"Dead Rocket Walking"--good one! You can almost see the cartoon of SLS
being led, nosecone hanging low, to the "cancellation chamber."
It sure seems that heavy-lift customers will be beating a path to Elon's
door and he'll have plenty of "OPM" to develop BFR (barring some unforeseen
catastrophe).
On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 2:01 PM, Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
On 2/6/2018 5:18 PM, Kenning Lundermann wrote:
The Falcon Heavy launch was certainly very impressive, but I wonder
whether FH itself will ever do much of note. SpaceX itself has dropped its
own plans for the rocket (Dragons to Mars, circular flights with
passengers). If certified, FH could get payloads now flying on Delta 4
Heavy, but that's about one a year. It might get some planetary probes too
demanding for F9 but, again, that's not a lot.
We have heard noises from VP Pence's entourage about a role for FH, which
I presume involves commercial resupply of the so-called Deep Space Gateway.
But aside from that, which may well never happen, is there much concrete
interest in FH among those with the ability to put there money where their
mouths are?
Some points here.
(Points that I should write about more deliberately elsewhere, if life
ever lets up long enough - but I'm currently recovering slowly from h3n2
induced pneumonia, and who knows what's next. So here's the hasty version.)
- Elon is a master of building useful things with Other People's Money,
OPM. Developing BFR will require a *lot* of OPM. My read of the tea
leaves is that Elon does not yet have the requisite amount of OPM committed.
Hence the recent PR push that BFR is a space transport *and* a fast
point-to-point carrier - aimed directly at the Shanghai-in-an-hour desires
of the OP's with that kind of M.
Hence also SpaceX soft-pedalling of any ongoing FH role in their
deep-space plans, lest it be seen as "good enough" to BFR's "better".
- Cheop's Law: All complex projects will take longer and cost more than
planned. BFR won't be the exception, as very much borne out by aerospace
industry experience in general as well as SpaceX's announced versus
achieved schedules on their successes to date.
So, even once BFR is funded, Falcon Heavy will be The Rocket for quite a
few more years than expected.
And paralleling that on the government side...
- With Falcon Heavy flying, SLS is Dead Rocket Walking. 64 metric ton FH
payloads at monthly cadence for maybe $150 million (my WAG at a NASA
paperwork-plus FH price) versus 70 metric tons on SLS for $1-2 billion with
at-best 6-month and more likely 1-year launch cadence? Puh-lease.
But, you say, RSN we'll have 140-ton SLS? Anything a big new high-energy
upper stage can do for SLS, it can do for FH - likely also years faster and
10x cheaper.
And apropos the moribund state of independent US rocket propulsion
providers (nobody in their right mind wants to count on Aerojet for timely
affordable essential propulsion) the US government could likely persuade
Blue Origin to provide BE-3U engines for a near-term FH U/S. (Or, perhaps
the whole high-energy upper stage? Not that much of a stretch from the
already-flying New Shepard.)
- Fiscally, NASA can have SLS, or it can have a serious beyond-LEO
Exploration program. Pick one.
NASA has $10G/year for Human Exploration for the foreseeable future.
Currently $4G of that for JSC/Station, $4G of that for MSFC/SLS, $2G for
everything else.
It's widely acknowledged that doing anything new and useful beyond LEO
requires freeing up one of those two $4G NASA budget lines. Alabama's
delegation may be the 500-lb gorilla in the cage, but Texas's weighs in at
800. Station is flying with ongoing national and international
constituencies. SLS if it ever does eventually fly may well do so sideways
into downtown Orlando - embarrassing, very (SERIOUS management problems
down there) - and will regardless cost an embarrassing number of billions
per flight with overhead.
Meanwhile, missile defense is an obvious Government growth area, and
Alabama is already a center of that work. Makings of a Congressional
deal? Replace NASA SLS regional funding with DOD missile defense money,
figure out a halfway face-saving way to declare SLS victory, plough and
salt the SLS management-structure ground (well, realistically, reduce them
to a No Output Division where they check each other's paperwork) while
freeing up all the SLS engineering talent to move over to missile defense,
keeping the regional economy rolling and the voters happy?
Radical change is hard. But SLS is only going to get more embarrassing,
and soon, either not flying at all, or flying badly & at enormous expense.
Could be time for the politicians involved to bite the bullet, figure out
how they all save face, and cut a deal.
All of which may or may not be among the directions VP Pence and the Space
Council are considering for renewed US deep space exploration. But it
should be.
<end long overdue policy vent>
Henry Vanderbilt
hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx