Looking ahead to how things will proceed in the long term | Project management | Forum

I have been thinking a little about how the CLLARE project will progress in the long term, i.e. on the timescale of years.

Obviously, design work is free and harmless and I suspect that design and planning for all parts of the project will happen more or less in parallel all the way up until we start launching.

But when it comes to construction, which is expensive and potentially dangerous, there seems to be a fairly obvious linear order in which things will need to progress.  Unless we somehow get suddenly rich, it makes no sense to begin construction of the actual CLLARE spacecraft until we have built and tested the Selene 1 booster.  It makes no sense to begin construction of the orbital bus before we have built and tested the CLLARE spacecraft, etc.  It may be a nice idea to produce a "roadmap" diagram showing how everything lines up.

Anyway, what this means is that while certainly we will continue to support design and planning for every aspect of the project, when it comes to what we are actually, physically doing and paying for, we should expect to be a booster building operation for probably the first few years.  The propulsion workgroup is where the action will be at for years, and we should be recruiting for that workgroup more aggressively than others.  We should probably start thinking/planning about this in a bit more detail. 

In particular, it somehow only just really hit me how large Selene 1 is.  This whole time, our "modular booster" concept in my mind has basically been a repeat of OTRAG.  But our concept diagrams show boosters much, much larger than the OTRAG ones.  In particular just one booster itself, Selene 1, is supposed to be capable of suborbital fight.

Now, I don't so much have a problem with getting into orbit by clustering say 20 largish boosters instead of probably hundreds of OTRAG-sized boosters (although I don't recall there being discussion of this, how do people feel, what are the relative pros/cons/etc?), but I do think that if we are using booster units of that size that it would be crazy to just start building one.  The sort of trial and error experience-building work that we will need to do on the booster project would be just far too slow and expensive with something of that size.

I think it is much more sensible that our first serious endeavour with rocketry (there should probably be less serious "toy" experiments done before even this) should be to build something that can get 100 km up and that's about it – something no more than a foot in diameter, very much like the recently posted about NZ rocket.  If we make sure that this rocket uses the same kind of fuel as we would consider for larger Selene boosters then we can get our experience and experiments out of the way cheaply and simply, still achieve something noteworthy, and then bring that knowledge to the challenge of building Selene.  Either that, or we just mass produce that smaller rocket and go for larger clusters.

Now might be about the time to seriously start thinking about where we would like to do rocket tests from and investigating what sort of licensing we need.  I imagine static testing on the ground will need fairly minimal approval.

Another thing we should start thinking about are less ambitious projects than CLLARE which we could start running earlier to make a name for ourselves.  Suppose we build a rocket that can get to 100 km up, or even suppose we build Selene 1.  We are still at that point probably years from even seriously thinking about trying for the moon, as we still have to get experience with staging the larger clusters, starting to fabricate the capsule, etc.  But, we will have the capacity to put small and light payloads into space and possibly even into LEO.  At that point, I think collaboratively designed microsatellites capable of simple but meaningful scientific data recording would be a good thing for us to do to establish ourselves.  It would let us test our rocket more extensively and have collaborative design projects running which are actually built within a year or less of their beginning date. It might also make us look a little less like dreamers if we don't have just one, massively ambitious project running.  Any ideas for things we could do along these lines?

These considerations have made it a bit clearer to me that the road ahead of us is a long one, and our steps will be small.  But it's an exciting long road, and I think that together we can really start to move along it.

PS: 200th post!  It really doesn't feel anything like that.