H-2A launch failure

On 1 Dec 2003 07:02:01 -0800, in a place far, far away,
(ed kyle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Tom Merkle) wrote in message . com...

Interesting that though Japan is the #2 economy in the world, and
supposedly techno-centric, there are no Japanese entries for the
x-prize. California and Texas both have multiple teams.


Probably because Japan is busy with important stuff like
conquering the world-wide automotive market, which is the
biggest part of the industrialized economy (think about how
many millions of vehicles are sold per year - and how many
tens of thousands per *day*). The space business is, and
will remain, irrelevant by comparison. Maybe some U.S.
outfit will win the x-prize, maybe not. But Japanese
companies have, in sequence, dominated the competitions that
really matter: first Formula One, then CART, and now IRL.
NASCAR would succumb too, if only the good 'ol boys would let
Toyota and Honda in. Japan dominates other competitions, like
the solar car race in Austrialia. Do these competitions matter?
Well, right now Ford is slipping from second to third in the
world, behind Toyota, and Honda just built its 10 millionth
vehicle within the U.S..

This thread inspired this week's Fox column:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104758,00.html

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104758,00.html

Nice. The line of thought is familiar, but making the analogy of
Japan's cars versus Japan's rockets is a nice way of driving it home.

And it was nice to go light on what the solution to the problem is.
In other columns you've talked more about how to get there, and in
fact it is something which has been debated quite a bit. But this
column did a good job of just sketching out what the eventual solution
would look like, however one gets to it.

h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On 1 Dec 2003 07:02:01 -0800, in a place far, far away,
(ed kyle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Tom Merkle) wrote in message . com...

Interesting that though Japan is the #2 economy in the world, and
supposedly techno-centric, there are no Japanese entries for the
x-prize. California and Texas both have multiple teams.

Probably because Japan is busy with important stuff like
conquering the world-wide automotive market, ...
This thread inspired this week's Fox column:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104758,00.html

A good way of presenting the issue, I think. One of your
paragraphs helps highlight the problem even further. As you
said:

"Consider--the most reliable proven launch system is probably
the Soviet (now Russian) Proton. *According to International
Launch Services*, the western firm that markets it, and has a
strong interest in putting the best face on its capability, it
has a 96% reliability record in about 300 launches over the
past four decades. They state this with apparent pride."

What the ILS web site actually says is that "Proton has
*earned* a 96 percent reliability record *with 300 launches*
since the mid-1960s". This sounds carefully parsed, eh?
What on earth does it mean?

It turns out that Proton is far from the most reliable
launcher. Its record is actually on par with Titan IV!
Although Proton "earned" a 96 percent mark during its
27 missions for ILS, when it suffered only one failure,
its overall career has seen 37 failures in 301 missions
for only an 88 percent realized success rate. Since 1990,
Proton has failed 8 times in 119 attempts (93% success).
It could be that Proton's true reliability is nearer to
93% than 96% and that ILS has merely been lucky - so far.

I can think of at least seven active space launch vehicles
that have better (proven) reliability than Proton. They
are Atlas IIAS, Delta II, STS, Soyuz/Molniya, Tsyklon 2/3,
Kosmos 3M, and the Long March 2 series. The best of these
have proven reliabilities of 97% or better.

Sad to say, and hard as it is to believe, with the passage
of Ariane 4, even at 88% Proton *is* the most reliable bigsat
geosynchronous-class commercial space launcher that a
prospective customer can currently buy (Soyuz and Delta can
only boost small geosync satellites). All of the remaining
Atlas IIAS vehicles are sold out, Boeing has pulled Delta IV
from the market, Ariane 5 is struggling, and it is too soon
to say how reliable Sea Launch Zenit, Atlas V, and H-II will
be.

- Ed Kyle

h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On 1 Dec 2003 07:02:01 -0800, in a place far, far away,
(ed kyle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Tom Merkle) wrote in message . com...

This thread inspired this week's Fox column:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104758,00.html

Nice article Rand. First time I've agreed with you 100% in over a
year.

It got me thinking about many of the problems with our government's
method of space launch appropriation, which insists that our method of
space financing match the method of space engineering, that is,
everything done at the razor's edge of the financing margin. We're
already spending so much to launch stuff to outer space that systems
and parts choice become dominated not by launch cost, but by total
justifiability. It is more important to be able to easily paperwork
prove that part A is necessary than to actually have part A be better
than part B for the job. The result is penny-wise, pound foolish.

By coincidence yesterday I happened to see three different historical
examples of how new weapon systems were introduced to the US military:
the submarine, the airplane, and the helicopter. In each case, the
first successful platform actually purchased by the military was a
demonstration model built by private financing, independant of overly
demanding government requirements. In both the submarine and the
helicopter's case, the eventual successful platform was built by an
individual-engineer-dominated company already working on a government
contract for unsuccessful government versions of the eventual vehicle.
The only difference with the Wright brothers is that they didn't
receive their first government contract until after their working
airplane was already built.

The first successful military submarine, the Holland VI, was built by
John Holland (working for the company that became Electric Boat) when
he realized that compromises forced by overly demanding government
requirements were going to make the government-financed Plunger
unworkable. The similarity to the way NASA developed the X-33 is most
remarkable. The Plunger was the result of an open government
competition that called for a submergeable boat with a surface spd of
15 kts, submerged spd 8kts, and at least a 2 hour submerged stay time.
Holland's clearly superior design easily won the design competition,
and the Navy in 1893 awarded him a $350,000 contract to build the
Plunger. Holland requested to ease the speed requirement in order to
allow an internal combustion power plant, but the Navy held firm on
the speed requirement, mandating (at the time) a steam plant. The
Plunger was dutifully built, but was unable to submerge because the
result of having a high-power steam plant in a metal tube was to make
the interior uninhabitable surfaced, never mind submerging. In fact
this temperature problem for submarine steam plants was never solved
until the advent of modern insulation and air conditioning first made
it possible in the 1950's with the first steam-powered submarine, the
Nautilus, and even then it only happened because Rickover had the gut
instinct to double the air conditioning he thought he needed to enable
it to barely work at all.

But I digress. The point is that overly demanding initial requirements
mandated an expensive, too high-tech, and ultimately unworkable
design, somewhat reminiscent of the Shuttle or X-33 a hundred years
later. When John Holland realized it was never going to work, he
convinced the employees and backers of what became the Electric Boat
company to privately build a submarine to his own less demanding
specifications, and using an internal combustion engine instead of a
hot, expensive steam plant. The Holland VI cost $100,000 to build
(almost a quarter the cost of Plunger), was capable of 11 kts
surfaced, 6 kts submerged, and was capable of staying under for 5
hours. Most important of all, it worked, and after Admiral Dewey
testified that if the Spanish had had two Holland boats, they could
have held off his fleet in Manila bay, Congress and the Navy signed on
to begin the submarine era in the US Navy (and the world).

The helicopter has a similiar development. The eventual working model,
the familiar single rotor-tail rotor combination that seems obvious
now, was only developed because Igor Sikorsky, frustrated with the
control problems that the gyrocopters and dual bladed prototypes
favored by the army exhibited, convinced his investors to build the
successful VS-300 and the subsequent R-4 out of pocket, only winning a
government guarantee after it already worked.

The story of the Wright brothers and Samuel Langley's travails in the
area of powered flight is well known, with Langley's military
designed, overweight, underpowered machine unable to ever lift off the
ground. What do these three examples have in common? In each case, a
government competition called for requirements that demanded too much
of the experimental machine that was attempting to be built, instead
of starting small and then expanding the envelope.

The same thing happened with the X-33, but this time the government
actually had a chance to take the right path and use it. DC-X started
small, and had already proven that it could do the basics of rocket
reusability. Rather than going with the McDonnell-Douglas
corporation's X-33 follow on to the successful DC-X, NASA insisted on
the Lockheed version, which promised to fulfill much more demanding
requirements. Unfortunately though, it was utterly unbuildable.

Sometimes, history keeps on comin' back around...

The submarine history parts of this post are largely condensed from
Edward C. Whitman's article in the Summer 2003 issue of Undersea
Warfare.

Tom Merkle