Re: Northrup Grumman - CEV Prime

From: George William Herbert (gherbert_at_retro.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: 29 Nov 2004 02:41:46 GMT

Ed Kyle <edkyle99@hotmail.com> wrote:
>There is talk of a bigger Falcon launcher, but I've seen no
>assembled hardware. Have you? I have read about big
>changes in the proposed design recently - making me wonder
>how real the design is.

They sold one of them and have a launch date attached;
that sounds like a real design to me.

That said, they haven't bent metal for the unit yet.

The change they made was to the second stage of the Falcon-V
vehicle design. It was a design and production optimization
that makes sense all things considered. They swapped two
engines for one engine of the same basic design as the first
stage engines with a higher expansion nozzle. The Merlin
isn't pressure fed, so it has turbopumps and such, but it
may not cost much more than the two pressure fed Kestrel
engines it replaces. And it does significantly increase
the payload and simplify the structure of the second stage.

>Even Mr. Musk admits that there
>won't be a bigger Falcon if the little one can't be
>made to work. And if history is a predictor, success for
>the little Falcon is a 50-50 proposition at best.

Even if true, there are probably twenty or more vehicles in
the little Falcon's payload and cost class that were developed
to or proposed for the DARPA FALCON (no relation) project.
Five are being worked on; Airlaunch, Lockheed-Martin,
Microcosm, SpaceX, and SpaceDev (SpaceDev under a separate
R&D contract, but as I understand it to the same parameters
as the four DARPA FALCON Phase IIa winners).

SpaceDev and Lockmart are doing hybrids, Microcosm and SpaceX
are doing liquids (Microcosm a lot more "big dumb" approach
than SpaceX, and with a long track record of incremental
development success), and Airlaunch is dropping something
off an airplane which Gary doesn't seem to talk about much,
but costs a fraction of what Pegasus does.

On top of all this, RASCAL could conceivably work.

Aside from the Airlaunch project, which would face carrier
aircraft scaling issues, four of the five mainstream DARPA
FALCON like proposals should be able to scale up nicely.
One of them (SpaceX) is talking openly about their design.
I don't doubt that Jim Benson, the guys at Microcosm,
and whowever at Lockmart who is in charge also have their
eyes on larger vehicles if they get the chance.

All of these companies have some money, a management team
that's credible, and a technical approach that is relatively
low risk. I got into space launch in the late 80s because
the problem seemed so hard given the available choices then.
I can look forwards to a future in which launch is low cost
and commoditized and I can be a payloads/projects guy again.
Not quite yet, but there is significant reasont to believe
that this really *is* the time we'll see progress.

-george william herbert
gherbert@retro.com

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