How COTS-D Was Killed

Lest we forget, under Mike Griffin NASA awarded to SpaceX an option in their Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract to develop a crew transport capability. The Space Act Agreement looked like this:

Milestone	Payment
Project Management Plan Review and Crew Demo 1 System Requirements Review	$27,420,000
Financing D1	$10,000,000
Crew Demo 1 System Preliminary Design Review	$22,420,000
Crew Demo 2 System Requirements Review	$25,420,000
Crew Demo 1 Critical Design Review	$20,420,000
Crew Demo 2 System Preliminary Design Review	$20,420,000
Crew Demo 1 Demonstration Readiness Review	$20,420,000
Crew Demo 3 System Requirements Review	$25,420,000
Financing 2D	$10,000,000
Crew Demo 2 Critical Design Review	$18,420,000
Crew Demo 3 System Preliminary Design Review	$20,420,000
Crew Demo 1 Mission	$15,420,000
Crew Demo 2 Demonstration Readiness Review	$18,420,000
Crew Demo 3 Critical Design Review	$18,420,000
Crew Demo 2 Mission	$8,420,000
Crew Demo 3 Demonstration Readiness Review	$18,420,000
Crew Demo 3 Mission	$8,420,000
Total	$308,300,000

As with all the COTS milestones, SpaceX would not have received these payments until the milestone was completed. The finance milestones were required to demonstrate that SpaceX could fund and complete all the milestones without using the payments from NASA as "seed money".

The COTS-D option was never activated. You may even hear some people at NASA say that it was never "funded", this is wrong. The final nail in the coffin of COTS-D came in the form of an intriguing exchange between Sen. Bill Nelson and then acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese. Here's the relevant part of the long transcript.

Senator Nelson. In last year's authorization bill, there was guidance to NASA about COTS-D Space Act agreements to develop a U.S. commercial alternative to Soyuz. We authorized $150 million in funding for COTS-D. I noticed that you are
putting $150 million of stimulus funds toward the Commercial Crew and Cargo program, but not actually initiating COTS-D agreements. Why are you not initiating these Space Act agreements?

Mr. Scolese. Well, we are working the commercial program as you defined. There was cargo on it. We have those two contracts with SpaceX and Orbital to do cargo. We had one for COTS-D. I cannot recall a specific--$150 million to go on to COTS-D. We did this year in the stimulus identify $150 million to stimulate a commercial activity, and it is broken into two pieces: $70 million to go off and develop capabilities that any visiting vehicle would need, including commercial vehicles, and that includes developing the human space flight rating requirements, the requirements that you need to be certified for human space flight. As you well know, we build human spacecraft and design them so infrequently that we have to write those requirements down. So part of this is to make those available to everybody, make them understandable to everybody, and that will help not only the commercial providers broadly, but all of us. And then $80 million to stimulate activity for a commercial crew.

[recess for a vote]

Senator Nelson. I want to go back to the question that I had asked you earlier. You described the breakdown of how you intend to program $150 million for Commercial Crew and Cargo. Instead of putting the dollars into the various component pieces that would enable crew capability, would it not make more sense just to invest that in a milestone-based demonstration flight?

Mr. Scolese. We discussed that, and we believe that we need to take a measured approach to developing commercial crew. As you know, again it is a very difficult prospect to develop a crewed vehicle to carry crews safely to and from space, let alone rendezvous and dock with the Space Station. So we are working a measured development where we work progressively from developing the capability to get into space, to conduct the rendezvous and docking with the Space Station, to crew rescue, which can be done without having to worry about crew escape,
all the way up to carrying crew. That is the philosophy that we are working to achieve. To do that, we needed to do some things that broadly help the community that wants to do this, as I mentioned earlier, about developing clear and concise specs and standards so that we can safely put our crew on those vehicles. And further, I think you have seen the annual report of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel that had some questions about the detail of our human rating requirements. So that is all part of what we are trying to accomplish, and we believe that will get us a commercial crew capability quicker and safer than if we were to just go off and suggest that we fund a capability.

Senator Nelson. But that was not what the legislation said. The legislation said that $150 million was funding for COTS-D. In this case, you would not even have to pay until the COTS-D partner was able to successfully demonstrate that capability. Is that not right?

Mr. Scolese. It would be dependent upon how we structured it. Of course, we wanted to maximize competition for the vehicle. As you know, there is only one COTS-D provider.

Senator Nelson. Well, when I say "you," I am referring to NASA, and you were not the Acting Administrator at the time. This is an example of where NASA has not followed the legislation. Now, let me ask you this. Would $150 million be enough to demonstrate that capability?

Mr. Scolese. We would have to look at it, but I do not think so, sir.

Senator Nelson. Well, what do you think it would be?

Mr. Scolese. I would have to get back to you on that, but it would be several times that, I would expect, because recall, we have to develop not only the crew portion of it. We have to develop the life support systems, the launch escape systems, the recovery systems. All of those have to be developed and demonstrated, and $150 million does not seem enough to do that.

Senator Nelson. We had a unique opportunity, if NASA had listened and followed the law, we had a unique opportunity this year between the 2009 operating plan and the additional funds provided by the stimulus bill and the development of the 2010 budget to craft a COTS-D plan that would have funded the program at the level that the folks needed. That path was not pursued. NASA did not obey the law. Again, I am not saying it to you because you are the Acting Administrator since January 20, but I want to point this out that sometimes NASA does not want itself to be helped. We have got to get our act together.

And that was the last opportunity for COTS-D. Had NASA obeyed the law and provided the $150M that was allocated in the FY09 budget, SpaceX could have started COTS-D and completed the first seven milestones. When the $150M in stimulus money came in SpaceX would have been on much better footing to claim part of it. Instead, Sen Shelby was able to divert $100M to the development of Ares I, a vehicle that was later scheduled to be cancelled prompting him to insert language into law prohibiting NASA from doing that. Of the remaining $50M, SpaceX received none.

The official position of NASA seems to be that the CCDev program has replaced COTS-D. SpaceX has put in a bid for the new round, which NASA has been prohibited from starting due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget for FY11. Should SpaceX be successful, they intend to start work on the launch abort system which will also allow the Dragon spacecraft to land vertically on land. While I have been assured that the CCDev program will be "milestone based" like COTS, I still have my doubts that it will capture the simplicity of the COTS-D option.

New Space Music Video

An idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a few years..



Great to finally get it out.

Making Fusion Rockets Relevant

If you read the literature on fusion rockets you probably have a pretty firm idea in mind of what they're good for and when they'll be relevant - in "the future". No good fusion rocket paper is complete without a superconducting magnet here, and a magnetic nozzle there - in fact, these widgets are a primary ingredient of any fusion propulsion design and the more infeasible or untested they are, the better. This seems obvious: fusion rockets are the future because we don't have fusion yet.. right? Actually, no.

Producing nuclear fusion isn't all that hard. Amateurs regularly cobble together desktop fusion devices like the Farnsworth Fusor and other contraptions. The significant hard problem of fusion is getting more energy out of the device than you put into it. The current government backed effort to achieve this is the ITER project who are building a tokamak style device, but many other schemes are also being tried, with significantly less funding.

One of these is the dense plasma focus of hydrogen/boron fuel, a combination called focus fusion. The technique is relatively easy to understand. You take a metal chamber and put a single tubular electrode in the middle, ringed by a number of solid electrodes. Pump all the air out with a vacuum pump and then add the fuel until it is at a few torr. Dumping about two mega-amps of current into electrodes causes a plasma compression called the "pinch" in which nuclear fusion occurs. The result is a stream of electrons in one direction, a stream of ions in the other direction and a whole lot of x-rays, and virtually no neutrons. These happen to be the perfect products for producing electricity and if that's your goal, it means you can do it very efficiently.

The challenge of focus fusion is getting enough power into the device to burn the fuel - typically done with a big heavy bank of capacitors - and containing that heat in the plasma for long enough. Hydrogen / Boron 11 (or pB11 as it is often called) is the hardest fuel to get fusion going, requiring temperatures over 123 keV. As such, dense plasma focus fusion researchers tend to use deuterium instead, which only requires temperatures of 15 keV. The government program uses deuterium/tritium which only requires 13.6 keV, but tritium is a little hard to come by - it has to be made in nuclear reactors - and is strictly controlled. Deuterium can be picked up in rented bottles from your local gas supplier.

Using a dense plasma focus device to produce deuterium-deuterium fusion is pretty simple and requires minimal startup costs - especially if you do your homework and learn from the mistakes of others. Unlike pB11 fuel, D-D fusion produces neutrons. Shielding fusion researchers from neutron exposure is easily achieved with two things: distance and concrete. Measuring neutron output can be as low tech as looking for bubbles in a contained gel, and as high tech as CCD detection of scintillator stimulation. When you're producing neutrons you know you're achieving fusion.

Getting back to rockets, let's look back up at how I finished my first paragraph describing focus fusion: producing electricity [..] if that's your goal. While nuclear-electric propulsion sure is sexy, what if our goal is just to make a good old nuclear thermal rocket? Back in the 60s the US did a lot of great nuclear-thermal rocket work. They were using highly enriched uranium folded into a solid core with liquid hydrogen running through it. They got specific impulse in the 850 s (vac) range and had plans to achieve higher power before being defunded for obvious political reasons. So what might a nuclear fusion thermal rocket look like?

As our goal is to produce heat, not electricity, it makes more sense to use deuterium as our fuel. We only need to produce pulses of electricity to feed into the electrodes to produce fusion, and the most readily available technology to do that with sufficient power density is a compulsator. Much like an alternator, a compulsator is an electromechanical device that converts mechanical rotation to electrical energy in the form of alternating current. A high power rectifying bridge converts that to direct current to feed into the dense plasma focus. Compulsators have been built for railguns which produce more than enough current (and way more than enough voltage). I haven't read much on reducing pulse width (sometimes called "rise rate") of compulsators, but the ~2 microsecond pulses needed for dense plasma focus does seem challenging.

The rest of the rocket cycle is pretty standard. The expansion nozzle is cooled by cycling the fuel through it, this heats the fuel enough for a state change to occur and the expansion is used to turn a turbine which pumps the fuel, and finally the fuel is used to cool the core. The only difference is that the turbine serves double duty by turning the compulsator. A smart engineer will recognize that the rotors of the compulsator could be the turbine. Similarly, although all three components are shown schematically as being on the same drive, there most likely will be gearing involved to keep the pump constant.

Unlike a device for the production of electricity, the dense plasma focus will probably be made from copper. This will absorb the x-rays and transfer the heat to the "fuel" (aka, the coolant, traditionally the propellant-which-isn't-an-oxidizer of a rocket has been called the fuel). The already slow neutrons will pass right through the copper core and be slowed more by the fuel, hopefully enough that they don't hit the outer chamber with enough velocity to make it irradiated or contribute to wear.

Speaking of fuel, most readers familiar with nuclear thermal rockets have probably been thinking about hydrogen this whole time. Although compulsators are certainly more mass efficient than equivalent capacitors and the means to recharge them, they are not known for being light. As a fusion rocket is incapable of spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere, the traditional safety concerns of launching nuclear thermal rockets from the ground does not apply. As such, propellant density is once again important and a hydrocarbon first stage fusion rocket doesn't need strap-on boosters trumping its inherent safety.

Space Colonization As The Savior Of Progress

The idea of Progress, as defined by J. B. Bury, proclaims that "civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction". Ever since the 1960s the belief in Progress has been waning and some would say that it has been completely lost to the current generation. Going beyond Bury's definition, Taylor E. Dark III provides three mutually reinforcing and interlocking premises:

1. NO LIMITS. There are no fundamental limits – nor should there be – on the collective human capacity to grow, no matter how growth is defined (which may be in terms of knowledge, wealth, power, population, or morality). Progress is endless (or at least indefinite for all practical purposes).

2. ALL GOOD THINGS GO TOGETHER. Advancements in science and technology, and the resulting mastery over nature, expand our knowledge, wealth, and power, and, in so doing, bring improvements in the moral, political, and spiritual character of the human race. The elements of progress are linked to one another and mutually reinforcing.

3. INNATE DIRECTIONALITY. There exist developmental tendencies, rooted in societal, psychological, or biological mechanisms, that make it far more likely that human civilization will move "upward," toward greater control and understanding of nature and ourselves, rather than “downward” toward chaos and entropy. Progress is, if not inevitable, always highly probable.

In his excellent paper, Reclaiming The Future: Space Advocacy And The Idea Of Progress, Dark proposes that the space program was insulated from the crisis in the idea of progress in the late 60s and because of this, the new pro-space ideology was just a reaction to social change.

To me, this kinda sounds like fearful Americans, desperate to hold on to their beliefs, turning to the only avenue of society where they can still openly talk about the future with a sense of awe and wonder. This may sound harsh, but at least I'm not suggesting it's all just narcissistic phantasy.

Dark has a different explanation for the desperation: the cancellation of Apollo with no plans to follow on with anything else:

The irony was that they embraced this belief at the very moment that the Apollo program was coming to a close, and the future of NASA and space travel becoming increasingly uncertain. Thus, a strong edge of anxiety and urgency was introduced into the writings of space advocates. The means to ensure progress had been found, but would soon be lost forever if government policy was not properly adjusted. This combination of certainty about the path toward redemption alongside anxiety about the possibility of missing a singular opportunity energized the new pro-space literature, and encouraged the growth of an accompanying space advocacy movement.

With the cancellation of the Space Shuttle (and Constellation), that same sense of anxiety and urgency can be felt in today's pro-space literature.. but perhaps that's just because we're all sick of waiting.

My favorite part of Dark's paper comes in the concluding remarks:

If advances in bio-technology, artificial intelligence, and nano-technology allow humanity to prosper on Earth to a greater extent than ever before, the urgency of the space endeavor is lost. In fact, if one has faith that terrestrial technology will continue to advance, the idea of spending billions of dollars on unprofitable space ventures becomes even less attractive.

Why not just wait until new technologies reduce the cost of space flight to reasonable levels? At that point, normal market mechanisms (such as tourist demand) may allow major increases in human space flight without government intervention. But then, of course, no grandiose ideology of progress will be required, any more than such an ideology was required to people the formerly arid deserts of the American southwest once water and air conditioning became widely available.

Oh the sweet bitter irony. Why wouldn't anyone suggest that maybe there are limits to how far terrestrial technology can advance? Why would one assume that the advancement of terrestrial technology would immediately imply that space-going would become any easier? And what would this "faith that terrestrial technology will continue to advance" be called?

I guess you'd call that Progress.

The Easy Way To The Moon

I recently described how to fly to the Moon solo using SpaceX hardware. Someone asked me why I worked out an Apollo 8 style flight and didn't just do a simple free return trajectory.. after all, it's a lot easier - and that's actually the reason - it's too dog gone easy. In order to make this interesting I decided to try to think of the easiest way to do a free return trajectory. Preferably, we'd like to use an unmodified spacecraft and launch vehicle and not have to develop any other hardware.

For a start, let's forget this whole idea of an Earth Departure Stage - we'll just throw the Dragon spacecraft to lunar orbit. This sure is simple, but it only gives us 2585 kg to work with. This prompts the question, exactly what is the mass of an unladen Dragon.. yeah, yeah, I know - African or European?

Looking at the Falcon 9 Users Guide we find that it can throw 9358 kg to 51.6º with an altitude of 400 km. SpaceX will happily tell you that the Dragon can carry 3000 kg of pressurized cargo and 3000 kg of unpressurized cargo to the ISS, and has 1290 kg of propellant. So the dry mass has to be around 2068 kg. It's this big number that prompted me to suggest pulling out the heavy docking adapter, etc, but we're not doing that this time.

At some point there is going to be a bunch of used Dragon capsules, and maybe we can get one for cheap. The actual launch is around $56 million, if you can get SpaceX to stop placating NASA's worst fears: another crew lost and everyone asking why the hell they were flying in the first place. If they keep blowing money on a fancy launch abort system, then who knows.. but it'll probably still be smaller than the $150M per seat that Space Adventures is charging for a ride on Russian hardware.

For a single crew member weighing a maximum of 100 kg, you need 11.839 kg of cabin air, 25.83kg oxygen candles, 52.71kg LiHo CO2 scrubbers, and 45kg food and water. Total is 235.379 kg. From our throw mass to lunar transfer orbit we subtract the dry mass and the consumable mass to find 281 kg remaining.

Remember how we took the fuel out of the Dragon? Let's put 245 kg back. This gives us about 300 m/s of delta-v, which is about 10 times as much delta-v as we need to do a free return trajectory. So even if you're flying like Scott Carpenter you should be able to pull it off.

The remaining 36 kg is margin.. or you could take your dog along for the ride.

---

I have one last thing to say on this insanity. For a while I've been using 3140 m/s as the required delta-v to from Lunar Transfer Orbit directly to the surface of the Moon. Apparently, this estimate is horrible. According to the Lunar Polar Volatiles Explorer concept mission the required delta-v post-TLI breaks down like this:

Thermal Control Maneuvers	70
Cruise ACS	10
Breaking Burn	2455
Landing ACS	20
Landing Site Navigation	25
Descent	209
Total	2789

For some inexplicable reason they do the breaking burn with a solid rocket motor with 292 seconds of isp. Their maneuvering thrusters have 272 isp, and the terminal descent is done with 296 isp. With this reduced performance they turn 3492 kg at TLI into 1203 kg on the lunar surface.

They get the wet mass there by flying an Atlas V 401 on a 5 day minimum delta-v maneuver, and although that's just fine for cargo, it just means more consumables and radiation exposure for a human. The Falcon 9 has higher mass to LEO, but lower mass to GEO, but it's also 1/3rd the price, so let's stick with the 2585 kg that a Falcon 9 can throw direct to Lunar Transfer Orbit and use a decent storable propellant isp of 312 seconds. With that we can deliver 1038 kg to the surface.

With a inert mass ratio of 0.15 for the lander, the total payload mass is 651 kg. Using the crew/consumable mass above, and assuming 2.5 days to get there, we can spend 28 days on the lunar surface. Or you could try to fit in propellant to fly back.. I guess, if you wanna die in your bed or something.

Two Game Changing Technologies

The Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit (yes, that's Richard Garriott) and Mini-Magnetosphere Radiation Shielding are two technologies which, if successful, will change the way you think about space exploration and eventually even colonization. They address the two fundamental stumbling blocks of long term missions in space: the negative health affects of zero-g and radiation exposure.

Zero-G Skinsuits exert a force on the wearer's body which duplicates the loading on the skeleton that gravity usually provides. The expectation is that Skinsuits will reduce or eliminate the deleterious bone loss that astronauts currently experience in zero-g. So far, the prototypes have only been tested on parabolic flights, although they are similar to the Russian penguin suits which were used by cosmonauts on MIR (unfortunately with little to no reported results - as is typical of Russian space medicine).

Should Skinsuits turn out to be effective at eliminating bone loss, and possibly even have some positive effect on muscle loss, this finding will render other technologies aimed at addressing the problem less important. Specifically, solutions aimed at getting astronauts to Mars as quickly as possible will be less important. Artificial gravity generation for long trips or even for space colony designs will be less important too. Although there may still be a use for weak fluid settling variations on the theme, not having to produce an Earth-like gravity field is a much easier engineering problem.

MiniMags produce an electric field around a spacecraft that interacts with the interplanetary plasma to produce a charge separation, strengthening the field. When ionizing radiation hits the electric field it is deflected and so does not cause damage to the spacecraft or its occupants. It was widely believed that such a "magnetic shield" of solar radiation could not be achieved without superconducting magnets and large power sources - placing it firmly in the domain of science fiction. However, a number of observations of solar wind phenomena and subsequent ground experimentation has shown that only a small electric field is initially needed - the neutral interplanetary plasma will do the rest.

Should MiniMags turn out to be effective at protecting spacecraft and human occupants from ionizing radiation they will solve perhaps the biggest problem with long term human exploration of space, and eventual colonization. Previously, the only known way to deal with the radiation problem was to surround the crew with mass. Over the years, a number of creative techniques have been devised to have the mass serve double duty - for example, using propellant or consumables mass to shield the crew. Careful study of the available materials for shielding has led us to determine that high hydrogen content materials like polyethylene are best, suggesting that the interior of crew cabins should be lined in the stuff, and windows should be replaced with periscopes (because ionizing radiation only travels in straight lines and is not reflected by mirrors). All these design problems go away with an effective radiation shield.

At the time of writing, neither of these technologies is being adequately funded. While the NASA Technology Roadmaps currently identify "pressure garment" suits as a potential avenue for research, they place it in the EVA-suit category and seem to be unaware of Skinsuits. MiniMags are not identified in the technology roadmaps at all.. This is particularly egregious as not only can MiniMags be used as a radiation shield, but they can also be used for in-space propulsion. As such, they should appear in both TA06 and TA02. But never fear! I've informed the Aeronautics And Space Engineering Board of this oversight and I'm sure they'll get right on it ;)

UFO Evidence (or the lack thereof)

"I was on the beach, at the water's edge and looked to the west to see a beautiful, bright moon. Except it wasn't the moon! It was a bright light moving slowly east, towards me and surrounded by a swirling mist. The mist rotated clockwise around the bright, white light and followed it perfectly."

Harry saw something strange in the sky, so he grabbed his video camera and put it up on youtube. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and plenty of other people do the same. You could say it's a defining feature of the society we now live in. Most of us walk around with a camera in our pocket. Many of us whip out our camera phones to take a picture of anything interesting, funny, or even just to later post on Facebook to show that we're out having a fun time.

As it turns out, this particular UFO was quickly identified as the second stage of the first Falcon 9 flight, spinning uncontrolled despite valiant efforts by the thrusters to correct the spin. It was the only flaw of an otherwise perfect flight. The video was shot just 122km from me, but I wasn't looking at the sky that morning, I was asleep.

Despite the identification, the comment section of the video (truly the last refuge of intellectual thought) remains alive with speculation and denials. Included in the discussion is comparisons to the "Norway Spiral", another UFO sighting later identified as caused by a wayward rocket.



If you search youtube for UFOs you will discover a lot of videos which are legitimately people seeing stuff in the sky they don't understand. Almost all of them are comically identifiable: helicopters, aircraft, balloons, planets, and even the International Space Station - unfortunately searching for passes of the ISS doesn't get nearly as much. Many others are so mundane that one wonders why anyone would post them, or the UFO is only seen after the fact (a pretty big hint that you're seeing a video artifact). But there's certainly no shortage of video out there of UFOs.

Unfortunately, NASA gets harassed by the crazies and perhaps doesn't provide enough ridicule.. but, of course, ridicule is the CIA's job.

Sigh.