Got any other tired old and LAME uphemisms for us?

Apollo on Steroids perhaps?

Nobody is buying it.

I am aware of the attempts to eliminate the promotion part of FAA’s aviation mission, dating to the ValueJet crash and the raise of the discount carriers. And there will likely be another wave following the recent grounding of aircraft through missed inspections this Spring.

But organizational cultures die hard and a significant portion of the FAA’s budget is still focused on promotion of aviation via money for airport construction, capital improvements and research on aviation via universities. Although it is justified now by its potential to improve aviation safety the reality is that this spending also serves to promote the aviation industry by lowering industry costs. For example if an FAA grant covers 90% of the cost of a runway expansion at a local airport for “safety” reasons, the impact goes beyond safety to allowing the airport to accommodate larger business aircraft without raising landing fees or local taxes significantly. Spaceport proponents have long argued for a similar FAA role in funding commercial spaceports.

Similarly a FAA AST funded focus to improve the reliability of launch could also be justified under its mission to facilitate the safety of launch operations. If the mission of the FAA AST is also to promote commercial launch operations so much the better to justify the creation of such a research budget.

As for the dollar amount. That really depends on what you wish to accomplish with it. If you want to follow the NACA model for growing an industry then a modest budget, funneled through universities would be the strategy. This was the basic NACA model in the 1920’s and 1930’s. And the model still used in the FAA’s Centers of Excellence for its research grants.

Granted you won’t get any X-Rockets funded that way, but it would go a long way towards helping many of the New Space firms reduce the technology risk of their designs. Just as the teaming of early aviation firms with local universities via the NACA reduced their risk. And produced innovators like Kelly Johnson.

If your goal is just to get a son of SLI or a mini-COTS via the NACA model to fund a bunch of X-Rockets then that is not likely to be any more successful. The New Space firms that would benefit most will still need to reduce their technological risk before any investors step in. Look at the RpK case. And if you provide a flood of government money it will just turn them into government contractors like Orbital. Also there is no real sentiment in Congress for such mega-million solutions for CRATS at the moment. And unlikely to be even if the spaceflight Gap becomes an issue. Any crash programs will go to the majors via NASA, not New Space, and focus on the speed of the results, not CRATS. Expect spam in a can on an EELV as the likely result.

By contrast a modestly funded R&D office managed by the FAA AST utilizing the existing FAA Centers of Excellence is quite doable using only the addition of a line item to the next DOT budget. And likely to produce your desired results of growing the industry. Yes it will take time, there will be no overnight breakthroughs. But I think most people in New Space are recognizing that building launch systems take time. Look at SpaceX, look at VG. Loook at XCOR. All have scaled back their rhetoric of overnight success they used to preach in the old days. .

Note that the proposed research budget for the FAA Centers of Excellence is $191 million. So a modest $20-30 million CRATS budget would be very practical and might even be tacked on the next FAA budget with only a minor effort by the New Space community.

Remember the Prefect is the enemy of Good. The NACA was not prefect when it was funded. It was a compromise tacked on as a $5000 amendment to a Navy Appropriation Bill that just slipped through Congress unnoticed. It grew into its role as the king of the X-Planes over forty years in response to serving industry needs one problem at a time. If you really want to grow an industry like New Space with a NACA type of organization you must be willing to design it to grow itself one problem at a time just as NACA did. Not try to jump start it with a new COTS or SLI level of funding. There is nothing that will doom New Space faster then a flood of government money as was demonstrated by RpK and COTS.

Actually, it’s the other way around. AST has a dual mandate to regulate and promote the commercial space transportation industry in the US, while the rest of the FAA is charged with regulation but not promotion of aviation. (See GAO report 07-16 for a discussion of this, starting on page 30, including whether those dual roles should be separated.)

Downmass is why I mentioned Joe Carroll’s work. On a phase II SBIR level funding he developed a tether based recoverable system that could bring 150 kg back to the surface and this system is scaleable. If you want to bring more back, I am sure that Spacex’s human capsule can be used to do that quite easily.

What we need in the micrograv business is to take the limited production hardware up, do what is needed, and then return the material of interest. Some of the other ideas, such as my orbital assembly, need no return mass at all.

Quit picking at nits when there is a huge universe of opportunity opening up.

Another huge milestone just happened with Space Adventures purchasing their own Soyuz. There are some amazing possibilities starting to open up and as we move forward the private interests will be able to at first compliment, then suppliment, then supplant the existing systems. This will be evolutionary, not revolutionary until the moment when the market is large enough for the investment to pay off for a revolutionary approach.

CATS and CRATS are 20th century ideals that simply will not happen without FRATS (I like that change) being fully developed. The great part is that all the chess pieces are in place to do so.

I understand that you are very specifically talking about cheap access to LEO, but I’d urge one note of caution about over-extending analogies. The aerospace industry may offer a good model for flying through the atmosphere to LEO; it offers a terrible model for going beyond that. With its spectacularly inhospitable environment, long travel times, need to carry your resources with you, and lack of existing destinations requiring supply, deep spaceflight is far more similar to early sea-going travel, and beyond getting to LEO I think the development of air travel has very little to teach us.

I think we should keep in mind in our arguments that atmospheric flight to LEO and deep space transportation involve vastly different environments and an economic model that works for one is unlikely to work for the other.

— Donald

Big difference, FAA does not research aircraft reliability

I am sure this is news to the FAA Centers of Excellence

http://www.coe.faa.gov/mission_vision.htm

The purpose of the research element is to identify and conduct high quality research that will foster significant advances in transportation science and technology and generate basic, fundamental and applied knowledge in the appropriate disciplines.

Although aircraft reliability is not the problem it used to be airworthy assurance I think would fall under that classification.

http://www.coe.faa.gov/funding.htm#AACE

Of course they are not the mega contracts you get from a NASA or the USAF, but they are in the range of the old NACA work in the 1930’s which was usually done in partnership with universities. It was only after WWII that NACA worked with the USAF on larger projects via the X-Plane program.

But if its a program of mega contracts to build X-Rockets for CRATS then you are probably looking at NASA again. But that was not the impression I got from reading the article.

But again, why not leverage what the FAA has been doing for years with aviation to the New Space industry?

Our current NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, shows some very strong points. I think, though, he would be helped quite a bit by a man such as his predecessor, Sean O’Keefe. O’Keefe came into an agency to which major damage had been done by the previous administrator. While O’Keefe was certainly not technical, he showed an extraordinary ability to communicate with people of all different types. Griffin, in contrast, has spent his career — especially his early years — working with techies. This shows up in many ways. Yes, I would also Jeff Foust and Keith Cowing in some sort of formal adviser roles. Keith brings an insider/outsider take on things. Jeff is independent and younger. He’s also quite likable.

Oh — it’s not really fair criticizing Griffin for having shortcomings with regard to internal NASA politics. Having shortcomings vis-a-vis internal NASA politics is normal. I remember one time Keith posted a note about Goddard had different unwritten rules from group to group. As someone who worked there, I can only agree. Failing at least some of the time with regard to internal NASA politics seems normal — especially when some of the people making the rules show significant psychological problems.

Oh, if you like these ramblings, you might be interested in my blog posting Aerospace Workforce Issues.

Big difference, FAA does not research aircraft reliability

When a demand for downmass develops systems to deliver it will as well. But having so many options for upmass is good.

Instead of developing new and innovating receivers, products, and programming, and marketing them, they are using all their energy playing corporate and financial games that benefit nobody but managers with ridiculous parachutes and stockholders (of which, admittedly, I am one) — an encapsulation of much of what is wrong with American industry today.

Just as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hill, etc. did in the golden age of business. Look at U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. Markets aren’t about progress, but about self-interest. Progress is only a side-effect in the battle to control the market.

Sounds like the Satellite Radio industry is demonstrating pure market based competition at its best, eliminating your competition via buyout, merger or driving it out of business. In this case merger seems to work better then fighting over subscribers. Ayn Rand should be smiling that the government decided not to stop it.