HIGH COST AND FUZZY PLANS THREATEN SLS

 This op-ed was published in the March 23, 2013 edition of Space News



     An unspoken reality in the world of U.S. corporate mergers and purposeful acquisitions across a broad geographical spectrum is the formidable clout the parent company gradually and argu­ably builds in the political arena, and in particular with members of Congress. It came to light recently in the spectacle of Senators essentially fixing the design of the heavy-lift launch vehicle with the obvious intent of supporting industries in the territories they represent.

In the broader perspective, the Space Launch System (SLS) was the result of a transparent collusion between the senators and NASA to do something that would preserve the space shuttle industries in their home states as part of the roadmap to an ultimate heavy lifter with a capability on the order of 130 metric tons. Sure, the intermediate rocket would have a capability of only 75 metric tons, and compelling missions for it are elusive, but hang the expense — this is what we want you to do. So NASA is spending big money on a rocket to nowhere.

Why not go directly to the 130-metric-ton heavy lifter? There are missions for that, not the least of which are replacement work stations when the international space station reaches end of life. If it has overcapacity for the one or two missions planned for the interim SLS, it’s an opportunity for forward thinkers within NASA and the industry to use that capacity for a robust experiment in propellant transport and storage in orbit.

To the ordinary observer, the estimated program runout cost of $41 billion (some con­sider this conservative) to an operational 130-metric-ton heavy lifter is astonishing. Much of this cost is attributable to NASA’s toying with several configurations, starting out with solid boosters and gradually evolving to the desired final capability instead of going directly to it.

The initial cost per launch, estimated by NASA’s Jody Singer, SLS deputy program manager, as “perhaps” $500 million, is low-balled by a wide margin. The cost of a Titan 4 launch in 1985 dollars was $400 million. At the conclusion of the space shuttle program the cost per flight for that vehicle approached a billion dollars. At the low anticipated launch rates, the cost per launch, considering the high usage of shuttle-derived hardware, would likely be similar to shuttle launch costs. Some of the cost of the initial few vehicles would be abated by the use of 15 RS-25 oxygen/hydrogen engines left over from the shuttle program.

On October. 1, 2012, NASA announced the award of contracts totaling $137 M to three contractors for development, en­gineering and risk reduction efforts related to the SLS program. One of the contractors, Dynetics of Huntsville, Ala, teamed with Pratt& Whitney Rocketdyne to assess updating the F-1 engine as a candidate thruster for the 130 metric ton heavy lifter. At that time it was announced that negotiations were in progress with Aerojet for a similar study on its proposed 1 million-pound thrust staged combustion engine The liquid-fueled boosters for the 130 metric-ton heavy lifter would require three engines per booster, in contrest to two F-1 engines, but superior performance was to offset that difference.

An article in the February. 14 18 issue of SpaceNews announced that NASA had finally executed a contract with Aerojet for an engine at a 550,000-pound lb thrust level [“Aerojet Awarded Contract for SLS Booster Design Work,” page 3].

What’s going on? The reference configurations for the SLS show no conceivable applica­tion for a 550,000-pound thrust oxygen/kerosene engine. — surely not six or seven as substitutes for an F-1 pair.

There is a love affair with the F-1 engine that may be the driver for this engine being se­lected by fiat. It stems from its superb performance in the Apollo program. However, of the two designs, it would be the poorer choice. The F-1 engine, at 1.8 million pounds thrust, would have only one application — the SLS. It would be a very expensive engine as its usage rate would likely be considerably under what was the case for Apollo.

On the other hand, the 1 million-pound thrust engine proposed by Aerojet would find broader application. It could replace the Russian built RD-180 engine used on Atlas 5, which is a strategic weak spot for U.S. Defense Department missions. It could also be adopted for the Space Exploration Technologies Falcon launcher, particularly the Falcon “Heavy,” provided perfor­mance and cost benefits outweighed the multiple engine configuration now in play.

Other aspects of rocket engine production need attention in order to lower costs. Produc­ers of the F-1 will claim innovations in design and processes, but the cost will still largely be rate dependent. Experience has shown that. Innovations for 1 million-pound thrust engine, however, could include heavy emphasis on automated production and production in relatively large lots. The system could be designed for seamless, periodic restart when needed. In this scheme, for example, a 10-year inventory of engines, produced rapidly at the lowest possible cost, would be mortgaged. The cost of mortgaging would be significantly lower than the on-running over­head costs in a process that produces engines at a low rate.

 
High-rate production of rocket engines is not a new idea. The model can be found in the U.S. Air Force’s construction of Plant 65 in Neosho, Mo., during the late 1950’s, operated by the Rocketdyne division of North American Aviation solely for production of MA-3 thrusters for Atlas E and Atlas F, and followed by production of H-1 engines for Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B. Over 400 engines were produced, the Atlas engines ahead of schedule and under projected cost. It was the first, and perhaps only, venture into manufacturing rocket engines with a strong level of auto­mation for that day and age.

Anyone can now see the SLS as a vast, make-work program. Its principals need to be cor­ralled by someone like former NASA Administrator James Webb and given marching orders.

Edward Hujsak is a career rocket engineer and the author of two books on rockets, “The Future of U.S. Rocketry” and “All About Rocket Engines.”

WHO'S FOOLING WHO?

    First, lets get the definition of “range” out of the way. When an electric car dealer assures you that the all-electric car you are thinking of buying has a range of, say, 160 miles, he doesn’t mean that you can drive to a city that is 160 miles away with assurance that you will get back without charging up at your destination. The range is really only half that distance.

    In the article titled “Everyman’s Electric Car,” posted Feb. 18, 2013. the range, specified as 500 miles, means that you can drive 500 miles and return without refueling with biofuel, and the batteries are still fully charged upon arriving home.

    There’s a lot of research and development going on to try to come up with batteries far in advance of anything presently in existence. Let’s say that company X has made a breakthrough, producing a long lasting, light weight, fairly economical battery that charges in the time it takes to fill a gas tank, (Graphene Supercapacitors?) and that promises to double the range of the best that Tesla can do with its thousands of lithium-ion batteries. Let’s say that the development is so good that the entire driving public switches to electric cars. But there is no compelling reason why  such a change would do anything toward abating climate change.   

    Indeed, such a development could make things worse. A life cycle energy balance will invariably show that losses exceed  gains with all existing battery powered cars.  The energy for charging the batteries would mostly come from central generating sources, some of which are the biggest polluters of the environment. In accordance with the energy generated by various processes (US data for 2011):

41.9 % of the electric cars would be coal burners.
24.8 % of the electric cars would be natural gas burners.
19.1 % of the electric cars would be nuclear powered.
7.7 % of the electric cars would be hydro powered.
4.7% of the electric cars would be powered by renewables (photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, etc.)

    The solution, as I discussed in the article, is an on-board, advanced biofuel burning Diesel engine that operates at its optimum speed to keep a modest complement of batteries charged. An engine that operates at efficiency above 50% is possible. One feature might be to build it to be steam cooled, using that steam to drive a turbogenerator for extra power.

DITTY FOR 2014

 As a believer that half the members of Congress should be women, I am placing this little ditty in the public domain. 


Women, wise up!
Women, rise up!
In two oh one four,
Show Congress MEN the door!


It has mileage, too. In 2018 "door" becomes "gate"

EVERYMAN'S ELECTRIC CAR

by Edward Hujsak

   
    To date, no one has designed, built and marketed a stand-alone electric car of merit; not General Motors, not Ford, not Chrysler, not Toyota, not Nissan, not Hundai, not Daimler Benz, not Audi, not BMW, not Tesla Motors, not anyone. Amazing, but also understandable when considering that automobile design is the product of a blend of marketing assessment and company management, in contrast to sound and practical design engineering and systems engineering with consumer needs paramount in establishing design requirements and specifications.

    Tesla comes close with its all-electric design, a triumph of artistry and technology. But overall it is seriously flawed.
a. It is either electric “clean” or electric “dirty” depending on whether the origin of its energy is, say, clean geothermal or coal fired power plants.
b. It is a niche vehicle because of its high cost. Not many can afford a $100,000 car, including taxes, license and insurance, or even the lower performance models at around $70,000.
c. Waiting time at charge stations is additive to time wasted in heavy traffic. A problem unless one enjoys wasting time, especially in mid-winter.
d. A new”fret/stress problem for drivers, worrying about mileage remaining vs. where the next charge station is.
e. Issues regarding lowered performance in cold weather.

    Designers of Everyman’s Electric Car would accept none of the above shortcomings. Everyman’s Electric Car is a stand-alone vehicle and plugs into nothing, except, perhaps, an occasional "top-off" when preparing for an extended trip, or due to an unintended depletion of battery charge.

    Everyman’s Electric Car can carry five to six passengers and has adequate cargo space. It weighs less than 3500 pounds and costs less than $30,000. Everyman’s Electric car is as carbon neutral as one can get. It has a minimum range of 500 miles.

    Everyman’s Electric Car carries a modest complement of ordinary batteries, as it is not range dependent on batteries. Batteries are of a type that end up in established recovery systems when their operating life has expired.

    Batteries are kept charged by an on-board, advanced Diesel engine that operates on a variety of biofuels. It operates at a constant speed at its most efficient operating point and drives a generator that keeps the batteries charged. Such advanced Diesels are in development at companies like Eco-Motors and Pinnacle Engines.

    Everyman’s Electric Car is powered by electric motors on two wheels, on four wheels, or by a single motor powering two wheels through a differential. Trade studies would determine preferred arrangements, which may be affected by regional preferences, i.e. North East USA versus Southwest.

     This design concept provides for the high torque requirements for coming up to speed and passing, and the modest hp requirement for normal cruising.
    
    The travelling range of Everyman’s Electric Car is established by the fuel tank capacity. Should one run out of fuel, battery capacity is enough to travel to the next available biofuel station. In a pinch, that quart bottle of olive oil in the grocery bag will get you an extra twenty miles.

    Utilities such as air conditioning can be powered by the Diesel engine. Others, like power steering, could be electric, depending on how trade studies reveal performance and cost advantages for one or the other.

    Who will be the first to design a stand-alone electric car that meets both consumer requirements and is fully compliant with the best ideas about how to mitigate climate change, and conserve fossil fuels? Who will be the first to let engineers do the job right? Everyman’s Electric Car is hardly a technological challenge. We know how to do it.

LUCKY ME

      Lucky me, blessed with a caring, brilliant, conversational son. Some years ago, in what was in retrospect an overly-ambitious move, we founded the Interstellar Propulsion Society, on the idea that once we get the propulsion problem solved, everything else will come together to make interstellar travel possible. It got to be much too ambitious an effort and soon faltered, but fortunately NASA picked up on the idea and funded Marc Millis of  Glenn Research Center to carry out further studies. That soon ran out of money, but Marc went on to  organize the Tau Zero Foundation, which operates toward the same general objectives. That is not the only thing in play. Recently DARPA funded what is called the “100 Year Starship Study” to examine some of the issues related to interstellar travel.
         
    The other night Jon and I were discussing the desperate plight of the countless fifty-year old engineers who have lost their jobs and cannot find a similar one even after searching and interviewing for years, finally ending up in occupations paying a third or less of their former salaries. This is a tragedy in work for individuals and their families, as well as for the nation. These people represent an enormous collective talent, with thirty or more years of experience, far along on the learning curve, possessing a historical knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, and in all likelihood would return  steady and faithful performance to anyone hiring them.

     We ended up speculating on what we would do were we to start up a new company. We concluded that our best chance at success would be to hire no one under fifty years of age.  Imagine...... starting up a company of twenty employees with 600 years of experience under their belts. How could you lose?

UNTITLED POEM

When did my story end?
It is now an unravelled rope,
its frayed strands
at the mercy of the wind.
It happens, on occasion,
I catch a thread
and follow it.
Sometimes it surprises me -
an adventure I hadn’t thought of,
a memory steeped in passion,
colors and fragrance.
A few lines, perhaps,
I might use some day.

PHOENICIANS, SAWMILLS AND ME

Now that I have your attention, I want to assure you that there is indeed a  kinship that I feel deeply, that reaches into history to a period extending as far back as the third millennium BC and in particular the twelve centuries between 1500 BC and 300 BC, when the great traders and shipbuilders of Phoenicia were a dominant culture in the Mediterranean region. In the second millennium and even in the third millennium metal workers made tools for wresting boards and timbers out of logs so furniture, buildings, ships, and even coffins could be constructed. They evolved from bronze tools to iron, as their “metallurgists”  discovered how to produce this metal, and further, with the addition of a little carbon, a type of iron that can be worked into various shapes without breaking, unlike cast iron. Steel didn’t arrive until recently. This material was what we call wrought iron. The technology seems to have spread throughout the region, including Egypt, Crete, Greece, the Balkans and Mesopotamia, the “Fertile Crescent” that spanned the territory between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

The tools they produced were  mallets, hammers, chisels, adzes, axes, bow- operated augers, possibly foot powered lathes for producing pegs and dowels, and saws in a wide variety. Everything they built was done with these tools. Of particular interest to me are saws. The ability to flatten iron to the thickness needed for a saw, and then cut dimensionally identical teeth into the edge, and then file the teeth to sharpness bespeaks of a metal working capability beyond what anyone has yet discovered.

Something occurred at about the beginning of second millennium that paralleled the westward movement in America nearly four thousand years later, that ended up in settlements along the Pacific Coast. In Mesopotamia, trading out of the Persian gulf had already been established for centuries. But there were dreamers, traders, adventurers, craftsmen and venture capitalists among the Mespotamians who perceived that the west coast, bordering on the Mediterranean, was the land of opportunity, so they headed  for the region now known as Lebanon, which had fertile lands along the coast, rivers leading inland, hills and mountains covered with magnificent cedar trees, and natural harbors with waters teeming with fish - a virtual paradise where a convergence of talents led to one of the greatest trading enterprises ever. Egyptians had already been making forays for centuries into Lebanon for the prized Cedars, as that nation had few indigenous trees that were useful for lumber. 

The settlers were a loosely organized civilization, occupying independent city states - Sidon, Byblos, and later the close-by island of Tyre, a prosperous, fortified trading center that took Alexander the Great seven months to subdue on his way to building an empire. Once in business, Phoenicians traded in slaves, lumber, wine, textiles, glass, and purple dye extracted from Murex shells that was prized by royalty wherever they travelled. Phoenicians traded along the southern Mediterranean, Egypt and other North Africa nations over thousands of kilometers, and set up trading colonies like Carthage as they moved westward. They were advanced in navigation and eventually sailed out of the Mediterranean in their trading ventures and travelled north, as far as England, where they traded for tin, and also south along the African coast. To facilitate their trade with various cultures they developed a common language that eventually became the alphabet we know, after the Greeks, Etruscans and  finally the Romans worked it over.  (The first two letters were alpha and bethe, so guess where alphabet originated, and also the word phonetics.) Needless to say, as the world’s dominant traders during that period, Phoenicians got to be very wealthy even while withstanding occasional invasions.

Of course, none of this would have occurred had the Phoenicians not gotten to be great ship builders. They had the craftsmen, they had the vast cedar forests in their back yard, and they had the metallurgists and toolmakers to fashion the tools for felling the trees and rendering them into the boards and timbers for building their ships and for trade with nations like Egypt. But the foundation for the entire fortunes of the Phoenicians are directly traceable to the excruciating, time consuming labor of pairs of men, probably slaves, wielding rip saws up and down, engaged in sawing logs into boards and timbers. The actual sawing of the boards was accomplished in an arrangement where the log, first hewed to flatness with axes and adzes on one side, was moved on rollers over a pit in the ground. The saws were rip-saws, with the teeth pointing in one direction. One of the men stood in the pit and drew the saw down in the cutting action and the other stood on the log and lifted the saw for the next stroke. They did this all day long. In a way the man in the pit had it easier as he had the help of gravity. But he had sawdust falling on him all day and the heat, especially in summer, must have been deadly. Millions of board feet of lumber were cut in this manner.

This method of sawing lumber didn’t change over thousands of years, although as far back as the Romans AD some experimentation was done with water wheels powering the saws. Pit sawing is even practiced today in places like Zambia, where high-value, individual trees are “poached” by natives. Gradually, water powered mills spread across Europe. They didn’t have much flexibility and production was largely limited to trees that were cut in the immediate vicinity. During colonial times n the United states most of the lumber was cut by two man teams in a manner nearly identical to that of the Phoenicians, except that there was no pit. The logs were placed on raised platforms. In Maine, where lumbering was very active, workers resisted mechanization in fear of losing their jobs. But the demand for lumber in the new nation grew rapidly, thus powered sawmills sprung up everywhere. Following the Europeans, water wheels were the initial power source with a device like a crankshaft that produced the reciprocating action for sawing. As there was plenty of power, mill operators emplaced several saws in a framework so more than one board could be cut a time- something like the hand held tomato slicer  that has ten little saws in it, side by side, separated by the thickness of a tomato slice.  In this scheme logs had to be transported to the mill. Not until the early nineteenth century, when steam engine power became available, did sawmills become more or less portable, thus could be located where the trees were.  When internal combustion engines were developed, they replaced the steam engines. Even as late as the 1850’s  sawmills used reciprocating saw blades.  That was when the next major advancements took place. With the availability of more power and higher shaft speeds, circular saw blades were adopted, often ganged together to cut several boards at a time. A later improvement switched to band saws, which also operated in gang arrangements to cut more boards at a time.

         A lost art is that of the specialist who travelled from sawmill to sawmill, like an itinerant piano tuner, skilled in hammering circular saws that had warped due to overheating into trueness so they could be used again.

Modern sawmills are stationary installations and are highly computerized. Every part of the tree trunk is used. - the bark for landscaping, sawdust for a type of panel board used in cheap furniture, chips for a panel board that replaces plywood for construction, chips for the paper industry from parts of the tree that are trimmed off in the forest. Tree trunks are trucked to the mills full length, because that is where they can be cut to optimum lengths for lumber. At the other end of the scale is a very small portable sawmill that consists of a simple metal frameworks on which is mounted a gasoline engine engine-powered band saw that travels along the  log. People operate these in their back yards and can cut hundreds of square feet of  lumber in a day.

Throughout the ages, since the method remained much the same, the hand operated saw created in the time of the Phoenicians has hardly changed, It is commonly known now as the two-man crosscut saw. It is still used for felling trees and cutting logs to length in situations that are temporary, where a chain saw isn’t handy, and perhaps governed by individuals who see no need to depart from “the old ways.” You can buy crosscut saws online. Probably the Phoenicians had crosscut saws too for felling trees and sectioning them into transportable lengths, as that was simply a matter of the tooth configuration on the blade. Things began to change when the chain saw was invented by Andreas Stihl in Stuttgart, Germany in 1926 and placed into production in 1929. It was a two-man,  gas engine powered affair that weighed 116 pounds - not something you can use around the home. It was very successful, but what with the Great Depression just around the corner and Germany ramping up to conquer the world, there is no history of a significant appearance of chain saws in the United States until after the war.  Stihl continued in business and expanded world wide, and other manufacturers like McCulloch and Huskavarna began domestic  and foreign manufacture. Stihl is a prosperous company after eighty years and has manufacturing plants in the United States.

As a side note, chain saws were first invented in 1790 for use in surgery. They were hand cranked affairs that gave the surgeon better control in amputations. I suppose if you hear the howl of a chain saw around a hospital, that might be what is going on. I’ve not heard that the practice was ever halted. (Well, yes, I have. The cutting is now done with a special wire that has cutters along its length).

So now we get close to home, to finally reveal what this kinship with the Phoenicians is all about. It goes back to the 1938 New England hurricane, which uprooted and laid over most of the pine forests in southern New Hampshire. As a result, I found my high school days truncated by time spent at one end of a two-man crosscut saw, with Pa on the other end. I didn’t know much about the Phoenicians then but I came to appreciate the conditions under which they worked. Together we cut up fallen pines, skidded them out of the forest, loaded them onto Pa’s aging Acme truck and hauled them to either an operating sawmill in Reeds Ferry or Horseshoe pond in Thornton’s Ferry, where the Federal Government stored them in water to prevent borer damage before they could be processed. It was exhausting, dangerous work. I came to understand why the logging business is among the most dangerous of occupations.

Toward the end, Pa saved a load of logs to be sawed into boards for his own use. One fine October afternoon, a great day for football, I thought,  we trucked the logs to Fred Hall’s sawmill, a short distance from our farm, which he operated when the spirit moved him, as he had aged beyond where any sensible man would be operating a sawmill. He was wizened and short, seldom shaved and wore bib overalls, a red-plaid woolen shirt and a Boston & Maine Railroad cap. His eyes had a peculiar brightness. Tobacco juice oozed from the corners of his mouth. We unloaded the logs and Pa took a position where he would help Fred secure the logs to the carriage that fed the logs into the saw. Fred, standing at the big circular saw, touching up the teeth with a file, looked at me and said, “Start er up.”

I went to the engine, a big six-cylinder International Harvester stationary power plant, turned the switch on and started cranking. I didn’t know I was cranking the whole sawmill and the entire affair suddenly roared into action. Fred jumped back from the turning circular saw and Pa stood there laughing his head off. Fred started sawing and I took the boards coming off the carriage and fed them into a smaller rip saw that squared the edges. In about three hours the job was done. Fred signaled me with a hand passed across his throat to shut the engine down, which I did, and suddenly all was quiet except for the siren sounds of the saw blades in our ears, which would linger for hours. Fred looked at me, his eyes shining.

“Durn fool!” he said. “Yer supposed to engage the clutch AFTER you start the engine!”

Author’s note:

The rise and fall of the Phoenician culture is the lesson of how a civilization which starts out rich in resources, but with no notion or inclination regarding sustainability, proceeds to plunder its own territory until there is nothing else left to exploit. The cedars of Lebanon were the Phoenician’s oil wells. When the trees were gone, or nearly gone, the entire economy slumped. The hills and mountains eroded, the rivers carried the soil to the sea and the harbors got silted in. The  final insult occurred when the British harvested the remaining cedars, using them for railroad ties. Only a few acres remain in protected areas, but the magnificent forests will never be seen again. Today, worldwide, various conservation efforts are indicators of growing concern about depletion of resources, but it is probably far short of what is needed.