Forum | Thinking big picture / long term again

If we do go with this approach, it may be worth while defining very early on a list of "milestones" for each project.  Ensuring the LV project has a "single stage suborbital flight" milestone will ensure that OHKLA fully survives the reorg in spirit.

The manned spaceflight project milestones would be obvious: suborbital / orbital / circumlunar / lunar landing.

As always, I understand the concern about biting off more than we can chew.  I am just worried about first impressions and I feel like right now CSTART looks a little like it doesn't have a sensible "big picture" organisation, it's just two projects, with some degree of overlap (hybrid rocketry in both).  The proposal above was intended as a trade off between not adding too much work (really all it adds is the unmanned satellite frame system, and arguably there's not a lot of new work in that – we could make an explicit effort to make as much hardware reusable between the satellite frame and CLLARE as possible, in terms of comms etc.) and presenting a coherent big picture.

Your plan with regards to the unmanned stuff sound great.  If we do go with this approach we should definitely make a big, explicit deal about maximising technology sharing between the CM and unmanned stuff.  As much as possible they should use the same batteries, communications and general computing hardware, software, everything.  Not only does this minimise the amount of extra work involved, but it gives us an opportunity to test how this stuff works in space a bit in advance.  I would feel much less nervous during the first manned launch of the CLLARE CM if I knew that identical, or "genetically related", hardware/software had been flown on unmanned satellites before.  Curiously enough, nobody has ever done this approach before, as far as I know, which is yet another point of uniqueness in our favour.

Re: big, clustered hybrid launchers: I was under the impression that this was still on the board for the smaller CLLARE configurations.  The full blown lunar landing stack has been more or less designed around the Falcon 9, but the smaller stacks are a little more up in the air.  I've learned that an improved version of the Falcon 1 is planned, the Falcon 1e, which will have a LEO payload of 1000 kg, so that would be a possibility for CM+OSM launches if things turn out a little lighter than planned.  I have no idea what we would use, commercially speaking, for a suborbital CM launch, and the circumulnar stack is a little up in the air too, although a Soyuz rocket may suffice.  We also need to think about what commercial options we might have for launching low-mass satellites.  Basically, I think we should use commercial launch vehicles where we can and when it makes financial sense, but it would be nice if we were developing our own, independent launch vehicle technology in parallel, so that we were not dependent on external groups and so that we could do launches cheaper, with more control over things like insertion altitude/inclination.  I guess the ideal would be that one day we would do 100% of our own launches, but during the long, long time before we get there we will use our launch vehicles where we can and use the cheapest commercial alternative otherwise.

That said, your ITAR concerns are valid, although ruling out the US and Canada would be quite restricting.  I'll look into whether or not Australia has an ITAR equivalent.  If not it may be a sensible choice, since there is plenty of sparsely inhabited desert in the middle of the country where launches would be relatively safe.  There's even a small, government-owned rocket and missile testing range in the desert part of my state that I guess we may conceivably be able to use/hire.

As for your final comments about SpaceX…did you leave something out?  You explained why it would be beneficial to them for us to succeeed (and I agree), and then finish up saying "we'd still have to see if they expressed interest in this", apparently without explaining what "this" is.  Did you have some kind of official partnership in mind?

I absolute agree we should try to reduce project and launch bloat, with the qualification that these are actually good if they can lead to a source of income, i.e. if we can sell module space on unmanned satellites or probes and thereby finance CLLARE then I say the more launches of those the better.

The more I think of it, the more the proposal just seems to make sense.  If we aim to have the CM basically be our unmanned satellite frame bolted onto a pressure vessel with life support wrapped up in a heat shield, then the additional unmanned project adds minimal extra work and gives us the opportunity to test how our off-the-shelf hardware approach works in space much, much sooner and cheaper than the alternative of testing it via an unmanned CM flight.  This advantage combined with a potential revenue source selling satellite module space makes it a pretty compelling overall approach.

As for rocket options: the circumlunar stack has a fuelled mass of about 3700 kg, i.e. just a little more than a third of a Falcon 9's capacity.  Falcon 9 launches are cheaper if you use less than 80% of the payload ($45 million, I think), but we're still paying for 8000 kg and using less than half of it.  Possibly we could share the launch with another project (CSTART or otherwise), although external groups may be nervous about sharing a fairing with a third party LH2/LOX tank.  I absolutely agree that basing our hybrid cluster designs of HEAT is a good idea.  In fact, ideally, after Copenhagen Suborbitals achieve their goals and are looking for something else to do, they may decide to help out with our cluster.

On the basis of some brief preliminary googling, I don't think Australia has an ITAR equivalent.  I've realised, however, that Australia would make a lousy place to actually launch from, given how far it is from the equator.  We could always construct the boosters in Australia and ship them somewhere nearer the equator for launch, but this increases costs and also raises the problem of wherever we launch potentially having restrictions on importing launch vehicles.  Lousy laws!

As for SpaceX partnership: I would have no objection to this (providing the patent related concerns you mention are dealt with satisfactorily), but, much like Rocket's suggestion of getting funding from NASA, I sincerely doubt that we have the credibility, just yet, to pull either of these off.  Still, it can't help to ask at SpaceUp if the opportunity arises and you get a decent vibe about it.  I wonder to what extent a single SpaceX employee at a conference could give much of an authoritative answer, though.

Post edited 8:09 am – February 8, 2010 by Luke Maurits

Rizwan said:

As for OHKLA, I believe this project should give us a idea about creating a LV but the main goal with this project should be propaganda, slap in a reddit logo and a couple of other sponsors on the rocket, attach a camera, do a live web-cast of the launch and see the open source community stroke its ego. If we are able to pull this off within the second anniversary of the project we would have definitely accomplished more than something. Any cost estimates for OHKLA?

I agree that OHKLA would be a fantastic piece of propaganda and a huge achievement, but I don't think it would be any less of these things if it were the first milestone of a long term project to build a full scale booster, as opposed to a one off project.  In fact, arguably it would be more exciting for the open source community because it would be the first step in a long and awesome road.  Of course, it would already kind of be the first step on such a road because presumably after it we would start a second project that was just a bigger version of OHKLA.  Rather than defining a new project after each launch (eating up project names and Wiki namespaces, etc), why not just have one cohesive long term project from the start?

Rizwan said:

I agree with unmanned craft but wasn't this our plan from the beginning? That we would do a few tests before the final manned mission? So isn't an extendable unmanned craft included in that by default?

Yes, we have always planned to do simple, unmanned launches before launching any of the CLLARE hardware, but currently (i) there is nothing to make this clear anywhere on the website/Wiki (and, as we know, it is a very common comment to hear "you should do something simpler first) and (ii) no details on what this will look like.  If we are more explicit about this as a separate project we can emphasise the technology sharing between it and CLLARE.

Okay, so I've got the fairly strong impression that there is not wide support for creating a formal LV project by breaking the Selene concept off of CLLARE and absorbing OHKLA.  That's fair enough.

In that case, do we agree to formally abandon Selene and make CLLARE a commercially launched project?

Are people generally happy to keep OHKLA around just for its own sake?

I haven't got too clear of a signal on how we feel about creating a formal unmanned satellite project and committing to technology reuse between it and CLLARE.  Can people give specific yes/no answers on this?

To be honest, even I have gone off my earlier idea of rebranding CLLARE as a "mere" manned spaceflight project, although I do still rather like the idea of giving the CM a separate, catchier name.  How did people feel about that?

brmj said:

I've got an idea for a direction we could head with OHKLA. Though we can use commercial options for pretty much everything else, I doubt there is anything comercially avaliable for largeish suborbital payloads. Also, a sounding rocket is a cheap way to test components for how they perform in space. My thought is that OHKLA becomes a research project and later becomes important in testing components for the rest of our stuff, then something we base off of OHKLA (or directly off of HEAT, if that looks more apealing) handles our suborbital flights. This would still have some of the same legal issues, but presumably not to the same degree. Launching paid research cargos, for example, and eventually suborbital space tourism, could also be an important early funding source.

If anyone knows of a comercial option for our suborbital option, I would advise that we use that. As it is, I know of no such option, though perhaps we could partner with the Copenhagen Suborbitals for this or contract it out to them.

I think the suborbital research project is a really good direction to go in.  Do we want to rename/rebrand OHKLA and have the current OHKLA plan be the first milestone of that larger project, or are we happy to leave OHKLA as it is and create a new, more general project after it?  If we go with the latter option, would we feel comfortable at least giving the future project a prospective name and one paragraph blurb, so that we can produce a "CSTART roadmap" that shows where things are going?  Such a roadmap would be a very nice thing to have.

I am quite happy with contracting the CS guys to launch our CM if they are up for it when the time comes (assuming, of course, the Tycho Brahe flies well!).

Okay, I think the roadmap is a very good and important idea.   It should satisfy my need to feel like we have a clear big picture.

In this roadmap OHKLA will lead to an as-yet unnamed project which is focused on flying suborbital payloads of a decent size.

Our unmanned satellite project could lead to a project for orbital probes of the moon / planets?

CLLARE could lead to…well, lots of things.  A more useful 2 or 3 crew craft that can properly dock with things.  A space station of our own (the Falcon 9 heavy would be wonderful for this, and we could follow Bigelow Aerospace's lead with inflatable structures)?  A Mars mission?

Obviously the future projects could have levels of certainty associated with them.  E.g. the suborbital payload testing project coming out of OHKLA would be fairly certain.  A Mars mission would have gigantic question marks all over it.

If we get a few more affirmative answers on the unmanned satellite question that should be sufficient grounds to start drawing up a roadmap like the above.