Save the American Space Program?!

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Delta IV Heavy......It averages between 140 and 170 million a launch.....so just a little shy of a 1/4 of a billion. It's capable of putting almost 29,000 pounds of payload into GTO, more then any other Heavy Lift Vehicle at the moment. We've built stuff up there without the shuttle before. What the Shuttle was best at, was small satellites, and Hubble. Especially Hubble. So is Delta a replacement, not as it is no, but then there was a point not long back with the Delta CEV (which evolved for the Constellation stuff into the Orion crew vessel) program that showed it could be perfectly suitable for such. Paperworks still out there for manned Delta stuff, so it could be done, and like Constellation, done mostly with off the shelf existing material. We've still got the Atlas V and the Titan IV as well. Still since we need a Bus to ferry people around LEO, build a new shuttle. That's what you do when the car is finally falling apart, you go get a new car.

 

While Not happy with the Constellation Project on one hand, on another, I really liked what I saw. One Ares V launch, drops the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope into the L2 point. One shot. Poof there it is. It used a lot of Off the Shelf Tech, and it's versatility with the family design (a smart way) allowed for fine tuning cost effective launches and payloads. If you were going to go Backwards to go forwards....Constellation was a good way to do it, based on it's numbers......Oh...Cost of an Average Shuttle Mission is 450 Million.....almost half a Billion, which means you launch 2.65 Delta IV's for the cost of one Shuttle Launch. Shuttle's not some fancy robot that goes up by itself and builds everything, People do that, and people did it before they had a Bus in the shape of an over weight glider to float around in.

 

~Rex

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Just to disagree with everyone while I'm digesting dinner (I had perogies!), I think that there's a pretty pressing case for people in space. Industry.

And by that I don't mean fantasies of manufacturing drugs or solar power satellites. Think about it. It costs almost $200 million to launch a satellite, they last 20 years or so, and then we deorbit them so they won't take up valuable orbitals.

That's no way to run a railway. When it costs that much to get something up there, it just makes sense to salvage and reuse it. We need a workshop up there, and some tugs.

That's a next step that flows logically and economically from experimental station habitats.

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Considering what those things are made of, and extrapolating from my own "salvage" and production background from my youth, (not to mention the old GREAT TV show Salvage 1), there's some serious money up there, floating around, waiting to be ground up and cashed in. So Workshop and Tugs. All for it, though the tug would look more like a big butterfly net methinks.

 

~Rex

[Cancer]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

I'm not sure it would be worth it. There's lots of pieces, yes, but not a lot of mass, and scrap material is sold by the pound. I'll see if I can find a list of launches of things and see what the total mass is. That'll give you a (maximum possible) total amount of collectable material and for a given cost of launch and operation of a collector we can see what the price of scrap has to be to recoup the cost.

 

EDIT: OK, I found some numbers for launches of stuff still in orbit as of last October. Half the things listed don't have a dry mass value in the list, but if I take the average of those that do and apply that average to the others, then very very crudely there's about a thousand tons of stuff up there. That seems small so perhaps those things without mass values listed are big classified things (which would make sense). (For reference, the Hubble spacecraft is 11.1 metric tons.) Still, it's probably not low by as much as a factor of 100; I could guess at upper mass limits from the launcher data in the file I found. And even a hundred thousand tons of scrap still isn't all that much material.

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Well regardless of cost effectiveness eventually a big component of a real space program is going to be something along the lines of a commercial cleaning service.

 

~Rex

[Cancer]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Yeah, that's going to become an essential function, I suspect. Salvage bounty's only going to recover a drop in the cost bucket, though.

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Well some of it will recoup but a lot of it will be a wash or worse, regardless, much like any industry in the beginning, it's gonna have to be done. Which means you need something and someone to do it. It wasn't long back when there wasn't much of a point to recycling a computer for example, but now, that kind of salvage is big money. It had to gimp along though until it got moving.

 

~Rex

[megaplayboy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

I could see reorienting the space program around the idea of

1) putting stuff into GEO

2) building a reusable medium-lift manned vehicle capable of achieving GEO

3) building a space station with included Hubble replacement telescope into said GEO

4) making said space station capable of limited manufacturing, fuel storage and launch capability

5) planning manned missions beyond GEO based on achieving #4--if you could launch a manned HLLV from GEO, that'd be a heckuva lot easier to get to Mars in a meaningful way than doing it from KSC.

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Everything you just listed, was easily doable under Constellation, and still doable with a couple of extra steps, With all the Delta IV and related stuff. Give it to the right people to run it and they could pull it off with less money as well.

 

~Rex

[Escafarc]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Give it to the right people to run it .

 

~Rex

 

That's the rub though isn't it? Getting the "Powers That Be" to take the politics out of the equasion and use common sense.

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

If common sense were common.....*sigh* State of things now makes me cringe and hide in my Fortress of Solitude with a copy of A Step Farther Out, lamenting the way things could have been with stuff from 40 freaking years ago......

 

~Rex...

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

I'm not sure it would be worth it. There's lots of pieces, yes, but not a lot of mass, and scrap material is sold by the pound. I'll see if I can find a list of launches of things and see what the total mass is. That'll give you a (maximum possible) total amount of collectable material and for a given cost of launch and operation of a collector we can see what the price of scrap has to be to recoup the cost.

 

EDIT: OK, I found some numbers for launches of stuff still in orbit as of last October. Half the things listed don't have a dry mass value in the list, but if I take the average of those that do and apply that average to the others, then very very crudely there's about a thousand tons of stuff up there. That seems small so perhaps those things without mass values listed are big classified things (which would make sense). (For reference, the Hubble spacecraft is 11.1 metric tons.) Still, it's probably not low by as much as a factor of 100; I could guess at upper mass limits from the launcher data in the file I found. And even a hundred thousand tons of scrap still isn't all that much material.

 

Yes, but

i) We're not going to do this for, say, 20 years. There will be a great deal more to salvage by that time.

ii) Build one satellite in orbit from salvage and you have gross earnings right there of $180 million. And it doesn't have to turn a profit if NASA can piggyback on its operations. Do it 80 times (which is a lot), and you've covered NASA's current budget. The endgame of the space-industrial revolution has always been clear: a comprehensive industrial infrastructure in space capable of producing, say, solar power satellites. It's the baby steps along the way that have seemed less clear. This gives us a clear direction by tieing crewed space travel to aspects of space that already make money.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

You should also consider that the stuff you collect in orbit . . . is already in orbit. Add the price per pound of the material to the price per pound to get stuff into orbit, and it looks a lot better.

[McCoy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

You should also consider that the stuff you collect in orbit . . . is already in orbit. Add the price per pound of the material to the price per pound to get stuff into orbit' date=' and it looks a lot better.[/quote']

• Collect the space junk
  
• Haul it to a stable orbit
  
• Use that as raw materials to build new satellites to order
  
• Place then in appropriate orbits
  

Sounds like a plan. One idea I'd like to see explored for the "tug" is a magnetic sail. Probe uses electricity generated by solar panels to form its own magnetic field, which can interact with Earth's magnetic field to shift it into higher or lower orbits without having to use reaction mass. Delta-v probably would not be very high, but that's OK, you've got time.

 

Start with rendezvousing with the space junk and hauling it to a higher orbit. When you've got a fairly serious pile of stuff, send up a ground-controlled rapid prototyping system, something than can be used to make one-off items. Build your second tug as a demonstration of principle, then start taking orders.

[Markdoc]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

You should also consider that the stuff you collect in orbit . . . is already in orbit. Add the price per pound of the material to the price per pound to get stuff into orbit' date=' and it looks a lot better.[/quote']

 

I think that is what he is basing his analysis on. The actual value of the junk itself is minimal. Electronic scrap comes in different categories and sells for different prices, but it's generally around 200-800 USD/ton. If Cancer's figures are right, the salvageable scrap in orbit is worth about 0.1-0.4% of the cost of getting up there to salvage it. And that doesn't even count the cost of getting down. You're going to need to find some way of covering the other 99.6% of your costs and then make a profit.

 

That's always been the problem with getting commercial entities into space: there's no argument from me about the value of space expansion: GPS, improved computing,weather forecasting, satellite surveillance for many purposes - lots of things that spun out of the program have made the cost back many times over. But those are mostly second level costs: sure, Google (just to take one example) generates a lot of money off technology originally developed for the space program, but they don't see themselves as a space-oriented business. It's why those benefits have spun out of a government program, instead of commercial development: the government makes tax revenue regardless of who develops the tech, so it's in their interest to stimulate new development.

 

In addition, humans have problems dealing with space, because it's big. Really really, big. You think it's along way down to the corner store, but that's just nothing compared to space ..... etc etc. Gathering a thousand tons of scrap and building new stuff out of it sounds great ... until you realize that 1000 tons is spread out over an area equivalent to 64 earth-sized planets. It'd be like starting a scrap business based on the concept of collecting the waste dropped by ecotourists in the Sahara. You're going to need a entirely new class of tech - a spacecraft that can maneuver for extended periods of time in LEO - to make it even remotely viable.

 

cheers, Mark

[McCoy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

You're going to need a entirely new class of tech - a spacecraft that can maneuver for extended periods of time in LEO - to make it even remotely viable.

Which is why I was suggesting a tug with a magnetic sail.

[Markdoc]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Which is why I was suggesting a tug with a magnetic sail.

 

Yeah, I'm not up enough on the tech to be able to say how practical or how close that tech is: maybe some of the astro people can inform me.

 

cheers, Mark

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Heh, we need to set more Bait out here for Nyrath to show up and pitch in, but the butterfly net thing is probably not feasible. A lot of this stuff is small. Some of the other solutions make sense though. A Laser, can be used to burn it up, either though direct energy transference, though for the most part the Laser would either shove it into a higher orbit where the junk eventually spreads out into so much area it's basically a non issue, or, shoves it into a lower orbit, where it eventually spirals in and burns up. There is also the Aerogel, where we basically stick a giant booger of goopy sticky stuff out there and when enough stuff slams into it and gets stuck, we push it down and it burns up. One of the other simple Ideas, is to set up all our orbital junk, in protective orbit junkyards and even just slap it on the outside of existing structure to act as a cheap "Junk Shield"......Sometimes simple is good (And yes, I just said use a frozen space turd as an ablative shield against incoming floating space turds.).....

 

As for the value. Parts of it would be very valuable. Other parts, not so much. Either way the folks that can clear the most space, are going to have the most control over that space. There's a bunch of legal issues as well. We can pretty much track (and do) every piece of space junk, down to about 3 inches or so. After that it gets iffy. Let's say Sputnik comes screaming around the world for example, and is going to smash into that lame excuse for a space station, and we have a way to stop it, but it would either drop Sputty down into the Atlantic, or boot his little ball self out into the Kuiper Belt like a world cup Soccer goal. If the Russians say, "NYET! Capitalist Pigs to Not touch the Sputnik!", we can't lay a finger on it, because of the incredibly stupid and badly written "Space Laws!"

 

It's still not going to do us much good though, if we can't get up there to do it. One of the things I liked about the Constellation set up was that while it wasn't Project Orion, it Could, Haul up a BUNCH of stuff all at once, and a serious scale, and a lot of what made up the Delivery system itself, Could be used as source material, and Orbital Barrier set ups, if you didn't want to drop it off in stages and burn it up. When you are looking at living in an area, where lots of little things can hit you, the best thing you can do, and the easiest, is to hide behind something bigger, that gets hit instead. Works for the rest of the Solar System, would work for us as well. When said big things get beat up, you de-orbit them, and launch up, or better yet, build a new one. Get to the Moon and that becomes even easier. Need a space Shield, The Moon railguns you up a bunch of rocks. Net 'em, stick them in the Orbit you want. Build breakable thing behind said rocks, so the rocks protect you from all the paint flecks and discarded space turds.

 

Of course we would need to be on the Moon for that. Can't get to the Moon because Constellation got flushed by the Space Haters, and the Corporations won't go to the moon, because of the stupid laws put in place by the Space Haters.

 

~Rex

[IndianaJoe3]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Can't get to the Moon because Constellation got flushed by the Space Haters' date=' and the Corporations won't go to the moon, because of the stupid laws put in place by the Space Haters.[/quote']

 

If there was money to be made, the laws would be changed (or ignored). The real reason we don't have lunar colonies is that nobody has figured out how to make money doing so. No bucks, no Buck Rogers (to steal a phrase).

[RexMundi]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

If the first Law is the one that says, "You May Not Own This", and the Second Law is the "You may not Make your Own Way to get there that violates this other book of Laws". You never get, to the Make Money part. Wasn't to long back, when folks felt trying to make that there flying machine, was complete lunacy. You'll never make Money, with Aircraft. Then, POOF.....you get the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line.

 

~Rex

[Escafarc]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

you get the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line.

 

~Rex

 

Replica of Benoist Flying Boat used by World's First Commercial Passenger Airline, crossing Tampa Bay one passenger per flight

(**Photo taken at St. Petersburg/Clearwater International Airport)

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

Rex, you do know that the Wrights built aircraft to make money, right? And they did?

[Old Man]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

I was doing research on the F-35 and accidentally came across this awesome analysis of cost overruns and scheduling for large projects, especially as it pertains to NASA. To sum up: Large projects nearly always go over budget and schedule; have been since the late 1800s; organizations are insufficiently motivated to fix it; people are psychologically predisposed to underestimate costs.

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14857058/NASAs-Joint-CostSchedule-Paradox-A-History-of-Denial-Final-41609

[Markdoc]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

If the first Law is the one that says' date=' "You May Not Own This", and the Second Law is the "You may not Make your Own Way to get there that violates this other book of Laws". You never get, to the Make Money part[/quote']

 

If the laws said that, you might have a point. They don't. Here they are. It is specifically noted that non-state actors (ie: private enterprise) are permitted to indulge in space commerce if they feel so inclined. All this "it ain't happening because of the space haters" is a fantasy. It ain't happening, because no-one has figured out how to make money. The suggestions posted here - "Let's spend a half billion to a billion dollars to collect 200 thousand dollars of space trash" are a perfect example of why nothing is happening. Companies are perfectly happy to spend hundreds of millions putting satellites up - because they have worked out to make money off that. If they could work out a way to make money off the moon, they'd be all over it.

 

I'm hoping NASA - and the other space agencies - can carry space exploration forward until we reach the point where they do find ways to make money outside LEO.

 

cheers, Mark

[Xavier Onassiss]

Re: Save the American Space Program?!

 

I wonder how much a 'souvenir' from Tranquility Base would fetch on eBay?