House Wants To Kill CRuSR

Much as I hate to say it, since I'm actually an advocate of suborbital tourism, but CRuSR never really made sense. It proposes spending money to solve a non-problem.
There really aren't a huge amount of experiments that can be done inside a manned suborbital vehicle that can't be done cheaper and better in one of the other microgravity facilities or on a sounding rocket. The suborbital tourism vehicles are really poorly optimized for science payloads-- you won't be able to put anything on the outside (no space exposure, no x-ray astronomy), and you won't be able to fly anything dangerous in them (and "dangerous" covers most of the rest of the suborbital experiments, like studying crystal growth, or flames, or almost anything with batteries or heaters or chemicals). The requirements are pretty stringent-- I'm not really sure what you will be able to fly.
I'm not surprised if "more than 300 researchers and educators" "showed up" at a conference. If I thought that there was a chance to get a suborbital ride, paid for by Uncle Sam, I would too!
But just because a lot of people want the free ride, that doesn't mean it makes sense.
$1M to fund studies sounds about right, since right now there aren't even preliminary guidelines for what will be allowed-- maybe that study will figure out what research the suborbital flights might be useful for.

I don't understand this. It's an absolute pittance, and as far as I can tell it threatens no-one. There's no broad-brush engineering or science argument against it; just the usual question of whether it's the best approach to the problem, experiment by experiment, which the proposal review board will assess in due course. It's just another option in the trade space --- unless it's killed legislatively for petty personal reasons.

There is not a lot of NASA money as it is for suborbital experiments. If those PI"s then had to 'man rate' their experiments for a manned suborbital flight, that doesn't offer them anything beyond what WFF offers them now, it's gonna cost them a significant amount beyond what they barely get now.

And notwithstanding HST, SMD does not like hitching any wagons to manned space flight.

Also, Sen. Mukulski often pays close attention to the health of WFF and it's suborbital programs, which have been withering on the vine for over a decade now. So any competition to that is apt to be noticed by her/her staff.

It's true that fifteen million dollars is an "absolute pittance" on the overall scale of government spending.
On the other hand, given that these are vehicles that don't yet exist, that don't have specifications for payload accommodations or microgravity levels, that have unknown safety standards, and on which it's as yet not clear what, if any, payloads might be safely flown... exactly why would we need to spend more than a million dollars this year to study the question?
Frankly, a budget of a million dollars per year seems like more than enough.

The money could be much better spent on plain, old sounding rockets. I've never known Ed Weiler to be against sounding rockets, since among other things, they provide validation of prototype instruments before they can be proposed for orbital missions.

What Ed may oppose is using the taxpayers' hard-earned money so Alan Stern can take a joy ride with Richard Branson.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, $15M is a relatively small amount to exercise some creativity in suborbital science that hasn't been exercised. Let's see where it goes and have it prove value.

On the other hand, I agree with some of the remarks above. Yes, there were 300 people at the Boulder conference, but the science that was proposed was not, in my mind, of astonishingly high value, nor obviously doable only with human beings attached.

Finally, let me correct something that Keith said in his intro. Ed Weiler has absolutely no opposition to suborbital research. He funds balloons, sounding rockets and aircraft, and appreciates the science, technology development and training they produce. That's what "suborbital" means in SMD. (So maybe this is just a correction about terminology.) But he doesn't think that highly of suborbital science with people in space suits holding wires and test tubes. Maybe he's right about that. Maybe he's not. That's where the opportunity to exercise creativity comes in. Prove him wrong.

CRuSR hasn't been limited to manned vehicles for over a year now. People like us (Masten Space), Armadillo, etc will provided unmanned vehicles for those that don't want people to go along. Other scientists want to send people.

sunman42, the actual scientists who are flying on current sounding rockets strongly disagree with you. About a third of them want altitudes no RLV is going to hit any time soon (1000+ km) but the other two thirds want the responsiveness (fly on demand), repeatability (fly immediately after), low integration costs (fly whatever you want), and the low price (fly 10 to 20 times for the same amount of funding).

And yes, these vehicles do exist in forms that are servicing scientists, technology development, and STEM education (CRuSR's three main focus areas) NOW. And several more are slated to come on line during the first few months of FY 2011.

This bill says commercial has to be as good as Orion. Orion doesn't have an escape system for reentry. Congress did not require one for Shuttle and 7 people were killed. Safety comes first? Commercial are talking about a Gemini capsule. It had ejection seats. If they use clam shell seats like the XB-70 and they are reentry capable,then they will be better than Orion. I like the Space Plane. Jet engines from the ground,drop the engines and LOX tanks, or mother ship.The Shuttle 747 has launched Enterprise at 75 tons. One Merlin at 125,000lb thrust ought to work. Reenter using aero braking to gradually come down.Several orbits would be required. No fiery reentry.One of the many surplus fighters might be modified for use. Such as replacing wing leading edges with steel.Many airplane modifiers could do this work.Admit it,everyone has wanted to try this.If NASA does not come out with proof this does not work,somebody is going to try it and get hurt. A lot of wishful thinking.

The existing NASA sounding rocket launch provider, a commercial contractor known as NSROC (NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contractor), is based at Wallops Flight Facility and overseen by NASA's Sounding Rocket Project Office. The missions flown by NSROC are peer reviewed programs submitted by entrepreneurial principal investigators seeking to enable new science using new technology and training a technically literate workforce to support it. The science, technologies and workforce developed on these research rockets provide critical support to the wider NASA strategic enterprise as the first step to proof of technical readiness for a new science thrust.

Please do not lose sight of the fact that much of the research rocket work is carried out on vehicles that have apogees of ~300 km, which yields about 400 seconds of observation above 100 km. The reusable launch providers are targeting rides to only 100 km. I would much prefer that we spend the extra $14M on seeking sustained low cost access to orbital space in the 100 -- 300 km region. By developing a true orbital testbed -- the second step to proof of technical readiness, we can increase orbital heritage and lower development cost and risk for future missions that are currently too-expensive-to-launch (but we try anyway). It would be money well spent. There is a plan -- http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~stephan/asrat/ASRATppprfifinal.pdf

Hmmm. From the CRuSR page linked in the Keith Cowing post above, it looks like it's not only piloted vehicles being considered, but also unpiloted reusable vehicles. Seems reasonable to me that, in the long term, these may be cheaper than expendable sounding rockets.
But I agree that without payload accomodations specified yet, it's a bit premature to budget millions of dollars on buying as-yet undefined services. So a FY-11 budget of a million dollars to start to set the parameters and understand what payloads make sense to fly on what vehicles sounds sensible to me.

A flight on a suborbital RLV is $100-$200K. How much is a sounding rocket launch?

A couple of thoughts:

A flight on a suborbital RLV is $100-200k. A ride on a sounding rocket could range from $250k(ish, not sure of lowest priced option) to upwards of $2.5M. Sounding rockets honestly provide access to higher altitudes for more payload mass than current or initial suborbital RLVs. They're (largely) different markets for the time being.

Additionally, the CRuSR program is not intending to buy any joyrides for scientists for the time being. From what I've heard, and I've been in tune with the conversation, CRuSR officials don't intend to pay for any people to ride on board any rockets until the rockets are proven safe and the science payload needs to be human tended.

Don't forget that not all of the folks vying for CRuSR money are flying manned craft. In fact, the only few people actually flying now and that'd actually benefit from FY11 money are not flying people. They can fly many experiments aimed at gaining insight into some very crucial issues. Upper atmospheric measurements could help gain insight into weather prediction or global trends. Research on materials or cellular growth in microgravity, not to mention pharmaceuticals could provide low-cost insight or proof of concept for extensive research on orbit at the ISS. Cryogenic fluid management in microgravity or fluid acquisition in weightlessness could have a profound impact on fuel depots and other technologies needed to facilitate on-orbit assembly and a move past LEO.

CRuSR matters. It's a small amount of money that could help impact technology development in many areas. Yes, I might benefit from the program, but that doesn't make it a bad program.

Um, these vehicles don't exist? Can we get a 2nd opinion? Yes, SS2 isn't operational, but that certainlny exists.

And more importantly, there is Xoie from Masten, and the vehicle that Armadillo is flying - both of those are already operation

And if you figure it'll take 1-2 years to get experiments ready for flight, this isn't unreasonable.

Before this language was inserted in the draft, NASA review panels could decide whether to accept a proposal to use a CRuSR launch for a given payload. With this language, the panel is prevented from selecting it, by law, without any cost or risk assessment.

Congress is sticking their noses into a very low-level NASA decision process.

A NSROC science sounding rocket launch costs about $1 to 2.5 million for the first launch on a bigger vehicle. Costs are significantly lower for re-flights, probably under $500k if no major changes are required. That gets you up to around 400km on a Black Brant 9. Cheaper rockets using only retired military motors (Black Brant is commercial) can get you up to around 150 km, and are around $500k for a first flight. It depends where you fly from, as a lot of the different sounding rocket ranges have fees and some are on the order of $150k plus extra required systems. Those prices include everything(design, analysis, skins, structures, payload support systems, telemetry, ACS, recovery, and motor costs).

Most missions take about a year from grant award to post-flight report, but we've been able to pull a few off in under 6 months. We do payloads up to around 1200 lbs.

I'm all for CRuSR. Some of these experiments built by the scientists are damned finicky, and it would be nice to have someone up there to whack one with a mallet or something when it starts misbehaving in flight :P