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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 28 2016, @10:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the whippersnappers dept.

Ars Technica reports on an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics forum in Salt Lake City with the provocative title, "Launch Vehicle Reusability: Holy Grail, Chasing Our Tail, or Somewhere in Between?"

Moderator Dan Dumbacher said of the panel, "We purposefully tried to get a good cross-section of those who have been working on it." However, the panel included no one actually building reusable rockets and relied heavily on the old-guard perspective. Dumbacher himself, now a professor at Purdue University, previously managed development of the Space Launch System rocket for NASA, and he expressed doubt about the viability of reusable launch vehicles in 2014 by essentially saying that because NASA couldn't do it, it was difficult to see how others could.

[...] The panel featured three men tied to the reusable but costly space shuttle in one way or another. Gary Payton, a visiting professor at the United States Air Force Academy, is a former shuttle astronaut. Doug Bradley is chief engineer of advanced space & launch at Aerojet Rocketdyne, which built the shuttle's reusable engines. And Ben Goldberg is director of technology at Orbital ATK, which manufactured the shuttle's solid rocket boosters.

The discussion was predictably negative, even dismissive. (Think tones of IBM, Honeywell, Burroughs, Amdahl, DEC when a couple of punks debuted a new "computer" at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in Menlo Park.) But, reality happens...

So where were the representatives of the new space companies actually building reusable launch systems in 2016 and flying them into space? Dumbacher addressed that question more than halfway through the two-hour discussion: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic were all invited, but "unfortunately were unable to attend due to other commitments." Perhaps instead of debating the question, they're just getting on with the job.[emphasis added]


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 28 2016, @01:10PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 28 2016, @01:10PM (#381161)

    The market is bifurcating.

    Theres a market of getting stuff into orbit cheaply and safe enough and theres the previously exclusively dominant jobs program of having at least one contract in every congressmans district while avoiding all risk with a theme park of we're gonna go to space, err not really but we're gonna burn shitloads of money LARPing and sometimes almost accidentally accomplish something. Previously the job program market was utterly dominant, but the "real space companies" are growing like crazy and are pretty successful. So thats the top down way to see marketplace divergence.

    For a bottom up view, look at how each groups metrics are not just widely different but don't even make sense to the other group, like trying to usefully compare the metrics for organic tofu to the metrics for helicopter rotor bearings. For example the jobs program can be seen on "this week in nasa" press releases where success is defined by having the politician leader of the org who's probably never differentiated an equation in his life or earned a buck outside government "service" visit with congressmen at grand openings of new facilities and new contract signing in various congressional districts. Meanwhile the excitedly reported metrics for the real space companies are all this obscure Isp figure of merit for various engine nozzles and $/Kg into LEO and stuff like that which the jobs program doesn't really care about externally.

    So sure, if you're running a jobs program making a big deal about dropping capex is idiotic for them to pursue, the purpose of the jobs program is to give jobs so ideally every piece of hardware is vaporized or on the bottom of the ocean because that maximizes jobs. Meanwhile its the guys running real space businesses have no motivation to throw profit away by destroying valuable boosters. The scrap value alone of a booster is interesting to contemplate. Fuel is cheap, metal is expensive, and R+D hours are staggeringly expensive, so throwing away some fuel to get a literal mountain of slightly used metal is viable...

    Note that both separate markets NEED each other. The jobs program is ineffective but sometimes they have goals to reach that requires actual success so contracting out is going to increase over time. The real space company needs someone to do outreach and PR on a very large scale and be utterly ineffective to provide the pitiful baseline for them to excel beyond, also the jobs program pukes cash everywhere and sometimes they need a little dough.

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