Commercial Space Problems

I am a little disgusted at the moment. The recent explosion at Cape Canaveral is the last in a string of accidents on commercial space ventures that were completely avoidable. It is way too premature for anyone to know what caused this one yet but recent experience has taught me that the cause will once again be found to be schedule haste combined with the reckless and deadly nature of commercial space.

I have written about NASA's accidents and how they were all caused by this same problem before. Schedule pressure is dangerous in the space flight industry. It has to be offset by the understanding that technical concerns ALWAYS overrides schedule pressure. This is literally impossible in commercial space because there is nothing that counterbalances schedule pressure in commercial space. Combine this with a total lack of practical experience that prevails at most commercial space companies and you get what we have now; a continuing string of disasters.

In the first place space flight travel is hard. It takes extremely powerful engines to lift cargo out of earth's orbit. These engines need oxidizers such as liquid oxygen to burn at the rates needed and liquid oxygen is an extremely unforgiving substance to deal with. Because of the energy involved and the close ratio between energy available and load to be lifted space flight vehicles operate on the bare margins of safety to begin with. The standard pressure to strength ratio for mechanical facilities on earth is 4-1. In other words if a tank is designed to withstand 100 pounds of pressure per inch it is designed to withstand 400 pounds of pressure per inch. On a space vehicle, this same tank is designed to withstand 150 pounds of pressure per inch, or 1.5-1.

Add in the extreme temperature changes involved in using a cryogen like Liquid Oxygen (-297 Degrees F) and one can begin to understand the difficulties involved. Each component is designed on the ragged edge of strength to weight ratio to maximize the effective cargo that such a vehicle can carry. Why not just go to 4-1 safety factors you might ask? Well, if we did that we wouldn't have the energy to get out of earth's orbit.

NASA has a long record of dealing with these margins yet they have also experienced many different failures of their own in its own history. Besides the two shuttle disasters that everyone is familiar with there were a lot of other accidents in testing and design phases at different NASA centers across the nation. It is an inherently dangerous business that requires inherently stringent testing and design characteristics. I think everyone understands this. Unfortunately, the degree of stringency is where the argument comes in.

There is a huge disagreement on this at the moment within the commercial space industry. NASA is charged with oversight on commercial space entities and I can tell you from direct experience NASA is losing the argument at the moment. Commerical space entities have a lot of Congressional support from local districts where these ventures are benefitting the local economy with good paying jobs. Hence the continuing level of confidence and support from Congress espousing the full confidence in these ventures. I can assure you that this level of confidence is NOT being expressed by NASA employees charged with actually doing the oversight.

In the next few posts I hope to go over some details about why these problems are occurring and what the particular problems are. The basic struggle is between the technical experts at NASA who have experienced these problems in the past and a young, energetic group working private space who believe NASA is hopelessly slow and restrictive by its very nature. Neither group is completely wrong in their assumptions about the other. However, the reason that NASA is slow and restrictive is that they have already learned some of the lessons that commercial space is struggling with now.