Here is a perfect example of huge cost savings that solids will give us over liquids. The running total for Endeavour so far is $6.5 million.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...ay-record.html

Are you suggesting that all LV's should be solid only? If not, then why not?

It is very VERY rare for STS to have this many scrubs. If the whole thing were solid-fulled, there would still have been scrubs, and there would still have be incurred costs for those scrubs. The material cost of the LH2 and LO2 is frankly lost in the noise floor of the total budget for the shuttle program. I'm not sure what the cost of a scrub would be without LH2/LO2 to unload - but it would not have been ZERO as you infer. If it were Ares 1 on the pad - there would have been scrub costs as well. What's the Ares 1 upper stage using? Liquid Fuels. So significant costs would be incurred both in personnel (like Endeavor) and indeed, LOX and LH2 (like Endeavor) . I see no reason to suspect that 5 scrubs of an Ares 1 launch wouldn't cost several million dollars as well.

Given that, where is your HUGE cost saving coming from? How can you honestly claim that in a similar situation, Ares 1, for example, would be $6.5m cheaper for 5 scrubs.

The commercial launch industry is dominated by liquid fuelled vehicles (Falcon 1, 9, Soyuz, Proton, Zenit) some with strap on solids (Atlas, Delta, Ariane) Are they all doing it wrong? Are Vega, Taurus and Pegasus the only LV's in the world to be doing it right?

Per kilo to LEO - can you provide proof that solids provide 'huge cost savings'.

What do you know that Elon Musk and the Space X team don't, for example. If solids really are THE way to go and have MASSIVE savings.....why are SpaceX using liquids?

(FWIW - my prefered architecture is Direct, with SpaceX / Dragon doing ISS grunt-work. I'm not a rocket scientist, I'm not pretending to be one, but I have an opinion based on the figures and feedback regarding the various architectures.)

I should think that although SRB's are good, convenient lift, you have to at basic know that Liquid fueled rockets are the fine tuning accelerant of choice.
It's all about control. And yes, the fuel costs are indeed lost in the noise floor.
Dan

It seems that as long as we are discussing solids and liquids, we may as well mention hybrids.

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exp...tml?c=y&page=3

The fact that the upper stage(s) still use liquid doesn’t change the fact that it’s a lot of money being spent. A solid first stage would just be sitting there without any additional carrying costs.

Plus if you factor in that the SSME only provide 15% of the total thrust, the costs would be significantly higher if it were an all liquid fueled launch.

There's one way to save money on tanking/detanking: hypergolics!

The liquids may provide only 15% of the initial thrust, but they provide the vast majority of the delta-v.

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samkent - could you tackle all the questions I posed please.

According to that article, the cost of wasted liquid propellents is about $500 THOUSAND per launch scrub.

By comparision, the mission cost is roughly $500 MILLION.

So the propellant cost per launch scrub is about 1/1000th of the mission cost. How would a pure solid-propellent booster be a "huge" cost savings regarding launch scrubs?

What's this $700,000 for personnel? Is this some kind of temporary employment, people who only get paid per day the Shuttle is on the pad? Work hazard bonuses?

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As much as I think a lot of that may be budgetary and allotments, there may be some reality in there.
Since so much is done by contractors, there could be some kind of temporary employment.
And; I'm sure there might be some overtime involved.

Althoug; in the financial world. Shifting resources from one budget line to another is really a cost. Although; the reality in our world is that there is a potential savings in another area that wouldn't have that allocation. At that point, you would start to need to add the complexity of the cost of idle time across all those areas.

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When they found the leaks in the tank(s) (sorry, I don't follow Nasa / shuttle news that closely), someone from Nasa had made a statement that they were considering the possibility of sabotage. Not that they thought these incidents were, but it got them thinking about the "what if" scenario.

One of the reasons they said it could happen was because many people are contracted specifically for the launch. The longer 'til launch, the longer they get paid. So there would certainly be motivation there to delay said launch.

So I guess the answer to your question is yes, there's temporary employment. Maybe not so much that only get paid on launch day, but there's lots of jobs that only need filled until the rocket is launched, then there's no longer a need for those people.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

This does not mean there's a $700k personnel cost SOLELY for propellant-related factors.

More likely each launch scrub incurs $700k additional personnel cost for various tasks.

Well when our chopper flight was delayed overnight and we had to be put up in Lerwick, I'm sure the hotel bill alone for the company must have approached $700k.

The first stage should be.


No. But Scout was an all solid launch system from Earth to orbit. No launch delays from turbo pump sensors and such. No additional costs for de tanking fuel. They just waited for the weather to clear.

It’s easier to obtain money to build something you know than something new.

Why only the first stage. Let us consider Ares 1. It would have tanking and de tanking costs. Surely if you're so damn sure that Solids are THE way to put everything into orbit, then you should be writing to your representative demanding the swop out of the J1X with a solid fulled upper stage.

After all, tanking and detanking WILL occur with Ares 1 if it ever gets to the pad - I promise you that. It WILL occur on Ares V (Or Direct).

No proposal out there is going for just solids. So tanking and detainking WILL still occur.

So from where do you get your 'huge savings', exactly?


SpaceX didn't 'know' either. It's was a startup company. They could have done either. They didn't.

From Fox:

This presumably adds up quickly, I didn't think of the abort sites.

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They still need to make substantial once in orbit.

Ask any project manager and they will tell you that saving millions of dollars is a huge savings. Plus look at the scale back of infrastructure. Check out the Taurus launch vehicle.

http://www.orbital.com/SpaceLaunch/Taurus/

From their brochure,


And

You can’t dismiss the benefits of solids. They are coming and I predict in a decade the majority of first stages will be solid.

You mean this one?

http://www.orbital.com/SpaceLaunch/T..._history.shtml

75% success rate. Hasn't managed to successfully launch a fleck of paint into orbit in over 5 years. Hard to believe the world isn't beating a path to Orbital's door.


Yeah I know those new-fangled Blu-Ray DVD's are all the rage, but I'm still convinced Betamax will make a comeback.

Yeah, but one launch? That means nothing about the success rate.
You can also say that they only had 1 failure in the last half of the program's lifespan.


If solids are so bad, then why are strap-ons all solid?

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First of all, no one is suggesting SRB's are bad. Secondly, not all strap-on's are solid. India's PSLV/GSLV uses liquid boosters with a solid first stage. But to suggest that in the next decade the majority of rockets in the near future will be using solid first stages seems ... unlikely.

Besides Ares, virtually every launcher in regular use and under development (Delta II, Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Proton, Zenit, Angara, Ariane V, Vega, Long March, GSLV Mk III) all use liquids.

The only exceptions are the current Indian rockets and converted ICBM/SLBM's like Minotaur.

Picking one solid launch vehicle as an example of solid launch vehicles, and concentrating on it's failure rate certainly comes across as suggesting that SRBs are bad.
Granted, it may be the the closest example of where were heading, but how many have attempted it? And; why have they not attempted it?

Ok; "all" was said of ignorance of India's booster, but there is a solid history of solid strap-ons.
But that doesn't imply better or worse. It could just mean that the history of knowledge and experience outweighs the unknown challenges of development.

How many of those are from the ground up new designs, and how many of those are adaptations of earlier technologies?

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You are yet to make a case that Ares 1 would be 'millions' better off.

The weird thing is that solid rockets came first, ie fireworks. Was the venturing to liquid rockets and technological dead end?

Just how much is NASA going to spend studying the reason for this latest foam shedding incident? I’ll bet it will be millions by itself. Add to it the huge amount of cost for the fuel loss for the tanking/detanking. Never mind the labor costs. The millions are adding up.

Old habits die hard. Should we keep the internal combustion engine just because we know how to make it work the way we want?

That’s not what NASA is all about. NASA is about new ways and new ideas. Maybe you were happy with the Gemini/Atlas combo?

But that isn't an issue for Constellation which is of more conventional configuration.

Just saw this discussed on another forum:

July 17, 2009.
USAF: Orion Crew Will Not Survive Early Mission Abort.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/20...rion_crew.html

USAF 45th Space Wing Study: Capsule~100%-Fratricide Environments (Implications for NASA's Ares-1 and Crew)
STATUS REPORT
Date Released: Thursday, July 16, 2009
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=31792


Bob Clark

That is specific to the Shuttle. That is not a problem specific to liquid fueled rockets. Direct, for example, would not have that problem.

Again - please show evidence that Ares 1 would be $6.5M better off after 5 scrubs.

Thanks for posting this... I was actually about to post it myself. I think that's pretty much the final blow to the Ares I. For those who didn't read the links, the Air Force concluded that, based on studying the failure of a similar rocket, the cloud of flaming solid propellant debris from an early abort (up to 60 seconds) of the Ares I would envelop the capsule all the way down to the ground, melting the launch escape parachutes with ~100% chance of killing the crew.

Sure, but R-7 derivatives with liquid-fueled strap-on boosters have been in service continuously for the past fifty years (Soyuz). The Long March 2 and 3 can use liquid strap-ons. Some variants of the Ariane 4 also used liquid-fueled boosters, or a mix of liquid and solid. While most strap-ons have been solid, liquid boosters aren't unheard of.

Um...unless ELV has made some drastic changes in the past couple of years, the first three stages of Vega will be solid. I'll point out that it's not a large launcher—it's projected to have less performance than the smallest Delta II in ULA's catalog. Arianespace intends to use it to cover the small satellite market, with Soyuz in the middle and Ariane 5 for heavy-lift and GTO.

That depends on how you define it. In the broadest sense, every launch vehicle is based on earlier technologies.

More specifically, what changes are necessary for a launcher or stage to be considered "new"? The Delta II is considered to be a descendant of the Thor IRBM, but it's like the old joke about Washington's hatchet. There's been so many improvements and upgrades that it's now a very different rocket.

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