Ad Astra Per Present Tense Dishonesty
Blue Origin finally launched and landed New Glenn this year. It took them long enough (they were founded in 2000!) but they did spent a while sending celebrities and the obscenely wealthy to just above the Kármán line for a few minutes at a time. NG-2's booster had only been back on land for about two days before Blue Origin announced their plans for both uprated first stage engines (about 15% more thrust) and a new "9x4" variant of New Glenn with more engines and stretched tanks.
But the way they described the design for the "9x4" bugs me to no end:
The next chapter in New Glenn’s roadmap is a new super-heavy class rocket. Named after the number of engines on each stage, New Glenn 9x4, is designed for a subset of missions requiring additional capacity and performance. The vehicle carries over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, over 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. Additionally, the 9x4 vehicle will feature a larger 8.7-meter fairing.
They used three different variants of tense and planning in that paragraph alone:
- "is designed for"
- "carries"
- "will feature"
As of when I'm writing this, NG-9x4 "carries" nothing. It is an idea, a rendering, maybe some pretty cool CAD drawings, and probably a few pieces of hardware. It does nothing. Yet.
It's not just Blue Origin. SpaceX (archive.org link) used similarly varied language when describing the "Falcon 9 Heavy" in 2007, which was three years before the first Falcon 9 launch and eleven years before the first Falcon Heavy launch (emphasis mine):
The Falcon 9 Heavy will be SpaceX’s entry into the heavy lift launch vehicle category. Capable of lifting over 28,000 kg to LEO, and over 12,000 kg to GTO, the Falcon 9 Heavy will compete with the largest commercial launchers now available. It consists of a standard Falcon 9 with two additional Falcon 9 first stages acting as liquid strap-on boosters. With the Falcon 9 first stage already designed to support the additional loads of this configuration and with common tanking and engines across both vehicles, development and operation of the Falcon 9 Heavy will be highly cost-effective. Initial architectural work has already begun, and we currently anticipate first availability of the Falcon 9 Heavy in 2010.
According to SpaceX at the time, it was both capable and would be capable. It both is and will be. (And wow, Elon time is rough.)
The folks over there at Rocket Lab seem much more judicious in their use of tense. Take this paragraph from their initial Neutron announcement:
Neutron will be the world’s first carbon composite large launch vehicle. Rocket Lab pioneered the use of carbon composite for orbital rockets with the Electron rocket, which has been delivering frequent and reliable access to space for government and commercial small satellites since 2018. Neutron’s structure will be comprised of a new, specially formulated carbon composite material that is lightweight, strong and can withstand the immense heat and forces of launch and re-entry again and again to enable frequent re-flight of the first stage. To enable rapid manufacturability, Neutron’s carbon composite structure will be made using an automated fiber placement system which can build meters of carbon rocket shell in minutes.
I bet their PR people hated writing "will be" so often, but it was true. But on that same page, they quote Peter Beck:
“Neutron is not a conventional rocket. It’s a new breed of launch vehicle with reliability, reusability and cost reduction is hard baked into the advanced design from day one. Neutron incorporates the best innovations of the past and marries them with cutting edge technology and materials to deliver a rocket for the future,” said Mr. Beck.
Aw, come on, Pete! It didn't incorporate anything, because wasn't a physical thing. Yet!
Some more highlights from the up-and-commers in the space business (again, emphasis mine):
Sierra Space describes their Dream Chaser:
Utilizing internally developed thrusters with three different thrust modes, Tenacity can nimbly maneuver in space and ensure deliveries are effectively completed. For the return flight, Dream Chaser can safely return critical cargo including supplies and science experiments to Earth at less than 1.5g’s on compatible commercial runways, making cargo accessible faster.
Astra's Rocket 4's payload user's guide (pdf)
Rocket 4 is an expendable, vertically-launched two stage LOX/kerosene rocket, optimized for reliability and manufacturability, and built to significantly reduce the cost of dedicated orbital launches.
Relativity Space says about their Terran R rocket:
Terran R is a two-stage, reusable rocket built for today's satellites and tomorrow's breakthroughs. Perfectly sized to serve the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation market, Terran R will make access to space more reliable and routine.
Firefly describes their Eclipse rocket:
Eclipse is built upon the success of Firefly’s Alpha and Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket with a significant leap in power, performance, and payload capacity. The launch vehicle utilizes scaled-up versions of Alpha’s patented tap-off cycle engines and carbon composite structures to reduce mass and lower costs while improving performance and reliability. Eclipse also retains the flight-proven avionics from the Antares program with additional upgrades, including a larger 5.4 meter payload fairing.
Look at all that present tense. Sierra at least has a flight article built, but one of its main jobs is to confirm whether or not all that stuff they say about it is true. Rocket 4, Terran R, and Eclipse are paper rockets as of now. Okay, there's probablly hardware in development, but certainly no fully-stacked rockets have been built. They currently do nothing. But read the marketing and you'd be forgiven for thinking that these things have been flying for years.
I sure am glad the culture of pharmaceuticals doesn't generally accept this sort of thing. Can you imagine? "Yes, we're just entering hit to lead, but our drug cures diabetes." That would be the pits.
Inkblot Extraterrestrials
Aliens are in the news.
It's not surprising. A little less than half of the electorate of the US has decided that conspiracy theory as a form of government is just fine with them, so why not? It's all fun to laugh at, until it isn't.
But I think the thing with aliens is really interesting. Whether or not you believe that there are aliens out there right now buzzing through our skies says a lot about you as a person. There are some obvious things – a lack of trust in the government, disbelief that non-Europeans could have built big things, not understanding technology so it must have been reverse-engineered – that sort of stuff.
But a belief that aliens exist and are among us is also a weird kind of optimism.
"But where is everybody?" is (allegedly) how Fermi put it. If the universe is big, and life can arise in other places like it did here, and Earth isn't the first place to develop life, then someone should be out there. Little green men aren't walking around downtown, so their absence sort of demands an explanation. Maybe we're early in the life-bearing era of the universe. Maybe every intelligent species eventually nukes themselves into non-existance. Maybe they all develop giga-computers and stop caring about the universe as they plug into the Matrix. Maybe FTL isn't possible. Maybe it's hard to do space travel and also feed everyone on your planet. Or maybe we are unique, and the professor at my college was right, and his dubious math showing life couldn't actually arise anywhere did prove it had to be intelligent design, and the people who didn't get good grades because they disagreed were wrong. But I digress.
If there's other life in the universe, but there are no alien visitors to Earth, it's bad news for humans. That means somehow every species has gotten stranded on their homeworld, and it's probably for reasons that are kind of a bummer. So, to me, the people who advocate that yes actually the aliens are out there are profoundly hopeful. We can get through the Great Filter, because someone else already did. We'll eventually solve hunger, because how would you go out into the universe if you haven't solved scarcity? We'll eventually figure out how to avoid nuclear armageddon, because check it out, they did. FTL is possible – see, they're here. We won't all just lock ourselves into a VR-island-of-lotus-eaters, becuase they managed not to.
I don't think the aliens are here.
And besides the fact that we have no credible evidence for them, I just don't think anyone can get through that Great Filter. In 1945 the whole world figured out how easy it would be to fail that test, but really, you don't need nukes for that. The World Wars kind of stopped because of nukes, and without them, we'd probably have had another one in the 50s or 60s. A culling like that every twenty years would keep us firmly planted on this planet. But with nukes, we have to worry about The Last War, where those of us who aren't radioactive vapor get to pay for bullets with bottle caps and try not to get eaten by radroaches.
Maybe nukes aren't the Great Filter. It could be something else. It wouldn't have taken that many base pairs to be different and the 2020s could have been like the 1350s. As long as the aforementioned conspiracy theorists keep getting elected, I'm not sure that won't be a problem going forward. That'll definitely keep us focused on continuing to breathe, not going to alpha centauri.
I mentioned the whole voluntary-extinction-through-Matrix thing because that's less overtly horrible than the rest of them, and (given it would be possible) I can totally imagine us doing that. Surveillance Capitalism is a lot easier when your whole mind has cookie tracking on it. Or maybe it's boring, and we just exhaust the resources of the earth as we create a lot of value for shareholders. Not every Great Filter has to be violent.
My guess? We'll eventually get caught in a Great Filter, just like everyone else, and that's why there are no aliens, and it's probably because of a thing we don't even know about yet. It's pessimistic, I know. I'd like to be proven wrong. But the types of folks that just insist that they exist don't give me a lot of confidence.
An Ode to Delta IV Heavy
The final Delta IV Heavy launch from Vandenburg just happened, and it kind of makes me sad to see it wind down – especially when comparing it to SLS. There are plenty of things to complain about relating to SLS, but two stand out when comparing to Delta IV Heavy: the engines and the boosters.
Its main RS-68 engines are derived from the Space Shuttle's main engines, but are intended for a single use, and are simpler and less expensive as a result. The heavy variant has three nearly-identical cores in the first stage, with the outer two serving as boosters. The RS-68 sheds much of the complexity of the RS-25's by cooling the nozzle ablatively, which you can do when you only need to use it once.
Compare that to SLS. If it ever gets off the ground, it will result in four flight-proven, re-usable RS-25 SSME's being thrown into the ocean as garbage. An earlier iteration of the Shuttle-derived booster concept did use a few upgraded RS-68's, but they decided the engineering required to manage the interactions of the RS-68's ablative nozzles with the solid boosters was too difficult to overcome.
And yeah, the boosters. SLS uses Shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters. I think this is really bad for everyone that doesn't work for Northrop-Grumman. Humans should never fly on a rocket that uses solids as part of its primary propulsion. Obviously, there's Challenger. That failure was predicted and ignored by managers suffering from go-fever. But in the leadup to SLS's predecessor program, the Air Force determined that in some phases of flight, a solid rocket failing would have a 100 percent chance of killing the crew due to the escaping capsule's flight through a shower of burning fuel. Watching a capsule full of crew successfully escape a failing rocket only to lose its parachutes to burning debris would be heartbreaking.
Delta IV Heavy doesn't use solids for primary propulsion. A failing side- or core booster would be really bad, of course. But it would probably result in an explosion that isn't followed by a persistent fire. By the time an escaping crew came back down through the altitude where the failure happened, the propellant would already be done burning.
Okay, so how about the upper stages? I'd compare them, but SLS uses Delta IV's second stage in an almost unchanged state. Of course there are plans to upgrade SLS's upper stages in the future. But that requires it to fly more than once or twice. We'll see.
Crew-rating the Delta IV Heavy would take some effort. NASA did a study (pdf) early in the Constellation days and said it could be done. It would require some new software, avionics, and process changes in manufacturing. The biggest change would be to modify the second stage. Here's the thing – that modified second stage could be done, because that's what the SLS second stage is. Although I'm not sure how I feel about Boeing's ability to safely implement hardware and software changes without cutting corners.
In the end, I'd feel a lot better about a crew-rated Delta IV Heavy than SLS. Sure, it's expensive, something like $250 million a pop. But SLS is like eight times that. And you have the solid failure debris problem, and the bad feeling of throwing SSME's into the ocean. And while I think the safest crew-rated rocket on the planet right now is Falcon 9, I'd much rather climb onto a Delta IV Heavy than SLS.