by Jeff Pollard
Dozens of contractors did studies and came back with a number of interesting designs. Several contractors used the three module spacecraft concept instead of the two module concept. In the two module concept, like Apollo, you have the crewed Command Module joined by the utility Service Module which houses the engine, fuel, batteries, and all kinds of equipment. The Command Module is heat-shielded while the Service Module is discarded to burn up during re-entry. If you try to heat shield the whole thing, you make the spacecraft much heavier. A three-module spacecraft goes another step further, separating the crewable Command Module into two parts. You still have the Service Module for equipment, but then you have a Re-entry Module which you design to be as small and light as possible, as all it needs to do is house the astronauts through re-entry. But this module is topped by the Orbital Module which is not heat-shielded, and the design of it is not dictated by the aerodynamics of re-entry. The two-module spacecraft's design is constrained because all of the crew volume has to be put into the re-entry friendly conical shape. However the three-module spacecraft can have a small, lightweight Re-entry Module tailored for re-entry and an Orbital Module without heavy heat shielding and can be made into the most efficient shape, a sphere. This all might sound trivial, but the result is a lighter overall spacecraft with more internal volume. The Soyuz spacecraft uses this design.
Several contractors submitted three-module designs for a CEV in the first round of reviews. These contractors pointed out that their lightweight spacecraft could easily fit on existing rockets, thus making development of the Ares I unnecessary and making launches of the CEV much cheaper.
For round two of development, NASA added two more requirements for the CEV. First, they declared that it should be a reusable spacecraft so they could save money by simply replacing or refurbishing the heat shield and reusing the complex spacecraft. This meant that three-segment designs were much less desirable as you couldn't reuse the discarded Orbital Module which housed much of the important equipment.
Second, NASA was still having trouble deciding on the exact method of the Constellation Program's return to the Moon. Some in NASA wanted to use a dedicated lander, just like in Apollo, which would land while the CEV remained in lunar orbit. Then the lander would ascend back to lunar orbit for rendezvous and docking with the CEV and the CEV would then take the astronauts back to Earth. However, since Constellation was meant to stay on the lunar surface for longer periods of time than in Apollo, that meant leaving the CEV in lunar orbit longer. In the event of an emergency, a lunar crew could not simply take off from the Moon at a moment's notice, they would have to wait for their orbiting command ship to be in the correct orbit in order to rendezvous with it. Additionally, something could go wrong with the CEV in the meantime (lunar orbits are quite unstable compared to Earth orbits).
Some in NASA thought that for Constellation, the CEV should itself land on the Moon, which would allow astronauts to take back off at any time and head straight back for Earth if necessary. The benefit of this direct-ascent mode was safety and simplicity; no need to maintain an orbiting command ship nor any worries about a complicated orbital rendezvous in order to get home. However, landing the whole spacecraft on the Moon, including the heat-shielded spacecraft and the fuel needed for the Earth return burn meant that landing on the Moon required far more fuel. Thus it drastically decreased performance in terms of payload to the lunar surface. For Apollo, they went with lunar orbit rendezvous as the only viable method of landing. For Constellation, with the larger Ares V rocket, they had the excess payload capacity to make direct ascent a viable option.
But NASA hadn't made a definitive choice on which method, so they tried to play it safe by adding requirements to the CEV to ensure that they would have both options still available. Thus they added requirements that the CEV be able to house astronauts on the Moon with enough space for them to stand up and don Moon suits.
With the added requirements of reusability and enough volume for the crew to perform Moon walks from the capsule, the three-module design no longer worked. Instead, the design had essentially dictated a single conical crew capsule, just like Apollo, and the large size of the crew and volume requirements meant that this conical capsule had to be quite large. Since the capsule's shape is dictated by re-entry, the only way to increase the volume for the conical spacecraft was to keep widening the base, and that wider base made the CEV too big to fit on any existing rockets.
After a year of intense work, the companies delivered their proposals. NASA thanked the contractors for all their work, then selected Lockheed-Martin as the winner, then told them to build the CEV NASA had already designed. They decided prior to any proposals or studies that they would make the CEV design “Apollo on steroids.”
There was immediate backlash both outside and within NASA. Once the shuttle was abandoned, and we returned to flying in space capsules, we could have moved to existing, much cheaper rockets like the Delta IV Heavy or Atlas V. But the CEV's design was just big enough to make those rockets no longer an option and thus justified the spending of billions of dollars to develop NASA's own new rocket, the Ares I. The Ares I was going to cost significantly more than existing rockets even if you ignore the fact that NASA would also pay for years of development while the Delta and Atlas were already being mass produced.
It became quite clear that the design of the CEV was an intentional attempt to justify developing a new rocket and to preserve contractors' jobs and facilities by finding an excuse to keep the costly shuttle infrastructure up and running.
The program's design was not chosen because it was the best, but rather because it was the most politically convenient and created enough pork to keep lawmakers happy. NASA's history is filled with similar stories. Teams of brilliant engineers spend years doing studies and thinking up ideas for making space travel cheaper, simpler, easier, safer, only to have their studies ignored as NASA pushes forward with something bigger, dumber, less safe, but politically convenient.
Constellation pushed on, developing the new technology that would be required, with a planned first manned launch of the CEV in 2012. Constellation proponents defended the program by claiming it would be cheap to develop the Ares rockets as they were “shuttle derived,” a favorite phrase of pork-barrel politicians, which is really a way of avoiding justifying new contracts by simply extending existing contracts. The pork-barrel politicians defended their plan by claiming that only NASA could develop manned rockets and that the Ares rockets, though configured differently, would be safe because they had a long history of use in manned space travel.
The new Obama administration came into office and was not happy with what they found. NASA had promised that the CEV could fly by 2012, only two years after the 2010 shuttle retirement, but the program was far behind schedule. NASA was still flying the shuttle and trying to pay for development of the new Ares rocket family at the same time. Congress had cut NASA funding and that translated to the axing of the lunar lander, named Altair. In October 2009, an Ares I prototype was ready to fly. It might seem simple to take an existing rocket like a shuttle SRB and put a payload on top of it and go, but it's not so simple. The Ares I-X prototype was not a full Ares I. It wasn't the elongated and upgraded SRB, but rather a regular SRB from the shuttle program. It also lacked the cryogenic second stage, but the test launch was needed to verify the flight profile and load characteristics that a launch of an Ares I would produce. The launch seemed to go perfectly, but that was an illusion. The launch seriously damaged the launch pad, much more so than with a regular shuttle launch. The rocket also vibrated much more intensely than anticipated.
Once the launch was reviewed, NASA determined that some changes would need to be implemented, such as developing a system of shock absorbers to protect the crew and payload from the intense vibrations, as well as strengthening of the rocket to withstand those forces. The supposedly cheap and easy to develop Ares I was going to cost billions to develop. Meanwhile the Ares V, though it exist
ed only on the drawing board, was already undergoing cost overruns and delays.
The shuttle would be retired in a year, and NASA had nothing to replace it. One thing was absolutely clear: NASA did not have the budget to send the CEV to space four or five times a year on routine missions to the ISS and also develop a heavy-lift rocket and do missions to the Moon and deep space.
President Obama canceled the Ares I, and effectively killed the Ares V at the same time, while throwing the CEV into limbo. The CEV was over-designed for simple low-Earth-orbit missions. Many inside NASA breathed a sigh of relief when Constellation was canceled, and called loudly for NASA to get out of the business of building rockets. They called for private rocket firms to compete to build rockets for NASA much more cheaply than NASA could develop their own rockets. NASA's job, they argued, was to push the envelope. Building a rocket was no longer pushing the envelope, and so NASA should get out of the way and become a consumer, instead using their budget to do cutting edge work in other fields.
This however, was not to be. Too many politicians had their hands in the cookie jar, and they saw NASA as a pork-barrel buffet. Behind closed doors, senators and congressmen threatened NASA and the Obama administration that the shuttle contracts would continue, or else NASA would see its budget slashed to the bone. The Obama administration came up with a compromise. NASA would develop a “shuttle derived” rocket family, keeping those shuttle contracts in place. However, NASA would not be using this new rocket family nor the CEV for any routine missions. Instead, crew and cargo missions to the ISS would be done by private companies. NASA would be left to cutting edge flights to the Moon and deep space, while private companies would get their feet wet in space, spurring private industry that could hopefully take over totally in the decades to come.
The result of the compromise was the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), a program in which private companies could receive funding for the development of and operation of crew and cargo missions to the ISS. While private industry got COTS, NASA pressed on with the CEV, since renamed the Multi-Purpose-Crew-Vehicle, which thankfully was quickly renamed again to Orion, as well as their new shuttle-derived rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). This massive commitment to keep much of the shuttle infrastructure up and running would cost billions and only be used by NASA and only in small numbers, one or two launches a year at most. Since the Orion was no longer slated to fly very often, that meant that the requirements that the Orion be reusable no longer made much sense.
Now in 2010, Orion was slated for a first unmanned test flight in 2014, and the first SLS wouldn't be ready until around 2017. NASA would rely on Roscosmos and the Soyuz to send Americans to the ISS until a viable alternative arose. And the competition to become that alternative was just getting started.
The Las Vegas Convention was a showcase for these companies, new and old, as well as the host for the behind-closed-doors awarding of development money from the COTS program. The burgeoning companies had creative displays, and slick corporate salesmen to explain their genius ideas to potential investors, as well as attractive women standing near them, which makes their rockets and spacecraft seem way more exciting.
There was Orbital Sciences, the company which had bought up the rocket engines from hundreds of decommissioned Soviet ICBMs. By using surplus engines laying around, they hoped to bring down the cost of space travel. Of course, this would be only a temporary measure as there wasn't an unlimited supply of old missiles.
There was Virgin Galactic. Richard Branson partnered with Scaled Composites to create a sub-orbital rocket-plane, capable of carrying a few passengers up into space, and right back down after a few minutes. Virgin Galactic had been the first private group to put humans in space with SpaceShipOne a few years earlier. The scaled up SpaceShipTwo would be large enough to carry passengers and would be ready, they claimed, within a year. VG was the most well know company there, and their passenger manifest was at least 50 deep already. They only asked $10,000 for a reservation, and full payment of $200,000 upon flight. They had enough money that they didn't need any to make ends meet until passenger flights would begin. But the other companies, starved for capital and customers, needed the money now, and couldn't even get the ball rolling as nobody wants to be the first person in line to fly on an untested rocket. SpaceShipTwo was a sub-orbital craft, it couldn't stay in space for more than a few minutes, but Virgin Galactic had a proposal to carry small rockets up in the mother-ship used to launch the space-plane, putting small payloads into orbit at a fraction of the cost it would take to do in a vertically launched expendable rocket. However the payload of such a rocket was miniscule.
There was Sierra Nevada Corporation. They were developing an orbital space plane called the Dream Chaser. The Dream Chaser would seat seven and was a lifting body, which means it has no real wings, but rather the rounded shape of the wide fuselage created the lift needed to glide. The Dream Chaser had no payload bay, and was significantly smaller than the Space Shuttle. In fact, it could almost fit inside the shuttle's payload bay. The promise of the Dream Chaser was that it could be launched atop existing rockets like the Delta IV or Atlas V, thus allowing missions to and from the ISS for just a few hundred million dollars, and the space-craft itself would be reusable, re-entering, gliding back to a runway, and needing no significant maintenance. Unlike the shuttle, it didn't carry the rocket engines with it to space, so they couldn't be reused, but it also made the payload much lighter and easier to reuse. The design was based heavily on a NASA design from the 90's, which itself was borrowed from a Russian designed space-plane from the 70's that never went into production.
There was Blue Origin, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Blue Origin was also developing a reusable rocket like SpacEx, but was years behind.
There was Bigelow Aerospace. The president, yes, Mr. Bigelow, is the owner of Budget Suites of America and had a plan to put up space hotels. Their idea was to use inflatable space-craft, something that could be squeezed into a payload fairing, but on orbit, could be inflated to a much larger size and be habitable, thus providing a lot of living space for not much mass. This had been a NASA idea that was researched extensively in the 80's and 90's and never used.
There was Paragon Industries, a company that was developing service modules, the part of the spacecraft that attached to the capsule that carried a small engine, fuel, oxygen, water, consumables, batteries, solar panels or fuel cells, etc. Since several companies were developing their own space capsules, Paragon hoped to develop a universal service module that could be attached to any of the capsules.
Since so many companies could see how obvious it was that a lighter space craft could perform the simple missions to the space station, there were many proposals for such designs. There were only a few companies trying to make rockets. SpacEx, Orbital Sciences, and the United Launch Alliance were basically the only ones in town that were designing rockets. That's deceiving because ULA is a cooperative venture by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, who each owned dozens of aerospace companies. ULA operated the Space Shuttle, owning all the contractors involved in shuttle infrastructure. Lockheed makes the Atlas V and Boeing makes the Delta IV, which are now operated by their joint venture instead of competing with each other. Any way you cut it, ULA was going to make money. They had been making billions off the shuttle, and were poised to be making billions for decades to come as NASA committed to the Space Launch System. The most anyone could hope for was that NASA would perhaps use an alternative capsule to the Orion for a dozen or so cargo and maybe crew missions to the ISS, but those would be using ULA rockets at a few hundred million dollars a piece. Nonetheless, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin had also applied to COTS which had only $400 million to distribute.
Boeing entered a design for a capsule named CST-100 that was lighter and smaller than Lockheed-Martin's Orion.
By far the favorites to win the competition to become NASA's ticket to the ISS was ULA's combination of the
CST-100 capsule, which would be cheaper and simpler than Orion and could fly on either Atlas or Delta rockets also made by ULA.
Orbital Sciences, with their plans to refurbish old rockets that had been sitting in Siberia, abandoned by the Soviet space program after the failure of the N-1 rocket, their answer to the Saturn V which went 0-for-4 in test launches in the late '60s and early '70s, was poised to be ready to launch cargo quite soon in their Cygnus spacecraft. That's the benefit of not having to design and manufacture brand new hardware, and an option Kingsley had examined years earlier when he had thought about purchasing old ICBMs.
But after the clear front-runner of ULA, and perhaps even behind Orbital Sciences, there was Kingsley's SpacEx. They were designing a brand new family of rockets, as well as a capsule. They claimed their Eagle 9, which they expected to be mass producing within three years, would cost less than $60 million dollars a piece, and each one would be capable of putting a Griffin capsule into low-Earth-orbit for visits to the ISS, carrying up to 7 crew. SpacEx projected a total cost of 85 million dollars for a cargo mission and 120 million for a crew mission. Meanwhile NASA was paying 70 million dollars per seat to launch their astronauts on Russia's Soyuz rockets.
Because SpacEx was a singular company with a single factory, they promised to make rockets and spacecraft quite cheaply, especially compared to ULA which contains dozens of smaller companies and was spread across the country in a way to ensure political support. SpacEx was designed from the ground up to provide the best product at the lowest price, while it seemed ULA was designed to be too big to fail, too politically connected to be beaten.
The convention was a show for potential investors. But away from convention center and the fake tits on display near the scale model rockets, the real business at hand was the meeting where NASA officials would award development money. Countless start-ups had their fingers crossed, hoping to stave off bankruptcy for another year. SpacEx was no different.
