The thread for space cadets!

[bhsup]

Ahahaha! I don't know what's funnier, the article itself, or your use of "twinkies" instead of "twinkles"

 

[Winner]

I did a little reading and I read on Wikipedia somewhere that the Russians don't have self-destruct systems on their rockets for some reason. So it was definitely falling apart from the stress of off-vector thrust and aerodynamic forces as it fell. As for ExoMars - yup, I think the ESA is going to have to rethink their plans. Or at least they'd be wise to. Anything that depends on the Proton is suspect and IIRC even an unmanned Soyuz failed last year. Plus the Russians have problems not just in their launchers but in practically everything.

I think it was the electronics that failed for their Phobos-Grunt probe and a couple of years ago the reentry system on one of their Soyuz capsules misfired. The cosmonauts were put on a very rough ballistic reentry path that put them through some really high g forces and injured them. And when the hell is their new Angara rockets going to be ready????

My question exactly. The Russians have lost a lot of time due to indecision about the new launcher (nothing new, that's been plaguing the Soviet space programme as well). AFAIK they wanted two launch vehicles, Rus-M for the planned new manned space capsule, and Angara for unmanned launches (probably to avoid giving one Russian aerospace company a monopoly). Now they realized they really don't have the money to support the development of two brand new launchers, so they decided to stick with Angara. But there's the problem that Angara is meant to be launched primarily from the new Vostochny cosmodrome in the Russian Far East, whose construction is delayed as hell. So, for the time being, it's more of the same old-same old: Baikonur launches of Soyuz-TM and Proton-M.

IMO, the Russians, beside suffering from their traditional nemesis called poor quality control and slack, are trying to do too many things with too little money. There is huge Soviet-era inertia pushing the space programme onwards, but the price for that is low (by Western standards) reliability. I understand that the budget situation for Roscosmos is now improving since Putin made the space program a priority (for purely nationalist propaganda reasons), so we'll see. I think Angara in its simplest configuration should fly from Plesetsk this year or the next. The more advanced versions however... who knows.

I think they've moved too many resources over to their armed forces at the expense of their space program and they are relying too heavily on old, outdated systems and flawed construction/certification programs. It's just a freaking mess over there!

Precisely. But that's nothing new, the Russian/Soviet space programme has always been primarily military in nature. Today, the main military goal is to finish GLONASS (the Russian GPS), and that's eating a lot of money.

---
EDIT: Here's more on the planned Russian involvement in ExoMars.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The first Angara launches were supposed to happen in 2010 IIRC.

Agreed with everything you said, just wanted to throw that tidbit out there. They have under-funded that program despite desperately needing it.

 

[Winner]

Behold Ariane-6, the future dead end of the European space programme:

:suicide:

Source article

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Some cool explosions:

Link to video.

Link to video.
So winner, what's the problem with the Ariane 6? It seems like it has roughly the same lift capabilities of the Ariane 5, so I guess it's not much of an advancement?

 

[FirstTurnRush]

How much could I see with a telescope with a X100 magnifier?

I assume I could see eight planets (I assume Pluto would still be out of sight): how clear would each one look? How much would my view of the stars improve?

 

[Winner]

So winner, what's the problem with the Ariane 6? It seems like it has roughly the same lift capabilities of the Ariane 5, so I guess it's not much of an advancement?

Where to begin...

Okay, let's start with why we're even having this discussion. Ariane-5 is a medium-heavy lift vehicle originally meant as a booster stage for the European Hermes space shuttle. Depending on configuration, it can lift about 10 tonnes of payload to GTO, or over 20 tonnes to LEO. That makes it one of the heaviest launchers in service - besides the US Delta-IV Heavy and the Russian Proton-M, or the planned Chinese Long March-5. This means that is is seriously overpowered for the most lucrative launch services provided by Arianespace (the semi-commercial company which handles most European launches from French Guyana). To compensate, Ariane-5 always launches two GEO satellites, one in a 6-tonne range, the other in a 3-tonne range. This poses a lot of problems since you need to match satellites, deal with possible delays, negotiate with too many subjects at once, all that while satellite operators require flexibility and speed. Partially as a result of this, Arianespace is losing market share and Ariane-5 remains too expensive to break even; Arianespace is thus existentially dependent on ESA subsuidies to keep Ariane-5 in business. This means, basically, that ESA is sponsoring commercial subjects, and not nearly only European commercial subjects, from European taxpayers' money. At the same time, the competition from American, Chinese, Russian, and possibly also Indian and Japanese launchers might make the dependence on subsidies even more pronounced.

The answer to this quandary, promoted chiefly by the French, is to develop a smaller launcher, hopefully designed to be reasonably cheap and optimized for GTO launches of payloads in the 6-tonne range, since it is believed that that is where the GEO satellite mass will stabilize (many dispute that belief, but screw them, right?).

And that's where the problems begin. You see, Ariane-6 is to be a one trick pony. It's job is to be to launch commercial payloads to GTO, and maybe science missions to escape trajectories. However, as many in Europe point out already, the design selected does not offer any opportunities for future growth. It is dumb as bricks - a few solid stages based on Ariane-5/Vega legacy, topped by a LH2/LOX upper stage for orbital insertion utilizing the new Vinci engine originally meant as an upgrade for the Ariane-5 upper stage. You can't do much to boost its GTO payload if satellites get heavier, and you can't really use it for LEO launches in an efficient way. Should you need to launch a heavier space probe to the outer planets, or say a Mars Sample Return mission, you're out of luck. Basically we're building a more expensive and slightly more capable European Soyuz - while we already have a *real* Soyuz flying from French Guyana The logic in that eludes me and a lot of other people, including some in Arianespace who now boast about being able to cover the needs of the whole launch market with medium-heavy lift Ariane-5, medium lift Soyuz, and small lift Vega. With Ariane-6 replacing Ariane-5, they'd lose the upper part of the launch spectrum and end up with two broadly comparable medium lift launchers.

Plus there are some additional reasons (which are heavily influenced by my personal opinions, so take them with a grain of salt).

Ariane-6 is about apportioning pork. Like in the US, where the design of SLS is subject to political pressures dictated by the need to provide jobs in key states and support from major aerospace companies, in Europe too there is a political imperative to make the key funding states (Germany, France, and Italy) happy. And they will only be happy if they can build some crucial part of the new rocket. You can see how this conflicts with the stated goal of reduction in cost. Whenever politics dictates your rocket design and distributes its construction over dozens of states, the result is inevitably going to be HUGELY over budget. Which means that we'll produce a rocket basically about as capable as Falcon-9 v.2, only 4 times as expensive, and 5 years late. Woo-hoo

The cost-imperative is another issue. You see, the European launcher programme does not exist for commercial reasons. The sole reason is supposed to be to ensure the strategic independence of Europe by providing it with an independent access to space. There is no mention of anything related to commercial competitiveness in the ESA mandate. ESA's rockets are not here to service the world's launch market, they're here to launch European government, scientific, and commercial payloads and thus assure Europe is not relegated to a position of an American geopolitical appendage. HOWEVER, maintaining this capability is expensive and ESA discovered in the 1980's that if you give your rockets something to do while there are not government or science payloads ready to be flown, the rocket can more or less pay for itself and thus free the member states from the need to pull their heads out of their butts and provide some serious funding. Ariane-4 was well suited for this role. Ariane-5 wasn't. Therefore, ESA wants to return to the good old days with a new, Ariane-4-like rocket.

But that's not going to work. The original success of Ariane-4 was party a result of the fact that it did not have any serious competition. The Americans have kindly left the market due to the Shuttle commercial fiasco, the Russians were not yet in business and in any case, their reliability record was less then stellar, and nobody trusted the Chinese and the Indians. Now, there is SERIOUS competition from SpaceX, the new generation of Chinese rockets, the Indians, the Russians, and even the Japanese. Arianespace will hardly ever get its 50% market share back.

So, why the hell do we even try, knowing well in advance that due to our bureaucratic-political hindrances, we don't stand a realistic chance? Why produce another expendable launcher, which is optimized for one job, which others can do cheaper and faster? At best we're going to end up with a lighter rocket, which will likewise require subsidies to fly. And if the satellites get heavier, we're screwed because there won't be money for a new launcher in the foreseeable future.


To me it seems much more sane to stick with Ariane-5. I am not an engineer, but I do believe that should there be proper pressure to do so, the rocket can be made cheaper, especially if new technologies are implemented (Vega-derived boosters and/or reusable liquid boosters; better upper stage, lighter construction materials, more streamlined production process, etc.). A modest upgrade that has been approved by ESA already can boost the GTO payload to 12-tonnes, meaning it can launch two 6-tonne range satellites at once, freeing it from the need to pair two differently sized satellites. More importantly, it gives Europe opportunities it wouldn't otherwise have - having some extra lift capacity gives you the chance to consider heavier probes, new space station modules, larger space telescopes, even manned spaceflight. Ariane-6 won't give you any of that; it will essentially shut the door for anything but commercial GTO services. Is that our vision for the future of Europe in space? I doubt it!

As for what to do next - what about trying something, I don't know, innovative? Like SKYLON? Or some other ways to achieve reusability in spaceflight? Something to give Europe an edge over the competitors?

Ah yeah, I forgot which continent I live in The worst thing is that we don't even have any influential pan-European space advocacy groups with the power to lobby the relevant governments. It's literally all backroom deals and horse trading between principal ESA member states and their national aerospace conglomerates, with little input from elsewhere, god-forbid independent expertise.

/rant (sorry for the wall of text)

 

[Winner]

And to keep with the topic, a short article on Ariane-6:

Newly Unveiled Ariane 6 Rocket Design Yields a Few Surprises
By Peter B. de Selding | Jul. 9, 2013

PARIS — The French and European space agencies on July 9 disclosed the design of a future Ariane 6 rocket that sacrifices performance on behalf of cost to replace today’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 and medium-lift Russian Soyuz vehicle at Europe’s spaceport starting in the early 2020s.

The vehicle — which as expected leans heavily on solid propulsion, with cryogenics used only on the upper stage — is designed to lift a payload weighing no more than 6,500 kilograms into geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.

Earlier Ariane 6 designs referred to maximum payload values of 8,000 kilograms to that orbit. More recently, Ariane 6 backers had talked of a 7,000-kilogram maximum, coining the phrase “triple seven” to advertise the vehicle’s basic characteristics: seven years’ of development, seven metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit and 70 million euros ($93 million) per launch.

Alain Charmeau, chief executive of Astrium Space Transportation, said the 70-million-euro per-launch cost target remains valid, and assumes an Ariane 6 launch cadence of nine to 15 liftoffs per year.

Officials from the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA) were not immediately available to discuss the trade offs that ultimately resulted in a vehicle with a more-modest performance than the one originally presented to European governments in 2012.

These same governments will meet in late 2014 to decide whether to proceed with full development of Ariane 6, an investment that French space agency, CNES, program managers say is likely to be between 2.5 billion and 3.5 billion euros over the seven-year period starting in 2015.

But French government officials also say they do not expect France to have much more than a 50 percent share of Ariane 6, about the same as the French stake in Ariane 5, meaning Germany, Italy and other European governments will be called on to fund the remaining 50 percent.

The Ariane 6 design selected is not modular; it comes in one configuration only: Three solid-fueled motors, each carrying 135,000 kilograms of fuel, are aligned in a row to compose the first stage.

The second stage uses a nearly identical solid-fueled booster, with the same 135,000-kilogram fuel tank.

The third, cryogenic stage uses the same Vinci engine that has been in development by Safran of France for years and is intended to power the upper stage of the Ariane 5 Midlife Evolution rocket that ESA has tentatively agreed to enter into service around 2018.

This Ariane 5 ME rocket will add nearly 20 percent to the payload-carrying power of the current Ariane 5 ECA vehicle, bringing to nearly 11,000 kilograms the combined weight of two satellites that can be launched simultaneously by Ariane 5 ME, compared to around 9,000 kilograms today.

In a July 9 statement on the Ariane 6, ESA said the three principal criteria for the rocket were development cost, time to market and operating costs.

The selected design remains the subject of dispute in some government and industry quarters in Europe insofar as it is tilted in favor of solid fuel as opposed to cryogenic fuel.

ESA asked two industrial consortia to analyze rocket designs to compare costs and other criteria as part of a program called New European Launch Service. Both teams concluded that, over time, the cost of vehicle using two cryogenic-fueled stages was not much different from a vehicle using one cryogenic stage and two solid-propellant stages.

Briefing reporters here July 9, Charmeau agreed that the cost difference between solid and cryogenic technologies was minimal. The choice, he said, was based on other factors.

One of those factors, according to ESA, was the potential synergies with ESA’s Italian-led Vega small-satellite launch vehicle. To the extent that Ariane 6 can borrow from Vega, scale economies might be found to keep Ariane 6 costs within the target, Ariane 6 designers said.

ESA said synergies with Vega development were one of the deciding factors.

The agency said having Ariane 6 use an upper stage similar to what is being built for Ariane 5 Midlife Evolution would save some 600 million euros over the cost of designing a new upper stage. Likewise, the Ariane 6 will employ a 5.4-meter-diameter fairing that is not much different from today’s Ariane 5 fairing.

Time to tell France to frak off

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Obesity. Not *just* for Americans anymore.

 

[Winner]

A little spam for a good purpose:

A team in Poland is developing a strategy game called Race to Mars, which will allow players to control a space industry and gradually launch varieties of space missions, with the goal of establishing a base on Mars. It's in pre-alpha and the team is looking for contributions through Kickstarter. So, in case somebody here is swimming in dough and want to part with some for a good cause, don't hesitate. I do believe such games are crucial in drumming up public support for more real-world space exploration

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I will have to check that game out. Will contributors be able to download the alpha version of the game as they can with KSP?

I will get back to the other comments later...bit short on time. However, I'd just like to share that I was reading a few issues of the newspaper Space News and there were many articles that indicated that the SLS is coming along according to plan. The articles weren't anything special, they just talked about various tests and awarded contracts and nothing about slipping schedules or funding falling through. The destination (asteroid vs unfunded moon base) is in question, but the rocket itself doesn't seem to be in jeopardy. To me, the flap over the destination truthfully seems to be simply House Republicans trying to deny Obama something he wants to do more or less. I see no other reason for all of the fighting.

-Although-
The sequester is really taking it's toll on space and science projects. Everything from major industry/government contracts to University science programs are in jeopardy and experiencing turmoil.

I'll get back to other posts here when I get home.

Edit: Oh I forgot to mention, in the comments section of an issue of Space News, Robert Zubrin got torn apart by a random reader over some really stupid stuff he said about asteroid deflection. I mean, he missed really basic and obvious stuff...it was funny

 

[Winner]

Edit: Oh I forgot to mention, in the comments section of an issue of Space News, Robert Zubrin got torn apart by a random reader over some really stupid stuff he said about asteroid deflection. I mean, he missed really basic and obvious stuff...it was funny

Is that online, somewhere?

As for Zubrin - my growing impression of him is that of annoyance. I mean, he has had and continues to have some very good ideas, but he sounds like a broken record and often as a bit of a jerk. I have the feeling he can't get over the fact that the window of opportunity for Mars Direct has closed. Instead of trying to be flexible and adapt as circumstances change, he keeps pushing for what has been rejected multiple times by multiple administrations. Within Mars Society, he surrounds himself with sycophants who just enforce his isolation from the real world. I am amazed that he has not changed his presentation slides from the time he first came up with Mars Direct. It's been 20+ years, but he keeps showing the same old hand-drawn diagrams. I mean, seriously? We're living in times when the overall form of presentation is CRUCIAL for getting support for a project - and don't tell me that nobody in Mars Society can make a new, smart-looking PPT presentation full of shiny new CGI. It makes you wonder, if he didn't bother to change the presentation, has he at least looked over his numbers again?

Also, it annoys me how he continuously ignores the problem of landing on Mars. I mean, there is a sort of consensus among all the articles on this I've ever read that we currently DO NOT KNOW how to land anything much heavier than 1 metric ton on Mars. The problem is that the atmosphere is too thin to slow down heavier payloads sufficiently for parachute deployment. Supersonic parachutes big enough to slow down something massing over 20+ tonnes would be prohibitively heavy, and in any case they wouldn't even fully open before the payload hit the surface. Inflatable aeroshields are being researched, but the problem remains that are not really suitable for anything heavier than a few metric tonnes. The ONLY realistic option at this point is some sort of hypersonic retropropulsion manoeuvre to slow down the spacecraft for final descent/landing. This is literally a terra incognita, because nobody has tried it before; AFAIK NASA wanted to do some tests on hypersonic retropropulsion, but funding for them has recently been cut

Then I listen to Zubrin on the Space Show, and he totally dismisses the problem as trivial, laughing inanely and remarking something about using bigger parachutes, clearly missing the frakking point that parachutes are not usable. And not only that, he also dismisses people raising this point as cowards and fearmongers and whatnot. It's pathetic to see him drop so low.

I agree with him on the issues of radiation, electric propulsion, and artificial gravity, but here he's obviously wrong and his simplistic notions have been rebuffed by numerous experts. And he, instead of going back to his project and addressing the criticism, keeps insisting that landing his HABs and ERVs would be as simple as landing the Viking probes

He also clearly goes ballistic every time somebody dares to mention some other goals than landing on Mars. For him, everything but Mars is nonsense and a diversion, which is both arrogant and insulting to people who've worked in those areas of the space programme for decades (much longer than he's been in aerospace engineering, in fact).

Then finally I can't stand all his patriotic/nationalistic nonsense. Mars is not going to be the new American frontier, a sort of new Old West, where the brave and bright will go make dollars while the old farts linger on Earth. That's romantic bullcrap. He also dismissed environmental issues, the need for sustainable growth on Earth, and so on, claiming it's some sort of global conspiracy to enslave the human race and prevent it from expanding into space. It's ridiculous, of course.

I could go on, but that's enough for one day.

 

[Winner]

Hey, ESA, remember the thing I said about being innovative? What about co-funding this? It would have the same performance as your Ariane-6, but it would be infinitely more versatile and enable Europe to have *real* space programme for an affordable price...


Link to video.

----
----

And something more on the Russian problems (not just with Proton)¨:

Proton M failure flags up unreliability of Russian space programme

The post-mortem is under way on the spectacular 2 July Proton M rocket failure at Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which destroyed the launch vehicle and its payload of three of Russia's Glonass navigation satellites.

But while it may be months before the cause of the incident is determined, what is certain even today is that the reliability of the Proton M rocket - a mainstay of Russia's space programme - lags far behind its Western peers.

Whereas, say, the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket can boast a reliability rate of more than 94% over 69 launches, and the Boeing-United Launch Alliance Delta IV has achieved nearly 96% over 22 launches, Proton M is running at less than 90% over 74 flights (see chart).

Moreover, Ariane 5 suffered all four of its failures in its first 14 attempts, suggesting that problems were ironed out early and justifying claims by ESA, prime contractor Astrium and launch services provider Arianespace of supreme reliability. Proton's failures, by contrast, have come throughout its lifetime.

According to Flightglobal's Ascend SpaceTrak database, this Proton launch failure is the fifth in the last four years. Likewise, over the last 10 Proton flights there have been three failures - a 30% failure rate. Of all heavy-lift rockets operating today, only Russia's Proton M and Zenit have had any failures in their most recent 10 missions.

According to Proton M's manufacturer, the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Centre, an emergency shutdown occurred 17sec into the flight, and the launcher hit the ground inside the cosmodrome's territory, about 2.5km from the launch pad; there were no apparent injuries or any destruction of ground facilities.

Many Proton failures have been attributable to the upper stage, which pushes the payload(s) into final orbit, rather than the main launcher. But in this case investigation will focus on the main engines, one of which can be seen in video of the accident smoking in the seconds before the launcher veered off course. Also, there is some indication that this particular launcher was powered by RD-276 engines, which had not before been used on this particular variant of Proton M.

GETTING SERIOUS?

That the Russians take failure seriously is in no doubt. The investigation into the 2 July loss is being headed by no less than Alexander Lopatin, deputy head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Following a Proton M failure on 6 August 2012, Russian prime minister Dimitry Medvedev gave space industry officials an ultimatum to improve reliability - and within the month Khrunichev boss Vladimir Nesterov had handed in his resignation.

International Launch Services, the US-based Krunichev subsidiary that markets Proton commercially, said that following the commission's findings, it will conduct its own Failure Review Oversight Board with representatives from ILS customers, insurance underwriters and technical experts, "to review the commission's findings and corrective action plan, in accordance with US and Russian government export control regulations".

But fixing the problem may take much more than lighting fires under industry bosses. Western observers regularly pay high praise to Russian engineering, and the basic design of space hardware such as Proton is regarded as sound. Analysis of the Proton failure record shows, however, a scattering of diverse failure points, suggesting the problem lies in quality control.

Such a management problem may prove more difficult to resolve than any design fault, as oversight shortcomings appear to pervade the Russian space programme. In November 2011, for example, Roscosmos attempted to put Russia back in the interplanetary exploration game with an ambitious mission to fly to the Martian moon Phobos and bring home a sample of extra-terrestrial soil. Unfortunately, the Phobos-Grunt mission - aboard a Zenit-2SB rocket - was left stranded in Earth orbit owing to computer failure and later crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The cause was determined to be computer failure, stemming from the use of electronic components that had not been qualified for spaceflight.

Whatever technical fault is ultimately assigned to the latest launch calamity, the incident may provide Roscosmos, Krunichev and the Russian government with the motivation to dissect the structure of an industry which is clearly failing to perform in line with its international rivals. As one Western observer with direct experience of partnering Russian companies in aerospace projects recently told Flightglobal, Russian industry has been restructuring for two decades but remains a child of its Soviet roots. Before 1992, he observes, the practice of separating design bureaux from semi-autonomous manufacturing plants was reasonably successful, but the collapse of firm central control left the two sides operating without adequate co-ordination.

Moreover, in Soviet times the industry operated in a winner-take-all system; companies that won a programme contract enjoyed all its benefits and locked rivals out. By contrast, he notes, Western companies have for decades been operating both as competitors and collaborators, with the result that a fluid ecosystem of customers, contractors and suppliers provides increasing product reliability. Russia, he says, has made comparitively little progress towards such a model.

As the 2 July fireball at Baikonur makes abundantly clear, however, spaceflight rarely accommodates half measures.

Source

 

[FirstTurnRush]

How much could I see with a telescope with a X100 magnifier?

I assume I could see eight planets (I assume Pluto would still be out of sight): how clear would each one look? How much would my view of the stars improve?

Anyone?

 

[El_Machinae]

Sorry, no idea.

Hubble Finds a True Blue Planet: Giant Jupiter-Sized Planet Located 63 Light-Years Away

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have deduced the actual visible-light color of a planet orbiting another star 63 light-years away.

Aaaand, this is how we're going to detect distant life, if we ever do.

 

[Winner]

Anyone?

You should probably ask the question in a dedicated amateur astronomy forum. I only have very limited experience with a very primitive telescope.

My observations: the Moon is most interesting, as even with a small telescope you can see a lot of detail, especially around the terminator. It looks awesome. The planets looked like fuzzy little balls, I never saw much detail, except for Jupiter (you can clearly see the galilean moons) and Saturn (the rings are awesome). I never found Uranus and Neptune, but I never particularly tried either.

The stars will always be points of light in pretty much any small telescope, nothing to see there. You can see binary stars more clearly, and you see their colour, but that's it.

I never had an opportunity to look for comets, but if ISON shows up, I might dust off the telescope and see if it still works.

---

Sorry, no idea.

Hubble Finds a True Blue Planet: Giant Jupiter-Sized Planet Located 63 Light-Years Away

I wanted to post this myself, fascinating.

Aaaand, this is how we're going to detect distant life, if we ever do.

I suspect any such discovery will be heavily controversial. We'll be looking for certain elements/compounds such as oxygen/ozone, carbon dioxide, methane, water, etc., and then speculate whether they're a sign of a biosphere, or not.

See what's happening with the methane discovery on Mars - we simply cannot tell whether the methane is created abiotically, or whether it is a sign of life. It will probably remain undecided, unless we finally get our act together and send some people there to take a look.

 

[El_Machinae]

True, but those are awfully small amounts of temporary methane whiffs. Earth's spectrograph is astoundingly different from that.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

/rant (sorry for the wall of text)

No worries, I read every word.

So they are going to replace the Ariane 5 with the Ariane 6? That's insane, they're two different classes of launcher...Why would you throw away that capability? It's like shutting down (permanently) the Saturn V lines - they just closed the door on so many potential missions. Is that what they did with Ariane 4, replaced it with Ariane 5 despite the two launchers being in different classes? And now they want to basically go back to Ariane 4's capabilities?? Why not just build more Ariane 4's and save the development costs? So many WTH questions????

As for the Ariane 6 itself, I don't know why they didn't take a cue from the Space Shuttle SRB's and make them modular. What I mean is that it's (apparently) pretty straightforward to add segments to the boosters to make them more powerful. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to subtract segments as well and then viola, you have a much more flexible design. As it stands they are kind of locked into a set lift capacity and concurrent mission profiles. Which is nuts because no one knows how the market is going to unfold over the next 5 years, much less 10. And I think you'd agree with me that it's going to take a lot longer (and a lot more money) to develop and fly the Ariane 6 than they project. That's almost a given.

As for what you said about competing with the Falcon 1.2, yeah, I thought exactly what you said myself when I read an article on the Ariane 6. It's going to hit the market much later, cost more and do more or less the same thing as the Falcon so how do they expect this to work out financially? Sure, SpaceX could goof up but then there is the Antares rocket from Orbital, the possibility that we'll see Angara launches at some point and so on... It just doesn't add up for Arianespace at all. :\

Is that online, somewhere?

Here you go. The first is the op-ed from Zubrin (which I just read for the first time 5 minutes ago).

Spoiler :

NASA’s Asteroid Absurdity

By Robert Zubrin | May. 20, 2013


NASA recently announced that it has embraced the idea of an asteroid retrieval mission as the central goal of its human spaceflight program for the next decade or two. According to the agency’s leadership, this mission will accomplish a number of important objectives, including delivering a science bonanza, demonstrating a technology useful for planetary defense, creating a large cache of materials in space that can provide in situ resources to support space exploration activities and achieving the president’s goal of flying a mission to a near-Earth asteroid as a way of breaking out of geocentric space and demonstrating human deep-space capabilities necessary for subsequent missions to Mars.

Since this initiative will cost many billions of dollars and, by diverting the entire multibillion-dollar human spaceflight program for decades, impose an opportunity cost amounting to many tens of billions of dollars, it is imperative that these claims be examined critically to see if any of them are true.

Let us therefore consider each of them in order.

There is no doubt that the “asteroid” mission, which involves using an electric propulsion spacecraft with a power supply half that of the international space station to push a 3.5-meter-radius object (i.e., a rock, not an asteroid) to a lunar-like orbit, and then visiting it with astronauts flying sorties in the Orion capsule sometime in the third decade of the 21st century, would eventually return some science. However, vastly more science could be achieved, much sooner, at much lower cost and risk, simply by sending a flotilla of small robotic spacecraft to collect kilogram-sized samples from multiple real asteroids and return them all the way to Earth.

While the electric propulsion system proposed for the so-called asteroid mission can be used over a period of several years of continuous thrusting to alter the trajectory of 3.5-meter rocks, objects representing planetary threats have masses thousands to millions of times greater, and it would not even be practical to despin them to allow continuous thrusting to begin, let alone deliver to them sufficient propellant or power to change their trajectories. There are tens of thousands of asteroids with radii over 100 meters, each with a mass of over 15 million tons. Assuming that such an object is in an Earth-like orbit, it would require a velocity change of about 1 meter per second to move the periapsis of its orbit by a distance equal to the diameter of Earth, and thus have a chance at turning a direct hit into a near-miss. Using electric propulsion, about 500 tons of propellant would be required, and the 40-kilowatt system employed by the asteroid mission would need to thrust continuously for 250 years to deliver the necessary push. A much more practical approach would be to send a missile armed with a conventional or nuclear warhead (depending upon the size of the object) to give the asteroid a sudden solid shove by blasting a small portion of its mass off its side. Unfortunately, in order to preserve a false rationale for the asteroid mission’s electric propulsion system, such more potent approaches to planetary protection are being neglected.

The 3.5-meter rock moved to near-lunar orbit in the asteroid mission would have a mass of about 500 tons, which is about 20 times the mass of the system that would need to be launched to low Earth orbit to move it. This might appear to be a good trade, but the rock would likely be only about 5 percent water by weight, so in terms of potentially useful mass delivered to space it would only be a match. However, hydrogen and oxygen launched to low Earth orbit are already in useful form as pure cryogenic propellants, whereas the water in the rock would have to be extracted by processing 3 meters depth of rock, then collected, electrolyzed and cryogenically liquefied, all of which would require a system of considerable power and complexity. Furthermore, in its proposed near-lunar retrograde orbit, the propellant produced from the rock would be in the wrong place to support useful space exploration activity. In fact, the delta-V needed to leave low Earth orbit to reach the rock propellant depot would be about the same as the delta-V needed to leave low Earth orbit and fly directly to Mars. Therefore, even if the rock propellant depot were there today, ready to provide propellant for free to any Mars-bound mission willing to stop by to refuel, it would not make any sense to go there.

In situ resource utilization is a key technology to space exploration, but the resources to be used need to be located at the destination of interest, not somewhere else. Martian missions need to use resources located on Mars. Lunar missions need to use resources located on the Moon. A rock in a retrograde lunar orbit is of no resource utilization interest to anyone.

As to the claim that the asteroid retrieval mission achieves the goal set by President Barack Obama in 2010 of breaking out of geocentric space, that is simply untrue. In point of fact, aside from potentially providing a fat contract to an excessively influential electric propulsion company (see my op-ed “The VASIMR Hoax,” SpaceNews, July 13, 2011), the entire purpose of the initiative is to find a way to shirk the challenge of human interplanetary flight.

The asteroid retrieval mission is not a competent way to advance science, planetary defense, in situ resource utilization or human interplanetary flight. It thus represents an enormous waste of time and money that could prevent NASA’s human spaceflight program from achieving anything worthwhile for decades. Congress must not accept this. Hearings need to be held, with the NASA administrator required to defend his plan in the presence of technically qualified critics. If the plan is found to be irrational, then lawmakers need to insist that it be replaced with a space agency strategy that actually makes sense.

The American people want and deserve a human spaceflight program that really explores new worlds. It is past time that NASA stepped up to the plate and accepted that challenge.

It really comes off as 'I HATE NASA SO HARD', though since I just read it I'm going to have to wait and let it digest before I pass judgment. What do you think?

Oh and this rebuttal makes a lot of sense to me:

Spoiler :

Letter | A Different Viewpoint on NASA Asteroid Plan

By Al Globus | Jun. 17, 2013

In “NASA’s Asteroid Absurdity” [Commentary, May 20, page 19], Robert Zubrin gets a few things wrong regarding NASA’s gutsy plan to bring a small asteroid into cislunar space for an astronaut visit and to kick-start asteroid mining. Note that NASA’s plan is based on a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/Keck Institute study, which is available at http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_report.pdf

Zubrin claims that to deflect an asteroid from hitting the Earth requires changing the heliocentric periapsis. However, to turn a hit into a miss requires only slowing or speeding an asteroid such that it arrives at the collision point before or after the Earth is there. This usually requires much lower delta-V than changing periapsis. Furthermore, the delta-V required is a function of the time to collision, a point Zubrin neglects entirely.

Zubrin claims that the best way to deflect asteroids is with explosives. This may be the only alternative if there is little time. However, without detailed understanding of the asteroid’s composition it could be a disastrous choice, turning a rifle bullet into a shotgun blast. There are a number of ways to deflect asteroids. For example, given sufficient time a gravity tractor is much more reliable and controllable than a blast and does not require a detailed understanding of asteroid composition.

Zubrin claims the asteroid would likely contain 5 percent water by weight. The amount of water in asteroids varies considerably and there is no easy way to know, a priori, the water content of any particular asteroid. It could be more, perhaps a lot more, or less.

Zubrin implies that the propulsion system of choice is the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR. However, the JPL/Keck study this mission is based on did not use VASIMR in the reference conceptual design.

Zubrin seems to know that the retrieved asteroid would be placed in a near-lunar retrograde orbit. However, while this may be a possibility, the final orbit is a function of the asteroid chosen and will be, I’m quite sure, the subject of rather extensive trade studies.

Zubrin seems to think that the only possible use for asteroidal materials is fuel for a mission to Mars. In fact, there are a number of potential markets that asteroidal materials might service, including radiation shielding for orbital bases outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, fuel for comsat station keeping and samples for collectors/museums (which is surprisingly lucrative, $1,000 per gram or more).

Zubrin does propose a large number of missions to collect samples from many asteroids. This is a great idea. It may not be cheap though. The OSIRIS-Rex mission to return at least 60 grams of asteroidal material is $800 million plus launch costs. The Hayabusa mission, which retrieved a few grains of asteroidal material, cost $170 million. The JPL/Keck study prices the asteroid retrieval mission at about $2.6 billion. There is, of course, no reason not to do both if funding is available. Considering that understanding asteroid composition is essential to planetary defense, and planetary defense is essential to survival, perhaps we should consider supplying the funding.

This is not a Mars mission; it’s an asteroid mission. For those, like myself, who think that economic activity in cislunar space is the best near-term objective, and free-space settlements co-orbiting with asteroids that supply the materials is the dominant long-term future of mankind, it’s a great mission. It has NASA doing what NASA does best: creating new capabilities for humanity.

As for Zubrin - my growing impression of him is that of annoyance. I mean, he has had and continues to have some very good ideas, but he sounds like a broken record and often as a bit of a jerk. I have the feeling he can't get over the fact that the window of opportunity for Mars Direct has closed. Instead of trying to be flexible and adapt as circumstances change, he keeps pushing for what has been rejected multiple times by multiple administrations. Within Mars Society, he surrounds himself with sycophants who just enforce his isolation from the real world. I am amazed that he has not changed his presentation slides from the time he first came up with Mars Direct. It's been 20+ years, but he keeps showing the same old hand-drawn diagrams. I mean, seriously? We're living in times when the overall form of presentation is CRUCIAL for getting support for a project - and don't tell me that nobody in Mars Society can make a new, smart-looking PPT presentation full of shiny new CGI. It makes you wonder, if he didn't bother to change the presentation, has he at least looked over his numbers again?

Also, it annoys me how he continuously ignores the problem of landing on Mars. I mean, there is a sort of consensus among all the articles on this I've ever read that we currently DO NOT KNOW how to land anything much heavier than 1 metric ton on Mars. The problem is that the atmosphere is too thin to slow down heavier payloads sufficiently for parachute deployment. Supersonic parachutes big enough to slow down something massing over 20+ tonnes would be prohibitively heavy, and in any case they wouldn't even fully open before the payload hit the surface. Inflatable aeroshields are being researched, but the problem remains that are not really suitable for anything heavier than a few metric tonnes. The ONLY realistic option at this point is some sort of hypersonic retropropulsion manoeuvre to slow down the spacecraft for final descent/landing. This is literally a terra incognita, because nobody has tried it before; AFAIK NASA wanted to do some tests on hypersonic retropropulsion, but funding for them has recently been cut

Then I listen to Zubrin on the Space Show, and he totally dismisses the problem as trivial, laughing inanely and remarking something about using bigger parachutes, clearly missing the frakking point that parachutes are not usable. And not only that, he also dismisses people raising this point as cowards and fearmongers and whatnot. It's pathetic to see him drop so low.

I agree with him on the issues of radiation, electric propulsion, and artificial gravity, but here he's obviously wrong and his simplistic notions have been rebuffed by numerous experts. And he, instead of going back to his project and addressing the criticism, keeps insisting that landing his HABs and ERVs would be as simple as landing the Viking probes

He also clearly goes ballistic every time somebody dares to mention some other goals than landing on Mars. For him, everything but Mars is nonsense and a diversion, which is both arrogant and insulting to people who've worked in those areas of the space programme for decades (much longer than he's been in aerospace engineering, in fact).

Then finally I can't stand all his patriotic/nationalistic nonsense. Mars is not going to be the new American frontier, a sort of new Old West, where the brave and bright will go make dollars while the old farts linger on Earth. That's romantic bullcrap. He also dismissed environmental issues, the need for sustainable growth on Earth, and so on, claiming it's some sort of global conspiracy to enslave the human race and prevent it from expanding into space. It's ridiculous, of course.

I could go on, but that's enough for one day.

I agree with everything you said pretty much. And you're spot on with the nationalistic stuff - he thinks it makes sense to push this 'wild west'/'frontier homestead' image of Mars and that just doesn't fly with the part of the world that isn't the US. No one but Americans have any real attachment to that kind of ideal and even then the average Joe American doesn't have any attachment to it. It's also flat-out off-putting to other nationalities as well as he downplays the importance of international cooperation that will be crucial for any manned Mars mission. He acts like the US can go it alone and we clearly don't have the political will to do that and probably won't anytime soon.


I wonder what his take is on all the new companies entering the launch market such as SpaceX and Orbital, etc. He's probably enthusiastic about it but if it were European or Chinese companies doing it I'm pretty sure he'd be irate.

 

[Winner]

No worries, I read every word.

So they are going to replace the Ariane 5 with the Ariane 6? That's insane, they're two different classes of launcher...Why would you throw away that capability? It's like shutting down (permanently) the Saturn V lines - they just closed the door on so many potential missions. Is that what they did with Ariane 4, replaced it with Ariane 5 despite the two launchers being in different classes? And now they want to basically go back to Ariane 4's capabilities?? Why not just build more Ariane 4's and save the development costs? So many WTH questions????

And pretty astute questions. I am by no means an insider in ESA/Arianespace deliberations, but from what I read on various forums, it appears the answer is basically two-fold: 1) money; 2) "technology development" lobby.

The first is pretty straightforward. ESA does not have the money to maintain multiple production lines. It can afford to subsidize only one major launch vehicle. Ariane-5 is deemed to be "too heavy lift" (yes, some people do think there can be too much lift on a rocket ) and too expensive for both commercial purposes and the kind of science missions ESA can regularly afford.[1] Therefore, Ariane-6 is supposed to save money while still providing Europe with these (sized-down) capabilities. In other words, it's a showcase of European lack of vision. Instead of seeing the European space programme as something that will grow to match the capabilities of Ariane-5, there is a belief that ESA will not grow, but do basically what it is doing now, for similar money, forever. It's frustrating to say the least.

The second problem is the need to keep European space industries "busy" with building something new every now and then. Ariane-5 is "old", therefore we need something "new", something that will "grow European technological capabilities". ESA stopped ordering new ATVs for ISS ressuply exactly for this reason, after only 5 (!!!!!1!!!1!1!1!!) of them have been build. Yes, ESA spent billions on R&D and then it kills the programme after five flight. Presumably because ATV is now too "old" and we need something "new". I am using quotation marks because I consider these views and arguments completely ridiculous and absurd, especially considering the funding situation. I want to scream something like "If you want to do something new and innovative, build SKYLON, otherwise STFU and stick with what works!"

Also, I strongly suspect that the choice of solid fuel stages has a lot to do with the French SLBM programme

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[1] - Although the fact that the JWST is to be launched on Ariane-5 does seem to prove that there are quite worthwhile science missions which do require a medium-heavy lift rocket. If ESA got more money for more heavy-class planetary missions, I am pretty sure they'd utilize Ariane-5's lift potential to its absolute fullest. Alas, that's not likely to happen.

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As for the Ariane 6 itself, I don't know why they didn't take a cue from the Space Shuttle SRB's and make them modular. What I mean is that it's (apparently) pretty straightforward to add segments to the boosters to make them more powerful. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to subtract segments as well and then viola, you have a much more flexible design. As it stands they are kind of locked into a set lift capacity and concurrent mission profiles. Which is nuts because no one knows how the market is going to unfold over the next 5 years, much less 10. And I think you'd agree with me that it's going to take a lot longer (and a lot more money) to develop and fly the Ariane 6 than they project. That's almost a given.

I don't know how easy the solid boosters are to change. AFAIK it took ATK a lot of time and money to add one more segment to the shuttle SRBs for the use on Ares-5/SLS. I believe that the ESA guys want to use VEGA-like solid rocket stages on Ariane-6, which means these will have filament-wound composite casings and electro-mechanical nozzle actuators. I think they just want to stick to one size to save money (at the expense of the launcher's flexibility, of course).

In any case, you're absolutely right about the schedule. It took a lot of time to develop even the small VEGA. I dread to imagine how delayed and over-budget the Ariane-6 will end up being by the time it's deployed (or cancelled ).

As for what you said about competing with the Falcon 1.2, yeah, I thought exactly what you said myself when I read an article on the Ariane 6. It's going to hit the market much later, cost more and do more or less the same thing as the Falcon so how do they expect this to work out financially? Sure, SpaceX could goof up but then there is the Antares rocket from Orbital, the possibility that we'll see Angara launches at some point and so on... It just doesn't add up for Arianespace at all. :\

It doesn't. That's why the Germans (and many others) are opposed to the whole idea. In the end, however, the French will probably make it happen because in ESA at least, they call the shots. It is in their narrow interest to build Ariane-6, no matter if it actually makes sense commercially or from a strategic standpoint.

All we can do is hope that the saner heads in ESA join forces with the Germans and block the insanity before it actually enters development stage.

It really comes off as 'I HATE NASA SO HARD', though since I just read it I'm going to have to wait and let it digest before I pass judgment. What do you think?

Oh and this rebuttal makes a lot of sense to me:

I'll have a look. Although, it makes more sense to me to rather travel to a larger NEO and study it in its "natural environment" instead of trying to capture a free floating boulder. Such a mission would of course be larger in scope and riskier, but it would be a good dress rehearsal for near-term flights to the moons of Mars which Obama promised, as well as for a potential piloted mission to deflect an asteroid that actually poses a threat to Earth.

I agree with everything you said pretty much. And you're spot on with the nationalistic stuff - he thinks it makes sense to push this 'wild west'/'frontier homestead' image of Mars and that just doesn't fly with the part of the world that isn't the US. No one but Americans have any real attachment to that kind of ideal and even then the average Joe American doesn't have any attachment to it. It's also flat-out off-putting to other nationalities as well as he downplays the importance of international cooperation that will be crucial for any manned Mars mission. He acts like the US can go it alone and we clearly don't have the political will to do that and probably won't anytime soon.

Yeah, exactly. As I said, I think he's stuck in late 1980s/early 1990s thinking, refusing to accept that space had become much more international since those times (as symbolized by the ISS, which Zubrin derides at every opportunity). I am quite allergic to his favourite saying about the 'sons and daughters of Chinese peasants getting to college'. I mean, seriously, how condescending is that? China may have been pretty backwards even in late 1980s, but today there are probably many more people studying sciences, engineering, maths, information tech., etc. and graduating from these fields each year than in the US.

I also sense a lot of... I don't know how to describe it in English, but what I mean is that he always tries to spin everything to suit his Mars-only view. He's normally pretty nationalistic, but when NASA pulls out of ESA's ExoMars, he's suddenly all about the importance of international cooperation, lambasting NASA for betraying its European "allies". Not that I disagree with him on that particular issue, but it seems a bit hypocritical.

On the other hand (to balance my criticism), I quite agree with him on what he says about the way development of hardware for government missions should be funded - by means of free competition, no "we'll give you $5 billion a year for the next 10 years and hope that you build us a rocket". Using fixed-cost contracts awarded to those willing to meet the deadline seem to me as a less corrupt and slack-ridden way of getting what NASA needs for its ambitious missions. Just compare the difference in costs of the COTS programme and the SLS programme. SpaceX has boasted on numerous occasions that they could build a heavy-lift launch vehicle for a fraction of the cost of the SLS, and I see no reason not to give them an opportunity to prove it.

I wonder what his take is on all the new companies entering the launch market such as SpaceX and Orbital, etc. He's probably enthusiastic about it but if it were European or Chinese companies doing it I'm pretty sure he'd be irate.

Oh, you can see his duality on that issue as well. He is often dismissive of what the "new space" companies do, UNLESS he needs to take some of their latest successes and use them to drum up support for his Mars Direct-like efforts. When asked directly, he's often quite evasive about whether he thinks commercial sector should play a role in piloted Mars exploration.

This is why many people say that he's essentially burned all the bridges behind him and has zero traction in the field today. On one hand, he criticizes NASA so much that nobody there is willing to listen to him seriously, on the other his insistence on government leadership in the Mars programme distances him from the private space entrepreneurs. He simply has an extraordinary gift to anger people who can make his dreams a reality

I for one am waiting for his comments when the 'sons and daughters of Chinese peasants' plant the red flag on the Moon on live TV, after which they retire to their comfy lunar base for a tasty Chinese dish. I expect something dismissive, since he believes that the Moon is utterly irrelevant and loves to quip about exporting poop to the Moon because it would be more valuable than gold there...

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I've been hearing lately that the US congress is considering designating the entire friggin moon as a national landmark or preserve just to protect the Apollo landing sites. Probably overblown, but I'm too lazy to look it up, so any truth to that?