Space Architecture

Use Multi-Payload Adapters to reduce launch costs

2008-11-27T11:10:00.002-06:00

For more than a year, I have been fixated on one question: why does it cost so much to get into space?

A previous blog entry discussed trends in launch costs. Namely, that “Steven Buckley noted that while the capabilities of the vehicles have grown—the Minotaur 4, derived from the Peacekeeper ICBM, has nearly four times the payload capability of a Pegasus XL—the vehicles have all had 'flyaway' costs of about $20 million a launch” [from “Reducing launch costs: a lower limit?” by Jeff Foust].

Steven Buckley also co-wrote a paper with Tim D. Luddeke and Horst D.E. Knorreck in 2003 titled “Low-Cost, Flexible Spacelift for Research and Development Satellite Using Peacekeeper ICBM Derived Space Launch Vehicle”. In the abstract, they say,

Over 40 years ago, the federal government decided it was prudent to store decommissioned ICBMs for possible future use. National Space Transportation Policy allows for the use of these assets as space launch vehicles on a case-by-case basis and under specified terms. The Air Force's Rocket System Launch Program (RSLP) is chartered to store and manage the reutilization of surplus Intercontinental Ballistic Missions (ICBMs)...

RSLP and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate are currently developing a Peacekeeper Space Launch Vehicle (PKSLV) Multi Payload Adapter (MPA), designed to allow several payloads to be launched in a variety of configurations to maximize our ability to meet unique customer requirements. More importantly, this multi-payload configuration also allows customers to cost share space access thus reducing their overall program cost.

Using the MPA, the PKSLV can lift eight 300lbm [sic] satellites into a two-year polar orbit for approximately $20M or $2.5M per satellite. This equates to a pound to orbit cost of $8,300/lb.

The principle at work here is the same as in any other transport vehicle: the more people or stuff you fit into the vehicle, the lower the cost of moving those people or stuff per unit of mass, distance, or energy. Economy of scale.

The Space Elevator, and Nanotechnology

2008-09-24T11:17:00.007-05:00

Slashdot had an article from the Times Online UK about the Japanese Space Elevator Association, and their attempt to make the space elevator a reality. The quoted price for such an elevator is one trillion yen, which is about $9.4 billion. To put that in contemporary perspective, the Bush Administration has proposed a $700 billion plan to bail out various Wall Street firms. The price for the space elevator is premature, and most likely much lower than what the actual cost will be. I won't even touch the Wall Street issue.

The reason, that the price for the space elevator is premature, is because the material necessary for the cable does not yet exist. A great deal of this material will be needed, and is the critical component of the space elevator. Any price tag at this point is meaningless.

The most commonly looked-at material for the cable is carbon nanotubes. I wrote about nanotechnology in general for my Master's Thesis, and trying to summarize the current state requires more than a typical blog post.

Let us take one thing at a time, starting with the Slashdot commentary. Some of the best reader comments are more informative than the articles to which they are responding.

Poster "Rei" says, "The problem is that even the *simplest* form is way beyond what we can produce in the present day, and you're wanting to do a form that's far harder.

"In a space elevator, the tether has to be long. Very, very, very long. So much that even if you could build a cable with the density of graphite and a tensile strength of 100GPa, it'd still have to taper severalfold as it reaches toward the earth. With the taper requirement, pulleys are simply right out (can't have the pulley's cable change shape as it goes, now can you?), as is *anything* that can increase the weight of the fiber. You need elevator "climbers", powered by beamed power transmission.

"The problem remains the cable. 100GPa with the density of graphite is just so far beyond anything that we can achieve today it's really just a sci-fi concept that people like to dream about. The last I checked, the strongest *individual single-walled carbon nanotubes* that people had directly measured the strength of broke at just over 60GPa. This is for single tubes, let alone bundles of tubes, let alone a bulk fiber, let alone an entire tapered cable. Tubes theoretically can be stronger, but I haven't seen any measurements confirming such extreme theoretical strengths. The strongest SWNT bulk fiber I've read about was planar sheets that were about 10GPa.

"Yes, you can build a space elevator with a tensile strength of less than 100GPa. But your taper factor for the elevator rises *very fast* with decreasing tensile strength or increasing density, which means that its mass increases *very fast*, which rapidly puts it outside the realm of possibility. Honestly, something more like 120GPa would be much easier to build, but that's even further from what we can achieve today. I'm not even sure it's physically possible to achieve. SWNTs are pure graphene SP2 structures; how can you get stronger than that? The only thing I can think of that could help us best today's best strengths are complete perfection, every atom of the fiber all the way up, and I'm not sure that would do it". [Rei's website]

That is the problem in a nutshell. The cable must go out past Geostationary Orbit, which is about 35,800 km above the surface of the Earth. GPa is a measure of tensile strength. Tension is the critical issue here, because to keep the cable aloft, the cable needs to be pulled away from the surface of the Earth as much as Earth's gravity pulls it down.

This 2001 paper describes the tensile strength of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as ranging from 0.14 - 0.177 TPa. If you know metric, T is for Tera, which is 1,000 times greater than G (Giga). However, those numbers are theoretical, as the research team in the paper notes, testing the CNTs is quite difficult, due to their very small size. A more recent 2003 paper shows that strength for both single-wall CNTs and multi-walled CNTs to range from 40 - 50 GPa, far below the requirements for a space elevator.

So, you have two issues: strength and size. I expect strength to vary as the length of the cable grows, and is exposed to conditions different than that of a laboratory. I also expect that when someone grows a CNT to some decent length (say, 1 meter), they will take it outside and test it under ambient-environment conditions. The longest CNT is currently about 2 cm.

What is the hold-up on length and strength? According to "Carbon Nanotubes -- the Route Toward Applications" (2002), "All currently known synthesis methods for SWNTs result in major concentrations of impurities. Carbon-coated metal catalyst contaminates the nanotubes of the HiPco route, and both carbon-coated metal catalyst and, typically, ~60% forms of carbon other than nanotubes are formed in the carbon-arc route (11). These impurities are typically removed by acid treatment, which introduces other impurities, can degrade nanotube length and
perfection, and adds to nanotube cost".

What is HiPco? High-Pressure carbon-monoxide. The HiPco route appears to be one of many methods of creating carbon nanotubes, using gas-phase growth procedures.

Essentially, the length and strength problems are problems of production. The above quote from the 2002 article is but one example of the many problems one runs into when trying to produce nanotubes. The machines seem to suffer an analogous problem to that of the ones used to measure the effects of quantum mechanics. Trying to detect the motions of electrons by throwing objects the same size or bigger than the electron itself.

With nanotube production, you are producing atomic-sized creations not necessarily by throwing atoms together, but by creating chemical environments optimal for producing the chemical reactions that lead to the tubes (or fibers, plates, dots, etc). These same environments produce other compounds that you may not want, so another process is required to purify your batch, with the side effect of weakening your nanotubes.

Despite this, as one reads the literature over the years, there has been a gradual improvement. Perhaps the Japanese Space Elevator Association is banking on continued improvement. As the Times Online article mentions, there will be an international conference in November to create a timeline.

New Website

2008-05-17T13:24:00.002-05:00

Please take a look at a website that I have been putting together: Off-World Architecture. The term is borrowed from an advertisement playing in the background in the movie Blade Runner. I have been working on the HTML and CSS off-and-on, fixing mistakes, trying to maintain a clean, contemporary image.

This is a portfolio of work, after all. The intention the site is to demonstrate what I and others from the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture have done. We have the skills necessary to create an architecture for building typologies that do not yet have one.

We have a way of thinking, a systems-of-systems approach. Integrating the necessary engineering requirements into a deliverable product ("the pressurized capsule"), and including in those requirements, human factors and social-psychological concerns. This is not "architects/architecture in space", this is "architecture about/with-respect-to space". This is about making living areas in space less of a laboratory environment, and more like home.

Compromises on the Shuttle and ISS

2008-03-15T16:59:00.002-05:00

ABC News has an amusing article on the compromises that astronauts have to make while in space. Here's an excerpt:

"The astronauts don't just toss the garbage overboard. The mandate is clean your plate and drink all the coffee in your drink bag because all the trash created on orbit has to fit in a container the size of a large kitchen garbage can. That is seven astronauts' times three meals times 12 or so days. The trick is to wrap it up as small as you can when you are done eating and then compress it even more and tape it shut."

People seem to be natural accumulators -- collecting things is easier for most than sorting or disposing. Another challenge with long-duration missions, when the (next) return trip is not scheduled to occur for next few months or years, is collecting all the garbage. Chucking it out the airlock is one option, but one might suppose that recycling all the material would be cheaper and more efficient in the long term.

Those considerations would need to be balanced out with the time and resources built into creating, launching, using, and maintaining the recycling systems. Even water is not completely recycled on board ISS. Developing technologies that create self-sustaining habitats are essential to long-term space development. Which is why projects like Biosphere 2 need to keep going, and be replicated by other organizations.

Going to Mars Alone, Or, A Better Approach

2008-03-06T21:05:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, on Slashdot, there was an article by Nancy Yatkinson. She describes a proposal by Jim McLane to send someone to Mars solo, arguing that:

"'When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,' said McLane. And because of a small crew size, the spacecraft could be smaller and the need for consumables and supplies would be decreased, making the mission cheaper and less complicated".

He goes on to say that more supplies, people, and equipment would follow, though returning to Earth would not be possible. As some people responded, this idea only really makes sense if one is planning on colonizing Mars. Otherwise, this is a dramatic suicide mission, or at least a lifetime prison sentence with scientific endeavours attached.

This idea would provoke a media firestorm, a Congressional protest, and many questions from the House Committee on Science and Technology. Barring very unusual circumstances, NASA is not likely to do this. I would doubt that private space firms would do this, out of liability and shareholder concerns.

If this idea were to actually go through, I would like to know the following things:

1) What studies were performed to show that extended isolation, lasting for years, would not lead to a decline in morale on the part of the explorer?

2) Is NASA, or the organization responsible, prepared for the media response in the event that the explorer dies en route or on Mars, for whatever cause? Can the organization prepare for the nightmare scenario and still carry on with the mission?

3) Define whether or not colonization is the major driver for not bringing astronauts back to Earth.

4) If colonization is the driver, why send just one? What are the costs (where are the spreadsheets) comparing sending six astronauts to Mars, and bringing them back, versus sending the minimum number to prevent inbreeding?

5) If colonization is not, why the one-way trip? How do costs compare for bringing the explorer back, versus continually sending him new supplies and replacement equipment?

6) If this is just to prove that going to Mars is possible, then hasn't this been done before, only with the Moon? Stop treating space like it's Mt. Everest, and more like undeveloped prairie.

The last thing NASA needs is another public failure. An ongoing controversy about a single human spending his time doing only what one person can do is hardly better.

I propose removing the legal barriers that intimidate private space development. If colonization is the long-term goal of NASA, and humanity's necessary "life insurance policy", then encouraging the migration of people off-world is necessary. A single shot publicity stunt is not good public policy, a bad investment, and irrational if one wants to see long-lasting, self-supporting population growth off-world.

Generation Y (Millennials) at NASA

2008-03-02T19:26:00.005-06:00

NASA's Gen Y Speaks Out, Wired

"At the recent NASA Next Generation Exploration Conference at NASA Ames, two young NASA employees, Nick Skytland and Garret Fitzpatrick, gave a powerful presentation called "The Gen Y Perspective"-- a set of charts they had delivered to their center management the week before that made it all the way up to the Administrator's desk. Now they were presenting it at a conference of their peers, with special guest moon walker Buzz Aldrin listening."

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2008/NASA.gen.y.pdf

The PDF is of a slideshow.

Years ago, I posted to a website called Fourthturning.com. The website was based on the book The Fourth Turning, by Neil Howe and William Strauss. The site has a discussion forum, and I was active on it from 1999 through around 2003. The conversation there is one of the best on the internet for historical and current event analysis. The members are really into the thick of the theory, so first-time visitors can be overwhelmed with all the jargon.

Without going into a lot of detail, here's the gist of Gen Y / Millennials, according to the work of Howe and Strauss:

- History influences generations (millions of people)

- Generations influence history (via large social trends)

- One can find similarities in various generations throughout US history

- These similarities repeat over time, usually in the same order.

- Generation Y / Millennials is more like the generation who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, than the previous generation who came of age largely during the 1910s (World War I) and 1920s (Prohibition).

- This is very macro, attempting to describe tens of millions of people, and their associative behavioral trends. Individual and group exceptions apply, etc.

What the presenters get at is that selling space development and NASA the way it was [not] sold to the Boomers and Gen X is not going to work, and that this bodes ill for NASA and space development in the future. There is heavy focus on NASA specifically, and one can make arguments for the enthused private business attempts at making space development a reality. These businesses are ran largely by Boomers and Xers (due to experiential and financial constraints), so enthusiasm is not restricted to the Millennials.

That may the concern that the presenters are getting at. The Boomers have the Moon Landing as a pivotal, shared historical experience. Gen X saw the space shuttle, and the infamous 1986 explosion on live TV. For the Millennials...space shuttles have always blown up, the space station was either Russian, or a continuously delayed international one.

From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.

As Dwayne A. Day writes,

"Unfortunately, the human projects are in worse shape. The shuttle is still grounded, the International Space Station is still years away from completion, and the bold new space exploration “Vision” is mired in the drudgery of budget politics. But wondrous things are happening way out there in the deep cold black of outer space and we do not have anybody to turn the science into poetry."

From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.

The Gen Y presenters call for making NASA (and/or its image) more interactive. Engage people with all the tools of social networking. My criticism is that internet-based technologies move fast, and trends faster. By the time someone at NASA has made a move, the crowds have moved on. Maybe letting private astronauts and scientists take their own initiative, if they so desire. But, a TV presence is still necessary, until astronauts can liveblog the launch experience from within the shuttle, and upload the video to YouTube.

Now, wouldn't that be cool?

PowerPoint Upload 3

2007-06-13T21:33:00.000-05:00

Here it is.

Here is an excerpt:

No metal is more malleable or ductile than gold. It can also retain its shape and maintain its appearance longer than many other metals, which helps to explain in historical value.

Gold has one outer shell electron. It will only bond to one other atom under most conditions. Gold is like hydrogen in this respect. However, gold is not as reactive as hydrogen.

Gold exists naturally in an unadulterated state, and can be sorted from sands and gravel through a process known as panning. Its pure state is so soft that to add strength, gold is alloyed with other elements.

Gold can be plated onto particles, and can covert light into heat. This has proven useful as a cancer treatment in tests conducted at Rice University. Gold's biological inertness contributed to its usefulness.

"The Universe" on the History Channel

2007-06-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

What I did instead of working on my grad thesis: watch an episode of "The Universe" on the History Channel.

I've never seen "Cosmos", though I did read the book, by Carl Sagan. The book presented the basic science of life and universe, star births and deaths, evolution, the history of astronomy, and so on. It's a good narrative, appropriate for most high schoolers, motivated middle-schoolers, and exceptional elementary school students. Few science books seem to offer an easy intro, and inspire readers to learn more.

The "Cosmos" TV series, of which I've only seen clips of, suggests typical PBS-style pacing and delivery. Measured and consistent are the words I'd use. Since the series was produced during 1979-1980, it has the spacey (mellow) music and computer-generated imagery of time. Good for information flow for TV, not necessarily a ratings hit if it were to air on network TV, against "The Sopranos".

So, here comes "The Universe". I've seen three episodes, though in fairness, I've been distracted by the computer (attempts to write thesis, and blog). The show does deliver a lot of information in its one-hour segment (with commercial interruptions). The first episode, regarding the sun, was quite good. The images, taken from sun-observing satellites, were used to communicate points well. The Mars episode was also good, talking about how the planet's lack of a magnetic field, like the Earth's, ultimately means that it has trouble keeping much of an atmosphere.

Then, tonight's episode was about Universe vs Mankind. Or, How the Cosmos Tries to Kill You! Mildly interesting. Everything you need to know can be seen in Neil Tyson's excellent five minute thirty-eight second lecture on not only how the Universe is out to get you, but also that it is amazing that anyone is alive at all.

The pacing and delivery are typical for modern-day TV. Fast, lots of CGI, and sound bites from the people interviewed. Everything seems more dramatic and important than it might otherwise be. It's certainly nothing like videos of police car chases, but I don't need a CGI of an asteroid (or a gamma-ray burst) wiping out London.

The CGI of the Universe stripping the Earth layer by layer was cool, but I thought the Universe was supposed to end in some sort of Big Chill. Maybe.

The lessons in the shows have important reminders for those of us interested in space architecture. Asteroids and radiation (and humans) are threat to this planet (and each other), and this planet is huge compared to the individual human. The amount of damage that a micro-meteorite or a solar flare (or an astronaut taking inspiration from The Shining) could do to the habitat (and everyone else who decided to watch Ordinary People) are just as bad because the initial habitat is likely the size of a trailer. Virtually no one expects Mars to be fully-terraformed and Earth-like in anyone's time scale, so there's no backup. Earth is it. The habitat is it.

PowerPoint Upload 2

2007-06-11T21:04:00.000-05:00

Now with pictures!

Nader Khalili

2007-06-11T20:34:00.000-05:00

Back in 2000, space.com interviewed Nader Khalili. He thinks that Lunar outposts should be built using non-toxic, environmentally friendly materials. I think that this is a good idea, given that there are enough health hazards of living on the Moon. Space travel is wrought with plenty of ways to cause human biological damage (read: make you very sick or kill you).

His idea, though, of using current, in-orbit space junk to create space habitats is more complicated. Spacecraft are high-tech, precise machinery. Not sure how one could assemble new air-tight and structurally sound spacecraft with debris as your starting point. That would depend on the nature of the debris, and the tools available.

He does advocate the use of in-situ materials. SICSA has studied this in the past [pdf]. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the biggest obstacles to moving lunar regolith around is the regolith's very small size. The stuff is not friendly to your lungs, nor to equipment. All the joints and servos would have to be sealed up. No exposed moving parts.

There are many technical challenges facing habitation off-world. One of them is the vagaries of local planetary soil conditions. The other is, of course, escaping Earth's gravity well.

Social Anxiety, and the Potential of Space Development

2007-02-24T18:45:00.001-06:00

The Space Review has an article titled "The Limits to Growth and the Return to the Heavens", by Nader Elhefnawy, dated 2 January 2007. He mentions that as energy prices increase, interest in off-world energy sources increases as well. It was during the 1970s that NASA pursued the solar power satellite concept.

The 1970s was a period of intense concern about natural resource shortages. It is associated strongly in the popular memory with the dire predictions of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, the 1973 and 1979 oil price shocks, and dystopian films like Z.P.G., Soylent Green and Logan’s Run.

One response to those concerns was increased interest in mining the oceans—and the skies. G. Harry Stine’s book The Third Industrial Revolution argued that the next great business opportunity was out in the heavens, as miners tapped the asteroids for their metals and manufacturing moved into orbit. After all, the Earth’s solar system is abundant in solar energy and raw materials, and an orbital environment has many advantages. Pollution is not a concern, and many industrial processes not feasible in Earth’s atmosphere and gravity become viable. Of course, getting all the plant and workers into orbit would be a challenge, but the idea was that space launch costs were set for a rapid drop, to well below $1,000 a pound. (Stine predicted that by 1990 they might be in the range of $150 a pound, if you adjust his figures for inflation.)

...

Concerns about natural resources and hopes for colonizing space did not vanish by any means, but they were given rather less mainstream attention. Indeed, it became fashionable to scoff at those concerns and hopes, but now the pendulum is starting to swing back in the other direction, in large part because commodity prices are rising again. Oil prices shot back up to nearly $80 last summer, but this is only the most visible and extreme example. Prices for the very same metals on which Ehrlich lost his bet are rising almost as dramatically. To give but one example, the price of high-grade copper rose from 70 cents in 2002 to over $3 a pound this year. There is, in short, ample reason to think not that the gloomier predictions of the 1970s were fundamentally wrongheaded, but that the 1980s and 1990s represented just a temporary reprieve, a position Thomas Homer-Dixon took in his recent op-ed “The
End of Ingenuity”.

As a result the “limits to growth” argument is enjoying renewed popularity, and to a lesser extent, so is the interest in overcoming those limits by going into space. Both the Chinese space agency and a private Russian firm have raised the possibility of mining the moon for helium-3, a potential fuel for fusion reactors. While not explicitly linked to such objectives, the United States and Japan also have plans to establish lunar bases by the 2020s. Along with the planned expansion of civilian and military space programs around the world in general, this suggests a heightening of interest in lowering the cost of space access (an objective long espoused in US National Space Policy documents). Even without deliberate efforts in that direction developments in materials science, particularly the prospect of low-cost carbon nanotubes, may make much lighter spacecraft feasible or, perhaps, even a space elevator. At the same time robotics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence seem to promise automated, miniaturized operations, reducing the launch burden further still.

...

It is an interesting, though logical, idea that as the future looks dim for earth-based energy, metals, food, etc, that space industrialization, commercialization, etc, starts being seen as a possibility.

Artificial Biosphere

2007-02-11T17:14:00.000-06:00

George Dvorsky writes that there should be an X-prize for an artificial biosphere:

Conventional futurist wisdom suggests that if our atmosphere should completely go to pot — which it certainly appears to be doing — humans could still eek out an existence living in self-sustaining biospheres. This would hardly represent a desirable outcome, but hey, it would certainly beat extinction. Moreover, a successful biosphere would prove to be an important step in the direction of space colonization, terraforming and remedial ecology.
...
Unfortunately, the impetus these days from the private sector is towards the development of space tourism technologies like space planes and space hotels. Perhaps some entrepreneur should start an X Prize for the first viable and long term biosphere. It is the space tourism industry, after all, that would most certainly benefit from the creation of a working biosphere; humans will not go very far in space without a self-sustaining ecosystem around them.

Moreover, given the rate of global warming and the ongoing depletion of the ozone layer, our atmosphere may start to turn on us. In the more distant future there will be such risks as global ecophagy. In our desperation, we may have no choice to but to dwell in temporary biospheres until we learn to fix our broken planet.

An X-prize is a great idea! The idea of living in an enclosed, isolated, and controlled environment where I could pursure a monastic, scholarly, quiet existence without worrying about cars, taxes, or ex-girlfriends, is most appealing.

Most people think of Biosphere 2, if they think about artficial biospheres at all. Since one of the problems was the loss of oxygen, that problem should be tackled! It might be a difficult excercise, due to the fact that oxygen appears to be very reactive! Chemists everywhere roll their eyes and mutter "duh" in response.

Launch Costs

2007-02-11T15:32:00.000-06:00

Found this article on the The Space Review, dated 27 September 2004.

A central tenet of the faith held by advocates, entrepreneurs, and others in an expanded presence in space is that launch costs must, and can, come down. These people will often debate endlessly the means for lowering these costs—reusable launch vehicles, big dumb boosters, or exotic technologies like a space elevator—and even what the magic price point is: $1,000, $500, or $100 a pound, and sometimes lower. However, all will agree that launch costs today are far too high to permit the commercialization and exploration of space they all desire.
...
During a presentation at the annual AIAA/Utah State University Conference on Small Satellites last month in Logan, Utah, Steven Buckley, an Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer who works with the Rocket Systems Launch Program (RSLP) at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, noted a trend in launch vehicle costs and capabilities. The RSLP has been involved with a number of small military launch vehicles in the last decade, including efforts to reuse decommissioned ICBMs as launch vehicles. Buckley noted that while the capabilities of the vehicles have grown—the Minotaur 4, derived from the Peacekeeper ICBM, has nearly four times the payload capability of a Pegasus XL—the vehicles have all had “flyaway” costs of about $20 million a launch. “It’s difficult to get the total flyaway costs below about $20 million,” he concluded.
...
Buckley’s analysis found that, for a typical RSLP launch, the launch vehicle contractor costs take up about 65 percent of the total flyaway cost: $13 million for a $20 million launch. Launch agency costs take up 15 percent, with range costs taking up another 10. The remaining 10 percent is split evenly between the launch site facilities and miscellaneous categories. Many of those costs are fixed, so that if the vehicle hardware cost goes down, the share of the flyaway costs absorbed by those other components increases: Buckley estimated that if the launch vehicle contractor costs were cut roughly in half, to $7 million, the total flyaway cost would still be about $13 million.

So, your rocket, whether it's carrying satellites or people is going to cost at least $20,000,000? That sounds similar to the idea that a decent used car in Houston, TX, is going to cost at least $3,000 to $6,000, because the car is going to have some cost of metal, plastic, engineering, safety equipment, and air conditioning.

What's new(er) since 2004? TSR has this article about the Aquarius launch system.

While the failure of a launcher carrying only consumables might be regrettable, it’s not because of the payload value. If many tons of commodities were to be delivered annually and launched in one-ton shots, the loss of one shot would be written off and a replacement launch performed in short order. A number of replacement launches would in fact be expected and included in operating plans. Furthermore, if the consumables were launched in advance of need and maintained on a depot until required, the orbital user would never experience a delay in deliveries or interruption of service even if a commodity-carrying launcher suffered a failure!

For this system to work, the consumables-only launch must be a lot cheaper than the launch of a high-value, possibly irreplaceable payload. Previously published studies show that allowing launch reliability to be reduced significantly, to between 0.67 and 0.8, can provide a way to cut launch cost by an order of magnitude. While a 0.67 delivery success rate might seem shockingly low from a traditional aerospace perspective, it is accepted routinely in terrestrial low-cost delivery systems. Aqueducts and high-tension power lines, for example, routinely lose one-third of their payloads en route, yet are highly successful.
As discussed here previously, the Aquarius system under development by Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) is built on this premise. (See “The myth of heavy lift”, The Space Review, May 17, 2004) The Aquarius launcher concept is a simple, low-margin, pressure-fed, floating-launched vehicle. Its design strategy allows mission reliability reduction to the extent that net delivery cost to orbit is minimized commensurate with the low intrinsic value of its one-ton payloads. SS/L has been developing this concept since 1998 and has been funded by customers to pursue it, with the concept receiving increasingly serious attention as it advances.

The Wikipedia entry for Aquarius has this pdf as a source. Excerpt:

The Aquarius launch vehicle was
discussed in a previous article (Space
Times, May/June 2001), and requires a
total liftoff thrust of 400,000 pounds. Here
low cost launch is obtained by relaxing
reliability. Aquarius system reliability
might be only 67%, so engine reliability
might be 93%. Aquarius will ship low
cost consumables and low-cost, replaceable
spacecraft and other equipment to
orbit. Since stringent protection of reliability
is not required, the cost per pound
to orbit could be $500, an order of magnitude
below that of any present launcher.

Five-hundred dollars per pound! I hope that Space Systems/Loral is successful!

Mars Gravity Biosatellite

2006-12-17T20:52:00.000-06:00

As a follow-up to the previous post about artificial gravity, here's a group, called Mars Gravity, that plans to launch a satellite that will simulate Martian gravity for 15 mice. According to this Press Release, "the mission could launch in 2006". Well, the year 2006 ends in a few weeks. According the program's sponsor website, Your Name Into Space, the satellite won't launch until 2010.

Better later than never (just say that to yourself repeatedly).

How will the artificial gravity be created? I'm not sure, judging by reading the website. I think that the spinning itself would be created by the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) System and/or the Attitude Determination and Control (ADC) System. According to the1988 Shuttle Reference Manual, the Rotational Hand Controller (RHC) controls the vehicle's rotation on the three axes: yaw, pitch, and roll. I presume that the satellite-equivalent of the RHC would maintain a constant rotation about one axis, while maintaining relative stability about the other two.

"Artificial Gravity and the Architecture of Orbital Habitats" by Theodore Hall

2006-12-15T22:30:00.000-06:00

Found this on Space Future, which is the site for "everyone who wants to go into space". It has a repository of articles, such as the one title for this blog entry. I found it while googling "space pyschology".

The article focuses on artificial gravity, with the intent of it being a mitigation strategy for people who live in otherwise microgravity environments for long periods of time. It's a very long piece, worth about 20 presses of the Page Down key on your keyboard. Hall lists 19 effects of living in microgravity, all of which is enough to discourage anyone from living in space. He goes into the formulas that one may use to determine an optimal angular velocity. One wants fast enough to have strong gravity, but not so fast as to induce disorientation every time the astronaut turns his/her head. Which means that one wants a very long radius. The longer, the better.

He writes at the end,

The design of an orbital habitat for artificial gravity depends on much more than physics. A few simple formulae relate the habitat's size and rotation to the apparent gravity. Unfortunately, the formulae are powerless to predict the satisfaction of the inhabitants. Many empirical studies have attempted to identify the comfort boundaries for artificial gravity, to constrain the values of the variables. Nevertheless, they have arrived at substantially different conclusions. The disagreement may be due in part to different assumptions regarding the mission, selection, motivation and adaptability of the target population. To support a large clientele, it may be safe to stay within the common ground of all of the empirical studies, choosing the most restrictive bounding value for each variable.

So much for clear answers. But, how to induce rotation in the first place, and keep it going? Hall doesn't go into that.

Fa la la la

2006-12-14T19:52:00.000-06:00

Hope you are having a good holiday season thus far. Here's the low-down.

Just finished my final presentaton on my Emergency Operations Center. Here's an image from the presentation:

In other news, the FAA has a good FAQ on "Commercial Space Topics". Here are some quotes:

Why isn't NASA, as the U.S. space agency, responsible for the safety and success of commercial space transportation?

NASA is a research and development agency of the federal government, and as such neither operates nor regulates the commercial space transportation industry. The regulatory responsibility for the industry falls to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is a regulatory agency. NASA does, however, often use launch satellites and spacecraft on vehicles developed by private companies.
What does a commercial space launch cost a launch customer?
Launch prices depend on the vehicle being used for the launch, which is determined by the size and destination of the payload being launched. Generally, the larger the payload, the larger the vehicle required, and thus the greater the price. Commercial launches are priced at as little as $8 million for a flight on the Russian START launch vehicle and as much as $180 million for a European Ariane 5 rocket.

So, what are some options?

Russian START launch vehicle: 400 kg payload to LEO. Cost: $8m

Ariane 5 rocket: 17,500 kg payload to LEO. Cost: $180m.

Space Shuttle: 21,000 kg - 24,900 kg to LEO. Cost: $450m.

The payload figures come from The Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight. Costs came from the FAA for the Russian START and Ariane 5. Costs for the Shuttle come from NASA.

Crunching some numbers, the most cost effective of these are the Ariane 5, costing $10,285/kg, followed by the Shuttle, for at least $18,000/kg, and finally Russian START, costing a Shuttle-like $20,000/kg to launch 400 kg.

Graduate Research

2006-10-07T20:53:00.000-05:00

A good way to use time not spent in studio, at work, commuting, sleeping, etc, is to learn as much as possible about Carbon Nanotubes. See my not-so-current [.doc file] research notes. I have the most recent notes on a USB drive, and will upload them before the end of the week. Not interested in downloading a whole .doc file, or want to read snippets of what I've found before downloading the whole document? Here are some clips:

"Monetary costs are a leading barrier to commercialization and colonization of outer space. Launch costs are the first in a line of high-cost problems that make commercialization prohibitive. One of the factors that make launching costly is the weight of the vehicle, and the dry structural mass of a spacecraft can be as much as 20-25% of the total mass [need source]. Reducing the structural mass, while not decreasing strength or safety, would be a great aid in encouraging space commercialization" (Original Text).

"The extreme environment in space presents both a challenge and opportunity for material scientists. In the near-earth orbit, typical spacecraft encounter naturally occurring phenomena such as vacuum, thermal radiation, atomic oxygen, ionizing radiation, and plasma, along with factors such as micrometeoroids and human-made debris. For example, the International Space Station, during its 30-year life, will undergo about 175,000 thermal cycles from +125°C to –125°C as it moves in and out of the Earth’s shadow. Re-entry vehicles for Earth and Mars missions may encounter temperatures that exceed 1,500°C. Critical spacecraft missions, therefore, demand lightweight space structures with high pointing accuracy and dimensional stability in the presence of dynamic and thermal disturbances. Composite materials, with their high specific stiffness and low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), provide the necessary characteristics to produce lightweight and dimensionally stable structures. Therefore, both organic-matrix and metal-matrix composites (MMCs) have been developed for space applications.

While the desire for high-precision, dimensionally stable spacecraft structures has driven the development of MMCs, applications thus far have been limited by difficult fabrication processes. The first successful application of continuous-fiber reinforced MMC has been the application of B/Al tubular struts used as the frame and rib truss members in the mid-fuselage section, and as the landing gear drag link of the Space Shuttle Orbiter (Figure 1). Several hundred B/Al tube assemblies with titanium collars and end fittings were produced for each shuttle orbiter. In this application, the B/Al tubes provided 45% weight savings over the baseline aluminum design" (Link).

SICSA website back up

2006-10-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

The SICSA website is back! The new design looks good, and the lecture series has been updated as well. You can also look at Faculty and Student reports. Big thanks to Olga Bannova!

The Way to San Jose

2006-10-07T15:11:00.000-05:00

New month, new blog post. Ha ha. Yeah, I know. Wired says to update early and often, and link like there's no tomorrow. Too busy making money and taking 12 credit hours of grad school.

Also, during the week of September 18, I went to San Jose with Larry Bell and fellow student Candice Feuer. We presented our work, and got feedback. See below for photos of my travels to San Jose.

The runway in Houston. Rainy. Typical.

California! It's dry, and 70 degrees outside!

So this is what an urban freeway looks like without billboards!

San Francisco Bay

Oakland Bridge

San Francisco

At the conference itself.

The streets of San Jose.

Robert Bigelow, of Bigelow Aerospace, addresses a luncheon. He talked about his company and what they're doing (trying to make access to space cheap enough to make a space hotel profitable). He showed some images taken from the Genesis I spacecraft, which his company designed.

Overall, it was beautiful experience. I can't wait to go back and visit northern California again!

The First Two Weeks of Graduate School

2006-09-04T19:15:00.000-05:00

Already, two weeks have passed at SICSA. The teams are still nebulous at this point.

Right now, there are two projects: one for the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and another the University of Houston, and the Houston Airport System. The HMNS project is a science/astronomy exhibition space that will be a whole lot more interactive than a typical museum exhibit. Preliminary discussions have involved simulators, screaming children on spacecraft (the louder the screaming, the faster the spacecraft), Ride-the-Hubble, etc. The more interactive and engrossing to the visitor, the better.

I'm on a less exciting, but no less interesting project: Emergency Operating Centers for UH and the Houston Airport System. Wait, before you yawn and wander off, dreaming of entering a museum with a Stargate device as its main entrance, this is hard-core human factors stuff.

For the first phase of the EOC, we have to pick a site. So, I spent this past Labor Day weekend walking around the UH campus. I looked at the Hilton Hotel (yes, UH has one), Science and Research 1, the Hoffheinz Pavilion, the Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting, and the newly expanded library.

I've chosen three, and noted them on a handout. Tomorrow, everyone who is participating in the EOC project will put their respsective handouts up on the board, and the three most commonly picked sites among the class will be investigated further. I hope to scan images as my resources allow.

Stream of Consciousness Web Crawl 13 August 2006

2006-08-13T12:54:00.000-05:00

As these things usually begin, I have a topic in mind that I'm curious about. In this case, long-term group isolation. Here's what I found:

The Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) conducted a study of group isolation for 240 days. I'm having trouble finding the results of this study. If anyone has info, or a link, that would be great!

An excellent article [PDF] by Lawrence A. Palinkas that overviews experiences in the Antarctic, MIR, and sea explorations. Essentially, the experiences of people who are in isolated groups depends heavily on the characters in the group, the environment around them, and communication with the outside world. Note that by "isolation", I mean physical isolation. Telephones and e-mail allow a kind of social relation, albeit without face-to-face contact.

I still think that it would behoove NASA, Russia, somebody, to put people in a 900-day long isolation setup. The more set-ups, the better. If there is a "cocktail" of human characteristics that are more likely to bring mission success than not, then that should be known!

Stream of Consciousness Web Crawl 12 August 2006

2006-08-12T17:06:00.000-05:00

I'm currently reading Spacecraft Systems Design and Operations. I'm trying to find a website that has the book's information, as it is apparently not sold through Amazon. Strange, as the other textbooks that are cited in the SICSA slide shows are sold through Amazon. Please note that as of Saturday 12 August 2006, the SICSA website is down. Anyways, while googling the title of the book, found some interesting websites:

ASTE 520: Spacecraft System Design, offered through the Astronauts and Space Technology Division at the University of Southern California. Based on the syllabus(?) [PDF], this course looks like the lecture version of the book that I'm currently reading! The course looks necessary for degree programs in Astronautical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering.

What's the difference between Astronautical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering? According to the University of Southern California's Astronautics and Space Technology Division About page on their website, "Astronautics is the art or science of designing, building, and operating space vehicles (satellites, probes, and manned spaceships) for space exploration and applications."

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics say that essentially Astronautics focuses on spacecraft, where as Aeronautics focuses on airplanes, helicopters, etc. A merger of the two would be Aerospace. Link.

Now that I know that there is such a thing as Astronautical Engineering, I can look up universities that offer such a program! Let's see the first ten that pop up on Google's return list:

Instanbul Technical University (don't know why they're the first one to pop up), Purdue, Capitol College, MIT, University of Washington, Ohio State, Universite of Southern California, Shanghai Jiaotong University (this is on the fourth page of Google's results...apparently Astronautical Engineering is not a popular name), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

OK, so most universities have Aerospace programs, not just a dedicated Astronautical program. I skipped over the websites that were from the Navy, etc. Not willing (yet) to join the military to get into spacecraft design. Weird that two universities, that were not in the USA, came back. Both had pages in English, so people in Turkey and China went out of their way to create English pages. Anyways, so dedicated Astronautical Engineering programs are not as common as general Aerospace Engineering programs. That said, the universities that I got back look top-notch: MIT, Purdue, etc.

Well, that just about ends it for today's web crawl! See you later!

The Orion Project

2006-08-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

Found the coolest launch method ever. Imagine going to space, riding on the backs of hundreds of nuclear bombs! A project, named Orion, ran from 1957 - 1964. The 1963 Test Ban Treaty heralded its demise.

Could such a project be resurrected? Maybe, if the bombs were to be detonated above the magnetosphere. The biggest problem with the system under the Orion Project is the fallout from radiation, and the electro-magnetic pulse. EMP was dramatically, maybe poorly, portrayed in a certain movie about the greater Kansas City area getting nuked.

Notwithstanding the undesirable health effects of radiation, international law, and a general global alarm if a whole lot of bombs were to go off in succession, this kind of propulsion system would be really handy to get off earth quickly.

Crew Exploration Vehicle

2006-08-06T14:41:00.000-05:00

While browsing for the latest information on Space Human Factors, I came across this article. Some pertinent quotes:

"Although the vehicle and cockpit will be highly automated, one thing we really want to do is make sure this is a 'crew-centered' and designed cockpit--something astronauts want to get in, rather than have to get in and [be] forced to use what non-astronauts have laid out for them," Fox says.

The initial cockpit design concepts are being roughed out based on assumptions that can only become facts once a CEV winning contractor and its overall spacecraft design is selected in August.

"It is a bit of an unusual and difficult time," Mastracchio says. "We are trying to keep it fair and not provide cockpit information to one contractor over the other, while at the same time making sure one contractor's concepts are also kept separate from the other."

If you ever seen a schematic of how astronauts fit into the Shuttle or Soyuz, one gets the impression that the astronauts have been "inserted" into the machines as if they were components. Now, when you get into your car, are you "jumping in" or "inserting yourself"? More room for the astronauts, however, can meen more surface area, which means more material, and thus more weight. Hence, one might attempt to reduce the machinery inside the cockpit.

All of the cockpit issues involve complex design tradeoffs that will not be fully defined until many iterations are done, Mastracchio says. They include seemingly simple basics that play into much more complex internal layout details that must be balanced, such as who sits where, how windows will be placed and how dockings will be flown using what type of window, television and computer display configurations.

Seating and stowage ties directly into the type of lightweight pressure suits that will be worn during launch and reentry. And the cockpit philosophy on manual piloting and auto system tradeoffs are directly connected to choices about the computer screen design and software display formats for conveying information to the crew.

One critical matter will be the extent of automatic rendezvous and docking. In the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, those have been piloted operations. CEV automatic rendezvous and docking is baselined, but with at least full manual intervention capability. How that will manifest itself in CEV test flights and routine operations is yet to be determined, however, Fox says.

Every little decision that is made has a clear impact on what choices on has later on! In our student work, some students had trouble coming to grips with the fact that modules have a finite, volumetric size. Finite, as in, you can't make the launch shroud any bigger. And, volumetric, which means that there is more than just "floor", as architecture students are accustomed to.

Storage Tubes Explained

2006-08-05T21:17:00.000-05:00

Earlier this past "week", I posted a message, showing some pictures of storage tubes on a CTM.

You deserve an explanation.

The storage tube idea came from a visit to a certain Swedish department store, in particular, the one on I-10 near Silber Rd. Storage is a big deal on manned spacecraft, due to obvious mass constraints. On longer-term trips, personalization and personal space becomes very important as well. A 1997 book by the Committee on Advanced Technology for Human Support in Space at National Research Council, entitled Advanced Technology for Human Support in Space, says that there is no experience with multi-year isolation (beyond 400 days or so) of groups. I don't think that anyones knows enough about long-term group isolation in confined spaces to determine compatabilities of six homogeneous people (six American males of similar age, temperament, physicality, social/economic/political history) or heterogeneous people (six people of differing nations, ages, tempers, physical abilities, social groups, income levels, and political feelings).

NPR has done a series on isolation in high-security prisons. I found the link at the Staff Psychologist Blog. The series focuses on inviduals who spent years in isolation. This is in contrast to what is likely to happen on a trip to Mars, where 4 to 6 individuals will spend a finite time in space. Prisoners are by themselves, for an indefinite amount of time. Nonetheless, the story was fascinating for its implications. Decline in cognitive activity, sociability, and even in speech, were noted. Some prisoners became severely mentally ill. Others, when released into the public, became stuck in a rut of daily activities. For example, one person frequently just drove aimlessly in his car after work. He didn't like interacting with children, or many other people. He couldn't stand to watch TV anymore, after spending years doing just that -- watching TV in his cell.

I hope that no astronauts will have the severe mental baggage that many prisoners have, though the stuck-in-a-rut symptoms, and avoidance of things that they couldn't have (children) and had in excess (TV), are fascinating.

What a load of problems to avoid!

Since no one had any definitive answers, I decided to use my own experience in isolation in groups. Namely, spending the Fall 2000 and Spring and Fall 2003 semesters living in a dorm, and my years in architecture studio.

Those of you who have lived in dorms know what I'm talking about. Needless to say, I put up on the walls as much Chris Loyd as I could possibly do. That freaked out my roommates a bit, to have the other half of a 200 sq ft room covered in my stuff, but hey, it was my side of the room! Architecture school was a bit different, where I had work to distract me, as well as a computer much of the time. To enclose my space with doors to my locker, and cardboard, and watch a movie or something, was a Good Thing.

Take the above, and add mass constraints. The visit to Ikea showed flexible fabric cylinders in which one could stuff clothes, stuffed animals, etc. I thought that a slightly more sturdy version, to withstand launch, could hold books, the 2026-equivalent of the iPod. Make them transulcent to show off whatever stuff the astronauts bring with them. Since they are intended to hold soft, plushy, compact stuff, they can be shoved aside and compressed laterally without much effort.