Interesting video, I had no idea how far back Orion really went. Artemis is truly a grotesque husk of a program, an amalgamation of dead programs morphed into forms they were never meant to be.
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.
"it was the 60s" And the calculations by the engineers were done in metric, although the displays and inputs for crew were in the imperial units they were accustomed to as pilots.
Your tale of how public funding can go terribly wrong boils my blood. It’s very fortunate that now such behavior seems to be going away now that we have commercial options available
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
@@artembolshakov3901this statement is so false 😂. Elon is wasting tax dollars on the starship program meanwhile blue origin, sierra space and ULA are achieving much more for less public funds(I’m exclusively talking tax dollars this is not related to Falcon 9 rideshare missions etc) . Everybody wants more performance in aerospace. It’s the name of the game
I felt this so hard, then the later part of nasa thinking in imperial and talking in metric also got me. made me shake my fist at my own country once again lmao
Oh boy the rationalisations to keep solids contractors, like someone i talked to once said *but the SLS solids are safe!!!! Old solids are fine!! Minutemen/Minotaurs are still perfect even after decades laying around!!!* The minuteman that blew up literally in the last 6-7 months: *uhhhh... About that*
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.
@@EagerSpace Considering that the Challenger accident occurred precisely because solid boosters were used (the cold caused the seals to contract and allow combustion gases to escape), I think that fuel boosters would have been safer. In addition, one of the dangers of solid-fuel rockets is that once combustion has started, it cannot be stopped.
The word in the aerospace industry at the time was that O'Keefe was encouraged to leave by members of Congress in "old space" districts and states, who opposed the "new space" aspects of O'Keefe's plan. So they pulled some strings and got him a better-paying job offer he couldn't refuse. This explanation is DEFINITELY supported by the fact his replacement, Griffin, brought an immediate wholesale abandonment of the "new space" approach and a focus on a Shuttle-derived system that would keep everyone employed. Anyways, I'm just surprised your video does not include this, and only mentions a "climate science gaffe" theory. If O'Keefe hadn't left, the original VSE plan would have been great. Instead, we got tens of billions wasted on Shuttle-derived garbage.
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.
22:19 WTF? Why do _all_ of the man-rated rockets with big ’uns solid rocket boosters have significantly better estimates for loss of mission and crew than all the others?
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.
25:38 At some point in its long development, Orion got smaller in at least diameter (and maybe height). So how the bleep did it get heavier? I hadn’t known about that little detail.
Video idea: What were all of the failure modes for the Constellation rockets if the SRBs sprung another O-ring leak? Could Orion’s launch escape tower handle all of them? What if the leak was on the lowest segment, and the segment with the nozzle detached, but not before the leak provided enough “RCS” thrust to point the rocket at the ground? Would that rupture the hydrolox tanks and engulf Orion with its own SRB feeding flames into the explosive cloud?
I was just looking at the history of the Apollo CSM engine. It was an Aerojet AJ-10. The other spacecraft that have used the AJ10 include the Delta II, Titan III, the Shuttles OMS pods, and-wait for it-the Orion’s Service Module. So WTF can’t Orion handle the same orbit type as Apollo? Is it lack of fuel, or is Orion that much heavier?
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 Eager Space videos I’ve watched prove that interesting content beats poor content with fancy presentation. The videos I’ve watched are essentially PowerPoint presentations. However, the topics are interesting, the research is thorough, and the content is concise. My interest in space exploration dates back to the 1960s.
I come away from this with a thought... Do the people at charge at NASA actually want us exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond, or are they more interested in keeping their jobs and keeping NASA in a position of power as "THE only way to fly people in space"?
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.
What do you think was the idea behind the “Shapsule”? If landing on airbags from a parachute in the end, then why bother making it pointy and non-capsule-ish? I’m puzzled.
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.
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?
Video idea: What was involved in human-rating the Atlas V, and why did NASA decide to use the Atlas V N22 model (with 2 solid rocket boosters) instead of the Atlas V N02 (with zero solid rocket boosters)? Wikipedia says the N02 model was the most likely circa 2011 (although the citation simply says “402”), so what changed?
16:33 What changed in NASA management that they no longer felt the need to maintain their monopoly on sending US astronauts to space? Was it simply Congress’ mandate, or something beyond that?
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.
Current lunar starship is stuck in lunar orbit after the astronauts transfer to Orion. I talk about some options where it could be reused in my "commercial moon" video. The blue origin lander is refueled in lunar orbit before landing and could therefore be reused by refueling it again.
Now I understand the shape of the Orion lander. It's shaped like a funnel to drain tax payer money into the pockets of Lockheed executives. Love the comment about how cancelling of an over-budget program was "not really allowed" and how SLS came into being. Many people thought Artemis started in 2011, not knowing that it really started in 2004 and had already sucked up billions of dollars before the big rebranding.
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.
I've been amazed at how little attention has been spent on Orion. The program has been going for 19 years and has taken in about $24 billion to date. It's still taking in $1.4 billion a year despite not really flying and not being under active development and it currently has what appears to be a broken heat shield (not clear if that is LM or NASA's fault).
Why not just add more fuel mass to orions service module? I mean the thing is necked narrower than the heatshield. You may as well make their diameters match
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.
Please confirm if I'm understanding you properly: Orion could have been made lighter-weight, and wind up being able to "fly commercial" to the ISS like the Dragon and Starliner. But to go from TLI, to low lunar orbit, and then back to earth, it would have also needed some kind of add-on "propulsion module" (with the big rocket engine and fuel tankage) that would have to go behind the "service module". Or rather just an alternate/heavier "long range" version of the "service module" with the rocket engine and 2000m/sec of tankage in it. Is that correct? And would that have been so bad?
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.
What’s funny is that the lander they eventually chosen is more capable than Orion itself, and it can launch the crew AND bring them back all by itself and probably has more space inside it.
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).
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
10:50 NASA never used Imperial units! US Customary units are significantly different, especially as in beer. These two systems were only partly unified with the establishment of the international inch and pound a few decades ago. US Units and Imperial are different enough even French people I’ve met know that you get noticeably more beer ordering an Imperial pint than a US pint or half liter.
I am at the the very beginning of watching this, so you may cover this topic in the video. One thing that *frosted my arse* about the _Orion space capsule program_ -- and I admit it is almost totally subjective -- was choosing the name *"ORION."* For those that do not know: In late 1950s and early 1960s the US federal government funded a classified study into the use of small nuclear warheads to propel a spacecraft. This is called _nuclear pulse propulsion._ The study was named *_"PROJECT ORION."_* While this concept may seem _rather far-fetched,_ it was actually determined to be doable with the technology available in the 1960s. HOWEVER, the _"Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty"_ put the kibosh on the whole thing. I first read about this study years ago in a book called *"THE LOST WORLDS OF 2OO1"* by Arthur C. Clarke. In that book, Mr. Clarke wrote about the development of the manuscript that ultimately became the novel -- and led to the motion picture -- *2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY.* At one time the movie makers were considering making the spaceship *USS Discovery* be propelled by nuclear pulse propulsion, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Whenever I read something about rocketry and space that includes the word _Orion_ my mind AUTOMATICALLY goes back to that study. The _Orion space capsule_ has NOTHING to do with that study, and whoever chose that name should be fired.
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.
I'm concerned at the fuel %s you calculated. I found the source on Wikipedia, and you used the Apollo CSM mass in lunar orbit which is different than the LEO mass. Mass does not change if the local gravity does. If I rerun your numbers purely based on initial and final mass assuming complete propellant usage, Apollo gives 19% and Orion 41.6% (also using Wikipedia numbers).
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?
Looks like Nasa wants to go and kill some more astronauts over politics. Solid rockets, a halo orbit (I never even heard of that before this video), and whatever other surprises they have for us.
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.
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.
I don't think spiral development is all as great as some people say. It started showing up in Software development when the early 90's "Software Crisis" started affecting large systems that were dependent on software-nobody could come up with accurate estimates anymore as things got more complex so everything ran over budget. So they came up with "Spiral Development" as formal way of acknowledging what they had been doing all along which was trial and error. The only way Orion would have made sense to ISS is if they applied that delta-V surplus to provide reboost services to ISS, replacing a few Progress flights, but it would probably work better on a commercial model. NASA should not have outsourced the SM to the Europeans. Programmatically making Orion an extension of ISS. Putting an International Partner in the critical path is a guarantee that everything will cost way more than it should have. Obama's cancelling Ares/Constellation had nothing to do with cost-democrats were proposing that before he was even elected as a means of increasing the Department of Education budget. Obama hated American exceptionalism, pure and simple, and that's why it was cancelled.
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.
Imagine what we could've done over half a century with simple teleoperated construction equipment on the moon. If you want humanity to live in space, stop sending humans to space. Do everything with bots instead, until you have a fully pressurized habitat complete with at least a year of plants and animals living inside. You will achieve your goals much faster and very much cheaper.
Interesting video, I had no idea how far back Orion really went. Artemis is truly a grotesque husk of a program, an amalgamation of dead programs morphed into forms they were never meant to be.
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?
I fucking love having stumbled upon this channel and am currently binging many of your episodes. Thank you for all the interesting content!
Thanks
same, this is a god tier channel
"it was the 60s"
And the calculations by the engineers were done in metric, although the displays and inputs for crew were in the imperial units they were accustomed to as pilots.
12:28 Tachyon tablet side effects can include can include brief harmless glitches in The Matrix.
Clearly the only possible explanation...
Your tale of how public funding can go terribly wrong boils my blood. It’s very fortunate that now such behavior seems to be going away now that we have commercial options available
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.
@@artembolshakov3901this statement is so false 😂. Elon is wasting tax dollars on the starship program meanwhile blue origin, sierra space and ULA are achieving much more for less public funds(I’m exclusively talking tax dollars this is not related to Falcon 9 rideshare missions etc) . Everybody wants more performance in aerospace. It’s the name of the game
The ~1/28oz joke was a good one lol
I felt this so hard, then the later part of nasa thinking in imperial and talking in metric also got me. made me shake my fist at my own country once again lmao
Oh boy the rationalisations to keep solids contractors, like someone i talked to once said
*but the SLS solids are safe!!!! Old solids are fine!! Minutemen/Minotaurs are still perfect even after decades laying around!!!*
The minuteman that blew up literally in the last 6-7 months: *uhhhh... About that*
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.
@@EagerSpace Considering that the Challenger accident occurred precisely because solid boosters were used (the cold caused the seals to contract and allow combustion gases to escape), I think that fuel boosters would have been safer. In addition, one of the dangers of solid-fuel rockets is that once combustion has started, it cannot be stopped.
The word in the aerospace industry at the time was that O'Keefe was encouraged to leave by members of Congress in "old space" districts and states, who opposed the "new space" aspects of O'Keefe's plan. So they pulled some strings and got him a better-paying job offer he couldn't refuse. This explanation is DEFINITELY supported by the fact his replacement, Griffin, brought an immediate wholesale abandonment of the "new space" approach and a focus on a Shuttle-derived system that would keep everyone employed. Anyways, I'm just surprised your video does not include this, and only mentions a "climate science gaffe" theory. If O'Keefe hadn't left, the original VSE plan would have been great. Instead, we got tens of billions wasted on Shuttle-derived garbage.
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.
The Artemis III HLS flight plan is some kinda nuts
22:19 WTF? Why do _all_ of the man-rated rockets with big ’uns solid rocket boosters have significantly better estimates for loss of mission and crew than all the others?
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.
Really top-shelf information and presentation. Subbed!
Some says Griffin was the worst NASA Administrator ever
25:38 At some point in its long development, Orion got smaller in at least diameter (and maybe height). So how the bleep did it get heavier? I hadn’t known about that little detail.
Video idea: What were all of the failure modes for the Constellation rockets if the SRBs sprung another O-ring leak? Could Orion’s launch escape tower handle all of them? What if the leak was on the lowest segment, and the segment with the nozzle detached, but not before the leak provided enough “RCS” thrust to point the rocket at the ground? Would that rupture the hydrolox tanks and engulf Orion with its own SRB feeding flames into the explosive cloud?
Really good channel man, looking forward to more of your videos.
I was just looking at the history of the Apollo CSM engine. It was an Aerojet AJ-10. The other spacecraft that have used the AJ10 include the Delta II, Titan III, the Shuttles OMS pods, and-wait for it-the Orion’s Service Module.
So WTF can’t Orion handle the same orbit type as Apollo? Is it lack of fuel, or is Orion that much heavier?
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 Eager Space videos I’ve watched prove that interesting content beats poor content with fancy presentation. The videos I’ve watched are essentially PowerPoint presentations. However, the topics are interesting, the research is thorough, and the content is concise. My interest in space exploration dates back to the 1960s.
Thanks. Somewhere I have an album with newpaper clippings from early Apollo flights, when I would have been 3 years old.
100%. Most of the UA-camrs I watch are pretty much just PowerPoint with voiceover.
Those ad reads are top tier.
I come away from this with a thought... Do the people at charge at NASA actually want us exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond, or are they more interested in keeping their jobs and keeping NASA in a position of power as "THE only way to fly people in space"?
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.
What do you think was the idea behind the “Shapsule”? If landing on airbags from a parachute in the end, then why bother making it pointy and non-capsule-ish? I’m puzzled.
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.
JSC Crew Office would not tolerate any winged vehicle as a Shuttle replacement.
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.
RIP shapsule
Video idea: What was involved in human-rating the Atlas V, and why did NASA decide to use the Atlas V N22 model (with 2 solid rocket boosters) instead of the Atlas V N02 (with zero solid rocket boosters)? Wikipedia says the N02 model was the most likely circa 2011 (although the citation simply says “402”), so what changed?
JSC Crew Office also would not tolerate small solid rockets as part of the launch vehicles.
16:33 What changed in NASA management that they no longer felt the need to maintain their monopoly on sending US astronauts to space? Was it simply Congress’ mandate, or something beyond that?
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.
I swear they are actively stopping humans from leaving the Earth... I guess they don't want to lose those tax dollars.
Am I correct that lunar Starship needs to return to earth orbit after each lunar landing and return to lunar orbit for refueling?
Current lunar starship is stuck in lunar orbit after the astronauts transfer to Orion. I talk about some options where it could be reused in my "commercial moon" video.
The blue origin lander is refueled in lunar orbit before landing and could therefore be reused by refueling it again.
Now I understand the shape of the Orion lander. It's shaped like a funnel to drain tax payer money into the pockets of Lockheed executives.
Love the comment about how cancelling of an over-budget program was "not really allowed" and how SLS came into being. Many people thought Artemis started in 2011, not knowing that it really started in 2004 and had already sucked up billions of dollars before the big rebranding.
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.
I need find and hire the guy at Lockheed martin who squeezed the government for money and made out like a bandit while Boeing took most of the bad PR
I've been amazed at how little attention has been spent on Orion. The program has been going for 19 years and has taken in about $24 billion to date. It's still taking in $1.4 billion a year despite not really flying and not being under active development and it currently has what appears to be a broken heat shield (not clear if that is LM or NASA's fault).
Why not just add more fuel mass to orions service module? I mean the thing is necked narrower than the heatshield. You may as well make their diameters match
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.
The orbital space plane kinda sounds like dreamchaser.
Please confirm if I'm understanding you properly: Orion could have been made lighter-weight, and wind up being able to "fly commercial" to the ISS like the Dragon and Starliner. But to go from TLI, to low lunar orbit, and then back to earth, it would have also needed some kind of add-on "propulsion module" (with the big rocket engine and fuel tankage) that would have to go behind the "service module". Or rather just an alternate/heavier "long range" version of the "service module" with the rocket engine and 2000m/sec of tankage in it.
Is that correct? And would that have been so bad?
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.
What’s funny is that the lander they eventually chosen is more capable than Orion itself, and it can launch the crew AND bring them back all by itself and probably has more space inside it.
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.
Still planning on that Ares-1x video?
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
10:50 NASA never used Imperial units!
US Customary units are significantly different, especially as in beer. These two systems were only partly unified with the establishment of the international inch and pound a few decades ago.
US Units and Imperial are different enough even French people I’ve met know that you get noticeably more beer ordering an Imperial pint than a US pint or half liter.
I am at the the very beginning of watching this, so you may cover this topic in the video.
One thing that *frosted my arse* about the _Orion space capsule program_ -- and I admit it is almost totally subjective -- was choosing the name *"ORION."*
For those that do not know: In late 1950s and early 1960s the US federal government funded a classified study into the use of small nuclear warheads to propel a spacecraft. This is called _nuclear pulse propulsion._ The study was named *_"PROJECT ORION."_*
While this concept may seem _rather far-fetched,_ it was actually determined to be doable with the technology available in the 1960s. HOWEVER, the _"Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty"_ put the kibosh on the whole thing.
I first read about this study years ago in a book called *"THE LOST WORLDS OF 2OO1"* by Arthur C. Clarke. In that book, Mr. Clarke wrote about the development of the manuscript that ultimately became the novel -- and led to the motion picture -- *2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY.* At one time the movie makers were considering making the spaceship *USS Discovery* be propelled by nuclear pulse propulsion, but the idea was eventually abandoned.
Whenever I read something about rocketry and space that includes the word _Orion_ my mind AUTOMATICALLY goes back to that study. The _Orion space capsule_ has NOTHING to do with that study, and whoever chose that name should be fired.
Artemis is critical for the future of spaceflight
Excellent video
Wow - LM running up the budget on a government contract? Who'd a thunk it?
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.
I'm concerned at the fuel %s you calculated. I found the source on Wikipedia, and you used the Apollo CSM mass in lunar orbit which is different than the LEO mass. Mass does not change if the local gravity does. If I rerun your numbers purely based on initial and final mass assuming complete propellant usage, Apollo gives 19% and Orion 41.6% (also using Wikipedia numbers).
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?
What a joke!
Exactly.
Artemis/Orion, both are glorified Apollo space capsules.
Looks like Nasa wants to go and kill some more astronauts over politics. Solid rockets, a halo orbit (I never even heard of that before this video), and whatever other surprises they have for us.
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.
I don't think spiral development is all as great as some people say. It started showing up in Software development when the early 90's "Software Crisis" started affecting large systems that were dependent on software-nobody could come up with accurate estimates anymore as things got more complex so everything ran over budget. So they came up with "Spiral Development" as formal way of acknowledging what they had been doing all along which was trial and error.
The only way Orion would have made sense to ISS is if they applied that delta-V surplus to provide reboost services to ISS, replacing a few Progress flights, but it would probably work better on a commercial model.
NASA should not have outsourced the SM to the Europeans. Programmatically making Orion an extension of ISS. Putting an International Partner in the critical path is a guarantee that everything will cost way more than it should have.
Obama's cancelling Ares/Constellation had nothing to do with cost-democrats were proposing that before he was even elected as a means of increasing the Department of Education budget.
Obama hated American exceptionalism, pure and simple, and that's why it was cancelled.
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.
Imagine what we could've done over half a century with simple teleoperated construction equipment on the moon. If you want humanity to live in space, stop sending humans to space. Do everything with bots instead, until you have a fully pressurized habitat complete with at least a year of plants and animals living inside. You will achieve your goals much faster and very much cheaper.
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.