SpaceX NPR Interview

So, NPR decides to interview Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX. I was really annoyed by the tone of the guy doing the interview. I've met Gwynne on one occasion, and I think she handled the interview pretty well all things considered, but the guy's attitude still torqued me a bit.

I mean, if you look at how open SpaceX has been so far about things compared to about any other alt.space company other than MSS and Armadillo, there just really isn't any comparison--these guys have been very open. John Carmack is about the only guy I know with the intestinal fortitude sufficient to show off pictures of his pranged vehicles, and I think even he would be a lot more reticent to do that if he had as much invested in his projects as Elon does. I mean seriously, these guys are doing this for a living. Cut 'em some slack. As much as I really am dying to find out what happened, I'm not an investor, an employee, or a paying customer (or potential paying customer). If Elon wants to let the rest of us know what happened, that's their prerogative...

Anyhow, I feel better now. That is all.

MSS Bleg

Most of you probably read Hobbyspace, but in case some of you haven't yet today, here's a quick bleg from Michael Mealling, our VP of Business Development:

As many of your may have guessed, we plan on competing for the Lunar Lander Challenge this October. We haven’t put out a huge media splash since the rules and agreements haven’t been officially signed. But we are starting to prepare for it as you will see over the next few months. To get things rolling we decided to post a bleg for sponsorships. We are going through the normal sponsorship broker search but I decided that asking on the blog might also help. We are interested in small, in-kind sponsors all the way up to fully named sponsors who will receive massive amounts of exposure at this fall’s XPRIZE Cup. If you are interested please contact Michael Mealling at mmealling@masten-space.com.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

by: Ken Murphy, guest blogger

The space field never ceases to amaze me. By day I work in a bank doing asset-based lending, and for the last two years I've been the airplane stooge, I mean underwriter/analyst. By any measure the U.S. airline industry is a mess, and I just got back from a two-day conference that did little in my mind to dispel that perception. Right now we're watching the hedge and private equity funds dive into the water to join the bloodbath. But as screwed up as the airline industry is, it gives me nowhere near the level of heartburn that the space industry does.

Today's dose of heartburn comes courtesy of two articles, one by Gregg Easterbrook entitled "It's the Earth, Stupid" which I found at Slate and will get to in a moment, and another by Robert Zubrin, "The Vision at Risk" which arrived today in Monday's print edition of Space News.

Now I have to admire Mr. Zubrin's article overall, but must nevertheless mark strong disagreement with one of the early contention's, in which he sets up three points in an editorial by Dr. Paul Spudis in the December 27th Washington Post in order to refute them.

The first point, as a reason to give a strong near-term focus to the Moon is "First, that studying lunar [sic] cratering will allow us to understand the processes of mass extinctions on Earth", which he refutes as "Argument one is false because the Moon's lower gravity gives it a lower impact rate than the Earth, and it's lack of an atmosphere or biosphere makes impossible any studies of the relevant post-impact terrestrial phenomenon that cause and shape mass extinction."

It is in fact true that the Moon receives a lower number of overall hits than the Earth due to its lower gravity (and also because of it's smaller cross-section, as well as the weird gravitational warps created by its close proximity to Earth, points I'm sure to make when discussing asteroids with the general public), there is nonetheless no better place to study the terrestrial impact flux than on the Moon. The Earth herself is too capricious and ever-changing. Mars is out where Jupiter provides a much larger impact, so to speak, on object trajectories. Venus is even worse with its volcanism, and Mercury is too close to the Sun.

So if you are going to study the crater record there is NO better place to do it than the Moon, and Dr. Spudis and I are in 100% agreement on this. My reason is that there is this weird astrophysical theory that in the Sun's approximately 225-250 million year elliptical orbit around the galactic core it moves up and down through the galaxy's equatorial plane where the bulk of the material is, something like a carousel horse. This theory defies everything I understand about orbital mechanics. From the z-axis perspective it looks like an ellipse, from the x/y-axis plane it looks like a sine wave. The period between the passes through this plane is guesstimated at about 30-35 million years, or about 60-65 million years for the full sine wave, or about a cycle per quarter-turn around the galactic core.

I strongly disagree with this theory, because my envisionment of the Sun's trajectory is more like wobbling within a tubular envelope defined by its ellipse. Not a perfect ellipse, but never really far away from one either. What gives this theory currency is the spooky pattern being found as we accumulate confirmed craters here on Earth. So while I disagree with the carousel-horse bouncing through the galaxy's equatorial plane, I have no better explanation and can't dismiss it because the historical record is there.

Thus, I believe it is important to go to the Moon to look at the crater record (what I call sizing, counting and dating). Not just to look at the -composition- of the impactors, but also to see if there is in fact periodicity in the crater record, and if there is where are we in the cycle?

This is pretty important stuff, because it ties directly in to the security aspect of the Vision for Space Exploration. We do need to know more about the threat of Potentially Hazardous Objects, both nearer the Sun and farther away, because asteroids DO NOT CARE if they destroy our civilization. This makes them orders of magnitude more serious than terrorists because terrorists at least have a fount of hate that can be understood by the human mind and addressed. Asteroids and comets have no hate, they just don't care. The ballistics were worked out aeons before we hairless apes came along.

So I think Robert's dead wrong on this one. His next point of refutation is that "Second, that Lunar activities will provide us with practice for exploration of "other worlds" which he refutes with "Argument two is false because while we can practice for operating on other worlds on the Moon, we can do much more in that line at 1/1000th the cost in the Artic".

Again, I disagree. This time because of vacuum discipline. Others strongly disagree with this point, but I nevertheless maintain that nothing substitutes for the dread paranoia of the vacuum on the other side of the space suit/craft than actually being in vacuum. This can be done in space, and on the Moon. It cannot be done in the artic, nor underwater, no matter how good the pretend factor. In this case Dr. Zubrin's point about the cost contradicts one of his assertions in the article, while also supporting my position, as I'd rather spend a couple of million dollars finding out if some clumsy idiot is going to kill themself on the Moon than several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for them to crack their faceplate on Mars. It's cold, but that's my sang-froid opinion. Ultimately, I believe we will use a mix of arctic stations, underwater stations, space stations, and Lunar stations in preparing for the trip to Mars to give us the solid experience base. Doing less is ultimately folly. (Oh, and partial gravity, giving us momentum and mass movement practice)

Dr. Zubrin's last point for refutation is "Third, the Moon base will provide an economic return by enabling the development of lunar [sic] solar power stations that will beam electricity back to Earth." His reply is that "Argument three is false because a pholtovoltaic panel only receives twice the solar flux as it does in Arizona, and all of its increased output would be lost in the inefficiencies of the transmission system. Thus the useful output of a photovoltaic power station on the Moon would only be equal to one on Earth, while logistics costs to support it would be 100,000 times as great".

True, but going back to the Moon to build PV power stations solely for Earth is a silly idea. It makes far more sense to build a network of relays and beam the power to Lunar robots (either autonomous or tele-operated), or practice beaming it to an L-1 station, so that when we finally get our act together and start building PV arrays in geostationary orbits we'll have a solid base of experience for doing so. (Moon to L-1 is about twice the distance of GEO to Earth, and we can practice with PV arrays prepared with different doping mixes to maximize their efficiency under raw Solar conditions). Amongst a whole host of other activities.

So again, I think Dr. Zubrin's arguing the wrong point, and he pretty much clinches it for me when he states "That goal can only be humans to Mars" later in the article. No, it's humans spreading out to the Solar system and Mars is but one of the destinations. One that will be almost as important as our Moon and, in my opinion, the asteroids out to the belt. But Mars is neither THE destination nor THE goal. The goal is for humanity as shepherds of this good Earth to take her life to the Solar system and the stars (and to understand life that may exist out there beyond our current ken), and the destinations are beyond counting.

Dr. Zubrin is fundamentally right, though. The Vision is at risk, though perhaps not in the ways he perceives.

Other perceptions that give me heartburn are those of Mr. Easterbrook, who takes a rather derisive look at the NASA budget. He dismisses the STS out of hand as a clunker, then lumps in the space station with guilt by association. He asserts that the moon-base [sic] project will benefit only NASA bureaucrats and aerospace contractors (wait, based on what we're being spoon-fed it is looking that way, isn't it? Thank goodness for the good work of Dr. Schoewengerdt over at NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program [be sure to order a free copy of Spinoff while you're there]). There's a long diatribe on the uselessness of the space station which is, admittedly, mostly useless in its current configuration. What is is not what has to be, thank goodness, and as we develop our launch architecture beyond the STS to support the station we can develop the opportunity to send more people up there, though NASA's limit of 12 dockings per year isn't helpful.

Having pharmaceutical researchers actually sitting at the lab benches running and re-running experiments to gather data for analysis, not spending three years to send up a black box, but rather planning each days research based on prior results. Ultimately the space station would make a near-Earth transit node to an L-1 station on the way to the Moon, but it will be superceded by a series of stations and free-flyers more convenient in inclination to the launch sites. Having 85% of the Earth's land mass visible over time is a pretty useful function, and the delta-V to L-1 is indifferent to the starting LEO inclination so once again we'll have good practice when those stations come about.

I most strongly disagree with Mr. Easterbrook's assertion that the Moon is not interesting, "That's because the Apollo missions found little to suggest that the moon [sic] is interesting, except to geology postdocs". That is wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean it, it's a wrong conclusion to so cavalierly throw out there. Gregg may not have access to the Lunar Library like I do, but that's still no excuse for such an ignorant assertion. There is a great deal of commerce to be done between here and the Moon, and a Moon base can be a valuable component of that. I've also posted twenty-five good reasons to go to the Moon below to give you an idea of the possibilities.

Ultimately Mr. Easterbrook makes some points that do need to be considered. He buys in to the "Moon as a crappy place to practice for Mars" meme, but his reasoning is actually sound, in that the mission to Mars will most likely be launched on a direct trajectory from low-Earth orbit (LEO) as the current CEV architecture seems to be taking the same approach, short-sighted and detrimental to commerce though that is. In the short-term direct trajectory missions are less-expensive, but deny us the opportunities possible with a sensible transportation architecture between here and the Moon.

He goes on about NASA's slash-and-burn of science (I would have taken more of a culling approach, but I do think that NASA science does need to be re-prioritized) to get to his conclusion, that NASA should be studying the Earth and Sun. I guess he's familiar with NASA's Living With a Star program. I do agree about the Sun, but strongly disagree about the Earth. I think that NASA's gaze needs to be upward (aeronautics) and outward (space) in its administration of space activities. I believe that space capabilities need to be better distributed throughout the executive agencies, such that the USGS is the one doing land observation and NOAA is doing the Ocean and Atmosphere observation. I believe that some of the more esoteric deep space astrophysics is better housed in the halls of American academia. I believe that NASA needs to poke us along in the study of asteroids. Observation of the Sun is important, though perhaps the operators of satellites could establish a collective organization to do so in order to help protect their assets. NASA should be (and is) studying it for fundamental knowledge, just as the military is studying it to register potential security capability threats. NASA cannot and should not carry the entire burden themselves, just because these activities occur in space.

I've got to go take some antacids, but I look forward to comments below, and thank you for your time.

Ken

25 Good Reasons to go to the Moon

by: Ken Murphy, guest blogger

1) Hydrogen

Whether in water form or not, we do know that there is hydrogen at the Lunar poles. This can serve a minumum of two ends: water for a base, fuel for rockets.

2) Oxygen

The heavy part of the LH/LOX fuel mix is the oxygen, about 7/8ths of the weight. Instead of launching all the fuel for cislunar maneuvering from Earth, launch 8x the hydrogen from Earth and mix it with the Lunox.

3) 1/6th gravity

This will provide engineering fun and challenges for future generations of engineers. How does one design an extensible tower for a solar mirror with 1/6th the force of gravity?

4) No weather

This goes hand-in-hand with #3. Engineering design will be significantly different in a vacuum environment with no water, wind, rain, hurricanes, or tornadoes. Corrosion takes a different form.

5) Vacuum

A critical part of many of the engineering processes used here on Earth, requiring the expenditure of large amounts of energy to create a vacuum. The Moon has about 15,000,000 square miles of it.

6) Glass

A good proportion of the Lunar soil returned by astronauts was in the form of glass. Lunar glass has the distinct characteristic of having formed in a water-free environment, making it anhydrous. What advantages this may offer in the field of optics is largely Luna Incognito. Then there's fiberglass, composites, etc.

7) Human factors

Having 1/6th of Earth's gravity, the heart doesn't have to pump as hard to supply oxygen to the brain. While for a youth this would have an atrophy-type effect, for those advanced in years it can serve a rejuvenative effect, as the heart is suddenly relatively stronger. This allows for longer productive lives for our citizens. And you can fly in a large enough space.

8) Crater history

The Moon is the best record in our local neighborhood of the history of bombardments from space. Earth is too dynamic to sustain a record, but the Moon is perfect. By establishing an impact history in size and time we can look for any cyclicality in the timing of impacts, and if so, where are we in the cycle?

Addendum: Dr. Paul Spudis has pointed out that the Moon also provides a historical record of the Solar System's journey around the galactic core as well.

9) Cold-traps

At the Lunar poles, there are places the sun never shines. These everdark craters seem to hold the bulk of the hydrogen detected at the poles. Excavations outside the craters can create additional cold-traps for later industrial use.

10) Solar mirrors

Mounted on extensible towers, mirrors can be placed in perpetual sunlight to illuminate selected areas. This requires the high-technology capability to turn the mirror. No batteries required.

11) Solar power towers

Extensible towers at the poles will allow the placement of solar cells or films in constant sunlight. It doesn't matter so much hitting the perfect peak for one's ground-based system as making the tower high enough to peek over the horizon, which on the Moon is very short.

12) Radio silence

While not a perfectly radio-silent environment, the far side of the Moon is far better than anything on Earth or even in orbit. Large arrays can allow for a leap in precision for radio astronomy and SETI.

13) Solar cathedral

A number of religions and cultures around the world still use the Lunar calendar in the conduct of their affairs. Part of this involves determining the beginning of each lunar month. Building a Solar cathedral on the Moon will allow an unprecedented degree of precision in making that determination. It's also a good way of getting different faiths to work together.

14) Neighborhood watch

The orbital scopes like Hubble get all of the credit for cool deep-space discoveries, but no one's keeping an eye on our local neighborhood. That's why we're finding more and more asteroids after they've passed the Earth. The Moon provides the kind of dull, stable platform for the astronomy that no one else wants to do.

15) Greenhouses

Lunar regolith can't really grow plants by itself, but the addition of humus (not hummus), other nutrients, and careful recycling does allow for plant growth. Plants grown in Lunar soil may provide new fragrances, flavors, and vintages. Spices were one of the early high-value, low mass/volume goods that helped create the trade routes of old.

16) Metals

Vacuum-processed ultra-pure aluminum. Vacuum-processed ultra-pure titanium. Vacuum-processed ultra-pure iron. Vacuum-processed ultra-pure magnesium. You want it? We've got it.

17) Volatiles

The Sun has been burying light elements in the Lunar soil for aeons. All it takes is a little baking at about 1100 K, a little shaking to agitate the particles, and a place to liquefy the output. Cold-traps are particularly useful for this.

18) Extreme sports

Imagine bicycle races at 250 kph. Imagine regoboarding the southside of Copernicus. Imagine flying in a large underground cavern. Imagine high-jumping in 1/6th G. Or long-jumping.

19) Spaceships

Some items, like advanced electronics, will be shipped from Earth for a very long time. But things like spacecraft structural elements (and fuel) can easily be done on the Moon, obviating the need to waste the lift mass from Earth's gravity well.

20) EML-1

Having such a large neighbor so close by creates a warp in Earth's gravity well. There are certain areas of relative stability, and one lies on the line connecting the center of the Earth and Moon. Putting a station at that point (or rather in a halo orbit around it) allows for all kinds of unexpected benefits.

21) GEO assets

We have billions of dollars of orbital assets in geosynchronous orbit. It's cheaper in fuel to go from EML-1 to GEO and back, than to go just from LEO to GEO. Over time, this will allow for a huge decrease in the cost of refueling, repairing, and upgrading, as well as building larger and more capable platforms.

22) Solar power satellites

Placement of large solar arrays in GEO orbit allows for the collection and transmission of energy to fixed points on Earth, such as military bases. This will also provide a long-term source of energy, as the Sun is not expected to expire for another 4.5 billion years or so. Besides, most of the energy we use here on Earth is second or third-hand solar power anyway. Pieces of the solar power satellites, like PV cells and structural elements, can come from the Moon.

23) Free-flyer platforms

Another consequence of the warping of Earth's gravity well is that trajectories can be created that sort of wander out from EML-1, and then wander back (like the Genesis mission which went via EML-1 to SEL-1 and back). This affords materials scientists and companies the opportunity to send free-flyer platforms on long-term, jitter-free production runs. Results can be studied on the station and new production runs undertaken quickly.

24) Constant access

The entire Lunar surface is accessible 24-hours a day from EML-1 for about the same delta-V (~2.5km/s). From EML-1 most inclinations of LEO are accessible for less than 1.0 km/s (with aerobraking and time, ~3.77km/s for a direct burn). GEO is constantly accessible, as is deep space.

25) A true space-faring civilization

The Moon is the ideal location to get our feet wet, and getting there can lay the foundation for a civilization that can go beyond the Moon to Mars and the asteroids and other destinations of interest.



Update:
To find out where you can learn more about the Moon, such as online articles, and books, software, movies and more, please visit Ken's Lunar Library over at OutoftheCradle.net.

Particular sections of the Library are accessed via the menu on the left side of the page. There are also sections on the High Frontier and Big Rocks from Space, as well as Space Business and Law, and even Fun & Games. Enjoy!

K

A Common Space Transportation Economic Fallacy?

I was reading an otherwise pretty interesting article by one of the authors of "The Rocket Company" over on The Space Review this morning. In the article, Patrick was trying to discuss some of the market challenges facing commercial space transportation companies. Much of the content was pretty good, however I spotted an oft repeated statement about space transportation (my emphasis):

Space transportation seems an unlikely realm for angel investors. Orbital launch services is an old, overbuilt market propped up by government subsides. The operations of the latest launch vehicles developed by the likes of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Delta 4 and Atlas 5, are being consolidated into a joint venture, the United Launch Alliance, to try and hold down the high cost to the Air Force. The market is flat and recent studies show negative elasticity of the supply curve, i.e., lower cost results in the overall dollar value of the market falling.

The way Patrick seemed to interpret this negative elasticity result was that if the price of launch comes down, revenue drops too, and thus it doesn't make economic sense. There's a problem though with that line of logic that I think should be fairly apparent if you think about it from the perspective of a new launch company.

Say you have a space launch company, we'll call it SkyZ just for simplicity. They're going after a market that has 10 launches per year worldwide, at an average launch price of $2500/lb, with an average payload weight of 1000lb (for a total revenue of $25M). The demand is inelastic to the point where you get no increase in launch demand until you reach $500/lb. It would appear on the surface that 10 launches per year at $1000/lb would result in a much lower amount of total revenue: $10M instead of $25M! There's one thing being missed in the analysis though--at this instant, SkyZ has $0/year of revenue from space launches. If they were able to get $10M/year in revenue, that would be a substantial increase for them, even if it was a big loss for everyone else. Now, SkyZ would need to have margins such that they could offer a reasonable return on investment at that lower revenue rate, but there's no inherent reason why the "negative elasticity of demand" should really matter to new startups who have no existing stake in the game. It only would matter if you assume that existing players are as economically efficient as possible, and that there's no way you could cut price without also cutting away most of your margin.

What this point does show is why there's a strong disincentive for current players to cut prices any lower than their existing competitors. Lower prices for them would mean less revenue and less profit. The good thing is that this disincentive for existing players to cut price is actually a nice incentive and protection for new players. Especially if those new players can field vehicles with substantially better operability, safety, and reusability compared to the existing players. It would be a lot harder to break into the space transportation market if it were as competitive as it really could be.

So, while it probably wouldn't make much sense to invest in space transportation as a whole, and while it wouldn't make much sense for current players to invest a lot of money to cut costs, that doesn't at all mean that investing money in new players is silly. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Sad Day for SpaceX

I figured I wouldn't be a good space pundit/SpaceX fanboy if I didn't chime it with at least some irrelevant commentary on SpaceX's launch failure today. I know some of the people there at SpaceX, and this has got to be a really lousy day for them. I can't speak from experience regarding what a crash feels like, but from the few test engine failures we've had, and how sick those make you feel, I can't even imagine what having a crash has got to be like. But I guess that when you have an incredibly complicated system like Falcon or like other existing orbital vehicles, where everything has to work just right, there are almost no margins, and nothing can be flight tested beforehand, risks and sucky days like these are inevitable.

I'm glad that for our suborbital vehicles we will be able to do things like cutting our teeth on takeoffs and landings hanging under a tether. While we'll still probably have out ulcer-inducing moments where we have to push the envelope into some new regime that we haven't tried before, and where something could go wrong, those will be fewer and farther between. Trying to get every part of a rocket vehicle like that, with all the subsystems working perfectly from the start is a real challenge. SpaceX has a phenominal crew, and I'm sure they'll get this figured out, and probably make a whole bunch of money on this, but I'm glad that the approach they're taking is not the only way to solve this problem.

Sorry For The Light Posting

I'm sorry I haven't had as much time this past week to post too much. Among other things, I had been hoping to post a little review and commentary on the MarsDrive Reference Mission that was linked to last month on Hobbyspace. Unfortunately I've been rather busy this past week. We're starting to get the vehicle plumbed up, and we're also headed out tomorrow and Saturday to see if we can get the rest of the thermal data we need to finish our throttleable regen engine. On top of all that, I've been doing a lot of logistics work with one of the potential test sites for doing tethered tests of our XA-0.1, 0.2, and XL-0.1 vehicles. So I haven't had much time or energy to do much blogging as of late.

Next week is Spring Break, so the other engineers and some of our interns will be around full-time next week, so I'll likely be even more busy than I was this week. Just giving you a heads up.

The Bandwidth May Be Improving, But the Latency Is Still Going to Suck...

There was an interesting news story over on space.com about a new optical detector for use in laser communication systems. Higher frequencies give you higher bandwidth per given amount of signal power, but so far optical receivers have been inefficient enough that the required laser for communication would be fairly heavy compared to radio communication systems. Supposedly a canceled NASA Mars probe would have been able to get 1-30 Mbps with a laser system (depending on the time of the year) compared to about 128kbps that is the norm these days with radio. I'm not familiar enough with the various communication technologies to know if this advancement is as major as MIT would like everyone to think it is, but it definitely sounds interesting. Having high bandwidth communications to various locations in the solar system would make things a lot easier for future space settlements. Now if only there was a way to fix that latency problem...

Venturer Space COTS Proposal: The S-550

There's been a lot of blogging recently regarding various teams competing for contracts under the NASA's COTS program for commercial resupply of the ISS. Most of the focus to-date has been on SpaceX's Dragon, t/Space's CXV, and SpaceHab's Apex capsule (I think I've briefly discussed all three at various points on this blog), to the point that some people seem to think that those three were the only three that submitted. I don't know what the total number of submissions was, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had at least a dozen proposals including both big alt.space companies, little ones, and more traditional Big Aerospace companies. One of the smaller alt.space companies that submitted a proposal, but that hasn't been mentioned anywhere on the other space blogs so far, is Venturer Aerospace.

The founder of Venturer Aerospace is a good friend of mine, George Herbert. George is pretty well known in the alt.space community, but if you haven't happened to meet him, he's a good guy to know. Venturer is a spinoff company from his other space company, Retro Aerospace, that is focused entirely on the manned capsule part of space transportation (as opposed to Retro which also focuses on boosters, and all sorts of other projects). George's company is also located here in the Silicon Valley area, and I knew he had submitted a proposal, so I pinged him and asked if he could give us any information about what he was up to. Here's the formal announcement he sent me a link to (follow the link for some simple art illustrating the basic design of his capsule):

March 15, 2006 - Venturer Aerospace announced today that it is pursuing a contract to demonstrate commercial manned orbital transportation services under the NASA COTS program, utilizing the Venturer S-550 manned orbital capsule vehicle. Venturer's proposal was submitted to NASA on March 3.

The S-550 is a reusable space capsule launched on expendable launch vehicles such as the SpaceX Falcon-5 or Falcon-9 launch vehicles. The production series S-550 is intended to carry a pilot, two passengers, and over two tons of internal payload or additional passengers to low orbit destinations such as the International Space Station. The full orbital vehicle includes a separate service module and space for external oversized cargo. The S-550 system is intended to fulfil all of NASA's COTS requirements for cargo and crew rotation.

Under this proposal, Venturer Aerospace intends to develop and test fly unmanned and manned subscale test capsules, and then full sized S-550 test and manned demonstrator capsules. A total of six test flights, including an optional NASA COTS Requirement D station crew rotation demonstration flight, are included in our test program plan. S-550 development and demonstration test flights for the NASA COTS Requirement A, B, and C cargo/logistics missions are intended to take place from 2007 to 2009 at a cost to NASA of about a quarter of the total $500 million COTS program budget, including launch costs. The Requirement D followon demonstration flight will take place in 2010 under our proposed schedule.

This same vehicle is intended to serve both commercial and NASA government customers. Orbital space tourist operations are a large part of the Venturer Aerospace midterm business plan, and we intend to operate commercial tourist services at lower prices than competing international vehicles.

The 10 foot diameter S-550 capsule system is designed to launch inside the payload shroud of the SpaceX Falcon-9 launch vehicle. The capsule is a sphere-cone geometry, very similar to a scaled up version of the Discoverer/Corona spy satellite film return capsules, which flews hundreds of successful missions in the 1960s and 70s.

The S-550 capsule has a design weight of 3,200 kilograms (7,040 lb), with a 1,750 kilogram (3,850 lb) service module and combined internal and external cargo capacity of 2,500 kilograms (5,500 lb). The S-550 uses a traditional ablative heatshield during atmospheric reentry, and parachutes to a landing at a continental US landing site. The nose cone of the S-550 includes a no-moving-parts metal foam shock absorber system which will absorb landing impact and cushion the crew. After landing, the outer shell and heatshield will be removed and replaced, with the reusable inner capsule being refitted for further flights.

Initial testing will include parachute and shock absorber landing tests of subscale and full scale S-550 capsules, and launch escape system tests. These tests will establish the S-550's ability to safely handle two of the more risky parts of actual orbital flight.

Venturer Aerospace intends to begin full scale engineering and space operations from a facility in Hayward, California later during 2006.

It will be interesting to see how he does. One of the nice things about George's approach as he's explained it to me in the past is that it is very incremental, and he can get to some of his first risk reduction technology demonstrators off of very little initial investment. With SpaceX not needing a huge amount of money to finish their design, and SpaceHab already trying to privately develop their Apex modules, one can hope that there will be enough seed money left over in the COTS program to fund a few of these other approaches. I'd love to see three or four US companies flying people and cargo to space on a regular basis before the end of this decade. That'd be tres cool.

Thought Provoking Quote

Here's a thought provoking quote I saw recently:

"Commercially very little is to be expected from either balloons
or flying machines. For passenger traffic the number carried will
be so small and the cost so great that no competition is possible
with existing modes of transit." -- Willis L. Moore, chief US
Weather Bureau, opening the International Aeronautical Congress, 1907.

It's interesting to remember that there was a time when serious people could doubt whether air transportation would ever be anything more than a flash in the pan. Moore was quite right regarding balloons, but couldn't have been more wrong about airplanes. I really wonder if people are going to look back in 100 years at the progress of space transportation, and find similarly silly pronouncements to poke fun at.

Of course, just because somebody really got things that far wrong in the past doesn't automatically mean that similar pronouncements today will turn out equally fallacious. They did laugh at Christopher Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. But it is an interesting thought.

Ditto

Brian Dunbar stumbled across a great quote on the whole robots vs humans discussion:

Manned and unmanned space exploration go together, hand in glove, and we shouldn't rule out one in favour of the other. The real question is what is the most efficient way of getting out there, and the answer to that is to take the project out of the hands of the bean counters, bureaucrats and politicians and into the hands of those driven by that most basic of human desires, greed. While businessmen and corporations may not be paragons of human virtue, at least they have a tendency to get things done, because if they fail they cannot hide behind walls of bureaucracy and political manoeuvring, instead they go bust, and the technology and patents they have developed are snapped up by their competitors to be used again, rather than disappearing into the governments' archives, never to be seen again. We will get out there someday, but as long as the space program is a slave to the whims of government, of national expediency, of the military, and indeed of science, it will be a long, long road with many switchbacks, reversals and pauses, and I for one could do with rather less white elephants sitting in the middle of the road.

I think this comes quite close to perfectly summing up my feelings on the matter. If space transportation was as free and healthy of a market as most other markets, I don't think anyone would care about robots vs humans. It would be so obvious that the answer is "depends on what you want to do" that nobody would even ask the question. The saddest thing about the mainstream robots vs humans debate is that it isn't really a robots vs humans debate at all, but merely people arguing over who gets the pork.

Jonny Blogging' Strikes Again

I know I shouldn't be blogging under the influence of severe sleep deprivation, but Tiffy and little Jon will be headed up to Oregon for a week starting tomorrow, and I figured I'd do some Jonny bloggin'. I tried to burn them a CD of all the pictures we took this winter, but couldn't get the CD burner to do its thing this time, so I figured I'd just blog my favorite recent ones (so Tiff's parents can see them), and call that good enough for now. Then I go sleep.

One of these days I need to get around to doing that update

One of my recent commenters was asking a bit about my Prometheus Downport Project, which was a project I started to figure out how to build a commercial lunar settlement. Part of the goal was to figure out how to actually get from where I am right now to where I want to be. Far too many plans have huge old "and a miracle occurs here" steps. The PDP was no exception to the rule, but over the years since then, I've been trying to find actual concrete ways to proceed.

I'd just link to the original article itself, but unfortunately, when my school website was finally taken down a few months back, they took that down with it. Carl, the commenter who first asked, was able to find a link on the Way Back Machine, and with a bit of digging, I found an even more recent version, which you can view here.

Looking back, I realize the last time I did a full update was in July of 2000. Although I had an engineering degree by that point, I was only 19, so you should take a lot of my bombast with the appropriate sized grain of salt. I've done a bit more baking on those half-baked thoughts since then, but never have had the time to go back and formalize all the changes into something concrete. A big part of why I haven't sunk much time into it recently (other than not having much time to sink at all) has been my continually evolving opinions about the transportation architecture, and how best to approach the financing/marketting parts of the plan. The biggest changes in my approach to the transportation question are the fact that I now prefer vehicles that carry at least two people, instead of just one, the fact that I'm no longer all that afraid of reusability or on-orbit propellant transfer, and the fact that there are now potential launchers around the corner like Falcon IX that are substantially better than what I had assumed for the original baseline.

But even though a lot of it is obsolete, there is also a decent amount of good discussion in there in case you haven't read it already.

So Would You Call it XPPS?

It's been kind of interesting to watch the ebb and flow of space business over the past decade or so since I started following things closely. One of the companies I had been particularly interested in the past was Microcosm of El Segundo, CA. I became interested in them due to my former fetish for "Minimum Cost Design" ELVs like the Scorpius that they were (and still are) developing. They also had some interesting papers back in 98 or 99 about low cost lunar settlements that inspired some of the thought that went into my old "Prometheus Downport Project" idea for a commercial lunar settlement. I noticed a link to their site from another space related news site (Lunar Enterprise Daily) today and stumbled across some interesting research they're doing.

Advanced warning, these are SBIRs, and Phase I's at that, which means that it'll be a while before they've even proven these will work at all, but they had two interesting projects that I figured were worth bringing more attention to.

The first was for their Micromak miniature (100 gram) star tracker that might be of use for nano and pico sats, the general idea I get is that by using mirrors and avoiding direct lines of sight to space, they are able to get away with a simpler sensor, and to make it more rad hard at the same time. Or so they claim. I personally wouldn't mind seeing something like that on the shelf eventually. Star Trackers are an excellent way to get orientation information in space.

The other one that appeared even more interesting to me was the idea (which I'll dub X-ray Pulsar Positioning System or XPPS for short) of using naturally occuring signals from X-ray Pulsars to provide positioning and attitude data anywhere in the solar system, not just inside the orbit of existing GPS satellites. If something like that works, it could make interplanetary navigation substantially easier, much as GPS has made terrestrial navigation so much easier. GPS is really convenient, and it would be nice to get even some of the benefits of it without having to pay the huge infrastructure costs of setting up systems like that around every interesting planet or moon that we want to settle in the future. All that said, this is just a Phase I SBIR, and it would be interesting to know more about how they were actually planning on doing this. Anyone have any thoughts?

Translunar Dragon Flights?

Some of the commenters in my Dragon post brought up the possibility of using a Dragon for lunar flyby tourism flights. I think this is an intriguing idea. The Dragon is about the same diameter as the old Apollo CM (about 30cm narrower), but much more roomy. They are meant for short jaunts to the station, but if you traded out say half the seating, and used some of that weight for extra food and sleeping equipment (and a thicker heat shield), it might just work.

Here, let's play with some numbers:

The Falcon IX has a payload capacity to a LEO of about 9300kg. However, this is probably to a 200km circular orbit launched out of Canaveral (a usual way of rating launch vehicles). That means that to a 400km ISS orbit, it may be as little as 7000kg or so, so I'll guess that the Dragon is about that size. If you assume that the upper stage of the Falcon V/IX vehicles is about a 94% drymass ratio (similar to that of their Falcon I first stage), with a 2700m/s delta-V for GTO, and then see how much payload the various systems could loft into a TLI trajectory, you get about 5600-5700kg for Falcon 9-S5, or somewhere around 8400kg for the Falcon 9-S9 variant. If you drop the number of crew/passengers from 7 to 3 (which would be a lot less cramped for that long of a trip), could you shave off enough to launch it on an S5 instead of an S9? Maybe. If you could squeeze it into an F9-S5, and assume 1 crew and two passengers, they could probably offer a ticket for only $50M each, and that's for a much simpler system than the one Space Adventures or CSI were proposing. If you had to go with the S9 option, you might need more like $60-75M per ticket to make enough money off of the deal.

Since SpaceX has already said that it only intends to field the S5 and S9 variants once they have at least one prepaid customer, it might be possible to launch instead on a Falcon 9 with no payload and just a CBM connector on it, and then launch a second Falcon 9 with a Dragon, and with something like the Canadarm Mini idea I just posted about, and berth the two together. Doing it that way would likely still get you a ticket under $60-75M each, and more importantly would be using what would by then be an off-the-shelf booster.

Any way you look at it, this is an intriguing alternative to the other translunar options that have been previously discussed. The biggest win is the fact that it would be done out of a US launch site with a US company, with no need to go to Russia for 6 months of training. There are a lot of details I glossed over, but I don't think there'd be any showstoppers for doing a Dragon flight around the moon.

Time for a Canadarm Mini?

Ever since I misread the report about SpaceX's Dragon capsule, it's had me thinking about the utility of manipulator arms. When I first read the report linked to in my previous post, I thought that they were saying that SpaceX's capsule would include an arm, and that its arm would grab the station and allow it to dock. Unfortunately, as a commenter pointed out, it looks like I was wrong. They are planning on getting close to the station using some sort of LIDAR system, then having the space station's arm grab them and berth them at a CBM port.



I still think though that having a spacecraft with a manipulator arm on it (or at least modularly attachable as an optional feature for any given flight) would be a very useful thing to have. I did a little reading about the ISS's "Canadarm 2", and realized that this is way bigger than what would be needed for an on-board manipulator arm. The stat's I've been able to see so far indicate that the Canadarm on the shuttle weighed in at about 450kg total, and the Canadarm 2 tops the scales at a hefty 1800kg. The important thing to realize though, is that both of these are capable of handling really big payloads (over 100,000kg for the station's Canadarm 2), like oh, mating the shuttle to the space station or vica-versa. A small capsule drying to mate itself to a station or trying to move a satellite is likely only going to need something a fraction as heavy. Say something in the 50-150kg range. Since this would be mated on the ground to the vehicle preflight, and could be brought back for maintenance on the ground between flights, it wouldn't need a lot of the bells and whistles that were added to the Canadarm 2.

Since there are many companies out there developing CEV's, capsules, or other sorts of manned or unmanned spacecraft, there could be some serious potential business if MDA Space Missions were to develop a generic manipulator arm. Right now they've been building expensive one-offs for the shuttle and the station, but imagine if they could sell a dozen or so of these smaller, simpler, generic systems? I don't know if they could really make the busines case close at a reasonable price, but if they could, here's my guess at what some ideal stats would be:

• Total Arm Mass: 100-150kg


• Maximum Handling Capacity: 15000kg


• Maximum speed: ~12cm/s unloaded, ~2-3cm/s fully loaded


• Power Consumption: Less than 250W


• Length: 8-12m extended


• Stowed Envelope: Less than 2m x .5m x .5m

Those are just a guess. Don't actually know if that's feasible or not, or if any of those suggested requirements are mutually exclusive.

The applications of such a system would be numerous:

• Recovery of damaged satellites


• On-orbit check-out and deployment of satellites


• Simpler "docking" with space stations and propellant depots


• On-orbit assembly of satellites, transfer stages, stations, etc


• Simplified rendezvous and docking proceedures

The list could go on much longer.

Apparently Some People Keep Secrets Better Than Others

Wow.

I had figured that SpaceX was working on a manned capsule already, they have more or less said so already, but I had no idea that they had gotten anywhere near as far as implied in this Space News article:

Neither Dragon nor its Falcon 9 rocket is ready to roll out to the launch pad. But the Falcon 9 is in development for a 2007 debut and some Dragon hardware - including a full-scale working prototype - already has been built.

"As part of a top secret project, we've already built a prototype flight crew capsule, including a thoroughly tested 30-man-day-life-support system, which is sitting on our factory floor right now," Musk told Space News. "It doesn't meet all the NASA requirements, so it will probably not see flight, but it has served as a valuable learning experience."

Now, while it is possible to game the definition of "working prototype" a bit, I think that this sounds like something more substantial than just a fancy looking mockup, and that's cool. There's far too much viewgraphing and far to little hardware bending going on in this industry.

A lot of other people have commented on this already, so I'll just list a few of the things I like or noticed about it:

• The system comes with a robotic arm. That is primarily to allow the module to be "berthed" instead of "docked", but it also opens up a lot of other ancillary possiblities that I've put some skullsweat into. First off, it allows you to do satellite recovery operations in the case of a satellite put into a bad orbit, or that was damaged on orbit. Admittedly, this would likely be limited to LEO for now, but is a good start on future capabilities. Also, it gives the ability to do on-orbit checkout of satellites. With a 1-2 person crew, no CBM, an arm, and the rest of the mass designated to a medium sized satellite (say 2000kg or so unfueled), that allows you intact recovery of your satellite in case of a launch failure, on-orbit checkout, and the ability to bring the thing back and fly it again if the bird fails. It would also make mating a GEO sat to a booster a lot easier. The list goes on. Basically, I'm a huge fan of the arm, even if it cuts into cargo mass. [Update: As one of the commenters noticed, it turns out that I misread the article. The Dragon itself would not contain a robotic arm, but would use the space station arm for berthing. While this should work great for the station, it means a lot of the other ideas I brought up really don't actually apply. Teach me to blog something when I'm this tired]


• Using a CBM for the connection. This allows for swapping out full sized station payload racks (I keep forgetting the FLA for those things, ISPR maybe?), unlike the other sorts of docking systems. This allows for bringing cargo and experiments up, taking cargo and experiments down, and doing a lot of the logistical crud that NASA has been having the Shuttle do (thus allowing us to kill the stupid thing sooner).


• SpaceX doesn't appear to be trying to "suck the air out of the room" for the COTS contract. They say that they're asking for less than the full amount of money, and most of that for paying for demonstration flights (as opposed to paying for the development itself). Since they already have hardware partially built, they could have tried to shoulder out all competition, but by leaving some additional COTS money for at least 1-2 other firms, that will be good for everyone, in my opinion. While there may be some counterexamples, most serious industries have more than one serious competitor involved. Jeff Greason of XCOR likes pointing out that a "rising tide lifts all boats", and I think he's right. By leaving it open for at least one or two other serious players in the field, I think SpaceX is showing its wisdom in this matter like they did with the DARPA FALCON SLV project. By only asking for a bit of money for demonstration flights, they are helping foster a real competitive industry.


• Did anyone else notice that Elon mentioned that the $100M SpaceX has spent to date has gone not just to Falcon I, but also to doing some of the development work for Falcon V/IX, getting two launch complexes setup, preparing test infrastructure for future vehicles, and a capsule as well? That means his investment on just Falcon I is a lot lower than some space pundits have been assuming.


• In a previous announcement about their plans for manned vehicles (I think it was back around when they announced the Merlin 2 and BFR), they said that they would allow other companies to launch capsules on Falcon IX and that in fact they would charge themselves internally the same rate as they charge external customers. Ie, they won't be internally subsidizing the launch costs for their capsules. I think that this is also a cool move on their part, as it encourages others to develop capsules that can fly on their vehicle, which should substantially increase their flight rates.

The only thing I can complain about really is that I think it would've been cool to see the DC-X like, VTVL capsule idea they had originally been working on. That would've been cool.