co-authored with Douglas Dechow
On Tuesday, May 22, we wrote about the successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon capsule. Since then, Dragon synced up its orbit with the International Space Station and, on May 25, berthed.
This low-Earth-orbit hook-up isn't technically docking. The space shuttle docked by moving closer and closer to the space station, astronauts piloting the orbiter to the right spot and latching on. Instead of Dragon maneuvering its own way toward the Harmony module, the International Space Station's 60-foot robotic arm reached out and grabbed it on that Friday morning. Dragon is no shuttle, with all the good and not-so-good that implies.
Unlike the shuttle, which landed like an airplane, Dragon splashes down in the ocean like Apollo. That's just what it did on the morning on May 31, pretty much where SpaceX said it would and less than a year after the shuttle's penultimate mission.
We knew all these things about how Dragon is supposed to work already. The day after we watched Atlantis lift off at Kennedy Space Center for the last-ever shuttle mission last July (see that launch video and launch photos at Lofty Ambitions blog), we visited SpaceX Launch Control Center, which shares its parking lot with the Air Force Space and Missile Museum. On the grounds that day, under a tent, was the Dragon spacecraft that had orbited the Earth in late 2010 and returned, not too much worse for wear, though certainly scorched by re-entry. We wondered then, with space shuttle Atlantis orbiting overhead, whether Dragon was really going to be the next stage of U.S. manned spaceflight, whether SpaceX could manage the task and, if so, how quickly.
Of course, less than a year after the shuttle's last mission, on May 26 (at 2:53a.m. here in California), residents of the space station opened the hatch of Dragon, one step in a really successful mission, the first of its kind by a private company. The six crew members of Expedition 31 -- three Russians, two Americans, and a Dane -- subsequently unloaded a thousand pounds of cargo, including science experiments developed by students. One experiment (from California, of course) aims to determine whether wine ferments faster in microgravity, in hopes of discovering that fermented foods can be produced more quickly. Another experiment studies the effects of microgravity on treatments for bone loss. The International Space Station is, after all, a global science laboratory, and SpaceX understands the need to get the next generations interested in space exploration as well as what are referred to as the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering, and math. So Dragon and SpaceX continue the work of the shuttle and NASA.
What was really important about this mission, though, is that the crew filled Dragon with cargo to come back to Earth. None of the other re-supply vehicles can take cargo from the space station and return it safely to the ground. All but Soyuz burn up on re-entry, and as Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, reiterated in a news briefing while Dragon was still in space, Soyuz is designed to transport people, with cargo capacity roughly the size of a knapsack. In fact, when asked about Dragon's carrying capacity, Musk said that, if it needs to be bigger, they'll make it bigger. In this way, Dragon is like the shuttle, and that's why it's necessary for this present moment.
So, what's next? For Dragon, another demonstration mission late this year. For SpaceX, there's buzz about an IPO, though Musk tried to quell anticipation, saying that he'd feel comfortable with that only when they are able to "launch every month" and, therefore, "had good predictability about the future." And Sierra Nevada is working on Dream Chaser, a spaceplane akin to the shuttle but with a design based on the HL-20 lifting body, to rival SpaceX's Dragon, though test flights aren't scheduled until 2016.
The United States plans to use the International Space Station through 2020, perhaps as long as 2028. That's between eight and sixteen more years. Then what? We ask because the first component of the space station was launched in 1998, and people moved in on November 1, 2000. That's twelve years to build it, not including development that occurred earlier. If we want a manned space program to follow this low-Earth-orbit science project and international achievement, we must plan now.
Friday, May 25, Dragon's berth-day, marked the anniversary of President Kennedy's speech to Congress in 1961, urging support for, among other things, the idea that "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." Eight years later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. But we no longer face the same "adversaries of freedom." The International Space Station represents global cooperation, not a Space Race we must win. Still, Kennedy's rule of thumb for making such big decisions holds:
[T]here is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.
Is NASA's Orion capsule atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket the next big step? Will SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, reportedly with twice the carrying capacity of the Delta IV Heavy, eclipse NASA's plans? Should we reach toward an asteroid, the Langrange points, or Mars? No matter what the nation decides regarding the future of manned spaceflight, the success of Dragon these past couple of weeks have established that SpaceX will have a role to play in that future.
SpaceX Dragon Capsule Successfully Returns to Earth, Makes History
ISS Welcomes SpaceX Dragon — First Private Spacecraft at Station
SpaceX Dragon capsule heading back to Earth
SpaceX's Dragon begins fiery descent to splashdown and mission's end
As Dragon capsule splashes down, SpaceX begins to convert skeptics
SpaceX's Dragon spaceship begins its fiery descent to splashdown
If and when Falcon is certified that way, it has a hugely easier job to cover both the -9 and -Heavy versions. Given the relative list prices of Falcon and Delta, flying humans on Delta would make little sense, unless it's to be a hugely expensive publicity stunt.
The big issue with Delta (besides the price) is that the RS-68 engine has an ablative nozzle, so it's not practical to ground-test the engine. Since the nozzle liner burns away, it can only be fired once. That's not such a good operational characteristic for an engine that would loft humans.
Of course the ATK Liberty, based on a Shuttle-derived SRB, has the same limitation where it can't be test-fired before launch, but certain factions within NASA tends to believe that solid rockets are inherently less complex and more reliable than liquids, and the SRBs are already "human-rated" by being grandfathered in from the Shuttle program.
One issue with Atlas is that there are maybe two dozen or fewer RD-180 engines left in the world, and who knows what ULA plans to do when their supply runs out. There may not be a long-term future for Atlas, because the U.S. has nothing comparable to the RD-180.
If you want RD-180s, I'd consider paying the manufacturer to make more, even if it means calling people back from retirement.
However, SpaceX's seeming steady success makes all this moot. They have the potential to eat so much of ULA's breakfast that it'll all be over by lunchtime.
In the matter of the RS-68, I'm not clear on what you mean by "ground-test." Are you referring to the ability that SpaceX demonstrated, I think on April 30th, during the pad-based test-fire? I don't think that ability is a deal-breaker for NASA. Whether or not it's good policy, NASA seems to have made themselves quite comfortable with booster rockets that can only be fired once.
My understanding w.r.t. human rating the Atlas V is that co-production of RD-180's would be considered mandatory. I know that there was a co-production effort a few years ago that was deemed a "success," even though no RD-180's were produced. My assumption would be that they (P&W, I think) gathered enough design data to produce a motor if required. That would certainly be a lengthy and expensive process.
Do you have the recent quotes from Elon Musk about education to share? In the past, he's talked about the need for less lecture and more engaged classrooms, but those of us in education have been talking about and doing that for a while. I've seen the commencement speeches by Steve Jobs and Neil Gaiman, both of whom were also drop-outs of sorts but who had good things to say to the graduates they addressed.
I don't care what Musk thinks or says, but it bothers me very much that Morley Safer fluffs him while he says it. It amounted to CBS News taking a stand against education. It's a little shocking, but not really surprising. Watch any CBS news or news-ish program lately and see that it is shockingly right wing, i.e., it is dishonest and/or destructive. I'd file the Musk interview under destructive.
======== =
It all depends on the 'burdens' it takes...
Is is $5 billion taxpayer 'burden' for a private enterprise, efficient, innovative Mars mission in 3 years via SpaceX...
Or is a $500 billion taxpayer 'burden' for an earmarked pork driven, wasteful Fed Govt, Mars Mission a decade from now via Nasa..
With private enterprise involved, the pork driven wasteful Govt monopoly ended, the questions are entirely different...
4 decades of miserable Nasa pork/waste, not a single American getting beyond low earth orbit... leaving American unable to either resupply ISS or even get an American to orbit..
The question before SpaceX, is must we double down on another 40 years of massive Govt/Nasa incompetence, waste, pork, futility
Now, we get to choose between funding private enterprise, SpaceX, efficiency, innovation, competence, spirit
or
fund more Govt/Nasa shameless waste, pork like SLS/Orion.