Congress, Lobbying

March Storm agenda: prizes, spaceports, and Orion/COTS

ProSpace, the group that bills itself as “The CITIZENS’ Space Lobby dedicated to opening the space frontier”, who be holding its annual March Storm lobbying effort this coming week, bringing dozens of space activists to Capitol Hill for three days of briefings in Congressional offices. ProSpace has posted its “2007 Citizens’ Space Agenda”, which covers the issues they’ll be bringing up in their briefings Monday through Wednesday. The key points:

Support Introduction and Passage of The SPACE (Space Prizes for the Advancement of Commerce & Enterprise) Act of 2007

This is a bill proposed by ProSpace that would create a National Space Prize Board that would oversee the development of prizes “as a means to accelerate the commercial expansion of economic, national security and scientific uses of space and spaceflight.” The Board would have four government officials as its members, including the heads of NASA and DARPA and the Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation, as well as three outside people nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The board would be authorized to offer prizes up to $400 million and would receive annual appropriations of $100 million, which would be set aside for prizes as selected by the board.

Support, co-sponsor and pass the Spaceport Equality Act

This piece of legislation would give spaceport developers the same bonding authority as airports, seaports, and the like.

Support formation of The Space Infrastructure Interagency/Industry Task Force

This task force, featuring representation from various government agencies and the private sector, would be charged with determining “what infrastructure is needed to aid in the development of space”, how that infrastructure would be used by various civil, military, and commercial entities, and develop a framework for putting that infrastructure in place. (“Infrastructure” is used in a very broad sense here, and following in the steps of the MIT Space Logistics Project, which looked at interplanetary supply chain management issues.)

Remove all programmatic deadlines from CEV development that are not directly related to returning to the moon no later than 2020

Expand funding for COTS to enable the earliest possible demonstration of commercial cargo delivery and crew transfer systems. Budget sufficient funds for FY2009 and beyond to provide ample cargo and crew transfer capacity to maximize use of ISS

Prevent NASA from diverting funds from science, aeronautics and education programs to CEV, ISS and the Space Shuttle.

These are lumped together because ProSpace sees the requirement that Orion (née CEV) enter service by 2014 (or so) for ISS missions as a “major detour” in the overall Vision for Space Exploration. By removing that 2014 deadline, increasing COTS funding, and firewalling non-exploration funding, ProSpace hopes to keep Orion focused on exploration, not ISS applications.

How successful will these initiatives be? It does depend on how persuasive MarchStorm participants are in their briefings. Some of these ideas aren’t new—the spaceport bond bill idea has been around for a while, as I recall—and prize proponents have had to scratch and claw for even the very modest Centennial Challenges effort. But will there be more support, or at least interest, in the Orion/COTS related proposals?

19 comments to March Storm agenda: prizes, spaceports, and Orion/COTS

  • Ray

    The National Space Prize Board sounds like a sensible idea. The Centennial Challenges are geared towards meeting NASA’s needs, but it would be useful for the nation to have prizes that address needs of other government agencies and the commercial space industry. Also, Centennial Challenges have been challenged themselves in the area of funding inside NASA. One problem might be Dr. Griffin’s perspective on the prizes. From a Spaceref transcript of Dr. Griffin’s recent Senate testimony:

    “IPP also manages the Centennial Challenges Program. NASA has already benefited from the introduction of new sources of innovation and technology development even though the Program is relatively new and no prizes have yet been awarded. In addition, ongoing and future prize challenges will continue to inspire brilliant young minds.”

    http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=23495

    It’s good to hear that future CC prizes of some sort are still possible, but I notice that he says “young minds”. I could be making more of this than I should, but this seems to reveal a view of Centennial Challenges as an educational program rather than a tool to give university teams, large and small companies, and anyone else with the right skills, motivation, and resources an incentive to help solve major space challenges that happens to have good educational side effects for university teams that address the challenges. As a result, I don’t think Griffin will want to have a large prize program within NASA.

    As for whether or not Congress will push for more/larger Centennial Challenges or a large National Space Prize Board like the Longitude Prize Board, I’m not going to hold my breath. However, my hat is off to the March Storm group, and I tend to agree with their proposals.

  • canttellya

    Why doesn’t someone offer a space prize for a viable economic activity in space? Present a business plan with net present value and positive cash flow after 5 years or so. Lay out the implementation architecture and technology development required. Use the winning plan to guide the remainder of the prizes offered.

    So far these silly prizes have been for joke-crap like space elevators and toy lunar landers. They need something better, not just more money.

  • I am an old “rocket scientist”. I sent my autobiography to all the members of the space committees of congress last fall and am currently trying to spred it around aerospace. The title is “Wings in Space Are like Wheels on a Duck”, which is the way that I ridiculed the space shuttle 37 years ago. Send me an email address, and I’ll email a copy. Specify Microsoft Word or ADP. Send a mailing address and I’ll respond to a limited number of requests for diskette or CD. I would appreciate someone puting it on the internet, just don’t change it. G. J.

  • Ray

    In part the Centennial Challenges have been for specific, more achievable technology demonstrations precisely because they only have a small amount of money to offer as incentives. The prize difficulty is calibrated to the available funds.

    Another factor might be that CC is inside NASA, so their challenges will be designed to meet NASA’s, not the nation’s or economy’s, needs. I don’t see anything wrong with that, as far as it goes. However, it does point out the potential utility of having a space prize organization outside of NASA like the March Storm’s proposed board run by representatives of various government organizations with interests in space, and presumably also commercial space interests. An organization with broader interests is more likely to emphasize prizes with commercial viability, or at least usefulness to a broader population of organizations.

    There have also been prizes or prize proposals with economic viability as a factor. A CC prize for a personal spaceflight spacesuit that had sold X number of units was proposed. The $30 Million Super Efficient Refrigerator Prize required meeting a technical requirement and selling 250,000 copies. It’s a lot trickier to judge the winner of a prize this way than to define specific technical challenges, though. The X Prize seems to have found a way to define a technical challenge in such a way that meeting the challenge helped kick off a possible new industry. I guess setting up a prize with this effect requires a certain amount of business, technical, and market judgement.

  • anonymous

    “Why doesn’t someone offer a space prize for a viable economic activity in space? Present a business plan with net present value and positive cash flow after 5 years or so.”

    That’s not how technology inducement prize competitions (Longitude Prize, Orteig Prize, X PRIZE, Grand Challenge) work. Technology inducement prize competitions are for actual technical achievements, not paper proposals.

    If NASA wants paper proposals at no-cost to the taxpayer, they’ll just release an RFI (Request for Information).

    “Lay out the implementation architecture and technology development required. Use the winning plan to guide the remainder of the prizes offered.”

    As Ray points out, the problem is that NASA has never allocated enough funding to Centennial Challenges for a prize large enough to actually put something into space. As near as I can tell, the program has been living off a lousy $10 million or so spread out over the past three or four years. And due to the budget resolution, which is based on the 2006 budget that zeroed out the program, there will be no new prizes in 2007, either. A sad side effect of the budget resolution.

    “So far these silly prizes have been for joke-crap like space elevators and toy lunar landers.”

    I disagree. If you delve into the technical details, NASA is trying to get breakthroughs in things like high strength-to-weight materials, wireless high density power transmission, and highly reusable rockets with lunar and suborbital applications out of those two competitions. I understand that there are lunar mining and oxygen production competitions on the way as well. The space elevator and lunar lander simulation aspects are really just bread-and-circus excitement to appeal to contestants, crowds, and the purposes of NASA’s partners in the X PRIZE and Spaceward Foundation.

    “They need something better, not just more money.”

    If you have ever seen a presentation from the Centennial Challenges guys or participated in one of their public brainstorming sessions, they have a ton of great prize ideas. At this point, it is a question of more money.

    It wouldn’t take much in terms of the NASA budget — a few tens of millions of dollars a year — to have a great portfolio of prizes that included some actual space hardware. Unfortunately, like science, Griffin has not lived up to his early promises with this program. Worse, as well-intentioned as they are, the March Storm folks don’t help the cause with unrealistic requests for hundreds of millions of dollars in prizes and the creation of new federal institutions to manage them.

  • anonymous

    “Why doesn’t someone offer a space prize for a viable economic activity in space? Present a business plan with net present value and positive cash flow after 5 years or so.”

    I’d also argue that you don’t want the government judging business plans, at least not for pure monetary awards (versus some of the business plan delving that was necessary for COTS).

  • “Why doesn’t someone offer a space prize for a viable economic activity in space? Present a business plan with net present value and positive cash flow after 5 years or so.”

    While not necessarily exactly what you asked, Brookings does have a prize for people to come up with innovative economic strategies. I shopped around the idea to some people at Brookings about some sort of space policy initiative for this prize and there was some interest in it and that it would fall within the guidelines. http://www.brookings.edu/es/hamilton/20061204_pr.htm

    This prize came out in a look at overall effectiveness of prizes that they did a report on last December: http://www1.hamiltonproject.org/views/papers/200612kalil.htm

    As to prospace, I was disappointed that they dropped ITAR from their agenda citing that it was too complicated a subject for them to effectively lobby.

  • al Fansome

    CANTELLYA: Why doesn’t someone offer a space prize for a viable economic activity in space? Present a business plan with net present value and positive cash flow after 5 years or so.

    ANONYMOUS: I’d also argue that you don’t want the government judging business plans, at least not for pure monetary awards (versus some of the business plan delving that was necessary for COTS).

    Fortunately, there is already an extremely large (multi-billion-dollar per year) and effective “prize” pool for writing a viable business plan that provides an adequate risk-adjusted ROI.

    The prize is called an “investment”.

    – Al

  • canttellya

    In that case, it would be reasonable to assume that there are no economically-viable activities for humans to conduct in space, and therefore, no reason to continue with a government-funded human spaceflight effort.

    If there’s no profit, there will be no investment.

  • Anonymous: I understand that there are lunar mining and oxygen production competitions on the way as well.

    This would be good news indeed. By helping to create future markets, i think that a successful demonstration on Earth’s moon (or anywhere else in a relatively shallow gravity well) would do more to advance new-technology launch vehicles than any amount of government money thrown at these projects.

    I argued a couple of years ago that, rather than investing in Ares-1, NASA should use an EELV or three to put a prototype oxygen producing plant on the moon, and do an early demonstration of the return 0f some initial lunar oxygen to the Space Station for use there and to fuel applications satellites and early space tourism facilities.

    Then, your lunar transportation infrastructure would have a potential market before you even built it.

    — Donald

  • Ray

    I don’t want to disappoint Donald, but I think the Centennial Challenges that Anonymous is referring to are the MoonROx challenge and the Regolith Excavation Challenge. These challenges are meant to be held on Earth, not the Moon. The prizes are for $250,000, which isn’t quite in the range you’d need to be in to inspire a demo on the moon … once again we return the Centennial Challenge funding issue. Demos on the Earth are a good starting point, at least. The Regolith Excavation Challenge is supposed to be held May 12 in California. I haven’t heard much about it, which probably means it isn’t getting much attention. I haven’t heard much about the MoonROx challenge, either, and I don’t see anything about it on the Space Florida web site linked by NASA Centennial Challenges. You can find more about the challenges here:

    http://spaceports.blogspot.com/2006/11/moonrox-challenge.html

    http://www.californiaspaceauthority.org/regolith/

    http://exploration.nasa.gov/centennialchallenge/cc_index.html

    On another note (not so much related to space or politics, but related to this discussion), it’s possible that the X PRIZE Foundaton will be getting in the news again soon with a new fundraising effort at Google and new prizes on the way. They seem to have an easier time with funding than Centennial Challenges. I haven’t heard about any space-related prizes, though:

    http://spaceprizes.blogspot.com/2007/02/bambi-franciso-interviews-x-prize.html

    http://spaceprizes.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-x-prizes.html

  • Nemo

    As Ray points out, the problem is that NASA has never allocated enough funding to Centennial Challenges for a prize large enough to actually put something into space.

    You misspelled, “Congress has never appropriated”…

  • anonymous

    “I don’t want to disappoint Donald, but I think the Centennial Challenges that Anonymous is referring to are the MoonROx challenge and the Regolith Excavation Challenge. These challenges are meant to be held on Earth, not the Moon.”

    Yes, Ray has it right. Sorry if my sloppy writing misled anyone.

    “The prizes are for $250,000, which isn’t quite in the range you’d need to be in to inspire a demo on the moon … once again we return the Centennial Challenge funding issue.”

    Exactly. To induce teams to attempt a sub-scale, robotic demonstration of actual lunar ISRU, you’re probably talking a prize of at least a few tens of millions of dollars (and that probably assumes someone like Space-X succeeds in offering a cheaper launcher). But within a $17 billion NASA budget, I’d argue those are easily afforded dollars and that they offer a very high potential return. Even if the processes don’t scale up and/or the winning team(s) never become a going concern, dollar-for-dollar, tangible lunar production of anything would capture the imagination and make the human lunar return element of the VSE more concrete in the minds of policymakers and the public more than anything else I can think of. It’s what someone like Marburger (the President’s science advisor, who has been so big on extending our economic sphere into space) should be pushing NASA to do, rather than letting them build rockets that can barely reach orbit and that compete with commercial alternatives for Orion business.

    “On another note (not so much related to space or politics, but related to this discussion), it’s possible that the X PRIZE Foundaton will be getting in the news again soon with a new fundraising effort at Google and new prizes on the way. They seem to have an easier time with funding than Centennial Challenges. I haven’t heard about any space-related prizes, though”

    Right now, NASA Centennial Challenges and Northrup Grumman are the sponsors of the only ongoing, space-related X PRIZE (the Lunar Lander Challenge). However, there’s material in the public domain regarding bigger prizes that NASA and X PRIZE have studied, for the first private lunar robotic landing and the first private human orbital flight (IIRC).

    Someday… maybe someday…

  • anonymous

    “You misspelled, “Congress has never appropriated”…”

    You’re right. It’s some of both — internal NASA budget reductions and lack of Congressional funding.

  • Nemo

    In that case, it would be reasonable to assume that there are no economically-viable activities for humans to conduct in space, and therefore, no reason to continue with a government-funded human spaceflight effort.

    Non-sequitur.

  • Ferris Valyn

    A few points gentlebeings :D

    1 – the MoonROx challenge is not being run by Space Florida – Its now being run by the California Space Research institute (Same people who are putting on the Excavator Challenge)
    2 – while the capabilities of the Excavator challenge are open to some debate, I’d argue that the MoonRox challenge really has some viablity to it, assuming 1 – CSRI gets their act together on it, and start putting out more about it, and 2 – someone actually comes close or does win it.
    3 – Since we are on the slight tangent of Space Prizes, anyone have any idea on the current status of the America’s Space Prize? Is it dead in the water? Is it going somewhere? Is anyone pursuing it?

  • Ray

    Sorry … I think the Centennial Challenges link I posted above may be out of date. This one has the MoonROx Challenge as being run by CSRI as Ferris mentioned.

    http://centennialchallenges.nasa.gov/

    For the America’s Space Prize, the latest I’ve heard (from Aviation Week) isn’t too optimistic about it being won (or serious competitors appearing):

    http://spaceprizes.blogspot.com/2007/02/bigelow-space-prize-doubts.html

    Also, on X PRIZE, I see a bit more information on their fundraising. According to 1 source they’re up to $17M in their fundraising challenge they’re about to kick off.

    http://spaceprizes.blogspot.com/2007/03/still-more-on-x-prize-plans-and-event.html

    On one of the other March Storm items, I think the one about preventing science/aeronautics funding from being switched to Shuttle/ISS/ESAS may have a better chance of happening than the others, since there is a lot of pressure already being exerted in that direction.

  • al Fansome

    CANTTELLYA: In that case, it would be reasonable to assume that there are no economically-viable activities for humans to conduct in space, and therefore, no reason to continue with a government-funded human spaceflight effort.

    Dear CantTellYa:

    In the long term there are quite a few economically viable activities for humans to conduct in space. But the risks are just too large, and the payback period too long, and the size of the required investments are too astronomical — to close the business case.

    For completely rational reasons, businesses are short term focused and risk averse. Investing in anything that does not pay off in 5 years or less (and investors generally prefer positive cashflow in much shorter time frames than 5 years) can be shown to be economically irrational for high risk industries. This has to do with the time value of money, and the risk-adjusted discount rate. The higher the risk, the higher the discount rate, and pretty soon you can’t close the business case if you started generating cashflow tomorrow.

    This is why the government has naturally taken over much of the role for “basic research” — like we do in the NSF, and the NIH — and the longer term “development” in R&D like DARPA does. There is a general agreement on both sides of the aisle that long-term basic R&D is an appropriate government role.

    But this system can be abused if the government research dollars are not tied to either answering fundamental and important science questions, or tied to (and focused on) concrete measurable outputs like the White House originally stated in the VSE. One reason that well laid R&D plans fail is that a government agency can become a “self licking” ice cream cone, where technology investments are not tied to development of private industry, and measured by the amount of economic growth for dollar invested, but instead are used to support the government agency’s own internal agenda.

    For what it is worth, it is my opinion that if the VSE was truly tied to increasing economic activity — as Marburger said was the goal — that there are a LOT of technologies that could be quickly developed and proven that would be quite useful to private industrial uses of space. To be effective, this would require that NASA change how it does its business with business. The only thing reflecting this kind of thinking in NASA is COTS and the Centennial Challenges.

    That, and three dollars, will get you a cup of coffee.

    – Al

  • I know that Ray has it right. I’m talking about what should have happened, not what did. Nonetheless, I think these demonstrations, terrestrial or otherwise, should be amongst NASA’s very highest priorities, for Anonymous’ reasons quoted below.

    Anonymous: But within a $17 billion NASA budget, I’d argue those are easily afforded dollars and that they offer a very high potential return. Even if the processes don’t scale up and/or the winning team(s) never become a going concern, dollar-for-dollar, tangible lunar production of anything would capture the imagination and make the human lunar return element of the VSE more concrete in the minds of policymakers and the public more than anything else I can think of.

    This may be phrased better, but that is exactly what I meant. I would add that this does not need to make money the first time it is tried. It only needs to be demonstrated. Then, when and if there is a real market (and I think there will be), someone like SpaceX can take it from there. Also, like space tourism, lunar oxygen delivery does not have to pay for the entire space program all at once to be considered a profitable industry. It only needs to support some activity that is being done anyway for whatever reason, and reduce the cost of doing that activity.

    there’s material in the public domain regarding bigger prizes that NASA and X PRIZE have studied, for the first private lunar robotic landing and the first private human orbital flight (IIRC).

    But, as applied to lunar resource development, both of these are means, not ends. It’s the ends — lunar oxygen production and delivery to a useful orbit (or some other commercial product) — that need to be demonstrated. Once that’s done, and there is a market, the means will take care of themselves. Once again, we are trying to develop a very expensive means before there is a market reason for that means to exist. It’s not going to work.

    CANTTELLYA: In that case, it would be reasonable to assume that there are no economically-viable activities for humans to conduct in space, and therefore, no reason to continue with a government-funded human spaceflight effort.

    But, there already is one, delivering tourists to the Space Station on Soyuz launch vehicles. By my guess / count, the Russian’s have been paid some $100 million so far. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a very important drop in the bucket because it is something that could grow over time into something much grander. Meanwhile, that’s $100 million that the world’s taxpayers don’t have to cough up to fly Soyuz’ to the Space Station.

    — Donald

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