically reduced, along with
propellant costs. LOX is $0.10 per kg and Kerosene is $0.40
per kg, whilst Polybutadiene and Ammonium Perchlorate costs
well over $2 per kg. Recovery from the sea, versus landing
at an airport, makes the SRBs way more costly than LRBs, the
SRB has far lower performance than the LRB with the LRB
being nearly twice as efficient, the cost of refuelling and
handling the SRB is 10s times more costly than LRB, the
ability to throttle the LRB makes things far safer for the
LRB than the SRB, structure weight is far lower for the LRB
than the SRB, increasing payload to orbit, haha - this is
just the short list.


You are completely ignoring development costs.


Magic Mookie Math and 'Asshole' Accounting (where he pulls numbers out
of his ass) frequently ignore lots of things.


NASA never received
development funding for liquid fly-back boosters. And with NASA's cost
models (especially back then), it would have cost many billions of
dollars to develop. The politicians were never willing to fund that
kind of development, especially with the huge political support that
ATK has always enjoyed.


ArianeSpace studied the idea of replacing the SRBs on Ariane 5 with
liquid flyback boosters. They concluded the development would take 10
years and be hideously expensive (and EU cost models tend to be much
worse than NASA's).


Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs. Politically, it
was hard to disentangle the shuttle program from the support of that
supply chain. This was not something expressed loudly in the press, but
I am arguing the pressure was there, behind closed doors.


This was pretty much common knowledge at the time when they were doing
the original development work. SLS was originally scheduled to get
liquid boosters to replace the SRBs around 2024. That development
slid to the latter part of the 2020's and it now looks like the
'internal plan' is to use a new ATK SRB called 'Dark Knight' rather
than liquid boosters based on the J-1B motor.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw


http://hydrogen-peroxide.us/uses-bip... tle-1999.pdf

http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...9457659090062P

Three engines were considered as part of the study I provided. Hydrogen peroxide and kerosene are an interesting possibility as well, given the high density of the propellaht - which exceeds the solid rocket booster in performance and matches it in propellant density.



 




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