Armchair engineering

With the successful landing of Chang'e 3, the attention of the world's spaceflight enthusiasts and experts alike once again turns towards the moon. These things spawn up discussions about why we should go to the moon, whether there is economical benefit to it, or about the "new space race", as well as the usual complaining about NASA's lack of productivity or that those damn commies is taking muh spaceflight. And to be honest, when these things happen, I can't help but feel a slight annoyance. Many of these things are based upon false premises, or people who live in the 1960's, or general ignorance of spaceflight that results in xenophobia, anti-americanism, armchair experts (I'm being a little bit of a hypocrite here, I'll admit that) schooling others like it's their job and nationalist slapfights.  Lunar resources Something I've seen so many times lately is that we can use lunar resources to pay off our debt, make fusion attainabl...

In previous blogs of mine, I wrote about how I wish NASA would stick with Block 1 instead of continuing development of SLS after EM-1. The reasons for this are simple; development is expensive. If SLS Block 1 was to be NASA's new main launcher, it would save billions in development cost, while at the same time giving a very capable 90 ton launch vehicle that can take whatever we throw at it. However, I changed my mind somewhat. I have given the option of going straight toward Block 2 as our main exploration launcher, instead of sticking with Block 1 or 1A, a chance in my mind. There are many advantages to doing this, and I'll explain myself here. Advantages of Block 2 #1: Block 2 doesn't have to be so expensive to develop. The current path baselined by NASA is expensive, but it doesn't have to be. The current one has the following order of upgrades: 1. Develop new boosters for SLS, either advanced solid or liquid; increases payload to >105 tons.j 2. Dev...

NASA's current focus is exploration, and for exploration of anything, you will need some kind of infrastructure, whether the goal is the moon, asteroids, or Mars. NASA is currently working on two vehicles that are supposed to provide the foundation of all exploration architectures for the coming decades: the Space Launch System and the Orion crew vehicle. These two vehicles are very useful for building a deep-space architecture, but they aren't guaranteed a future, especially with sequestration and other political nonsense lately putting many big NASA projects in danger. And at $1 billion and $1.4 billion annual for Orion and SLS respectively, they are some of the biggest projects around. Therefore, it's always necessary to hold some backup plan around in case Congress goes nuclear on NASA's budget. Here I present an plan that might be part of such a backup plan, that could get humans to places in a more budget constrained environment.  Delta IV launch vehicle T...

Lunar exploration has always been a huge interest of mine. The moon is our closest neighbor and could teach us tremendous amounts about the history of our solar system and our planet. It could also function as a place to gather resources to explore further into the solar system. In short, there's plenty of reason to go there, but how? Many earlier plans to got there have yielded nothing but powerpoints and pretty animations. Getting there in a low-cost manner would be critical. (For info on the plan discussed, scroll to the bottom.) Constellation: How not to go there The Constellation program was initiated by NASA as part of Bush's Vision for Space Exploration policy in 2005. It had the goal to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and give America independent manned access to space by 2014 after the Shuttle's retirement in 2010. However, the way they wished to accomplish this was doomed to fail from the beginning.  The first fatal flaw of the program was the w...

Some weeks ago I wrote a blog about SLS costs. Now, it was more meant to provide a rough idea as to what SLS would cost per launch, not a full on cost analysis; the methods I used for this were obviously flawed in several ways. In this one I'll look a NASA budget availability study from 2011 (I won't do my own analysis), as well as some more things about budget that I often see confusion about. What exactly is "SLS"? This is a dumb sounding question that is actually a lot more complicated than you might think. When people talk about "SLS" they often mean the complete system, not just the rocket which is what I refer to as "SLS". The current Exploration Systems Development programs contains three different main programs: SLS, MPCV, and 21st Century Ground Systems. They all have their own costs and their own purposes, with the current budget looking like roughly $1.4 billion for SLS, $1 billion for the MPCV and about $400 million for 21st CGS, t...

In my previous blog, I wrote about canceling the Block 2 SLS because I considered it unnecessary, claiming that Block 1 should be more than enough.  Now, to be fair, Block 1 will probably not last us long enough for a serious program because the current booster casings only allow up to 10 flights. After some time, Block 1 will run out of boosters and we'll have to make new ones, which would basically turn it into Block 1A with advanced boosters. Still, I think that the initial 90 and 105 metric ton capacities of these vehicles are more than enough, and in this article I will describe a possible lunar mission using only Block 1 capabilities. Block 1 capabilities  The Block 1 payload to Low Earth Orbit is usually described as 70 metric tons. However, if you have paid close attention to the project and have an eye for rocketry, you might have noticed that this isn't true. Initially, SLS was to have four different variants: Block 0, Block 1, Block 2 and Block 3. Block 0 w...