A Rocket to Nowhere (2005) | Hacker News Reader

A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)

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83 pointsswatkat30 comments

I think I tell this story every time there's an article about the STS on here. When I was a precocious space cadet, I followed the development of the Shuttle as closely as a kid could before the Internet. I remember the initial promised launch cost of $50/lb into LEO. Young theothermkn weighed himself and worked out how much that would cost, and even tried to guess how much a capsule would weigh, and how much of a group capsule's weight that he would be responsible to pay for. Tough, but doable.

And then the price went to $100/lb. Okay, tougher, but still within reach. And then $500/lb. Ugh. And then $1,000/lb. Oh, well. Maybe a later version will be cheaper. Economies of scale! And then the newscasters stopped talking about the cost at all, except to note how far we were from the initial cost.

The Space Shuttle set spaceflight back 40 years. Years later, I got an aerospace engineering degree, and promptly left the field when I graduated because I didn't want to work inside soul-crushing aerospace institutions without even the hope of doing anything good.

We may never recover, given that all our eggs are in the SpaceX basket.

> given that all our eggs are in the SpaceX basket.

What do you mean here?

SpaceX is currently the only credible organization with a low-cost launch system of sizeable payloads capable of reaching more than a tiny fraction of the energies needed for orbit. For example, Blue Origin's vehicle is capable only of an exoatmospheric hop, which is optimistically 3% of the energy capability needed to get to orbit. Given that the rocket equation says that the floor of the the remaining costs are proportional to exp(sqrt(remaining 97% of the orbital energy)), Blue Origin amounts to a rich boy's hobby or lifestyle tourism business.

Advances in space launch technology and improvements in cost are thus concentrated in one basket, and one that is additionally weighted with electric car and solar power ventures of dubious long-term financial viability.

Blue do have a plan for an orbital launch vehicle. And seem to be fairly far advanced with developing an engine for it (BE-4 -- also planned for use on ULA's new "Vulcan" launcher)

They've got a launch site at CCAFS, and have started building a new factory there as well.

I'm a SpaceX fan, and definitely consider them to be ahead at the moment -- but certainly wouldn't write Blue off completely.

Yup. Most of the energy actually goes into building up kinetic energy to be able to circle around at tremendous speeds. Lifting the thing up to that level only takes a tiny fraction of the total energy budget. Blue Origin can only climb up, then fall down - for now.

But who knows what they are working on.

This was a touchy subject for me to bring up because it became obvious if you had a practical eye that the Shuttle was a monster that ate not only most of NASA's budget but also meant there were no funds left over to develop it's replacement. Touchy because mention that to anyone and they'd typically go insane on you.

> The Shuttle even helped Reagan inadvertently bankrupt the Soviet Union, as the Soviets decided they needed a rival orbiter, and cloned the vehicle at terrific expense

Yeah that line of reasoning is pretty popular. "Soviet Union collapsed because of Reagan's masterful tricks. Look how great we are, we beat them"

Reagan didn't have any measurable effect on the collapse. But I guess it makes us feel better saying "We won the fight". Even though in reality the opponent's cancer finally got to him and he collapsed in the ring.

Russian shuttle Buran was in some way more advanced than ours: it could land itself automatically. It used an interesting programming and guidance system. There is even a vestige of it alive today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

https://drakon-editor.com/

Also, the four Buran liquid rocket boosters were designed to also function as the first stage of a smaller launch vehicle, Zenit. At one point, Zenit was set to replace many of the existing Soviet launchers -- that never quite happened, mostly because Zenit is built in the Ukraine, but it has still been a reasonably successful rocket (and although it hasn't launched yet this year, I believe a few more launches are still planned).

The RD170 engine family developed for Zenit has been very successful. A half-sized version (RD180) powers Atlas V, and a quarter-sized version (RD191) powers the first-stage modules of Russia's new Angara rocket family.

Exactly. Also, there's a meme that "the Russians beat us to space in the '50s because they were cutting so many safety corners".

Bullshit. Not only is it not true, it's not even a good story to teach your kids. "So, you're saying if I cheat I could win?" Good job, dad.

Reality not only has the advantage of being, well, real, but the story is that much better. The Russians won the first round because they were laser-focused on the goal, while America was twiddling its thumbs. They had a genius engineer, Sergey Korolev (pronounced: Karalyov), who was like von Braun and James Webb put together, only better, and was dreaming of sending people to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond. They had a forward thinking leader in Nikita Khrushchev, who was a passionate supporter of the space program, and would give Korolev nearly a blank check each year. And they never put any airgap between military rocket research (ICBMs) and civilian space programs - Korolev & Co built both. It also helped that Korolev was an excellent leader who could motivate his teams to crank out 80 hour weeks and love it and be proud of it. Kind of like Elon Musk, come to think of it.

So of course they were first to throw Sputnik 1 up into space, and the first to send Gagarin on a world tour in orbit.

And then in the mid-60s Korolev died, and Khrushchev got sacked and replaced by stuck-in-the-past Brezhnev. Political will disappeared, funding dried out. They didn't have money to do proper testing on the N1 (their Saturn V equivalent, the Moon rocket), so they did all their testing "in production", during real launches - with results that you could sadly very well imagine.

And meanwhile JFK gave his famous speech ("this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth"). And billions of dollars started pouring into the industry, and the sleeping american industrial complex giant woke up.

And we won the second round, the race to the Moon, fair and square.

It turns out, if you are 100% focused, and you work really hard, and you're passionate - you win. Who knew? And it worked for both sides in that race, but during different rounds in the game.

And only afterwards did the Soviets start cutting safety corners, and only then did Vladimir Komarov crash after re-entry.

Always tell true stories. Bullshit doesn't help anyone in the long run.

My understanding is the SU collapsed for several reasons. One was that, as a centrally-controlled socialist economy, it because increasingly inefficient, as Hayek explained.

Another was that it had an economy only one-third the size of the US, but was matching it in military strength. This lead to so such huge expenditures that little was left over for capital investment in the rest of the economy. In addition, all the engineering and scientific talent went to the military sector, so there was little technological innovation elsewhere.

Reagan looked at his and decided to greatly increase the US military budget, in hopes the SU would see it couldn't win, and quit the cold war. In addition, his technologists came up with the Star Wars idea, which was a scam they knew wouldn't work, but the hoped the SU would be tricked into thinking it would and that they couldn't match it.

Fortunately, the Russian Politburo realized Russia was in terrible economic shape and needed radical changes, so they appointed Gorgachev to do this. And so when Reagan launched his plan, he eventually agreed to end the cold war. In addition in his attempt to rescue the Soviet economy he made radical political changes that eventually lead to the end of communism and the dissolution of the SU in to a number of separate states.

So yes, Reagan's plan succeeded, but in part because of independent developments in the SU.

Author here, thank you for lifiting this up from the mists of time.

Is there a readable summary anywhere of the last few years of progress towards Constellation (or whatever it's called now)? I find the situation confusing and have trouble figuring out what's still slated to happen, what got changed, and what missions are still on the drawing board.

NASA cancelled Constelaltion program. Now, Space Launch System (SLS) expendable launch vehicle is the planned replacement for Space Shuttle program. SLS aims to provide heavy cargo lifting and human spaceflight (via Orion capsule) capabilities.

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sls_octo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

Progress updates: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/tag/sls/

SLS is a reconfigured version of the larger rocket from the Constellation program (Ares V); renamed for political purposes. The 'Senate Launch System' will take humans nowhere useful, and its real purpose is to preserve the employment status of the people developing it.

So I once saw a talk by one of the Steve K. Robinson, a mission specialist on the STS-114 where a gap filler came loose from one of the tiles and was protruding near the front of the shuttle. Accord to him, this was a very scary situation. The reason being that the gap filler could trip the flow near the front of the shuttle from laminar to turbulent.

This would be very very bad. So if you haven't taken fluid dynamics, turbulent flow transfers heat a lot better than laminar flow and once flow becomes turbulent it tends to stay that way. So what this meant is that pesky gap filler could have made almost all of the flow trailing it turbulent, creating a region of increased heat transfer across much of the shuttle, which could have destroyed the shuttle.

And unfortunately poor Steve knew about all of this because he did some work on hypersonic flow in grad school. So NASA engineers went all apollo 13 and macgyvered some procedures on how to turn the hack saw aboard the station into filler slicer-offer. Steve Robinson himself decided to perform the mission, this was the first and probably only time a spacewalk was performed under the shuttle's heat shield. This was a very risky mission where a small mistake could do more damage than the gap filler could do. Luckily in the end, the gap filler was loose and easily removed by pulling.

All that caused by a tiny piece of ceramic sticking out about a centimeter! Now the interesting thing is that a couple missions later, NASA engineers decided to put a turbulent trip on the shuttle on purpose, because we don't understand hypersonic boundary layer transition all that well[1]. It was near the end of the shuttle, so the region of increased heat transfer couldn't do much damage, but still performing such an experiment on the shuttle, almost right after the Columbia disaster, was pretty nuts. Necessary though, because experiments on hypersonic flow are difficult to perform in wind tunnels.

One of the reasons capsules are so compelling is that there is less distance for this laminar to turbulent transition to occur.

[0]http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/EVA_gapfiller.html [1]http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2011001...

>Necessary though, because experiments on hypersonic flow are difficult to perform in wind tunnels.

At my dads old place of work in the early eighties was a hypersonic wind tunnel. It was made out of a WWI era battleship gun barrel. With 6000 psig tank of hydrogen and pebble bed heater at one end. A shaped charge at the other. And a window with a schlieren photography setup pointing through a window in the middle.

The way it worked was an explosive disk would be blown releasing the 6000 psi hydrogen. Which would flow through the pebble bed heater heating it to 2000 deg F[1]. Then into a nozzle where it would accelerate to hypersonic speed and head down the barrel. Meanwhile at the other end the shaped charge would fire blasting the pencil eraser sized model down the other end. If everything went right take a picture through the window in the middle as the model hurled into the blast of hydrogen.

[1] 2000 deg F so that when it expanded from 6000 psig it wouldn't liquefy.

Found an Ames Research center link.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4302/ch2.11.htm

"with each Shuttle mission now bespangled in a dazzling assortment of scientific experiments, like so many talismans against budget reduction."

Now that's a beautiful line.

I was hoping Maciej would make the following crack, which of course he did:

> And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission.

Bravo.

The replacement rocket to nowhere, the SLS (senate launch system) should be able to lift them all at once.

Another:

> You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design.

I am reading Ben Bova's 1985 Privateers novel, where the Soviet Union controls all access to space, and a private American company is trying to find a niche. Almost all his other solar-system novels were written after the fall of the USSR, and I think nowadays he excludes Privateers from the series (a retrospective reboot). But perhaps it was prescient after all!

Btw it is a pretty fun book. It does feel a bit like Atlas Shrugged in Space, with a good 80s struggle between Freedom and Communism, but if that doesn't bother you, it is a fun read and gives some food for thought about how an off-Earth economy might get started.

If you'd like a lot more detail on the process described here by which the Shuttle program went from what it could have been to what it ended up being, I've found NASA's own history, "The Space Shuttle Decision", to be quite thorough and comprehensive. You can find it here: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/contents.htm

It makes you wonder what a shuttle program unencumbered by political compromise would look like.

A space station on an orbit where it could be used as a way station for manned exploration further afield.

Like SpaceX maybe?

SpaceX is benefiting from NASA figuring out what works and what doesn't work. I don't think they could be as cheap as they are without that knowledge.

But the space program would certainly look differently. the Space Shuttle would have looked much different too.

I seem to recall that one of the drags on the Shuttle's performance was the Air Force insistence on a larger cargo bay and requirement that it be able to reach polar orbit.

I go into this a bit in the article. The worst thing about the polar requirement is that it means adding 1000 miles of cross-range gliding capability to something that really, really, really doesn't like to glide.

The ISS itself, is the same kind of boondoggle as the Shuttle.

Imagine a US space program that put unmanned probes front and center. We could've had video feeds crawling over every moon of Jupiter and Saturn, and inside the Martian caves. We might've settled the Mars and Europa life question. And two Shuttle crews would not have died.

Humans don't belong in space. Robots do.

Lovely piece on the Soviet shuttle "Buran" http://www.astronautix.com/b/buran.html

Can anyone offer an explanation of why the shuttle used a horizontal launch stack (booster alongside the orbiter) instead of a vertical launch stack (booster beneath the orbiter) like every other launch vehicle I know of? TFA hints that it was related to the requirement for polar orbit capability, but offers no details.

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