Der Tag

The day has finally come I dreaded for close to a decade. The billionaire hobbyist has sent his hobby rocket into Low Earth Orbit with a pair of unfortunate humans. Congrats to Bridenstine for “the win” and I hope he stays unsullied if something goes wrong.

In 1930 “the capitalist airship” R-100 flew the Atlantic and was hailed as the triumph of free enterprise over socialism. A few months later “the socialist airship” R-101 crashed and burned and the entire Imperial Airship Scheme was canceled. The R-100 was scrapped. There were several problems with airships that would seem to have made them impractical but I have addressed these in another post and they need not have passed into history if available solutions had been adopted.

It is interesting to speculate if airships had come into use and then been used as communication relays would a kind of satellite communication network have become available in the 1930’s.  As I write this the crew dragon is firing its draco thrusters. Packing the capsule with propellants and multiple engines instead of using a service module was an incredibly bad design choice. Much like airships- which had no double hull with an inert gas in the outer envelope isolating the inner lifting hydrogen from atmospheric oxygen. Because this very basic precaution was never taken it virtually guaranteed airships would burn like torches in the event of an anomaly.

The fundamental problem is the inability of the Space X and ULA launch vehicles to lift a spacecraft capable of leaving Earth Orbit. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is a dead end and should have been abandoned long ago. Back to airships: Besides a double envelope the second requirement for airships to succeed was a pressurized cabin so the craft could fly above the turbulence that repeatedly tore them to pieces. The analogy with Human Space Flight (HSF) is the minimum requirement of sending craft Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) to intercept shielded Lunar Cyclers instead of inferior lift vehicles placing humans in LEO to no purpose at all. The Moon is where the factories will be built.

The Space Shuttle was one of the worst wrong turns ever made by the Space Agency while NewSpace has undoubtedly been the worst. The strip mining of Earth orbit with smallsat constellations and the continuation of inferior lift vehicles to the space-station-to-nowhere has wasted mountains of money and years that should have been focused on a lunar return. When evidence for water ice was confirmed in 2008 this should have immediately pointed the U.S. back at the Moon and ended HSF operations in LEO.

The logical path was to invest in a evolved Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SHLV) with ever more powerful iterations. The most critical need at this point is reusable boosters for the SLS and a reusable core engine module for the SLS. The ISS and commercial crew program should be ended and the funding redirected at opening new SLS core production lines and reusability of a core engine module and new boosters.