Buzz Writes: Washington, we don't have liftoff!

Chapeau!

Buzz's comment was interesting. But I got as far in the Huffington Post's comments section as the person who said we just get the secret research at Area 51 when I quit in disgust.

I don't disagree at all, but Buzz, where the hell have you been for 40 years? In good times and bad through republican and democratic administrations funding and dramatic bold progress were put off for later. Now that we are facing a world wide recession the chances of getting something going are less than ever.
Really significant progress in space has been stolen from my generation. The first landing on the moon was between 10th and 11th grade for me. I am now 56 and after Apollo we have not been out of low earth orbit. Even moderately advanced probes like JIMO have been canceled. Buzz, we could have used you as a hero - not as a hero astronaut but rather as a hero spokesman for American progress in space.

"But, for now, think of spacecraft worthy of following our Shuttles. We don't need any stinkin' capsules!"

C'mon Buzz. What we really don't need are stinkin' reasons for putting people in space. Once we have those good reasons, I don't care if they go up or down in feather baskets.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Buzz Aldrin, and the astute commentary that has come from him over the years on the future and potential of manned space flight. But this is just a rant from a fighter flyboy. It just ain't right if it don't have wings! We went through this on Mercury with windows and a control stick.

Whether astronauts land in water with parachutes, or with wheels on land makes not the slightest bit of difference to me.

"Whether astronauts land in water with parachutes, or with wheels on land makes not the slightest bit of difference to me."

So even the price difference doesn't interest you?

I wonder where that particular mindset might lead us?

And BTW... you are all aware, of course, that Aldrin has a ship to push. One that, like Direct, requires a functioning shuttle infrastructure for ramping up.

Thus the ridiculous "shuttle a year" scam.

If you're going to hold the STS lines open in any event then you could launch 3-4 times a year for pretty much the same price.

It’s amazing you’re the only person speaking out, and finally! You’re so accurate, it’s unbelievable. It’s shameful that more of us in-the-trenches engineers haven’t spoken out. A block 2 Orbiter should have been on the drawing boards a decade ago! Now that Washington makes our design decisions, we have lost control of the technical requirements that drive the designs of our future. They do not realize they do not possess the tools to set technical requirements well.
It took only three restarts of the ISS program in the 1980’s to appease the political gods…..our next entry vehicle appears destined for more than that. It’s obvious that the good press generated by the manned program is so envied by those inside the loop that they want to guide it, even if it results in killing the flame of exploration. Eventually, NASA will have become just like any other federal agency…mired in beaurocracy, its decisions made for the wrong reasons, basically incapable of independently achieving far-reaching goals set by our government.
What we need from our President is a long-range goal (not micromanagement)……what we need from Congress is just support, not fiscal bargaining. What we need from our Administrator is for him to run interference for us, basically preventing the micromanagement that passes for governing these days.
The engineering community of this agency is still the world-class capability it was in the 1960’s and 1970’s, just a little stifled by the non-engineer program managers of late. With the right goal, and a miniscule percentage point of our federal budget, the agency is still capable of pulling together to keep us in the forefront at exploring, inspiring, as well as spinning off technology to every aspect of our lives.

„Whether astronauts land in water with parachutes, or with wheels on land makes not the slightest bit of difference to me.”

It makes a difference. Picking them out of the water is more expensive that two small wings! Who will pay it?

Sorry, I did not read, nor need to the article on the subject. This is an endless debate. The reason why you use a capsule is very very very simple: CASH. So until the CASH issue is resolved there will be no spaceplanes. I am sure Buzz knows that very very very well. I will add however that a non-capsule vehicle may make sense. BUT it has to be within the framework of a mission, based on darn requirements, nit just because it looks cool. Today VSE does not require it. Flexible-Path tomorrow probably neither. So what do we do with the cash we actually have? Develop the spaceplane or the architecture for deep space exploration? I don't know, what do you think?

"It makes a difference. Picking them out of the water is more expensive that two small wings! Who will pay it?"

Any reference to this statement please? Handwaving arguments are not good enough sorry. Who says you need the whole Navy? Or 2 ships? Or what? Do you actually have proof to what you say? Any idea what the 2 small wings might cost for say a lunar return vehicle? Any idea whether those required materials even exist?

Oh well...

I'm still waiting to hear actual *reasons* to land spacecraft on runways aside from some general notion that it's more "advanced" or that someone wanted to copy it.

I hear the argument (paraphrased from the above article) that winged vehicles are better because they require more analysis and expertise to make them work. That sounds to me like it drives up costs.

The "too expensive to go pick up a capsule that lands in the ocean" idea never made sense. Since we launch over water, it's already a requirement that in the event of a launch abort you be able to land in the ocean. So your spacecraft already needs to be able to land in the ocean and you need to be able to send out ships to go pick up your crew -- wings or not. Any other modes of landing the spacecraft are additional requirements and will drive up cost and mass. The mass issue is especially serious given the Delta-V requirements for beyond-LEO exploration. (I would, incidentally, like to know what the costs are for sending a ship a few hundred miles off the coast to pick up a crew, and what fraction of the cost of a human asteroid mission or of ISS operations that represents.)

I sometimes hear arguments about reusability. In a reentry at >11 km/s, the heating rates are far greater than that for the shuttle because you become dominated by radiative heating. So (short of some miraculous new material) your heat shield isn't reusable anyway. And of course if your flight rate is ~2/yr then whether reusability would make sense at all is questionable.

The Shuttle is an amazing machine, but its basic design will never go beyond LEO. For many years, I wondered what would follow it, and if NASA would have the guts to admit that a wingless capsule made sense and weather the inevitable but necessary online PR firestorm. The fact that they do has given me hope. Now if only they can deliver ...

Just to give an idea. There are still the numbers from Apollo available. How much was it to pick up the Apollo capsule?

There was a russian proposal called Clipper. These calculations exists but have never been compared. The actual russian plan is to build an asymmetric capsule with a landing system similar to the delta clipper. This is still much cheaper than just to drop it into the sea. It is not only the water, it is the salt water.

Everything Aldrin says is not only correct, but obvious. I'm amazed that anyone would argue with any of it. But he doesn't go far enough. He's still willing to use chemical-propellant rockets. Real spaceships aren't fished out of the ocean at the end of a mission...but they aren't powered by chemical-propellant rockets either. Until we're prepared to build real spaceships, which must obviously be nuclear powered, let's quit wasting money on meaningless missions flown with primitive rockets.

„Until we're prepared to build real spaceships, which must obviously be nuclear powered, let's quit wasting money on meaningless missions flown with primitive rockets.”

Beyond low earth orbit – yes. But the taxpayer will not accept a nuclear power plant flying in our atmosphere. Therefore we made the Saenger proposal within the former german hypersonic program. This might be the most advanced step to be realized with available technology and without nuclear components.

I suspect that it really does cost more money to achieve water landings than to land horizontally on a runway like the Shuttle does. But it also costs money and time to develop a CEV that can land horizontally and I wouldn't be surprised if the schedule aspect was the critical metric for the decision that was made for the CEV.

I don't have operating cost numbers to validate that hypothesis, but I'd like to see them, regardless of how it works out. I'd also like to see a comparison of the lifecycle cost numbers.

Regarding the comment that real spaceships must be nuclear powered: I agree that chemical propulsion provides significant limitations. However, I see no reason for nuclear power except perhaps at some point beyond Jupiter, where solar-electric and magsail propulsion methods become less effective.

The cost of putting things uphill makes it inefficient to bother bringing anything back. This was the only real flaw with the shuttle design.

The two rocket system of Ares was not a bad idea in principle. Its roughly what we had with the Saturn IB and Saturn V. If your going to throw something heavy into space then it might as well be only the stuff you'll use once there. That leaves us with a tiny escape capsule as our "ship".
Being able to say "our spaceship has wings" is not as meaningful as saying "our spaceship lifts ten times the cargo of any other rocket".

Now if you can find a way to pay for the development program of a winged vehicle that's actually affordable to fly, you'd have something.

Fortunately, the USA is not the whole world.

I agree with Buzz. The thought that we are scrapping the shuttle without out even a lesser replacement for at least 7 years is crazy. The ISS is just the mission the shuttle was made for. It can carry large amounts of crew and payload up and down. But now as soon as ISS is build we are canceling the shuttle. It finally had a place to shuttle to!
The orion has a purpose, in that eventually it could get us out of LEO. But it is a step backwards in technology, it can suplement the shuttle, but can not replace it. The shuttle should not be retired until we have some thing to replace it. This will cost more money, but these high tech jobs will be less expensive and have a higher return than, the trillions we have been throwing away on failed banks and businesses.
Right now it does not matter that Orion is going to land it the ocean. Although assigning a Navy fleet is another expensive step backwards. It doesn't matter because it does not look like Orion will ever fly, never mind land! The President has not made a decision on what to do next and has shown little if any intrest in manned space. Indeed while campaining he talked of pushing Orion out 5 more years and pushing the moon out another 10 years. His lack of leadership on the subject since becoming president seems to indicate he is willing to just retire the shuttle and use the money else where. I really hope I am wrong, but I do not see much reason for optimism. I wish Obama would go down, see the shuttle and watch a launch. Maybe that would inspire him.

"It makes a difference. Picking them out of the water is more expensive that two small wings!"

Yeah, I guess even with $5000/kg ascent costs, having wings and a landing gear is a lot cheaper than having a parachute. That must be right, no ... ?

No, it's not about cost at all. It's just about the flyboy fibre that traditional astronauts have to have. Runways are where people land. Oceans are where people drop.

So, um, what do you do with those wings and landing gears when you go to the Moon? Oh yeah, I guess you put them in cold storage in LEO.

I know Buzz's thinking about this and his observations about landing on runways was for logistical vehicles that ferry back and forth to the ISS. For limited exploration missions such as asteroid rendezvous and lunar flights, he believes a capsule would be fine. It is the routine back and forth to ISS, with return cargos, that he thinks cries out for a winged or lifting body vehicle.

How many times must it be said (when it should be far too obvious to have to be said at all) that a vehicle that has a payload-to-orbit cost of $5000/kg, or even $500/kg, is no more like a real spaceship than chalk is like cheese?

"I know Buzz's thinking about this and his observations about landing on runways was for logistical vehicles that ferry back and forth to the ISS."

That may well be, and makes at least some sense with regard to downmass. But his HuffPost article was certainly ambiguous about this. He ends that article with "We don't need any stinkin' capsules!" without any obvious caveats about the kind of human spaceflight such stink applies to. To the extent that NASA ends up being responsible for space flights outside of LEO, and commercial providers end up servicing facilities in LEO, I guess his exasperation applies to the latter rather than the former. Dragon with wings and a landing gear? Sure, why not? Take that, Elon!

The whole issue is how best to retrieve experiments returned to Earth from the ISS? A water recovery will require at last some sort of deployment of naval vessels in both oceans during the duration of the Orion Earth orbital flight. Whatever this costs will be budget money not factored into the overall program cost, I predict. And how long to get from the ship to the stateside dock for the experiments to be offloaded? Designing a manned ferry for this purpose certainly would suggest a land recovery is a better option, from the experiment users perspective. And the ability to glide to different alternate land landing sites (airports?)would be a plus, don't you agree? For once-or-twice a year exploration missions to the Moon or elsewhere, the limited reentry footprint of capsules would not matter much. It's when you have continuous manned Earth orbital flights that airports look much more appealing.
That's my two cents.

Why wings and returning from outer space is always handled as a contradiction? Remember CEV, the Lockheed proposal from 2005, remember the russian Clipper or remember MAKS with its foldable wings. Parts of the heat protection for X38 were developed in Germany and we learned that these things could be done.

How much time do we have to design, develop and produce an ISS transport spaceplane between now and the time the ISS retires? How much time is it taking NASA today to build even a capsule? What is the likelihood it'll ever happen? People stop dreaming and get real at least a little...

The LMT CEV proposal for CEV was a lifting body, no wings. The first iteration of Clipper had no wings. MAKS was a LEO return vehicle, as was X-38.

You will not develop a LEO space plane anytime soon UNLESS there is something to visit in LEO. There is no such thing as an infrastructure that is planned to do say DeepSpace-LEO and LEO-Earth transfers. There is no cash for it. VSE was not it. Flex-Path has the flavor but no cash still.

There is no cash for a reusable spaceplane. Period.

Notes:

** Soyuz: carries crew to and from ISS, finishes on land. Flights ~2/yr
** Progress: carries cargo to ISS, robotically. Final stage disposed in atmosphere or abandoned in place. Flights ~4/yr

Hmm, any of this seem like a good technical starting point for a US system that carries crew and cargo to ISS 2-4 times/yr?

If the goal is HSF beyond LEO, we won't do it by dozens of launches once/week. We'll work on it for a decade and then boost it in one or a few launches. Multiple missions? Probably spaced by a year. For that cadence, reusability is a distraction and even an impediment.

We should (re)develop reusable LEO launch systems and crew vehicles when we start having good business and government reasons for flights faster than 1-4 times/month. That's the reason STS didn't work out as planned -- we didn't really have the commitment to fly that often.

Because the Shuttle was so expensive as to be next to useless! It was going to carry 65,000 lb, at $160/lb, and was going to fly once a week. The mission just ended carried 30,000 lb, and the cost (which seems remarkably hard to nail down) is around $10,000/lb. The launch rate has averaged less than a tenth of what we were told it would be.

If we had built a real orbital spaceship instead of this abomination, things would have been very different. But we couldn't afford to do that...

And Griffin wanted to replace the Shuttle with the Ares I...a Great Leap Backward. But it's hardly surprising that a fool like George W. Bush would appoint a fool like Mike Griffin to head NASA.