After
the happenings of the last weekend and having read about all the things NASA
have been wibbling on about in the last few months and also knowing how awful
NASA has become in managing spacecraft design I’ve had a few thoughts on
what I think should happen…
Firstly, as a stop-gap the shuttle has to keep flying, it’s the only thing
we have which can do the tasks necessary in human spaceflight currently.
Secondly, the US government should request bids from all over the world for
two separate launch vehicles., a space taxi and a space truck. The former
would be manned, the later would be human habitable in space but would not
be manned during the acsent or decent stages. All vehicles should be able
to be flown unpiloted and the space taxis should be able to dock with each
other and be able to stay on standby for long periods of time (rescue missions).
Any design should be concidered, however radical and all parts of the spacecraft
should be designed to be reusable and have longevity built in.
Now, here are the contraversial bits:-
(1) All consortia must supply at their own cost one fully operational prototype
to NASA for a comparative “Rain Hill Trials” of all vehicles. (The Rain Hill
Trials were a comparative test of different designs of steam locomotive in
1829, Stephenson’s engine “Rocket” won.)
During the design and build stages of the vehicles full access to all NASA
staff and fecilities would be free of charge so as to offset development
costs.
(2) All designs will be fully disclosed to the public and competitors. Many eyes will help see flaws in the design.
(3) NASA may decide to buy a production run of any one or more of the designs after the trials.
(4) Once designed, the consortia may sell the vehicles to anyone in the world
who wants to buy them only restricted by export regulations inposed by the
United Nations.
(5) Crew safety is paramount. Options for safe crew recovery from all possible
situations should be catered for. (eg. Hardened crew quarters during decent
which have their own secondary heat shielding and are capable of sustaining
life in such an incident as that which played out on Saturday.)
the US government should request bids from all over the world for two separate launch vehicles
Why do you want to privatise the process? What’s your rationale? And what companies could possibly have both the capital and the technology to do this? I simply don’t think any company out there has sufficient fund to develop such an expensive product from their own pockets. Boeing or whoever are dwarves compared with the kind of company you would need. Even Microsoft would struggle, at it’s got $40 billion in the bank.
And aren’t these types of private developments when funded by the public sector notorious for going over budget? All the really big engineering projects always seem to end up with a total cost triple that estimated, whether here or in the US. Be it the Eurofighter, or a new IT system for Government, a new motorwaym, they always seem to mushroom in cost.
(2) All designs will be fully disclosed to the public and competitors. Many eyes will help see flaws in the design.
I suspect you’re paraphrasing ESR here. (A man I’ve never agreed with). In my experience I really don’t believe this is ever true in any situation because few people can be bothered to go through a large amount of technical information in detail required to spot non-trivial errors. I really think it’s a flawed concept.
The discussion at our lunch concentrated on apparently how expensive the shuttle has become to run compared with the dirt cheap, Swiss Robinson, sellotape-n-glue Russian rockets. Something I hadn’t heard before.
I’m not sure the shuttle has necessarily had it’s day. Maybe it could do with an overhaul, but not an entirely new concept and design.
My idea is not so much to privatise the process as to get the politicians out of the way and stop the sorts of project overruns generated by the normal US government projects. A great deal of the overruns are caused by either supersonic goalposts caused by political meddling or by contractors taking the government for a ride and wasting money (as it’s not their money).
If the companies are spending their own money they are FAR more likely to be frugal. Of course, the Boeings of this world have their own internal political stupidities.
As for costs of development. A great deal of the problems of cost are not necessarily as great as you think, at least for a non-man rated project. There are a number of small projects currently in development at a slow rate. The big costs come with beaucracy and more managers than engineers. The biggest cost being wages. If such a project as I suggest did take place it’s quite likely the Boeings wouldn’t be at the front of the pack.
With the promotion of the idea of selling the spacecraft to other space agencies as well as NASA (eg. China and Japan and maybe even ESA) it could be made to look like a profitable thing to do.
As for the “Many eyes,” yes most people won’t look in detail, but people with an axe to grind could and probably would, especially people from competing consortia.
The important thing is that the politicians would and should have no control over the design and implementation of the them, only in the final choice AFTER the competition has finished and the comparitive tests concluded.
The current shuttle was designed to be cheap to design and build and worry about the running costs later. It was a very poor camel designed by a committee. It does nothing at all well and most things pretty badly. There is a place for the cheap and cheerful 40 year old Russian technology. It’s reliable and reasonably cheap, in the short term, but it is restrictive and expensive in the long term as the whole enterprise has stagnated. Sometimes you need slow evolution, sometimes you do need to jump into the abyss.
This is very similar to the state of the railway industry in the 1820’s.