Luna Road

by guest blogger Ken

Howdy all! I'm back and (semi-) recovered from an unanticipated trip to upstate NY for my grandmother's funeral. Always a somber occasion for anyone, and of course a time for reflection on not only the past in one's life, but also the future. The picture of me to the right is one that I had never seen before this occasion. I guess I got an earlier start in space than I realized.

In a space context, a certain melancholy can be drawn from the recent release of "In the Shadow of the Moon" on DVD. It is a great documentary, on par with "For All Mankind" from 1989. One point that it may or may not have been trying to make is that the Moon Walkers are aging. This unintentionally begs the question "What happens when there are no humans left alive who have walked on the Moon, the sole other body in our Solar system that humans have visited?" It could happen.

The impact of that visit was immense, and we've been cruising on those achievements ever since. From a science standpoint it is still the penultimate mission, with a per gram cost of sample return orders of magnitude cheaper than most other sample returns we've undertaken (not sure about the Lunas). Why? I'd argue that the robustness required for sending people to the Moon allowed for a robust sample return, most of which we haven't studied in detail.

Still, we've learned much from what we have studied, and the takeaway is that the Moon is a good place to get our "space legs". Of course it's going to be difficult. Of course there's nothing there but raw materials to work with. Of course we're going to have to carry in every single thing we need to work on the Moon (at least in the beginning). Nevertheless, the Moon and cislunar space address economic, security, and science objectives, all of which are at the core of the VSE.

In the latest issue of Espace Magazine there's an article on the 'tormented' Ares I rocket. The author notes that after the VSE was announced, O'Keefe set course on a 5 launch/4 rendez-vous approach(!). I don't remember that as having been settled since the space industry community was still working through the Concept Exploration & Refinement stage of the process. (Wait, Mark W. might have been arguing that way, I'll bet that's what it was...)

After Griffin came on board, ESAS was the ordre du jour, and the author argues that it was basically sold wrong from the start, being portrayed as an effective fait accompli, and ignoring the obvious fact that changes would have to be made once NASA started taking a close look at it. He then goes on to discuss the web reaction to the launcher, and the 'virulent' attacks on it. He gives the back of his hand to a certain poster that regularly haunts the comment sections of the space community. Personally, I'd like to think that Jon and I take a somewhat measured (if at times derisive) approach to critiquing the Shaft as the sole means to put crew into space.

I readily admit that I don't have the engineering background to criticize the Ares I on technical grounds. My issues with the system aren't technical in nature. I think it's the wrong answer to the wrong question, and therefore not what we need to be spending our taxpayer time and money on.

I do think we need to decouple human transport to orbit from NASA. Only by breaking the monopoly that NASA holds on crewed orbital access will American industry be able to advance our commercial interests even further out into space. That's why I cheer LockMart's efforts with Bigelow to that end, and the efforts of Blue Origin, which just bought a large chunk of land in west Texas for a launch site, and SpaceX's Dragon/F-IX rocket. It's always struck me as odd that in the U.S. of A., the best place on Earth (still) to do business in a just legal environment, you can't buy a ride to orbit, even though Americans go to orbit. Parsed in another way, why are we paying NASA to not make transport to orbit available to all Americans and their commercial interests? (I do consider things like art and music to be quasi-commercial)

If NASA's not making transport to orbit available to Americans, why not? They provide transport for themselves. Why can't we have some?

This is why I think we'd be much better off if crewed transport to orbit was decoupled from NASA. Most Americans apparently don't think that NASA is really (or should be) in the business of launching rockets, even if the most visible thing they do is launch the shuttle. We want our heroes to be explorers, not bus drivers. Bus driving is for schlubs like us, who don't get to be the first to set foot on an asteroid, but do get to eventually go to space in some work capacity.

We're getting closer to that being a reality, and I'm pretty excited about the next few years. I've got a few bucks in the Roth IRA, I may just have to go pick up a couple shares of LMT. The handful of ORB shares that I picked up when Griffin was made NASA Admin. have done well. I just wish I'd had the capital to get a decent number of shares. [No, I did not have non-public information. The public info was more than enough to tell this analyst to hop on that train]

Please note that I am not a 'Financial Advisor' in any way shape or form other than to the bank that I work for (and we don't have anything to do with equities), so please don't ever consider my musings as anything more than idle ramblings. I rode Iridium all the way to zero, so don't come looking to me for investment advice. ;-)

If NASA's looking for a good sales message, they should be selling space as a place where the U.S.A. holds a competitive advantage, and in this cruel and hungry world of ours we need to ensure that we stay at the front end of developments, and also be the means for the benefits of those developments to be distributed to the world in the name of peace and freedom, because in the eyes of the world we are the best hope for that actually happening.

The fact that the U.S. has (pretty) just laws makes it a good place to do business, and if the U.S. takes just law into space, that will be a good place to do business as well. As hurtful as it is to say, Russia and China do not seem to be necessarily likely or inclined to open the space frontier to everyone's benefit, and Europe, oy, look at all the paperwork!

Since the whole issue of why NASA isn't connecting with Gen Y seems au courant at the moment, I decided to go back and review some of the lessons from NASA's Strategic Communications work last summer, which I took a look at in "NASA's new plan for talking at us", parts I and II.

Dru made a comment in the first part that Gen X will likely be a significant part of the new/alt.space workforce. He's more right than he knows, as Gen X is the transition generation. We're only about 40Mn or so as compared with the huge bulges ahead of and behind us. Nevertheless, we are the ones carrying the knowledge to the latest generation. To the bare extent we've had a presence in the space field. The Goldin years were certainly not kind to GenX at NASA,and we're still largely ignored by most everyone, even though we were the pathfinders for a lot of the benefits that the Gen Yers grew up with. I've been using an ATM card since 1981. My Atari is long gone, as is the TI-99/4A that I spent so many hours coding, saving the results on cassette tapes. I'll admit, I almost became a programmer, like so many others of my generation. I was using Minitel to get financial research before Al Gore invented the internet. I'm what you would call an early adopter. That's why my laser pointer is green and yours is red (and I'll get a blue one when that comes out). It's why I'm ripping vinyl (and cassettes!) to mp3 on my USB turntable.

I looked through the presentation that Loretta noted over at Wired blog. My first impression was that it was way too long. The sufficiency of the message was delivered in just a few slides, and there was a lot of dross, presuming upon my time. The takeaway message is that Gen Y wants you to do space their way. Looked at a bit more carefully, the message is a technological one - you're not using the right tools to connect to Gen Y, which is just getting started in the big bad world, but which will eventually become an economic powerhouse perhaps even greater than the Boomers. This means crafting and channeling information in different ways than NASA is used to doing things. Rather than running tape on the NASA Channel, they need to be doing short videos that can be played on iPhones. Rather than issuing Press Releases to AP, they need to be running insider blogs and RSS streams. It's hard to think of NASA as being on the way to technological obsolescence.

I made the comment at a LEAG conference lunch to Dr. Spudis and Dennis Wingo that NASA is not on my critical path to the Moon. That's part of why I'm so happy about the private sector developments in crewed spaceflight. If it can be decoupled from NASA, then the private sector will be on the path to the Moon, making things easier for me. I do intend to overcome every obstacle on Luna Road.

Name Transfusion

My little sister, Jennifer successfully earned her "Mrs. Degree" yesterday up in Utah. The name transfusion was also successful, and she now has a new last name. Walton or Walten or something like that. I'd actually know for sure, and I'd probably even post a picture of the happy sappy couple if anyone had bother to send me one.

As it is, I started hearing rumors a few weeks ago that Jenny was dating some "Returned Missionary". Apparently even though he lived on the opposite side of town (and of course neither of them had a car) he was walking her home and staying up talking on her front porch till 1am on a regular basis. Having been there and done that myself, I knew what the signs meant, and figured there was a decent chance I was going to be hearing about an engagement at some point in the near future. After all, Tiff and I had only been dating in such a manner for three weeks when we got engaged.

So I get a call from my sister Monday, squeakily announcing that they were getting married, and that I ought to see if I could get some time off in the next three weeks to come up and meet him. I asked if they had picked a date, and they said no. Then I hear later on in the day that they actually meant that the wedding itself was going to be within the next three weeks, but the Salt Lake Temple was booked solid through the end of the month. So I figured, ok that'll give me some time to arrange for a Friday off, and get caught-up on work after being gone most of last week. No problem.

Then I get a call later in the day telling me that they had picked a date--this Friday. By the way, yes, having a 4 day engagement does strike me as clinically insane too. My parents had a short engagement (first date week before Thanksgiving, engaged at Thanksgiving, married between Christmas and New Years), but less than a week is impressively fast. Of course this meant that I wasn't able to make it. I haven't even seen a picture of the guy, talked with him, or even chatted with him on the intertubes. He's a nice guy from what I hear. Name is Allan or Allen or something like that [Edit: It turns out it's Alan...Hey, at least I was close!]. Apparently he did the same thing I did (started college at BYU at 16), but he switch majors enough that he didn't graduate before his mission. When he got home, some of his old best friends convinced him to transfer down to George Wythe College (the little ~100 student liberal arts school my siblings have all gone to so far) just in time to meet Jen.

Anyhow, in spite of slight annoyances at being kept completely out of the loop like this, I am happy for them. Hopefully I'll actually get to meet the guy sometime in the next month or two or three. Maybe someone can eventually send me a picture as well.

Kids these days.

Space Tugs vs. Space Ferries: A Useful Distinction?

Something that's been bugging me for some time is the confusion surrounding the term "space tug". The term's been used to describe at least two very different ideas for many years now. At NGEC-2, I tried to inject a little clarity into my working group's discussions by drawing the distinction between "tugs" and what I called "ferries", and I was wondering if others thought it was a useful distinction (and if anyone had a less snicker-drawing nickname then "ferries"--you would think the conference took place somewhere near San Francisco or something from all the chuckles that term drew...)

Under my proposed classification scheme, a "space tug" would be a spacecraft of some sort that primarily is used for maneuvering target spacecraft/objects in the near vicinity of a space station or another spacecraft. For instance, the CSI and CSI/SSL systems proposed for COTS 1 and COTS 1.5 would both fall under this category (and Orbital Express would also likely fit under this category). A "space ferry" on the other hand is a spacecraft that hauls other spacecraft, cargo, or people from one orbit to another in a reusable fashion. For instance, CSI's or Space Adventures' respective "Soyuz-Around-the-Moon" concepts would somewhat be examples of a one-use ferry.

Basically tug == prox ops, ferry == large orbit transfers.

Both are very important capabilities, but while they have some overlap in requirements, many of their requirements lead to very divergent capabilities.

Tugs for instance are explicitly designed for proximity operations in mind. A good tug system implementation would likely have one or more robotic arms for better handling, grappling with, and berthing target spacecraft. A tug likely doesn't have a huge amount of propellant on board. Enough to move things around between various low earth orbits, and to maneuver around the station, but total delta-V capability is probably in the low-hundreds of m/s range. Tugs want to be very robust. The very low delta-V requirements actually make a tug very mass insensitive. So long as most of the things you're moving around are an order of magnitude or more bigger than you, even doubling the mass of your tug has only a minor effect on the total propellant used for tug operations.

Ferries on the other hand are high-performance spacecraft. The delta-Vs necessary for a useful space ferry are on the order of 4-8km/s (though those last 4km/s are probably going to be "dead heading" ie. flying the ferry back to LEO with no payload attached). In the case of a chemically fueled ferry, this means it looks very similar to an upper stage--mostly take, one or two big engines, and some hardware on both ends. An inflatable aerobrake might not be a bad idea depending on how much it weighs. It might not really need much in the way of prox ops capabilities, just navigation and rendezvous capabilities. Ferries are typically going to be much bigger than their cargoes, while tugs will typically be much smaller.

Both ideas also provide different benefits.

The key benefit of tugs is that they enable launch vehicles and their cargoes to be much simpler. Instead of having to come up with a "last mile" solution for every new passenger or cargo spacecraft, you can have a standardized tug interface, and have the tug do all the hard work. That means that it becomes easier for launch providers to get involved in station resupply, because they're now just taking a standardized container, launching it to a specific orbit, and holding attitude until the tug can swing by and pick things up. Right now, most crew or cargo deliveries to the station require a system that uses a complicated service module and prox-ops hardware to actually get to the station, which results in fairly poor launched mass to delivered mass ratios. What tugs allow you to do in the cargo case is to drastically reduce the amount of wasted mass required to deliver a given mass of cargo to a station. Instead of having your cargo vehicle be a fully capable spacecraft, all it is now is a pressure shell, with some tug interface attachment (probably something brutally simple involving a couple of "hand holds"), and a passive CBM adapter on the other end. If you're launching to a station that's in a resonant orbit that provides frequent "first or second orbit rendezvous" opportunities, you might even be able to dispense with the need for power, communications, or even much in the way of thermal management. In other words, the cargo container starts becoming a lot more like your dumb intermodal container that you see on earth (just much lighter...). Tugs can also serve an emergency role for spacecraft that do have their own prox-ops capabilities, by serving as a backup in case something breaks (or in case multiple docking attempts need to be made and the visiting vehicle runs out of maneuvering propellant). Tugs are also a critical enabler for propellant depots. For propellant deliveries, the propellant can go through relatively narrow tubes (compared to what a human could fit through for instance), which means that a tug could allow for a very simple and lightweight standardized propellant transfer interface to be developed that could just be welded into the delivery tank. This interface could be 100% passive--just some mechanical attachment points, and the quick disconnect ports for fluid and if necessary power. A tug with robotic arms could then take all of the complexity onto itself for the fluid coupling. Much better than trying to make an automated docking and fluid coupling system that has to fly on each and every propellant delivery.

In a nutshell, tugs allow you to take all of the most complicated parts of getting people, propellants, and provisions to a station, and offloads it to either the launch vehicle, or to a reusable vehicle that always stays in orbit, doesn't have to reenter, etc. Why lug all of that hardware with you each and every time if you can leave it at the destination. Why require each and every company that wants to launch stuff to a station to then also have to come up with their own prox-ops solution? Solve the problem once, and then you don't have to keep solving it again. If your delivered payloads start outgrowing your tug, the right option might be to build more of them and operate them in a group, instead of designing a newer, bigger model. I think tugboats do just that for very large ships here on earth--instead of building a super jumbo tug, they'll often just use two or three smaller ones.

Ferries provide very different benefits. First off, and most importantly in my opinion is the fact that ferries (when combined with propellant refueling capabilities) allow you to launch a given exo-LEO vehicle on a much smaller, higher-flight rate vehicle. Dave Salt has on many occasions mentioned that an RLV with an 8000-9000lb payload capability could pretty much service the entire GEO satellite market. Most of the mass required in LEO (I know, many GTO launchers don't even stop in LEO, but it's still a useful point) to put a satellite into GEO is not the satellite, or its "beginning of life" propellants--it's the upper stage, its propellants, and the circularization propellants on the satellite. By having a ferry that operates between LEO and GEO, that has refueling capabilities in LEO, you can launch the largest commercial and government exo-LEO missions without requiring anything bigger than a bottom-of-the-line EELV. In fact, you can even launch manned lunar missions using launchers no bigger than an Atlas V 401 or a Falcon IX (a "Phase One" Atlas V might be a little nicer, but not because of the extra payload to LEO, but because the ICES stages envisioned are scalable and potentially much bigger than a stock Centaur stage, and would thus make a great starting point for a passenger transport ferry). For geostationary satellites, ferries can provide an extra service. Because the ferry can deliver things all the way to GEO, the satellite they're carrying could possibly forgo its "main propulsion system" and circularization propellant tanks in exchange for more station keeping tanks, more transponders, more solar panels or what have you. Or, you could leave the main propulsion system on, but have the capability to retire the satellite to a different, lower-value GEO slot, where it could spend its last few years before moving itself to a final disposal orbit. For instance, by the time a satellite is nearing 15 years on orbit, it may be a bit obsolete for first-world markets, but maybe it would still be useful for a different GEO slot servicing locations in the third world, or sparsely populated areas in the Pacific for instance (much like how passenger jets in the US are often "retired" only to be refurbished a bit and sold to third world countries at a much lower price). Either of these can help you get more revenue out of a given satellite launch. There are probably plenty of other benefits of ferries that I'm not thinking of right now, but those are just some thoughts.

Ferries can be based around either chemical or solar electric propulsion systems. Some cargoes don't mind a slow spiral out through the van Allen belts, and thus can be shipped by the more mass efficient (and hopefully therefore more cost efficient) solar-electric "slow boat". Other cargoes (people, cryogens, and possibly GEO satellites) can be shipped via a much faster chemical ferry. Sure, it's less mass efficient, so you're going to be paying for launching a lot more material, but the hardware is relatively cheaper, it can make more flights before being retired, and most importantly, you're not cooking your payload for several weeks in the van Allen belts. For GEO satellites right now, most of their radiation exposure (for their entire 15 year operation timeframe) happens in just one or two passes through the van Allen belts, so minimizing the time spent there might give chemical ferries a leg up (contra conventional wisdom).

Anyhow, what do you guys think? Does drawing this distinction make sense? And does anyone have a term better than "ferry" for a reusable transfer vehicle? Every time I've tried to bring up the idea of a "space ferry" there at the conference, the term would draw smirks or chuckles, or comments along the lines of "I guess NASA Ames is close to San Francisco after all"...

NGEC-2 Summary Part II: Speakers, Ideas, and Memes

In addition to the working groups, there were several speakers throughout the conference. While there most ideas presented at space conferences aren't particularly new, there were a few ideas from the various speakers (and from conversations I had at the conference) that I thought were worth mentioning. This may be a bit random, but I'm going to just list several of the ideas I found most interesting and new.

Buzz Aldrin was one of the breakfast speakers during the conference. Though I was sleep-deprived enough that I couldn't concentrate during most of his talk, he made an interesting (if not heretical) point about "astronauts". The "naut" part of astronaut, taikonaut, or cosmonaut, refers to "nautical"--coming from the concept of an astronaut as someone who knew how to navigate in space. Basically a pilot, an astrogator, someone who knows orbital dynamics, and knows how to fly spacecraft. His point was that not everyone who flies on a vehicle in space is an astronaut. I think he was saying this to try and distinguish space tourists from actual NASA astronauts, but I think his point is more interesting than that. For most space flights, you really don't need more than one or two astronauts. Most of the people who fly into space don't need to know how to navigate by the stars, or how to plot a trajectory, or how to null out the rotations on a vehicle. You might want a backup pilot, but not everyone who flies into space needs to or should be a fly-boy. Now, there's a bit of an emotional appeal to the idea of being able to call oneself an astronaut because one flew over 100km, enough so that it's probably still worth leaving that tradition in place for now--my point was just that those paying space travellers don't need to be trained or treated in the same way as a career spacecraft pilot.

Taber MacCallum of Paragon Space Development Corp gave probably the most interesting talk at the conference. Some of the earlier talks had copies of the slides posted on the NGEC-2 site, so I thought they were going to do the same for Taber's talk. Alas, as of the last time I checked, this didn't turn out to be the case. If anyone can snag me a copy of his presentation, that would be greatly appreciated. Taber and his wife were members of the original Biosphere 2 team, and he spent at least part of his time talking about lessons learned from that project. The biggest and most important part of his presentation was about the role of "leadership" in entrepreneurial ventures. He made the point that I've made in several instances that entrepreneurial ventures are high-stress, high-ambiguity environments. As I understood it, his point was that leadership in many cases boils down to emotional maturity. How we deal with our egos, with stress, with uncertainty, and with critical decisions. He made the interesting point that when a person gets identified too closely with a certain technical project or solution, it's often easy to allow the success or failure of that project to become intimately tied to one's self-worth. In such situations it becomes very hard to act objectively, and very easy to act in an emotionally immature fashion. I've seen this before (a lot) in myself, and I think that most readers could probably find examples in their own lives of such shortcomings. I know that when I've been championing an idea, and shoots holes in it, that sometimes I end up becoming very defensive, and will actively start blocking out evidence that contradicts my position. I usually calm down later, apologize, and get back to work. But it's a valid point--and an extremely dangerous one for entrepreneurs (or other people in leadership positions). As one person put later on in the conference, the single most likely thing that could hinder the development of commercial space is the personalities of the key players involved. Ironically, I think he might be right. While the technical, financial, and market obstacles are real and severe, the emotional, ego, and personality challenges may actually be more important in the long run. Just a thought.

Another interesting idea came up in the discussion in our lunar access working group about space ferries. One of the members of our team was an engineer at a major commercial satellite manufacturer. On several occasions, when discussing various alternative commercial means for delivering satellites to orbit or to GEO, I've had friends like Dennis Wingo bring up the risk aversion of the satellite manufacturers/launchers as an insurmountable show-stopper. As the logic went, launch costs are such a small percentage of the overall costs (and minuscule compared to the future revenue streams) that doing things that would reduce launch costs wouldn't really be very interesting to satellite builders/launchers, because the risk of doing something new would be too high. I had been repeating this conventional wisdom, when my teammate suggested a slightly different viewpoint. He agreed that satellite builders and launchers were very risk averse, by necessity. They really don't want to buy the first flight of some new transportation concept. Higher risks correspond with higher liability premiums. However, he made the point that after the initial risk has been reduced through a demo (or preferably two or three), that launch costs actually end up being very important. He said that while launch costs weren't the majority of the cost of building, launching, and activating a satellite, they were significant, and investors and customers really hammer on them to try and find the best deals they can. The fact that people are willing to launch on rockets with known worse reliability track records (Ariane V and Sea Launch for instance) in order to get a better launch cost should put to lie the idea that satellite builders and launchers are so risk averse that they'll never get involved in a new technology until after its been in service for a long time. One shouldn't assume that they'll be able to just sign customers up right from the start, but at least from what he was suggesting, the barrier to entry into supplying services to that market might be a little lower than I had originally suspected. Another idea that came up in the conversation was that the sooner you could convince insurers that your service provides a net decrease in risk, the more likely they'd be leaned on by customers and investors to take advantage of that service (in order to lower their premiums). Once again, just some more food for thought.

Another interesting point, brought up by Ken Davidian regarded the aging of the NASA workforce. At the time of Apollo 11, the average age of a NASA employee was about 29 years old. Now it's over 55. This has very important ramifications for the future of NASA and commercial space development, particularly with Griffin's statements on several occasions that NASA was going to be relying on more experienced engineers for Constellation, instead of hiring on a bunch of younger engineers for the project.

Unfortunately, I've been asked not to blog about one of the most interesting new ideas that I heard at the conference. Maybe at some point once my friend has had more chance to spread his meme from inside the agency I can blog about it without risking getting the idea tossed out as being "Not Invented Here".

Lastly, in addition to the working groups and the planned speakers, this conference ended up being a great chance for networking. I finally got to meet Grant Bonin in person (he's been trying to rope me into writing a commercial Mars transportation white paper for a while now). I got to meet a few people from the NASASpaceFlight forums. On Wednesday night, Tiff and I (and some friends from Santa Clara) got to go swing dancing in San Francisco, and we were able to arrange a meeting with Jake McGuire (who I've known from the sci.space.* newsgroups for over 11 years now). And on Friday night we had dinner with both Henry Cate's. For the conference, we were staying at the house of the one who hosts the Bay Area Moon Society meetings, and on Friday we had dinner with him and his wife and several of his kids and their families. His son Henry is the one who started the Carnival of Space last year.

I hope they have another conference like this next year. The work was fun, but I enjoyed getting to finally meet some of these people even more.

Next Generation Exploration Conference 2 (Part I)

Apparently unbeknownst to most people in the space blogosphere, there was a second space related conference going on in Silicon Valley this past week (at about the same time). This conference, the second "Next Generation Exploration Conference" was an invitation-only conference for young, "emerging global space leaders" put on by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate's "Commercial Development Policy" group (now headed by Ken Davidian), and by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. The focus of the working conference was commercial opportunities in cislunar space, and our goal was to put together a document overviewing some of the commercial opportunities in cislunar space, fleshing out some detail on the nearest term and most feasible of those opportunities, and making suggestions to NASA (and industry/academia) on what could be done to help enable those opportunities.

It was a lot of fun. I missed the first day (due to an important meeting we had down in Mojave on Monday and Tuesday) of the conference, but was able to make it there in time for the start of the working groups.

I was worried at first that with the sponsor being ESMD, and with the "alt.VSE" conference going on across town at Stanford at the same time, that there would be lots of pressure to turn the conference in a NASA-centric direction. In the preplanning discussions, I got chastised by one of the other attendees for suggesting that the Constellation architecture and Global Exploration Strategy didn't serve as much of a "point of departure" for the working groups, since it was pretty much irrelevant to commercial lunar development. I was worried that the desire to toe the NASA line would end up turning the conference into a brainstorming session for NASA-serving lunar businesses that 20 years from now might be feasible if NASA happens to get its architecture built and lunar base started.

Fortunately, Ken was able to find a way to focus the conference that was much more productive without degenerating into Ares-bashing, which I tend to be frequently guilty of. First, he made an important distinction between "commercialization" and "commercial development". I wasn't at the conference on the day he explained this concept, but as I understand it, "commercialization" is more or less taking some NASA-provided function, and contracting it out to the private sector. This could be things like "commercial" ISS resupply, where NASA is having the private sector serve it in a more cost effective manner than it could do on its own. "Commercial development" on the other hand is when a commercial actor creates a good or service to meet the needs of various groups, among which NASA may or may not be one of them. For instance, if a company were to develop a crew/cargo transport vehicle for servicing Bigelow stations as well as the ISS, that might be more of a commercial development. His point was that while commercialization was good, true commercial development was better. The other thing Ken did was to suggest focusing primarily on near-term projects taking the current status quo as the point of departure.

Anyhow, with that focus, we split up into working groups. I joined the "Lunar Access" working group, which consisted of several NASA employees (including several people from the COTS program), several university students, and a couple of people from "Big" aerospace, and one or two other representatives of the entrepreneurial space access community (including the guy at SpaceX who is in charge of most of their lunar business development).

We started out by looking at the long-term of what kind of commercial ecosystem we'd like to see in cislunar space over the next few decades, and then focusing back on transportation segments and business opportunities that were either feasible now, or that needed to be started in the near term. The big conclusion we came to was that the transportation needs of commercial lunar ventures (frequent access, low marginal cost, etc) did not line up very well with the planned Constellation architecture, and that therefore commercial lunar transportation would be important for a lunar ventures. We weren't necessarily suggesting abandoning Constellation, just stating that for non-governmental ventures, other transportation options needed to be available. So as I said, we worked back to the near-term to figure out what steps would need to (and could be) taken in the near term, and spent most of our time fleshing out the ideas that we came up with. I'll probably go into more detail in further blog posts, but the seven opportunities we found most interesting were:

• Developing off-the-shelf Automated Rendezvous and Docking systems
• Space Tugs
• Space Ferries (I'll go into the distinction between these two in another post)
• Propellant Depots
• Standardized Lunar Microlander Buses
• Testbeds for proving out technologies on orbit
• An ESPA-ring derived secondary payload system for lunar payloads
  

I was mostly involved in the second, third, and fourth ideas. So, we fleshed each of these ideas out, including putting some thoughts down into who could use these services, who might be actors in supplying or helping develop these services, what things NASA or industry could do to enable these opportunities, and what sort of time frame these things would likely occur in. It probably would help if next time they do this, they involve more business people, particularly among the mentoring/moderating staff (most of the people in my group were engineers). I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to find angel investors, VC managers, and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are interested enough in space, and interested enough in working with young people to help provide a more thorough business analysis. But, as it is, the results we were able to put together were at least rather informative. Once the finalized document we produced is ready, I'll post a link to it so you all can see more of what we came up with.

Skribit

My friend and coworker Michael Mealling has been telling me for a while about this blogger widget that he and some friends from Georgia were developing on-the-side. The widget, called "Skribit" allows blog readers to suggest and vote on topics that they would like to see the blogger (in this case me) write more about.

Anyhow, they recently got it into testing, and I volunteered as a guinea pig. While this won't guarantee that I'll actually have time to post about anything, at least it should be a fun experiment, and it should give me a feel for what sort of topics are interesting to you all. The widget is below my links, but above my archives on the right. Add a topic or vote on an existing one, and lets see where this goes.

It's Not Important Whether You Win or Lose...

...it's how you place the blame. Or at least that's how a friend of mine at NASA once put it.

Apparently, in the wake of yet more news leaks about severe technical issues on Ares I, Mike Griffin decides to play the blame game (hat tip: Space Politics):

A: Let me get down to the bottom of it. There were winners and losers in the contractor community as to who was going to get to do what on the next system post shuttle. And we didn’t pick (Lockheed Martin’s) Atlas 5, in consultation with the Air Force for that matter, because it wasn’t the right vehicle for the lunar job. Obviously, we did pick others. So people who didn’t get picked see an opportunity to throw the issue into controversy and maybe have it come out their way.

I'm sure the guys in Denver are getting a hoot out of this. Of all the people who have a reason to be upset at the massive waste that is Ares-I/Ares-V, the LM/ULA guys I know have actually been rather politic about their complaints.

You see, they're too busy working on making a vehicle that's safe enough to fly people and affordable enough to do so entirely on the private market, without needing multi-billion dollar sole-source contracts from NASA. Of course, Mike may actually have a point though. If there is anyone outside of NASA HQ who is to blame for making Ares-I look bad, it probably is the Atlas V guys...

Just not in the way Griffin is insinuating...

LM/Bigelow Atlas V Deal

For those who didn't see it on Hobbyspace, I got interviewed yesterday by New Scientist about the recent LM/Bigelow announcement. All in all it was a pretty good article (though apparently we might need to update our website to reflect the fact that we haven't been in Santa Clara for over a year and a half...). I had a few other thoughts about the announcement that I figured might be worth sharing, for what its worth.

In the quote they selected for the article, they mentioned my question of "will they be able to drum up enough demand to justify the flight rates they're talking about." Here were some of my thoughts that I shared with David Riga (the author of the New Scientist piece), that didn't make the cut:

If he were just running an orbital hotel (he isn't), I'd be very skeptical. Instead I'm somewhere between skeptical and guardedly optimistic. While there haven't been large numbers of takers for flights on the Soyuz, what Bigelow's offering is fundamentally different. Flight opportunities are frequent (which is critical for most microgravity research programs--imagine trying to run an R&D lab that you could only visit once or twice a year!), the situation is more customer friendly, training would likely be more streamlined (I hear that for Soyuz training the "passenger" is actually more of a third crew member than an honest-to-goodness passenger), etc.

It'll be interesting to see if he can pull off his idea of forming an international astronaut corps for countries that don't have their own space program. It wouldn't have all the usual glory of having your own national launch system, but it also wouldn't have the waste of it either. Countries like the UK could look at it as a smart and low-cost way of doing a manned space program--why reinvent the wheel when you can just buy a ticket and focus on doing something in space instead of blowing billions just getting there?

Also, the title of the New Scientist piece is somewhat misleading (though David may not have had anything to do with the title). There are some major hurdles for using Atlas V to fly people to Bigelow's station--it's just that most of the major risks don't lie with "man-rating" the Atlas V (or whatever you want to call making reasonable adaptations for flying a capsule on an ELV). Continuing with some more thoughts that didn't make the cut (yeah I wasn't expecting David to use every word of my several page response...):

Most of the challenges fall into two areas: developing a market at the pricepoint Bigelow can offer with existing transportation systems (like a "man rated" Atlas V), and finding a capsule developer who can raise the money and technically execute on doing such a capsule. I think the technical risk for both parts is relatively low--this has been done before even if there are still some improvements needed over previous systems (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, etc) to make it commercially viable. Most of the risk is on the marketing and financing side of things.

If Bigelow is able to start signing up high-visibility customers though, look to see that change. Once there looks like there's going to be enough demand to justify a capsule project, I think it'll be much easier to raise money for [developing] it.

Lastly, discussing whether I thought that the Atlas V was a good choice for Bigelow, I said:

I think at the moment they're a pretty good choice. The good news is that with SpaceX also hopefully getting into the launch business soon, that'll provide the competition Bigelow needs to keep prices low. Obviously, it would be great if there were high-flight-rate commercial RLVs instead, but those really need a proven market in order to justify the funds needed to pull them off. So short term, I think this may be Bigelow's best bet. In the longer term, it'll be up to LM to find ways
to keep themselves competitive.

To elaborate on this last point a bit, the price points Bigelow has been talking about (~$15M per person for a 1 month stay) and which a system based off of the existing Atlas V could likely deliver are probably too high for there to be a lot of space tourism demand. Fortunately, as Bigelow has mentioned a lot of times, he isn't running a space hotel. In order to really start getting to the elastic portion of the demand curve, the price tag would probably need to be a bit lower--on the order of $2-5M per ticket (according to some reanalysis of the old Futron Space Tourism study that T/Space did a few years ago that I discussed in this old blog post). It may not actually be as impossible for LM to deliver numbers at least on the high-end of that scale as I used to think (they have some possible tricks up their sleeve if the demand for Atlas V flights was high enough to justify the investment), and if Bigelow can actually deliver on demand for 80+ people to his station in a given year it might also be enough to close the business case for a high-flight rate, small RLV. But neither of those options are likely to happen right away. So, while someone like Space Adventures could probably rent some of his facility for space tourists, at the price point they are talking about, I'd be surprised if they could fill up more than 1-2 of the 12 targeted flights per year with actual "space tourists".

That leaves Bigelow's "sovereign" and "prime" customers to make up the rest of the 10 flights worth of demand. Admittedly one should note that not all of the 12 flights per year are going to be people--I'd imagine that at least one will be consumables, cargo, reboost propellants, etc. And on some flights I imagine that some of the passenger seats might be exchanged for experiments, research hardware/raw materials, and other commercial cargo.

The good news is that if they're really providing 12 missions per year, that's a monthly flight. While that still isn't phenomenally great for a microgravity research program (see Ken's last post, and my last space post and these posts from the ACES conference two years back for why flight rate is important for such programs), it's substantially better than the existing state of practice. As was stated in the first of those two ACES posts, when people know that there's going to be a flight every month to the station, it's a lot easier to slip last minute experiments or small hardware on-board at the last minute. Scientific research often lives or dies on iterations--on how fast you can experiment, analyze, reformulate, rehypothesize, and get to your next experimental step. What this means is that while 12 flights a year at $15M per seat isn't perfect for orbital microgravity research, it might actually be good enough to start generating some real demand--ie the "tipping point" where orbital microgravity demand starts picking up might be a little higher than orbital tourism, and possibly high enough to fill up at least a chunk of those 10 remaining flights.

But like the space tourism demand, that demand is only going to be able to grow if Bigelow can provide enough demand for the rest of those flights. Which brings us back to the "sovereign" customers that Bigelow has mentioned on several occasions. The idea being that this would provide smaller countries a much cheaper way to get involved in manned space flight. At least one country I know of might be in an ideal position to take the lead on this venture: the UK.

As Duncan over at the Rocketeer blog has mentioned on several occasions, this might be a good way for the UK to get back into manned spaceflight as they have recently been discussing more seriously. It's interesting to note that the premier suborbital tourism venture involves a US launch provider and a British operator, so the idea of the UK buying tickets to a US owned commercial station on US owned and operated launch vehicles could be framed as being the new way of doing things. As I mentioned above, by letting someone else spend the money on the destination and the transportation, the UK could focus on actually doing something useful with people in space, instead of blowing so much money on the first two categories that they have little left for actually accomplishing something. This would be a very forward-thinking thing for the UK to do. And if they took the lead in signing up for such a program, it is very feasible to believe that you would see other nations following their lead. I'm thinking of other Anglosphere countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and possibly even India. It wouldn't take too many of them running small low-cost astronaut corps and doing their own research projects on Bigelow stations before you could start providing enough demand to see those kinds of flight rates. Or at least it doesn't seem to unrealistic to imagine it.

So, at least on the surface it might be possible for Bigelow to pull this off--but he's going to need to sign up some high profile customers sooner rather than later. In the medium and long term, if Bigelow is able to provide enough demand for that many Atlas V flights, LM is going to have a lot of competition. From SpaceX and from other corners. But that's a problem that I'm sure we would all love to have...

Go Ahead, Throw Your Vote Away!

I really hate to bump such a good post as Ken's last one from the top of the list (go read it if you haven't had a chance yet), but I've been meaning to say something about this year's Presidential election for some time now. Tomorrow's primary day here in California (and about half of the rest of the country), and I for one am looking forward to "throwing my vote away".

To borrow a phrase from another blogger, last month I went through the motions of changing my political affiliation from "Libertarian" to "that party that lets you vote for Ron Paul in the primaries". I know that many (if not most) readers of this site will disagree with me on this choice, but I figured I'd be a coward not to give my endorsement to what will probably be the only major-party candidate I'll see in my lifetime worth voting for.

Now, Ron isn't perfect, and I do disagree with him strongly on some issues. Immigration for one--as one person put it, immigration laws used to be such that so long as you didn't have some super-contagious disease, you were welcome--I think that wouldn't be a bad policy to go back to.
But some differences aside, I agree with Ron that:

• Even with the recent downturn in violence, staying in Iraq isn't worth the continued costs
• Militarism and military spending are one of the biggest drivers of federal deficit spending today, and that we should bring our troops home from now-obsolete Cold War bases
• That central planning isn't any better for currency than it is for any other portion of the economy
• That combining militarism, welfare statism, and our monetary policy greatly increases our odds of severely hobbling the economy
• That the executive branch needs to be reigned back in to a more constitutionally sound footing
• That most federal agencies are of rather dubious constitutionality
  
• That entirely eliminating the personal income tax, and replacing it with nothing but spending cuts, would be very good for the economy and society as a whole

There's probably other areas we agree on, but for me the big issues of the day are executive power, militarism, and the economic downturn that's underway (in a large part due to deficit spending, monetary policy, and government intervention).

That said, I do think it's worth bringing up the whole newsletters issue. I'm sorely disappointed not only by the obvious lack of judgment that this episode brings to light, but also by how Ron Paul's campaign has handled things. I'm not the vindicative sort that wants to see someone outed and destroyed for stupid stuff they wrote when I was still in Junior High, but I would've appreciated a more transparent explanation of how this all happened under his nose, when he found out, what he did about it, and what he's learned from the whole mess.

I can't say I've been very happy to see the libertarianosphere's reaction to the issue either. At least according to how sites like Wikipedia define paleolibertarianism, it's probably the closest match for how I see the world. But that doesn't mean I haven't been rather embarrassed at the behavior of some of the big paleo sites like LewRockwell.com (which used to be on my list of sites I regularly visited). While there have been some meanspirited stuff from the Reason and Cato sites, many of those so-called "cosmopolitarians" are people who were genuinely interested in Ron Paul before the whole newsletter thing hit the fan. At least as far as people like Radley Balko and Jim Henley (both on my daily read list), I got the feeling that they were sincerely dismayed by this turn of events. Jim sounded downright depressed. I know I was. Anyhow, I think the whole episode has been a rather sad one. With as much mutual hatin' going on as there has been, you'd think we were talking about the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front...

Anyhow, all things told, I still can't see anyone else on either party who even remotely represents my views and concerns. So while I have some reservations, you can still consider this to be my endorsement of Dr No.

Microgravity Musings

Howdy all, guest blogger Ken here.

I've promised a couple posts that have been on the back burner. One is on regolith, a complex topic that needs more exposure, but unfortunately one of the main resources I was going to use, NASA's 'Lunar e-Library' uses some kind of proprietary Acrobat interface for searching the pdfs that keeps freezing up my computer, making progress frustrating and slow (and easy to put aside as other priorities come along). I was however impressed with the appendix in "The Moon" which dealt with regolith simulants, and how the different types are useful for specific kinds of research. One thing I did note in an old engineering study from the '80s was a blithe dismissal of iron in regolith, and its potential contribution to mitigation strategies. Then you look at the number of studies that source from the original one, and it's easy to see how misinformation can spread. I say misinformation because thanks to the work of Dr. Taylor at UTenn we now know just how useful can be that fine misting of free iron particles on all of the regolith particles. And so we're having to revisit a lot of assumptions and dearly held beliefs. Like regolith being a 'show-stopper' for Lunar development.

Another post I've promised is one on microgravity science, and why it is not a failure as a research methodology. The basic thesis here is that the reason microgravity science hasn't been able to fulfill its promise is because it hasn't had the opportunity to fulfill its promise. It's pretty darn tough for a scientist to get good results when they can only get into the lab once every six months (at best) and in addition to doing all of the maintenance on the lab trying to run your experiment as well. In my view it is a fundamentally flawed approach, although one that has tried very, very hard to succeed. I don't consider my analysis to be comprehensive, but y'all aren't paying me enough to be comprehensive. I've got a fair amount of stuff in the Lunar Library, and I have been following this particular topic a bit since I identified it years ago as one of the key business opportunities. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to follow all of the flown experiments back to their sources and get first-hand accounts of the results, but I did put together enough data to get a sense of what was going on.

The whole issue is of course transport to orbit. If you can't get to the lab frequently and regularly, it's difficult to make progress in your research. This is one way in which Bigelow balloons may have a competitive advantage. By adopting a strategy of merely providing orbital space, Mr. Bigelow allows the consumer to determine what goes on at the orbital facility. If someone wants to do microgravity science, they can lease the space, move in some equipment and lab benches, and send their researchers to orbit to run and re-run experiments in the search for better hypotheses.

I've asked Mr. Bigelow about whether his facilities would be able to interface with ISPRs, or International Standard Payload Racks, which are the plug-n-play equipment modules for the ISS, but never got a clear answer. These were designed to accomodate all of the old shuttle mid-deck locker experiment kits and Spacelab drawer racks used in the cargo bay. From a business perspective, this means that the ISPRs are able to accomodate legacy hardware. If the Nautilus and other balloons can fit them, that means that researchers will be able to tap a toolkit that dates back to the 1980s.

One business idea I considered while at ISU for grad school was to quietly buy up old mid-deck locker racks from the research institutions that had flown them, and probably had them in a closet somewhere. These would be cleaned up and then made available for lease to researchers who want to do experiments in microgravity. The idea being that the researchers wouldn't have to go through the misery of designing and building fully-automated push-button black boxes to run their experiments, they could use equipment that someone else had already made. Plus, since the equipment had flown previously on the Shuttle it was already 'space-proven', making for an easier vetting process for future flights.

Bwaa-hahahahaha! Reality quickly squished that idea quick, like a pathetic insect beneath an iron boot-heel. Not that the idea is without merit. Rather, the same old problem creeps up - access to space regularly and frequently. Though in this case not just in the case of physical access, but also procedural. So long as NASA has control of access to the ISS for the U.S., things will be done NASA's way (like no more than 12 dockings with the ISS per year). That means a significant outlay of capital and the underwriting of salaries for long periods of time in return for infrequent and not necessarily usable the first time around results.

Looking back at the historical record, the first thing I did was pull out the good ole '1981-1999 Space Shuttle Mission Chronology' (pdf), which is a terrific reference that KSC published back in 2000. It covers basic almanac-style information about each mission, including noting most of the microgravity experiments run on each trip. Mashing through the incomplete data, what becomes evident is that while there were many suites of equipment that flew fairly often, there was a lot of competition for the limited access to the microgravity environment from different interests. Experiments that might have returned results needing follow-up would find that they had a long line of experiments ahead of them before they could refly, if at all, because if a later experiment proved more 'interesting' science-wise, it would get bumped up in the line.

The high level of interest in the new realm of microgravity made possible by the STS begining in 1982 can be seen in the conference proceedings of the 'Second Symposium on Space Industrialization', compiled together with 'Microgravity Science and Applications Program Tasks' into the book "Space Industrialization Opportunities" edited by Jernigan & Pentecost in 1984. It weighs in at 601 pages of papers on results to date and abstracts on future research opportunities. The book is a thorough overview of space business, including things like transport and remote sensing benefits. My favorite part, though, is the appendix on specific microgravity science applications, which gets into the nuts and bolts of specific research avenues in the space environment. Some are the traditional crystal-growth experiments, but also more unusual things like Sol-Gel glasses. If you have doubts about the 'potential' of microgravity science for the creation of new high-technology products, then you need to take a read through this relatively hard to find book.

Given the potential identified in the early 1980s, given that it is now the late in the first decade of the next century, what happened? The usual suspects: politics and access to space. The shuttle was settling into a groove, and companies like 3M were doing experiments in orbit. Then Challenger hit and the nation was stunned into numbness. Any space ambitions of GenX (who would be inheriting the operation of the Space Shuttle and implementing a space station as a platform for the next steps as their generational challenge) were vaporized in that fireball in the skies over the Atlantic. To this day I cannot watch a video of the event or even ponder it without choking up. I think I knew on that day that the Shuttle was not the long-term answer, though I didn't know what might be. (General guess at this point: near-term, EELVs, intermediate term, RLVs, permanent, space elevator, but let's practice on the Moon first) Space did not again cross my path until 1999. Odd, given that 'Space: 1999' was what I grew up with instead of 'Star Trek'.

After Challenger, access to orbit essentially shut down for the U.S. The experiment backlog grew longer, and companies were having a harder and harder time justifying the salaries of microgravity science staff that had nothing to do. Some recognized early on that longer duration access to micro-g was needed to really get good science results. Space Industries was formed in 1982, and proposed an Industrial Space Facility to supplement the Shuttle. It would not be crewed, but rather crew-tended. Experiments would run unperturbed between shuttle visits, giving the STS a near-term destination, and a place to run science experiments for a longer duration than a 1 to 2 week shuttle flight.

ISF tried to be a commercial venture, but by the late 80s and in the wake of Challenger money was starting to dry up. Again, it's hard to commit capital to an endeavor to which you don't have good transport. ISF tried to get support from NASA as an anchor tenant, which set off the folks in Congress who saw it as a grab for Federal money. Besides, the U.S. would soon have the Space Station Freedom in orbit, so why would NASA need the ISF? Private industry could sure use an ISF, but without reliable crewed traffic to the station it is a hard sell, and the ISF ended up going nowhere.

By the early 1990s, even the hardest-core corporate micro-g efforts had dropped out, especially in light of the increasing devotion of NASA to their own space-station efforts. Many of the NASA researchers moved out into academia and pursued their studies through that venue. By the late 1990s, NASA was again hitting a groove, and there were more and more regular flights of equipment. Micro-g science was starting to become interesting again, and with the promise of a space station for longer-duration research the drumbeat started up for commercial access to space. In this case with NASA serving as the space-experienced chaperone for private efforts. Spin-offs were oft cited as a motivation for private capital to come back to the table, but spin-offs are something that is often confused as an end in and of itself, rather than as a contributor to the pool of knowledge that allows us to make better products.

By studying how materials behave in microgravity, we are learning things like how atoms arrange themselves as the form changes from liquid to solid. I had a good friend from the Space Generation Forum who was doing research on data on solidification-front changes in metals in microgravity,and who told me about some of the difficulties they were having interpreting the work while racing to beat another team to publication. By understanding how these things happen in the effective 'absence' of gravity, and comparing the results with what we know from studies on the same thing in our 1G environment, then we can learn how to do things better on Earth (and in space).

The problem is NOT that microgravity science, and eventual production, does not hold any promise. The problem is fundamentally that we can't get our researchers into the environment in which they need to work on a frequent and regular basis. The Shuttle is not the answer, but it is the only one we have right now. I don't think that the ISS, serviced by us exclusively with the shuttle, is being applied in the best way right now, but again, not because it is a bad tool, but rather that the bureaucratic infrastructure that has ossified around it makes access as problematic as not having transport.

The two players who are most obviously positioning themselves for an early start in future efforts are Bigelow and SpaceHab (SPAB). Bigelow is smart enough to not create space hotels, but rather leases available pressurized space on orbit. It can be used as a hotel for space tourists, but it can also be used as orbital research space if you put the right equipment in, and one company that has a pretty good amount of experience in the equipment side of things is SpaceHab. They were doing pretty well until Columbia took out their SpaceHab module, a pretty severe body blow for the company. They came back fighting, and have now positioned themselves as the company to contact for getting micro-g science stuff to orbit, and their COTS application is again heavy on their equipment experience. Like any good American I love the scrappy underdog story of SpaceHab against the goliaths of Boeing and LockMart, but unfortunately my work as an investment banker precludes me from investing in companies that I research for my job, because more likely than not I have non-public information (I do in the case of SpaceHab), and even the semblance of impropriety is not a good thing for an old-school banker. I also wish I could invest in Bigelow Aerospace, but I personally don't wield sufficient capital to do so, and the IPO is I'm sure a ways away.

Browsing around the web this weekend, I did see an allusion at one of the blogs (Rockets & Such) to Boeing being an entrant in the COTS competition. Space.com revived the story of LockMart working with Bigelow on potentially providing transport to Bigelow's facilities in orbit. This is an interesting development, in part because I think to some extent the big corps like Boeing and LockMart really do want to see human spaceflight as a standalone industry in the way that satellites and launchers are. I'm sure Boeing would love to sell CEVs to rich people all over the (free) world the way they sell aircraft to rich people. From a transport perspective is there much difference in selling transport between points A and B if the locations are both on Earth or if one of the locations is in orbit? Sure the physics are all screwy and really not comparable, but that was also largely true in the substitution of aircraft for trains as a means of going from point A to B. So hopefully over the last couple of years since the CE&R project the corporate community has come to realize that they have all of the right pieces, they just need to be put together in the right way, and the CE&R was a big step in that direction, as you kept seeing the same design elements in multiple presentations, such as an EML-1 staging point.

The kids don't wanna do their daddy's space program all over again. It doesn't have to be that way,and more and more people are beginning to realize it. There are different ways of approaching the problems, and if you change your frame of reference to look at the problem in a new way then you can see new solutions. Fuel depots don't make sense if you're throwing everything away each time. For the generations raised on Reduce/Reuse/Recycle the idea of throwaway missions to the Moon is noxious. What is interesting to them is one in which the pieces get reused and we're not throwing expensive tools into the void anymore. That means fuel depots and L1 stations and spacecraft that don't necessarily come back to Earth after launch. It means providing the tools like freeflyer platforms for microgravity science so that the U.S. can maintain its edge in providing the highest technology materials for both Earth and space applications. It means tapping directly the source of all of our energy [except for nuclear and geothermal] and beaming it down to Earth. Given that you can grow crops and graze cattle [most likely without ill affect] underneath the rectennas, you don't necessarily have to sole-source acreage like you do for traditional terrestrial Solar power. I can easily see skyscrapers (and brownstones) in NYC installing rectennas on their roofs to supplement the grid, especially in winter.

Kids don't want to see a rehash of what their parents did 40 years ago. They want the promise of a future of hard work that will lay the groundwork for things like energy from the Sun and high technology goods and services that build a stronger nation. That's a future that promises economic competitiveness and the kind of groundbreaking things that made America great and a nation worthy of the respect it held/holds in the eyes of the world. That's not what the kids're being sold, and they're not buying, surprise, surprise. Of course, the analyst in me points out that as taxpaying and voting blocs the GenXers and Millenials are pretty insignificant, which means that your target audience is in fact the Baby Boomers and their parents the Greatest Generation, who are significant taxpayers and voters. Who also happen to be living longer thanks to the advanced medical capabilities we've developed in the biological sciences. If we get our acts together some Baby Boomers will get to retire to the Moon, for an extra decade or two thanks to the lesser stress on the heart (and as a colleague pointed out, may provide the benefit of increased blood flow to the brain, an interesting concept).

Speaking of science, I mentioned last time around that I had submitted an abstract to the Lunar (and Planetary) Science Conference to talk about the Lunar Library, but that I wasn't holding my breath. With good reason because the rejection letter came today. They were nice enough to address me as Dr., even though I don't plan for accreditation at that level until my 50s. I'm figuring on a law degree during my 40s, and anyway no one even offers a doctorate in my field of interest, which is Lunar Studies. Anyway, the specific reason cited was that "The abstract focuses on a specific product instead of scientific data and is not suitable for presentation at our conference." It does have the feel of a somewhat personalized letter, and was hand-signed, so I am appreciative of that fact. When I got the three rejection letters for the OSF Policy Analyst position I had applied for at NASA you could tell they were all machine generated and autopenned.

Ah, ever the search for credibility. Is the Lunar Library in fact a product? I would argue that service is a truer word for what is being provided, that being a comprehensive overview of available books and other resources with a Moon focus, but also covering asteroids and the High Frontier. Nah, they're probably right, it's likely not of interest to the Lunar and Planetary Science community.

Sometimes I wish I could do a poster, especially since I was invited to do soat the ISU Symposium, but that's a messy and time intensive process (I know, a poster session for the GSFC researchers is one of the exercises the NASA Academy RAs go through as part of the program), made more difficult by the fact that it is web organized, not poster organized. All of the non-fiction reviews are housed in the Book Review section of OotC, not the Lunar Library, but they are cross-linked. The Lunar Sci-fi reviews are an 11 page long php bulletin board thread over in the forums (because I don't consider them worthy of the main section, only the non-fiction is). How do you link through to the on-line text from a poster? How do you demonstrate that by filing them chronologically you can scroll through and see what kinds of items were being produced when? The ease with which one can decide that they only want to see reference materials from a particular time frame?

That's the power of the blog format. I can arrange the Library thematically, and chronologically, and the most recent stuff shows up at the top. I can link to the publisher's website, on-line text, reviews at other websites, interviews with the authors at The Space Show, make commentary, and so on. The downside is of course that it is all hand-crafted, which takes time, and the fact that I have to have a physical copy for it to get a 'filecard', which means a capital investment.

Of course, if you go with my usual being way ahead of everyone else, often years ahead, then it probably won't be until about 2011 that anything ever comes of the Lunar Library, when NASA and the established space community finally has their "Oh, Crap!" moment and realizes that it would probably be a good idea to have a cadre of younger scientists and technicians (and my job: management flunkie) who actually know a fair amount about the Moon. GenXers and Millenials, because the Baby Boomers can't expect to be the ones to actually mount the Lunar expeditions, unless they are envisioning their own version of Apollo, in which case I would really, seriously need to re-think my whole position on the future of space in this nation.

Because that's what ESAS is turning out to be, with disposable rocket parts and everything. If we are only going to be repeating Apollo, then I'm ready to throw in the towel. I think that would be a phenomenal abuse of taxpayer funds, and the Libertarian in me is dead-set against it.

Perhaps it's because I can see the might have been, or may yet be (it's hard to tell sometimes), and I know there's a different approach. One that focuses on the emplacement of enabling infrastructure with the costs burdened amongst the users. Setting up a fuel depot for a NASA mission to the Moon is a phenomenally stupid idea. Setting up a fuel depot to be used by NASA, American industry, the DoD, and international customers, is a brilliant idea.

Luckily, the kids seem to be getting it. I was surprised to find a lively discussion of EML-1 as a staging point over at the Space.com Uplink. While at an NSS-NT field trip to the UTA Planetarium, we were talking about the projection capabilities of their new digital system. I asked if they would be able to map out the Lagrange points, and a young Civil Air Patrol cadet (actually, the volunteer that got to sleep with Pixel during the ISDC) piped up 'Yeah, Lagrange points!'. Such things were apparently beyond the ken of the classically-trained planetarium director, but I'm pretty sure it could be done if I gave him the equations.

Actually, that's an interesting idea. A digital planetarium show on cislunar space that laid out the terrain from a gravipotential standpoint, and showed the kinds of stuff you would put at all of the different locations between here and the Moon. Show the little spaceships shuttling between EML1 and the different LEO inclinations, to GEO and back, and landing all over the Moon. Call it "TomorrowMoon" Hmmmm. I wonder how much money there is in licensing planetarium shows...

The Perfect Storm?

Just wanted to post a link to a good article by Shubber over on Space Cynics.

Shubber's basic hypothesis is that the combination of economic pressures on the country, and NASA's current Constellation plans will likely lead to a cancellation (or at least gutting) of NASA's manned spaceflight program. While I sometimes disagree with the Space Cynics (or their tone), I think Shubber's hypothesis in this article is probably spot-on.

But I had a few comments I wanted to share.

First off, I share Shubber's amusement at those who think that we aren't in a serious economic downturn. I don't think I've blogged much about this, but I've pretty much been convinced for the last five years that the housing bubble was an unsustainable farce, and that when the market was finally allowed to clear out some of these malinvestments, that things were going to get ugly for a while. My problem has always been timing--when I am right, I tend to be right a little too far in advance (for instance, I figured that the tech bubble was a bubble all the way back in '97 or '98, even though it took another few years for the bubble to actually burst). Unfortunately, I think this downturn is going to be very hard on the entrepreneurial space industry as well. It wasn't just the collapse of the LEO comsat market that doomed the last wave of alt.space attempts--the general slowdown of the market at the same time was also a major contributor.

Second off, I think Shubber's point about Weldon retiring is also important. A lot of people who are defenders of Shuttle Derived HLVs (the Shaft, Longfellow, Shuttle-C, DIRECT, etc) like to fall back on parochial interests to save the day. The argument goes that the Shuttle program just provides too many jobs in important places to ever be canceled, regardless of if it makes any technical or economic sense. However, I wonder how true this really is. With Weldon retiring, will there really be anyone with clout on the manned spaceflight side of things that could stand-up to canceling or gutting the program? Especially if the funding is competing with bio-ethanol, entitlements, or funding the Great Important Super-Duper War Against IslamoNaziHitlerFascism?!!!!1!eleven!!1!

Third, while I agree with Shubber's overall point about the utility of the ISS, I think a caveat is worth mentioning. While I agree that ISS was very overhyped as far as its commercial potential, I think it also provides insufficient evidence on whether or not there is potential for commercial orbital research. Without frequent, reliable, low-cost access to space, there isn't any chance that orbital research can compete very well with terrestrial research, and ISS hasn't done anything to help solve that problem. Now, it may turn out that even with frequent access to an orbital facility (say weekly flights, ticket prices below $5M per person), that the case for orbital microgravity research just really isn't that compelling. But until we've resolved the access situation, I don't think we can truly pass final judgement on microgravity research.

My last thought deals with Shubber's last two paragraphs, where he says:

One thing that may give some of you heart, though, is that if NASA officially leaves the manned space game the door is wide open to you private sector proponents who have long claimed that they were the main obstacle to the successful private development of the sector.

… of course, if that wasn’t really the reason, then I suspect you aren’t going to be quite as happy about my prediction coming true as one might expect you to be.

I do have to admit that I did once think this way--that NASA manned spaceflight was holding us all back. I still think that NASA is hurting things, but mostly in the form of opportunity costs. By them blowing billions on playing steely-eyed rocket boys and Apollo reruns, they forgo the opportunity to really help the private space market blossom in a way that would benefit everyone in the long run. Just getting rid of them isn't going to change the financial difficulty of raising money for commercial space launch, and it isn't going to make the engineering any easier either.

That's not saying that the end of NASA's manned spaceflight program would necessarily be a total tragedy--just that it isn't going to really directly help private space development either.

Anyway you face it, we've got a long hard slog ahead of ourselves. NASA could have made some real progress during the window it had over the past four years, but that opportunity is pretty much gone. Whether NASA manned spaceflight goes on, or ends, it's still mostly irrelevant to the kind of work that needs to be done in order to become a truly spacefaring civilization.