December 21, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- ULA CEO Tory Bruno on reusing Vulcan 1st stage engines: “Built the business case on 3. Everything above that is gravy.”
Considering that SpaceX has now reused its first stages routinely more than that and as much as 15 times, my sense from Bruno here is that ULA continues to seem very doubtful about reuseability.
- Ground-based image of the Apollo 8 engine burn — dubbed the Trans Lunar Injection or TLI — that on December 21, 1968 took it out of Earth orbit and headed to the Moon
As I wrote in Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: “Unlike past space missions, these astronauts would actually be going somewhere.”
Sadly, since Apollo no humans have gone anywhere. Like the ancient mariners afraid to fall off the edge of the Earth, we have hugged the coast for the past half century, merely going around and around the Earth. Is it not time to finally travel to distant worlds?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- ULA CEO Tory Bruno on reusing Vulcan 1st stage engines: “Built the business case on 3. Everything above that is gravy.”
Considering that SpaceX has now reused its first stages routinely more than that and as much as 15 times, my sense from Bruno here is that ULA continues to seem very doubtful about reuseability.
- Ground-based image of the Apollo 8 engine burn — dubbed the Trans Lunar Injection or TLI — that on December 21, 1968 took it out of Earth orbit and headed to the Moon
As I wrote in Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: “Unlike past space missions, these astronauts would actually be going somewhere.”
Sadly, since Apollo no humans have gone anywhere. Like the ancient mariners afraid to fall off the edge of the Earth, we have hugged the coast for the past half century, merely going around and around the Earth. Is it not time to finally travel to distant worlds?
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Orion will do exactly-if people will quit trying to kill its ride. Elon spent SLS league money on Twitter-how does that help spaceflight? MSFC got our Apollo mojo back. Real space advocates are happy NASA is better funded with sliming engineering as “pork.”
America will return to Luna despite libertarians-not because of them.
Institutions survive any one individual and his caprices.
Jeff Wright Asked: “Elon spent SLS league money on Twitter-how does that help spaceflight?”
Why does everything that Musk owns, does, or says have to help spaceflight? Isn’t he allowed a life outside of SpaceX?
“MSFC got our Apollo mojo back.”
And we lament it, because we should be advancing beyond Apollo. Of course, JPL had better mojo for the past half century, without interruption.
“Real space advocates are happy NASA is better funded”
However, we real space advocates are ecstatic that commercial space is even better funded:
’There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by commercial space marketplace] than there is inside of NASA.’ — paraphrased from an interview with NASA Administrator Bridenstine on the Ben Shapiro radio show on Monday 3 August 2020.
“America will return to Luna despite libertarians-not because of them.”
Maybe, but Americans are on their way to Mars because of free market capitalism, despite big government and not because our it. Three decades ago, NASA (specifically MSFC) killed its dream of landing man on Mars, but We the People — not NASA and not government — have a plan and funding to make it happen.
No-MSFC’s Saturns would have HAD us on Mars decades ago, had they not been axed in favor of of a re-usable craft with big payload bays and high flight rates…and here we are again with Starship promises. Fool me once.. let Elon have LEO and sat-launch…but I’ll support the proven.
Saturns would have HAD us on Mars decades ago, had they not been axed in favor of of a re-usable craft with big payload bays and high flight rates…and here we are again with Starship promises.
That wasn’t Elon Musk’s fault. He wasn’t even born when that decision was made.
Saturn V was terminated because no one in Washington supported continued use of them – not least because they were extremely expensive to build and operate.
Not to mention that the Saturn 5 was extremely dangerous with several near misses. The people responsible knew that it was a crap shoot on every mission and only a matter of time before losing a crew.
What is “SLS league money”?
What does Elon Musk have to do with SLS funding?
Is Elon Musk responsible for every dang thing that people don’t like?
Maybe your anger and disappointment should be aimed at bazillionaires who’ve never done anything for spaceflight. Like Bill Gates. But instead you’d rather fume at the guy who’s done the most.
Jeff Wright,
You wrote: “MSFC’s Saturns would have HAD us on Mars decades ago, …but I’ll support the proven.”
Except that neither the Saturn nor the SLS has been proven to be able to get man to Mars. This is mere speculation on your part. What has been proven is that Congress was not willing to spend much money on getting man into space at all. Just to get the Space Shuttle required securing Air Force support at great cost to the overall mission that NASA wanted to accomplish.
The Saturns were designed to get man to the Moon at a time when cost was not an object. It became an object as soon as the mission was completed. When we let government be in charge, all we get is what government wants. Now that we are in charge, we are building rockets to do what we want at price we can afford at a cadence in which things can get done.
When SLS was first announced, it sounded like we could get 70 tons and eventually 130 tons into orbit and that all our probes, satellites, landers, and rovers could have the weight budgets to have more instruments and cameras aboard and the power available to use them. However, when we learned the price tag and the launch rate, we realized that few people would be able to use SLS.
What has been proven is that the Falcons and the Electron reduced the price of getting into space and increased the cadence so that more people can afford it and they don’t have to wait long to do it. Other launch providers have been forced to find efficiencies in their launches in order to reduce their prices so that they can compete. Space has opened up to companies and countries that previously could not afford to explore or use it.
We can be fairly sure that Starship will be able to get similar masses to orbit as SLS does, for a lower cost and a higher cadence, even if the Starship fails to reenter successfully. If it succeeds and is reusable, the price will be even lower and the cadence even higher. Either way, space will open up to even more people, companies, countries, and universities. The Saturn, the Shuttle, and SLS failed on that front.
Jeff, if Marshall Space Flight Center wants to be competitive then they should concentrate on advancing the state of the art, not clawing their way back to forty-year-old technology to do a worse job at performing fifty-year-old methods. Why do we even have a NASA if they are not going to bother advancing the state of the art?
We all loved NASA when they were at the technological forefront and pushing the envelope, but these days they — and you — are stuck in the past. Either NASA should be the technology leader or it should revert back to NACA’s task of supporting American companies so that they can once again be the technology leaders. This is what is meant by “make America great again.” Right now America’s aerospace technology leaders are a guy from South Africa and a guy from New Zealand.
Not to mention that the Saturn 5 was extremely dangerous with several near misses. The people responsible knew that it was a crap shoot on every mission and only a matter of time before losing a crew.
I don’t know that I would go so far as to call it “extremely dangerous.” It certainly would not be deemed sufficiently safe to put crew on TODAY, I grant you. NASA had a 1965 risk assessment of Apollo which found that, based upon the current plans and technology, the probability of mission success [LOM] for each flight was only around 73 percent, while rated per-mission crew safety [LOC] sat at 96 percent. Which is basically a 1 in 25 LOC. This was almost certainly underestimating the risks in certain respects, especially on earlier missions. [For comparison, Commercial Crew must meet a minimum PRA standard of a 1 in 270 loss of crew.]
And you’re right that almost every Apollo mission had some close shave. We tend to forget that now.
But that said, there was more than a little nervousness about it not just in Richard Nixon’s head, but also among senior NASA management at the time. Bob Gilruth in particular was adamant about it: He was ready to terminate the lunar missions after Apollo 11 had achieved Kennedy’s goal. “I put up my back and said, ‘We must stop,’” Gilruth said. “There are so many chances for us losing a crew. We just know that we’re going to do that if we keep going.”
High cost was a big reason Apollo was killed. But the safety concerns were a bigger factor than a lot of people realize.
Richard M: In writing Genesis, I spoke to numerous people at NASA in the 1960s. At least for Apollo 8, they all consistently rated the chances of mission success as 50-50, not 73%.
Richard M wrote: “But the safety concerns were a bigger factor than a lot of people realize.”
This would certainly explain why it took over 30 years for a president to suggest that we send anyone out of low Earth orbit. We may be the land of the brave, but we do not have a brave government. I keep saying it, but it is true and a very important concept: when we let government be in charge, all we get is what government wants, but when We the People are in charge, we get what we want.
Ha! It doesn’t even have to be Americans that are brave. Yusaku Maezawa, from Japan, created the dearMoon project before Starship was proved to be safe. He had how many volunteers? A million or so? And even as the ten are selected, Starship still has yet to be proven safe. There are some brave souls out there.
Hello Bob,
Interesting!
But maybe that wouldn’t surprise me. Like I said, I think the risks were higher on those first Apollo missions, when they were still working out the bugs – and none more dangerous and risky than Apollo 8. Such a ballsy decision by NASA. (You could not possibly imagine them doing that today.)
Didn’t Frank Borman say privately at the time that he only gave the mission a 1 in 3 chance of success?
Richard M: When I interviewed Borman, he never said that. He agreed with NASA’s risk assessment of 50-50.