On-Orbit Refueling Primer

I've talked a lot about the concept of on-orbit propellant transfer, and how important it is to reducing the costs of interplanetary and cislunar transportation. However, I realize that there aren't a lot of easy to find resources discussing the problem, and many readers may not know all of what's involved in the process. While I'm not an expert in the area by any stretch of the imagination, I think I know enough about the problem and the various ideas suggested that I should be able to give a brief introduction for those unfamiliar with the topic.

Rendezvous and Docking
The first step in on-orbit propellant transfer is actually getting the tanker to the vehicle it is refueling (or the orbital propellant depot). I won't spend too much time on this, because although this is a definitely complicated task, it is one that has been discussed thoroughly elsewhere. The basic idea of orbital rendezvous if for the vehicle being launched to try and match positions and velocity vectors with the object it is wants to dock with.

There has been a lot said about the difficulty of orbital rendezvous, but one needs to keep in perspective the fact that the US has been doing this for decades now. NASA did have some problems with their DART spacecraft, but that stems more from the fact that they were trying to do a fully autonomous rendezvous, as opposed to a rendezvous that is either performed by a pilot on board, or remotely by telepresence. For on-orbit refueling in cislunar space, there really isn't a need to do the rendezvous autonomously, because communication lag is so short that even if you don't have a pilot on-board, telepresence is adequate.

A quick distinction also ought to be made between the two standard ways of mating two vehicles in orbit,docking and berthing. Docking is basically flying the two vehicles together using a heavy mechanism that latches the two together after they've contacted. Berthing uses some sort of robotic arm to connect the two vehicles together in a much gentler manner, requiring a much lighter connection system. The Russians have prefered docking systems in the past, while the US has been more a fan of berthing systems. A orbital propellant depot might very well have a robotic arm to allow for berthing of tankers and visiting vehicles, while a refueling system that connects directly to the vehicle might just use a docking system. It might also be possible to have a small robotic arm or set of small arms on the tanker if that turns out to be a useful idea.

Umbilicals
Once the two vehicles have been mated, some method for connecting the propellant tank on the tanker to the receiving vehicle must be implemented. A manned tanker might have manually attached plumbing umbilicals, while an unmanned tanker might have automatically connecting ones. Depending on how good the alignment is during docking/berthing, this could be a relatively complex or relatively simple. The number of connections that need to be made depends on how many fluids are carried on one tanker. A tanker could carry just one propellant, or it could carry several liquids and gasses. The umbilicals may need to be able to transfer gas from the ullage of the tank being filled back to the tank being emptied. Lastly, umbilicals will also likely need to provide at least some data to the tanker if possible to let it know when to start and stop.

Propellant Management
Probably the most difficult part of on-orbit propellant transfer is the propellant management. One of the difficulties in designing propellant tanks that function in zero-G is controlling where the liquid is within the tank. The reasons why propellant location within the tank is important are:

• Many rocket engines can be damaged if their feedlines are sucking gas in, particularly if the engine is turbopump fed.


• If the vent line isn't uncovered, you could end up venting liquids as well as gasses--this is wasteful, and could be dangerous depending on the liquid.


• If the propellant is floating around unconstrained, the vehicle's CG can move substantially, particularly for high mass ratio vehicles like lunar transfer tugs. Sloshing propellants can make it very tough to dock with, among other problems.

With these reasons in mind, you generally want to keep the liquid near the outlet (usually at the engine end of the tank), and the gas near the vent port, especially during docking and propellant transfer, and immediately prior to engine firing.

This is particularly important for propellant transfer. As you transfer propellant from one tank to the other, it is a lot easier if you can also either vent the excess gas from the one tank, or suck it off and use it to pressurize the transfer tank. This requires making sure that the outlet of the transfer tank is always covered with liquid (so you aren't just passing gas between the tanks--that would be impolite to say the least), and that the vent port on the receiving tank is always uncovered.

For storable (ie room temperature or non-cryogenic) propellants, there are some rather easy ways of dealing with this problem. The best being using a flexible diaphragm. The diaphragm is basically a flexible sheet of plastic or elastomer that separates the gas from the liquid. If the diaphragm is impermeable, you can always assure that the gas and liquid are where they're supposed to be. This also gives you a lot more flexibility with how you pressurize the tank.

The problem is that it's hard to find diaphragms that are both compatible cryogenic propellants (particularly LOX), while still being sufficiently flexible at those temperatures to avoid cracking and eventually leaking. While the flourocarbon that XCOR is using as the matrix for their LOX compatible composites might just do the trick, there's no way of knowing how many cycles it will last for. Not to mention that cryogenic liquids tend to have boiloff issues as heat enters the propellant tank from the outside environment. This can quickly create gas bubbles on the liquid side that now need to be dealt with.

There are fortunately several avenues that could be explored for solving this problem, depending on what sort of propellant transfer scheme is used. Since this is just an introduction, I'll just list a few toss a few out (some conventional, some rather wacky) without elaborating too much for now:

• Gravity Gradients or Tethers--When a vehicle is said to be in a specific orbit, it is actually the CG of the vehicle that is in that orbit. Any portion of the vehicle closer to the gravity well is actually going slower than the orbital velocity of a chunk of matter at it's precise distance from the center of the planet, while any portion of the vehicle further out than the CG is actually going a little bit faster. This acts like a very slight outward acceleration on anything past the CG, and a very slight downward acceleration on anything planetside of the CG. In small vehicles, these forces are almost negligible. Just enough that some ultraprecise microgravity experiments can get thrown off, but not enough to do too much for short-term propellant settling. These settling forces need to be strong enough to offset any unsettling forces caused by things like equipment vibrations. Over the space of days or weeks, even a constant 1 millionth of a G (in abscence of any other disturbing forces) is sufficient to settle propellant tanks, but in the presence of disturbing forces, and with the time constraints inherent in economically viable propellant transfer, the accelerations need to be bigger.
  
  For very long propellant tanks, large propellant depots oriented with their axis pointing down toward the center of the earth, or vehicles hooked to a sufficietly long tether, the accelerations can be sufficient to settle the propellants in a reasonable amount of time. This requires at least a dozen or more meters long between the two ends of the vehicle, or between the two ends of the station (or the end of the tether and the opposite end of the vehicle). For permanent propellant depots, it is even better if the tether is of the electrodynamic sort, being used for reboost. The constant, but small, acceleration caused by an electrodynamic tether is more than sufficien to insure adequate propellant settling for quick propellant transfers.
  
  A quick google search on tethers and propellant settling can get you more details.


• Tank Pistons--If the propellant tanks are cylindrical, lightweight pistons can be used instead of a diaphragm. Propellant tanks on space vehicles tend to be very light compared to the liquid they hold. It isn't unheard of for LOX tanks to be only about 1% of the mass of the LOX they hold for low pressure tanks. Adding an extra tank segment long enough to put a tank piston/float that won't cock will only add another 20-30% to the tank mass, plus the mass of the piston. This might make the tank 2-3% of the propellant mass instead of just 1%. Liquid Hydrogen is low enough density, and requires enough insulation that tanks for it tend to be a lot heavier per lb of propellant, and getting good seals that work at LH2 pressures is more challenging, but this still may be a valid solution to the problem.


• Surface Tension Screens--These are the preferred method on most satellites, but usually end up being a lot more complicated than they sound. Basically, screens, baffles, and other structures are placed througout the tank so that the propellants will stick to the screens. Unfortunately, these can get heavy fast, tend to result in large amounts of unused propellants stuck in the tank at the end of firing, and can cause boiling issues with low temperature cryogens like LH2. But they are still an option


• Fans--one could use a fan with a magnetic coil outside the tank (think flowmeter in reverse) to create sufficient force to send the liquid to one end of the tank. Besides the problem of having moving parts, this might also result in lots of gas entrainment in the liquid if the velocity is too high. It might also augment heat transfer between the liquid and the gas (which may or may not be bad). This would probably need to be used in conjunction with a surface tension screen, but could be used to reduce the complexity of that system.


• Metallic diaphragms--there have been ultra thin-walled metallic diaphragms that could work down to cryogenic temperatures. However, due to wrinkling and other issues, these tended to be single-use items. With modern materials, though, this may now be feasible.


• Spin Gravity--if you are docking the tanker directly to a vehicle instead of depot, it may be possible to spin the two end over end, using the vehicles' RCS systems, producing some centrifugal forces. Only a very slow rotation is needed, probably on the order of .001-.01G might be sufficient, which implies very low RPMs.


• Propulsive Venting--if one of the propellants is LH2, the boiloff from that can possibly be vented through a low-pressure cold-gas thruster to produce just enough thrust to settle propellants a bit. If you're going to toss it anyway....


• Ion drives--ion drives have such low T/W that you could possibly fire an ion drive to settle tanks, and so long as you transfer the propellant fast enough, the actual orbital velocity change should be relatively minute. Not to mention that you don't waste as much propellant. Could cause some interesting issues with ion jet impingement....

There's probably more ways to skin the cat, but this article is just supposed to be an intro, and it's already too long as it is.

Comments?

Light Blogging

Well, another Wednesday night rolls around, and I find myself at home babysitting again. Things have gotten rather busy at work over the last week or two, now that we've are pretty much done with engine test preparations, and are moving into design of our first demonstrator vehicle (XA-0.1). Between performing the engine testing, and getting into the design work I'm in charge of, I'll be rather busy for most of the forseeable future. While that means that blogging may be a little lighter than it has been in the past, I should still be able to put up some thoughts on Wednesdays, and the occasional comment here or there on other days.

X-Prize Cup/Self Promotion

The company I'm with, Masten Space Systems, is now one of the sponsors for the X-Prize Cup personal spaceflight exposition. I'll probably be there with my family, as will David Masten (the boss), and Michael Mealling (our VP of business development). We won't be demoing anything there this year, but we will have a stand there with information about what we're up to.

It'll definitely be interesting to see how the X-Prize Cup turns out. There's some definite hurdles to jump, such as getting a reasonable regulatory setup, building up the infrastructure, getting sufficient branding and interest, etc. But there's also a lot of potential too, particularly for helping smaller entrepreneurial firms get into the business. I particularly like their race ideas that involve teams having to demonstrate quick turn-around times for their vehicles. I think we'll see a lot of innovation in flight operations coming out of this event, and maybe a decent amount of funding for small teams trying to push some of the technological envelope.

In spite of the fact that it'll be a few years till they are fully operational with all of their races, the expositions over the next few years should be quite interesting. Hopefully by next October we'll have an XA-0.4 flight demonstrator to show off to the public. Should be a lot of fun.

Comments Experiment

Some people had mentioned in the past that they didn't like having to be Blogger members in order to comment. Blogger recently added a word verification feature to the comments section, which requires commenters to read and manually type in the letters shown before their comments can be posted. So, I'm going to try out an experiment. Basically, I've switched the comments settings so now anyone can comment, regardless of if you have a Blogger account or not, and have turned on the word verification feature to try and avoid comment spam. If this works out, I'll leave it this way.

Jonny Bloggin

Tiff bought us a digital camera for my birthday (and I bought her a 256MB memory card), so I figured I'd post a few pictures of our little Jonny. Because being doting parents, we really don't take too many pictures of anything other than him:

Interesting Orbital Space Tourism Numbers

In the light of Virgin Galactic's recent announcement of the possibility of doing an orbital "SpaceShip 3" if their SpaceShip 2 is succesful enough, I ran into a rather interesting bit of information this afternoon regarding orbital tourism. I had been poking around a NASA website that had copies of the final CER reports from the various companies that had been picked for the round one paper studies for the CEV. I saw some other interesting ideas (and noticed some interesting trends) that probably deserve their own post when I get time, but the thing that really stuck in my mind was from t/Space's presentation [Note: This is a ~3MB PDF file, the part discussed below starts on page 44 if you want to follow along--Jon]. Most of the stuff in their presentation was covered by them at the RTM VI conference, but the part they hadn't mentioned was a study performed on the prospects of orbital tourism.

On doing a little further research, I'm no longer clear if they (or Futron) did additional research on the topic, or if these numbers were just a reanalysis of the original results of Futron's 2002 Space Tourism Market Study. However, the results are still interesting. I happened to have a .pdf copy of the Futron study on my computer, so I just reread all the sections talking about orbital tourism. What appears to be the key difference between the forecasts that Futron came up with for orbital tourism, and the numbers that t/Space did had to do with the following key assumptions:

• Futron assumed that the Soyuz would be the only available space tourism vehicle between now and 2015


• Futron assumed that the price would start at $20M and decline gradually to $5M per person over the next 15 years


• Futron assumed that all flights would require 6 months of training in Russia

The key thing that t/Space noticed was that as the price dropped, the interest rises rapidly. As they point out, while there are only about 6,000 houses worldwide that have a net value of $200M or more, there are 100,000 with a net value of $20M or more. Futron noted that for suborbital flights, most wealthy people are only willing to spend about 1.5-5% of their net value on the flight, but that for orbital flights, the amount Tito and Shuttleworth paid was closer to 7-10% of their net value. Truly wealthy people usually only have a small amount of their value in readily liquid assets, most of their value is in things like stocks, bonds, houses, rental properties, etc. The key as t/Space saw it was to reduce the price far enough that a much larger market segment would be interested.

Based on the idea of a lower-cost vehicle (ticket price $1-5M), that was designed to be more spacious and comfortable, operated out of the US, and requiring only 1 month of training, and capable of flying as often as they had passengers, they used the results from the Futron study to come up with an estimate of demand and revenue. They showed results for both the 1.5% and the 5% of net value levels (instead of the 10% assumed by Futron), and for ticket prices of $1M, $2.5M, and $5M. They didn't include a deduction of interest in latecomers due to the "pioneering reduction" like Furton did, and they assumed that flying from the US would increase the worldwide demand by the same amount as it would the US demand (Futron assumed only North Americans would be more likely to fly if the vehicle were American). The S-curve approach they used to model acceptance over time seemed a little different too. While the initial ramp up was rather slow at first(only 1% of the total pool of those who would be interested were assumed to fly per year), the percentages they assumed toward the far end of the column seemed way too high. 97% of those interested flying every year? Yeah right. Admittedly, the number of high net worth households should increase substantially over the next several years as nations like China, India, and Russia join the first world, but I still would only take anything much past 10 years with the appropriate sized grain of salt.

All that said, the results were rather impressive.

Assuming the worst case numbers (that most people would only spend 1.5% of their total net value on the trip), the total first year revenue was between $40M and $340M, with the lower ticket prices ($1M and 2.5M) being much higher revenue than the $5M. By 2015, anywhere from $350M to $3B in revenue per year was likely. That's starting to get rather respectable. That's also still assuming only 8% of the total available people who fit all the requirements would be interested.

One interesting piece of data. If you assumed the 5% of net value level of interest, the highest revenue predicted was for the $2.5M ticket, while if you assume that people will only pay 1.5%, the $1M ticket is much better. What that seems to mean is that as orbital spaceflight becomes more common, ticket prices will need to drop in order to increase revenue further to offset the "pioneer deduction" effect Futron mentioned.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd draw attention to this analysis. While it assumes several things that don't exist yet (low cost, high flight-rate RLVs being the biggest one), it really does show the potential scale of the market involved. If a company can develop an RLV for a cost low enough that they could still offer $1M tickets and still make money, they will likely do very, very well.

I wonder how these numbers would play out for a commercial lunar flyby or for a lunar landing....

SpaceHab Announcement and Launch Services Ideas

Now that I have little Jon asleep (man that kid can sure be cute--now that I have a digital camera, I may just have to post some pictures soon), I have a few minutes to blog a few thoughts I've been having today.

The first one was about a Space.com article about some of the work that SpaceHab is doing. SpaceHab is an interesting company. One of those that got founded with the help of the Citron brothers back in the day. Those guys are amazing (Rick in particular). They've managed to raise literally billions of dollars for private space companies over the years (something like almost $3B between SpaceHab, Orbital Sciences, and Kistler Aerospace), thus proving that it is actually possible to raise mind boggling amounts of money for space projects if you do things right. On the sad side, most of those companies have ended up nearly as bureaucratic as the big NASA/DoD contractors, with Kistler not even managing to build a simple TSTO RLV in spite of raising $800M!

But on the other hand, SpaceHab and Orbital have been profitable, and SpaceHab has actually managed to keep a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit about it. Back in the day when the Artemis Project first started talking about trying to put together a commercial manned lunar mission, the intention was to use some SpaceHab modules that had been developed for the shuttle as the backbone of the system.

I think that Columbia was a wakeup call for SpaceHab. They lost one of their modules when Columbia crashed, and now with the Shuttle about to be shut down in the next few years, they're starting to look at where to go from here. And fortunately, unlike ATK, they actually appear to be taking the route of trying to meet people's needs in a cost effective manner, instead of trying to get Uncle Sugar to keep them in business. Not only that, but it looks like they are even funding it with their own money (or at least raising the money for the project commercially). I'm starting to regain a lot of respect for them already.

Anyhow, the meat of this article, and a previous one by Alan Boyle is that SpaceHab is starting development work on a family of recoverable spacecraft. These spacecraft would be placed into orbit on top of existing or future launch vehicles. These craft would be able to carry cargo, experiments, or eventually crew into orbit, dock with space stations or other vehicles on orbit, and also are capable of returning to earth's surface for recovery. The vehicle family, dubbed Apex, comes in three sizes:

• The Apex 100, which can carry up to 380kg on non-recoverable flights or 260kg on recoverable ones, is being designed to be launchable on Falcon I, Taurus, or Minotaur.


• The Apex 300, which can carry 4,000kg on non-recoverable flights or about 2,200kg on recoverable ones, is sized to launch on a Delta II, or possibly a Falcon V.


• The Apex 400, which can carry 12,300kg non-recoverable or 8,600kg recoverable, would likely require an Atlas, Delta, Zenit, or maybe Falcon IX to launch (that last one is purely speculation on my part--SpaceX hasn't even announced the Falcon IX's payload yet).

While they are trying to offer these to NASA for ISS resupply, they appear to be seriously trying to go after private markets as well. I liked Jim Baker's comment about Bigelow's Nautilus space station:

“That thing’s going to need clean towels and champagne brought up, there’s that logistics issue there”

In addition to Nautilus and ISS, there are many potentially interesting things that could be done using these craft (depending largely on how expensive they turn out to be):

• Manned flights--SpaceHab mentioned the interest in eventually making manned versions of these modules. The 300 series version could likely orbit up to 4 or 5 passengers at the same time. Might even be worth using it to go after the America's Space Prize, particularly if they are doing this entirely with private funds. The market for orbital tourism could potentially be quite large, especially if prices go down compared to current Soyuz flights (more about that later).


• Microgravity free-flyer station--Several years back there was a proposal for a commercial free-flyer station that would only be occasionally man tended. This would allow for much better microgravity for commercial research and manufacturing. If SpaceHab can actually lower the costs and time involved in working with them on such a vehicle, we might actually see more interest in microgravity research. As it stands now, with the costs, bureaucracy, and long lead-times inherent with doing anything on the Shuttle, microgravity research is in a rather sorry shape. There's nothing like slashing costs and making the whole process quicker turn around and less of a hassle to try and get people interested in this field again.


• Satellite launch--someone recently asked the question that if astronauts were so valuable that we used launch escape systems for them, why not do the same for satellites? While the initial versions of these Apex craft probably don't have LES capabilities, they could at least return the satellite in case of not reaching the right orbit, or having the satellite fail to deploy correctly. While the costs of launch for such a system would likely be higher, the insurance costs could be substantially lower, and for many satellites, the insurance cost is actually almost as high as the launch cost anyway.


• On-orbit satellite construction--Once manned versions of these capsules become available, it might be possible to launch a spacecraft in pieces, and have it assembled, checked-out, and deployed in orbit. As Dennis Wingo of SkyCorp is apt to point out, eliminating the need to do all deployment and checkout automatically from several hundred miles away should reduce spacecraft costs substantially (especially if they are assembled in a shirt-sleeve environment inside the vehicle), while also greatly reducing the probability of satellite failure. Not only that, but such a satellite can be shipped in special vibration dampening containers, and can thus have a much lighter structure, and require much less vibration resistant hardware. The burn-in test can be done with someone right there at hand to fix something if it doesn't work out.


• Propellant delivery--these craft will already need to be capable of performing rendezvous and docking anyhow, adding the additional equipment and tankage needed to deliver fuel to orbital propellant depots, or to space tugs, or directly to lunar transfer vehicles should be not too difficult. The economics of this idea would depend a lot on the actual costs of the vehicle, and how much of the difference in "non-recoverable" vs "recoverable" payloads is due to recovery equipment mass. If the number mentioned mean that they can take that much mass on a round trip, it might very well be that recovering just the craft with empty tanks would not reduce the payload by nearly as much.

There are probably other options that I'm not even dreaming of yet, but an interesting thing to note here is that even though this is only a recoverable vehicle launched on an expendable launch vehicle, it already has some of the very characteristics that make RLVs desirable. The reality is that people don't just care about raw price to orbit. They also care a lot about what services come with the package. Some of those services are really business opportunities all by themselves.

NASA Chooses In-Line Booster

Well, it looks like NASA has decided to go with the ATK Full-Employment Plan instead of trying to develop a lunar architecture that might actually lead to the commercial development of space. Can't say I'm shocked.

Stakeholders or suppliers?

Over at NASAWatch.com, Mr. Cowing tempts us with an interesting tidbit from a press conference which focused largely on the March launch date, and the Minority Opinion addendum which raises grave doubts about NASA management and its structure.

Griffin: "...I think that as NASA we do a disservice to ourselves and to our stakeholders, and frankly, to the taxpayers by creating an appearance that we do not wish to hear what people have to say if it should be negative..."


Aside from my personal feeling that NASA just doesn't want to hear what people have to say, period, irrespective of appearances, something else about that line caught in the back of my brain. I went back and looked it over, and it soon became clear.

With regards to not hearing negativity, Mr. Griffin indicated that would be a disservice to three groups:

NASA
Stakeholders
Taxpayers

It's an interesting way of looking at it, probably because I regard the nation and the taxpayers as the Stakeholders in NASA. We are investing the taxed part of our nations wealth in the commonweal, those things that are of benefit to everyone. We are, in effect, the equity holders in the government because we're where the capital comes from.

I get the feeling that Mr. Griffin is refering to the industrial concerns Boeing & LockMart and various smaller concerns in their orbit. They do have a stake in the space program as a buyer of their products (so they are actually suppliers, and not true stakeholders), but there is no more obligation to them than to any other company in the U.S. of A.

Except to the extent that NASA boxes itself into a corner by how it manages its mandate, delivered to it by the representatives of the true stakeholders: the taxpayers.

Personally, I think we've passed the equilibrium point of aerospace consolidation and are desperately in need of a period of shedding of assets by the big guys (and not just transfering Rocketdyne to an allied industrial concern) and careful nurturing of the entrepreneurial efforts of the little guys. This will allow a flowering of results that may truly turn the U.S. into a space-faring, and not just space-visiting, society. This would be a very, very good thing for our future prosperity and commercial competitiveness.

But that's not the path we're headed down, and I have serious misgivings about the path that we seem to be on. I'm getting an uncomfortable feeling of way too much quid pro status quo going on behind the curtain.

A Battle of Memes?

In case you're wondering why I'm posting so much today, I'm at home tonight babysitting, and little Jon is asleep, so I have a little time on my hands.

There's been a lot of recent discussion in the space corner of the blogosphere about the Innovative Programs group that NASA is creating to pursue "non-traditional" (aka more commercial) approaches to space exploration. There has also been a lot of discussion right now about the more "traditional" Shuttle Derived transportation architecture that Griffin and NASA are trying to push for implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. I noticed that there is a potentially dangerous conflict of memes between the programs that impede the Innovative Programs from really having a chance to get anywhere.

If you look at it, the "critical path" lunar transportation system that NASA is leaning toward uses government funded, designed, built, and operated vehicles. These vehicles will require massive development budgets, and substantial fixed yearly costs. In order to justify these costs, NASA needs to get Congress (and to some extent the public) to believe a few things:

1. Space is inherently very hard


2. Private companies are inherently unreliable


3. Lunar travel requires building vehicles so big that no commercial company would ever do it


4. Doing lunar hardware is so tough, that no private company can possibly do it without a lot of NASA money and expertise

There are probably a few other ideas that I'm not thinking of right now, but you get the general idea.

Innovative Programs, and the approach they want to take, have a contradictory set of ideas that they have to try to convince Congress of:

1. Space can be done succesfully by private companies


2. Private companies are competent and innovative


3. Lunar travel can be done using commercially developed vehicles that have other markets they can serve


4. It's possible to build enough of a commercial market that government can get a large amount of leverage off of a small amount of initial money


5. Lunar development is within the capabilities of private companies

Basically, in order to get funding, each side has to disprove the other. If the private sector is really trustworthy enough to deserve serious funding for IP, why does NASA need to build a huge Shuttle Derived booster? If there's no way that lunar projects can possibly be done with anything smaller than an 80 ton to LEO booster, why even try to sponsor prizes or contracts to develop technologies that really aren't useful (in NASA's opinion)?

Are these two memes reconcilable? I'm not really sure. It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I'm afraid that the amount of money that is at stake here is sufficient that those who benefit from the "traditional" approach are unlikely to give up without a fight.

SpaceX and Learning Curves

I was having a recent discussion with a friend on a space related discussion board, when he made a rather flawed argument that I think deserves further discussion. Recently, I've been pointing out a lot of the problems with the approach that NASA wants to take for its return to the Moon. This has made some von Braunian sorts start to bash private companies like SpaceX in a rather uninformed and knee-jerk fashion.

He brought up some statements made by Elon Musk back in June of 2002 about what SpaceX was trying to achieve, how much he'd do it for, and when it would be ready. Since then, the schedule has slipped substantially (Q3 2005 instead of Q4 2003), and the budget has gone over by quite a bit. His analysis was that Musk was naive, and is now learning how tough rockets really are. The implication being that now that SpaceX knows "how tough space is", that they will now budget a lot more time and money in the future for development projects, and maybe will stop making as big of claims for what it will achieve.

The problem with this as I see it is that my friend is ignoring the effect of the learning curve. When any company starts doing something, there is a learning curve. The company starts out with some important lessons that they haven't learned yet. This is true for any industry, not just space.

For example, my first engineering job, after I graduated back in '99 had me doing sheet metal design for the first six months I was there. I had never done sheetmetal design before in my life. It took me quite a while to come up with the first iteration of the sheet metal design for our first prototype. It had many problems with it, and I learned a lot about CAD design, working with suppliers, tolerances, doing interference checks, designing sheet metal parts, etc. It was a lot harder and more involved then I had thought. Does that mean that next time I should budget a lot more time to do sheet metal design? Not neccessarily. Now that I understood the basic rules, the next iteration went a lot faster. By the time I left the company to go serve a mission, we had gone through nearly a dozen iterations, almost none of which took as long as that first one.

Back to the example of SpaceX, I think there is good reason to believe that their next engine development program will go faster. Yes, engine design is tougher than they may have thought in June 2002, but now they know a lot more about it. They can avoid previous mistakes, capitalize on previous experience, leverage off of previous work, and previously installed infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX could build a 200,000lbf Merlin-2 type engine in half the time that it took them to develop the Merlin-1. Likewise, I think they will be able to come a lot closer to their time and cost goals for Falcon V than they did with Falcon I.

Space isn't inherently that much harder than almost any other field of modern engineering design. It's tough, but so is automotive or airplane design. There is a learning curve. Companies on their first project, or trying to do cutting edge work in a new field will often have cost and schedule slips. One should be very careful though in how one extrapolates from the experience they had with thier first forays into predictions of how things will go in the future.

To a Logician

I've been thinking a lot about the blogosphere in general lately, and one of the things that recently popped into my mind was a poem written by my grandmother back when she was studying English at Stanford:

To A Logician

Say you thus and say you so--
Tell me, do you really know
What it is you speak about?
Does there never come a doubt
As to the validity
Of the things you say must be?
Is it true vocabulary
Really makes a man so very
Much more certain than the rest--
Who, it is to be confessed,
Cannot follow very clearly
All the words you use and merely
Wonder what it's all about?
Come, sir! Do you never doubt?
Say you thus and say you so--
Tell me, do you really know?

~Margaret Tuttle, October 1939

Musings About Agile Space

After taking a brief hiatus due to work concerns, Dan Schrimpsher of Space Pragmatism just posted an interesting reply to my last post.

Dan briefly discusses the idea of change in development processes, and brings up the concept of what is called frequently called "agile" development. In his own words:

Agile development was the created with the idea that change isn't bad. It isn't good, it just is. It will happen, so why not design your system from the beginning to be fast, light, and flexible.

I think this is a very important concept myself. Many of the grand plans I see coming out of NASA, space enthusiasts, and even many space companies seem to imply a static world. One where nobody else does anything in space other than buy your goods or services, or fly on your vehicles. This is related to my whole rant against monocultures.

Reality is quite different from these static worlds. Not only are there other companies, groups, countries, etc pursuing various space projects of their own, there are also many non-space related groups pursuing their own techologies, markets, etc. that all have to interact together. Michael Mealling brought up the concept of Value Networks during the RTM conference. The interesting thing is that the more you think about it, these networks are constantly evolving and adapting. The history of the civilization is one of constant change. Of technologies, markets, and free association interacting in sometimes quite rapid and unexpected ways. As Dan puts it, change isn't good or bad, it just is. Whether you're NASA or a private company, you'll get just as screwed if you ignore change.

While I'm sure there are all sorts of good business books written about these topics that some of my more enlightened readers could probably point out, I think the answers really just boil down to common sense. The main thoughts I have focus on incrementalism and modularity.

If your crystal ball is blurry, and can't see very far in the future, make shorter term plans. Use a more incremental development process. Don't try to go straight for lunar transportation systems all in one fell swoop. Find intermediate markets that can be served along the way. Find places where you can start growing your future markets using those intermediate ones.

Don't try to design your whole system as one massive unitary system. Modularity is your friend. Make break points and design in interfaces where other companies can interact more easily with your system as the market develops. The success of open architectures during the PC revolution seem to be particularly interesting. How many of the orginal periphrial companies from back in the 80s still are in business today? Yet we still have plenty of choice with hard drives, disk drives of various sorts, etc. We've moved from those big floppy disks to the 3.5" disks to Zip disks and CD-ROMs, and DVDs and flash drives, all without the whole system having to be redesigned from scratch. How exactly does this apply to space development? I can't honestly say I'm sure. I think that breaking down transportation systems into modular pieces, with well defined interfaces is a good way to go. It'll be interesting to see if Boeing or Lockheed eventually sees the light though and decides to become the IBM of space.

Some Constructive Suggestions for NASA

It's been a little while since I last posted anything to the blog. Michael Mealling suggested that after the RTM articles, it might be a good idea to take a break for a week or so, in order to not burn myself out. Between that piece of advice, the fact that the ideas I wanted to write about last week are only about half-way baked, and how many trips we needed to make to our remote test site for my day job last week, blogging has been pretty light. We're still going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks, but I'll try to find some time to post occasionally.

Anyhow, I've noticed that a lot of my posts recently have been rather negative about NASA, and not particularly constructive. While I probably am not going to stop bringing up what I see as legitimate concerns with NASA's policy choices, I figured it was about time to post something a wee bit more constructive.

I wanted to take a few minutes to briefly describe one possible way that NASA could better organize it's return to the moon. It probably is still a far cry from perfect, probably isn't as purely libertarian as I would prefer, and may not have a chance in heck of ever happening, but I figured it would be worthwhile to put a few thoughts on the table.

A Modest Proposal
The basic idea is to have NASA change the lunar transportation architecture from a closed, shuttle-derived system, to an open, commercially launched architecture.

Instead of developing two new heavy lift launch vehicles, NASA should go with an architecture that dry-launches the various components, and then refuels them on-orbit using fuel modules boosted by existing or future launch vehicles. The lunar lander module would be a single stage lunar orbit to surface and back vehicle instead of the two stage, Apollo-esque system they have now.

Potential Benefits
By using on-orbit refueling, and by having the lunar lander return to lunar orbit, the vehicles could be reused multiple times, greatly reducing the costs per mission. This style of architecture is also more able to take advantage of lunar derived propellants if they become available.

By putting the propellant launch needs out on the open market, the price of launching it will be driven down substantially, allowing for more ambitious projects. There is a current glut in the 10-20 ton to LEO launch vehicle market, and prices would drop considerably with higher utilization. The high launch prices currently bandied about by SDV supporters are high precisely because these vehicles are used far less frequently than the infrastructure was designed to handle. Higher flight rates would drive the per launch prices down substantially compared to their current place, and with competition from companies like SpaceX, launch prices might actually start getting close to where they need to be for a sustainable architecture.

This architecture has the benefit that it can rely on existing launchers, while still being able to take advantage of future lower-cost launch vehicles if they become available. Between Atlas V and Delta IV, there is plenty of currently idle US launch capacity that could be used. SpaceX with their Falcon V and IX could eventually be tapped, as could Zenit, Proton, Soyuz, or Arianne V if the government were willing to purchase launch on an international market. This could also encourage future players with RLVs or low cost ELVs to enter the market, without putting them on the critical path like Griffin is afraid of. In contrast, if someone came up with a magical RLV that cost $50/lb to orbit next year, NASA would have to completely change its whole architecture to benefit from it.

There is an additional benefit in that by going with multiple suppliers, the program has less programatic risk of any one supplier going out of business or having to stand-down their launcher due to a launch accident. Not to mention avoiding the programatic risk of having the sole launch vehicle canceled due to cost, like the Saturn V.

If NASA doesn't trust the commercial sector to provide on-orbit refueling capacity, they could develop a docking and propellant transfer module that could be integrated into otherwise dumb propellant tanks that could then be launched by commercial providers. The commercial provider would launch the tank with module into LEO, then the module itself would perform the docking and propellant transfer maneuvers, followed by a deorbit burn after the propellant has been transfered. A propellant depot in LEO isn't required, but might make logistics easier in the long term. While using a NASA designed docking and propellant transfer module is probably not as cost effective as having an all commercial system with NASA only defining the docking interface, it at least gets rid of the "last mile problem" and the difficulties of dealing with NASA proximity ops bureaucracy.

Anyhow, this is just a few initial thoughts. I may flesh out various parts of this as time permits, but I wanted to put the basic idea out in the open for some discussion.

Griffin on "Man-Rating"

I just noticed an interesting point brought up in the comments section of a recent post on Jeff Foust's Space Politics blog. The commenter linked to article with an old quote (emphasis mine) by Mike Griffin on human rating:

In other testimony, Griffin has made it clear that he is not opposed to using EELV vehicles effectively unmodified from their current versions to launch crewed vehicles. In a May 2003 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on NASA’s Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program—a short-lived effort to develop a manned spacecraft that was superseded by the CEV—Griffin noted that the term “man rating” dated back to efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to modify ICBMs to carry capsules. “This involved a number of factors such as pogo suppression, structural stiffening, and other details not particularly germane to today’s expendable vehicles. The concept of ‘man rating’ in this sense is, I believe, no longer very relevant.”

He argued that EELVs and other expendable vehicles are already called upon to launch high-value unmanned payloads. “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission?” he asked. “The answer is, of course, ‘none’. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention.”

The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 EELVs, he noted, have a specified design reliability of 98 percent, in line with experience with the premier expendable vehicles to date. If such a vehicle was used to launch a crewed spacecraft equipped with an escape system of just 90 percent reliability, he noted, the combined system would have a 1-in-500 chance of a fatal accident, “substantially better than for the Shuttle.”

So, here Griffin is more or less saying that the Delta IV and Atlas V could be used pretty much as is for launching people. However, not too much later, when he started getting into full swing with his pitch of The Stick, and the in-line SDV (now apparently dubbed the "ILV" by NASA), he completely switched tunes, as can be seen from this article. Once again, quoting Griffin:

[T]here would be a bunch of changes that would have to be put into the EELV to human rate it, and I don’t know that that’s the most fiscally sound path for NASA to go down. And frankly, I don’t know that the EELV community would welcome us getting into their production lines in order to make those kinds of modifications.

I'm confused now. Which is it? Are Delta IV and Atlas V good to go right out of
the box? Is man-rating an antequated concept that mostly dealt with converting old ICBMs into launch vehicles? Or is man-rating a launcher a process so onerous and difficult that the costs justify a $5B launcher development project instead?

Realistically speaking, the main add-ons that have been suggested were engine health monitoring systems. These let you know if something is going wrong with the engine, so you can shut it down, and in this case eject the capsule. Usually engines don't fail instantly, there is often tell-tale signs that something is going awry long before a catastrophic failure can occur (even for engines designed at the bleeding edge of technology with razor thin margins like the SSME). One suggested system uses spectroscopy on the engine plume to detect problems, such as if the mixture ratio is shifting from what the vehicle thinks its delivering to the engines. This might be indicative of a chamber burn through that is now leaking extra propellant into the chamber. The problem is that doing this doesn't require billions of dollars, thousands of pounds, or tons of modifications to the launch vehicle. When the DC-X program was moved to NASA and they upgraded it to its DC-XA configuration, they added several of these sensor systems for a trivial cost and time expenditure. We're talking low millions, and a couple dozen pounds. All you're doing is mounting another sensor or two or three, and some wiring to send that data up to the payload fairing. This isn't something that should take billions of dollars or require subtantial rework. Basically, this argument is bogus.

The real answer to why Griffin is changing his tune may have come out in his next sentance (emphasis again mine):

Right now the path we think is the most favorable is the shuttle-derived, in part because that gives us the best work force transition issues.

Basically, the real reason why the VSE architecture is being diverted into a shuttle-derived direction is entirely due to jobs issues. In order to maintain support, NASA needs to keep people employed in key congressional districts. It isn't the difficulty of earth orbit rendezvous, it isn't the difficulty or cost of man-rating, it isn't even the "unreliability" of private enterprise. It's entirely about making sure that enough pork is distributed to the right places.

We should support this why?

Dribs & Drabs II

So I'm reading through the leaked reports on the new architectures that Keith Cowing has posted over at NASAWatch.com's subsidiary SpaceRef. In a sense reading it is almost like a slow motion train wreck - you know the doom that is coming but nothing can be done to avoid it.

I think the thing that puzzled me the most was the imbalance in cited figures between the two systems studied. While there were a lot of heming and hawing about concerns with EELVs, there seemed to be a complete turnaround with the SDHLV. Here's how much it'll cost, how long it will take to deliver, 100% confidence in results, &c.

The EELVs are initially cited as favorably reviewed, especially the super-sizing: "Planners found in their trade analyses that scaled up variants of both families could lift in excess of 40 metric tons, to as much as 80 metric tons. The latter figure was believed to be the smallest payload envelope a heavy lift design would need to carry in order to participate in a lunar mission."

I'm not sure why 80 mt is the minimal lift requirement. This seems to preclude anything like on-orbit operations such as assembly or post-launch systems verifications.

The negatives?

"Human rating an EELV would result in additional costs.
Any EELV that would be enlarged for heavy lift cargoes would require entirely new launching pads and associated facilities in Florida."

Reading through Mr. Cowing's analysis, it becomes clear that NASA really doesn't want to invest in human-rating (whatever that means) the EELV class of D-IV & A-V, and they don't want to think about facilities upgrades required by their 40 mt (CEV) and 80 mt (Lunar) minimas.

Then we go to the SDHLV:
Shuttle-C (original side-mount cargo design)
development cost of original Shuttle-C - $2.8 billion (c.y.$)
~50 months to produce the first flight vehicle

Option 1:
new side-mount SDV
additional $3.1 billion
four to five more years past shuttle orbiter retirement in 2010

Option 2:
ILV family
additional $5.6 billion to the baseline Shuttle-C development costs
additional 36 to 48 months
require the most modifications to KSC facilities.

So either way we're looking at the investment of between ~$6Bn and $8Bn, and you and I both know that rounds to ~$10Bn (and includes modifications to the launch facilities!). Some of the more obvious hidden expenses are the crawler upgrades that are going to be required and the re-configuring of the launch pads. Some of the more subtle costs are things like the over-engineering of payloads that has to be done on the ground to ensure 100% operability post-launch, since we're not doing any kind of on-orbit assembly or inspection (that sort of thing is tough to build into a parametric model, so tends not to be considered).

The difference to me seems to be that the main architectural differences lie in the differences between the "build-a-little, test-a-little, grow-our-architecture" philosophy and the "all or nothing, shoot for the Moon" philosophy where everything works just perfectly the first time and every time because we've figured out every little thing that could conceivably go wrong and addressed it beforehand.

I'm not privy to the inside workings of NASA, but from what Mr. Cowing has shown us it appears to me that the decision was taken early to go with the SDHLV, and that's where the bulk of the effort went in this study, in an engineering orgy of strap-ons and 109% thrust. I find it inconceivable that NASA's EELV concerns of human-rating and super-sizing and launch-pads are sufficient to cost the taxpayers between $6 and $8 billion.

I'm becoming resigned to the fact that America will be saddled with this behemoth for the next 20 years. The engineers all seem to be going bananas over it (which for me is always a huge red flag).

All the while the rest of the world will work to wrest the remainder of the 20 mt payload market from American launch providers, who will become resigned to essentially break-even on the few launches that have to be done domestically because of technology export limitations.

Using ISS as a starting point, Europe and Russia could easily move to dominate cislunar trade while we're busy leapfrogging to the Moon. Using Bigelow balloons, ATVs, and Klipers & Soyuzes they move to EML-1 and start working on larger broadcast arrays in GEO, while cleaning up the garbage for salvage and learning from the garbage how to build better assets in GEO.

We'll construct a disposable Moon base to do some touch-n-go practice for Mars, try to pawn it off on industry, and if the funding continues we'll be on Mars by 2025 and the "objective" of the VSE will have been achieved.

Except it won't have been, and we'll just have a Kennedyesque "Flags & Footprints" moment on Mars to savor over the years while we buy European anhydrous optic digital binoculars, Japanese vacugel coats, and Russian honeymoon flights to our Moon.

Various Memories

For those of you only interested in my space stuff, I wanted to write about other topics today. Partially because this is Sunday, and I try not to do work or goofing-off on Sundays, and partially because I've been thinking about some other things recently.

Tomorrow's is my birthday, and I will be officially one-quarter century old. I simultaneously feel ancient, and yet still very young and wet behind the ears. Tomorrow is also the three year anniversary of my return from a two year proseletyzing mission in the Philippines. About this time three years ago, I was probably getting on the plane in Manilla. It was the longest birthday I've ever had--lasted for about 30 something hours in two spurts--and it also was the only birthday I've ever had twice, once in the Philippines, and the other time starting over the international date line.

It's kind of ironic. Before I went, I had a friend of mine ask me why I didn't just set up a church related web page, and send out email to everyone about the gospel. I knew it was a kind of silly idea then, but it seems even more silly now. After I got home, and after I had reestablished my school webpage, I started a kind of protoblog, and listed religion as one of the topics I wanted to write about. I think I also said something to the effect on my first post on this blog. I never actually got around to writing a single post. Not because it isn't important to me, not because I was too afraid of others' opinions, but mostly because I couldn't find a good way to express my thoughts and feelings that seemed appropriate for the subject matter. The internet medium is just not particularly well adapted for such topics.

Anyone who actually knows me on a personal level knows that my religious beliefs are such a core part of who I actually am, that you can't really even begin to understand me at all without knowing what I believe. It's not that I merely allow religion to "color my politics", or that I wear it out on my sleeve so to speak. It's more that my understanding about God and his relationship to us is the fundamental lens through which I view everything in life, even if I don't go out of my way on the internet to let people know that is the case.

I learned a lot while serving in that beautiful Island nation. Maybe in the future I'll put up a few pictures and a few stories about things that happened while I was there. I learned much about the power of faith, about the importance of humility, about the dangers of pride, and about the ability to love even those who hate you in return. I learned how to serve, how to keep going long past when you thought that you couldn't go on. I learned a little about effective leadership. I learned how difficult, but how important, patience can be. I learned a lot about my own personal weaknesses, incompetencies, and character flaws. I learned the vital importance of having empathy, compassion, and understanding for others. If you don't even try to understand why other people think and act the way they do, if you never try to put yourself in their position and see through their eyes, you can never make much more than an accidental difference in anyone's life. Well, or at least it will be very, very difficult. Our world could really use a dose of empathy, humility, patience, love, and tolerance.

I learned the power of the gospel to truly and completely change people. I saw drunkards clean up their lives and become leaders. I saw families and marriages heal themselves and become truly happy. I saw truly amazing changes as people accepted the gospel into their lives, repented, and served others. I also saw the destroying power of pride, arrogance, unwillingness to communicate, unwillingness to forgive, inability to allow others to repent and change.

I gained a lasting testimony of the reality of God, and that he does act in our lives. I gained a testimony of personal revelation and inspiration, and the reality that God does still talk to man in our days. A very good friend of mine often likes to voice his agnosticism about the existence of God with the phrase "I don't know, and neither do you!" It's cute, but he's wrong. I do know. I can empathize with those who don't yet know, and I don't look down my nose at others who express doubt or uncertainty. Those feelings are natural, and had I not experienced what I have experienced in my life and on my mission, I would probably be doubtful too. Having been through what I have however, I could no more easily deny what I know than to deny gravity, or claim that the Sun, Moon, and Stars didn't exist...

I think that's probably all I ought to say on that topic today.

Moving back to topics that many readers here might feel more comfortable with, I have another anniversary that just past, and one that is coming up. Two mondays ago was the first anniversary of my starting paid work for Masten Space Systems. I started by doing work remotely at Brigham Young University while I tried to finish my thesis up. It's kind of nice to know that after a year worth of effort, off and on, we finally have a test qualified igniter that is consistently and reliably creating a very robust and roudy flame. We aren't where I had hoped we would be by this point, but I've learned a huge amount about the difference between theory and practice over the last several months. While making a liquid rocket engine test stand has been far more involved than I ever imagined, I'm also more confident than ever that we will soon have a truly safe, high quality, and useful test stand that will allow us to do all of the testing we need to do for a while. It was a tough project, but one that I think is just about there, and at a much higher quality level than I had originally expected.

It's kind of sad to see though that my thesis has barely budged an inch since then. I've actually been temporarily dropped from the program for the time being since I haven't been enrolled in classes for over a year now. I can be readded before I defend my thesis, but that's an extra reminder that I have unfinished business.

Which reminds me of my last anniversary coming up. This Saturday will be the 6th anniversary of my graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Manufacturing Engineering at BYU. I'm not sure, but I think at that summer graduation that I was the youngest person graduating out of a graduating class of about 5000. This goes back to my statement about simultaneously feeling ancient, and yet still young and depressingly wet behind the ears. I'm probably way too tough on myself from time to time, particularly when faced with a problem that is in an area that wasn't covered so well by my undergraduate work. I've still got a long way to go, but I guess I've already come pretty far for someone at my age.

Anyhow, that's all the ramblings I want to share today. I hope that I haven't offended anyone, and I hope I've allowed a little bit of a window into who I am for those of you who don't know me so well. Thanks.

The Importance of Economics in Space Development

I've been talking a lot about the importance of economics to the sustainability of space development and eventual settlement. Well, some would likely go so far as to accuse me of flogging that dead horse a little too much. I'm not sure that's possible.

Brian Dunbar over on his Space for Commerce blog has it right with this Niven quote:

A. E. Van Vogt never worried about what a spacecraft cost. I don't think Isaac Asimov did either.

Nobody ever did until, in the 1950s, Robert Heinlein published "The Man Who Sold the Moon". And nobody did again for a long time. Imitating Heinlein used to be normal, but the science fiction writers of the day couldn't imitate this. None of us had trained for it. The excitement of travel to other worlds is in our nerves and bones, but where is the excitement in economics?

Then we watched mankind set twelve human beings on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.

We saw our space station built in Houston, orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.

Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon, celebrated by grumbling.

My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture of Freedom space station and the legend, "Nine years, nine billion dollars, and all we got was this lousy shirt," and it's years old and wearing out.

Now is economics interesting?

We're never going to see large amounts of interesting things happening in space without commerce playing the leading role. Commerce will only happen when things make economic sense. Without tens or hundreds of commercial dollars being exchanged for every dollar that government spends in space, we're not going to see settlements on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else for that matter. Making the business case connect over and over again for space ventures is the most important thing we need to start doing if we want to space settled and developed in our lifetimes.

Added Trackbacks!

I was kind of annoyed that normal Blogger software didn't include the ability to do trackbacks, as that is a feature that many of my friends often use. So, I finally bit the bullet and signed up with HaloScan. I was going to use them for both comments and trackbacks, when I noticed that they had lots of limitations on their comments for their free accounts. I also noticed that all of my old comments would've been lost in the process. So, after a little thinking, I decided to stick with Blogger comments and add just the code for the HaloScan trackbacks. While I was doing this, I noticed that the font and display for the comments and trackbacks was different, but I was able to figure out how to fix that pretty quickly. Anyhow, comments still require a blogger login (mostly to filter out spammers), and trackbacks are active now. If I end up having lots of trackback spam, I may cancel this in the future, but for now I'm going to give it a try.

RTM Summary

Well, I'm finally done with recapping the Return to the Moon conference, and probably in more detail than anyone else cares for. I figured that after such verbosity, it might be worth a quick summary to pick out what I saw as the most important memes and themes. Clark also has his summary, here.

If I had to sum up the most important thought of the conference in a single word, it would be "execution". Since nobody who's been reading this blog actually expects me to stick to just one word, I'll try to ellaborate quickly.

NASA and commercial space are both at an important crossroads. NASA has an excellent vision before it, but is now admitting that they can't succeed alone--they need private industry. Private space is also at a crossroads. With the X-Prize victory last year, the giggle factor is dieing. People are starting to get excited about space again, including potential investors. But we have to perform, we have to execute, we have to prove that commercial space isn't just a "one act wonder". Both NASA and commercial space are still lacking in credibility, and this is the time to start regaining it.

On NASA's part, they desparately need to not botch the implementation of their Innovative Programs concept. If they can execute on setting up a system of prizes and contracts, with the right incentives, they can actually go a long way toward catalyzing the development of cislunar space. If they botch it, we'll probably get a couple of NASA employees on the Moon, and then have our grandchildren scratching their heads 50 years from now saying "if we could go to the Moon back in 2018 and 1969, why can't we now?"

On commercial space's part, we have the more critical need to execute. Both with those commercial entities that get these non-traditional contracts, and with those that are pursuing purely commercial enterprise, now is the time to deliver. Rex Ridenoure said it best, if commercial space can beat NASA back to the moon (and do so in a profitable, evolvable manner), it will set the tone for space development for the rest of this century. Coming up with ideas in this area is tough enough, but we need to find ways to deliver.

The next few years are probably going to be some of the most critical (and exciting) ones for the development and settlement of space.

Last RTM Session: Space Law and Property Rights

While there were actually several presentations on Saturday other than the Space Law and Property Rights panel, most of those have been better covered by Clark Lindsey over on Hobbyspace (scroll down to Day 3). So, I'll mostly focus on that last panel. This panel was chaired by Berin Szoka, a recent law graduate. Berin formally announced the Institute for Space Law and Policy (ISLAP), and one of its projects, Grokspace. According to Berin, Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation was the brainchild behind the idea, and Berin was they were able to find to run with the idea. The goal of ISLAP as Berin explained it was to provide a credible source of "pro-frontier" legal analysis in order to help the industry. In order to do this, ISLAP is working to build a network of legal experts to try and propose realistic solutions to some of the legal issues that stand in the way of the development of space.

As one of the panel members said the night before at dinner, "he hadn't met a single engineer who didn't think he could have graduated top of his class at Harvard Law, had he only been interested". Unfortunately, the legal opinions of us engineers are often uninformed, biased, and the sort of thing that make real legal experts just cringe (or worse start drooling in delight as they ponder the liabilities you're opening yourself up to). When Berin was asked about what we could do to help, he gave two suggestions. First off, their first major policy issue that they're working on is ITAR reform. He requested specific examples of horror stories people had faced due to ITAR, and also he requested ideas for specific suggestions on how to resolve those problems. Second, the other thing ISLAP needs is some seed capital to get things going. This is a fairly important institution, and I think that as space enthusiasts, and members of the commercial space community, it would be in our interests to try and help Berin and his associates succeed.

Anyhow, the panel on space property rights that Berin chaired was done in a rather unusual fashion, kind of like a talk show. Berin had a few prepared questions, and he would ask them to different panel members, while this was going on, he also had conference attendees write their own questions and pass them up. He then tried to incorporate the best of the questions into the remaining time. The panel members were Wayne White, Jim Dunstan, and Rosanna Sattler.

Seeing as how this was the most complicated of the panels, and also the one I'm least familiar with, I really probably should have written this up first. I'll try to briefly summarize the key ideas I came away with, and I'm also having Berin look over this when he gets some time to see if I missed anything (or misstated anything) important. [Note: after having Berin look this over, he caught a few mistakes that have now been fixed]

One of the first things discussed were the various forms of property in space. As I think Jim pointed out, the status of property rights for each of these types of property are different. Some are actually quite secure, while others are more iffy and uncertain. These include, but probably aren't limited to:

• Real Estate--actual pieces of land


• Things launched into space--satellites, space stations, tugs, etc


• Objects created in space--from microgravity processing for instance


• Orbital slots for various satellites and communication frequencies


• Raw materials extracted in space

The next question was what are the various sources of space law. The list as I remember included:

• Customary Law--law established through previous cases and actions by various entities that have been upheld.


• International Treaties--such as the Outer Space Treaty


• Multilateral Agreements--such as the International Telecommunications Union


• Laws made in specific countries--such as the Space Launch Act, the Deep Seabed Mining Act, etc

Some of the International Treaties that have some impact are the previously mentioned OST, libability conventions, convention for rescue and recovery of astronauts, launch registration conventions, and the Moon Treaty.

A good deal of discussion about the Outer Space Treaty followed. It was noted as several people have discussed in the past, that the OST prohibits the excercise of territorial sovereignty by signatory nations. However, they also pointed out some good parts of the OST, such as the fact that it requires that space be free for use on a non-interference basis. It also establishes the fact that if an entity launches something, it is still theirs. They also mentioned the "common heritage" bit.

Another interesting thing brought up was that the US and USSR have now established a solid customary legal precedent that materials extracted in space are owned by the extractor, and not "commons". Both countries have extracted dozens or hundreds of kilograms of Moon rocks, and nobody has ever disputed their claim to those rocks.

The basic feeling of most of the experts on the panel was that there is already some good precedent and law protecting most of the key property rights needed for space development. As Jim Dunston brought up, if there were sufficiently compelling economic reasons for space utilization, where the financial and technological risks were well enough reduced that only the political risks remained, the political risks would be pretty easily overcome. He gave the example of oil extraction in the Alaska wilderness. There were many legal obstacles to that too, but since the economic case was solid enough otherwise, the legal obstacles were eventually overcome. He doesn't believe that confusion about property rights is really what is holding back lunar business, he believes that lack of solid and realistic business plans is.

That said, some of the panelists still had some near-term suggestions to help resolve some of the ambiguities. They mentioned the idea of targetted statutes in various space interested countries, as well as multilateral agreements between spacefaring nations. They gave the example of how the harvesting of ocean resources was initially in limbo for a while, but through the use first of targetted statutes in the US (The Deep Seabed Mining Act), then various multilateral agreements with other countries, a workable structure was established. As mentioned previously, the International Telecommunications Union is an example of such a multilateral agreement.

Long term though, the panel was fairly unanimous that if off-world settlement is really technologically and economically feasible, the long-term solution is for the formation of sovereign entities offworld. Ie, something akin to the American Revolution, but hopefully in a more peaceful manner, where the offworld settlement declares independence, establishes sovereignty, and then recognizes formally the real estate property rights that were already recognized informally under the previous structure. It was mentioned that the prohibition on excercise of territorial sovereignty was actually a good thing in this regards, as it would make it easier for an off-world entity to declare sovereignty if there isn't anyone already excercising sovereignty over their territory.

Anyhow, it was a fascinating discussion, and I probably haven't done it justice. I have to say though, that what was said made me a lot more optimistic about us being able to resolve satisfactorily the questions of property rights and other policy issues in space. Over on Grokspace and ISLAP they are planning on putting together forums to help discuss some of these topics further. Definitely worth following more in the future.

Comments

Just as a friendly reminder to readers, I've kept the comments option open for all my posts, and I usually do try to reply to them. I've had over 1000 visitors in the last two weeks, and less than half a dozen comments. I am interested in what others think, particularly as I get into more of my thoughts and opinions. Part of the utility of comments in the blogosphere is to supply full-bakedness to half-baked ideas.

Brant Sponberg: Centennial Challenges/Innovative Programs

In order to save time on this section, I'll mostly refer readers to Michael Mealling's post on the topic. I have to say that this is the best (and most important thing) that NASA presented at the whole conference. To me, making sure that NASA implements the Innovative Programs idea correctly will be the key to getting any real, lasting value out of the Vision for Space Exploration.



As the "stair steps" in the image show, this is a set of incremental non-traditional contracts, service procurements, and prizes starting with suborbital flights and leading to small cis-lunar demonstrators. If NASA doesn't bungle this, and if the commercial space industry is able to consistently execute on these deals, most of the key technologies needed for an affordable lunar architecture will be developed. In fact, as I pointed out in Chris Shank's talk, if these key capabilities (such as on orbit propellant storage, cislunar travel, reentry, proximit operations, etc) are developed soon enough, it may not be too late to fix the currently planned lunar transportation architecture. We only have till 2010 or 2011, but if Innovative Programs is succesful enough, a truly sustainable cislunar architecture may be adapted by NASA instead of their current Shuttle-derived architecture. The good news is that if Brant's idea does work, then even if NASA ignores those capabilities, those technologies and capabilities will be "on-the-shelf" for other commercial entities to use. If NASA really wants a commercially flown CNN camera crew waiting for them when they return to the Moon, that's their choice. I'm sure that Bigelow wouldn't mind renting them space for four at his Budget Suites of Selenia.

More RTM Stuff: In-Space Business Models

Well, I've probably gotten about as much readership as I'm going to get out of my RTM coverage, but there were a few more interesting parts and ideas that haven't been discussed much that are worth one or two more posts to wrap up with. Since I'm home with a stomach flu today, may as well make lemonade out of those lemons.

The next panel, discussing in-space business models was one of the more important panels at the conference. David Gump of t/Space led off with an interesting discussion of what he saw as the four basic categories of space company:

• Classic Contractor


• Innovative Contractor


• True Commercial


• Non-Profit Organization

The big differences between the three for-profit types of companies were source/method of funding, and who their customers are. Classic contractors are usually government funded, with the government as their main "customer", and they tend to prefer cost-plus contracting. Innovative customers still get most of their funding from the government, and have government as a major customer, but prefer to work through fixed-price schemes like Space Act Agreements and Other Transaction Authority type pay-on-milestone type arrangements. True Commercial companies are those that are primarily privately funded, and typically have government only as a minor customer if at all. Dave said that t/Space is pursuing the "innovative contractor" model with their CXV project. His opinion was that government was going to be the primary customer for most near-term lunar projects.

He made a few other intersting points, like that NASA scientists typically only trust data generated by their own instruments, and that they'd rather try and fly their instrument on your vehicle (like they are with the Indian lunar probe) than try to buy data from your instruments. He pointed out a few potential lunar markets, many of which have already been touched on elsewhere in the conference, including tourism, communications, PGM mining, He-3 mining, telepresence rovers, lunar map making, energy (fuel/momentum) storage in LEO/LUNO, and a few others.

The next talk was a rather interesting one by Michael Mealling, our VP of Business Development (and the owner of RocketForge.org). He discussed a concept he's been working on for a while called "Space Value Networks". His site gives some further details, but the basic gist of the idea is that all companies operate within a value network. This network includes customers, suppliers, regulators, etc. The example he gives is an auto manufacturer. Their value network includes groups as disparate as transportation regulators, auto dealers, parts suppliers, customers, the highway system, etc. Without all these pieces in their value network, these firms would have a hard time existing. This kind of relates to a point I was making several years back about industrial parks. Nobody could afford to have a factory if they had to also design the trucks and machinery to get the materials there and build it, if they had to make the roads, build the power plant, put in the electrical system, the sewer system, etc.

One of the big problems facing commercial lunar developers is that these value networks don't yet exist, and Michael's goal is to find a way to create and engineers these networks. The basic plan he wants to pursue has three steps:

• Step One: Pick a long term market (such as PGM mining or lunar tourism) and try to figure out what the value network would need to look like for that market to function.


• Step Two: Create Business Plans for the various nodes in the network. If at all possible finding intermediate markets that can help those nodes develop even before the whole network is up to speed.


• Step Three: Bring in money and entrepreneurial talent to reduce those business plans to practice.

One of Michael's favorite statements is that "It is much easier to teach space to a business person than to teach business to a space person". This project hopes to pull some of the entrepreneurial talent that is out there and channel it into helping open the frontier.

The next speaker, Rex Ridenoure of Ecliptic was one of my favorites from the conference. As Rex put it, Ecliptic is a purely commercial entity. They don't do cost plus or even SBIRs. He gave a little obligatory explanation about what Ecliptic does, but that wasn't the really valuable part of his talk. First off, he gave a primer that he called Business Plan 101. His main points were pretty simple:

• Be able to say in one sentance what you will sell for $X, that costs $Y, where $X > $Y.


• Describe what you will sell first


• Show compelling evidence of who the first customer will be


• Provide evidence that you have the team needed to pull off the venture

Rex gave a few other good pieces of advice. He mentioned that many good companies don't talk a bunch about what they're doing. He also brought up the fact that the right idea, the right team, and adequate money only gives a chance for success. Without all of those, there isn't much of a chance, but even with all of them, success is never assured.

My favorite part of his talk though was the proverbial gauntlet he threw down to the crowd. He reminded us of the schedule that Chris Shank showed earlier in the day. NASA plans its first lunar probe in 2009, it's first lander probably around 2011 or so, and its first manned landing by 2018. Rex suggested that the best way to set the mood for the next several decades of space development was for the commercial space industry to try and find a way to beat NASA back to the moon. If commercial space leads the way, it sets a completely different mood than if NASA ends leading the way.
I think this is an excellent challenge, and hope that others will step up to the plate.

The last talk was by Charles Miller of CSI. He made a very important point about government developed infrastructure like the Space Shuttle and the ISS. He mentioned how the Shuttle had been supposedly "privatized" by the creation of the United Space Alliance. However, due to the design choices made, the Shuttle could never be truly commercialized. It costs way too much to operate, and is way to inefficient to ever become profitable on its own. Even if all the shuttles were given away for free! The ISS is the same way. Many have talked about commercializing the ISS, but the realities of its design preclude it from being easily modifiable for commercial use. Some people had been suggesting that the lunar architecture NASA is putting together for VSE could be privatized, but many of the same systematic flaws exist--the systems aren't designed from the ground up to meet customers needs for the most reasonable price possible. As I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog, it appears that much of the decision-making about the VSE architecture is driven less by physics, economics, or safety, and more by where the work is done and how much pork can be provided in the process.

Charles made the suggestion that a separate "port authority"-like Lunar Base Development Authority might be an answer to the problem. The LBDA would in his plan design, build, and operate the lunar port, with NASA only as an anchor tenet. While several other people, like Tom Matula have also suggested such an idea, I'm skeptical how well it would turn out. There are succesful examples of port authorities in the world, but a good economist could probably point out dozens of counterexamples.

But the most important part of his talk was his comment that in order to gain credibility, the alt.space movement has to "execute" over the next several years. He reminded us that NASA is probably coming out with a "non-traditional" ISS crew/cargo BAA sometime this fall, and that some alt.space firm is going to win it. He suggested that whoever wins, we need to support them, and help them execute succesfully, otherwise commercial space will come off looking like the light-weights they think we are. This idea of the importance of "execution" or "delivering" ties in very well with Rex's challenge. If the commercial space industry can prove its competence, and can prove even more competent then NASA, over the next several years, that will completely change the mood in which space development is discussed.

Falcon IX?

I was about to respond to a comment by a blogger named MJ, when I decided to check out his blog, Chair Force Engineer. While looking around, I stumbled across this rather interesting story that I hadn't seen anywhere else yet. Can't vouch for its validity, but I'm sure if it gets picked up by Hobbyspace, that Elon will correct any mistakes MJ or I made in reporting this (since Elon appears to be a regular reader of Hobbyspace.com).

Anyhow, Elon Musk of SpaceX apparently visited whichever Air Force Base MJ is affiliated with, to give a lecture. At the lecture, he made his first public announcement of SpaceX's next project after the Falcon I and the Falcon V: the Falcon IX
. If MJ got his details right, it appears that the Falcon IX will be a nine-Merlin first stage upgrade to the Falcon V, with a stretched 5-meter diameter upper stage (though he doesn't mention the engine count on that). According to MJ's account, since SpaceX slipped its schedule too much for the first Genesis flight this next year, Musk was able to talk Bigelow into agreeing to do his first flight of his next module (I think he was calling it Guardian or something like that) sometime in 2007. Musk also mentioned the possibility of a parallel staged version of this (Delta IV Heavy style).

Not sure what to make of this. The bigger payload shroud is a big win, and this vehicle will likely be able to compete with Delta IV and Atlas V commercially. However, having nine large engines of that style on a single stage seems a bit much. I'm also a bit leary of the whole parallel staging upgrade idea. They had initially been talking about such an idea for the Falcon I Heavy, but eventually discarded it due to the decreased reliability of such a system compared to a more conventional two stage design, so any proposed vehicle is likely subject to change also, especially while it's still in the conceptual stage.

All that said, Falcon I is still yet to launch (though they now have a goal date of September 30th for their first Kwajelein based launch), so we'll have to wait and see how this turns out. I wouldn't be surprised though if the Falcon IX couldn't put at least 25-35klb into LEO.

Dribs & Drabs

The Orlando Sentinel has certainly done everyone a big favor in printing a leaked schematic of NASA's thinking on the architecture for the return to the Moon. In many regards it bears an uncanny resemblence to the Apollo architecture, especially in the end stages when pieces are being discarded.

There's no permanence to this architecture. The Earth departure stage is jettisoned. The descent stage is discarded on the Lunar surface. The ascent stage is jettisoned in Lunar orbit. The Earth return stage is jettisoned. It's all being thrown away.

No mention is made of the ISS, or its possible use as a staging point for leaving LEO. No mention is made of any capabilities at EML-1 or at least in LLO (Low Lunar Orbit). No mention is made of harvesting the ET (external tank) after orbit.

Is a disposable Moon program really what we want to pay NASA to do?

Bigelow Aerospace Tour

Toward the end of the last panel, I was handed an invitation to a VIP tour of Bigelow Aerospace! I'm not sure how I got added to the list, but whoever did it, thanks! This was, for me, the highlight of the conference.

After meeting upstairs and getting on a bus, we drove out to Bigelow's facilities up in northern Las Vegas. Of the 35 or so people in the group, there were about half a dozen of us who were in our 20s, including Jeff Feige, his fiancee, two guys from SEDS, myself, and Berin Szocka from the Institute of Space Law and Policy (ISLAP). We had a rather interesting discussion about running space related organizations and chapters, but that'll have to be a story for another day.

After a several minutes drive out into the outskirts of town, we reached the facilities. As the articles I had previously read on the internet stated, the whole thing was surrounded by a security fence topped with several rolls of concertina wire, and yes he had a very competent security detachment. That said, the security guys were fairly nice, and I have to admit, if MSS was working on a half billion dollar space project, I bet we'd have tighter security too.

After checking in, getting our visitors tags, and being taken to the actual buildings, we went inside one of them, and were promptly greeted by Mr Bigelow himself. I have to admit that I thought it was rather classy that he was taking his time to give the tour personally. They've been doing a few tours over the past year or so, mostly for local elementary schools and high schools, and I got the distinct impression that Mr Bigelow probably conducts all of the tours himself.

The first room was dominated by the full-scale mockup of t/Space's CXV that they were showing off to us and to Bigelow. There were also lots of models of rocket engines, Gemini Capsules, and other space memorabilia. After a brief introduction, Bigelow led us into the second room. This one was quite a bit bigger. It housed storyboards showing various aspects of the currently planned Nautilus station, as well as several interesting alternative future uses for his modules, including lunar bases, mars bases, and translunar cyclers. It also housed several test articles that they had tortured over the past few years.

I liked his table with several hypervelocity impact test samples. He had two pieces that had similar construction to the strongest part of the ISS's micrometeor impact shield. They had fairly large holes in them, and one of them had a crack in the pressure vessel that probably would have ripped the module open. All from a small impactor going at about 7km/s relative velocity. That is extraordinarily fast, but there are probably pieces going that fast in LEO right now. LEO is really huge when you think of it, but the probabilities of hitting something with that kind of mass and velocity are definitely non-zero. Next to that, he had several examples of some of his older shielding ideas that had been through tests with similar velocities and masses. The shield had held up. Admittedly, they did throw a thicker (albeit lighter) shield at the problem, and for micrometeor impact protection, spacing between layers is what does most of the work. The first layer will usually vaporize the micrometeor, and any spacing just allows that jet to spread out over a larger and larger region.

There were several other pieces that were leftovers from hydrotests of their modules. They also had a scale model of the Genesis 1/3 scale inflatable that they plan on launching on a Dnepr sometime early next year. Bigelow did give a precise goal date, but I don't think he meant it for public consumption. Genesis is mostly being flown to test out the inflation process, and to try and catch any hidden flaws or complications in the system. They had originally intended to fly on the inaugural Falcon V flight first, but since SpaceX is behind schedule, he bumped the first Genesis flight to Dnepr. I think they still intend to fly on Falcon V later once it's available, but they wanted to start getting experience and data as quickly as possible.

Mr Bigelow then gave us a quick presentation about Nautilus, discussing many of the technical aspects like the longerons (which are used to take the launch loads), the reinforcement straps on the outside of the inflatable section, the windows, the testing they're doing at the moment, and their plans for future testing. He also discussed a bit about the Nautilus station and some of their current and future plans for that. He did mentioned that at the moment they're looking at several existing and proposed docking methods, with the Russian APAS system being a fallback in case they can't get something better.


After taking a few questions, he then led us into a large room with the three full-scale Nautlius module mockups that were shown in Aviation Week several months back. Since there were three modules, he had three groups of five each go through at any given time, with him leading one group, and two of his engineers leading the other groups. These modules were quite spacious by space standards. They're mostly being used at the moment to test out different ideas for internal layouts, and as a tour item. While in there, I was able to pick the brain a bit of the engineer who was giving us the tour. I had been curious to find out if Bigelow was interested in doing subscale versions of the module for potential use in lunar transfer vehicles or other applications. The answer I was given was that Bigelow would probably be willing to work out some sort of a deal if there was sufficient interest. I also asked him what the current plans were for launching the station, since the reported weight of 50,000lbs puts it at the upper end of what current ELVs can deliver to orbit. He mentioned that they were looking at several options, including launching all at once on a Delta IV Heavy, or maybe a Proton, or even The Stick if it gets developed. He also mentioned that if those didn't pan out, or if a lighter lift but more affordable booster was on the market, that they might launch it in several pieces and fit it out on orbit. As it is, there's a decent amount of on-orbit fitting out anyhow for an inflatable module, so this isn't as big of a hassle. A lot of the quoted weight is probably in the water bags used for radiation control, and in other internal pieces, so maybe flying it on three or four Falcon Vs might be possible. He didn't state what the minimum mass they could break it down into was though.


While we were waiting for everyone else to have a chance to look through the modules, we went back to the first room. I got to check out the t/Space CXV mockup, and Jim Voss let me try out their launch seats. I have to say that the concept they chose was rather non-obvious, and quite creative actually. The seats were very light, but felt that they could take the forces they'd need to. The module was quite roomy, in fact there was enough room to add an extra row of seats if needed. It'd be a bit crowded with 6 people on board instead of three, but for short flights, that might be reasonable.

After everyone had had a chance to go through the mockups, Bigelow took us over to their actual assembly building (which will double in size once they're done with the new extension) next. This was a truly large building, which houses their machine shop, a huge vacuum chamber, and most of their actual hardware they're making. They have a structural mockup they're about to send to Russia in the next few months to allow them to get everything ready for the flight next year. Bigelow did mention that their new facility down in Houston is where most of the docking, controls, solar power, life support, and radiator work was going to be developed. This facility was mostly for building the actual structural pieces, the inflatable sections, and doing final assembly and integration. They've got a long way to go, but they're making some solid progress so far.

On the way back to the first room in the other building for t/Space to show off their CXV module to Bigelow, I asked him about the Americas Space Prize, since he hadn't mentioned it during his whole tour. I was curious to find out if they planned to do any publicity for the prize once they had more people signed up for it. The answer he gave seemed to miss the point of my question, but that may have just been poor phrasing on my part. He seemed to assume that I meant that Bigelow needed the publicity to raise money for the prize, which he assured me they didn't. The impression he gave was that the prize was real, and he would pay out if anyone met the requirements, but it isn't his main focus at the moment, and competitors may have to raise their money for the prize attempt without the benefit of a large PR campaign on his part. That may change as time goes on, but that was what I got from my brief question. I really hope that he does reevaluate that, because without low-cost, frequent access to his space station, I doubt he can close his business plan very well. Spending a bit of extra time, energy, and money to help build that market will pay off handsomely for him in the future.

Anyhow, as we boarded the bus on the way back from the tour, I couldn't help but be impressed with what they've accomplished. I also was rather impressed by Mr Bigelow himself. In spite of being an extremely wealthy individual, who is a little bit on
the paranoid side when it comes to security, Bigelow came off as a rather normal, polite, and down-to-earth businessman. I hope he is succesful with this venture, and hope that next time I get a tour of a Bigelow inflatable, it is located a few hundred miles higher than this one was.