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Hi, space and rocket fans, I have a real world technical question


Shevek23

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Hello! I am between jobs right now and I bought a new computer that can run KSP before my last job ended. I can't afford to buy KSP itself right now, though I will treat myself to it when I get my next job. 

In the meantime I am a big alternate history fan, and also a fan of space technology and history, and plan to use KSP to model proposed possible alternate history configurations. One interest of mine is whether it might have been possible to repurpose developed Space Transport System technology to make a family of useful launch vehicles with relatively cheap and quick development time, rather than what has been done historically--which was to simply reuse the existing Shuttle fleet until it was deemed superannuated, and then enter an era where the USA had no crewed flight launch ability whatsoever. Over time since the last Shuttle flight, SpaceX in particular and also some competitors in New Space have developed pretty good new launchers and spacecraft and realistically I think these will be America's ticket back into crewed missions in Low Earth Orbit and beyond.

However as an alternate history fan I would like to demonstrate some other possibilities we missed out on.

My question seems to be an odd one, as I cannot seem to find any online source that details the answer.

Bottom line is I want to know, of the three type of dry segments of the historic Shuttle Solid Rocket booster, what were their separate dry masses?

My reasons for wanting to know this might require some involved answers but the short version is, I want to be able to estimate how varying the Boosters by -shortening- rather than lengthening them, by removing segments, so we could have three smaller variants with 3, 2 or conceivably even just one segment of solid propellant, to use for smaller expendable or semi-expendable launch systems that would be literally Shuttle Derived in design would have worked out.

What I do know is that overall, the historic SRBs each massed 589 metric tonnes fully loaded with propellant, and that propellant massed 502 tonnes, so the six segments--one nose segment, one nozzle segment, and 4 propellant units--massed about 88 tonnes at burnout. It would shed some mass descending but I am only interested in the mass at burnout, not the mass recovered. If all segments were identical in dry mass that would imply each one was 14.3 tonnes, but of course I think the nose and nozzle units each massed more. If we were to make smaller booster units with fewer segments, the nozzle section would have to be redesigned for each possible size, since the mass flow of exhaust gasses is determined by the number of segments. The throat and nozzle would scale down to keep the same expansion ratio, and this means it is lighter and thus easier to move so the gimbaling hydraulic system and its actuators would be smaller in proportion too; conservatively I would guess it scales with 2/3 power of the number of segments, or by area, though it might work out to be closer to linear. 

So I want to know if anyone already knows for a fact the dry mass of any two of these three elements since then I could compute the third one. That would tell me the burnout mass ratio of a smaller system (or larger though I am not really interested in that).

Since the solid fuel segments have little job to do but be strong cylinders that can contain the peak pressure of the grain combustion I suspect they massed remarkably little, say 8 tonnes each, which gives just 32 for the 4 of them and thus the nozzle and nose sections between them would total 56 tonnes, of which about under 2/3 I guess would be the nozzle, for say a 40 tonne nozzle unit (!) and 16 tonne nose unit. If we don't try to recover the boosters but just let them splash, I suppose the nose unit can be lightened more. Well 40 tonnes for the nozzle strikes me as pretty absurdly high, so I hope these aren't close to true figures. But that's my best guess for now.

Anyone able to set me straight?

I can't just look at SLS's boosters because they aren't really "Shuttle Derived" in that the grains have also been modified, in addition to adding another fuel section. They don't compare directly. I want to know what the classic Shuttle booster mass breakdown was, so I can see what the ratios would be for proper literally Shuttle Derived variants.

 

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Welcome to our forum. :)

We have a subforum where the people who know the history of spaceflight and like to do math hang around, so I have moved your thread there in hopes that you will receive some helpful answers. Good luck with your project. 

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If you could make an falcon 9 style reusable first stage you could do with lighter and less stressed shuttle engines as they would be second stage. 
I would also made the shuttle smaller but with the option to put an fairing on top of the tank for large payloads as in hubble and space station modules, this would reduce dry weight for most missions. 

The saturn shuttle was an plan like this using an saturn 5 first stage and then capture it with an giant helicopter using jet engines on its tips. 

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On 2/13/2018 at 3:36 AM, Shevek23 said:

I can't just look at SLS's boosters because they aren't really "Shuttle Derived" in that the grains have also been modified, in addition to adding another fuel section. They don't compare directly. I want to know what the classic Shuttle booster mass breakdown was, so I can see what the ratios would be for proper literally Shuttle Derived variants.

I think they were redesigned to increase their saftey margin. There were problems with the classic design. 

"Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident"

Some of the problems were fixed after challenger.

If the shuttle were designed today they probably would not be using the SRBs if their intent was to recycle.

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I can understand why you'd want figures specific to the Shuttle SRBs, given that mass changes have likely been made on the SLS SRBs. One directly-derived SRB was the Ares 1 booster, which was a 5-segment version of the Shuttle SRB with no other real changes other than the interstage (it still had chutes, etc.). It flew a test flight in 2009. If you can track down its dry mass, the difference between it and the Shuttle SRB dry mass should be almost exactly the mass of a single segment.

The dry mass of the solid rocket alone, which includes only the thrust segments and the nozzle, was 82,879 kg. The aft thrust segment is heavier than the other three, since it includes the nozzle. Adding on the parachutes, avionics, thrust vector control assembly, sep motors, and nose cone brought the dry mass to roughly 91 tonnes. I'll estimate the mass of the 3.8-meter nozzle at 4.8 tonnes, bringing the mass of each segment to roughly 18.1 tonnes. The parachute assembly massed around 3.5 tonnes with a deployment system of about 500 kg.

So, a Shuttle-derived five-segment booster would have been 96.8 tonnes (nozzle + 5 segments), plus 8.2 tonnes to complete the whole assembly, or 105 tonnes. However, if you don't need chutes, this drops to 101 tonnes.

The SLS SRBs mass 100.3 tonnes. So, that's an 0.7% difference. I think it's safe to say the dry mass difference per segment from the Shuttle SRBs to the SLS SRBs is negligible.

I'd baseline the mass of your Shuttle-derived three-segment booster at 72.9 tonnes or 68.9 if you fly without chutes.

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On 2/13/2018 at 8:25 PM, Vanamonde said:

Welcome to our forum. :)

We have a subforum where the people who know the history of spaceflight and like to do math hang around, so I have moved your thread there in hopes that you will receive some helpful answers. Good luck with your project. 

Thank you!

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23 hours ago, magnemoe said:

If you could make an falcon 9 style reusable first stage you could do with lighter and less stressed shuttle engines as they would be second stage. 
I would also made the shuttle smaller but with the option to put an fairing on top of the tank for large payloads as in hubble and space station modules, this would reduce dry weight for most missions. 

The saturn shuttle was an plan like this using an saturn 5 first stage and then capture it with an giant helicopter using jet engines on its tips. 

Well, you are talking about going back to 1972 or so and getting a very different Shuttle configuration! That would probably have been very good to do.

The Saturn Shuttle was a good idea I think. We have to remember that what everyone was dreaming of, what the majority of the aerospace community thought was both feasible and clearly economical, was a single stage or two stage system with both parts fully reusable. Most agreed two stages would be needed and that the first stage would be piloted and would fly back to the launch site as a jet-propelled suborbital spaceplane, while after separating from that a second stage orbital speed spaceplane would contain all the propellant it would need to reach orbit, and deploy cargo from a cargo bay, take on down mass and then return for a horizontal airplane like landing, as the first stage had done. This is what everyone was thinking of. And later I thought they were insane to want an orbital spaceplane that massed far more than the cargo, because it meant putting a lot more mass into orbit than they had to. But I realized that of course airplanes do this all the time, and that since propellant is relatively cheap compared to the cost of making a rocket's dry mass, it is OK to use 5 or 10 times as much propellant if you are able to use the spaceship over and over dozens or hundreds of time with only modest refurbishment. When you look at it that way, the real  historical STS was not as crazy as it can be made to look. The reason it was expensive was not just that it was a Saturn V sized monster delivering a Saturn 1B sized payload--mainly it was that refurbishment costs, including time needed to accomplish them, were quite large and not modest. I've never found a source that pins down just how much it realistically did cost because the program is very political. NASA had ways of playing fast and loose to lowball the cost and hide it with subsidy; latter-day Monday morning quarterbacks who want to pour on as much bile as possible I suspect of greatly inflating it, by such tricks as smuggling in the development cost into each operational launch. If the Shuttle had been made by a private firm that had taken out a great big loan to develop and build it and all the launch facilities and so forth, then they certainly would have to include the cost of recovering that investment so they could pay back the lender with interest, so amortizing development would be a line item in each launch. However--the Shuttle development was paid for the US taxpayer in the 1970s, it was water under the bridge and NASA had no obligation to collect the value and pay it back to the US Treasury. So it is wrong to include those costs in the operational cost of Shuttle missions, though it is certainly an instructive statistic to compute to get an overall sense of the economics of the system. 

The ultimate TAOS configuration adopted was meant to reduce the development cost of the Shuttle system to a low level that the Nixon Office of Management and Budget was willing to accept. To try to develop the "real" configuration with two liquid fueled flyback stages was found to be considerably higher than OMB would tolerate. It was believed that the solid boosters would be much cheaper to develop (true, at least with a clean sheet booster to compare to) and yet would be reasonably economical to reuse--quite false. Again no one will give me exact figures, but it made little sense to try to recover and refurbish solid fuel engine elements. Actually maybe it would make sense to reuse the nose cap section and the nozzle section, since these would be simple "plug and play" items, assuming that the hot exhaust gas they contained and guided did not erode or otherwise wear them badly. It is not clear to me these elements were in fact reused. It is clear that the silliest element to attempt to reuse was where most or all the effort went--the solid fuel segments! These were little more than lengths of high pressure containing wrapping to hold the solid fuel in place as it burned, and would be quite a small part of the cost of the segments, which mainly would be the formed solid fuel grain itself. Clearly in retrospect, either all attention to recovery should have gone just to the nozzle, or maybe the nozzle and nose pieces, but the fuel segments should have been regarded as disposable. Add to the cost of the quixotic effort to "reuse" these simple cylinders by shipping them back to Utah the cost of recovering the whole spent solid at sea, and I can believe the claims that the added costs were about equal to the savings, and many suggest they were more. But it was very important to the political selling of the TAOS Shuttle that the solids would be reused, and optimistic projections of savings helped sell the idea that using solid booster elements would be cheaper than developing the Saturn V first stage into a suitable liquid booster.

The Saturn Shuttle idea had several variations too. One version famously shown as a model for President Nixon's desk was an apparently unmodified first stage on which an upper oxygen-hydrogen external tank of the same diameter was mounted, with the Orbiter looking much as the historic one stuck sidesaddle there. In this version, the first stage would simply be expended. That made it a tough sell versus allegedly reusable solids! Other variations proposed putting some wings on the first stage and presumably other fancy developments, and a crew cabin (it was assumed all fly back stages would be crewed, and the astronauts would not have it any other way insofar as their opinion counted, and it did count). It would thus have jet engines and would have to take rather substantial thermal stresses to survive undamaged--it would not be going fast compared to the upper stage but it would be going very fast compared to standard issue airplanes, even military supersonic fighters and bombers, and it would get very hot. So it would not do to just weld some wings onto a standard aluminum S-1C first stage and call it good! The whole thing would have to be redesigned, made out of titanium or high temperature steel, the added weight would make the size of the upper stack take a hit--it would be a big project. Of course out of it we'd get a truly reusable first stage, although of course there was no way to predict whether it would turn out as with the historic Orbiter that they underestimated the refurbishment costs. I've read a good alternate history timeline that suggests that for a similar amount of budget money they might have decided to go ahead and invest in making this first stage, and postponed and cheapened the upper stage Shuttle by making it ride on an expendable second stage basically a version of the Saturn S-IV, the almost common second stage of the Saturn 1B and third of Saturn V--the investment there would be to cheapen production while stretching it a bit. This would make the actual Shuttle Orbiter a much smaller vehicle with no main engines, only orbital maneuvering system, and a small payload, the idea being that bigger payloads could ride without an Orbiter on the second stage. A key idea of this alternate history timeline was that a portion of the first stage propellant would be reserved to brake the first stage down to a much lower speed after the second stage separated, which would trade off some theoretical payload capability with greatly reducing the heat dose the structure had to tolerate. This would allow use of more standard, cheaper and lighter aeronautical materials to make the first stage out of, thus cheapening and speeding its development. The timeline is called "Right Side Up." This refers to the idea that the booster is a bigger, heavier system and therefore more costly than upper stages and so ought to be the first place someone looking for a reusable rocket system should concentrate. Instead the historical TAOS shuttle design concentrated on recovering an Orbiter that would also include the main engines, in effect being preoccupied with recovering the upper stage, and taking a cheap to develop shortcut on the massive booster system.

I think I would advocate for a third approach to the recoverable liquid booster--splash and drag back! Even expendable booster designs often have their first stages splash down or crash in remarkably recognizable condition. The idea here is to use more structural weight, using steel instead of aluminum, to make a robust stage structure that can take the heat of reentry and simply splash down in the ocean, to be retrieved by a ship that just drags it back to port at the launch site, then inspect it for damage, test and refurbish as needed, hopefully minimally, and then if it checks out or is patched up suitably to then check out, put it back in the VAB and add the upper stages and payload to it, haul it out (being all liquid fueled, it should be much lighter than the historic TAOS shuttles with 1200 tonnes of monstrous solid boosters loading down the crawler--a common feature of all liquid boosted systems of course!) and launch it again. I even wonder if making so strong that the propellants can be pressurized to the chamber pressure of an F-1A engine, and thus the mechanical turbopumps and gas generator systems of that engine can be eliminated in favor of simple pressure feed would be about the right strength so it can stoically endure repeated launches without accumulating serious damage. Such a pressure fed system would also greatly simplify as well as lighten the engines and thus speed up refurbishment considerably and save costs there too. The simple burn to full speed then aerobrake and splash down system also gets the maximum use out of the propellants for the upper stack and hence payload. It is still necessary to redesign the stage, but it is a relatively simple design; the use of very strong structural elements presumably simplifies many things. It might seem fatal to raise the dry mass of the first stage, but actually the burn out mass to be considered includes the full wet weight of the whole upper stack; as long as the dry mass of the first stage is small compared to that, it makes little difference to performance. Pushing the dry mass up to a significant fraction, but still much smaller, than the upper stack gives margin to make it very very strong indeed! So massive would it be I doubt parachutes would do much to slow it and it would have a very high subsonic terminal velocity, so I figure retrorockets of some kind would be needed to slow it down to acceptable splash speeds, but doing the math on it I don't think that is a big problem. 

A common feature of all Saturn Shuttles was that the layout did not allow for the possibility of ground-lighting the upper stage hydrogen engines. And that is a good thing for a more practical Shuttle program, since a huge part of the cost of developing the historical Shuttle was developing the hydrogen-burning SSMEs, which had to achieve decent Isp and thrust at sea level despite being hydrogen burners. This meant that the reaction chamber pressures had to be raised to 200 atmospheres to give hydrogen-oxygen exhaust a decent performance at sea level pressures, which led to all sorts of extra complications. All this also had to be reusable hundreds of times, which made the project even more insanely massive. Whereas, if it is accepted that the hydrogen engines will not light until the rocket is at a high altitude with much thinner air, already developed engines like the J-2S from Apollo's Saturn upper stages could be used instead. This was not a popular option unfortunately; the J-2S was in my opinion an excellent engine but its manufacturer was quite bored with it and would not have enjoyed a contract to turn them out in quantity; they wanted the challenge and high payments for developing the advanced hydrogen engine to be used at sea level. In fact the other "classic" shuttle concepts that called for two spaceplanes would not have used the kerosene-oxygen mix the Saturn Shuttles would settle for as an Apollo legacy; they wanted these same sorts of sea level high performance hydrogen engines for the booster as well as for high altitude performance on the orbiter, and cheerfully embraced the bloated volumes needed to provide hydrogen at its very low density in quantity. The idea of continuing to use the F-1 engines in their improved F-1A form was unpopular, as was using the similarly upgraded J-2S. Everyone wanted new toys, not to frugally reuse the legacy equipment they had from Apollo. They wanted a new Apollo in fact, and starting over from scratch was the preferred approach.

So--I think we would have done far better to develop a Saturn Shuttle. Mind, we'd still get into trouble with the ceramic thermal protection tiles, which by their nature are fragile and need to be laid out on the hull in very great numbers, making a very labor-intensive and slow turnaround process. There were alternatives, but they had their own drawbacks. I think ablative would have been quite unacceptable for instance--although I do wonder how workable it might have been to put an ablative layer atop the ceramic, so that a relatively thin layer of ablative might have taken the brunt of the highest entry heats, then burn off completely and smoothly exposing ceramic, or maybe metal that would be good enough once the ablative had gotten past extremes, that would char off all the ablative and thus present a predictable aerodynamic smooth surface for the glide phase of entry. Obviously this would be a labor intensive costly delay in refurbishment, painting or plastering or gluing on another layer atop the fixed permanent lower temperature TPS before each mission, but in retrospect hindsight tells us it would be cheaper and faster than managing the tiles, and also safer. 

You also seem to suggest that you'd favor a fourth kind of Saturn Shuttle, one that does not use wings and does not splash down, but rather uses reserve rocket fuel to retro-brake the first stage, shove it back to the launch site, and have it rocket-land on its tail at the launch site like a Falcon can. But I don't think that is realistic for a 1970s program! One reason Falcon rockets can land their first stages like that is that the standard Falcon has 9 Merlin engines; it is easy then to get low thrusts by lighting just a few of them and throttling. Variations on the Saturn V might possibly have gone up to 7 engines, a filled hexagon, I suppose, but it would not work well I fear to light 2 or 3 F-1A engines for a controlled gentle landing! Also, the option of flying the Falcon first stages back is pretty costly in terms of payload that can be launched; it is nice they have the intermediate one of landing on a drone ship downrange. Needless to say the option of a robot drone ship in 1971 would have been more far fetched, as would the confidence that a robot controlled system could successfully manage a rocket landing at all. So, overall that might have been a clean sheet option in the later 2000s, but never for the original Shuttle.

So I do support the idea that a Saturn Shuttle would have been the smart way to go in 1971. But the scenario I am working on assumes that as in real history, the Shuttle Decision went much as history and we are stuck with the solids made by low bidder Thiokol which fell short of promises, especially in reusability, the nightmare tiles on the Orbiter, and the long and extended process of expensively developing the SSMEs. All of this is water under the bridge and NASA is committed to the STS system for the 1980s. Then Challenger is lost. I would like to explore the possibility of developing more flexible and more cost-effective use of the expensive Shuttle component elements. In fact this scenario here is focused even later than the Challenger post-mortem, more in the Columbia post mortem period of the mid-2000s. Here, the recognition that the old Orbiter fleet is going to be retired soon forces consideration about what to do afterward. Historically, the Constellation system was proposed, and when one digs into that decision, I see a couple things I think are pretty ugly that led to grossly unsatisfactory results. For one thing the NASA leadership was not interested in retaining the capabilities that the Orbiter did give us, such as the ability to put 7 or 8 people into low Earth orbit and support their doing useful work there. With the development of the ISS of course it was no longer necessary to have a giant Space Winnebago to hold a miniature SpaceLab in, but neither was NASA's leadership interested in making a smaller space bus to take such large crews to ISS and do their scientific work there. They wanted to shut down ISS within just years of getting it operational, and instead focus only on long distance missions, to the Moon or Mars. This mission is all Constellation was designed for, it was not meant to assist in operating the ISS which the administration proposed to abandon! Thus we would have no economical means of reach low Earth orbit with large crews, or even crews of any size at all, only the expensive option of wasting an Orion mission in a spaceship oversized and overpriced for LEO work. Secondly, despite the evident desire to make a clean break with the Shuttle legacy, they were under some pressure to develop "shuttle derived" systems. The idea here was not so much that Shuttle systems had in fact solved some problems well and we should continue to use that successful aspect of STS. No, it was that on Earth, established contractors such as ATK Orbital (heir of Thiokol) wished to continue to see their facilities used to supply NASA, never mind whether their products were the technical best way or not. And NASA being subject to political pressures, such as the powerful lobbying these established Big Old Space contractors could wield, meant they had to think inside a box that would reuse STS tech whether it was a good fit to the problem at hand or not.

These forces shaped the Constellation proposal. For crew launch, we were to switch over to the Ares 1, which would put a hydrogen fueled upper stage on a solid fuel stick. Since Orion was designed for deep space missions and added some features such as a radiation shelter that Apollo lacked, it was grossly overweight for a mere LEO mission--but had Constellation gone forward, we would have shut down ISS and had no LEO missions anyway. Thus it was too big to be boosted into orbit with a standard issue Shuttle 4 solid fuel element stack; ATK Orbital would be forced to develop a 5 segment stack instead. But the old Thiokol works would go on churning out more sold segments! That was the important thing you see. Then, big spacecraft such as the Moon lander and a TLI stage to send an Orion/lander combination to the Moon or more distant places would go up on an Ares V--this was presented as cheap to develop because it was suggested to be a Shuttle style external fuel tank, with SSMEs on the bottom meant to be used once and thrown away, the payload on top, and familiar side mounted solid boosters. The catch, from the point of view of claiming economy by using already developed Shuttle parts, was that the new tank first of all would suffer new stress patterns with its payload on top and its engines on the bottom, instead of those things being sidesaddle and together as on the Shuttle. And second it was to be stretched to be bigger than the old expendable tanks. Being more massive again the solids from the Shuttle would not cut it; if we were lucky the same 5 segment stack used for Ares 1 could do but there was a desire for a 7 segment stack. Thus every allegedly "Shuttle Derived" element would really be a new development project, nothing was taken as given by the Shuttle program. The contractors would receive large new payments for development on top of continued demand for their existing facilities to be used for components. 

I would be less outraged by all this if in fact they had delivered with a useful product in time for the retirement of the Shuttle. But this has not happened. Obama might be blamed for refusing to continue Constellation but Congress forced the Ares V program to go forward anyway under a new name but with the same pork-maximizing, results minimizing priorities in place. SLS is too expensive to be used more than once every other year, and leaves no budget for something to ride on it, and has not been tested.

So I was wondering, what sort of spacecraft might we make with genuine Shuttle Derived hardware? I believe for instance that an adequate Earth to LEO crew vehicle could be based on a booster made from a single segment of the Shuttle SRBs! That would allow for something like 10-12 tonnes in LEO which ought to be good enough for a taxi to the ISS for 5 or more crew. Two such single-segment boosters should be able to put cargoes as massive as the Shuttle could up, flanking a central liquid hydrogen fueled upper stage. A whole family of possible booster-tank combinations could be studied, including those that would be big enough to use up one or more SSME to dispose of it. The combinations with the most economical features could be chosen for an alternative kind of Constellation, one that preserves our LEO capabilities while being extendable to bigger configurations with massive capacity. The old space Mafia could be gratified with ongoing indefinite demand for their products while achieving much greater economies per ton to orbit.

By the mid 2010s of course SpaceX was showing that a clean sheet approach was more economical still. But I am talking about an Alternative Constellation, one that might have gotten operational, at least with some elements, enough to preserve our LEO capabilities, before STS was finally shut down. Meanwhile to a great extent the new system uses the old elements supported by the Shuttle Mafia, who are gratified. Versus actual history, small rockets just to ISS would be using just a trickle of ATK's solid segments, but American capability to reach ISS would never be lost, and the line item cost of these launches would be far lower than a Shuttle mission. Perhaps with the pace of Shuttle launches coming down due to the alternative small crewed vehicles flying to ISS instead, the Shuttle Orbiters could be stretched to the present day or beyond due to having fewer missions to fly, justifying postponing their retirement.

That is the scenario then. We stick with legacy Shuttle tech because the suppliers have political influence, and it is still a bit early to have trust in SpaceX's ability to get it done cheaper a different way. American crewed missions continue to launch from the USA and we have the newer Orbiters handy to carry out special missions while routine stuff is more and more done with the Shuttle derived but not Shuttle vehicles carrying them. 

 

It is not better than what we might do now with SpaceX developed options. But it is better I think than what did happen between 2006 and today, that is the last 12 years!

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16 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

I can understand why you'd want figures specific to the Shuttle SRBs, given that mass changes have likely been made on the SLS SRBs. One directly-derived SRB was the Ares 1 booster, which was a 5-segment version of the Shuttle SRB with no other real changes other than the interstage (it still had chutes, etc.). It flew a test flight in 2009. If you can track down its dry mass, the difference between it and the Shuttle SRB dry mass should be almost exactly the mass of a single segment.

The dry mass of the solid rocket alone, which includes only the thrust segments and the nozzle, was 82,879 kg. The aft thrust segment is heavier than the other three, since it includes the nozzle. Adding on the parachutes, avionics, thrust vector control assembly, sep motors, and nose cone brought the dry mass to roughly 91 tonnes. I'll estimate the mass of the 3.8-meter nozzle at 4.8 tonnes, bringing the mass of each segment to roughly 18.1 tonnes. The parachute assembly massed around 3.5 tonnes with a deployment system of about 500 kg.

So, a Shuttle-derived five-segment booster would have been 96.8 tonnes (nozzle + 5 segments), plus 8.2 tonnes to complete the whole assembly, or 105 tonnes. However, if you don't need chutes, this drops to 101 tonnes.

The SLS SRBs mass 100.3 tonnes. So, that's an 0.7% difference. I think it's safe to say the dry mass difference per segment from the Shuttle SRBs to the SLS SRBs is negligible.

I'd baseline the mass of your Shuttle-derived three-segment booster at 72.9 tonnes or 68.9 if you fly without chutes.

I think ATK was not interested in minimizing changes for Ares, as they would be if the program was driven mainly by a desire for development cost economy. I want to get a picture of what an economical minimum development fleet might have looked like--this is something the various proposals called Direct/Jupiter were also striving for, so it is not like no one thought of this stuff. They were ignored because I am convinced the real driving force behind Ares and SLS was pork. Getting a lot of money for development of improvements was exactly what was wanted, and evidently getting an operational spacecraft was not. So, I was able to find a description of the 2008 Ares proposals here at this site 

http://www.b14643.de/Spacerockets_2/United_States_1/Ares-I_CLV/Description/Frame.htm

I am not 100 percent sure the vehicle mass breakdowns this fellow Brugge provides are accurate, but having caught Encyclopedia Astronautica in a huge howler of an error in its description of the J-2S engine, I don't know who to trust! Brugge's descriptions seem to hold up pretty well every time I can cross check. The SRB first stage of Ares 1 here definitely seems to have a higher dry mass than adding a single solid fuel grain element would account for. Anyway getting a definite figure for the fuel elements would still not tell me what the balance was between the nozzle segment and nose segment, and I need to know one or the other of them--which would tell me both if I also knew the solid element dry mass. 

It is from Brugge's description of the Shuttle solids I get the gross figure of 88 tonnes for a spent SRB before it starts shedding stuff, by subtraction of 1003.2 from 1178.42 tonnes--that is for both SRBs added together of course.

From your own description the 4 grain units were not identical because you imply the nozzle section was not a separate sixth section but integrated with one of the grain elements! In that case there are 5 segments not 6, and 4 joints, not 5. I've never heard that or seen it implied but my sources are scanty and cryptic so that might be right! But the bottom segment, fused to and including a segment of solid fuel or not, adds not just a nozzle, but also some equipment to articulate it, vectoring through 8 degrees in two dimensions; is the weight of that, and the APU hydraulic system (powered by hydrazine monopropellant) included in the 4.8 tonnes for the nozzle? There are yet more structural elements, skirts the nozzle shifts within, which must add more weight. You see why I regard the nozzle section as a thing in itself and not part of a solid fuel segment. There is a lot of stuff there.

Brugge gives 753 tonnes for the solid first stage all up, and 647.65 as the mass of the fuel elements, so that comes to 105.35 for the dry weight. Which is in remarkably close agreement to your estimate, I have to admit. The inconsistency is that Brugge does not allow an additional 3-4 tonnes for the parachute and associated gear on the Shuttle--in fact it would have to be 6-8 tonnes since the two separate boosters are combined into one group in his table. 

Also, if there are 5 segments producing gas instead of 4, a Shuttle SRB nozzle will not cut it; the gas flow rate is increased to 1.25 and that can't flow at the proper rate through a nozzle throat sized for 4 segments. At expansion nozzle throats, the gas is flowing at the speed of sound, and that is determined by composition and temperature of the gas mix, which is the same for both versions, so if the nozzle is to work right its throat needs to be expanded to 1.25 the area, and then the bell needs to be similarly scaled up in cross section all down its length. Thus if the nozzle is 4.8 tonnes on the Shuttle it becomes 6 on the Ares V or any 5 element stick made with the same propellant grain. 

Meanwhile, burn time and pattern is also determined by the grain properties. But the burn time of a Shuttle SRB is 122 seconds while the Ares version is given as 132 sec, so something has been tinkered with there too. The longer burn means I have overestimated the nozzle cross section. The sea level specific impulse is also given as a bit lower, which might account for the longer burn time. Also comparing the Ares 1 and Ares V solids according to Brugge, it seems the latter are a bit more massive and give a higher peak thrust, but the burn time is the same as is SL Isp. 

I was hoping the Kerbal community had extremely detailed figures as to the sectional mass breakdowns of such a widely known element as the Shuttle SRBs because I figured other people also would tinker with variable numbers of solid segments to get stretches or downgrades of basic Shuttle elements just as I am trying to do.

OK, your figures suggest a mass of 14 tonnes per fuel segment, and if that is true than out of 91 tonnes at separation the nose and nozzle would together mass 91-46 or 45 tonnes. Without parachutes and support, 41 tonnes. I still have to split that between the nose and nozzle, and I suspect the nozzle must have the lion's share of it. Say 60:40, the nozzle then is 24.6 and the nose is 16.4.

So a one segment booster would have a mass scaled down to (1/4)^(2/3) x 24.6 or 9.76, call it 10; the nose is always the same, so we have 26.4+14 or 40.4 containing 125 tonnes of solid fuel in one grain segment. 2 segments would be 60 dry with 250 tonnes and with 3,  we'd have 79 and 375.

It's more pessimistic than your estimate but I think it is more likely to be right unfortunately.

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5 hours ago, insert_name said:

here is a helpful source, the castor 300, 600, and 1200 are all based on sts booster segments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_(rocket_stage)

There have been a lot of modifications of the baseline SRB design, which is sensible considering Thiokol designed the SRBs in the early '70s while the castor 300 multiples date 30 years and more later. But thanks!

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18 hours ago, PB666 said:

I think they were redesigned to increase their saftey margin. There were problems with the classic design. 

"Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident"

Some of the problems were fixed after challenger.

If the shuttle were designed today they probably would not be using the SRBs if their intent was to recycle.

Actually as I understand it, the risk of the intersegment seals coming undone and firing jets of gas possibly right at the ET was anticipated and noted in the design reviews for the proposed SRBs in the late '70s, and the fix that was applied after Challenger was also documented before the program went live in 1981; Thiokol engineers had already developed it. To double up the seals as was done after the disaster would have increased the dry mass of the units thus costing a bit of performance for the Shuttle which was already overweight and underperforming, and I believe would also have increased labor costs and assembly time somewhat and therefore the simpler, lighter, riskier solution was approved. But then of course issues with seals showing signs of near or partial failure were demonstrated on many, perhaps most, STS launches beginning with Columbia's first flight in 1981. At that point I think a prudent management would have put in a change order and demanded the better seals immediately. Perhaps, given the pressure they were under, not standing down the test sequence and continuing to use the assembled units in the pipeline but with the transition to the better system already in the works. Perhaps then they never would have encountered the Challenger disaster specifically. Then too, of course Challenger's final launch was on a day colder than any prior STS launch had ever been, and outside of Thiokol's recommended protocols as well, which the on site Thiokol chief of engineering duly noted and called for a mission scrub on that grounds. He was then overriden by agreement between NASA officials on site and his boss in Utah for Thiokol. Perhaps if the written guidelines had been respected and no launches ever happened below the minimum temperature allowed, again despite the risky lightweight O ring retention design, maybe we'd never have had a solid igniting the tank. Historically, after Challenger it was suspenders and belt, with the temperature rules being followed and the retention design upgraded. So we don't know what the cost of running the one risk without running the other might have been; with better rings perhaps even more severe cold weather might have been defied with the result of multiple ad massive jets blowing a Shuttle up before it cleared the pad, as the material shattered like glass. Perhaps with the temperature protocols scrupulously honored, the flimsy approved ring design would have failed anyway someday despite balmy weather. I suspect both conditions created the disaster but that was two strikes of lax attention to warnings against conditions engineers actually did predict. It is said in aeronautics that you need two or more failures to make a crash. 

So yeah, I would hope that 30 or 40 years of progress would transform the design made in the mid-70s! But there was only the one modification made in the SRBs in the course of the Shuttle program.

SInce ATK Orbital rather infamously desired to push NASA's SRBs to 5 segments because it would position them to be ready to supply the Air Force with a super-sized ICBM, I don't really believe better safety is their major motive. After all the SRBs were never a problem again after 1986, if one discounts the ongoing issues that made them risky and unpleasant in every launch--inability to shut them down if something was going wrong elsewhere, which prevented the Orbiter from being able to escape until they burned out; heavy vibrations for resonance reasons analogous to pogo in liquid fuel rockets, which could be moderated by design so they didn't actually threaten to destroy the rocket but could never be eliminated either. Solids give a rough ride by their nature. I have to suspect a 5 segment version would inherently produce at least 25 percent more vibration energy as measured in decibels. 

Reliance on the solids for post-Shuttle design was clearly not determined by best practice nor economy per launch, but rather by the political desire to keep an existing contractor happy.

And I want to be clear when I disapprove of Thiokol, I respect the integrity of its engineers. They tried, and presumably under ATK management still try, to do a good job and to be frank about the drawbacks of their product. Nothing is going to be perfect, everything involves tradeoffs; we should understand that admitting to a drawback is not damning and shows evidence that someone is thinking seriously. But decisions are made over the heads of engineers in most businesses; the engineer has to make things work within the parameters of the orders they are given and the limits of resources other people over their heads set. So, the Thiokol man in charge at Cape Canaveral made the right call for the Challenger launch to be stood down and that was him doing his job right. In view of the fact that the disaster happened anyway and that his dissent certainly made people over his head look bad, I often wonder what happened to that fellow, and what happened to the guy over his head who overruled him. Cynicism suggests to me the latter was promoted and retired rich and the former was dead ended and retired or was persuaded to quit in shame, and never got another job at his level of expertise.

So this whole project is an exercise in hopeful cynicism. Murphy's Golden Rule still applies, I just wonder what could have been accomplished if all the crony contractors still got priority to continue legacy systems with incremental and gold-plated linear improvements, but someone had their eye on the performance ball enough to see to it we still had functional spacecraft, if not optimal ones, flying despite the retirement of STS. 

No one wanted to make a Shuttle II with lessons learned and better economy, not anyway anyone at that above-engineer decision making level. Spaceplanes were out of fashion and evolved expendables and returning to the ways of Apollo was IN. So I'd like to see a cool mid-2000s Shuttle II design but they weren't being commissioned, nor am I sure they should have been.

Elon Musk looks to be returning to the philosophy of a big spaceship that carries modest size cargoes relative to its gross mass, but does so more cheaply in dollar if not in mass terms. Considering how cheap he's made optionally recoverable/expendable launch systems already, that is a heck of a challenge. The man does zigzag! But intelligently I think, it makes sense when you bear in mind incremental improvements in capability. But while the BFR is apparently meant to be Shuttle-like in its bottom line operations pattern--as with the 1960s consensus, a two stage vehicle will use a booster that returns to the launch point,  to boost a second stage that integrates fuel tanks, engines, crew space and payload, the latter to be delivered as cargo, and then the orbiter part takes on downmass cargo and lands at the launch site ready to be inspected, undergo minimal and rapid refurbishment and launch on another stack on a refurbished booster--the detailed mechanics are different, with both stages being retropropulsive vertical landers that reenter tail first instead of flying like an airplane or glider. But in economic and functional terms, it is the realization of the 1960s Shuttle consensus, albeit on a grander scale than many dared dream--though some did!

BFR then is the Shuttle II I suppose.

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5 hours ago, Shevek23 said:

Actually as I understand it, the risk of the intersegment seals coming undone and firing jets of gas possibly right at the ET was anticipated and noted in the design reviews for the proposed SRBs in the late '70s, and the fix that was applied after Challenger was also documented before the program went live in 1981; Thiokol engineers had already developed it. To double up the seals as was done after the disaster would have increased the dry mass of the units thus costing a bit of performance for the Shuttle which was already overweight and underperforming, and I believe would also have increased labor costs and assembly time somewhat and therefore the simpler, lighter, riskier solution was approved. But then of course issues with seals showing signs of near or partial failure were demonstrated on many, perhaps most, STS launches beginning with Columbia's first flight in 1981. At that point I think a prudent management would have put in a change order and demanded the better seals immediately. Perhaps, given the pressure they were under, not standing down the test sequence and continuing to use the assembled units in the pipeline but with the transition to the better system already in the works. Perhaps then they never would have encountered the Challenger disaster specifically. Then too, of course Challenger's final launch was on a day colder than any prior STS launch had ever been, and outside of Thiokol's recommended protocols as well, which the on site Thiokol chief of engineering duly noted and called for a mission scrub on that grounds. He was then overriden by agreement between NASA officials on site and his boss in Utah for Thiokol. Perhaps if the written guidelines had been respected and no launches ever happened below the minimum temperature allowed, again despite the risky lightweight O ring retention design, maybe we'd never have had a solid igniting the tank. Historically, after Challenger it was suspenders and belt, with the temperature rules being followed and the retention design upgraded. So we don't know what the cost of running the one risk without running the other might have been; with better rings perhaps even more severe cold weather might have been defied with the result of multiple ad massive jets blowing a Shuttle up before it cleared the pad, as the material shattered like glass. Perhaps with the temperature protocols scrupulously honored, the flimsy approved ring design would have failed anyway someday despite balmy weather. I suspect both conditions created the disaster but that was two strikes of lax attention to warnings against conditions engineers actually did predict. It is said in aeronautics that you need two or more failures to make a crash. 

Elon Musk looks to be returning to the philosophy of a big spaceship that carries modest size cargoes relative to its gross mass, but does so more cheaply in dollar if not in mass terms. Considering how cheap he's made optionally recoverable/expendable launch systems already, that is a heck of a challenge. The man does zigzag! But intelligently I think, it makes sense when you bear in mind incremental improvements in capability. But while the BFR is apparently meant to be Shuttle-like in its bottom line operations pattern--as with the 1960s consensus, a two stage vehicle will use a booster that returns to the launch point,  to boost a second stage that integrates fuel tanks, engines, crew space and payload, the latter to be delivered as cargo, and then the orbiter part takes on downmass cargo and lands at the launch site ready to be inspected, undergo minimal and rapid refurbishment and launch on another stack on a refurbished booster--the detailed mechanics are different, with both stages being retropropulsive vertical landers that reenter tail first instead of flying like an airplane or glider. But in economic and functional terms, it is the realization of the 1960s Shuttle consensus, albeit on a grander scale than many dared dream--though some did!

BFR then is the Shuttle II I suppose.

FH is heavy buts the rocket itself is not crazy big. The space shuttle uses H2 which drives up the volume of the space craft. Heavy is a cost and Voluminous is a cost. 

The SRBs on the shuttle while safer in 2010 than in 1986 still do not have a throttle down state short of fuel depletion and therefore can never be made as safe as a 2-component fuel rocket, this is coupled to the fact that solid fuels have ISPs with ISP 2/3rds of LF rockets and 1/2 that of cryogenic. And while the shuttles SRBs were meant to be recycled, it was not an efficient process and really did not save that much money.

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5 hours ago, PB666 said:

FH is heavy buts the rocket itself is not crazy big. The space shuttle uses H2 which drives up the volume of the space craft. Heavy is a cost and Voluminous is a cost. 

The SRBs on the shuttle while safer in 2010 than in 1986 still do not have a throttle down state short of fuel depletion and therefore can never be made as safe as a 2-component fuel rocket, this is coupled to the fact that solid fuels have ISPs with ISP 2/3rds of LF rockets and 1/2 that of cryogenic. And while the shuttles SRBs were meant to be recycled, it was not an efficient process and really did not save that much money.

I know. In hindsight there was a lot wrong with the Shuttle, which could have been approached differently for some improvement. And maybe the concept was just something that could not be implemented at all well with 1970s tech. I do not like SRBs. The idea of trying to recycle the fuel segments of an SRB was pretty marginal and perhaps downright silly--I do think maybe the nose and nozzle sections ought to be reused if they were robust enough to take being scoured by the hot propellant gases many many times, but perhaps they were not designed for that and doing so would have been too heavy. Anyway some people even say that the nose and nozzle sections were not recycled while the fuel segments definitely were. All very dumb; I think after Challenger admitting that recycling SRBs was a bad idea and saving weight by omitting the parachute kit would have been an appropriate policy change. You'll note that my "What If?" project here assumes no SRB recycling but they persist in using solids to keep the contractor ATK happy.

I don't think the Isp Issue matters so much at sea level; during booster phase you need thrust first of all, mass efficiency is not so important there, especially if the propellant is cheap. Solids have excellent thrust/weight ratio properties overall despite the low Isp and store very densely as well as stably. Still, I like a good kerosene-oxygen system much more than a solid; indeed I wonder if we might not do well with kerosene-hydrogen peroxide! 

In 1971, I would propose developing a heavy pressure fed booster made to be very very robust so it can just splash down in the ocean and be recovered and quickly reused. It is not as nifty as Falcon returning to the launch pad but even to recover to a drone ship downrange, the Falcon must reserve some propellant that could have gone to the payload. For realistic launch rates, there is nothing wrong with fishing the spent stages out of water downrange I think. The idea is to save money, so if a simple design can be cheaply and rapidly inspected and approved, it does not matter if it is overweight or uses less than perfectly efficient systems. 

After all if Isp were everything we could hardly question the decision made with the Shuttle to ascend all the way from sea level with hydrogen fuel! And yet we do, for many good reasons.

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1 hour ago, Shevek23 said:

I know. In hindsight there was a lot wrong with the Shuttle, which could have been approached differently for some improvement. And maybe the concept was just something that could not be implemented at all well with 1970s tech. I do not like SRBs. The idea of trying to recycle the fuel segments of an SRB was pretty marginal and perhaps downright silly--I do think maybe the nose and nozzle sections ought to be reused if they were robust enough to take being scoured by the hot propellant gases many many times, but perhaps they were not designed for that and doing so would have been too heavy. Anyway some people even say that the nose and nozzle sections were not recycled while the fuel segments definitely were. All very dumb; I think after Challenger admitting that recycling SRBs was a bad idea and saving weight by omitting the parachute kit would have been an appropriate policy change. You'll note that my "What If?" project here assumes no SRB recycling but they persist in using solids to keep the contractor ATK happy.

I don't think the Isp Issue matters so much at sea level; during booster phase you need thrust first of all, mass efficiency is not so important there, especially if the propellant is cheap. Solids have excellent thrust/weight ratio properties overall despite the low Isp and store very densely as well as stably. Still, I like a good kerosene-oxygen system much more than a solid; indeed I wonder if we might not do well with kerosene-hydrogen peroxide! 

In 1971, I would propose developing a heavy pressure fed booster made to be very very robust so it can just splash down in the ocean and be recovered and quickly reused. It is not as nifty as Falcon returning to the launch pad but even to recover to a drone ship downrange, the Falcon must reserve some propellant that could have gone to the payload. For realistic launch rates, there is nothing wrong with fishing the spent stages out of water downrange I think. The idea is to save money, so if a simple design can be cheaply and rapidly inspected and approved, it does not matter if it is overweight or uses less than perfectly efficient systems. 

After all if Isp were everything we could hardly question the decision made with the Shuttle to ascend all the way from sea level with hydrogen fuel! And yet we do, for many good reasons.

There wasn't alot wrong, its just its weaknesses get blown out of proportion by a few idealist.

What a boosters true function is to get the launch vehicle away from the launch pad. That sounds sort of redundant, but its not. .  suppose you have a perfect rocket, ISP = 500 and the first stage is going to get you to Space, the problem is that in providing 9000 dV required to get to orbit, the launch only has enough thrust to hover over the launch pad for a minute before it starts moving. If a launch vehicle has only TWR = 1, its not going anywhere until it loses fuel. But as the rocket approached MaxQ it really does not need TWR >> 1, otherwise the thrust of the rocket just gets thrown into the structural rigidity of the forward payload. So basically if you have a really efficient rocket, all you really need to do is get off the launch pad with an acceleration at the structural limit of the vehicle, approach about 0.85 M and release whatever boosted you there  . . . .take about 15 seconds to pass MaxQ and just go. The ISP issue becomes trivial because, if the Booster is cheap, you're not holding onto the weight but for a minute, the mass of the fuel hardly matters. But if you are going to use a booster to go to >2000 m/s , the ISP is not trivial, and its particularly notable if the SRB is more expensive per kg than alternative boosters.

The SRBs weren't cheap, they were expensive, and they were designed to burn much longer than to Mach 0.85 (if they had cut out at 0.85 the challenger disaster would not have occurred and thermodynamic forces would have not torn up the shuttle), and the shuttle would have befitted from having more engines (just not the SS25). The shuttle itself cannot be blamed on the SRBs.

The good points of the shuttle program were its flexibility, which many here see as a weakness. But some of the critiques to 'stick' First it could hold up to 11 personnel in an emergency which was basically silly. That wasted weight in the cockpit. The missions should have been scaled back with crews of 4 and a maximum crew capacity of 7. IOW the shuttle tried to do to much of too many things, which could have been scaled back for a viable launch, but not 12 times per year, more like 4 launches per year for specialized missions. Many things the shuttle were doing, like ISS crew and supply missions were redundant with much cheaper launch systems, and having completed the ISS, many of the science missions were redundant in facility with the ISS.

The bad point of the shuttle as mentioned was the 'damn' foam and tile issues. Tiles repeatedly fell off the shuttle, including tiles in area that were not exposed to falling foam. So that there was a certain inevitability to the Columbia disaster. If a tile falls off in the wrong place, then craft cannot re-enter until its fixed. The tiles would have continued to be a problem until they designed a different ablation system. @tater posted a comprehensive summary of missions with tile issues over the course of the shuttle program that is worth reading.

What is really true about the space shuttle is that the US lost a certain degree of functionality, functionality that was supposed to be replaced by now, but is nowhere near being replaced. The shuttle program was ended to save on cost, but the reality is that the up-and-coming functional replacement systems are not cheap, they are very expensive, and the practices that ran up the cost are still on-going. The only bright spot is that SpaceX has stepped in and it might be able to sort through the supply-inflexible market place weeding out the inefficient players, I suspect the SLS SRBs, once used up, will not be replaced.

 

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