I have come up with an advanced cost-plus model. don’t have s nazzy title for it but here it is.

After the first few flights on the cost plus model the buying price is set and any reduction in cost for the contractor, the sell price is reduce half of that. So say its 20% plus cost. a $100M cost will be sold at $120M price for a $20M profit.

If the contractor reduces its cost by 10% the customer now buys it at 5% below the “Set” price.
Costs $90M sells for $114M for a $24M profit.

This gives them an innocentive to innovate. For any additional costs added due to request by customer for a period of time that is at what ever % of basic cost plus. Also needs to be checks for safety for manrated items and not quite sure what happens when costs go up at no fault of the customer or the contractor.

Sure the accounting is a little tougher, but if we can send a man to the moon..

Apparently some of the SpaceShipOne people were even bent out of shape from the marketing of M&Ms during the winning X-prize flight.

This editorial linked at spacetoday (tips hat to Jeff Foust) says “Get over it, already!”

The Kepler money is chump change compared to what we need and the fact that so much energy is being spent arguing about the Kepler money tells me we are much further away than we would like to believe.

First, there has been a number of comments highlighting the need for a “market” to make space exploration viable. The implication being that space tourism or space adventures is the logical first market. While I would agree that these are the current flavor-of-the-month, I would submit that they will never be the spark that unleashes a flood of space exploration. Europe’s expansion into the New World was not driven by a market, but rather by the perception that there were new, valuable resources to be found and exploited. Similarly, westward expansion of the US was initially driven by the search for new natural resources, farmers seeking new lands to farm, trappers seeking animals for their pelts, and ultimately, prospectors searching for new ores. While the farmers and trappers provided a slow, steady trickle to exploration, the discovery of gold in California was what unleashed the flood. Traditional commerce (the market) followed the source of new wealth and Government was forced to respond to the needs of the populace that had blazed the trail west and in a second way, reap the benefits of the new wealth as well. The question then is; “What resources do the Moon or Mars have that can ultimately be exploited in an economically valuable way?” To be sure, a small presence on both bodies is needed to provide the prospecting spark, but Government is not the right entity to accomplish this. If past expansion is the accurate model, any human presence on the Moon or Mars will naturally evolve to an activity focused on finding new resources to exploit and the resulting generation of wealth that will attract greater numbers of people looking to make their mark if a non-government entity leads the effort. If Government leads, then it will devolve into an effort of program self-preservation, e.g. the Shuttle and ISS, that is perceived as nothing more than a white collar job works program with no impact on the general public. This perception leads to a rapid loss of interest by the public as correctly noted in previous posts.

Second, I would agree that using existing lift capabilities is a better approach to the initial exploration than sinking funds into yet another new and improved, bigger is better, launch vehicle. Multiple launches with either distributed payloads or on-orbit assembly of a single transport system are viable ways of addressing the limited launch-mass capability. The focus should be in getting there and getting things done than developing new and better toys. If there are resources to be exploited, new transport systems will be developed to return those resources as economically as possible. Trappers and prospectors didn’t focus on building a railroad system to get them west, thay packed several mules, put them together in a train, and headed out.

Finally, the comment that cost-plus contracts to space contractors is the wrong approach indicates a lack of understanding of how aerospace companies operate. Producing spacecraft on a one-sy, two-sy basis will never be done on a fixed-price basis. The potential of failure in space of essentially one-of-a-kind spacecraft with no means of in-field repair is too great as profit is realized upon success milestones. Aerospace companies are, for the most part, publically held entities with shareholders. If the company cannot produce a profit to those shareholders on a consistent basis, investment dollars go elsewhere and the company folds. The closest they come are commercial sats, and to some degree launch vehicles, with limited modifications that can be produced on a scale large enough to ultimately realize a standard architecture that can reasonably assessed for risk of failure and amortorized over enough units to warrent a fixed-price approach. Science sats are a long, long way from reaching that scenario. Note, privately held companies aren’t held a tightly to this model. Mr. Musk can choose to sink as much of his own money into a space enterprise as he wishes. No one is going to fire him or cause his company to fold if he fails.

Like Mr. Martel, I’m not particularly sold on most of the Deep Space stuff that we do now, and I question the value of the knowledge that there is an Earth-like planet around another star that we won’t visit for generations. Especially when we don’t know all of the objects in our own neighborhood. Sure it’s nice to look out 14.5Bn years to the edge of creation, but what does that serve?

I don’t think it’s a matter so much of of NASA hiring some Madison Avenue type to better flog the public with something they’re largely indifferent to, but rather of NASA going to the American public and asking them what they want the U.S. to do in space. Do they want us to fix GEO sats? Do they want us to mine the Moon to build Solar Power Satellites? Do they want us to look for asteroids? Do they want us to take a close up look at Pluto’s atmosphere? Do they want us to watch nearby stars for pre-nova activity? Do they want us to look for planets around other stars?

Ask the public to prioritize them (say $20Bn to spend on $40Bn of activities) and see what the results are. And not just a standard 1000 person sample, but lots and lots of folks.

When you think about it, things like SPSes and Lunar Power Towers aren’t going to be built by NASAnauts, they’re going to be built by Teamsters. That means the kid in shop class can actually think about going into space, as well as the nerd in AP Cosmophysics. There are plenty of blue-collar Americans who’d be willing to work in space for a year for $100,000 or two. With that kind of nut you can buy a small business, set yourself up, maybe even send a kid to the community college. Years and years of wages rolled into one.

Pretty pictures of space are one thing. A job in space is truly another.

The direct jump to masses of people in space is economically, if not technically, impossible. But, it _is_ happening. I think the work initiated by the X-Prize will ultimately lead to that, but, even if everything goes right, it will take decades. Even if NASA were to dedicate itself solely to that project, and nothing else, it would still take decades.

One thing Apollo and space advocates have both done is over-set expectations. As I argued in some of my early articles, that is a guaranteed route to disappointment and a loss of faith. Rule one in both politics and technology is _never_ over set expectations. It is better to promise too little and achieve it than it is to promise too much and fail. So, we need to set the highest expectations that can reasonably be achieved and no higher. (This does not mean that higher achievements will not be made; once a project is started, people start thinking, and, like Apollo, the goal can be beat.)

The fact is, if you look at history, new frontiers are colonized slowly.

Matthew says, “The plan for the transcontinental railroad was done in 1838, but congress did not deem it important enough at the time. Then the gold rush occured in 1849, 80K people used into calfifornia mostly via overland routes. Suddly easy overland travel was needed. Even so it didn’t begin construction till 1861. Even so the expense would be yeah so to justfy that The Homestead act of 1862 was made to start a massive colonization of the west. The railroad was not completed till 1869. THe west would not be as developed as it is today if it wasn’t for early government subsidies.”

These figures are comparable to the ones I used in my article, and he proves both my points. It will take a _long_ time to colonize the Solar System, just as it took many decades to colonize the West under far more ideal conditions than we are dealing with. If we really want to start this process, rather than just talk about it, we need to recognize that it will take generations and then find the _minimum_ next step that will result in more human infrastructure off-planet and greater transportation requirements to get to it. Currently, I believe that’s a lunar base with EELVs. (If someone can think of a smaller step that would get us off-planet human experience, please feel free to suggest it.)

Otherwise, we’ll create lots of view graphs and dreams about instant success, and probably spend lots of money, and end up right where we are now.

— Donald