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| Interview: "Two Guys At The Vanguard:" TGV Rockets' Earl Renaud on Suborbital Spysat Replacement |
| 2005-07-12 |
| From The Space Review, an interview by Sam Dinkin; I'm bypassing the parts on the pitfalls of space tourism and excerpting the parts on reconnaisance satellites. TSR: You are going after popping upâ Renaud: Suborbital. TSR: Take some pictures, or do some science and come back down. Renaud: We found a lot of people in the DoD who have a need for that mission. TSR: You are accessing a new market? Renaud: Nobody does imagery right now from a suborbital vehicleâvery little. TSR: For a while they had the SR-71 Blackbird going because they decided the Keyhole spy satellites werenât enough. Youâre saying, âHey, you need real time imagery.â Renaud: Well, letâs do it: When you want overhead imagery right now, if itâs over denied territory, the only way to get that today, is with a satellite. A satellite costs $1 billion. Itâs a $200-million Delta launch. Itâs a couple hundred million dollars of satellite development minimum. Plus the insurance. TSR: You need a bunch of satellites. Renaud: Just figure one. Itâs $500 million to $1 billion to launch one imagery satellite to get you sub-meter imagery resolution on the ground. You put that thing up in space. It goes around the planet. It circles a planet thatâs covered in 70% ocean, 40% is in cloud cover, and 70% of the land mass is absolutely uninhabited. Only about 2% of the time is that satellite ever over something even remotely interestingâitâs a very, very low yieldâand you only come over that spot with a satellite once a day if itâs in a polar orbit. Combine that with the fact that anybody with a laptop can get on the Internet and download the ephemeris [a table giving the coordinates of a celestial object at a number of specific times during a given period] for our entire constellation. They know exactly when the satellites are coming overhead. Denial and deception is a real problem. TSR: Even thirty years ago people knew how to do that. Renaud: Itâs no big shock that people would like a better way to get imagery. Something that doesnât cost $1 billion and doesnât have a very low yield. TSR: Yours would have a high yield. Renaud: A high percentage yield. You only fly a suborbital imagery mission when you can get the pictures, when you want the pictures, and where you want the pictures. So your yield is 100%. TSR: Itâs also a lot cheaper so the interest on your billion dollars will pay for one of these suborbital flights whenever you need one. What is NROâs budget anyway? Renaud: Thatâs a classified number, but itâs a big number. TSR: So there are a lot of satellitesâ Renaud: In fact there are very few. When thereâs a regional conflict that we are about to be involved in, we retask all the satellites: we move them around in their orbits. We have coverage, almost continuous coverage or high percentage coverage over one place, but that means you have very low coverage over every place else. So itâs no surprise that while we retasked all our satellites to look at Kosovo and the Balkans, thatâs when North Korea restarted their nuclear program. They knew nobody was watching. Theyâre not dummies. What we have is national assets that are conflicted. They are at least at the theater level. Low intensity, theater-level operations are generally shortchanged on the national assets. TSR: You are saying something different, too: âEven if they got all the assets, that still would not be as good,â as your product. Renaud: During the Gulf War, how many Scuds did we get on the ground? How many Scud launchers did we get after they launched one? After we did photoreconnaissance of the area, they were gone! Because thereâs a huge amount of latency, even if you could get the satellite overhead, the satellite imagery is not beamed down to the guy on the ground. The satellite takes the imagery and stores it, and then it passes over a digital download place, like Guam or White Sands or something. It goes to Chantilly [Virginia] and is printed on these giant printers, driven out to Dover [Air Force Base in Delaware], then put on a C-5 and flown to the theater. TSR: So you can find out what happened last week. Renaud: Youâre not getting stuff that is minutes old. Even if you can improve it to where there is network connectivity, gigabit over the long haul is lot of bandwidth. You are suffering a bandwidth choke. It is very tough to get that in a timely mannerâand I am talking minutesâinto a theater commanderâs hands. TSR: Suppose instead you had suborbital over the theater. You could just have an optical link to headquarters or just burn a DVD while you are up there. Renaud: Itâs a ten-minute mission, bring it back and hand it to the guy. You slide it into the jacket and hand it directly to the analyst. Ten minutes. We are talking a ten-minute latency. TSR: Once you get the optical link going, you can have real-time data. You can launch your next strike before you land your suborbital rocket. Renaud: So that is something that a theater-level commander would love to get his hands on. TSR: So we are spending what, $50 billion, $500 billion in Iraq? Renaud: Oh God, we just spent⊠isnât the supplemental for $82 billion? And thatâs just for this year. TSR: If you took $2 billion to spend on this kind of intelligence, how many flights would it be? Renaud: A lot. Thousands, tens of thousands. TSR: So you could have snapshots every ten minutes during every critical mission. Tora Bora, looking straight down at the mountains. Renaud: You donât really need imagery that often. When something changes, you need imagery of it. When somebody is going to mass troops and do an attack, you need imagery of it. If you fly a strike and drop weapons on somebody, you want to be able do rapid battle damage assessment so you know whether you have to send more pilots back into harmâs way. That kind of stuff where itâs not really intelligence that the strategic people need to worry about. Itâs purely tactical. The theater-level commander has a need for local reconnaissance that he has a tough time filling. TSR: You say theater, but we are spending a lot on theater this year. Renaud: Thereâs more theaters than just Iraq. Donât you think that PACOM [US Pacific Command] would like to have some imagery of North Korea? TSR: It would certainly be nice to send one of those once a month. Renaud: From 80 kilometers up, you can see almost 1,600 km, which means from Taiwan you could see the majority of the populated areas of China. Donât you think the Taiwainese would really like to know whatâs going on in China right now? TSR: What youâre saying is that the guys who did these orbital satellites had this low tech low cost option that they just could have taken their X-15 or their sounding rockets, and made something reusable out of it and done this instead of the national fleet of satellites? Wouldnât that be cheaper for all the theater support? Renaud: Not really. Thereâs a problem with glass. To get decent sub-meter resolution imagery from 80 kilometers up you are not talking about something the size of a coffee can. A Black Brant can launch a coffee can. Youâre talking about something the size of your desk or two desks. Youâre talking about a meter aperture piece of glassâhigh gain optics. A large sized CCD, solid-state storage, powerâ TSR: You are basically lofting an observatory. Renaud: You are lofting a ton of stuff, literally a ton of material. Renaud: There isnât anything that will launch that in a cost-effective manner to 80 kilometers. There wasâit was called the DC-X. The DC-X did not have inflight restart capability and was limited to about 45 kilometers. So you tend to get a little more performance with that capability. Funding challenges TSR: This is really exciting and the DoD should really be pushing you hard. They have given you some startup money? Renaud: We are funded through detailed design review. That takes us out into some time in the middle of â06 and weâre trying to build up the money to build the vehicles. The manufacturing, the piece parts, thatâs a bigger challenge. If you look at government funding, thereâs the color of money issue. People who do operational work in the military canât fund research and development. TSR: Right, it has to come from the R&D people. Renaud: The R&D people look at this and go âwhereâs the R?â I am sure you have heard the term âDARPA hardâ. Thatâs the new buzz phrase: DARPA hard. If you donât have enough science, new science and technology that is not risky enough, they donât want to talk to you. They see their vision, their mission, as âdo the hard stuffâ. TSR: Itâs like the A-10 Warthog. The stuff that actually gets the job done has no friends. Renaud: The C-130, you are aware they turned it into a gunship. They put a whole bunch of high-caliber weapons on it and they fly in a circle and saturate an area with fire. The only way they could get that funded was through the Congressional add. It would never survive the budget process. TSR: Itâs too boring. Renaud: Exactly: thereâs no technology there. Getting things through the military budget is a hard thing to do. Obviously we are working that. Right now thatâs been a hard thing. ... TSR: Can you tell me about your design philosophy? Renaud: We try to do everything with off-the-shelf technology, off-the-shelf components. Major suppliers, not SBIR [Small Business Innovation Research] shops. People who actually have done what we want to do before. If I go to somebody and describe a partâ TSR: They donât say, âWeâve discovered unobtainium and all you have to do is give us $100,000 and we will give it to you.â Renaud: I get calls all the time from entrepreneurs who have discovered anti-gravity or you know. And I go, âThatâs great. Sorry, bye.â But if I go to somebody and I need a part thatâs not in their catalog and they say, âWell gee, we think we can make that, but weâre not sure.â I stop. Well obviously what weâre going to do isnât going to work. We need to rethink that. If they say, âWeâve never made that before, but thatâs within our design space. We have to redo the engineering, but we know we can get there. You just have to pay for us to redo the design.â Then I say, âOK.â and I pay the money. But absolutely no technology development. That leads us back to that, âWell, gee, our system is boring and stupid.â TSR: So no R and now youâre telling me, âno D.â Renaud: As little D as possible. No parts D, just the integration. We are not willing to do wild extrapolation. TSR: Obviously you are building a new spacecraft so thereâs going to be some new stuff on it. So itâs not going to be 100% off-the-shelf parts. Are you trying to make it 90% and the parts as close to being as off-the-shelf as possible? Renaud: Thereâs no parts in there that are technology development. Letâs put it that way. No new materials. No new technology. No new design techniques. No novel weird moulds. TSR: That sounds like Wozniak and Jobs [of Apple Computer]. Basically, you are taking catalog items and finally putting them together to do something useful. Renaud: We are building that first eight-bit processor. Yes. Itâs going to do something dumb. Itâs not going to be optimized for performance. In fact, its performance is gonna suck. Itâs not gonna go to orbit. Thereâs no way I can make it go to orbit. With a straight face, I cannot say this system grows into a single stage to orbit system. TSR: You would have to start doing what you said you donât want to do. which is asking for the biggest one of these ever. Renaud: What I can do is, once I am flying, I can revisit each of those things I said I didnât want to do any new technology on. Once Iâve got a system that works, and itâs bringing in revenue, I can say, âOK. Now that Iâve got some revenue coming in, letâs start one of those science projects.â Letâs try to make conformal composite tanks for this. If they work, weâll take our old stupid heavy metal tank and weâll stick this in. And weâll make it plug compatible. One of the things we did right from the beginning is we designed a vehicle that is a very loosely coupled design. Itâs a modular design. If you think about a fighter aircraft, a fighter aircraft is a very closely coupled design. The engine controls and the avionics are all over the place. The aero surfaces and the primary flight control are actually load-bearing structure. Everything is all tied together and if you try to make one little change to a component somewhere, it ripples through the entire design. TSR: Most people think spacecraft have to be that way. Renaud: Well, because theyâre optimized for performance. TSR: Exactly. Renaud: Weâre designing a system that is very loosely coupled. TSR: Optimized for money? Renaud: No, itâs optimized for operations. The interview continues next week. |
| Posted by:Phil Fraering |
| #6 I'm involved in the overhead imaging business myself. A friend of mine is a professional photog and takes pictures of construction sites and the like. He uses a Grumman Lynx for this. We fly to the designated point at the specified altitude (ususally 1200 AGL), then he opens the canopy, leans out, and takes the pictures with a really fancy 35mm professional camera of some sort. My job is to fly the plane while he is doing this. It's a lot of fun and involves some pretty decent flying, to hold the needed altitude and bank angle while avoiding those annoying broadcast towers that seem to litter the ground around here like so many giant punji stakes. Yesterday, this led to an encounter with probably the most careless Lubbock driver I have yet seen, and that's saying a lot. A truck pulled onto the runway just as we were on final at the little country airstrip that serves as our base. We were a few hundred feet downwind and about 60 feet high when the truck careened off a taxiway and drove right into the middle of the active. I hit the throttle and went around. I think we cleared the heedless fool by about 30 feet. The canopy was closed or I would have given him the finger as we went by. I am sure we got his attention anyway. He had disappeared entirely by the time we came back around a couple of minutes later. Not quite KH-12 stuff. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-12 23:41 |
#5 Hey AC!
I don't know for sure, but I suspect this is because "Michelle" is meant to look fairly "off track" according to the article. | |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-12 23:14 |
#4 As worthwhile as Renaud's proposal is, he is being less than honest in this passage:TSR: What youâre saying is that the guys who did these orbital satellites had this low tech low cost option that they just could have taken their X-15 or their sounding rockets, and made something reusable out of it and done this instead of the national fleet of satellites? Wouldnât that be cheaper for all the theater support? As part of the background for one of my alternate history projects, I researched this very possibility; eg sub-orbital reconnaisance vehicles at a comparatively early date. During the Second World War, German A-4 ("V-2") rockets routinely lifted their 1 ton payloads of explosive to 100 km altitude and could have bettered this if trajectories had been optimized for altitude rather than range. During research flights after the war, captured A-4s did in fact reach much higher altitudes. The Redstone rockets that launched the first 2 American astronauts on their suborbital flights were advanced derivatives of the A-4. The Mercury capsule used on these flights weighed not one, but two tons. Redstone itself was an Army MRBM, designed for mobile field operation, and was succesfully deployed as such. The first US reconnaisance satellite, Discoverer (actually KH 1-5) had nothing like the kind of optics that Reynaud descrives as necessary for this kind of operation. The system was quite successful in terms of its optical performance and was within the payload capacity of a Redstone. The X-15 was probably not flexible enough for recce missions, but its successor, the X-20 Dyan-Soar, definitely was. It was intended for orbital flight, with a very large booster, the Titan 3C. A much enhanced Discoverer optical package was one of the intended payloads. In a suborbital mode, the X-20 would have required only the addition of a reusable engine (already available) and relatively modest jettisonable propellant tanks similar to those used on some X-15 flights. This would have been a modest re-arrangement from the orbital configuration (engine and tanks in a throw-away stage) shown at the links. Sub-orbital missions would have been air-launched from a B-52, though ground launch was possible with a solid propellant booster of fairly modest dimensions. On steep trajectory oblique imaging missions, recovery would have been by a standard re-entry, followed by a spiraling glide back to the original launch point. Additional link for X-20 Black Brant is a Canadian sounding rocket and its maximum payload is much greater than what a coffee can would hold, even if the can were filled with plutonium: 136 kg to 430 km or 408 kg to 230 km. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-12 22:56 |
| #3 I wonder if we're related? I (Gary Renaud) work for Raytheon. My brother (Alan Renaud) works for Lock-Mart. Maybe rocketeering runs in the family. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-07-12 19:25 |
| #2 Not plastics. Tinkertoys. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-12 15:08 |
| #1 Shhssssssssss "plastics" |
| Posted by: Shamu 2005-07-12 14:24 |