Unaffordable and Unsustainable, NASA’s failing Earth-to-orbit Transportation Strategy Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

The Space Frontier Foundation has gotten a lot of attention from the mainstream press with their latest Whitepaper.

They advocate a more extensive support fo free enterprise and entrepreneurship in the American space program. They suggest that NASA should no longer be allowed to develop and own new launch vehicles, and that CEV and CLV development should be cancelled. They also advise that NASA rely on Altas 5 and Delta 4 rockets, and transfer more funding to the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

I cannot find the actual white paper on the SFF website. I don't know if SFF is particularly professional (certainly their gaudy website doesn't look it), but I have to agree with some of their points.

[Mariner9]

A very interesting white paper. I don't agree with a lot of it, in particular it seems to place an almost religous faith on every mention in the Presidential Commision report dealing with commercial resources for low Earth orbit access. Different people have been calling for space commercialization for decades, and the talk eventually seems to fizzle. If I were Dr Giffin I wouldn't want to put too many of my eggs in that basket either.

On the other hand, I think the white paper is dead on when it talks about the evolution of the CLV. What started out as a huge ammount of hardware inheritance has instead evolved into an entirely new vehicle from the ground up, with the exception of the solid rocket motor casings. Not the internals of the motor, which are rather critically altered with the move to the 5 segment design, just the basic shell. At this point I think serious consideration should be given to an evolved Delta IV or Atlas V design for the CLV.

I diverge from their conclusions again when it argues against the heavy lift Ares V. I just don't envision an evolved Delta or Atlas getting much past 100,000 pounds of payload to LEO (which would be double what they can manage today). And the diagrams of the uprated EELVs seem to show a lot of strap ons and maybe even extra staging to acheive this. Every time you add a component to a vehicle you are adding a lot of extra cost, and I seriously doubt the payload cost-per-pound would be all that attractive. Anyone remember what happened when the Titan II morphed into the III and into the III-E, 34D and ultimately the Titan IV? That was one heck of an expensive, and complicated, beast.


Plus, 100K payload is somewhat below what I think would be considered Heavy-Lift.

What this leaves you with is a requirement for all deep space missions to have a large number of assembly flights, with boosters whose cost efficiency is in considerable doubt.

No thanks, I think I'd rather see us invest in some sort of heavy lift like the Ares V.

Ultimately I think Dr Griffin's vision will have to be modified somewhat, but unlike all of the other shuttle follow-on attempts in the last 25 years, I think his will suceed. And even if all we get is Apollo on steroids, 50 years later, at least we got something.