Campaign '08

Getting presidents to notice space

An editorial in today’s Florida Today offers a familiar complaint: presidential candidates don’t seem to care about space policy. The current crop of candidates, both Democratic and Republican, haven’t yet articulated policy positions on space (yes, it is traditionally early in the election cycle, but not in this distended campaign); the editorial cites as an example some glittering generalities recently spoken by Mitt Romney during an area campaign stop. “It’s time for the White House wannabes to recognize the program’s importance for vital domestic and national security reasons,” the paper argues, citing in part perceived competitive pressures from Russia and China. The paper doesn’t consider, though, that the campaigns may have already done their calculations on this topic and found that importance lacking.

If you think getting attention for NASA’s current plans isn’t difficult enough, Mike Snead has a bigger challenge for you in this week’s issue of The Space Review: getting the pro-space community to press the next president to support revamping our space infrastructure, which would consist of, in his words, “two-stage fully-reusable space access systems for passenger and cargo transport with ‘aircraft-like’ safety and operability, permanent space logistics facilities in low Earth orbit to establish a base of operations for government and commercial space operators, and fully-reusable space transportation capabilities and logistics support services throughout the Earth-Moon system”. That’s a big challenge, but he outlines a proposal to carry out such an effort, focusing on the policy aspects rather than the technology. “This must become the priority of the American pro-space community,” he concludes, although it’s not at all clear that, even if the “pro-space community” supported such a proposal, it would have the influence to get the attention of the next president or even the leading presidential candidates.

66 comments to Getting presidents to notice space

  • It’s a worthwhile goal, and one that the community should get behind, but unfortunately much of it is too busy cheerleading “Apollo on Steroids.”

    What I found interesting about Snead’s piece is that a certain four-letter acronym commonly associated with space doesn’t appear in it anywhere.

  • CynicalStudent

    i think if the rumors prove true and an enviromental department is created under a democratic administration, we’ll see NOAA and NASA’s earth science merged with the EPA. i cant help but think then that such a shift in NASA objectives will induce a refocusing in it’s national role. maybe VSE will be fullfilled and maybe it wont, but what im talking about would have a far longer lasting impact than the projected lifespan of Ares/Orion. we dont have to view NASA through the lens of VSE or judge it’s future on it’s recently lackluster past. restructuring of it’s place in government, possibly as the article describes fulfilling more of a Transportation dep. role, is a very real possibility with a new, creative administration. not that any of the candidates have given evidence of such desire to change, but i can think of at least a few that themselves represent real change in the status quo just for running.

  • Brian Swiderski

    There are several key problems with these articles. First and foremost, Snead advocates that the government get back into the business of creating vehicles, which we know doesn’t lead anywhere no matter how good the original specs are. There was nothing fundamentally flawed about the plans for Shuttle, but engineering decisions were made on the basis of politics and bureaucracy, and the end result was naturally far short of what was intended.

    He also mistakenly includes vehicles in the term “infrastructure,” which really doesn’t apply: A space infrastructure includes stable, profitable commercial enterprises providing the industrial base for a wide range of customers (not just gov/mil); revolutionary new launch complexes and ground operations that eliminate inefficient legacy while refurbishing and upgrading whatever is still relevant; a favorable and appropriate regulatory and legal environment; and massive investment in all fields of space-related R&D, including regular robotic exploration and human scouting and base operations. But the means can’t be defined by the government, because it’s not capable of regularly operating by trial-and-error, which is crucial to success in technology and economics.

    As for the elections, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Any presidential candidate who focuses on something as left-field as space in this petty environment will be lampooned as some kind of fruitcake, while their opponent’s people (no matter what side of the spectrum) will seize on it to frame themselves as “down to Earth.” It’s easy to underestimate how much Cheney/Bush’s Caligula-esque, blood-soaked daydreams have come to be associated generically with any kind of imagination. A lot of people now want to avoid any hint of deviance from mediocrity in politicians, seeing how horrific the consequences have been in this case. After a traumatic era like this one, anything that moves fast and talks big looks dangerous, and plenty of people would defensively write off a candidate with bold ideas as kooky. Space advocates should take a lesson from the civil rights movement: Don’t expect bold words during the campaign, just make sure the right person ends up in charge.

  • Ignorant American

    We already have two (2) very fine liquid powered two stage to orbit (TSTO) launch vehicles in our inventory that aren’t being utilized, that our current administration has no (none, nada, zip) intention of utilizing, which would require zero (0) time and money to begin utilizing.

    They are called evolved expendable launch vehicles (EELVs).

    The Boeing Delta IV and the Lockheed Atlas V.

  • Ignorant American

    Concern for the environment is just kooky, all good Americans know that.

  • Paul Dietz

    Cynical Student: Please read this.

  • ....

    A chief scientist with China’s Moon exploration programme, Ouyang Ziyuan, said that the country was planning to launch its first mission to the Moon in 2010.

    He reportedly told the Beijing Morning Post: “Our long-term goal is to set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity.” May 2002

    Mike Griffin’s responses to a Congressional hearing regarding China’s space plans 5 years later.

    Griffin, who toured some of China’s space installations last year and met with leading scientists and engineers, told the panel that China, with its strong economy, is capable of a come-from-behind lunar landing.

    “I cannot speculate and won’t speculate on what China’s intensions are. I just don’t know that,” said Griffin. “As a matter of technical capability and political will, if the Chinese choose to do so, they can mount a lunar mission within a reasonable number of years, say a decade.” March 2007

    I think I found the problem.

  • MarkWhittington

    Sounds like a big government project that chooses methods and technologies by fiat. I don’t see why we should abandon the vision provided by COTS, which lets the private sector compete.

  • richardb

    I find Mr. Beard’s piece to be delusional. A Federal Corporation to manage assured access to space? To create more than 100 billion in wealth? Only in Marxist hash dreams would either occur under the Federal government.
    I don’t think we need more public-private partnerships, we’ve had one for over 40 years with some incredible results and fiascos. The problem we have is our energy is sapped with constant changes in direction. Shuttle was to be a space truck on an airline schedule. Sold and built that way and 25 years later it has failed its initial promises. Feds did that.

    ISS was supposed to be a world class research center. Now the US can’t find many researchers to use the available space. Feds did that.

    X-33 was supposed to introduce SSTO and fast turnaround. Feds did that.

    This is 10’s of billions of dollars in unfilled promises by the Feds. Should be scandalous. Can’t possible believe this record justifies a new Federal corporation.

  • Adrasteia

    Not surprising that the white house doesn’t care at the moment. I suspect Bush is too busy with figuring out how to spin his “reverse surge” next month.

    This is 10’s of billions of dollars in unfilled promises by the Feds. Should be scandalous.

    There would be scandal had the work not been distributed so widely. As it stands, congress doesn’t care whether any progress is being made in access to space provided that the money flows and there is a reliable if high cost launch system that can orbit spysats in a reasonably timely fashion.

  • Thomas Matula

    Brian,

    [[[First and foremost, Snead advocates that the government get back into the business of creating vehicles,]]]

    And exactly when did the government get out of that business? Or were the EELV’s not government sponsored? Or the Ares I/Orion? or DC-X? just to name some recent ones.

    As for the non-government vehicles, if you haven’t noticed they are not doing very well.

    SpaceShipOne flew about a dozen times under power, only three times into space, and then went on display at the Smithsonian. No one knows when, or even if, SpaceshipTwo will fly.

    Kistler is hoping for a miracle for COTS.

    Actually so is NASA now despite the alt.space spin-masters…

    Let’s face it, Falcon I had two failures. Next shot is scheduled for early next year. Hopefully this one will be successful. If not it will set back Falcon IX even more as its using the Falcon IX engine.

    Faclon IX itself is finally going to the Cape at the end of 2008, although it was supposed to do its first COTS flight in 3Q of 2008, and its last two by the end of 2009. But it looks like NASA is letting it slide as it has done for Kistler in the hopes of a last minute miracle…

    And as for the rest of the current viewgraph private launch fleet, how long do we have to wait before we see that there is no hope for funding them and move on?

    The reality is that the private sector has not done all that well. So its high past time to go back to the old procurement model that brought us Redstone, Juptier C, Saturn IB, Saturn V, Shuttle, Pegasus, the X-15, EELVs and start moving forward again. And remember, the problems with Shuttle were because Congress got cheap and limited funding for it. Mike Snead has a good solid plan for moving forward and hopefully the alt.space community will stop drinking the ideological Kool-aid and recognize it.

    Also vehicles are indeed part of infrastructure. Just check out the various auto ferries run by different states. Or the Alaskan owned locomotives/rolling stock on the Alaskan Railroad. Why shouldn’t a TSTO RLV be viewed as national infrastructure.

  • CynicalStudent

    Mr. Dietz: touche sir. i suppose you didnt have an actual opinion on the post, which was concerning presidential candidates? i think the china-scare issue has been beaten down sufficiently on this forum of late.

  • anonymous.space

    Personally, I didn’t get a lot out of Mr. Snead’s article. It’s dense with generalizations and platitudes and short on analysis and specifics. But that’s neither here nor there.

    As Mr. Simberg notes, Snead’s article is arguably more interesting for what it doesn’t say than what it does say. The article doesn’t say much about who — in terms of NASA or other government entities versus the for-profit and non-profit private sectors — should do what in Snead’s “plan”.

    And in that vacuum, many of the posts in this thread are jumping in and taking sides — either for NASA or the government or for the private sector and commercial companies. But just taking sides misses an opportunity for a deeper discussion about the appropriate roles of the public and private sectors in space activities in general and in space exploration in particular.

    It’s not a binary question of whether space exploration is a public or private activity. It’s both public and private. This nation and most other nations have always had a public sector and a private sector, and arguably space activities will involve both for decades, if not centuries, to come.

    So if it’s not going to be an all-or-nothing future, the more important discussion to have is about the appropriate roles of each sector in that shared public/private future. For example, should the government be designing, building, operating, and owning ETO systems, especially medium- or intermediate-lift launch vehicles, when partially private examples of such systems exist today and more fully private examples of such systems are on the way. Or would the taxpayer’s dollar be better spent developing government-unique systems — heavy lift launch vehicle, propellant provisioning, deep space transport — that are not planned, in development, or operational in the private sector?

    I don’t mean to be overly critical, but blaring generic rhetoric about “ideological Kool-aid” in the “alt.space community” or about “a big government project that chooses methods and technologies by fiat” — or tallying the successes and failures that occur on both sides of this incredibly difficult endeavour — does little to inform or advance the discussion.

    Instead of that kind of go-nowhere discourse, I’d encourage the participants on this thread to examine and analyze the appropriate roles and goals for the federal government and for the private sector in advancing civil space exploration. What activities do you think are critical for NASA or the government to concentrate its limited resources on to create a sustainable human space exploration effort versus what activities do you think should be left to private sector investment and direction (even if the government is paying to use some of those private sector capabilities)?

    Hope this helps… FWIW.

  • al Fansome

    Anon,

    I heartily agree. We need both the public & private sectors involved in a partnership to succeed at the objective of CATS.

    Truly, we can work together — bringing the best aspects of each partner to the issue — or we can hang separately.

    – Al

  • HPV

    A lot will depend upon NASA’s situation in early 2009. Is Orion/Ares on track and viable? How is COTS doing? Is there enough money to support both? What’s the status of NASA’s other priorities?

  • Donald F. Robertson

    richardb: A Federal Corporation to manage assured access to space? To create more than 100 billion in wealth? Only in Marxist hash dreams would either occur under the Federal government.

    While I agree that Mr. Beard’s piece is delusional, the reason is that he vastly over-estimates the amount of government money likely to be available in any realistic scenario, and he refuses to prioritize. However, Government Corporations actually have far more promise than either government alone or private enterprise alone. Read any good history of the British East India company, or of the large number of similar organizations that Britain relied on to expand the Empire. Or, don’t forget that it was the Post Office that subsidized early aircraft development. (I hate to use that example, since I think air travel is actually a very poor analogy for space travel, but there it is.)

    Feds did that.

    The Feds also built the Highway and Freeway systems, which (even though I think they were a long-term economic mistake) rank among humanities’ most successful engineering projects, whether measured by scale or the achievement of it goals.

    Thomas: And exactly when did the government get out of that business? Or were the EELV’s not government sponsored? Or the Ares I/Orion? or DC-X? just to name some recent ones.

    Don’t forget SpaceX, who are relying far more heavily than generally realized on government money and guarantees of money.

    Anonymous.space: It’s not a binary question of whether space exploration is a public or private activity. It’s both public and private.

    As usual, I fully agree. I also agree with your answer to your question (as I understand it) that COTS should be properly funded and LEO access handed off to private companies (including the EELVs). And, my opinion is that NASA should be building second-generation lunar transportation to deploy a minimal base, then, once the market is established, hand that off to some kind of COTS-like project. An alternative would be something like the British East India company, where government works with private individuals and organizations to create a larger whole. But, neither private organizations or the government by themselves will get humanity into the Solar System in finite time, any more than private organizations or governments by themselves created the transcontinental rail road, explored the oceans and established early trade routes, or built the freeway networks.

    — Donald

  • richardb

    Anon, the topic at hand has been a couple articles one of them suggesting a model for deepening America’s economic interests in space. To the extent people addressed that point, they are on task. Most posted about the wisdom of a new Federal corporation. Addressing that is fair game.

    What are appropriate goals for the public and private sectors you asked? Here’s my take, it addresses access and ownership in space.

    Our goal should be within X years to have a private manned orbital industry worth at least $1 billion dollars in annual revenue. Within X+10 years, its worth at least $5 billion. I think a reasonable value for X is 15.

    How to do this? The problem is launch costs to orbit remain too high. Get them below $500/pound and large numbers of people will go, repeatedly. The Feds should setup lucrative tax breaks and prizes for private companies using 100% private funds to build systems that can deliver and safely return 4 people, all for less than $500/lb per launch. To the extent the regulatory system adds liability, those statutes should be removed for the parties involved. While all of this was ongoing, we should be drafting laws to define what private ownership means beyond Earth’s orbit. Since America can’t own space for themselves(darn!), there will need to be a space law accepted by our world’s governments. Given the nature of countries that could take 25 years or more to negotiate as we have seen with the Law of the Seas.

    If we can get launch costs low, then the ideas and projects to exploit space will far outstrip our current plans for Nasa.. Get launch costs low by hook or crook, Then “The invisible hand” will do its thing in space as its done on earth.

  • anonymous.space

    “I also agree with your answer to your question (as I understand it) that COTS should be properly funded and LEO access handed off to private companies (including the EELVs). And, my opinion is that NASA should be building second-generation lunar transportation to deploy a minimal base, then, once the market is established, hand that off to some kind of COTS-like project.”

    Yes, the LEO/deep space divide is roughly where I would draw the line between public/private roles in current space exploration. It’s interesting, for example, that the VSE says nothing about whether the CEV should provide ETO transport. If NASA had taken the VSE literally, they could have assumed that the CEV should be a deep space vehicle that should be serviced by commercial ETO providers.

    Instead of spending $20-30 billion on a LEO-limited Ares I/Orion through 2012/15, NASA could have increased the COTS budget by an order of magnitude (to $5 billion) to bring a couple commercial providers across the finish line (say Atlas V/CLV and Falcon 9/Dragon) for the ETO segment and then still had $15-25 billion to pursue actual exploration hardware. That hardware might have been a Shuttle-derived heavy lift launcher like DIRECT (based on DIRECT’s 2012 IOC, I guesstimate that’s a $6+ billion development) and an in-space CEV that would have at least been capable of Apollo 8-like circumlunar flights, and maybe even lunar landings, circa 2015.

    What a different world we could be in had NASA applied some basic Government 101 principles about appropriate public/private roles, instead of duplicating capabilities that the private sector either already has or is already pursuing.

    “But, neither private organizations or the government by themselves will get humanity into the Solar System in finite time, any more than private organizations or governments by themselves created the transcontinental rail road, explored the oceans and established early trade routes, or built the freeway networks.”

    Well put.

  • anonymous.space

    “Anon, the topic at hand has been a couple articles one of them suggesting a model for deepening America’s economic interests in space. To the extent people addressed that point, they are on task. Most posted about the wisdom of a new Federal corporation. Addressing that is fair game.”

    Agreed. But, without naming names, other posts were just government=good/commercial=bad (or vice-versa) arguments, which does nothing to inform the discussion because the real world does not present such an either/or choice. It’s a both/and situation and a real policy argument will revolve around the appropriate roles of each sector.

    “The Feds should setup lucrative tax breaks”

    I have nothing against tax breaks, but I’d be very skeptical about their political viability. The congress-critters responsible for out tax laws are not the same congress-critters responsible for overseeing our space program, and there’s a long list of, arguably more important, non-space interests standing in line for tax breaks.

    “While all of this was ongoing, we should be drafting laws to define what private ownership means beyond Earth’s orbit. Since America can’t own space for themselves(darn!), there will need to be a space law accepted by our world’s governments. Given the nature of countries that could take 25 years or more to negotiate as we have seen with the Law of the Seas.”

    I’m rusty on this so someone should correct me if I’m wrong. But my limited understanding is that, under current law, nations can claim ownership of extracted resources on the Moon (or other bodies) and transfer ownership to private entities. That should be enough for the foreseeable future of space activities. Although at some point somebody is going to want to take ownership of real estate or natural resources on the Moon or some other body, I think that’s far enough in the future to set aside for now.

    But if I’ve got it wrong and that’s not the case, then I agree this legal vacuum needs to be addressed and soon. There’s no point in NASA talking about a national lunar base if the legal regime for claiming ownership of the resources that the base extracts (arguably the most important output of the base) does not exist.

    FWIW…

  • Donald F. Robertson

    Anonymous: There’s no point in NASA talking about a national lunar base if the legal regime for claiming ownership of the resources that the base extracts (arguably the most important output of the base) does not exist.

    Question: does it require “ownership” of the resources for NASA to extract oxygen from the moon and use it there? I’m not sure that it does, at least on a small scale. How about exporting to other in-space facilities? How about when private organizations help in the project?

    The fact that nobody owns the oceans does not seem to create a problem for small fishing operations. Do commercial and naval ships extract gasses or other resources out of the international waters? If so, that would seem to set a clear precedent for similar activities in “international spaces.”.

    — Donald

  • anonymous.space

    “Question: does it require “ownership” of the resources for NASA to extract oxygen from the moon and use it there?”

    I only took one space law class many years ago and am quickly getting out of my depth here. That said, my understanding is that no ownership (sovereignty?) can be claimed over unprocessed resources, but ownership (sovereignty) can be claimed over processed resources by those that do the processing.

    In other words, I can’t go plant a flag in a lunar crater and claim all the mineral resources of that crater. But if I landed a smelter in that crater and started producing aluminum or titanium, then I would have ownership (under the sovereignty of my nation, IIRC) over the aluminum or titanium. (But I and my nation would still have no ownership or sovereignty over the unprocessed minerals still lying in crater.)

    That’s my (very basic and potentially incorrect) understanding of the current legal regime for extraterrestrial resources (and even that regime may not have been ratified by the U.S. or by enough nations to bring it into force — I don’t recall exactly).

    “How about exporting to other in-space facilities? How about when private organizations help in the project?”

    I don’t think those issues are problems. Once sovereignty and ownership is established, ownership can be transferred to other parties (public, private, or otherwise).

    Hopefully someone capable of quoting chapter and verse from the relevant international law will chime in and correct any errors in what I’ve written here.

  • anonymous.space

    This is off-topic, but the Ares I/Orion IOC is facing another year-plus delay, to the end of FY 2015, due to conflicts with the Shuttle manifest and the two programs’ common infrastructure. See http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5221. Here’s the relevant quote:

    “‘Ares I-Y launch date slipped from 9/2012 to 8/2013,’ noted impacts within the schedule, based on the pros and cons of the manifest options NASA has to consider, with ‘Orion 4 – the first manned Orion flight – slipping from 9/2014 to 8/2015,’ being threatened on one of the schedule impact notes. ”

    It will be ironic if this additional delay happens for that reason (Shuttle-derived).

  • Brian Swiderski

    Thomas: No one knows when, or even if, SpaceshipTwo will fly.

    It’s financed by a billionaire entrepreneur, not some guy who won the lottery eight consecutive times, and it’s being built by an aeronautical genius. What more do you want, an engraved guarantee from God?

    Let’s face it, Falcon I had two failures. Next shot is scheduled for early next year. Hopefully this one will be successful. If not it will set back Falcon IX even more as its using the Falcon IX engine.

    SpaceX could sink five more Falcon I’s into the ocean, and the consequences of final success would not be diminished. Elon has said that even if the upcoming launch fails and no takers for the next can be found, the one after will fly empty. He has the resources, the talent (personally and in his team), and the determination to hammer Murphy into submission, and I can’t imagine this effort failing.

    And as for the rest of the current viewgraph private launch fleet, how long do we have to wait before we see that there is no hope for funding them and move on?

    The success of either Virgin Galactic or SpaceX will flood the entire market with funding, some of it perhaps from Branson and Musk themselves looking to reinvest their new capital.

    So its high past time to go back to the old procurement model that brought us Redstone, Juptier C, Saturn IB, Saturn V, Shuttle, Pegasus, the X-15, EELVs and start moving forward again.

    We were never moving forward in the first place. The old procurement model incentivizes companies to make things more expensive because their payoff is a percentage of cost. If they could get away with it politically and technically, Lockheed would cover their rockets in solid gold and demand their 7% (or whatever) guaranteed profit on the expense.

    And remember, the problems with Shuttle were because Congress got cheap and limited funding for it.

    Yes, and it would happen again with Snead’s plan. That’s how the government works–it’s a political institution, so it makes decisions politically. It’s not an excuse to say that reality interfered. That’s why the value of every dollar needs to be maximized by pumping it into R&D and commercial relationships, not minimized on cost-plus contracts.

    Why shouldn’t a TSTO RLV be viewed as national infrastructure.

    It is national infrastructure–that’s the problem. What it isn’t is infrastructure for a spacefaring civilization. You don’t obtain a new capability by first defining what your means will be–that has to be determined dynamically, through trial and error, and competition among multiple approaches that all get their shot. Rather than spending $20 billion (or whatever) on a new STS trainwreck, have a competition and give five companies each $4 billion, and promise every single company that produces a workable system with just that money (along with any private investment they can obtain) a fixed-term, fixed-price operating contract. Once the term expires, just let competition do its work.

  • Anonymous Coward

    Our goal should be within X years to have a private manned orbital industry worth at least $1 billion dollars in annual revenue. Within X+10 years, its worth at least $5 billion. I think a reasonable value for X is 15.

    Concentrating on revenue is pointless, Musk has $75m+ per year revenue and he’s bleeding cash faster than pets.com. What the industry needs is above-zero earnings.

  • Anonymous Coward

    If they could get away with it politically and technically, Lockheed would cover their rockets in solid gold and demand their 7% (or whatever) guaranteed profit on the expense.

    Gold would decrease payload considerably. You’re better off covering your rocket with high carat diamonds.

  • CynicalStudent

    “Hopefully someone capable of quoting chapter and verse from the relevant international law will chime in and correct any errors in what I’ve written here.”

    “While all of this was ongoing, we should be drafting laws to define what private ownership means beyond Earth’s orbit. Since America can’t own space for themselves(darn!), there will need to be a space law accepted by our world’s governments. Given the nature of countries that could take 25 years or more to negotiate as we have seen with the Law of the Seas.”

    as i am currently attending school precisely to get involved in this legal field, ill comment.

    U.N. resolution 2222(XXI) establishes the basic principles that the moon and other space bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, but gives no mention of mining/resource rights, only that it is specifically ineligible for appropriation by sovereignty, and that states are responsible for non-state space activities. although present maritime laws leave far less room for maneuvering by states, even they can be stretched and disputed when the wealth of resources become involved. as we are witnessing with the opening of the fossil-fuel rich Artic Ocean due to global warming, international laws which had previously held strongly for decades are now inadequate. i suggest that anyone interested in the future of international space law read heavily on this current issue, how it revolves around regional players like Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark, as well as immediate benefactors, like China, Japan and the rest of the E.U. the newest issue of Harper’s Magazine has an excellent article on this issue, although it deals more with the national security element as opposed to the economic aspect. i think we will come to see strategic posturing in different legal philosophies taken up by modern industrialized nations capable of attaining lunar transport independently (either through government or non-government is ultimately irrelevant) contrasted to those that are unable to guarantee unfettered state access but which are economically dependent or heavily beneficial upon those resources lunar exploitation will provide.

    it must be noted that, like most multilateral trade, maritime, and defence nonproliferation treaties, the United States has played a heavy role in drafting space law through the U.N. but has ultimately failed to ratify many treaties. we sign them, so we can say we follow the spirit of the law, but then dont actually ratify them, so our political leadership is not legally obligated to follow it. the historical precedent for American hypocrisy when it comes to international treaties must be noted when contemplating the future of space exploration.

  • Thomas Matula

    Brian,

    [[[It’s financed by a billionaire entrepreneur, not some guy who won the lottery eight consecutive times, and it’s being built by an aeronautical genius.]]]

    Yes and they are following Alan Boyle’s law. After the X-prize they were going to start flying in 2007. Now its 2009. Next year it will be 2010. And so on…

    Also the costs keep going up. When it was announced in 2004 the cost was supposed to be $125 million, last estimate I saw in a press release was 275 million. And that was before the accident delayed progress further,

    And note that in the press conference it was stated they had only started testing the injectors on the new rocket engine for Spacehiptwo. Rocket engines are usually the pacers in spacecraft development as they are the element that takes the longest to develop. The fact they have apparently just started testing the first elements of their new rocket engine, and only selected the engines for the White Knight 2 in May makes me wonder just far long they are with Spaceshiptwo…

    So the questions is how long will Branson continue to pour more and more money into an ever receding flight date? Or just give up a call it a bust? And remember that although Burt Rutan has a great record for innovative prototypes his commercial record is much less successful – anyone remember the Starship business jet?

    [[[SpaceX could sink five more Falcon I’s into the ocean, and the consequences of final success would not be diminished. Elon has said that even if the upcoming launch fails and no takers for the next can be found, the one after will fly empty. He has the resources, the talent (personally and in his team), and the determination to hammer Murphy into submission, and I can’t imagine this effort failing.]]]

    The real question is if Elon has pockets deep enough to sink another 5 Falcon I’s into the ocean. I expect SpaceX will succeed, and it will succeed the same way Orbital succeeded, on the path it is following now as a government contractor. Who do you think are paying for their flights? Not alt.space customers as there are none. So SpaceX becomes another Orbital. So what?

    [[[The success of either Virgin Galactic or SpaceX will flood the entire market with funding, some of it perhaps from Branson and Musk themselves looking to reinvest their new capital.]]]

    Yea, right. They will undermine their own firm’s stock value… Orbital’s success didn’t flood the market. How is SpaceX any different? They will just join the current stable of commercial providers for comsats and government missions. There will only be a marginal decline in cost as SpaceX ramps up their revenues to account for the full costs of the R&D based on what the actual demand for Falcon family. And Alt.spacers like you will be calling them old space just as you do now with Orbital. As for Virgin, see my comments above. Every year their first flight is delayed reduces greatly the chance there ever will be a first flight.

    [[[The old procurement model incentivizes companies to make things more expensive because their payoff is a percentage of cost.]]]

    That is an oversight issue. In the 1950’s and 1960’s you had engineers at NASA and the USAF who knew when contractors were padding. You need to make sure those managing the contracts have similar skills today.

    [[[And remember, the problems with Shuttle were because Congress got cheap and limited funding for it.

    Yes, and it would happen again with Snead’s plan.]]]

    Actually that is an advantage of a FGC. Its bonding authority and ability to work with manufacturers as a corporation would provides a layer of political isolation. And also here is where the space advocate community could actually play a useful role for once, to make sure the Congress does fully fund it.

    Of course knowing the alt.space community they will probably work to undermine the funding as soon as their firms don’t make the cut, or the design is not one they approve of. Actually that is another big advantage NASA had in the 1960’s. There was no “space advocate” community to “help” them in Congress.

    [[[You don’t obtain a new capability by first defining what your means will be–that has to be determined dynamically, through trial and error, and competition among multiple approaches that all get their shot.]]]

    The iterative approach works fine for software and other technology where development cycles are short and cost per cycle low. That is not the nature of spacecraft development where you have high development costs, long cycle times and an inelastic market. Your choices are simple. Wait for private firms to do so, someday, or follow the same model that has been successful in other areas of the economy when private enterprise has failed to meet the need.

    Tom

  • Donald F. Robertson

    Thomas Matula: The real question is if Elon has pockets deep enough to sink another 5 Falcon I’s into the ocean. I expect SpaceX will succeed, and it will succeed the same way Orbital succeeded, on the path it is following now as a government contractor.

    Note in proof: I just read that SpaceX is changing from ablative to regerative cooling to increase performance on their Falcon-1 engines. It’s hard to imagine cheap regenerative cooling, so it does indeed look like they’re on the same path as Orbital and that their products will not achieve a dramatic reduction in cost. Needless to say, I hope I am wrong. . . .

    — Donald

  • Ignorant American and everyone else that thinks the EELV’s (Atlas V 551 and Delta IV Heavy) are capable of launching manned missions into even LEO (low-earth orbit), one simple answer: can’t be done.

    Look at the 28.5 degree LEO lift capacity of the either the Heavy or 551 (21,892.00 and 20,050.00 kg respectively), then look at just the weight of the Apollo CSM (30,357 kg), never mind the LAS, etc., and then tell me what you notice. Alright, now add the LAS (4,158 kg), cut the total weight (36,356 kg) by nearly 50% and now tell me what you notice?

    Neither of these boosters will get off the ground because payload mass exceeds liftoff thrust. If you lit their engines, they’d just sit there on the pad doing nothing but wasting fuel and scaring the wildlife.

  • have a competition and give five companies each $4 billion

    Ahh. Welfare for the aerospace companies. I assume of course that alt.space would demand one or more of those “contracts”, right?

  • anonymous.space

    “Sounds like a big government project that chooses methods and technologies by fiat. ”

    Not to pick on Mr. Whittington, but this from the guy that keeps defending Ares I/Orion? If an uncompeted and unchecked study like ESAS is not “fiat”, I don’t know what is.

    “So its high past time to go back to the old procurement model that brought us Redstone… Saturn IB, Saturn V,… Pegasus,”

    I’d be careful about these examples. The Nazis arguably had more to do with Redstone development (it’s a direct descendent of the V-2) than we did. Saturn’s infrastructure was not affordable or sustainable outside a very unique Cold War national security context. And, although it serves government customers, Pegasus is a commercially designed, developed, owned, and operated vehicle. (Heck, even Burt Rutan himself had a hand in Pegasus.)

    “Just check out the various auto ferries run by different states. Or the Alaskan owned locomotives/rolling stock on the Alaskan Railroad.”

    I’d be careful about using state railway analogies. State railways are an order of magnitude or two smaller than a human-sized launch system and they largely come into being to service an established customer base when a commercial railway fails. Tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars to operate existing infrastructure and service existing customers, versus billion plus to build a new infrastructure to service TBD customers.

    “Why shouldn’t a TSTO RLV be viewed as national infrastructure.”

    It’s been tried before — it was called the Space Transportation System (STS), otherwise known as the Space Shuttle. It was underfunded by both the White House and Congress; NASA tried to have it do too many things for too many customers; it ended up doing very little well or cost-effectively; and there were so many compromises made in its development that it became too fragile to operate safely. We shut down other existing launch capabilities and put national security payloads at risk for the sake of creating enough business to justify the STS, only to have to turn those launch capabilities back on and reroute those national security payloads after Challenger. We passed up opportunity after opportunity to create new launch capabilities for the sake of upgrading and keeping the enormously expensive STS operational, only to set a shut down date for STS after Columbia and rush a new system into existence that some argue is a step backwards.

    I know that’s old hat to anyone who posts here, but before proposing another government-designed, -owned, and -operated TSTO RLV, we really have to critically ask ourselves what would be different this time around.

    And even if we could create a good story, we have to be realistic about how well it would sell to decisionmakers, given the awful STS experience.

    “Read any good history of the British East India company, or of the large number of similar organizations that Britain relied on to expand the Empire.”

    Technically speaking, the British or Dutch East India companies were not FGCs or anything similar to the type of organization that Snead proposes in his article (assuming he really meant FGCs). Rather, they were private corporations that were given a monopoly over trade in a certain region by their governments to incentivize development. Their model has more in common with the land grants the U.S. government gave to the railroads to encourage the development and settlement of the western territories than it does with FGCs like the USPS, FDIC, or TVA. (More below.)

    And given that there is no trade to/from destinations in space yet, I’m not sure they are an appropriate model, at least for the current state of space development.

    “After the X-prize they were going to start flying in 2007. Now its 2009. Next year it will be 2010. And so on…

    Also the costs keep going up. When it was announced in 2004 the cost was supposed to be $125 million, last estimate I saw in a press release was 275 million. And that was before the accident delayed progress further”

    Schedule delays, cost overruns, and lethal accidents are hardly unique to altspace/newspace/entrepreneurial space projects. The same things happen with commercial space projects at the established aerospace firms and they happen with NASA and DoD space projects as well. Heck, these things happen on practically any development project, whether it’s the Three Gorges Dam or my wife’s latest kitchen remodeling (even that’s probably going to be lethal to me!).

    The promise of entrepreneurial space is not that it will be free of delays, overruns, and accidents. That’s an unrealistic expectation given the history of aerospace engineering or just engineering in general.

    Rather, the promise of entrepreneurial space is that space projects can be developed and operated for a fraction of what it would cost the government or a traditional firm to do the same thing.

    And that’s exactly what we see when we compare the costs of SpaceShipOne to the equivalent government achievement, the suborbital Mercury-Redstone flights. Paul Allen reportedly spent double the value of the $10 million X PRIZE, or $20 million, on SpaceShipOne. By comparison, the entire Mercury program cost about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars, most of which was spent on the DDT&E that preceded the two manned suborbital flights — Mercury-Redstone 3 (Shepherd on Freedom 7) and Mercury-Redstone 4 (Grissom on Liberty Bell 7). Both SpaceShipOne and Mercury-Redstone 3/4 were manned, suborbital test flight projects with hardware that had to be developed practically from scratch. (Arguably, Mercury-Redstone even had the advantages of leveraging the pre-existing Redstone rocket, itself a direct descendent of the V-2, and of using expendable systems.) Yet their costs are different by orders of magnitude. SpaceShipOne would have had to overrun a hundred times over before approaching the costs of what it took to carry out the Mercury-Redstone 3 and 4 flights.

    We also see orders of magnitude differences when we compare the costs of today’s NASA program for developing manned ETO transport (Ares I/Orion) to the costs of its COTS competitors. NASA’s FY 2008 budget shows over $20 billion in spending on Ares I/Orion from FY 2006-12. When we estimate the spending from the other fiscal years before the system’s IOC in FY 2015 and normalize for the program’s low budgeting at a 65% chance of success, we may be looking at a figure as high as $30 billion before Ares 1/Orion development is complete. Compare that $20-30 billion figure to the $500 million or so that NASA will pay Space-X if all Falcon 9/Dragon options are exercised and milestones are achieved. Even when private Space-X cost-sharing is added in (say $1 billion in total cost for Falcon 9/Dragon), we’re still talking more than an order of magnitude difference in cost. Falcon 9/Dragon would have to overrun 20-30 times over before approaching the cost of Ares I/Orion. (Same goes for the costs in Kistler’s COTS SAA.)

    Other comparisons show the same order of magnitude differences between similar space projects undertaken by the government and established space firm versus entrepreneurial space firms. Armadillo, for example, has spent low millions on their VTVL rockets while DC-X cost the Air Force high tens of millions of dollars. (I wish Blue Origin figures were also public to compare to DC-X. Same goes for Bigelow and comparisons to ISS, even on a per cubic foot or kW/h basis.)

    It’s a guilty pleasure to keep track of escalating costs and schedule delays on any space project — entrepreneurial or otherwise. (Even I’m guilty of that with respect to Ares I/Orion in an earlier, off-topic post in this very thread.) But we have to keep our eyes on the bigger total cost picture, because that’s what’s important. It’s when those total costs are too big that other NASA programs and opportunities get cut, and it’s also what kills the viability of new commercial markets. We shouldn’t lose the total cost forest for the latest cost overrun tree.

    “So the questions is how long will Branson continue to pour more and more money into an ever receding flight date? Or just give up a call it a bust?… The real question is if Elon has pockets deep enough…”

    This is a strength, not a weakness, of entrepreneurial space. Because the pockets of its sponsors are not as deep as the U.S. Congress and because its sponsors are not driven by workforce votes, they’ll exit a bad project that the government would have continued to throw money at (and foregone other opportunities) for years. Unless one is not a believer in free market competition and forces, the lower pain threshold of the backers of entrepreneurial firms is a good, not a bad, thing. Getting rid of the bad and moving onto the better sooner only accelerates the pace of innovation.

    “That is an oversight issue. In the 1950’s and 1960’s you had engineers at NASA and the USAF who knew when contractors were padding. You need to make sure those managing the contracts have similar skills today.”

    Good contracting is about incentives first and oversight second (or third). We can have the best oversight in the world and all it will do is add layers of bureaucracy if the contractor is not incentivized to deliver on spec, on cost, and on time. If a contractor doesn’t feel pain in their pocketbook when they fail or share the wealth when they succeed, then the oversight on their project just becomes a gun without bullets.

    Although incentives in cost-plus contracts can be properly structured to do this, it’s difficult and we’re much better off avoiding cost-plus contracts in the first place (as the COTS program has done). Cost-plus is a unusual feature of the military contracting world that has been carried over to civil aerospace and other government programs by accidents of history, but it’s not how most of the world’s business — even commercial space business — gets done. If human space flight is ever going to expand beyond the boundaries that have defined it for the past several decades, it’s going to have to leave the military contracting world behind and operate more in the commercial contracting model. NASA itself has plenty of legal authorities both in the FAR (which was used for Kistler’s first contract with NASA) and under its OTA (which is what COTS uses) from which to do this.

    “Actually that is an advantage of a FGC. Its bonding authority and ability to work with manufacturers as a corporation would provides a layer of political isolation. And also here is where the space advocate community could actually play a useful role for once, to make sure the Congress does fully fund it.”

    Several points here:

    One, the statement is contradictory. An FGC (or any entity) cannot enjoy “political isolation” yet still rely on “the Congress” and an “advocate community” to “fully fund it”.

    Two, the statement is not true. Examples of FGCs include the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). They and other FGCs are assigned to specific Congressional committees, have to make annual reports to Congress, testify at least annually to Congress, and must variously get Congressional approval on a broad array of items, ranging from new authorities to raising investment to changes in pricing. FGCs are not politically “isolated” by any reasonable definition of that term.

    Three, the FGC model is not applicable or appropriate for a government space transportation infrastructure that either serves the government or that competes with commercial space transporation capabilities. FGCs obtain most or all of their funding from revenue and private customers, not taxes and Congressional appropriators. Unlike the citizens and businesses that buy USPS postage, unlike the homes and businesses that buy electricity from the TVA, and unlike the account holders and banks that buy insurance from the FDIC, government space transportation customers like NASA, DoD, NRO, and NOAA are not private entities, they are public agencies. Therefore, it makes no sense to establish an FGC to send federal astronauts into space — the government would just be creating a new organization from which to charge itself. It also makes no sense (and very bad policy) to establish an FGC to send government or commercial satellites into space — the government would just be taking business away from commercial launch providers (as STS tried to do back in the ’80s).

    Again, I found Snead’s article was way too lacking in details and specifics to be of much use. But the few details that did exist in Snead’s article — like an FGC — are non-relevant non-starters.

    “And remember that although Burt Rutan has a great record for innovative prototypes his commercial record is much less successful?”

    Rutan has his share of commercial aircraft successes. Approximately 5,000 individuals have purchased Long-EZ, Quickie, Quickie 2, and VariEze aircraft and/or plans, for example.

    “The iterative approach works fine for software and other technology where development cycles are short and cost per cycle low. That is not the nature of spacecraft development where you have high development costs, long cycle times and an inelastic market. Your choices are simple. Wait for private firms to do so, someday, or follow the same model that has been successful in other areas of the economy when private enterprise has failed to meet the need.”

    A couple points here:

    One, incentives in terms of sheer market size and profit margins are considerably more important than development cost, cycle time, and market elasticity to innovation. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, arguably has development costs (hundreds of millions to billions of dollars for each successful drug), cycle times (about a decade to identify a potential compound, test it, and get in through the FDA), and market elasticity (a drug’s cost is fixed for years until generics are allowed to compete) that are all on par with those in the aerospace business. Yet innovation in pharmaceuticals moves at a much faster pace than in the aerospace, and especially the space, sectors. The key differences are the much larger size of the pharmaceutical market and the much higher profit margins enjoyed by the pharmaceutical industry. For the rate of innovation in the space sector to accelerate, the space sector has to tap markets that are bigger than the current government and comsat markets and for which it can pass on the costs of higher profit margins than what government cost-plus contracts allow for. There’s nothing inherent in an FGC that is going to change this (or the other issues like high development cost, long cycle times, and an inelastic market).

    Two, even if the FGC model somehow made sense in terms of who the customers and competitors were (see comments seven paragraphs earlier), it’s not the only — or even simplest — alternative to waiting for new commercial space markets to mature. NASA spends billions every year on government-designed, -operated, and -owned human space flight systems — a huge existing market that could be directed instead to existing (e.g., EELV) or new (pick your favorite) commercial systems. Instead of replacing NASA with an FGC, which would only replace STS and Ares I/Orion with yet another set of government-designed, -operated, and/or -owned human space flight systems (and all the duplication of NASA’s technical expertise, procurement structure, etc. that would entail), NASA just needs to learn to buy services from existing or soon-to-exist commercially designed, operated, and owned systems, instead of wasting gazillions of taxpayers building its own, duplicate, government-designed, -operated, and -owned systems. We don’t need to spend years, maybe decades, reinventing the organizational wheel. We just need to realign the organizational wheel we’ve got.

    (Note, I don’t think that there is no role for government-designed, -operated, and -owned systems in the human space flight world. I just think that role lies out beyond LEO, not in the ETO segment — especially when it comes to medium- or intermediate-lift launch vehicles.)

    “Of course knowing the alt.space community they will probably work to undermine the funding as soon as their firms don’t make the cut, or the design is not one they approve of.”

    I have never worked for, lobbied for, attended the launch of or otherwise been associated with an enterpreneurial space firm. But even I have to point out that these kinds of unsubstantiated, two-faced, smear-every-firm-with-the-same-color statements are really uncalled for.

    We can’t, with one face, call for private space companies to act more commercially, competitively, and entrepreneurially, and then, with the other face, deride them when they take each other or the government to court over market opportunities that were not fairly offered or competed for under U.S. law. That’s the nature of free enterprise under the rule of law. If we believe in it, we shouldn’t criticize those firms that exercise their rights under it.

    And just because one such firm has exercised its rights (i.e., Space-X taking NASA to the GAO over Kistler’s first contract with NASA), it doesn’t mean that the rest will. We should not paint all entrepreneurial firms with the same color just because of the (arguably justified) actions of one firm.

    Finally, again, this is hardly a phenomenon unique to enterpreneurial space firms. Witness LockMart taking Boeing to court over leaked competition sensitive information in the EELV program.

    I would apologize for such a comment.

    “Note in proof: I just read that SpaceX is changing from ablative to regerative cooling to increase performance on their Falcon-1 engines. It’s hard to imagine cheap regenerative cooling, so it does indeed look like they’re on the same path as Orbital and that their products will not achieve a dramatic reduction in cost. Needless to say, I hope I am wrong. . .”

    A couple points:

    One, I would not assume that an ablative nozzle is necessarily cheaper than a regeneratively cooled nozzle. MSFC’s Fastrac engine, intended to be a low-cost exemplar, was ablatively cooled, but was a non-starter from a cost standpoint. No one has picked it up for expendable or reusable applications.

    Two, I’d also note that Space-X also just passed its first NASA ISS visiting vehicle review on the first try. Unlike every other vehicle that’s gone through that review, NASA did not send Dragon back to the drawing board. There will always be bad news to go with the good news, but Space-X’s ability to mount such a huge NASA hurdle and do it better than any other entity has before, speaks volumes about their chances for success going forward. Will they be as cheap as the claim? Probably not. Will they be considerably more affordable and maybe even fly sooner than Ares I/Orion. Probably yes (or they won’t fly at all).

    My 2 cents… FWIW.

  • anonymous.space

    “Ignorant American and everyone else that thinks the EELV’s (Atlas V 551 and Delta IV Heavy) are capable of launching manned missions into even LEO (low-earth orbit), one simple answer: can’t be done.”

    This statement is false on its face. It all depends on the requirements assumptions. How many people and how heavy a capsule are we putting them on?

    For example, LockMart and Bigelow have investigated a proposal that would use an Atlas 402 to launch a Crew Transfer Vehicle or CTV that masses under 12,500 kg to a 264 nmi orbit at 41 degrees — all without black zones and with ESAS mass safety margins.

    See http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5008.

    I can’t speak for Ignorant American, but I would downsize Orion’s crew and capsule size, regardless of what launcher it goes on. Ares I doesn’t have enough power to close NASA’s lunar architecture at Orion’s last reported mass, Orion is removing safety systems and adding operational complexity to fit on Ares I for the ISS architecture, and it would be safer to launch Orion on a less-capable EELV with fewer solid boosters if one of EELVs was pursued instead.

    “Look at the 28.5 degree LEO lift capacity of the either the Heavy or 551″

    Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but the Atlas 551, with only a single Centaur, isn’t usually intended for LEO. It’s a GEO variant.

    If you want a high-end Atlas intended for LEO, you want the 552 (five solid boosters, dual Centaur upper stage) or the 5H2 (triple liquid stick heavy with dual Centaur upper stage).

    “then look at just the weight of the Apollo CSM (30,357 kg)”

    Although Orion masses are similar, we’re not launching the Apollo CM or SM.

    Hope this helps.

  • Brian Swiderski

    After the X-prize they were going to start flying in 2007. Now its 2009. Next year it will be 2010. And so on…

    There was no basis for 2007–the company didn’t exist when people started pulling that dateline out of their ass. But there is a basis for 2009, and your “and so on” is nothing more than short trend extrapolation. They could just as easily build up synergy and move like greased lightning.

    Also the costs keep going up. When it was announced in 2004 the cost was supposed to be $125 million, last estimate I saw in a press release was 275 million.

    I’ve seen a lot of crazy figures thrown around, and they often get confused with each other. Maybe one person’s talking about the cost of SS2, another person’s talking about SS2and WK2 put together, and a third person’s talking about the whole shebang including spaceport tenancy. Or maybe the collapse of the dollar is affecting the flow of money across the pond. Regardless, Branson isn’t going to walk away from this. He’s a billionaire glory-addict who’s done everything but this, and wants to carve his name into the future. He could double-down four consecutive times on this and still have $4 billion left over, but we know that will never be required of him.

    And note that in the press conference it was stated they had only started testing the injectors on the new rocket engine for Spacehiptwo.

    That means most of the delays until now have been organizational and business-related, not technical. Now that it becomes all technical, and Rutan can shine, it’s entirely possible the pace will pick up substantially.

    And remember that although Burt Rutan has a great record for innovative prototypes his commercial record is much less successful – anyone remember the Starship business jet?

    There weren’t hundreds of thousands of fanatics chomping at the bit waiting for his plastic air golf-cart. I will make this bet with anyone: Within three months of VG going live, they will not be physically capable of keeping up with demand. The assembly line at Scaled will not be physically capable of producing SS2s fast enough for VG to avoid a passenger waiting list 6 months long or longer.

    Who do you think are paying for their flights? Not alt.space customers as there are none. So SpaceX becomes another Orbital.

    With SpaceX’s prices, it will do more commercial business all by itself than the entire industry has done in its history, and will single-handedly create more of that business than has ever before existed. Elon is not a fool–he looked at how other firms in the past had failed or been diverted, no doubt including Orbital.

    Orbital’s success didn’t flood the market.

    Because Orbital isn’t a success, and they aren’t part of the market. They’re a contractor zombie like the rest, suckling at the teat.

    There will only be a marginal decline in cost as SpaceX ramps up their revenues to account for the full costs of the R&D based on what the actual demand for Falcon family.

    Everything you’re saying is at complete odds with the facts of what SpaceX has done, is doing, and has said it will do. At almost no flight rate or reusability, Falcon is several times cheaper than its competitors. The additional reductions from reusability and increased demand would be on top of how cheap it already is. Jesus, read their website.

    That is an oversight issue. In the 1950’s and 1960’s you had engineers at NASA and the USAF who knew when contractors were padding.

    It has nothing to do with “padding.” They just never do anything to cut costs, and have no motivation to try, so costs just creep up. They can’t design robust worth a shit, even in their military hardware, and you’d be laughed out of the room asking one of these aerospace giants to come up with cheap, reliable, and efficient anything. Bombers that can’t fly in the rain; manned rockets that fall apart during every launch; EELVs so complex, expensive, and touchy they require an army and a nursemaid to operate. When I read my favorite science fiction novels, I am literally embarrassed by the state of today’s space technology. It is truly disgraceful how far our reach exceeds our grasp.

    That is not the nature of spacecraft development where you have high development costs, long cycle times and an inelastic market. Your choices are simple.

    This is a circular argument. The market is inelastic because prices are so high that only the most inelastic demand can afford it. Once prices are low enough, new demand enters the market and reduces them even further, which makes shorter and cheaper development cycles feasible. The equilibrium point of this process may be at a much lower price than we currently believe plausible.

    Wait for private firms to do so, someday, or follow the same model that has been successful in other areas of the economy when private enterprise has failed to meet them.

    I would love the government to do everything private enterprise isn’t doing, while it’s not doing it, but the fact is it won’t happen. Republicans want their murderous war and their tax cuts both, and Democrats want to restore all the domestic infrastructure Republicans destroyed or allowed to rot, so neither of them is particularly interested in space. Government space will limp along like it has for decades, with some interesting but not broadly significant progress in the military, and our only real shot will be private ventures.

  • Not alt.space customers as there are none.

    Apparently Mr. Matula has never heard of Bob Bigelow.

  • The best Presidential candidate space position might be to call for elimination of NASA and cancellation of the space program. This would be a false economy, but nevertheless good politics. Voters far over-estimate how much is being spent on NASA and their home grown ideas about the point of NASA and its utility is that it is not that useful. As a debate point, the debater in favor of NASA would have a tough time disentangling a multiple untruth like “NASA is taking money out of the mouths of poor children.” I wouldn’t expect it to be taken up by one of the leading campaigns. Leading campaigns have plenty of attention and don’t want to create enemies no matter how small an interest group if there is no countervailing larger interest group to win over. Also, a campaign with a policy to kill NASA would potentially be labelled as backward looking so offering some kind of cheaper, radical alternative like a US Mars prize might be good. Press coverage of NASA is far in excess of its relevance to the economy so it might be a good way for a non-leading candidate to get on the radar.

  • richardb

    Every year there are reasons, as Mr Anonymous just wrote, for Nasa to be ignored by the USG. This year its a “murderous war”(note for the future: war is always murderous…by definition). In the Clinton years, Nasa was sacrificed to a mythical “balanced budget”. Stay tuned for the next excuse.

    Even if the VSE is faithfully executed, we’re talking about 2 flights per year to the moon. It will be fun to watch but hardly the stuff to bring space to the earth’s masses. Whoever figures out how to do that affordable will dominate space and all its resources for years to come. The USG should be pondering what it can do to help US companies win this competition.

  • Ray

    Thomas Matula: “Kistler is hoping for a miracle for COTS. Actually so is NASA now despite the alt.space spin-masters…”

    I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies trying for COTS funds gave overly-optimistic estimates about technical, schedule, and financial difficulties in order to win a chance against other competitors that might do the same thing. It seems to happen all the time in other types of government contracts, so why not with COTS? The difference with COTS is that there are milestones that have to be met before the major funding is released, so the taxpayer is protected more, and the company has more of an incentive to perform, and perform efficiently. Nevertheless, the money NASA has for COTS strikes me as really small for the challenge at hand (especially for the 2 winners which have to develop 2 major systems). It isn’t too surprising that it isn’t going according to plan. If I were NASA I’d probably be planning to fund another (2nd or 3rd depending on that miracle you mentioned) COTS company that significantly increases use of existing hardware to try to at least reduce the ISS cargo gap. (I don’t care if it’s a little company or LM, as long as it’s credible).

    Thomas: “And as for the rest of the current viewgraph private launch fleet, how long do we have to wait before we see that there is no hope for funding them and move on?”

    Most of these are suborbital. I imagine cheap suborbital rockets could do a lot of useful work for NASA and other agencies (Earth remote sensing, microgravity research, testing sensors or ISS payloads, launching UAVs/smallsats, etc) if they panned out. Note that the following document goes into the problem of inexperience, and how suborbital missions could help address this problem:

    http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11916&page=44

    I don’t know how well these particular vehicles would meet these needs, but it would be good if the government agencies that could benefit would lay out what specific capabilities they could use, and what they would pay to purchase such services. Has anyone seen such documents? I haven’t (but if anyone has it would be good to know). If such information were available, it would clear up the picture a lot for potential suborbital vehicle investors one way or the other, and we could “let nature take its course” with the suborbital vehicles. Does anyone know how much interest NASA has shown in using UP Aerospace services?

    Thomas: “The reality is that the private sector has not done all that well. So its high past time to go back to the old procurement model…”

    Isn’t that the model that’s being used for ESAS, and was used on numerous other NASA space transportation systems that failed (in schedule, budget, performance, or even in actually being built) in spite of huge investments?

    NASA’s procurement seems to work reasonably well with moderate-sized robotic missions (and personally I’d be happy to let them stick with that at $17B, and tons of launches to “incentivize” cheap launch companies, per year), but it seems there’s a big problem throughout the government in procuring large space systems. NASA has had problems throughout its manned program, and with large robotic missions (eg: Mars Sample Return, Jimo, Webb Telescope). There are big problems with NPOESS. Lots of big DoD and intelligence programs have big schedule or budget problems. It seems like the old model, or how it’s been implemented, has major flaws.

    Thomas: “That is an oversight issue. In the 1950’s and 1960’s you had engineers at NASA and the USAF who knew when contractors were padding. You need to make sure those managing the contracts have similar skills today.”

    I’d imagine they did their best do do that. Do the skills no longer exist (too little experience on small missions before getting assigned to big ones)? Are the current missions so much more complicated than the early ones that oversight isn’t feasible? Are the skills in too much demand elsewhere? Have the contractors learned how to play the game a bit too skillfully for cost-plus oversight to work on huge projects?

    I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me that in a case like ISS resupply, where you have several private companies willing to match with their own cash, with technical plans that meet some NASA threshold of credibility, and where there’s a reasonable chance to expect that the developed services will be able to serve commercial (or other non-NASA) customers and thereby spread out the maintenance costs, why not go with a COTS-like contract instead of a cost-plus contract? I thought the only reason the military started going with cost-plus is that contractors got burned with difficult and costly fixed-price contracts with only the military as a customer, but the military programs were do-or-die. It seems like there are a lot of NASA opportunities where a fixed-price or COTS approach (again, I’m not against big companies doing this) makes more sense.

    Thomas: “I expect SpaceX will succeed, and it will succeed the same way Orbital succeeded, on the path it is following now as a government contractor. … So SpaceX becomes another Orbital. So what?”

    Actually I like Orbital (even though they made some mistakes, that’s inevitable), and wouldn’t mind more of them. I’m probably personally biased in favor of small satellites over alt.space launchers any day. Also, Orbital recently made some rumblings about developing a cheap Delta-II class rocket, and I didn’t see anything about government funding for that.

    Anyway, SpaceX has a mix of government and non-government customers, which makes perfect sense to me:

    http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

    I suspect if they want to get more commercial business they’ll need to have restraint on their launch prices, but sure they may go up depending on what the market will take.

    Anonymous.space: “NASA just needs to learn to buy services from existing or soon-to-exist commercially designed, operated, and owned systems, instead of wasting gazillions of taxpayers building its own, duplicate, government-designed, -operated, and -owned systems”

    Yes, that would be incredibly helpful. Two of the big weaknesses of many of the private space businesses is funding and a market, and this could alleviate both of those problems. If NASA did a *lot* of that, who could fault them for doing what they want building an in-house heavy-lift rocket?

    That also reminds me of the microgravity aircraft services RPF (ie commercial services for NASA on the “Zero-G” plane). Has anything happened with that?

    Richardb: “Even if the VSE is faithfully executed, we’re talking about 2 flights per year to the moon. It will be fun to watch but hardly the stuff to bring space to the earth’s masses. Whoever figures out how to do that affordable will dominate space and all its resources for years to come. The USG should be pondering what it can do to help US companies win this competition.”

    Exactly. I’ll definitely follow those 2 flights/year if they happen and I’m still around then, but I don’t expect anything “Earth-shattering” from them. They’ll be too expensive (financially, and more to the point in opportunity cost).

    From Snead’s article in evaluating a large government space proposal:

    Can the problem or challenge be perceived by the public as important?
    Is the time for change clearly evident?
    Have reasonable solutions been identified?
    Are the needed resources available?
    Is the cost on par with the public’s perceived importance of solving the problem or undertaking the challenge?
    Will the implementation of the solution sustain needed public support?
    Will the solution draw sufficient political support to be enacted and funded?
    Is the solution likely to succeed?

    I think the VSE, and many other alternatives to it, could get “yes” answers across the board, but the strange Ares I/Orion interpretation of the VSE falls short on several of those questions.

  • anonymous.space

    “Also, Orbital recently made some rumblings about developing a cheap Delta-II class rocket, and I didn’t see anything about government funding for that.”

    Correct. OSC is currently wrestling with the details of this Delta II replacement to see if they can get the vehicle to operate as cheaply as they want it to on a relatively low flight rate. If they can do that in the coming weeks, we can expect an announcement from OSC.

    Antonio Elias, the father of the Pegasus, actually has a thread in the free section of nasaspaceflight.com. The original topic of the thread was Pegasus Q&A, but on page 8 of the thread, Antonio started going into OSC’s Delta II replacement.

    http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=3911&start=106

    Antonio’s screenname is “antonioe”. Although Antonio can’t give away too much, just the thought process that he and OSC are going through on this new launcher is very educational. Very nuts-and-bolts about the workforce, facility, and institutional “footprint” that the vehicle is going to have to pay for. It’s also interesting just to hear Antonio comment on other topics, like Space-X pricing.

    FWIW…

  • WOW!! What a range of comments. My thanks to those taking the time to provide these comments.

    Let me clarify a couple of points that, due to the need for brevity in the already lengthy article, were not addressed.

    1. I fully appreciate the limitations of government management effectiveness, having worked in the government side of military aircraft development for many years. There is a positive role that the government can and continues to play in bringing new operational military aeronautical capabilities into successful operation, but it is intentionally limited in scope. Since prior to World War II, the military has led the development and fielding of ever improving aeronautical flight systems through a public-private partnership that relies on private industry doing most of the work and being responsible for the design, development, and production of the new flight systems. The government has a role to ensure that the delivered product meets in the intended safety, operability, and suitability defined in the request for proposals and agreed to in the contract. This process has worked well in helping to ensure our national security through the deployment of new systems with ever advancing technologies yielding improving safety, performance, and operability. This process not only brings new technologies and operational capabilities to maturity but it advances the technical expertise, experience, and capabilities of private industry – what I call “mastery.” As we are all aware, this is not without difficulty.

    My proposal for a FGC is to serve this government role for building and operating an integrated spacefaring logistics infrastructure. Private industry would be hired to do the work. The FGC would be a fairly small organization focused on the very narrow charter of building and operating the infrastructure. It would set the safety, performance, operability, suitability, interoperability, and similar requirements to be met and then provide oversight of the execution of the contracts to ensure that the requirements are being met by private industry. These would be defined in the request for proposals.

    The FGC would take ownership of the initial systems and facilities on delivery and then contract for their operation – essentially leasing the systems and facilities to private industry so that the needs of both private space enterprises and government space enterprises can be met through competing space service providers. The need for assured space access and assured in-space logistics operations would require that these efforts be undertaken with multiple service providers would be used in most cases.

    As private industry’s mastery of spacefaring logistics operations improves, then the role of the FGC would diminish for the initial phases of the infrastructure – getting to orbit and LEO operations – and it would turn it attention to expanding the infrastructure throughout the Earth-Moon system. With its new mastery – facilitated through the initial FGC efforts – private industry, using commercial funding, would undertake building new systems and logistics capabilities to serve a hopefully expanding national spacefaring enterprise. The FGC is essentially the catalyst for getting started and providing systems that are acceptably safe and operational so that American space enterprises can flourish.

    2. I use a fairly broad definition of logistics that is based on the military definition (that can be found on the Internet.) This includes transportation, housing, servicing, emergency services, training, etc. Many terrestrial logistics infrastructures include transportation elements. Package deliver, for example, includes many different types of transportation systems. Human travel also includes many different forms of transportation systems, some which are “public infrastructure” and some are provided by private enterprise. The function of logistics is to enable some operational goal to be achieved. The goal I am addressing is to enable Americans, as spacefarers, to safely undertake space enterprises. I propose to accomplish this by using a new public-private partnership to provide the needed spacefaring logistics infrastructure.

    3. The nature of the systems and facilities that will form the infrastructure will be heavily influenced by the requirements for safety and operability. For the U.S. to become a true spacefaring nation, then Americans must have the ability to travel to, within, and from space with acceptable safety. I refer to this as passenger safety. It is the level of safety that we all take for granted when traveling. In the aircraft world, this is referred to as airworthiness.

    All commercial and military aircraft are required to be airworthy. A different criteria now exists for space launch systems. Both the traveling public and the non-traveling public accept the risk to public safety that comes with airworthy commercial and military aircraft flying over our homes and schools as well as the direct risk when taking our families on trips on commercial airliners.

    In my view, all elements of a spacefaring logistics infrastructure that impact spacefarer and non-involved public safety must be airworthy. (One day we will call this “spaceworthy.”) In my understanding of the needs of airworthiness, EACH production article must be:

    – Shown to be built in compliance with the approved design
    – Demonstrated thought ground and flight test to be airworthy BEFORE being placed into operation
    – Maintained in an airworthy condition
    – Operated in compliance with the design constraints of the approved design

    All existing space launch systems fail to achieve these requirements for airworthiness and, in my view, are unsuitable for spacefaring passenger transport. This then requires that new systems be developed that meet these requirements. Necessarily, these systems will be fully-reusable because expendable systems or elements cannot be flight tested, by definition, prior to being used operationally. All existing space launch systems are expendable or incorporate expendable elements. (I consider the SRBs on the Space Shuttle to be expendable by this definition.)

    In these discussions of safety, it is important to note that the “human-rated” safety requirements for astronauts are different and, in my view, less demanding that airworthiness safety standards needed for passenger travel. Hence, while an existing space launch system may meet human-rated standards for astronauts, they do not meet the airworthiness standards needed for passenger spaceflight.

  • Ignoramus

    Ignorant American and everyone else that thinks the EELV’s (Atlas V 551 and Delta IV Heavy) are capable of launching manned missions into even LEO (low-earth orbit), one simple answer: can’t be done.

    Oh God, thank you. You’ve saved us so much money and embarrassment.

    look at just the weight of the Apollo CSM (30,357 kg)

    Actually, some of us ignorant Americans prefer to look forward, not backwards.

    Neither of these boosters will get off the ground because payload mass exceeds liftoff thrust. If you lit their engines, they’d just sit there on the pad doing nothing but wasting fuel and scaring the wildlife.

    Oh, thank you so very much, I can’t believe we missed that, it just never came up in any of our Orbiter simulations. You’re a freekin genius.

    As a former aerospace engineer who has a Master’s degree in the field, one of the things that bothers me the most about Space enthusiasts is that they will propose missions, spacecraft, equipment, and orbital transfers that demonstrate they have no idea what they are talking about. This blog is to meant as an anecdote to those confident expressions of ignorance.

    I guess that explains it then. Of course, we have no solutions to the thrust to weight deficiencies of the EELVs, since canning the gold plated vanity craft for the prima donna safety obsessed astronaut corps is out of the question.

    Yes, it’s much better to ‘stay the course’.

  • anonymous.space

    “My proposal for a FGC…”

    I appreciate the follow-up and additional details that Mr. Snead has provided. But his post still fails to address the crucial questions of “Who is the customer?” and “Who is the competition?” for his proposed FGC.

    From the USPS and first-class mail, to the FDIC and deposit insurance, to the TVA and electricity, FGCs serve broad bases of customers in the private sector and do not compete with private sector businesses (either naturally or by long-standing, government-established monopolies).

    A space infrastructure FGC would do neither. There is no broad base of private sector customers. Rather, there are government astronauts, unmanned government spacecraft and payloads, and commercial satellites.

    The first two are government customers, not private sector customers. It makes no sense to create a layer of FGC bureaucracy, on top of all the other government bureaucracy, just so the government can pay itself to transport its people and stuff to and from space.

    The last two customers use existing commercial launch services provided by existing commercial launch providers. It makes no sense — and very, very bad policy — for the government to create an FGC that would compete with commercial launch firms in the private sector and run them out of business.

    Organizationally, Mr. Snead is proposing to fill a round hole with a square peg. Before getting too enamored of the FGC model, I’d urge Mr. Snead to carefully examine what FGCs are actually used for, think critically about whether that model has any relevance or utility to the problems in the space sector that he is trying to resolve, and explore more direct means of addressing those problems.

    Finally, I’d also urge Mr. Snead to critically review the history of the nation’s last, failed attempt to create a single, national space infrastructure — the Space Transportation System (STS) or Space Shuttle. For Mr. Snead’s proposal to have any credibility, he must explain why such a strikingly similar approach makes sense this time around and how his proposal would avoid all the pitfalls that STS fell into.

    My 2 cents… FWIW.

  • In Presidential politics, as in all politics, there are two rules that govern. All politics is local and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Space supporters abound in every neighborhood, but their voices are not heard when needed because nobody represents their interest. And while the Space advocacy groups squeak allot, they do so neither in unison nor very loudly.

    During Apollo and the run-up to that program, there was a consensus among regular Americans and their leaders that to succeed in space we needed to fix on a target, focus our energy, and spend the money needed. We don’t have that sort of consensus today.

    These days, Presidential candidates and members of Congress hear advice from space advocacy groups on getting back into space exploration that conflicts with NASA’s, when those voices should be working with NASA to secure its funding.

    What the space advocacy community needs is its version of the NRA, a group that speaks with one voice (and one checkbook) to the interests of space exploration. That means most of the swarm of space advocacy groups that exist today, Mars Society, National Space Society, Space Frontier Foundation, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and the plethora of other pro space groups, need to be merged into one group under strong leadership and organized in a way that attracts talent to its ranks so that the diffused political impact that the space advocacy community has now can be focused and effective in the future. This requires that the space advocacy community will have to do something that it has shown itself ill-suited for, compromise and to do so on even our most closely-held ideals and focus on the biggest of our desires, to see that mankind move beyond our present home and into our new one. Only if we come together, merge our disparate and varying messages into focus, can we have the impact that has so far alluded the space advocacy community on the debate about our nation’s space exploration and aeronautics effort. United we stand, divided we fall.

    Though the cure may sound worse than the decease, consider where the space advocacy community is now. There are as many space advocacy groups today as there are months in a year. None of the space advocacy groups has anything approaching clout on Capitol Hill, in the White House, or the Presidential campaigns. The only really effective space advocacy group is the one with the most money, Aerospace Industries Association. But one look at the AIA’s website shows that, while space is important, it is but one of many, and not the most pressing of, priorities.

    If the space advocacy community fails to unite and focus, our continued political insignificance will hurt our nation’s attempt at getting back into orbit after the Shuttle is retired by refracting the focus that we need to succeed. And the only people we have to blame is us. Fitting, isn’t it?

  • To anonymous space, I am critical of your choice to remain anonymous. People should have the courage to stand behind their comments especially when being critical of the efforts of others in public forums such as this. When you wish to identify yourself, I will be pleased to address your comments. Yelling over the wall with a dissenting opinion is not dialogue.

  • I agree with the remarks of Jim Hillhouse as that was one purpose of this article. I have put my advocacy for such an approach under the “Spacefaring America” banner.

  • Ignoramii

    What the space advocacy community needs is its version of the NRA, a group that speaks with one voice (and one checkbook) to the interests of

    Christian American Fasc*sm

    That’s just what America needs right now, more Christian American fasc*sm.

    We need more promotion of gun violence for profit, war mongering for profit, glorification of war, murder, lead pollution and poisoning, and we especially need more rednecks and hillbillies and movie stars in position of power in America, that’s what makes America great, violent, belligerent, unapologetic and unashamed of their obvious misdeeds in the world, and clearly space science and space technology can benefit from this attitude.

    Genocide, weapons, secret prisons, torture and domestic surveillance, all are quite necessary for the elevation of America to a space faring nation.

  • Ray

    Mike Snead: “To anonymous space, I am critical of your choice to remain anonymous.”

    For my part, I’d be glad if you continued the discussion, as long as it stays professional. It (FGCs) isn’t an area I’m familiar with, so I might learn something. I would just not assume anything at all about anonomous.space’s background, and just take their arguments as they are. I imagine the rest of the readers will do the same. From your article, one benefit the FGC seemed to have is the possibility of fund-raising using government bonds, and I don’t think anonymous.space addressed that.

  • Ray

    Jim Hillhouse: “These days, Presidential candidates and members of Congress hear advice from space advocacy groups on getting back into space exploration that conflicts with NASA’s, when those voices should be working with NASA to secure its funding.”

    Unfortunately, if NASA got more funding, it’s likely that NASA would direct that funding to projects that many space advocates would be against. Speaking for myself, I’d rather not spend more (or anything) on Ares I/Orion, but I’d expect that if NASA got more funding, they would do whatever the funding language would let the do to pour more money into them. There are a lot of alternatives to them that I’d go for (and I think Ares I/Orion represent enough money to do lots of them), such as a much more aggressive COTS ISS transportation program, NASA X vehicle demos geared to solve common space transport problems, giving a “small” incentive in the form of prizes for demonstrating different levels of ISS transportation, or even (much as I don’t want a government-run transport system at all) a NASA HLV (without Ares I) or a small NASA Orion that would work on multiple launchers. I’d even go for scrapping ISS and pouring out tons of moderate robotic missions (perhaps enough to get some leverage over private rocket fixed costs). I just can’t go for Ares I/Orion, which are so expensive and slow to develop, and will be so expensive to operate, that we’d be better off without them. I even heard one of the managers of the program (on the Space Show Mars Society segment) advocating using these rockets for big NASA science missions. Uggh. They’re trying to repeat the history of the Shuttle in its efforts to U.S. thwart commercial space transportation. Maybe they can kill commercial space transportation and NASA science in a single blow, since the science mission that uses Ares V will have to be so big, and so little science money will be left after ESAS development and ops … well, I don’t know what moderate science missions would be left.

    No thanks, I think I’ll wait for NASA to change before pushing for more NASA funding. I could push for funding for specific NASA programs I like, but not for NASA as a whole.

    I suspect that many other space advocates feel the same way about just pushing for NASA funding (although their reasons may be different).

  • Ray

    Jim: “That means most of the swarm of space advocacy groups that exist today, Mars Society, National Space Society, Space Frontier Foundation, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and the plethora of other pro space groups, need to be merged into one group under strong leadership and organized in a way that attracts talent to its ranks so that the diffused political impact that the space advocacy community has now can be focused and effective in the future.”

    There is the Space Exploration Alliance that includes a lot of these groups:

    http://www.spaceexplorationalliance.org/

    I’m not sure how active it is, but it may be something that a few people with contacts in multiple space advocacy groups could grow. The interests of the separate groups are so different that I suspect it would be impossible for them to simply merge. However, it is a way for them to find common ground, and join their voices when they find something they can agree on. If they can do this regularly, it could grow. For example, in the SEA Moon-Mars Blitz II, they seem to agree on increasing NASA funding, VSE, gap reduction, COTS, Centennial Challenges, science missions, and NIAC. Some of these are quite small, so you would think that with their combined voices they’d have a chance of affecting these small programs if they have a chance anywhere.

    There’s also the Coalition for Space Exploration:

    http://www.spacecoalition.com/Member.cfm

    It includes industry, but also AIAA, AAS, AIA, NSS, Citizens for Space Exploration, etc. Again, I’m not sure how active they are. Their interests may not blend very well with some of the grass-roots groups.

  • Ray

    For more clout, I’d also suggest an attempt to broaden these groups to include others in the SEA and/or CSE that might not be considered just space interests, but that might have common interests. For example,

    American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing:

    http://www.asprs.org/society/about.html

    American Geophysical Union (or maybe just the AGU sections on Planetary Sciences and Space Physics?)

    http://www.agu.org/

    IEEE (or maybe just component societies like Aerospace and electronic systems, or others with a space-related emphasis)

    http://www.ieee.org/web/societies/home/index.html

    American Society for Mechanical Engineering:

    http://www.asme.org/

    Astronomy Societies
    Rocket Clubs
    Science/technology-friendly environmental groups

  • anonymous.space

    “To anonymous space, I am critical of your choice to remain anonymous.”

    Mr. Foust has repeatedly welcomed anonymous posters on this site. You may be critical, but the forum does allow for anonymity. Due to day jobs, anonymity is critical for several of us to participate on this site.

    “Yelling over the wall with a dissenting opinion is not dialogue.”

    I did no “yelling”. If you reread my post, I was polite, including stating that I “appreciated” the detail and follow-up you had provided in your post and “urging” you to do additional research and thinking. That is “dialogue”, not “yelling”.

    That said, I made two critical points that, I would argue, must be addressed in your paper if it is to be taken seriously. First, from the perspective of large private customer bases and lack of commercial competitors that characterize FGCs, an FGC does not fit the space sector’s large government customer base and existing commercial space transportation providers. Second, because your proposal, even down to some of the technical solutions, closely resembles the proposals that led to STS and all its failings, you have to be able to explain what’s different this time around. There’s a slew of other key questions that your proposal raises that we could get into — end goals beyond just building space infrastructure, budget realism, what to do with the existing NASA organization, politics associated with that NASA organization, etc. — but it’s not even worth bringing them up until the proposal addresses its own organizational contradictions and the lessons of history.

    If you have responses to these critiques, please share them. Based on facts and logic, please do tell me if and how my arguments and critiques are misinformed or misconstrued. But if not, then please don’t resort to ad hominem attacks about my anonymity. That is “yelling”, not “dialogue”. I did not attack your status or credentials. It shouldn’t matter whether we’re Nobel Prize winners or village idiots. Our arguments should stand on their own merits. Debate the logic, facts, and opinions, not the poster.

    Thank you.

  • anonymous.space

    “one benefit the FGC seemed to have is the possibility of fund-raising using government bonds, and I don’t think anonymous.space addressed that.”

    It depends on the enabling legislation, but some FGCs can raise private funding. But again, that investment is usually based on a stream of highly predictable revenues from a large installed base of private customers. It’s not clear who the customers for a space infrastructure FGC would be, beyond the government itself and a few commercial comsat builders. Creating an FGC to serve government needs is usually bad policy. Instead of using public funds (tax revenues) to serve public needs, which is what annual appropriations are suppossed to do, we’d be circumventing appropriations and tapping private investment markets to serve public needs, which reduces the capital in, and otherwise screws with, those private investment markets. And creating an FGC that competes with and runs existing commercial providers out of business — i.e., the ELVs that launch commercial comsats and government satellites/spacecraft — is also bad policy. It’s important from the perspective of good policy and a healthy private sector to respect the public/private divide that we all learn about in Government 101.

    One could argue that a new space infrastructure could open new markets by lowering costs (space tourism or microgravity research/production) and tapping new resources (lunar metals and volatiles). But bond investors don’t put money into those kinds of businesses today (angel and maybe VC investors do, but not bond investors, not for some time to come), and it’s far from clear how an FGC would change that. And again, for some of these markets, we’ve got the problem of the government creating an FGC that competes with existing commercial firms and private investment (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Bigelow, etc.).

    FWIW…

  • Leo

    The proposal involved here is more of the same – the failed approach of the last three decades that has had a corrosive effect on national support for space. Literally going in circles, no more than a few hundred miles up, accomplishing nothing while spending billions and risking catastrophe. Space is a void through which one passes to reach other worlds, not a destination. Imagine Columbus asking for money to sail a few hundred mails off the coast, and then stop, drop anchor, and sit for months to study the effects of long sea voyages, or “build infrastructure”, or similar asininity. We should be focusing on exploring, and especially settling, colonizing, and terraforming Mars. Giving humanity a new homeworld is a worthy cause, and will spark imaginations.

    Also, I would love the sneering, dismissive, inflammatory references to the Iraq War and other space-irrelevant hot-button issues to be either deleted by the moderator, or self-censored by prospective posters out of a desire to promote amity in the space community rather than pointless distraction.

    I realize that the loudmouths who support legislating defeat and retreat in the face of the enemy are becoming ever more aggressively ubiquitous and insistent, but it’s time for a pushback.

    There are PLENTY of supporters of a robust and revived space policy that oppose vindicating Osama bin Laden’s contemptuous view of America as having a pathetically low casualty tolerance, that support persevering through a historically small casualty rate and continuing to seek victory in Iraq and in every other theater of the war, and who view our ENEMIES, rather than our own country’s leadership, as exemplifying “Caligula-like bloody dreams”.

    I’ll bet, of course, that THIS post gets censored, while the calls for running away from battle and the slanders against our country’s wartime leadership from people who insist that they are patriotic continue to remain untouched.

  • Thomas Matula

    Mike,

    I agree. The best way to deal with folks like anonymous.space who lack the courage to sign their name is to simply ignore that just as you would any heckler. If enough folks do it then they take their trolling elsewhere.

    And if their job is a risk from their actions you would think they wouldn’t even post as such folks rarely stay anonymous for long. Writing and debate styles are often easy to catch. In the investment community there is a big scandal at the moment as the CEO of Whole Foods was just caught in such trolling behavior on stock blogs

  • Thomas Matula

    Hi Rand,

    Bigelow is a prospective customer for SpaceX only if he finds customers himself for his station. As you may have noted he has restructured his test system to cut his burn rate. This means he is getting to the make or break point for this business model

    If he finds enough paying customers, either foreign government or private individuals/firms, he will go ahead. If not, given his behavior in other non-space ventures, he will likely cut his loses and shut down. I also expect the recent Proton failure will actually be a benefit to him as it will delay Proton launches down the line not only for technical reasons, but for diplomatic ones as well which will give him more breathing space.

    Bigelow is also a classic example of a U.S. firm which would benefit from a FGC for space infrastructure. In fact it could well be the market that enables him to close his business case.

  • anonymous.space

    “The best way to deal with folks like anonymous.space who lack the courage to sign their name is to simply ignore”

    Mr. Matula is right, here. If someone is uncomfortable engaging in a dialogue with an anonymous poster, nothing forces any of us to respond to any post, anonymous or otherwise, on this site. But if we are going to respond, it should be to the substance of the post, not the identity of the poster.

    “just as you would any heckler. If enough folks do it then they take their trolling elsewhere.”

    Unfortunately, Mr. Matula did not follow his own advice and engaged in a couple ad hominem attacks of his own. Forthright critiques based on the defining characteristics of real FGCs and of past experience with STS are hardly “trolling” or “heckling”. If Mr. Matula has counterpoints to offer, he should do so. If not, he should follow his advice, ignore the post, and not stoop to arguing the identity of the poster.

    “As you may have noted he has restructured his test system to cut his burn rate. This means he is getting to the make or break point for this business model”

    That’s one possible interpretation, but we don’t know that. As likely an explanation is that the technical value of the remaining tests has gone down with the success of the test vehicles already up. That also happens to be the explanation that Bigelow has provided himself.

    “Bigelow is also a classic example of a U.S. firm which would benefit from a FGC for space infrastructure. In fact it could well be the market that enables him to close his business case.”

    That assumes the FGC buys services from a service provider like Bigelow, versus paying traditional aerospace contractors to build and operate space stations for the FGC. Mr. Snead’s proposal, in fact, assumes the latter:

    “The FGC would take ownership of the initial systems and facilities on delivery and then contract for their operation – essentially leasing the systems and facilities to private industry”

    Mr. Snead proposes that his FGC own and contract for the operation of a space station, rather than buy time and services on a commercially owned and operated space station, which is the model that Bigelow is operating under. Again, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, a space infrastructure FGC in general, and Mr. Snead’s proposal in particular, would compete with, rather than become a customer for, existing commercial space service providers.

    FWIW…

  • Thomas Matula

    Brian,

    Sorry for the delay in posting. I have been busy in my day job. Also a lot is going on behind the scenes in space policy as you probably know :-)

    Brian stated “There was no basis for 2007–the company didn’t exist when people started pulling that dateline out of their a–.’

    From the Offical Press Release dated Sept. 27, 2004 from the Scaled Composite website.

    http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/092704_scaled_paul_allen_virgin_galactic.htm

    [[[Virgin has formed Virgin Galactic (‘V.G.’) a new company, which will become the world’s first commercial space tourism operator. It is envisaged that Virgin Galactic will open for business by the beginning of 2005 and subject to the necessary safety and regulatory approvals begin operating flights from 2007.]]]

    and

    [[[It is expected that around £60 million ($100 million) will be invested in developing the new generation of spaceships and ground infrastructure required to operate a sub orbital space tourism experience.]]]

    I assume both Richard Branson and Burt Rutan approved the text of this press release.

    And here is an interview on Space.com with the VG CEO that gives the figure as $250 million in November.

    http://www.space.com/news/061110_tai_galactic.html

    [[[“And that’s going to cost money as well. I believe we’ll spend between $225 million and $250 million” to reach that operating point,]]]

    The $275 is a more recent figure I saw but I am not able to track down the interview at the moment. Doesn’t matter as I am sure there will be a new figure as the anniversary of SpaceShipOne approaches.

    Still the trend is clear and documented, Boyle’s law of the first flight always being at least two years away and a clear 250 percent cost over run.

    Yes, Richard Branson is able to afford it, but at what point do the cost overruns and schedule delays cease to make business sense and indeed, even starts to hurt his image?

    Brian stated: “There weren’t hundreds of thousands of fanatics chomping at the bit waiting for his plastic air golf-cart.”

    Again.

    http://www.space.com/news/070703_virgingalactic_sales.html

    [[[Wincer said 200 customers from 30 different countries have already made deposits to confirm their reservations.]]]

    I recall seeing that some 80,000 individuals have registered with the website for updates, still far less then the “hundreds of thousands of fanatics chomping at the bit”….

    And I have read SpaceX’s website. I also know what the economics of space launch are and the law of physics and basics of project management are the same for SpaceX as everyone else. Their final pricing may be marginally lower but not the breakthrough alt.space folks believe it will be. And like Orbital they will become part of the opposition.

    Brain stated: “When I read my favorite science fiction novels, I am literally embarrassed by the state of today’s space technology. It is truly disgraceful how far our reach exceeds our grasp.”

    Yep, real spaceflight is much harder then in science fiction. The laws of physics and limits of technology have a way of really messing up some good stories. But then that is why its fiction.

    Heinlein wrote about how a college professor and some teenagers built a rocket at an abandoned ranch in New Mexico to win a prize for reaching the Moon first, only to find a bunch of Nazi’s beat them there. In reality it took 500,000 people a good chunk of U.S. Dollars (over 3000 billion in 2007 dollars) to do so.

    Actually that of one of the key problems with the alt.space movement, they believe too much in science fiction. It fun to read, but you should base national space policy on it.

    Brian stated: “This is a circular argument. The market is inelastic because prices are so high that only the most inelastic demand can afford it. Once prices are low enough, new demand enters the market and reduces them even further, which makes shorter and cheaper development cycles feasible.”

    Most of the studies I’ve seen shows that E=1 only at prices below $300 lb or less. SpaceX would have to sell flights on his Flacon 1 for $300,000 a flight versus the current $7 million to reach that point.

  • Thomas Matula

    Correction

    [[[Actually that of one of the key problems with the alt.space movement, they believe too much in science fiction. It fun to read, but you should base national space policy on it.]]]

    Should be

    Actually that is one of the key problems with the alt.space movement, they believe too much in science fiction. It fun to read, but you shouldn’t base national space policy on it.

  • I thought I had posted this comment yesterday, but here it is again:

    With respect to the comments of “alt.space” enterprises”

    Building an integrated spacefaring logistics infrastructure will be undertaken through many individual projects of different sizes and complexities. Some will be of the scale that large companies may be best positioned to be responsive to the request for proposals while others will be of smaller scale and, therefore, more accessible to smaller companies. Hence, starting to build and then to operate an integrated spacefaring logistics infrastructure where private industry is called upon to undertake the design, production, installation, and most operation of the infrastructure will provide opportunities that do not exist today for alt.space companies to gain a foothold and then to grow into substantial space enterprises.

    The facilitation of this growth of new American private space enterprise would be an essential purpose of the FGC. The Tennessee Valley Authority, an early FGC, had similar objectives in terms of increasing private enterprise in the rural south. Building dams and generating electricity was only one of many TVA objectives.

    Why should the spacefaring logistics FGC be interested in this as an objective? The answer lies in the clear need to improve the industrial base’s mastery of logistics operations in space and to provide for the injection of innovation into the process. The act of becoming involved in building the new infrastructure will provide businesses of all sizes with the opportunity to gain new expertise, experience, and industrial capabilities that will significantly enhance their competitive position with respect to future private space enterprise operations. It will also provide the opportunity for these businesses, especially smaller businesses, to argue the merits of innovative approaches to designing, building, and operating the infrastructure. Hence, undertaking the building of a spacefaring logistics infrastructure through the leadership of a FGC should significantly enhance the business prospects for alt.space companies and benefit the FGC’s goal of providing robust, effective, and efficient spacefaring logistics capabilities to the nation.

  • Re: Coalition for Space Exploration; Space Exploration Alliance, etc.

    The key emphasis of such groups has been on space exploration. We need to now shift emphasis to spacefaring logistics. Under the “Spacefaring America” banner, I would envision a federation of pro-space organizations that support the establishment of spacefaring logistics infrastructure because this step is enabling for the individual organizations to more practically achieve their goals.

    Why is this appropriate at this time? My belief is that there is a general public myth of a “space access barrier” where the public perceives that significant technological advancement is needed before fully-reusable space access with “aircraft-like” safety and operability can be achieved. While this is true for single-stage, I do not believe it is true for two-stage systems based on my 20+ years of direct experience. With the development of fully-reusable, two-stage space access systems, developing and deploying the in-space elements of a useful integrated spacefaring logistics infrastructure become practical. Undertaking these steps would be the focus of the public-private partnership that I have proposed for this purpose. The “Spacefaring America” federation would strive to dispel this space access barrier myth and to promote the public-private partnership.

    Mike

  • Re: Commercial development of human spaceflight systems

    Developing new flight systems for public use that have acceptable levels of safety is far from simple. It is especially difficult for new start companies that do not have the benefit of an integrated and experienced workforce. The challenge of forming a successful new company becomes even more challenging for spaceflight, whether getting to and from space or operating within space.

    As we all expect, most new start companies approach these problems in a highly optimistic manner leaving the impression that the problems can be easily overcome though a new twist in the design process or a potentially revolutionary advancement in technology. Unfortunately, unexpected technical challenges have typically arisen that have caused delays and cost increases.

    I thought it might be helpful to place these development efforts into perspective. A fully-reusable, two-stage space access system capable of deploying a 25,000 lb net payload to the ISS has a gross weight of about 2.9 million lbs. The system development effort consists of a booster, orbiter, cargo, container, 10-person passenger spaceplane, booster engine, orbiter engine, and spaceplane engine. The total effort required to develop this system is estimated at 100,000-125,000 work years. For comparison, a typical Boeing commercial airliner may require 20,000-25,000 work-years. It will require substantial industrial capabilities to undertake the development of such a new spaceflight system. This would appear to be beyond the capabilities of a modestly-funded new company.

    Another key aspect is achieving the necessary airworthiness needed for routine passenger transport. This, again, is an area where established corporate experience and expertise is important. To achieve an airworthiness certification, the FAA or some other governmental body will require substantiation of the airworthiness of the design. This is generally done in an evolutionary manner. A near-term, fully-reusable, two-stage space access system will still draw upon substantial existing subsystems and similar subsystem designs. New companies may not have ready access to such information.

    Developing industrial mastery of spacefaring operations would be an important objective of a FGC. We need new blood in this industry and building the spacefaring logistics infrastructure provides a very good opportunity for encouraging and enabling this goal. This opens the door for new-start companies to enter successfully into space business, to form partnerships with existing companies to draw upon their established capabilities, and to bring innovation and a new enthusiasm to space operations.

    Mike

  • anonymous.space

    At the risk of torquing off Mr. Snead with more anonymous comments, I feel compelled to once again try a little constructive criticism on the FGC model.

    “Hence, starting to build and then to operate an integrated spacefaring logistics infrastructure where private industry is called upon to undertake the design, production, installation, and most operation of the infrastructure will provide opportunities that do not exist today for alt.space companies to gain a foothold and then to grow into substantial space enterprises.”

    As it relates to “alt space”, the problem with the FGC model is that most entrepreneurial space companies are not interested in designing, building, or operating infrastructure for the government (in the form of an FGC or otherwise) or anyone else. Their business models, right or wrong, are all about designing, building, and operating infrastructure that they own and with which they can sell services to various customers, including the government. Space-X is not building Falcon I, Falcon 9, and Dragon to turn over to the government. Rather, Space-X plans to own these assets and sell their services to various customers, including NASA. Same goes for Bigelow and Sundancer and BA 330. Same goes for Virgin Galactic and the SpaceShipTwo fleet.

    Heck, there are commercial entities outside the “alt space” world that operate on this model. United Launch Alliance owns EELV infrastructure and sells EELV launch services to the military and NASA. Same goes for OSC and Pegasus. Same goes for SpaceHab.

    I apologize if I sound like a broken record, but again, it makes no sense and very bad policy for the government to create an entity that, instead of buying services from these pre-existing commercial companies, has as its primary mission to create an infrastructure that competes with them.

    “The facilitation of this growth of new American private space enterprise would be an essential purpose of the FGC. The Tennessee Valley Authority, an early FGC, had similar objectives in terms of increasing private enterprise in the rural south. Building dams and generating electricity was only one of many TVA objectives.”

    But electrification of the rural south was no doubt the TVA’s main, driving objective. And unlike the proposed FGC to develop ETO and Earth orbit infrastructure, the TVA had no pre-existing commercial competition for electrical power generation and supply in the areas the TVA was trying to electrify. (If there had been such commercial electricty suppliers, there would have been no need to electrify and no need for the TVA.)

    FGCs exist where commercial companies do not exist, to address needs that the private sector does not address. A space infrastructure FGC, especially for ETO and Earth orbit, does the exact opposite. It would invade a segment of the national economy where commercial companies do exist and create competition for companies that are already meeting public and private needs in that segment.

    I’m not trying to be mean, but until the FGC proposal addresses this reality and adopts a different model, especially for any ETO and Earth orbit infrastructure where there are numerous existing and planned commercially owned capabilities, the proposal is very bad policy and likely an unrealistic non-starter politically.

    “A fully-reusable, two-stage space access system capable of deploying a 25,000 lb net payload to the ISS has a gross weight of about 2.9 million lbs. The system development effort consists of a booster, orbiter, cargo, container, 10-person passenger spaceplane, booster engine, orbiter engine, and spaceplane engine.”

    Why 25k lbs. to ISS? Why 10 passengers? Why a fully reusable TSTO?

    In the absence of any driving end objective, it’s not clear why the proposal is picking these vehicles with these technical characteristics. For example, going all the way back to the ’70s, most studies show that the costs of developing an RLV cannot be justified or paid back without annual flight rates in the range of 50-60 flights per year (at least). But the FAA currently forecasts an annual world-wide demand for commercial launches that’s only about half that (25-35 flights per year). So the TSTO RLV proposed for this FGC would have to capture the entire commercial launch market and then double it to make good investment sense. Is that realistic? Or is the TSTO RLV infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure?

    Instead of starting with the infrastructure, I’d urge Mr. Snead to start with the end-goals of his proposed FGC and then let that drive the infrastructure. For example, the FGC could have the goal of developing the Moon (as opposed to space in general), a goal that might get translated into putting in place enough surface habitats, power, and supplies (ISRU and delivered) to support X paying visitors and Y kg of their hardware each year (where X and Y increase with time). A TSTO RLV might not fit that goal — it might be better addressed and/or at lower cost using existing and soon-to-exist commercial launch vehicles.

    Focusing a little on the end-goals like this (instead of the infrastructure) could have the benefit of moving the FGC out of the realm of competing with existing or soon-to-exist commercially owned assets (ETO and Earth orbit) and into a realm (such as the Moon) where the private sector does not yet exist and the FGC can serve a public good. It would also have the benefit of more clearly driving the FGC’s proposed technical solutions, showing where the FGC can leverage existing commercial services to ETO and in Earth orbit, where the FGC must develop new infrastructure, and what minimum technical characteristics that new infrastructure must have (TSTO RLV or otherwise) to fulfill the end-goals in the FGC’s charter.

    I’m not saying the Moon is necessarily the right target for an FGC. But I think this proposal would benefit enormously from more clearly delineating public (FGC) from private (commercial capabilities) roles and some thinking about specific end-goals before jumping into infrastructure.

    My 2 cents… FWIW.

  • As I mentioned previously, when anonymous.space wishes to identify himself or herself, I will address his or her points. While they choose to remain anonymous, it really doesn’t make any sense to try to respond as they will choose to continue to make long, rambling statements about things they appear to have little understanding while hiding behind their anonymity.

    For some reason, anonymous.space chooses to hide their identity. There is no reason for this unless they are simply trying to gain support for some position which benefits them directly or indirectly. If he or she believes they have valid questions, asking questions is certainly something that anyone can do regardless of where they work or their position. Asking questions about a proposal, such as I made in the article, does not require elaboration on their personal views. Encouraging such discussions are why the article was written and why this discussion forum exists.

    Mike

  • anonymous.space

    “While they choose to remain anonymous, it really doesn’t make any sense to try to respond as they will choose to continue to make long, rambling statements about things they appear to have little understanding ”

    Look, Mr. Snead, if my critique of your proposal really is that poorly put together, then it shouldn’t take much effort for you to refute it, point-by-point. If my reasoning or facts are in error, please do correct me. I’m willing to learn.

    But don’t you hide behind an ad hominem attack on my anonymous status, when the owner of this forum (Mr. Foust) has repeatedly welcomed anonymous comments. You can choose not to respond, but don’t denigrate me without going into the substance of the argument I’ve offered.

    “For some reason, anonymous.space chooses to hide their identity. There is no reason for this”

    Sure there is. Some of us have day jobs that we have to protect.

    “unless they are simply trying to gain support for some position which benefits them directly or indirectly”

    Yeah, I work for the anti-space infrastructure development FGC lobby. It’s right up there with tobacco and petroleum lobbies.

    [rolls eyes]

    ” If he or she believes they have valid questions, asking questions is certainly something that anyone can do regardless of where they work or their position. Asking questions about a proposal, such as I made in the article, does not require elaboration on their personal views. Encouraging such discussions are why the article was written and why this discussion forum exists.”

    I don’t have questions about the proposal. I have constructive criticisms, which this forum is also for and which I hoped the proposal could benefit from. If you choose not to accept them, because they’re wrong or because you just don’t want to, that’s fine. But don’t attack me personally for offering them. I critiqued your proposal, but I never attacked you or your credentials. Argue the facts, logic, and opinions of the posters, not the posters themselves. You shouldn’t have to be told twice.

    Thank you.

  • canttellya

    As I mentioned previously, when anonymous.space wishes to identify himself or herself, I will address his or her points. While they choose to remain anonymous, it really doesn’t make any sense to try to respond as they will choose to continue to make long, rambling statements about things they appear to have little understanding while hiding behind their anonymity.

    Are we reading the same comments from the same poster? Anonymous.space’s comments are articulate, clear, and demonstrate great understanding. He/she is one of the main reasons I come to this site. Ad hominem attacks do not benefit your argument, and they’re even more worthless when they’re just wrong.

    You’ll probably dismiss me for anonymity as well, but to paraphrase “anon”, some of us aren’t exactly toeing the party line in our business.

  • Cantellya, my name is Mike Snead. What is your name and what questions might you have that I could address?

    Mike

  • My apollogies, canttellya, I thought it was “cantellya.”

    Mike

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