Centennial Challenges

One of the talks given at Space Access last week, by Ken Davidian, was rather informative. Ken's a contractor working with NASA on running the Centennial Challenges program. Now, I'm kind of biased toward the Centennial Challenges, I work for a company that fully intends to walk away from the X-Prize Cup this year with at least one goofy oversized check from them. But even though most of the rest of the prizes aren't things we're directly involved with at the moment, I still think the Centennial Challenges program is one of the most useful and innovative things NASA is doing.

There are currently several Centennial Challenges currently being offered, ranging from space suit gloves, to lunar landers, to space elevators, to lunar regolith movers. And the guys running the program have even bigger plans for the future, including the possibility of a prize for the first company to soft land a robotic lander on the surface of the moon!

But, none of that is going to happen if the funding situation for the Centennial Challenges program doesn't improve. While the original plan was for them to get a steady stream of funding in the $10-30/year range, that hasn't panned out, and in fact they haven't really received any new money for a while.

It turns out that publicly funded prizes are kind of a hard sell compared to normal contracts because it's not clear which companies in which congressional districts will win the money, so it's a lot harder for people in Congress to take "ownership" of the program, because it isn't clear if it will actually benefit their constituents. It's really easy for a Florida congressperson to be excited about the CEV and CLV, because it will provide a concrete amount of jobs in their districts (even if it is a completely lousy investment for the country as a whole).

Another problem is that the Senate is having a hard time understanding with giving Centennial Challenges more money this year since they haven't spent all of their money from last year. One of the coolest things about how the Challenges are setup is that it allows them to put a modest amount of money in each year to offer much larger prizes than they could offer if they had to get all the funding for those prizes in a single budget year. But since no money has been claimed yet from any of those prizes, there are some Senators who didn't want to give them more money.

So the situation as it stands is that the Centennial Challenges has been more or less living off of what it got over a year ago. Fortunately, as soon as they realized that they weren't getting more money, they put together plans so that all the prizes they had already started would be fully funded. They have money set aside so that they can afford to run competitions and award money for some of the prizes several years in a row. Most of the $12M they currently have is set it aside for prize money payouts, while only using the minimum they can for overhead. One of the creative things they've been doing is teaming up with outside groups like the X-Prize Foundation to run the prize competitions, with those companies getting no NASA money to actually operate the prizes. All in all, I think they're probably one of the best run, highest "tooth-to-tail ratio" entities in NASA.

And they're still not getting any new money this year...

I'm trying to figure out ways to fix that. While prizes are far from a panacea, they are quite helpful in promoting new commercial development, and typically deliver a lot more bang-for-the-buck than typical prime contracts. I'm hoping that with this year's X-Prize Cup, and the several challenges being run between now and then, that we'll see a lot more positive attention being focused on this program. If the Lunar Lander Challenge contest this year at the X-Prize cup ends up being anywhere near as exciting as it looks like it will be, and especially if NASA leaves that contest with several pounds less of goofy oversized checks, that will definitely help.

But I can't help wondering if there's something else that can be done.

One half-baked idea I've been noodling is trying to find some way to find a Congressional (and Senatorial) "champion" for the program. As I mentioned above, this will be tricky, since being an inherently low overhead program, there aren't a lot of fixed government jobs to put in someone's district. But I wonder if it's possible. If anyone has an idea for who might be a champion or patron saint for the program, let me know. If there is someone likely to take up that role, we need to make sure they get invited out to the X-Prize Cup or some of the other challenges, so they can see the creativity and innovation that such a small allocation of funding is providing. It'd also be cool to see a congressional hearing about the centennial challenges. Possibly soon after the X-Prize Cup if that goes as well as it seems it will. I think that with how much private space companies are starting to capture the public's imagination, this might provide a clear and direct cause for people to get behind...

What do you all think?

Much Better

Sorry that I haven't had much of the will to blog lately. It's not that I've been too busy, just that I needed to recuperate a bit after the last several weeks. Anyhow, I wanted to link to the much improved "Governor's Amendment" version of Virginia's Spaceflight Liability and Immunity Act that Jesse Londin just posted on Space Law Probe.

At Space Access they mentioned that the good intentioned individual who had drafted the original law actually had a background in I think it was something like farm tourism or ecotourism or something like that(?!?) and had borrowed heavily from a recent bill on that topic. The newer language is a lot better (though hats off to the guy who got this started, even if it did need some polishing), including more closely linking it to the federal regulations like the CSLAA. The biggest improvement though is how well it cleaned up the language regarding exceptions to the act. Here is the original text before the governor's amendment:

B. Nothing in subsection A shall prevent or limit the liability of a spaceflight entity if the spaceflight entity does any one or more of the following:

1. Commits an act or omission that constitutes gross negligence or willful or wanton disregard for the safety of the participant, and that act or omission proximately causes injury, damage, or death to the participant;

2. Has actual knowledge or reasonably should have known of a dangerous condition on the land or in the facilities or equipment used in the spaceflight activities and the danger proximately causes injury, damage, or death to the participant; or

3. Intentionally injures the participant.

And here's the governor's amendment:

B. Nothing in subsection A shall prevent or limit the liability of a spaceflight entity if the spaceflight entity does either of the following:

1. Commits an act or omission that constitutes gross negligence evidencing willful or wanton disregard for the safety of the participant, and that act or omission proximately causes a participant injury; or

2. Intentionally causes a participant injury.

Much better, no? The original language left loopholes so big that they would've almost completely eliminated any benefit of passing the bill. "Reasonably should have had knowledge" can mean just about anything a lawyer wants. Also notice that the word change from "gross negligence or willful or wanton disregard" to "gross negligence evincing willful or wanton disregard".

I'm not a space lawyer, but I have to say this governor's version seems a lot more solid, and a lot more along the lines of what I think the intent of the Congress and Senate of Virginia thought they were passing originally. If they ok this, and this becomes law in Virginia, I think it will mark a huge step forward for the personal spaceflight industry. As mentioned at Space Access, it'll be important to start following on to this with similar bills in other space states including Oklahoma and New Mexico (and possibly Wyoming, Florida, and eventually California).

Good job guys!

The Next 50 Years: A Commentary

Earlier this morning an interesting article by Michael Griffin was posted at NASASpaceFlight.com in the L2 section. Apparently it was meant for Aviation Week, as it appeared on their blog there tonight (NASAWatch provided the link), which also means it's fair game now to discuss. The paper is a long one (15 pages in the word document that was on L2), and is worth a very thorough reading. Or two or three.

The topic of the article was the next 50 years of space flight, but the paper also discussed the past 50 years as well. As I'm sure that the article will likely be discussed on several space blogs and forums over the next few days, I'm not going to try and summarize the whole thing, but I'll bring up a few of the highlights, some things that I think Griffin has said almost better than anyone else, and some things that I disagree with him on.

First some of the highlights. A lot of the paper discussed the past 50 years of NASA, particularly regarding its budget.

• Griffin brought up a point I've brought up here before--namely that when discussing historical space projects, you need to use inflation adjusted prices or you'll be deluding yourself.


• Griffin brought up a rather intriguing point, shown in the Figure to the left, that if you look at the average NASA budget over 15 year time periods, it turns out that 15 year time period spanning Projects Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab, that NASA actually didn't receive more than it has over say the last 15 years. There was a brief spike as several projects were completed in parallel (instead of in series), but the average NASA budget over that time window wasn't really much more than it has been at any other time in its history.


• He also brought up the point (shown in the table to the right) that during the Apollo Era, manned spaceflight took up roughly the same proportion of the NASA budget as it does today. Actually, the only area that has changed a lot has been the drastic drop in space technology investment, which I feel is a lamentable loss. Even 5% of NASA's budget if put into intelligent space technology development (for technologies like orbital propellant transfer and storage, aerobraking, reentry technologies, etc) would make a massive difference. Alas.

The balance of the paper discussed where he thought NASA, international, and private space flight would be going over the next 50 years. While there is probably plenty of things that could be said, I want to just focus on two things for the rest of this blog post, commercial space and Heavy Lift.

Commercial Space
I tend to rip on a lot of NASA's decisions, and by extension, can come off as being rather hard on Dr Griffin himself. This is kind of unfortunate, because in many ways I think that Griffin has his heart in the right place. So, before I go into a point of disagreement, I want to highlight several excellent points that Griffin made about commercial space development emphasis mine:

By “commercial space,” I mean space business enterprises which develop a marketable capability while dealing at “arms length” with the government; i.e., largely without the financial backing and close government supervision which has historically characterized the space industry. The government will, at least initially, still be the major customer for such enterprises. Whether or not an enterprise is part of the commercial space arena depends not on the identity of its customers, but on the nature of its interactions with that customer.

An interesting corollary to this point is that when big "primes" like Lockheed or Boeing pursue a project on their own, like the guys trying to develop Atlas V into a personel launcher, they are being just as commercial and entrepreneurial as the plucky alt.space firms that we all love to root for. This corollary is important for several reasons. One is that it's important for us in the alt.space community to not brush off the "dinosaurs", as they may yet play an important enabling role in the development of commercial space. There is a lot of potential for "plucky mammals" and "dinosaurs" to work together in this venture. Another important point is that NASA also needs to remember that these dinosaur firms can be commercial as well. A lot of the talk about if the private sector is "up to the task of spaceflight" seems to ignore the fact that there are preexisting commercial entities in the US that do have demonstrated orbital transportation capabilities. They may not be the leanest, meanest, cheapest ride in town, but the point is that commercial orbital transportation exists in the US, it's just a question of if the newer, potentially cheaper startups will be able to improve the capabilities or not. But I digress.

Another gem:

I believe that the future for U.S. civil space exploration that I have outlined here can be attained with the resources that will be available to NASA by means of conventional government appropriations and acquisition strategies. But I also believe that this is just about as much as we can achieve with those resources, unless we can effect real changes in our methods of doing business. If we want to do more, if we want a richer future, if we are unsatisfied by the relatively modest program of inner solar system exploration I have envisioned here, there must be a change in how we go about it. Embracing the possibilities inherent in commercial space transactions is one such method.

I would go a bit further by stating that commercial space transactions are probably the single best method for expanding the scope of what NASA (and the rest of us) can accomplish in space. A lot of commenters on the internet have tried to paint those of use who'd like to see NASA do more to promote commercial space as "alt.spacers looking for handouts from Uncle Sugar." The reality is though, that with a vibrant and innovative private space sector, NASA can accomplish far more than it possibly can with an anemic and small one. As more and more non-NASA markets for space transportation, services, and products blossom, the cost of space exploration for NASA will also go down, allowing them to do much more for the same amount of money. With how obviously powerful of an impact a vibrant commercial space industry would have on NASA's plans, you'd think they'd be investing more of their time and money into making sure private space blossoms, instead of ambivalently watching from the sidelines to see what happens.

Heavy Lift
My single biggest beef with Michael's article (actually my only big beef) is his assertions about the necessity of Heavy Lift. In fact, I think that this belief is at the core of all the bad decisions that Michael has, is, and will make.

In discussing NASA's plans over the next several years, Griffin states that:

Most of the next 15 years will be spent re-creating capabilities we once had, and discarded. The next lunar transportation system will offer somewhat more capability than Apollo. It will carry four people to the lunar surface instead of two, and for a minimum duration of a week, rather than a maximum duration of three days. But in all fairness, the capabilities inherent in Orion, Ares I, and Ares V are not qualitatively different than those of Apollo, and certainly are not beyond the evolutionary capability of Apollo-era systems, had we taken that course. But we did not, and the path back out into the solar systems begins, inevitably, with a lengthy effort to develop systems comparable to those we once owned.

But as I have tried to make the case on this website, Heavy Lift isn't the only way or even the best way "back out into the solar system". As Michael himself admits, government operated Heavy Lift systems have high fixed costs, high marginal costs, and the cost to develop payloads for them is so high that they can only be launched a couple of times a year.

Griffin talks about how "We simply cannot again afford the strategic distraction, the wasted money, the squandered talent, and the lost time of building a new human spaceflight system, and then using it for only sixteen missions." While there is some truth to that, looking back at the example Griffin gives in the end about trying to keep a minimal post-Apollo lunar program going complete with Saturn Vs, Saturn IBs, and Skylab, I think he makes a stronger case for keeping Saturn IB than for keeping Saturn V. In the world of unlikely counterfactuals, imagine if Saturn IB had been retained, but Saturn V had been retired, and some of the money used from that to test out and develop the technologies needed for orbital propellant depots and propellant transfer. Quite frankly that would've been a world with far more current space activity and capabilities than one where the Saturn V had been retained. Saturn V had very high fixed overhead costs, wasn't capable of high flight rates except at enormous cost, and would've sucked up most of the manned spaceflight budget for decades had it not been retired. Kind of like Shuttle. Good thing we're not repeating that mistake...

ESAS Thoughts

A recent comment on Space Politics got me thinking about ESAS again. I realized that I'm probably one of the most vocal ESAS critics in the blogosphere, and figured that it would therefore be worth trying to summarize a couple of my key thoughts on the matter.

1. Ares I Technical Feasibility: I've actually backtracked a little bit on this one since my earliest posts on this blog. I think there is a good chance that given enough money and time, NASA can probably get the Stick flying. There is no reason why you can't make a solid first stage, LOX/LH2 upper stage vehicle fly. There's no reason why any rational human being would want to make such a pig fly, but there's nothing preventing irrational people from possibly succeeding. There's a chance that the vehicle might underperform and force Orion to be rescoped, or require drastic last minute kludges to meet performance requirements. But there's also a non-zero chance that in spite of having such thin margins this early in the development program, they might just pull it off.
   
   But it's still a bad idea.


2. Ares I Reliability Predictions: While I think Ares I can possibly be made to work, I think that the reliability predictions bandied about are completely unrealistic. Thinking that you can accurately predict the future reliability of a new system, before it has flown is the height of hubris or naivety (or both). I'm skeptical that somehow a team that hasn't developed and fielded a successful orbital launch vehicle in decades is somehow going to make an expendable launch vehicle that will be several times more reliable than any other expendable launch vehicle ever flown. Saying that "we have to build Ares I because a paper study shows that it will be the most reliable launch vehicle ever" just doesn't hold water. Or it shouldn't for anyone who has taken a reliability engineering course. Quite frankly if they can retire the thing without killing anyone, I'll be impressed.
   
3. Highlander Fetishism: There seems to be a large number of people I've run into on the internet who expect that an alternative to ESAS has to provide the exact same capabilities in the exact same way that the ESAS vehicles are supposed to provide in order to be considered valid. One common example of this is the belief that somehow the crew capsule has to have built-in long-duration living facilities in order to do "exploration". Which leads them to believe that a space station servicing earth-to-LEO capsule like Dragon or whatever the Atlas V team might come up with are useless for exploration because they don't have all the long duration hardware built-in to the capsule itself, as though there was no other way such capabilities could be provided. There are ways to go to the moon without using an "Earth Departure Stage" or an "LSAM" or a "CEV". There are literally thousands of different mission modes and options one can choose from. I've tried to mention some of the alternatives here on the blog, but people need to remember that "there can only be one" is a motto best left out of engineering.
4. Opportunity Costs: My biggest beef with the ESAS approach is that even if it accomplishes absolutely everything it initially claimed, it will still be a waste. The goals of ESAS are so meager compared to the costs and the time, and the other opportunities that are being abandoned in their favor, that it just isn't worth it. The point isn't whether it can be done or not, or whether exploring the moon is worthwhile or not, the question is, is this the best way to be going about this? By spending so much money and time developing new NASA-only boosters, what are we forgoing? By trying to retain a shuttle workforce that couldn't compete in the real world of the market, what futures are we selling? If NASA had chosen a more commercial approach, what could that $50-60B over the next decade and a half have gotten us?
   
   There definitely are benefits that will come from ESAS. A lunar base isn't a bad idea. Even a lunar base with a transportation system that's so massively expensive that it can only deliver 8 people to the moon per year has some value. Maybe even a couple hundred million dollars worth of value. Maybe even a billion. But $50-60B?
   
5. Risks: There's almost nothing worthwhile in life that doesn't have some risk attached. Many people that argue for ESAS compared to more commercial approaches to implementing the VSE like to gloss over the fact that Ares I and Orion are hardly low-risk options. NASA has botched a large number of "Shuttle Replacement" projects over the years, and is perfectly capable of botching this one too. Government failure is just as much a reality as market failure. Especially when you look at the odds of budgetary failure, I think I can safely say that the odds are probably in favor of COTS or some other commercial US venture flying people into orbit before Orion does.
6. Fiduciary Responsibility: Someone who invests other peoples' money has a responsibility to those people. But the responsibility isn't to avoid taking risks, it is to provide them the best return possible. Avoiding stupid or unnecessary risks is part of that. Hedging one's bets is part of that. However, completely avoiding risk at the cost of providing no reward is just as fiducially irresponsible as betting it all on a high-risk investment. A lot of the discussion about Mike Griffin's fiduciary responsibility comments remind me of the Biblical parable of the talents. One servant was so afraid of losing the money his master gave him that he buried it. When his master came again, he presented the unused talent to his master, who needless to say wasn't too impressed. Why hadn't he put it out to usury? Why hadn't he done something to provide a return?
   
   Fiduciary responsibility is more than just avoiding loss. There are risks that need to be taken and opportunities that need to be pursued in this life. Now, having not worked in the financial world, I'm only guessing here, but I imagine there are some places you can put your money that have a higher "risk tolerance" than others. For instance a hedge fund manager and a company managing people's retirement money probably have very different expectations when it comes to what balance of risk is acceptable.
   
   But putting most of the taxpayers money into a program to build a vehicle that costs way too much, delivers way too little, and directly competes with private alternatives sure doesn't sound like sound fiduciary decision making to me.
   

I could go on, but I need to get up early tomorrow for work. But I think I've remade my key points.

More Thoughts on the Lunar Much Sooner Architecture

I did some tweaking of my Lunar Much Sooner architecture. The latest numbers are available here. The original post about this architecture can be found here. I'm still basing this on existing rockets and stages (with the only modification being a partially developed "Lunar Mission Kit" for the stock Centaur stage), as with previous versions. The lunar lander is still sized for the Sundancer delivery mission (with some modifications described below), with the 2-man missions using a lander that has substantial propellant offloaded from it.

The main changes were:

1. I increased the weight allotment per crew + seats to 250lb each from the 150lb each original assumed. That should open up missions to a wider range of people.
2. I assumed a much higher delta-V required for WSB trajectories. I'm still not familiar enough with these trajectories to be too comfortable with them, and at least one source I saw seemed to imply that the lower WSB delta-Vs were for insertion into a highly elliptical lunar orbit. And that once you added in the burn to drop down to lunar orbit, you'd be looking at ~3.7-3.8km/s total Delta-V.
3. The constraint of using only existing launchers, with no propellant transfer, and only using existing stages (ie no Wide Body Centaur derived stages) forced me to assume that the Sundancer for use with this architecture is "offloaded" a bit for the landing. Some of the Sundancer weight quoted in the original Space.com article is for subsystems that wouldn't be needed for a lunar base Sundancer. There are also some subsystems and consumables and stores that don't implicitly have to be shipped with the Sundancer, but could be loaded/installed at a later date. When I was on my tour of Bigelow Aerospace two years ago, they mentioned the fact that a decent chunk of the mass for a station module could be sent up on a second flight if absolutely necessary. In order to make the numbers work with a little bit of margin, I needed to cut it down to about ~15klb. That means that somewhere around 5000lb of cargo from the first cargo lander would be needed to fit out the station.
4. Since I no longer needed a lander to bring the full Sundancer station down from LUNO, I decided to shrink the lander itself by a similar percentage (going to an 1800lb dry, 12klb wet lander stage--ie still using the 15% dry fraction assumed previously).
5. The lighter lander stage allowed for more mass on the manned missions to be allocated to the capsule section as well as to the "light crew cabin" section, while still maintaining margins similar to what was discussed previously. Now the capsule mass is within a couple hundred pounds of the mass assumed for the Early Lunar Return missions.

All in all, I think the exercise is still relatively useful, even if there is almost no chance that NASA would be interested in this approach. I think the rough sizing for the lander is probably in the ballpark of what would be desirable for commercial/multinational projects, and there are several important lessons I've learned so far. Here are a few thoughts of how this idea could be improved substantially:

1. One of the two most annoying constraints for this strawman architecture has been sticking with existing upper stages as the base for the lunar transfer stage. Both Centaur and the DIVH upper stage are just a little too small for practical purposes. Using existing Centaur stages without propellant transfers makes everything a lot lower-margin, and requires everything to be more weight-optimized.
2. Once you have propellant transfer capabilities, there isn't a single element of this mission that couldn't be launched on a stock Atlas V 401/402, Falcon IX, Zenit, and many of the components could be launched on Delta-IVMs if push came to shove.
3. Wide Body Centaur technologies make everything in this architecture a lot easier. With a 1.5x WBC derived transfer stage, you don't need to offload anything from the Sundancer lunar base module (and can go with the slightly bigger lander). WBC derived modules should have much lower boiloff losses, which is one of the areas that I think this architecture is likely to have the biggest challenges with. A WBC derived transfer stage could take a Dragon/"Human-Rated-Atlas-Capsule" all the way to LUNO, and then provide a Trans-Earth-Insertion burn.
   
4. The lander (whether the 75% sized one assuming a normal Centaur transfer stage, or the full-blown one with a WBC stage) is big enough to land a much larger "crew cabin" if you top the tanks all the way up. Depending on which lander size you're looking at, you could transport up to 6-8 people at a time to and from the lunar surface using a bigger crew module. You'd have to use either a LUNO way station, or a split mission (ie you send the lander and the crew separately), or use propellant depots, etc.
5. A reusable lunar lander has enough performance to ship itself (and a decent amount of cargo) to lunar orbit from LEO (the required Delta-Vs are very similar).

Anyhow, that's just the technical thoughts I had. I've been mulling over the best way to proceed on such a project, if one were looking at it from a fully commercial approach, and it is obvious that the path is quite a bit different than if you were trying to do things as part of a publicly funded project (or one funded by a very rich philanthropist who didn't care about ROI). For a commercial lunar architecture, each step has to be developed incrementally, and if at all possible needs to be financially self-supporting. Figuring out exactly how to do this (ie what sequence of technologies and markets to take, how to finance things at different points, etc) makes the CM power-up problem shown in Apollo 13 seem like childsplay in comparison. I may try to work up some of my thoughts on the problem for the ISDC conference (which it is now looking like I'll be able to attend--Thanks to all of those who've tossed money in the tip jar!), but until then, I'll try to toss out random thoughts, and pieces of the solution as I go along.

Cool Picture

I was just looking at the SpaceX site, seeing if there was any new info about their upcoming launch, when I stumbled across this picture of a hotfire test of their Merlin-1C regeneratively cooled engine. According to a recent article somewhere, the engine has now been test fired "dozens" of times (Credit: Cory Stewart/SpaceX) :


How sweet is that? I want one.

Random Thought: RS-68 Inflatable Nozzle

It's interesting how you can hear a part of an idea, file it away in the back of your brain, and then all of the sudden have something pop into your mind months later.

A couple of months ago, my arch-nemesis from ATK (ok, he's actually a friend of mine, we just tend to disagree about...work related issues...) posted a rather interesting article about inflatable nozzle extensions that was done by Goodrich back around the time of the Apollo program. Basically, the idea was that they wanted to see if they could put a huge deployable nozzle extension on the bottom of a J-2 engine, so that it could have a much longer nozzle without paying a huge weight penalty for a long interstage section. The nozzle was made of a stainless steel "airmat" mesh, with the outside of the bell sealed off with a high temperature silicone rubber, and the whole thing was inflated with the turbine exhaust gas (which also acted as a warm-gas transpiration coolant for the nozzle extension). They did some testing with the concept including deployment tests and such, though they didn't get an opportunity to hot-fire altitude test the concept.

The RS-68 has a fairly short nozzle (21.5 expansion ratio) so that it won't get flow separation at sea level, so it can have enough thrust to lift the vehicle off the pad (since in some Delta configurations all the thrust is provided by RS-68s). However this lower expansion ratio severely hurts the vacuum Isp of the system. The RS-68 has a vacuum Isp of only 420s (similar to the J-2 which had an Isp of 421s), compared to the ~450s of the SSME or RL-10. The SSME has a much higher chamber pressure, so it can have a longer nozzle extension (~75:1 if I'm recalling correctly) without flow separation at sea level. The RL-10 only operates at high altitude, so it doesn't have to worry about flow separation at all, and can have a really large expansion ratio (84:1).

Interestingly enough, if you could put a large enough inflatable nozzle extension on the RS-68, you could boost its Isp into the 430-445s range. And unlike the sliding nozzle extension like on the RL-10B-2 used on the Delta IV, this doesn't involve any sliding seals. You'd probably want to go with a regen cooled nozzle upgrade while you're at it, which would also help with things.

If this technology pans out, it could probably increase the performance of Delta IV vehicles by a substantial margin, while also bringing ideas like DIRECT back into the realm of feasibility.

It'd definitely be fun to see if the idea could be dusted off (now that the patents have expired).

Just a random thought.

Congrats to the ULA Team

I got home just in time to catch the liveblogging of the Atlas V STP-1 launch tonight. As several others have already pointed out, this launch was fairly important because it carried the Orbital Express satellite into orbit. Orbital Express is a DARPA project being led by Boeing, that will test out several autonomous on-orbit operations, such as rendezvous and docking, and non-cryogenic propellant transfer. While fully autonomous operations aren't the only way to do rendezvous and docking, or even propellant transfer, it's not a dumb approach, and it'll be interesting to see how things turn out.

Anyhow, congrats to the Atlas V team, who have now had 80 consecutive successes in a row. Watching one of those big vehicles fly is always impressive, though definitely a nail-biter, even with the Atlas team's relatively impressive track record.

Tip Jar?

I've been thinking a lot about this year's ISDC which is coming up. I'd like to go for several reasons. One, I'd like to see what ISDC is like. Each space conference seems to have its own flavor, and attracts different parts of the industry. Two, I think that it might be nice getting to actually meet Ken Murphy in person. He's been coblogging here at Selenian Boondocks almost since the start, but I've never met him in person. He's the guy organizing this year's conference, and it'd be cool to see what he was able to put together. Three, I've been invited to some sort of a space blogger summit that's being put on there, and it would be fun to go and meet some of the other bloggers out there. Four, Ken's been trying to talk me into giving a presentation for a while, and while public speaking scares me to death, I also kind of enjoy it. Go figure. Five, I'm finally starting to make some progress on my thesis, and might just be getting close to the end by May.

Problem is money, or the lack thereof. Having just barely gotten money in time to avoid having my rent check bounce, I'm not in a great position to plop down the several hundred dollars it would take to attend. Now, I can probably work out some deals as far as crashing on someone's hotel room floor. And I can be frugal as far as food is concerned. The big challenge I have is getting to and from the conference. Dallas is a bit too far to drive, and I probably wouldn't save much money anyway. The prices I'm seeing for flight are out of the range I can cover myself.

So I was wondering, is this the sort of thing that blog tip jars are for? Anyone know how to set one up?

[Updated: I added a small paypal tip jar in the upper right hand corner.]

Some Launch Economics

A commenter on my post about Soyuz launches from Kourou raised the question of whether launch prices would really drop with an increase in flight rate. This question may be due to discussions about a report prepared for NASA by a Dr Hertzfeld of GWU that was discussed on the Space Show last year. I've been meaning to discuss the topic of launch economics for a while, since it was raised during my Space Show, and also because its a rather important question to answer for the emerging space industry as a whole.

There are a few pieces of anecdotal evidence that leads me to believe that increased flight rates typically will lead to lower prices. This doesn't mean Dr H's research was wrong, or that I'm more knowledgeable about economics than he is (because I'm not), but might mean that some people may be drawing incorrect conclusions from his paper.

I remember at one point while developing our current line of rocket engines, we had found an analytical model to help us estimate a couple of design parameters. The model (which is a fairly well-accepted one) was suggesting that our design flat out wasn't going to work, and that we were going to have to try some drastic measures to get it to work. One of my coworkers though had been looking over actual data from our system, and questioned the model. It turns out that he was right, and as far as I can tell my understanding of this model (or possibly the model itself) was off by over a factor of 3! Ever since this situation, I've tried to be a little more humble about my capacity for correctly understanding things the first time, and have been a little less willing to brush-off inconvenient facts that ruin my otherwise perfect theories.

Two of the pieces of evidence that lead me to believe that there is something wrong with the theory that increases in flight rate won't decrease price are:

1. There is a lot of evidence that when you sign an order for multiple flights, you can usually negotiate a better per-flight price than if you order them one at a time. One publicly available piece of evidence corroborating this common knowledge is shown on the SpaceX site:
   

   Pricing and Performance
   SpaceX offers open and fixed pricing that is the same for all customers, including a best price guarantee. Modest discounts are available for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases.

   I'm sure that others that have dealt with launch providers (such as Dennis Wingo) could provide additional support to this piece of evidence--that "bulk buys" of launches will almost always net you a lower price per launch. The price reduction is probably modest mostly because most such bulk buy contracts are for a relatively small amount of launches spread out over several years.


2. As part of their study to try and determine if Atlas V could be used for servicing Bigelow Aerospace's planned Sundancer station, the ULA Atlas V team investigated the business case as well as the technical requirements. According to several sources, the total per-person price for a visit to Bigelow's station (including launch price, the price of the capsule flight, and the price of spending time there at the station) is actually substantially below what the current prices of Atlas V would suggest. One online article (whose numbers jibe with several other sources I've seen) states that:
   

   So how much will a space cruise cost the Average Joe? One week on the Sundancer alone will cost $7.9 million per person, predicts Bigelow. While pricey, it's a steal compared to the $20 million that Space Adventures, another orbital flight company, charges for a week-long whirl on the International Space Station.

   Even assuming the $7.9M/seat only covered the Atlas V launch costs (and all the info I've seen says that includes Bigelow's fee and the capsule providers fee as well as the Atlas V launch price) , you're talking about less than $60M for an Atlas V 401 flight. That's more than a factor of 2 drop from the current Atlas V 401 price, and is only possible because Bigelow is talking about providing for a much higher flight rate than the measly 1-2 flights per year Atlas V has been bringing in so far. Now obviously whether they will charge that price or not depends very strongly on if they think they can get enough demand to justify it. If Bigelow only buys 2-4 flights per year from them, the price will likely be a lot higher. But if the flight rate ever reaches the 16/year that Bigelow was talking about, their case can close on the $8-10M/person price point that Bigelow has been talking about.
   

While those two examples don't conclusively prove that in all situations increases in flight rate will drop price, they do show that that is in fact the case at least some of the time. Another commenter, Habitat Hermit, I think gave a much better explanation about the fundamental idea that governs whether prices will drop or rise--profit maximization:

[T]here isn't a conflict between demand & supply elastics (what you're reacting to) and profit maximization (what you're alluding to even if you manage to contradict yourself), quote contrary the two depend upon each other (which is sort of beautiful if you think about it and its consequences).

The launch industry's publicly traded companies will always seek to maximize their profits, they're even bound by the law to do this to protect the interests of their shareholders (privately owned companies without shareholders is a different story but I don't know of any currently available launch company that is).

Now as to whether the price will increase or decrease can be simplistically illustrated by where on the supply & demand curve the company presently is and where it is moving to. You are absolutely right that increased demand does not always lead to decreased prices and both scarcity and oversupply are important factors.

So what is the current situation?
- almost all launch companies are looking for more customers (could be interpreted as oversupply but it isn't, the correct term for this is overcapacity: the business as a whole has spare unused capacity it would like to fill to maximize its profits further)
- however it's not like the launch companies are constantly producing more launch vehicles than they have any use for (that would be real oversupply as well as the opposite of profit maximizing and if they did that the leadership would be quickly thrown out by the shareholders)
- there are plenty of available launch windows, especially for LEO (no scarcity)
- there is no lack of material or factory capacity for increasing the production of launch vehicles (no scarcity)
- most launch complexes can be easily expanded (and NASA is trying to get rid of a rather large one in an excellent location...)
- the main cost to the launch company is in maintaining the infrastructure and workforce required (fixed capital costs) and not in the launch vehicle production and launch itself (variable cost depending on units produced). Actually the fixed costs dwarf the variable costs, the two aren't remotely close.

Regarding the last point there are at least two things worth mentioning:
1. This is the explanation for why the barrier to entry into the industry is rather high unless you can evade or mitigate the huge fixed costs. A NewSpace company like SpaceX is able to attempt it because it is lead by an "angel" investor (Elon Musk) willing to spend a lot of money for little in return in order to establish the company. Another NewSpace company is attempting to evade the fixed costs by using air-launches (that would be t/Space) and thus has less of a need for money (but they're still struggling getting enough investors).
2. The second thing is that this is a very strong indication that increased production even if at a lower price would be more profitable. In other words if a somewhat lower price would bring in significantly more sales your total profit would rise (thus profit maximization).

What would cause the price of a launch for the customer to go up even though there was high demand? Scarcity in the launch industry. If the launch industry has little additional capacity and/or the fixed costs are no longer such a major cost relative to the product production and/or when investing in additional infrastructure (industry expansion) would not lead to increased profits through increased sales, then profit maximization would result in price increases to the customer (taking advantage of the oversupply of customers).

However that simply isn't the case in the immediate future and even an additional 40 Atlas launches a year would not make it so for the industry as a whole, likely not even for LM. It's also important to understand that guaranteed sales as would be the case with Bigelow Aerospace is somewhat different than one-by-one sales and makes any need for additional capital investments much more tenable (if theres should be such a need at all that is).

Might as well stop now or this is going to become very long and cumbersome. I guess any introductory textbook on microeconomics should do a better job at this than I have.

I could probably go on as well, but I think that Habitat Hermit put it very well. The ULA team will do whatever they think will lead to the most profit for their investors, as will any other publicly held company (and even most privately held ones unless they are owned and run by the sole investor--like SpaceX or Bigelow), and in many cases the best way to maximize profits will involve dropping their launch prices.

Dallas Bienhoff Space Show Interview

I typically don't get a chance to listen in on the Space Show too often. I work long enough hours that when I get home I typically don't have a 1.5-2hr chunk of time where I can set aside for personal time. However there was a talk this week about orbital propellant depots given by Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing that I was planning on trying to find a way to listen to. Alas, it turns out that it was scheduled at the exact same time as a dentists appointment I had previously scheduled, so I had to download the archive and listen to it at home. I've met Dallas at a few space conferences over the years, including the ACES conference out at NASA Ames in October 2005. When it comes to orbital propellant depots, he's one of the most knowledgeable people I know, so the show ended up being very interesting.

A lot of what Dallas said mirrors some of the points I've been making here. That propellant depots could greatly enhance the current lunar plan. That they could provide huge markets for commercial orbital flight. That NASA isn't going to develop one of these on their own. Etc. I'd just like to comment on a few of the things he said that got me thinking.

Dallas presented a paper at STAIF a few weeks back discussing the implications of a commercial propellant depot for NASA's ESAS architecture. He found that by using orbital propellant transfer, the amount of surface cargo that could be delivered in a single flight could be more than tripled. This would be enough to bring a Sundancer module, or a ISS derived module down to the lunar surface, even at the same time as bringing crew down.

The market implications are even more impressive. Just to support 2 NASA lunar flights per year, there would be demand for nearly 40 Falcon IX sized flights. When you compare this with the current global launch market, you can see how important this market could be. It's large enough that it could possibly provide flight rates high enough to help close the business case for one or more orbital RLV companies.

There has been a lot of discussion claiming that orbital propellant depots only make financial sense if SpaceX is successful with their Falcon IX. However at different points in his interview, Dallas clarified several things. First, he clarified that the reason he used SpaceX numbers so much was because they were publicly available information that he couldn't get in trouble for talking about. Second, in light of the high projected flight demand (40+ launches per year), a listener asked if Boeing or Lockheed's prices could drop far enough for Delta or Atlas to close the business case. Dallas skirted the question, saying that the idea was possible, and that it was under investigation. If the numbers I've heard for human rated Atlas flights are any indication, then there is a real chance that Atlas could be a contender. Quite frankly, with a market this big, it's almost guaranteed that there will be more than one supplier. Possibly even more than two or three. Third, he also discussed the possibility of buying foreign launches. He brought up the launch inclination difficulties associated with Russian launch sites, but what with Soyuz expected to start flying out of Kourou next year, that could change substantially. With foreign providers, there will be real competition going on, and the prices will likely be kept low enough, even without SpaceX, to make such a venture worthwhile. If SpaceX succeeds, all the better.

One thing that came to mind during his discussion of using foreign propellant launches was the fact that an international standard propellant transfer interface could be very useful at some point in the future. If someone like MDA of Canada (or any of a number of European or Asian companies) were to come up with a working, standardized interface design for propellant transfer, it wouldn't be ITAR restricted, and would likely greatly facilitate the use of internationally launched propellant tankers. I imagine such standards already exist in other markets like oil transport and such. I wonder if a prize for coming up with such a specification might be useful?

Dallas also talked about the concept of anchor tenants, and how NASA could possibly make things drastically easier by acting as one. Unfortunately, Dallas came to the same conclusion as I did--that while writing NASA entirely off a customer is probably premature, they haven't proven themselves to be very reliable or stable customers in the past. Basing your business plan on them buying propellant from you is a recipe for disaster. He did mention one possible alternative, which was interesting: Bigelow Aerospace. Now, that's still a bit premature, seeing as how they haven't yet orbitted their first manned space station, but they have expressed a lot of interest in cislunar transportation, lunar cyclers, and most recently landing whole lunar bases in a single flight. All of these could benefit immensely from orbital propellant transfer. So, once Bigelow gets his current projects brought to market, working with him might make a lot of sense.

Anyhow, I think Dallas painted a fairly useful picture of how close this technology is to primetime. There are probably ways to make a 1st generation propellant depot even simpler than he outlined, but I think he made my case that this is a near-term technology that can have massive impacts on commercial space transportation.

Listen to the whole thing.

Soyuz in Kourou

Clark Lindsey linked to a recent news article about the groundbreaking for a Soyuz pad at the Guiana Space Centre (aka Kourou). The interesting item from the article was that the inaugural Soyuz launch from there is slated for late 2008, which was a lot sooner than I had expected. It'll be interesting to see how the Russians and Europeans do on this joint venture. Being able to launch from Kourou should greatly improve both the performance of Soyuz, as well as the orbits it can launch into.

This got me thinking about orbital propellant depots again. Soyuz is one of the more cost effective boosters in the world (prices I've seen are on the order of ~$2.3-3k/lb in LEO, compared with the typically $4-5k/lb from most other expendable vehicles), and the ability to buy propellant launches from them should help provide the competition necessary to help drive prices down with other potential providers. When there is no real competition, sellers will tend to charge whatever they can get away with, to try and maximize profits. But when there is direct competition like this, it should help keep people honest (and provide at least one redundant supplier).

For right now, this is just for unmanned Soyuz launches, but who knows what will happen down the road. This might allow the Russians a way to access Sundancer if that market pans out. Competition and backup suppliers for that market would also help keep prices down, and access more reliable.

Just a thought.

SPACE Act of 2007

Here's an interesting one I saw over on Space Law Probe: the SPACE Act of 2007. Now, I'll be the first to admit that in spite of being rather vocal about space policy, I'm not exactly the kind of space activist who goes out and writes his congressman all the time. In fact, I'm not sure I ever have. I've never gone to March Storm, and doubt I will anytime soon, but I have to say that I think the general idea behind this act is intriguing.

The basic gist if I'm understanding it is that it would create a 7-member National Space Prize Board that would come up with prizes to encourage the commercial, scientific, exploratory, and national security applications of space. This board would be funded at the rate of about $100M per year, and could offer prizes of up to $400M without requiring special permission from Congress.

I have no idea if getting a $100M/year entity funded is realistic at all in these times of tight budgets, but the idea of having a prize entity that represents not just NASA, but the military, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Transportation as well sounds like a good idea in general. By having the ability to give out bigger prizes, hold money in escrow, form partnerships with other government and non-government entities for funding/running prizes, etc this could be rather helpful.

What do you all think?

Random Thought: EDS

Just wanted to post a few random thoughts while I watch the kids until Tiff has had a chance to get some sleep (James was up sick all night).

First one regards the EDS. I haven't thought out all the implications of this idea, but wanted to open it up for discussion. It appears that NASA may be setting itself up big-time for failure by focusing so much of its scarce near-term money and its short window of opportunity on new launch vehicles and earth-to-orbit capsules. This seems particularly short-sighted when you consider that:

1. It is impossible for Ares-1/Orion to close the US manned spaceflight "gap", while it is reasonably possible that commercial enterprise could.
2. When you factor in budget uncertainties, technical uncertainties, delays, etc, commercial manned vehicles are more likely to fly first than Ares I/Orion.
3. The law you know, kinda requires NASA to purchase commercial services whenever possible instead of owning and operating their own systems. Not that they've ever let the law get in the way of a good time, but I'm just sayin.
4. When it comes to launching to ISS, many of the commercial projects underway offer more crew or cargo capacity at substantially reduced costs.

A lot of people will come back with arguments about how the CEV has capabilities for long-duration space operations that won't exist in these commercial manned vehicles. While this is kinda true, the reality is overblown. If you've looked at pictures of the interior layout of the CEV, it is still a very cramped place. It doesn't as far as I've heard have a toilet (adding yet more evidence that Apollo on Steroids is turning into Apollo on Geritol--Now with Depends!), and only has a small "galley".

It will have a thicker heat shield, but seriously guys, thickening up a heat shield isn't that tough. Especially with 40 years of continual experience in the art, including work done on designing heat shields for entering Jupiter's atmosphere, or Titan's, or nuclear reentry vehicles, etc. The fact is that designing a heat shield tough enough for lunar return is really not that much tougher than designing one for earth return. It's thicker, but we have a lot more experience base now to base design work on, and it's probably now entirely within the capabilities of commercial entities to design a "lunar/martian return shield" upgrade for their capsules at a reasonable price.

Even more to the point, this whole mixing of earth-to-orbit transportation with cramped "long-term" habitation capabilities is one of the major technical flaws of the Shuttle. Here you have a huge service module that gets used up after every mission, and you end up sizing the reentry shield, parachutes, etc for a capsule that is significantly bigger than it needs to be to transport the crew.

So here's my crazy idea (that I know would never happen). What if you offloaded from the CEV to the EDS all of the subsystems that were necessary for long-term spaceflight, and then outright cancel the CEV and just buy crew/cargo flights from commercial providers? Have a manned version of the EDS include something like Sundancer--a fairly lightweight module that would provide spacious accommodations for several astronauts for up to several month periods (including some sort of toilet), while the unmanned version could haul cargo. Size the EDS to perform the LOI and TEI burns. Maybe even go out on a limb and design the thing for orbital refueling and dry launch.

If you did it that way, you'd have a true "exploration vehicle". One that could support lunar or martian exploration, and that wouldn't be duplicating and competing with existing or nearterm commercial capabilities. Not to mention it would be more capable and could help catalyze commercial development.

Reality is that NASA isn't going to do this, but it does suggest a route commercial entities could take for manned exo-LEO transportation.

Clear Thinking About "The Gap"

In a post today on Space Politics, Jeff Foust displays some rather clear thinking about the so-called manned-spaceflight gap:

One thing to remember with all this discussion of a gap, including claims that it is “a national security issue”, is that it refers only to the US Government’s ability to send humans into space on vehicles it operates. Should one or both of the COTS awardees, or another company interested in commercial orbital spaceflight, be successful, the gap would be greatly reduced—or even in the best case eliminated—simply by having the government procure transportation services.

Of course, this raises a question about another oft-repeated line of thought about why Congress wouldn't dare cut funding for implementing ESAS: that no Congress member would ever vote to end US manned spaceflight. I've raised this point before, but it bears raising again. If 2010 rolls around, and Ares-1 hasn't even flown in its full configuration to orbit, but one of the commercial companies has started flying people and crew to orbit, how seriously should Congress take this claim? Why shouldn't Congress at that point outright cancel Ares-1/Orion and force NASA to purchase flights to LEO from commercially available domestic sources. If commercial manned spaceflight becomes a reality in that timeframe, it becomes impossible for Congress to "end US manned spaceflight" without outright legally prohibiting it.

Which is even less likely than NASA getting the funding it needs for its bloatware lunar architecture.