Maciej Ceglowski on the Sad History of STS
I remember laughing when I read John’s post yesterday:
And, before I get flamed out of existence by my friends in the aerospace industry, let me point out that I think the space program was great, like, when I was in grade school. But come on Shuttle fans, give it up… we need a new vision of space exploration.
Gee, John, were you thinking of me just then? 
There’s no doubt that I’m a fan of Shuttle, in many ways. I mean, heck … when you work on cargo transfer to the International Space Station, as I do, and the only heavy cargo lift vehicle you have at your disposal is the Shuttle system, well … you’re pre-disposed to liking it.
But let me say that Maciej Ceglowski’s review of the sad history of STS is spot on in almost every regard. Appropriately titled “A Rocket to Nowhere”, Ceglowski gives his readers an excellent run-down of all the things that are wrong with STS, including one I always forget to mention when I talk about STS’s flaws: the polar orbit design constraint.
The Air Force was only too happy to agree, but at a crippling price. What the Air Force wanted to launch was spy satellites – lots of them, bulky telescopes with heavy mirrors, the bigger the better – and it wanted to launch them in an orbit over the Earth’s poles, so they could snoop over the maximum amount of Red territory. This meant NASA had to go back to the drawing board, since polar orbits would require a heavier orbiter than the Shuttle design had anticipated 2 , which in turn meant using a bigger rocket at launch, and dissipating more heat during re-entry.
Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy Space Center – it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. And because some of the Air Force’s military missions involved capturing a Soviet satellite on the sly and landing after one orbit, the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry, so that it could catch up with the rapidly eastbound Air Force base underneath it. This meant bigger wings, which in turn meant more weight, an even more powerful rocket, and again a more complicated heat shield.
After it became clear that the Space Shuttle was going to also be the Space Tug, it was clear that there were going to be massive compromises in the system. Any aerospace designer will tell you that the efficiency of any vehicle at doing any mission is inversely proportional to the number of missions it must perform. Simply put, Shuttle was asked to do too much.
[On that four-piece system: the original idea was a Space Station, serviced by a Space Shuttle and a Space Tug that would bring up crew and cargo, respectively. There would also be a Space Telescope, which did end up being developed as the Hubble Space Telescope.]
One thing that Ceglowski doesn’t note—probably because he didn’t know it—was that Columbia had been pulled off of ISS duty. Why? Orbiter airframes are rated for only so many flights—past that, they’re to be retired. A flight up to ISS puts the airframe under more stress than does a free flight out over the Atlantic, purely because the STS can’t make full use of the Earth’s rotation. ISS is at a much higher orbital inclination because Baikonour Cosmodrome was used as the launch constraint. An ISS launch hugs the East Coast before taking a right at Nova Scotia, rather than going out over Africa.
My only quibble with Ceglowski? He takes a swipe at the use of solid rockets for STS. I think that he’s wrong there: solids are better for the application they’re used for. Did design constraints push us to augment the SSME’s with the SRB’s? Yes, and that’s unfortunate. But, given the design constraints in place, the SRB’s are great for what we need them to do: provide peak thrust power in the early part of the flight transition.
And yes, I say that with a straight face, thinking back to Challenger. That was just a huge mistake on a we-must-launch-now mode.
Now, where do all these constraints come in? Politics. The Air Force played politics with Congress and NASA on constraining the Shuttle. [Of course, NASA needed the work at the time, since the Space Station was far off ... we thought we'd have it in the late 1980s, and we finally got it a decade later, when Shuttle was almost old enough to buy cigarettes in most states.] Flight decisions were made for political and not technical reasons. [The old story about a push to fly Challenger on 26-Jan to support a State of the Union Address by Reagan is disputed, but it generally rings true.]
I want to thank Maciej for being an even-handed critic of Shuttle. I am ready for Shuttle to go away … I’m far readier for a Vision for Space Exploration that breathes new life into NASA. But I also get to have fun in helping build carriers for other cargo rockets. And all that fun starts later this month for me. 
Interesting stuff, Geof. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next generation space vehicles will look like.
So, 13 hours down, 11 to go…
August 6th, 2005 at 19:33Nope, I’m not to twelve hours yet, man. I’m in Central like you.
The early next-generation launche vehicle designs I’ve seen, Chris, are all Shuttle-derived—but they’re all stacks rather than side-launched. I think those will be good designs at the end of the day.
August 6th, 2005 at 19:35Dang, I forgot – was thinking you were Eastern. Well, get the caffine out, it should be a fun night. I assure you that I won’t be sticking around for all of it.
Stacks, huh? That means that they’re piggybacked with a cargo jet until they get to some high altitude, and then they kick in the boosters from there? Interesting. I haven’t followed spaceflight stuff too closely in the past, but my interest is developing. Let’s just hope they can get this current bird down… then we can go from there.
August 6th, 2005 at 19:47Awww, c’mon.
Nope, a stack in my parlance is putting everything atop the rocket, just like the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo days. That kind of air boost is not going to work inexpensively, especially for cargo.
August 6th, 2005 at 19:50Oh, gotcha. The old roman candle idea… except it burns from the bottom instead of the top. I’ll have to look into it further when I get some time.
August 6th, 2005 at 19:57I’m describing this badly. Let me just link to an old entry.
August 6th, 2005 at 20:00Thanks, that link explains it very well.
August 6th, 2005 at 20:05You’re welcome. I’m not surprised that my powers of explanation have begun to leave me.
August 6th, 2005 at 20:07Um… yes. I was. You and all the other crazy Huntsville people there. I don’t remember the conversation, I don’t remember the topic, I can’t even remember if it was about the Shuttle, Nasa, or space exploration in general, but at some point someone said something, and then someone made an angry-sarcastic comment, and I remember thinking to myself: “Self, NEVER criticize NASA, the Shuttle, space exploration, space, planets, comets, astronauts, asteroids, Centipede, Frogger, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Star Trek or any show on the Sci-Fi channel within a 100 mile radius of Huntsville. Ever.”
August 7th, 2005 at 00:11You can criticize most any of that around me, man, as long as you’re not criticizing my job directly. [But what do you care about hardware carriers, anyway?] But yeah … I’ve mellowed, too.
August 7th, 2005 at 00:17The biggest problem with the STS is its huge standing army. You guys, specifically. C’mon, 10,000 people to maintain four, no, three orbiters? That is why STS costs $20,000/lb of payload, the highest of ANY launcher today. The shuttle was supposed to lower launch costs by a factor of ten. The liquid fuel costs less than a million, the ET costs a half million to build, and a few million more for the SRB fuels. 99% of the launch cost are thousands of union bodies on the ground grazing on donuts and making mistakes.
The new launchers are an improvement safety-wise, but I’ll truly be impressed with it when they lay off a good 5,000-8,000 of you guys as surplusage. THAT will be a measure of the improvement of the new boosters over the shuttle.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:48Mike: I don’t work STS directly. I work payloads and carriers that ride inside STS.
That said, I don’t disagree that there’s some, ah, largesse in the STS-related workforce. When one considers that the theory-of-the-moment with the PAL ramp foam is that workers damaged it, well … those workers are unionized.
[Here's where I stop to readily admit that I'm biased against unionized workers in this sphere: not only do I work in a company with a non-union shop, but my father was also the target of striking union workers at Monsanto back in the 1960s in Mississippi.]
I wouldn’t lay all of the cost burden on the unionized workforce, though: there were some significant design choices that reduced any hope of cost savings—choices well outlined by Ceglowski in the linked article above. I’d urge you to read it if you have not already done so.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:53Now, you’ll likely make it through the cuts, though payload should be trimmed a bit as assembling in a dumb fairing is far easier than putting it in the shuttle. Primarily the OMS and TPS departments should be completely axed by at least 95-99%. Vehicle assembly should obviously be less difficult, so trim that group by 25-50%. Landing gear: 100% gone. Wings & flight controls: gone. All the personnel for airfield recovery: gone (the SRB recovery people can recover the capsule too). Launch control: 30-60% smaller.
I’d also make the astronaut corps a volunteer organization, like a volunteer fire department: there are plenty of people around the country willing to do it for nothing, if not pay big money for the experience. Our government has no need to pay people for the honor.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:56Well, the costs of going to EELV’s shift things a bit: you do less engineering to make sure that things are re-usable, but there’s more cost associated with just kicking a bunch of metal over the side every time you perform a mission. Do I think we can do EELV’s cheaper than RLV’s? Yes, but not by a huge deal.
I don’t know that you can realistically make the dramatic force cuts you suggest, and your concept of a volunteer astronaut corps is ludicrous on its face, given the amount of time spent in training for each flight.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:00I wouldn’t blame the workers so much for the foam issue. The issue of falling foam only started after the CFC treaty banned the use of freon. A buddy of mine at Lockmart had the job of figuring out suitable subs for freon in everything they used it for. The best sub they could find for freon in cleaning the surface of the ET before foam application was substantially less capable than freon at the job, and that is when the falling foam thing started happening.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:01Ehhh, I’m not so sure about that. I’ve seen first-hand the issues you have in applying any paint, foam, etc. without proper surface treatment. If Freon was the real issue, you’d see foam shedding in other areas; the main places for shedding right now are places where there’s not robotic application of the foam, which points to improper surface preparation and poor application techniques.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:04I happen to be a big supporter of SSTO and TSTO RLVs. I just think that NASA should be out of the launch business and let private industry supply solutions they find cost effective. Their subsidies to the Lazy B and Lockmart stifle industry innovation, private investment, and competition. I do, though, like NASA’s GTX program very much. IMHO NASA should be focusing on x-vehicles like that, among others, as well as scientific space probes, and leave the launch business to private industry.
They should also get out of the practice of cost plus contracting. Instead, go entirely by the X-prize model: issue a big bounty to the first company that accomplishes x or provides product or service x. And just to make sure there is competition, offer a half bounty to the second guy to accomplish it. Let industry decide how they want to approach the problem.
I’d encourage you to reconsider my idea of a volunteer astronaut corps. I know volunteer firemen who dedicate significant portions of their lives to their avocation, and private pilots who are far better pilots than any airline bus driver. Amateur does not mean unskilled.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:10If you’re a fan of SSTO, well … I’m not going to take you seriously. Do the math: SSTO isn’t cost-effective at all—anyone who’s taken an undergraduate propulsion class knows that.
As to whether NASA should be out of the LEO launch business: maybe. However, if Boeing or Lockheed thought they could do it more efficiently and make money on it, I think they would have made the proposal already. After all, Boeing did think they could do a Space Station better than NASA…
As for contracting: the big issue isn’t in cost-plus contracting, but far more in this whole prime contractor outsourcing business. In creating a single prime for ISS, NASA had Boeing create their own bureaucracy to manage ISS development on NASA’s behalf—essentially subsuming NASA’s responsibility becuase NASA ceded it to them. That was a mistake, but it’s emblematic of the greater shift in government-civilian contracting from 1980 forward: larger orders for fewer models of craft designed to perform more roles. With less contracts out there, competition starved a lot of people out of business, and the survivors acquired the losers to have their capital [which was necessary to their success].
I don’t know that an X-prize system is the way to go, because CPAF contracting can work if NASA is willing to manage contracts in such a way as to control costs. FFP contracting works when the design’s mature, but it’s horrible for development, because the costs of change deltas end up becoming a sizable minority of the entire contract costs.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:19Eh, Gary Hudson’s done the numbers on SSTO. Even the S-IVb or the STS ET could be made into SSTOs. Take an ET (cost: $550k-650k). Stick six SSMEs under its butt…. instant SSTO with 70-100klb cargo capacity. Of course, you have to deal with a termal protection system, too, but lets say you redesign the ET to be an entirely carbon-carbon structure. You’ll save 30% of the ET’s mass while building the TPS into the tank structure itself.
Of course, why return the ETs to earth anyways? I’m also a fan of using ETs as building blocks for space stations, moon bases, etc. rather than tossing them into the ocean. Take five of the six SSME and have them on a detachable ring bus that drops off after 65% of fuel mass is burned (as the Atlas II did with two of its three engines). Recover those five engines in a suborbital trajectory without need of a TPS, and let the sixth engine drive the payload and tank into orbit (this would also boost your payload capacity by about 35,000 lbs as well). If the sixth central engine is an SSME with a ceramic expendable nozzle, remove the nozzle in orbit, and return the powerhead and turbopump in the bay of a small shuttle of the MAKS/X-38 variety, or leave them in orbit for use in building lunar and martian missions with meat on them.
I’m working all this up in a more formal way, btw, this isn’t just idle speculation….
October 22nd, 2005 at 22:33Yes, you can do SSTO … but the mass fraction just isn’t feasible!
And “redesign the ET to be a carbon-carbon structure” … you want to put cryogenics in a carbon-carbon? Go right ahead, man … good luck getting that to work.
[I can't discuss what I really want to say here, because it's all ITAR-restricted, and I like being a government contractor. But there are better things to use than ETs, but they're expendable. That's all I'll say.]
What good would an ET be for you in such a situation? None. The ET has structural rigidity in usable situations only when pressurized.
I admire your out-of-the-box thinking. I really do. I just don’t think that it scales as well as you think that it will where the rubber meets the road. If you do—great! DO IT! There’s probably a market for it. It’s just not feasible for the kinds of missions that NASA is trying to do.
Since my job function is morphing, I’ve really got to close comments on this entry. We’re getting ever closer into things that I may or may not be doing, and that’s where this stops being an academic exercise for me and starts becoming a sand table … and that’s where I really have to stop. Sorry.
October 23rd, 2005 at 01:41Maciej Ceglowski on Vision for Space Exploration
As with his excellent dissection of what was wrong with STS, which I really loved, Maciej Ceglowski has written an excellent essay on the Vision for Space Exploration, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and the real impetus behind a Moon and Mars Shot. As…
October 25th, 2005 at 12:42