The Orbital Space Planes were a new one for me, and it became really obvious why Griffin moved so quickly to change the original CEV plans. To have not only one, but two possible commercial crew carriers, and to have one of them be shuttle-like, *and* have them be used outside of LEO?

It goes back even farther, really. It's heavily based on ACRV designs from the late 80's and early 90's meant to service Space Station Freedom. Specifically a version that would have served as an orbital runabout/tug for the station as well as the escape pod if a shuttle was not docked. Even then it became so delayed that first Congress investigated buying a few Soyuz capsules and refitting them for the station, and later paused the whole station program while waiting for the ACRV program to catch up. When SSF became the ISS Soyuz indeed did become the ACRV. Even SLS goes back much more than just Constellation. It's a subset of Constellation, but that was already a subset of a more complex earlier program, which included a range of launch configurations and alternate cargo modules for the shuttle. The whole program is decades deep in sunk costs, struggling in vain to finally realize the failed pipe dreams of the shuttle program while only wasting what potential it did have.

@@Hevach Thanks for the extra info - I hadn't made those connections.

This tragicomedy tells that you dont have to succeed or go anywhere. Just delay 1 or 2 decades and charges money.

@@HevachAre you talking about the X-38?

Thanks

Solids happened on shuttle purely for monetary reasons. NASA *really* wanted liquid boosters, but NASA had to fit shuttle within a certain budget and OMB forced them to solids. Though to be fair I'm not sure a booster failure was survivable for shuttle even if it were a liquid booster.

It's not going away. Only Elon actually wants real performance; everyone else is fine lobbying for a piece of an inefficient project

The industry is fine just lobbying for a piece of an inefficient project. Basically, the industry is only getting more efficient because of Elon personally

@@artembolshakov3901 In that case, these guys will be overrun by commercial companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab.

Clearly the only possible explanation...

I did a little research into O'Keefe leaving and didn't find a lot that looked definitive to me, and I thought I was already engaging in enough speculation around Griffin. But what you say sounds really plausible.

Thanks. Somewhere I have an album with newpaper clippings from early Apollo flights, when I would have been 3 years old.

Interesting... My assumption is that it was mostly about not flying astronauts on anything other than a commercial rocket. Do you know why they would be against winged vehicles?

@@EagerSpaceThis should go on your video list board.

It's the second one for NASA management. But this is not unique to NASA - in the vast majority of companies the incentives for managers are not around company performance or customer satisfaction. They generally reward compliance - following the rules and not making waves.

I talk about this a fair bit in the "what if spacex had failed" video. The short version is G.W. Bush wanted a legacy, and that drove the cancellation of shuttle with the replacement Ares I and Ares V in the constellation program. Ares I was supposed to be the replacement to carry crew and cargo to shuttle. NASA was spinning up the commercial cargo program which already had a crew version tacked on it, but nobody bid to do the crew part and that made it palatable for NASA. When Obama came in, he had the Augustine commission look at the financials of NASA and the commission concluded that there was no way that NASA could afford what they had planned. At the same time, NASA had made very little progress on constellation and it was clear that if Ares I flew it was a billion dollar a launch rocket. Obama "cancelled" constellation. Shuttle retired, and the only way NASA had to get anything to ISS was through the Russians, and the Russians smartly started raising their per-set costs. This made NASA look really stupid. Commercial crew was the obvious solution, and apparently there was some horse trading that went on where congress got SLS + Orion as programs with no mission and commercial crew got funded. Though congress threw a bit of a tantrum and underfunded it for a few years until they realized that having NASA send a lot of money to Russian made them look stupid as well. Lori Garver's excellent "Escaping Gravity" is a great exploration of what was going on at NASA during this time period.

It's because everybody has seen the failures that have occurred with small solid rocket boosters, so they are bad. The big ones aren't bad because they are operated by NASA and NASA knows how to do safety right. That is pretty much the argument and I don't know how they made it with a straight face. I will note that current NASA has no problem launching astronauts on starliner with two (IIRC) solid rocket boosters on the Atlas V.

Much heavier and with a less capable service module. The original architecture for orion had an "earth departure module" put it into low earth orbit so it only needed enough capability to get back out. That doesn't exist any more so it needs to have an orbit it can get into and out of, and that's NRHO. It's more complicated because the Block 1 SLS doesn't have a lot of oomph and can't really carry a heavier payload *and* the service module is ESA's contribution to Artemis so any attempt to change things brings up geopolitical issues.

@@EagerSpace Thanks! I had watched this before, but the question occurred to me later, so noticed several of those details the second time through, but still wasn’t understanding the differences with Apollo masses. Does Block 2 SLS change any of those limitations? I’m guessing that since there’s still no kerolox first stage, the answer is no.

Block 1b bumps up the payload a lot - the block 1 upper stage is stolen from a Delta IV and is ridiculously weak for the task. That gets them enough extra payload to carry gateway modules to nrho, so it could carry a more capable service module if one existed. Block 2 is quite a bit better than 1b. The composite solids are a lot better than the steel ones because they are so much lighter.

The Space Act of 2010 said, "Build a really big rocket and we like that capsule thing you've been working on, keep doing that". SLS has attracted a lot of well-deserved criticism, but I've been amazed that Orion has escaped that over the years. This one capsule has spent almost the same amount of money as all of SLS, and that doesn't include the service module as it comes from ESA.

@@EagerSpace Fair point. There are nuggets that don't end up being a money pit. I had gotten Orion bunched up with the SLS program since they're all under the Artemis umbrella.

@@EagerSpaceOne of these days I hope you’re brave enough to do a video on where all of the cost overrun money is really going.

There's a paper here that talks about it a bit: ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030106071/downloads/20030106071.pdf My view: * The shapsule gets them an easier reusable thermal protection system. * The shape is inherently easier to add volume to as it gets longer, and a capsule gets wider. * You get more cross-range * A wheeled lander requires bigger and therefore much heavier aerodynamic surfaces to have reasonable landing behavior * You also need wheels and real aerodynamic controls, which are heavy and need to be protected during reentry.

@@EagerSpace From the paper: "But a pure capsule has the disadvantages of excessive g’s during a launch abort (NASA has a 14-g limit spec) and, for the space station inclination of 51.6’, the risk of an abort that would result in a landing in the Alps." OK that's something, though I confess that I don't understand why a capsule could need a higher-g launch abort than a winged craft would.

@@craigrmeyer if the STS did an abort aside from abort to orbit, it could drop it's launch stack and glide, meaning G forces drop during the abort. A capsule has to "out run" its own rocket along the same path for an abort. A top-stacked space plane like the X-37b (which is unmanned but manned concepts for top-stacked space planes do exist) can split the difference. It has to out run the rocket initially, but can more easily break away from trajectory after separation, so it can experience high G forces for a shorter duration than a simpler capsule.

@@Hevach Thank you. I never considered this. So the idea (all along?) was that the Space Shuttle could drop its orange tank -- and the solid boosters that might be attached to it -- "like a bomb" and turn into a glider that instant. Do I understand you correctly?

@@craigrmeyer there's more to it but... basically, yes. It had several abort modes: return to launch site, it would drop the stack and come around to land back at Kennedy. Abort to alternate site, where the boosters were already gone, it would drop the tank early, going suborbital and landing at one of the backup sites. And lastly abort to orbit, which it did several times, using the OMS engines to reach a lower orbit than the target, possibly requiring a reduced mission plan but not ending the mission immediately.

The crew exploration modules could definitely have been able to launch commercial to ISS. That's about 400 m/s of delta-v. To do the constellation architecture - where you get delivered to low lunar orbit by somebody else - you need maybe 1200 m/s of delta-v (1000 plus some margin). To do something like apollo to low lunar orbit, you need around 2200 m/s of delta-v That could be an add-on propulsion module (that the lockheed design used) or service module variants. So yes, you are correct. It's good in the sense of wanting to build something flexible and useful. It's bad if you want to keep flying crew to be a NASA only thing.

Yes, I was also surprised as its so out of character. Orion spent most of SLS coasting along at a billion dollars a year, then suddenly SLS was actually done and now it turns out LM and NASA made a stupid choice on the heat shield.

Orion plus the service module is pretty much at the limit for what SLS block 1 can toss to the moon, because the upper stage they took from the delta IV is comically too small for the rocket. This gets better if/when block 1b shows up. The original Orion Service module was a different design that came out of the Constellation architecture but was - like the rest of constellation - way behind and over budget. After some back and forth, the european space agency agreed to supply a new service module based on their orbital transfer vehicle. Doing a redesign of that would be a fun international problem as the ESA would not be happy. The other issue is the Orion performance is one of the reasons that Gateway needs to be in that same orbit, and a more capable Orion would mean that you would probably move to low lunar orbit the way Apollo did. That means less reason for gateway and the people that want gateway to continue would not like that.

Hold on there. Starship is _planned_ on being more capable. There is still a lot of obstacles for it to overcome. The entire point of the HLS lander is to prove that Starship is capable for doing all that SpaceX has promised. Congress was allegedly not happy that NASA chose HLS Starship (which is hilarious because they were the ones who didn't provide the funds NASA requested), but the entire reason they chose it was because SpaceX was the only one of the companies who agreed to fund parts of the project themselves instead of relying only on NASA to fund everything. SpaceX's bid was also the cheapest of the companies who submitted designs. Congress is practically breathing down SpaceX's neck right now, waiting to see if they screw up the upcoming orbital test. They already made NASA revise their lander contracts which forces them to pick other companies instead of only SpaceX (Sustaining Lunar Development contract).

Orion is proven tech. Starship is FAR from proven tech. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

It's still on the board but there are a lot of ideas there. Convince me why it should be near the top...

I read "Truth, Lies, and O-rings" recently, and my opinion of the (reworked) shuttle solids went up considerably. I would like to know in more detail what the criticisms of the Ares-1x are, and how valid they really are.@@EagerSpace

For the Apollo missions that launched to LEO on Saturn IB rockets, the CSM was not fully fueled (both because they didn't need the delta-v and because the Saturn IB couldn't lift that much). Does that account for the difference in mass you saw?

Exactly.

There is someone who is using their brain. Probably much easier than sending a rover to Mars too.

Just do it if it‘s that easy.

The interesting question is whether you garner enough political support to create such a thing without humans flying.

Imagine where we'd be if, instead of dumping all of that money into ISS, we had just kept going to the moon and made the moon our space station.

@@spaceranger3728 Not a fan of moon bases; you end up going down a gravity well that you just have to climb out again.

Solid Rockets are generally safer than liquid though? The main reason why STS-25 failed was due to how it was stretched beyond its conditions and the engineers knew this. It was primarily the fault of the leadership.

I’ll agree with you on the solid rockets-if there’s a problem with liquid fueled rockets, they can be shut down. That’s not an option with the solids. However, unlike the Shuttle orbiter, the SLS does have a launch escape tower and is atop the stack, so there’s no worry over falling foam or ice.

@@johncronin9540 Asides from the fact that the launch escape tower is made from solid rocket boosters.

Maybe I am being too harsh on NASA and the SLS Rocket probably will be safer than I am suggesting. Still I simply have trouble not feeling cross over how the Shuttle was designed around certain people demanding that certain parts be manufactured in their state even though it caused lots of issues or what the Airforce demanded. It is more the Shuttle that has me upset although we will have to see about this SLS.

@@thomaseubank1503 I would say you're not far off, Ares I was a failure in engineering safety and most of the big decisions regarding Constellation, SLS, and Artemis are politically determined at the expense of almost everything but political capital.

The point of spiral development was to build an orbital vehicle first, learn from that, and then expand the envelope to do new things. The point isn't to use Orion to go to the ISS. The point is that the crew exploration vehicle could have a version that would make sense for transport to ISS - the same way that commercial crew does now.

@@EagerSpace That's the ideal for sure. But when the government tries to do Spirals they just wind up doing sequential waterfall developments.

@@spaceranger3728 I don't disagree, though I'll note that the same is true for the majority of big companies as well.

@@spaceranger3728 Spiral dev would have uncovered the Heatshield issue 10+ years ago.