Some Interesting Ideas From the Other Side of the Pond

I don't have time to go into detail at the moment, but I wanted to relay an interesting paper that Keith Cowing reported on NASAWatch today. Now, if I were someone at the ESA, I'd probably be taking NASA's grand plans about Constellation with an appropriate sized grain of salt right about now. But there were some good ideas overall:

• The report mentioned that our ISS experience shows the importance of having redundant transportation methods (ie imagine what would've happened to ISS if Soyuz didn't exist). I don't think that redundant transportation method should necessarily be another government-centric transportation system, but I agree wholeheartedly that monocultures are a bad idea.
• The report also mentioned that having a safe-haven in LLO is one of the best ways to increase the safety and flexibility of a lunar exploration program. Right now, most of the danger associated with lunar exploration have to do with operations on or near the moon. The current architecture does nothing to reduce those risks, but instead focuses on the much sexier earth-to-orbit transportation risks. Having some infrastructure in LLO can go a long way to fixing that, while also giving you some very interesting mission options. Now, I'm still a fan of the idea of Lagrange stations, and I think that in the long-run they'll dominate the traffic in the lunar half of cislunar space. I just think that there is a small, and critical niche filled by one or more small polar LLO stations. I've been planning to write up my ideas on this concept for over two months now, so can someone poke me in a few weeks if I haven't followed up on this thought?
• Unlike NASA they don't seem to be deathly afraid of on-orbit assembly when it makes sense. Of course, they don't have an HLV fetish that they have to rationalize...
  

There were a few other good points, but those three were the key ones that stood out to me. Of course they also seem to be missing the importance of propellant transfer, and they seem to be almost as clueless as NASA as far as commercial enterprise is concerned (both why it's important, and how best to foster real commercial involvment). But it was an interesting read if you have a few minutes.

Westward Ho?

Other than a busy schedule at work over the past several weeks, and ongoing blogger's cramp, one of the other big reasons why I haven't been blogging very much lately is that Tiff and I started reading together again. This is an old tradition of ours that we started back when we were poor newlyweds and couldn't find a cheaper date than borrowing a book for free from the library, snuggling up, and reading to each other. Anyhow, when we finished the Harry Potter series a few months back, I had decided I needed a break from reading together every night, so I could get caught up on my blogging. I still have another one or two installments to write in my Orbital Access Methodologies series. Seeing as how that hasn't really been happening, we decided to finish up the last two books in a nine-book historical fiction series we had started back in Santa Clara. To my surprise, reading this series has actually got me thinking more about space development, and so I figured I'd share some of my thoughts.

The series, The Work and The Glory, is a historical fiction adaptation of LDS Church history over the 1828-1847 timeframe, revolving around the lives of a fictional family, the Steeds. While the books do tend to get somewhat preachy at times, and while someone familiar with LDS history might find some of the foreshadowing to be a little weak, the series was overall a good read.

The Mormon Exodus
It was the last two books in the series that got me thinking about the challenges of space settlement. These two books, which we finished a few days ago, cover the Mormon exodus to Utah in 1846-47. In 1845, the deteriorating relationship between the Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois and their non-LDS neighbors got bad enough that the Saints agreed to leave the state by the end of the following Spring. Since none of the other states in the Union at the time were willing to accept the Mormon refugees, Brigham Young and other church leaders decided to colonize the Great Basin in the heart of the Rocky Mountains (which at the time were part of Mexican territory). The theory being that the area was pretty much unpopulated, nowhere near as nice as Oregon and California, and therefore they might finally be left alone.

What the story really brought out was how amazingly challenging of an undertaking the exodus was. The goal was to move all 15,000 Saints (many of them destitute) over 1200 miles through unsettled wilderness, and set up civilization in the previously unpopulated mountain valley around the Great Salt Lake. Much like space, the destination was not existing towns or settlements, and relative to other areas being colonized at the time, the area was very forbidding and unfriendly to human habitation.

One of the interesting points I gleaned from the story was the importance of infrastructure in making it possible to move that many people, and Brigham's use of advanced teams to help prepare the way for the main body of settlers. The original plan in late 1845 and early 1846, was that a set of advanced companies would lead-out, with the goal of reaching the Valley early enough that summer/fall to plant some quick-growing crops. The hope was that they could get there early enough to provide food for the main body of the Saints to survive the winter by the time they would arrive. Also along the way, they'd be blazing the trail: creating fords, digging down steep river banks to allow for easier crossing, building bridges or ferries where necessary. As the nasty weather that Spring in Iowa Territory bogged the Saints down, these advanced parties were instructed to build temporary settlements at several locations including Mount Pisgah, Garden Grove, and eventually Council Bluffs and Winter Quarters (near modern-day Omaha, Nebraska). They fenced in and cleared farm land, planted and cultivated crops, and then moved on, leaving those crops to be harvested by those who were still coming up the trail.

One of the other major lessons I learned was that settlement by large groups is inherently more complicated than settlement by smaller, individual groups. Especially when you need to move not only the rich and well-equipped, but also the penniless, starving, and destitute. In the end, by the end of 1847, only about 10-15% of the Saints had arrived in Utah. Things ended up taking well over twice as long in the end, but created an infrastructure that allowed everyone, no matter how poor to make the trip. Of the ~60,000 people who made the trip before the railroads reached Utah, many of those literally pulled pulled their way to Utah using handcarts. Without the ferries, resupply settlements, trails, rescue parties, the Perpetual Emigration Fund, and other pieces of infrastructure set in place during the initial exodus, many of those who followed would have never made it. Also, the experience gained in setting up the infrastructure for the exodus provided experience that eventually led to over 500 settlements throughout the Rocky Mountains (spanning from Mexico to Canada), playing a pivotal role in the settlement of the Western United States.

Anyhow, there are far more interesting stories (the Mormon Battalion, the Brooklyn Saints, the Donner-Reed Party, etc) that were covered in those two books than I can do justice too. So, if you can stomach the thinly-disguised religious apologetics long enough, I'd highly recommending digging into some of these books.

Important Differences (ie history never really repeats itself even if it rhymes)

While there are many possible similarities between the Mormon settlement of Utah, and the challenge of space settlement in our century, there are also lots of important differences. One of the keys to successfully learning from analogies is recognizing where they break, and understanding how those differences impact your situation. Because, as one of my history professors at BYU pointed out "all analogies fail at some point." Failing to recognize the differences between your analogy and real life leads to the sort of silly debates all too common in the space community.

Some of these differences make space settlement more challenging, while others might make it somewhat easier than the colonization of Utah that we've been discussing.

• At the time of the exodus, the basic technology for traveling directly to the Great Basin existed. Conestoga wagons, draft animals, firearms, ferries, sailing ships, bridges, etc were all technology that was already in use for commercial and military logistics purposes, as well as playing a big role in the settlement in the MidWest and other places. Much of the technology had been around for centuries or millennia. Not only were the technologies well-understood, but they were commercial available, cost-effective, and off-the-shelf. While there were still improvements being made continuously, as far as settlement was concerned, the commercial state-of-practice for ground transportation at the time was far beyond what the commercial state-of-practice is for space transportation today. A particular case in point is the wagons.
  
• Along the trail and at their destination, the Mormon colonists were frequently surrounded by ready sources of food, “fuel”, water, and raw materials for repairs. While it was still possible to starve and die or to run out of water, or to break down in an area where there wasn't readily available wood (just ask the Donners and Reeds), the general availability of easily extracted in-situ resources was much better for the pioneers than it will be for future space settlers. After all, even the air isn't free in space. Sure, there are potentially interesting ISRU technologies out there, but they're nowhere near as mature as cutting wood, shooting buffaloes, carrying water in barrels or canteens, or simply allowing the cattle to graze along the way. Not to mention the fact that you didn't have to carry all the food for your animals for the whole first half of the Mormon trail...
• While they weren't as common as would've been nice, there were several human settlements in existence along the way by that point. Places like Fort Laramie, Fort Bridger, and Independence, Missouri. While goods were expensive, they did allow for restocking at some price of hard-to-replace items.
  
• Transportation physics were completely different. While I don't think that the rocket equation makes inexpensive space travel impossible, it really complicates things, and sure doesn't make it easy. Combine that with the lack of stopping places between here and LEO, and the transportation physics are much less favorable for space settlement.
• On the side of things that are easier with space settlement, the Moon is a much shorter trip than the trip from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City. The fact that you're talking about less than a week worth of travel instead of several months makes a huge difference in some of the required provisions and supplies.
• Modern water and air recycling technologies, when combined with freeze-drying can allow for a much smaller amount of food mass per person per given amount of time--potentially over an order of magnitude less.

The Big picture
Basically when you look at where we are today relative to space settlement, we’re nowhere even close to settling the solar system (not even the moon) as the Saints were to colonizing Utah when they were camped at Sugar Creek, across the river from Nauvoo in the bitter winter of 1846. Our civilization as a whole has never even flown 100 people to orbit in a year, let alone 1000, 3000, or 5000.

Just to give a sense of the scale we're talking about, here are some rough numbers to think about. Suppose it takes at least 6000-7500lb per person (which is probably a very optimistic bare minimum) to settle and survive off-planet. If those numbers are accurate, then in order to settle 15,000 people in space, even just in LEO, you’re talking somewhere around 45,000 tons of material needing to be lifted. Doing that over a 3-5 year period like the first wave of the Mormon Exodus would require 9-15 thousand tons to be lifted to orbit every year. That’s over 100 Ares-V equivalents per year, and several orders of magnitude higher than what has ever been done before. And that’s assuming that they all stop in LEO! Going to the moon would require something like 6-10 times that mass in LEO in order to do that, and Mars or Venus would likely require even more. That gets you to 90-150 thousand tons per year!

At least right now, if some group of 15,000 people were given a similar ultimatum to what the Saints got in 1845, they'd probably be screwed.

ISRU, Infrastructure, and Access
Now, in this article, I'm not going to go into the rationales that could potentially justify settlement on that scale, or even if it is desirable at this point in time, or how soon it would be desirable. I'm just trying to paint a picture of the kind of things that would need to happen in order to make such an exodus feasible in the first place. Think of this section as a sort of roadmap for stuff that would need to happen between now and when space settlement becomes an even remotely realistic possibility.

With that in minde, once you start to realize how mind-bogglingly large the numbers are when you start talking about serious space settlement, you realize that if such a state even is reachable, it will require attacking the problem from multiple directions. There are three different primary areas of development necessary for enabling space settlement: space access, in-situ resource utilization, and in-space transportation technologies and infrastructure.

Even though lower cost, reliable, and very frequent space access is probably the most important step in the near-term (and also the one that has the clearest near-term potential for ROI and thus commercial feasibility), I want to start by talking about ISRU. ISRU helps enable space settlement by reducing the amount of mass you need to ship to orbit in order for someone to settle somewhere in space. Using the historical analogy I started in this post, colonizing Utah would've been far more difficult if all the food, draft animal feed, and construction materials for Salt Lake City had to be hauled from Illinois. In fact, if that were the situation, colonization would've been impossible. ISRU basically allows you to hack the space access (ie earth-to-orbit) transportation problem back down to a size that might be workable.

ISRU covers a wide variety of areas including in-situ propellant production, production of life support gasses and liquids, production of construction materials, farming, and eventually extracting and processing industrial raw materials, and manufacturing finished goods. Many people in many venues have talked about this subject (particularly Peter Kokh in his "Moon Miners Manifesto" newsletter), but I want to put my own spin on it. For enabling settlement, there are some ISRU areas that are higher leverage than others (ie where you get more of a payoff for a smaller initial investment). As I see it, the two highest leverage areas for enabling space settlement are in-situ propellant production and in-situ construction and construction materials extraction/processing. Of the mass you need to take to LEO in order to settle on the Moon, Mars, the upper Venutian atmosphere, or even the asteroids, most of it is going to be propellant for the trip. Eventually, as more advanced in-space transportation technologies get fielded, this may change, but if space settlement occurs in the near to medium future, I think the importance of oxygen and hydrogen (and possibly some light hydrocarbons like methane or propane) is major. The next biggest mass is going to be the actual structures that people live in and the other buildings, roads, etc. In fact, some previous studies have pointed out that if you can use ISRU to provide for spacious extra-terrestrial facilities, it can have spillover effects on lots of other things. If your internal space is relatively spacious, for instance, you might be able to have more of the work you need to do be done inside, in a shirtsleeve environment, thus allowing you to more directly leverage existing terrestrial tools and processes, without having to do as much redesign.

When you look at in-situ propellant production, something you realize very quickly is that the less you have to ship propellants around, the better. In other words, the closer you can harvest propellants to the place they will be used, the better. That's one of the reasons why even though it's a long-shot, I'm so interested in the whole concept of atmospheric propellant gathering. LEO may be halfway to anywhere, but it's also halfway from anywhere too. If you can gather LOX in-situ in LEO, and especially if you can do it in large quantities at reasonable cost, that would have a major impact on the cost of beyond-LEO transportation. On the other hand, another thing you realize when you study the problem is that due to the rocket equation, propellant resupply on the final legs of the trip have a disproportionately large impact on the overall propellant requirements. Being able to ship a Lunar, Martian, or Venutian lander "dry" saves a lot more weight to LEO than just that landing propellant. It also save the propellant needed to ship that propellant to the destination in the first place. So, at least to me, the two highest payoff places for propellant ISRU are in LEO (if possible) and in orbit around the final destination (for planetary destinations).

Other forms of ISRU such as farming, large-scale manufacturing, extraction and processing of industrial metals, etc. all have an impact on the situation, but for the most part they are much lower leverage--as far as space settlement itself is concerned. We might still see some of the metals extraction and processing sooner rather than later if for instance, it turns out that Dennis Wingo's theories about lunar PGMs turns out to be true. But as far as actually getting there and setting up shop, propellant extraction, and extraction of the simplest construction materials is more valuable.

In order to use those ISRU derived propellants, you need more matured in-space transportation technologies and infrastructure. You need propellant depots, you need reusable in-space transportation (as well as reusable landers). You need technologies that make reuse easier such as better aerobraking (which may involve both infrastructure like satellites, and space technology like better reusable TPS, ballutes, etc). You eventually need infrastructure to service and maintain those transportation systems. You'll probably want lots of prox-ops tugs, and you'll eventually want rescue services (possibly provided by some of the prox-ops tugs). Some of this infrastructure wants to be in LEO (in whatever inclinations have enough demand and/or cheap supply to make sense--and probably eventually multiple smaller depots in the same inclination), and some of it in the vicinity of the destination (for the moon this could mean elements in L1, L2, and/or low lunar orbit, for Mars this probably implies stuff in Mars orbit, or possibly on Phobos or Deimos themselves, for Venus you'd be talking about a Venutian orbit). This infrastructure will probably grow "organically" as market and governmental demand for those services grow. It's hard to know in advance what exact mix of propellants, inclinations, number and size of depots, etc will make the most sense--so it will need to be market driven (and yes, government customers are a market too--just a potentially very dysfunctional one that needs to be treated with a lot of care).

The core reality though is that in order to be able to even get to the point where large infrastructure or ISRU development can really take off, the space access (ie earth-to-orbit) transportation situation needs to improve. Even if you're getting all of your TLI and landing propellants from lunar and upper atmospheric sources, you still need to be able to ship vast amounts of material up from earth, and in order for settlement to be feasible it has to be both significantly cheaper than current launch methods allow, but also the sheer quantity of material that needs to be shipped (even with the rosiest of ISRU scenarios) requires a fundamentally different approach to space transportation. While you may be able to do some of the early infrastructure development with existing launch vehicles (tugs and early "pilot-plant" scale propellant depots come to mind), largescale infrastructure and most ISRU other than atmospheric propellant gathering really need lower cost and more frequent transportation.

As Henry Spencer has put on multiple occasions, developing and debugging ISRU on the moon is going to be an involved process, even if it may be a very worthwhile one. The idea that we're going to design a working ISRU plant, ship it out to the moon, set it up with a few robots, and then start pumping out LOX right away is ludicrous. We know some things about the moon, and there are some good ideas on how to solve some of the more pressing problems, but the reality is that the lunar environment cannot be simulated 100% here on earth, and there are going to be plenty of snags, complications, and unexpected events. Developing hardware, materials, design processes, chemical processes, etc that can cope with the local environment is going to require trial and error and probably several people "on the ground". It's going to take time and lots of work to develop spacesuit materials that can handle the dust, making seals and airlocks that do what we want them to do isn't likely going to be one of those things we get right the first time. And especially once you get into things like metals extraction and processing, developing construction techniques, etc. you see more of the same challenges. And the reality is that the same thing probably applies for Mars, or Venus, or the Asteroids, or even to living in orbit or in deep space. In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there always is.

Improvements in space access need to not only include cost, but frequency, reliability and sheer volume. When you look at the air transportation industry, you're probably talking about over 10,000 jets flying every day (some of them multiple times per day) from hundreds or maybe even thousands of airfields. With rocketry today we have something like two dozen flights per year from about one dozen or less active sites. If we're going to get to the point where we're shipping hundreds or thousands of people and their goods to orbit there are things that fundamentally need to change. One of the biggest changes isn't just going to reusability, but going to reusable vehicles that can fly from many locations. While what SpaceX is trying to do is technical reusable (or at least recoverable), they're never going to be able to operate out of more than three or four launch sites (Kwaj, Vandenburg, Canaveral, and maybe Wallops). Same applies for some of the reusability ideas I've seen bandied about by other ELV groups. Sure, for larger goods, those types of reusability are an incremental step in the right direction. But in order to get from where we are now to a transportation system that can fly 1000s of people and their goods to orbit every year, ELVs or recoverable ELVs really stop making sense at some point.

In order to get to the point where we could fly that many people and their stuff to orbit every year, not only do you need "reusable" launch vehicles, but they also need to be capable of high flight rates, capable of operating out of many launch sites (including combination airport/spaceports like Mojave), and safe and reliable enough that they can launch at least some of the time over land. In Part I of my Orbital Access Methodologies series, I discussed one such potential approach, in the next part(s) I'll be discussing a few more.

Summary
Getting to a point as a civilization that we're truly ready to start spreading out throughout the solar system is going to be a difficult process. We're nowhere even close to where we need to be, and most of the options being investigated by national governments are pretty much orthogonal to where we need to go if we want to see our civilization become a truly spacefaring one. Getting to there from here will require work on radically improving earth-to-orbit space access, developing in-space transportation technologies and infrastructure, and learning how to tap the resources of the upper atmosphere, the Moon, and other planetary and asteroidal bodies. There is useful work that can be done now on all three of these areas, but we've got a long way to go, and the engineering challenges are very interconnected. Probably the biggest challenge of all is going to be finding a way to craft solid and profitable business cases along the way to fielding these technologies.

Westward Ho? We'll see, but we probably have an even rockier road between us and our destination than the Mormon pioneers did in the spring of 1846.

Discussion of Dr. Griffin's STA Comments on ESAS

I've had several people in several places ask me if I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Griffin's comments to the STA this week (for reference the text of his comments is available here). While I don't have the time to go into every single disagreement I have with what he said, I think there are a couple of key points I would like to point out. In other words, I've come to discuss Griffin, not to Fisk him.

Missing the Vision

Dr Griffin starts his defense of the chosen Constellation architecture by framing it "in the
context of policy and law that dictate NASA’s missions." As he said on page 2:

Any system architecture must be evaluated first against the tasks which it is
supposed to accomplish. Only afterwards can we consider whether it accomplishes
them efficiently, or presents other advantages which distinguish it from competing
choices.

He then went on to discuss President Bush's original announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration, and the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. I agree that it is important to make sure you know up-front what yardstick your program is going to be measured by. However, I think one thing becomes quickly obvious as you read Dr Griffin's quotes from those documents--he entirely focuses on the technical implementation details, and never once mentions the actual policy goals!

Quoting from "A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for U.S. Space Exploration":

Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.

These goals are the yardstick by which any VSE implementation needs to be judged. The rest of the technical details of how the space exploration program is carried out needs to be viewed in the light of these three areas of US interests. It doesn't matter if a proposed implementation hits all of the other technical details, if it doesn't really further US scientific, security, and economic interests, it isn't really compliant with the goals of the president's Vision.

Going into a little more detail on these goals, the Renewed Spirit of Discovery document continues (emphasis mine):

In support of this goal, the United States will:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.

Once again, all of the specific technical details like the CEV, retiring Shuttle in 2010, etc. are all pursuant to these goals.

Lastly, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 (available here) states, once again with my emphasis:

The Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations.

Once again, you will notice that the key goals of this Vision, elucidated by both the President and Congress include not only science, but commerce, and in the president's case security.

I could go on about how Dr Griffin's focus on the parts of the Authorization Act that talk about heavy lift and shuttle derived ignored other sections in the act that talk about "encouraging the commercial use and development of space to the greatest extent practicable" (see Section 101.a.2. parts B-C). But I think the fundamental issue is that by focusing exclusively on just the technical side of the requirements, and not on the underlying goals, Griffin is missing the Vision.

Growth Potential

On page 7, Dr. Griffin starts making his case for the Constellation architecture with this somewhat ironic statement about the Space Shuttle:

Once before, an earlier generation of U.S. policymakers approved a spaceflight architecture intended to optimize access to LEO. It was expected – or maybe “hoped” is the better word – that, with this capability in hand, the tools to resume deep space exploration would follow. It didn’t happen, and with the funding which has been allocated to the U.S. civil space program since the late 1960s, it cannot happen. Even though from an engineering perspective it would be highly desirable to have transportation systems separately optimized for LEO and deep space, NASA’s budget will not support it. We get one system; it must be capable of serving in multiple roles, and it must be designed for the more difficult of those roles from the outset.

And then Dr Griffin goes on to try and justify an architecture based on building a duplicative LEO capable only launch vehicle first, and hoping that when that vehicle is finally done, that there will be funding for developing "the tools to resume deep space exploration"...

After that auspicious start, Dr. Griffin then reminds us that "the new system will and should be in use for many decades." Of course some of the historical analogies he draws could lead one to different solutions than it led him. For instance, he mentions that "In space, derivatives of Atlas and Delta and Soyuz are flying a half-century and more after their initial development." An interesting thing to note about Atlas and Delta is that the only reason why vehicles with the name Atlas and Delta are "still flying" a half-century after their initial development, is precisely because they are only derivatives of the original. In fact, the current EELVs have very little in common with the vehicles that originally bore their names.

On pages 8 and 9, Dr. Griffin concludes that (emphasis mine):

The implications of this are profound. We are designing today the systems that our grandchildren will use as building blocks, not just for lunar return, but for missions to Mars, to the near-Earth asteroids, to service great observatories at Sun-Earth L1, and for other purposes we have not yet even considered. We need a system with inherent capability for growth.

While I disagree with the direction Dr. Griffin is going, I do agree with his point in that last sentence. We do need a transportation architecture that has inherent capability for growth. I just don't think that the Constellation architecture really fits that bill.

The Promise of Commercial Space

Now, lest you think I'm going to spend yet another post hammering on Dr. Griffin, I'd like to quote a part of his speech that I really agreed with:

Further application of common sense also requires us to acknowledge that now is the time, this is the juncture, and we are the people to make provisions for the contributions of the commercial space sector to our nation’s overall space enterprise. The development and exploitation of space has, so far, been accomplished in a fashion that can be described as “all government, all the time”. That’s not the way the American frontier was developed, it’s not the way this nation developed aviation, it’s not the way the rest of our economy works, and it ought not to be good enough for space, either. So, proactively and as a matter of deliberate policy, we need to make provisions for the first step on the stairway to space to be occupied by commercial entrepreneurs – whether they reside in big companies or small ones.

I have to say that for all my disagreements with Griffin, he at least talks a good talk when it comes to commercial space. I full-heartedly agree with his point in this paragraph. When you think about it, even assuming everything works out according to his plan, Constellation is never going to be capable of supporting more than a dozen people off-planet at any time. While that may be a lot more than we have now, Ed Wright has a point when he says that that is a round-off error, not an exploration program. Basically, the only way we're going to see large numbers of people off planet, and the only way we're going to see the large-scale manned exploration and settlement of our solar system in our life times, is if the private sector can eventually play a much more expansive role in space transportation. As it is right now, so long as the commercial industry continues to play second fiddle to parochial interests and NASA-centricism, we're not really going to go much of anywhere.

So, the fact that NASA is at least doing something to help promote that day is a sign that they at least partially get it. A successful and thriving entrepreneurial space transportation industry is going to help them actually achieve their goal of extending human life throughout the solar system in a robust program of space exploration.

Griffin continues with more good comments in his next paragraph:

If designed for the Moon, the use of the CEV in LEO will inevitably be more expensive than a system designed for the much easier requirement of LEO access and no more. This lesser requirement is one that, in my judgment, can be met today by a bold commercial developer, operating without the close oversight of the U.S. government, with the goal of offering transportation for cargo and crew to LEO on a fee-for-service basis.

But here is where the conversation takes a dangerous turn:

Now again, common sense dictates that we cannot hold the ISS hostage to fortune; we cannot gamble the fate of a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollar facility on the success of a commercial operation, so the CEV must be able to operate efficiently in LEO if necessary. But we can create a clear financial incentive for commercial success, based on the financial disincentive of using government transportation to LEO at what will be an inherently higher price.

To this end, as I have noted many times, we must be willing to defer the use of government systems in favor of commercial services, as and when they reach maturity. When commercial capability comes on line, we will reduce the level of our own LEO operations with Ares/Orion to that which is minimally necessary to preserve capability, and to qualify the system for lunar flight.

While I agree that the government not only is the government being "willing to defer in favor of commercial services" is a really good idea, I think that this approach (of hedging their bets by coming up with a competing in-house launcher) is fraught with risk. Also, while on first blush, it may appear to be common sense to not "hold the ISS hostage to fortune", it is my contention that this line of reasoning not only doesn't hold as much water as it seems.

First off, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, including in Griffin's statements above, a commercial solution to ISS crew/cargo is going to be a lot more affordable than the in-house Ares-1/Orion solution. It has been mentioned before by people high up at NASA, that they really need COTS to succeed, because if they have to fly all the ISS missions themselves (especially if ISS doesn't get retired in 2016, which Dr. Griffin mentioned in this speech as a possibility), there really won't be anywhere near enough money to develop the lunar portions of the proposed Constellation architecture in time for the 2020 lunar return goal. You could say in a way that the existing Constellation architecture holds the rest of the Vision hostage to the fortune of COTS. If COTS doesn't succeed, there's no way NASA is going to be able to afford executing on the rest of the vision. If the supposed "backup plan" for ISS resupply won't produce acceptable results anyway if COTS doesn't turn out, NASA shouldn't be trying to make it a backup plan at all--they should invest more heavily in making sure that there are multiple COTS competitors and that they have enough resources to succeed. One of the single biggest execution risks for any COTS company is financing risks. And having a NASA "backup plan" that could potentially compete with them is one of the single biggest obstacles to be overcome in raising money for a COTS team.

Which brings me to my other concern. The danger of having NASA in-house launch vehicles and space access capabilities that can serve as a backup to COTS also allows them to directly compete with COTS if the budgetary situation goes sour. Think about it. If Ares-1 finally gets built and working, but Ares-V doesn't get funded, there's nothing for Ares-1 to do but service ISS. With how hard the esteemed congressmen from Florida, Utah, and Alabama are fighting to maintain the Shuttle workforce and infrastructure (even to the point of suggesting continuing to fly the Shuttle!), does anyone really think that they would just "stand down" at that point, even if there was a clearly superior commercial alternative? Not very likely. I'm sure they would come up with some technical reason why Ares-I was superior (after all, our probabilistic risk assessment says that Ares-I has a 1:2106.5923 chance of killing a crew, while our numbers show that they have a 1:500 chance--who do you want flying our brave astronauts?) and find a way to not actually stand down. The frustrating thing is that by setting things up the way NASA is doing, the NASA people don't even have to be malicious for such a result to happen--it's a natural and likely consequence of the perverse incentives that NASA and Congress are setting up.

So, while I personally think that Dr. Griffin really and emphatically believes in and supports commercial space development, I'm afraid that there's a high chance that some of his well-intended choices could end up coming back to haunt us.

Moon, MARS!!!! and Beyond

The last item I'd like to point out in Dr. Griffin's speech is one of the justifications he used for the "1.5 launch" architecture they selected. Dr. Griffin made the point that while he feels that Constellation needs to be backward compatible with ISS as a backup plan, it also needs to be forward compatible with Mars, because sometime in the 2030s, we're going to be going there. Now, I'm of the opinion that trying to guess what the best technical approach will be for a problem 30 years from now is somewhat of a fools errand. But that's just me I guess.

So, starting on page 16 he begins to layout his case:

On the other end of the scale, we must judge any proposed architecture against the requirements for Mars. We aren’t going there now, but one day we will, and it will be within the expected operating lifetime of the system we are designing today. We know already that, when we go, we are going to need a Mars ship with a LEO mass equivalent of about a million pounds, give or take a bit. I’m trying for one-significant-digit accuracy here, but think “Space Station”, in terms of mass.

Now, I'm not going to go into the fact that there are probably plenty of other approaches to Mars exploration that can change the equation entirely. That's a post for another day. For now, let's just run with that premise.

He then repeats the "everyone knows that ISS taught us that using 20 ton vehicles to build something big is a bad idea" catechism, but that's not what I'd like to discuss. The real gem is in this paragraph on page 17 (emphasis mine):

But if we split the EOR lunar architecture into two equal but smaller vehicles, we will need ten or more launches to obtain the same Mars-bound payload in LEO, and that is without assuming any loss of packaging efficiency for the launch of smaller payloads. When we consider that maybe half the Mars mission mass in LEO is liquid hydrogen, and if we understand that the control of hydrogen boiloff in space is one of the key limiting technologies for deep space exploration, the need to conduct fewer rather than more launches to LEO for early Mars missions becomes glaringly apparent.

It is true that one can draw that inference--that hydrogen boiloff means you should build as big of an HLV as possible. However, the conclusion I would draw is that if cryogenic propellant storage technologies are "key limiting technologies for deep space explortion", then the right answer is to stop trying to kludge around the problem--develop them! Don't use the existing state of the art in propellant handling and problems that are still 20 years down the road drive multi-billion dollar development projects today.

There are current technologies under development that could yield very low to zero boiloff of cryogenic propellants. There are multiple groups (ULA, Boeing, groups working with Glenn Research Center, etc.) pursuing multiple approaches to solving these problems. There are passive cooling and active cooling techniques. This isn't some high-risk technology like nuclear fusion. The technologies needed for cryogenic fluid management in space are mostly low-risk extensions of 40 years worth of research and development. More to the point, many if not all of these technologies need to be developed to make Constellation work for lunar trips anyway, and would still be needed for Mars trips.

Is 2030 really so close that we can't afford to do this right and actually develop the technologies we need instead of trying to kludge by with existing technologies?

Once you have the boiloff issue reduced or solved, that ~500klb of hydrogen ceases to be a headache, and begins to be an opportunity. That's a lot of demand for propellant in orbit, and it can be supplied commercially. You're already going to need propellant transfer technologies anyway if you have to launch the hydrogen in multiple launches, so what's to stop launching it in even smaller launches?

I guess my point is that if one of the key arguments for the 1.5 launch architecture over a more commercial one, or a less expensive shuttle derived one like DIRECT is hydrogen boiloff, I think their kludge around the issue isn't the right approach, and that they'd be better off just doing it the right way. Also, part of the reason why we have a federally funded aerospace program is to help prove out the technologies necessary for enabling the commercial exploitation of space, and actually solving problems like these would be much a much more responsible use of public funds than developing a kludge around point design like Ares V that doesn't advance the state of the art for the commercial benefit of the country.

Conclusions

I guess overall while there were some good points, there was also a lot of issues with Dr. Griffin's latest defense of Constellation. As discussed, I think that an a myopic focus on the technical details while ignoring the overall goals of the VSE has led to an architecture that isn't responsive to the key policy goals laid out by the president and reiterated by Congress (particularly with respect to promoting the commercial and security interests of the United States). I think that in spite of Griffin recognizing the need for growth and flexibility in any architecture, that he chose a rather brittle and inflexible one. I also think that while he showed that he does recognize the potential of commercial space, and the importance of NASA trying to promote it, I think that the way he's running COTS and Constellation will likely end up being highly counterproductive. Lastly, I think that in many cases, when confronted with a solvable engineering problem, Constellation has instead decided to kludge around the problem instead of properly solving it.

There are plenty of other issues I could've raised, but I figured these were some of the more obvious ones that I felt needed discussion.

It's The Journey That Matters, Not The Destination

The story broke yesterday that a group of scientists, astronauts, and other space enthusiasts is going to be meeting at Stanford next month to discuss an alternative to the Vision for Space Exploration. Clark and several others have already commented, but I figured I ought to throw in my two cents.

Basically, I'm skeptical.

While there are some good things in the plan, such as supposedly more commercial involvement, and destinations that tap better into some of the supposedly more pressing space-related concerns of the US populace (ie planetary defense against near-earth objects), there's still a lot to be concerned about.

Are we going to see a repeat of what happened with the VSE, where there were all sorts of wonderful platitudes about commercial involvement at the start, that end up being effectively nothing in the end? I mean, COTS is great and all, but NASA spending $10B on its own in-house solution (that's going to end up competing with COTS for ISS cargo/crew delivery when Ares V never gets built), while giving only $500M for more commercial approaches is not what we were led to believe back in the early days of the VSE. Once NASA gets its hands on this new plan, how much commercial content will really survive? If the only commercial involvement ends up being renting an extra Bigelow module or two, it won't be a complete waste, but that's not saying much.

At least from what I've seen, they still are talking about "giving America the Shaft", and wasting countless billions on Ares V, and EDS. If they do that, they're still going to have all the extremely expensive shuttle infrastructure that will have to get paid for every year. Sure, they'll save a little on the edges by not having an LSAM line running, and possibly save a tiny bit by cutting back on the mission tempo (only one manned mission per year or every other year maybe)--though with how much of the money will be going to fixed infrastructure, the savings won't really be that great.

What this new approach probably won't do (any more than what we're getting with the ESAS implementation of the VSE) is actually be relevant to the commercial development of space, or helping our civilization become a truly spacefaring one.

I guess people just get way too hung up on the destinations. Quite frankly, where NASA goes over the next 20 years is of almost trivial importance compared to how it goes there. For all I care, they could set their sites on performing manned exploration of Europa, just so long as they do it in a way that actually helps promote the development of the infrastructure we need to become a truly spacefaring society.

I know I keep hitting on these concepts over and over again, but that's because while the meme is spreading, it still hasn't really sunk in among those in power. There's nowhere in the solar system that's of such pressing importance as to justify a NASA designed and operated transportation system.

On the flip side, almost anywhere in the solar system is a good enough destination if NASA were to go with a truly commercial transportation system. One using commercial propellant depots in orbit that buy propellants from whoever can launch it cheapest, and sell it to whoever wants to move something around in space (both NASA, commercial entities, and other governments). One where NASA "astronauts" are passengers flying on commercial vehicles alongside cosmonauts, taikonauts, UKnauts, Koreanauts, ESAnauts, private (or government) customers going to Bigelow stations or on CSI or Space Adventure operated trips around the moon. One where NASA only builds and operates the actual spacecraft, not the launch vehicles. Because if NASA helps build up a commercial industry like that, we'll end up getting not just whatever the destination de jour is, but everywhere else as well. Maybe NASA ends up spending most of its resources focused on putting boots on Mars, but with a propellant depot on orbit, and NASA acting as an anchor tenant with enough demand to help close the business cases for future RLVs, you're going to see space travel cheap enough that a lot more people can get in the game, and a lot more destinations may be visited. While NASA's off planting flags on Mars, some groups will be exploring NEOs, others will be offering tourist trips to and around the Moon, and others might even be building cloud colonies on Venus.

Anyhow, I think you get my point. We'll see what this new group comes up with. They might surprise us, but for now I remain skeptical.

Random Thought: Lunar Ejection Seat

[Note: I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago, but it got left on the backburner over the holidays. Oh, and welcome to anyone coming here from the Carnival of Space.]

One of the biggest mixed blessings of lunar transportation is the lack of an appreciable atmosphere on the moon. While this is a big benefit as far as propulsion efficiency and deep throttling goes, it is also a big drawback for crew safety. Basically, a VTVL vehicle lives or dies on its propulsion system. However, in an atmosphere, even if you have a complete propulsion failure (say catastrophic loss of power, propellant tank rupture, etc.), there is still the option of using an emergency ballistic chute (if your vehicle has one), or "bailing out" and using your own parachute. While this is by no means foolproof, it sure beats the alternative.

The problem is, on the moon there is none of that nice, draggy, "air" stuff that are somewhat non-optional for parachutes.

The traditional solution to this problem has been to use a two-stage lunar lander, and treat the upper stage (the ascent stage) as an escape capsule. But such TSTO designs make reusable lunar transportation a lot more difficult. And you're still stuck with the tricky situation of what happens if your ascent engine fails?

While a good reusable lunar lander is probably going to borrow heavily from operations, design, and maintenance experience from terrestrial VTVL suborbital vehicles, there's still the reality that cislunar space is a more dangerous place. Not only are there environmental factors such as micrometeors, radiation, etc. that make failures more likely. But the effects of those failure modes are more severe. There's a reason why most of the predicted risk for a lunar mission center on the transportation phases to and from the lunar surface. The Moon really is a "Harsh Mistress".

Ejection Seats: aka "Attempting Suicide to Avoid Certain Death"

So here's a crazy idea: what about using some sort of ejector seat that used pure rocket power instead of parachutes? Basically it would be a propulsion system with a main engine, and possibly some RCS engines, and some sort of minimal GN&C system. Assuming that either some sort of hypergolic combination (or something like a scaled up version of what Digital Solid State Propulsion is working on) were used, and that the package was sized for say 1200m/s, you're only talking about a couple of hundred pounds per spacesuited crew member.

Assuming 400lb for the crew member in a space suit, 100lb worth of dry mass (chair structure, engines, tanks, any pressurization systems, valves, etc--probably quite doable), you're talking about ~250lb of propellant. For a total weight of about 350lb for the ejector seat (at least some of which may have been needed for a non-ejectable landing seat anyway). If you go much higher than 1200m/s, the propellant fraction starts growing fast enough that the system would probably weight too much to make sense, but at an extra cost of only about 250lb per crew member, it might not be too crazy. Especially if it allows you to save weight elsewhere by going to a higher performance but non-hypergolic main propulsion system, for instance.

Since there's about 2km/s of Delta-V between a low lunar orbit and the lunar surface, the worst case failure would occur partway through the retro burn (or the orbital ascent burn), where you have about half of the delta-V left. 1200m/s gives you a little bit of margin, plus some propellant for RCS ops, off-nominal operations, etc. If you're most of the way down, or only part of the way up, you abort to the surface (using your legs as landing gear like parachutists do on earth). If you're more than half way up, or less than half way down, you abort to orbit.

Also, 1200m/s can probably give you a pretty decent suborbital hop. Unfortunately the lack of atmosphere means that once again you have to decelerate as well as accelerate. But we're still probably talking about a several hundred km range in case your lander malfunctions during a sortie mission.

Lastly, having each crew member have a maneuverable emergency seat like that also makes rendezvous failures between the lander and the lunar orbital station (or CEV or whatever you're using to get back to earth in) much less likely.

Are there some dangers in such a system? Probably. Ejection seats kill ground crew on a regular basis here on earth. But they still save enough lives on net (in spite of how much more reliable even combat aircraft are compared to rockets) that they still get used. It's like a launch escape tower. Even if it only has a 75% chance of working, and a nonzero chance of going off at the wrong time, it will probably cut back on overall fatalities by a substantial amount.

Now, obviously, in order to do any good, you obviously need the crew in spacesuits during orbital descent or ascent maneuvers. Also, you need a way of getting the seat out of the ship without undue risk to the crew members. Shrapnel from something like a shaped charge that on earth might just risk causing an ugly injury could cause a loss of pressure integrity in the spacesuit with predictably bad results. Fortunately, due to the lower gravity, lack of aerodynamic forces, etc. it may be easier to make such a system safe and reliable than it would be for say an ejection system for a supersonic jet fighter.

Potential Benefits
One of the main potential benefits of having something like a lunar ejection seat, is that it frees up the design of your lunar lander a lot more. For instance, you can now use a single-stage (and thus more easily reusable) lunar lander without having to take as much risk of losing the crew. Also, you can pick propellants for the lunar lander more on performance and economics criteria instead of having to use hypergolics on your ascent stage because you're trying to shoehorn the thing into being an escape capsule.

Now, I don't know if the idea makes total sense on balance, but I think it's an interesting one at least worth looking at. What do you all think?

DIRECT v2.0 and Orbital Propellant Transfer

Several people have already brought up the DIRECT v2.0 architecture paper that was rolled out at AIAA Space 2007 this last week, as well as the snazzy new website that the DIRECT team just launched. I just wanted to give a few of my own thoughts.

First off, I really got a kick out of the "safer, simpler, sooner" subtitle. Isn't it ironic how hollow ATKs claims about the Shaft appear these days. Oh well, there's no idea too stupid for an entrenched bureaucracy to fight for to the bloody end.

Ross, Chuck, the Metschans, Antonio, and the others deserve a good deal of respect for putting together a rather solid case. As I've said in the past, I think having NASA develop any new launch vehicles is a big mistake--launcher development and operations are NASAs core incompetencies after all. However, politics is the art of the attainable, and the DIRECT concept shows how NASA could develop an architecture that is not only more affordable, more robust, and more capable than the planned architecture, but more importantly is a lot more friendly to commercial cooperation. NASA's current concept of commercial and international collaboration--the notion that commercial space entities and foreign countries should eagerly wait with bated breath for the construction of a lunar outpost before any serious involvement--is a sick joke.

I was only very tangentially involved with the DIRECT team's v2.0 development, but I'm glad to see that some of the memes I've been trying to spread took root in their latest development.

The biggest and most important of these improvements over v1.0 revolves around orbital propellant depots. I may sound like a "Jonny-one-note" on this topic, but I'm still convinced that the ability to store and transfer cryogenic propellants on-orbit is one of the key enabling technologies needed for a spacefaring society. Ross and team did a very good job of highlighting how important such technologies can decrease the odds of losing expensive missions, enable a much more capable NASA lunar architecture, and provide a massive increase in demand for commercial launch services.

As I've mentioned many times previously here, with the current architecture, a delay on the Ares I launch will more or less doom the multi-billion dollar hardware already on orbit. The time pressures likely to exist in trying to get off a lunar mission within 14 days of the first launch greatly increase the odds of making fatal mistakes like have been made in the past. Now, it is probably possible to build stages that can last longer on-orbit without excessive boiloff, but by having the ability to "top-off" the tank, this issue completely goes away. At worst delays would necessitate launching some more fuel before leaving.

The ability to "top-off" the EDS in orbit, or to transfer propellants launched on one launch to the earlier launch can both greatly increase the payload capacity of a 2-launch mission. The problem with doing a 2-launch mission without propellant transfer is that it's very difficult to evenly divide a lunar mission into two roughly identically sized launches. One of the two launchers will end up launching substantially lighter. But if you can transfer propellants, you can now pretty much divide the payload evenly, because you have an infinitely divisible medium that can be transfered back and forth as needed. More importantly, with propellant transfer and dry-launch techniques, a single Jupiter-232 mission could perform the same mission as a much more expensive Ares-1/Ares-V combo.

On a related note, by having propellant transfer capabilities and infrastructure in both LEO and L1/LUNO, several design decisions can be revisited. Right now, with the fragile, no-orbital-infrastructure approach taken in ESAS, if the CEVs engines don't light for the Trans-Earth-Injection burn, the crew is probably dead. Even with an ISS-like base on the surface, unless they have a bunch of backup vehicles, there's very little chance of a successful rescue mission being mounted in-time. Issues like this are part of what drove the CEV back to using hypergols instead of higher performance cryogenic combinations. Once you have some infrastructure in space, such issues become inconveniences instead of fatal mishaps. If your engine doesn't light, you just redock with the L1 node, and wait for a rescue, or possibly try to effect a repair. Or maybe you could transfer propellant back to the lunar lander and head back for the surface, etc.

The most important benefit of the latest DIRECT architecture is the development of a potentially massive new LEO launch market. As I see it, there really are only two major potential markets out there for LEO delivery services that actually have the potential to generate demand for the dozens to hundreds of flights per year that would enable RLVs to really shine--personal spaceflight and propellant deliveries. And by designing a NASA architecture that intentionally takes advantage of such developments to the maximum extent possible, NASA could really help promote and catalyze the development of a robust commercial LEO launch industry. As the Centaur team pointed out over a year ago, even 2-4 moon missions per year would provide a several-fold increase in the demand for commercial earth to orbit launch services. And because propellants are even more finely divisible than people are, such a market could be very helpful for early orbital RLV operators.

But beyond the NASA demand for propellants, having NASA as an anchor tenant could be very useful for making propellant depots a reality sooner rather than later. As I've discussed in previous posts, propellant depots suffer from a chicken and egg kind of problem. Nobody is going to want to privately fund a depot before there are customers for such a depot, and nobody is going to want to fund businesses can act as customers for depots until the depots exist. It might be possible to break this chicken and egg problem without NASAs help by either finding a way to get a minimalist depot built for the low enough cost that someone would be willing to take the risk, or by trying to codevelop the depot and one of its potential customers...but both of those approaches are very uncertain from a business and a financing standpoint.

With NASA as an anchor tenant however, it becomes a lot easier for other businesses to then spring up that can take advantage of the new capabilities. Businesses such as cislunar tourism, or possibly changing the way upper stages are done today. For instance, a Falcon I upper stage refueled in LEO could deliver its full payload to GEO or LUNO, or even interplanetary trajectories. In fact, a Falcon I refueled in LEO could provide almost half the GEO capability of an Atlas V 401 (for a tiny fraction of the price). A Centaur stage refueled in LEO could put a Sundancer sized module into Lunar Orbit, etc.

But some have expressed concern about the idea of putting "risky technologies" on the critical path for NASA's return to the moon. They seem to believe that it would be best to take the lowest technical risk approach from the start, and then only add on things like propellant depots as after-the-fact performance enhancements. I think this view is shortsighted for several reasons, but first I'd like to draw an analogy. Back in the early Apollo days, there was a big debate over the mission architecture. One of the mission architectures that had a lot of favor originally was the "direct ascent" architecture. That architecture avoided the need for orbital rendezvous (which at that point was just as unproven and risky as propellant transfer is today), but at the cost of requiring a much larger NASA developed vehicle (NOVA). Had NASA not taken the smart move of putting "risky unproven technologies" like orbital rendezvous on their critical path, the Apollo program probably would've failed. As CFE points out in his latest blog post, if the Apollo program had taken the further technical risk of developing EOR technologies such as propellant transfer, they might have even been able to avoid the program cancellation that came from trying to run two very expensive launch vehicles.

If the ESAS architecture, by avoiding "risky unproven technologies" like propellant transfer, was able to provide a basic lunar transportation infrastructure for a couple of billion over a couple of years, it would be one thing. But in spite of avoiding any technology that really has the potential to make ESAS even remotely useful, they're still looking at spending $60-100B and the better part of two decades to develop a bare-bones lunar transportation architecture that's only a little more capable than the one fielded by NASA 40 years ago. What's the point in "avoiding technical risks" if it doesn't actually allow you to do things in a cheaper, quicker, or more sustainable fashion? By taking such a hyperconservative approach, and by abandoning most real new space technology R&D, NASA's setting itself up for stagnation over the next decade or so.

In life, and particularly in engineering, there are some risks that end up being riskier to avoid than to meet head-on and overcome. For NASA, orbital propellant transfer is one of them. So, I applaud the DIRECT team's latest release for its emphasis on this technology that's been neglected for far too long. The rest of the report is pretty good too...

Google Lunar X-Prize

It's been a long time since I last blogged. Between being busy at work, starting into another book series with Tiffany (one of our favorite traditions is reading good books together), and trying to raise two increasingly active and silly little boys, I haven't had much chance to provide a lot of bloggy goodness lately. It also doesn't help that my favorite topic to discuss online also happens to be closely tied to my day-job, so sometimes propriety forces me to say less than I would like to.

All that aside, I wanted to give a couple of thoughts about the recently announced Google Lunar X-Prize. While there is a chance that my company may participate in this competition at some point, we aren't formally involved with the competition yet, so I figure I can still give a few thoughts on the matter.

So far, most of the response in the blogosphere has been, shall we say, mixed at best. The three biggest complaints I've seen are that an orbital X-Prize would've been more useful, that there really aren't any useful markets that this prize could help promote, and lastly that the prize is far too small for what it's asking for. I don't think that these opinions are invalid, however I have a couple of thoughts I'd like to discuss.

First, lets discuss the complaint that an orbital X-Prize would've been more useful. The claim is that this prize really isn't doing much of anything to really open up space development, because its ignoring the earth-to-orbit launch problem, and that therefore the prize is irrelevant at best. While there is some truth to this line of reasoning--the technical immaturity and unaffordability of existing earth-to-orbit launch services is probably the single biggest impediment to commercial space development--I think there are several other things that need to be considered:

One, it has been nearly three years since Scaled Composites won the original X-Prize for suborbital space launch. While I fully expect that at least two or three (or maybe more) of the existing companies targeting the suborbital tourism market will get there, and more importantly, be financially successful at it, it's likely to take far more time than most of us had previously imagined. The engineering challenges of developing a reusable suborbital vehicle are impressive, and the market and more importantly financial challenges are even more daunting. I think that several of the competing companies have structured their business approach such that they can have the endurance neccessary to see this through (XCOR being an excellent example). But the reality is that we may be lucky to see any of the competing companies actually offering personal spaceflight services before the end of the decade. The companies most likely to be able to build a commercially successful orbital launch vehicle are these suborbital companies. The larger space companies, while they have the technical competence and the financial staying power necessary, are also all very risk averse and are not well structured for executing on a first-generation reusable orbital transport. I could go further into why I think that the emerging suborbital companies are more likely to develop the first generation of reusable orbital space transports, but that's a post for another time. The main point though is that there are very few companies or groups that are even remotely ready to tackle the challenge of developing affordable and reliable reusable orbital transportation systems. A few of them will likely be there eventually, but I think an orbital X-Prize may actually be dangerously premature at this point. By encouraging emerging space companies to move faster than they're really ready for yet might end up causing an alt.space equivalence of the Apollo Program--premature over-optimization of globally suboptimal approaches. The approaches most likely to win such a prize if offered now may very well not be the optimal result that would develop naturally without a prize.

Two, an orbital prize by necessity needs to be a lot bigger than even the $30M that Google is putting up for this prize. Even if the requirements were only say 2-3 people to LEO twice in a week, the prize would likely need to be in the $100M range to be really effective. As it is, there already is an existing prize for reusable orbital transportation: the $50M, Bigelow Aerospace sponsored America's Space Prize. Now, there are several things about this prize that make it far less likely to be useful than it could've been, such as the large minimal crew size, the long minimum flight duration, and also the ban on using any government development funding (note this last one is one of my biggest concerns about the Google Lunar X-Prize). However, I doubt that the prize would've been won even if those restrictions had been more reasonable. That maybe just be my opinion, but $50M just isn't a huge amount of money, and you have to raise the money to compete in the first place. A successful orbital space prize would need a lot more money than Google was willing to offer, and a lot more than the X-Prize is ever likely to raise.

Three, there's more to opening up space to commercial development than just the earth-to-orbit launch problem. While that may be the 800lb gorilla in the room at the moment, I'm not sure how much there is that we can do to accelerate the solution to that problem at the moment. I think it will be solved, but as I said, it is going to take a while. In the meantime, its perfectly reasonable to start working on some of the other problems and technologies needed to be solved before we can become a spacefaring society. The ability to autonomously land stuff safely and reliably on planetary surfaces is one of them.

The second major complaint ties in with my last point on the first complaint. There really are several potential "follow-on" markets that can be encouraged by this prize. Several of them will for the near-term at least revolve around potential government markets, but that doesn't mean that they aren't markets, or that they won't eventually spread out to more commercial customers. For instance, as I mentioned above, it may very well be that competitors for this prize may end up maturing some areas of space technology that open up the possibility for them to provide services to future government projects such as other unmanned planetary landers. I have some further thoughts on this, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Also, depending on the approach taken, competition for this prize may help private companies develop some of the subsystems, technologies, and techniques necessary for future manned commercial landers. It'll be very hard to make a business case close on commercial manned lunar landers at this exact point in time, but many of the long-range navigation, communication, and landing technologies developed for this prize may be directly applicable to future projects. By gaining experience with developing spacecraft that can operate in the cislunar environment, can land autonomously, can perform maneuvers in deep space, etc., these companies will help position themselves for the commercial opportunities that may open up when the earth-to-orbit transportation becomes more affordable. While the propulsion system and scale for a manned lunar lander is likely to be very different than the subscale robotic landers that will be involved in this competition, many of the non-propulsion disciplines will be directly relevant.

The last complaint revolves around the size of the purse. Many prior commercial and government low-cost lunar lander efforts have estimated the cost of such an undertaking to be in the $40-60M range, with the launch portion of the project being a large component. I have a few thoughts, though they aren't entirely original:

One, there's nothing that says that a prize competitor has to actually turn a profit on the prize itself. Scaled spent over $25M to win the $10M X-Prize, and as several people have pointed out, there are often groups who will spend tens of millions to compete in events, some of which don't even have a cash prize! The real key is that the total value delivered to the team and its investors/sponsors has to exceed the cost by a sufficient margin. For instance as one commenter quipped, it might well be worth $50M to Bill Gates to have the winning rover broadcasting with a big Microsoft logo on its side while winning a Google sponsored prize. Also, potential commercial and governmental follow-on markets can sometimes justify spending more than the value of the prize to win it (see: SpaceShip One). There may also be some potential sponsors who would be willing to provide money "just to say they did it". So, just because it may cost more than the prize is worth to win it, doesn't necessarily mean that nobody will try or even succeed, in spite of spending more than "the prize is worth."

Two, most of the comments that have come to these conclusions have assumed that the competitors will purchase launch services for the competition in the traditional fashion--ie that someone is just going to buy a slightly discounted Falcon 1 flight from Elon, or purchase a secondary payload slot from ULA, or buy a Dnepr launch from the Russians. While I agree that in order to be successful in this competition, competitors are almost certainly going to launch on existing launch vehicles, I also highly doubt that the launch "purchase" transaction involved is going to go the way that most people are assuming. I'll leave it at that.

Three, some people have been assuming this prize can't be won because for some reason they think a company needs to have an orbital launch vehicle to compete. It's true that none of the alt.space companies are successfully flying things to orbit right now, but as per point two above, I think that's pretty irrelevant. This isn't a launch prize, its a prize for a lunar lander/rover. I'd give at least 95% odds that whoever wins this will fly on an existing launch vehicle, and not try to roll-their-own.

Anyhow, those are some of my thoughts on the main complaints. I do have some of my own worries about the prize, particularly about the form of the final rules, the short timeline, and particularly how they handle the rules about limits on government income for competitors, but my overall opinion is positive. I'm of course biased as heck, being a certified and certifiable lunar enthusiast and being an engineer at a VTVL rocket developer, but I still think it's a good idea.

A Heterogenous Moon

Since the end of the Apollo program, and the analysis of all the samples returned from those expeditions, the orthodox view of the moon has been one of dreary, dusty, homogeneity. Oh, there were things like Mascons, and your occasional magnetic anomaly to spicen things up somewhat, but the Moon was thought to be for the most part bone dry, boring, and overall pretty much the same wherever you went (with only minor difference for highlands vs. maria). Over the last several years, new data and new theories are starting to question that orthodoxy, painting the picture of a Moon that is potentially far more interesting than had been previously thought--both scientifically and economically.

Lunar Polar Deposits
The first major crack in the orthodox view of the moon came with the detection by both the Lunar Prospector and Clementine orbiters of potential hydrogen concentrations in the lunar polar regions. It had long been speculated by some scientists that the polar regions could possibly serve as a "cold-trap" that could keep volatiles from escaping back into space, however here was some hard evidence that that might very well be the case. Now this data is not without controversy. Recent data from the Arecibo radio telescope try to call the original data into question, however there are possible good explanations for that contradictory evidence, and the idea of lunar polar concentrations of volatiles has gains considerable traction recently. We don't know a whole lot (yet) about the form of these volatiles (it could be water ice, hydrogen molecules trapped by the regolith, or maybe something else entirely), and are not entirely sure of their origin (cometary impacts, solar wind implantation, etc), but the general scientific consensus appears to support the idea that there is at least something interesting going on.

Ni-Fe Meteorites
Another recent attempt at challenging the orthodox view of the moon has come from research done by a good friend of mine, Dennis Wingo. In his book, Moonrush, Wingo makes the case based on recent research for the possibility of intact platinum-group-metal-bearing nickel-iron meteorite impacts on the moon. Wingo's case was based on models that predict the impact velocity distribution of objects striking the moon, computer models that predict the effect of impacts on the impacting body, and data on the number and distribution of Ni-Fe asteroids in the solar system and impact craters on the Moon. If he's right, there's a very strong possibility that there are economically interesting concentrations of nickel, iron, and platinum group metals on the moon.

Now, while the idea of lunar polar volatiles has gained considerable respect within the scientific community, Wingo's hypothesis hasn't gained anywhere near as much traction yet. As Wendell Mendell likes reminding Dennis at various conferences, there's very little evidence from the Apollo lunar samples of his hypothesis. Fortunately, Dennis provided several methods in his book for trying to falsify his hypothesis.

Transient Lunar Phenomena
The most recent challenge to the homogeneous Moon orthodoxy comes in the form of some papers recently published in the journal Icarus regarding Transient Lunar Phenomena. A much simplified overview was provided by Space.com. The work, carried out by Crotts and Hummel of Columbia University in New York, is a rather fascinating read (though very, very complicated--I'm not sure I understood more than 25% of the details). Their main conclusions were that there's good reason to believe that TLPs are real, they appear to be strongly correlated with specific geographic regions, and they appear strongly correlated to lunar outgassing. This outgassing might possibly lead to discoveries of gas pockets below the lunar surface in several locations, which depending on their makeup could be extremely useful for future lunar development. On a substantially more controversial note, Paper II by Crotts and Hummels postulates a mechanism that could lead to substantial subsurface ice deposits in the regions where TLPs are occurring (particularly in the region of Aristarchus crater). While these ice deposits would have been small enough that the resolution of previous neutron spectrometers and such might very well have missed them, this hypothesis is a long way from proven. If the existence of substantial subsurface gas and ice deposits do prove out though, it could have some very important scientific and economic ramifications. Crotts discusses some methods that they are currently using and some future methods for trying to validate or falsify their hypotheses, including using automated telescopes with computer algorithms watching for TLP events. The hope is that by detecting an event early, additional telescopes and sensors can be brought to bear, possibly providing a lot more useful information about what is going on. With several orbiters planned for the near future, the potential for getting close-up data on these events is even more intriguing. It should be a fun topic to watch.


While many of these hypotheses still have a long way to go before they've been proven out, it's interesting to see that the orthodox view of the moon as being boring from both a scientific and economic perspective begin to change. We've got a long way to go yet, and some of these ideas might not pan out, or might end up not being as economically interesting as hoped. However, it's really starting to look like the Moon may very well be a far more interesting place than anyone imagined.

[Note: this post is part of the 14th weekly Carnival of Space being held at Universe Today. Check out some of the other posts if you have the time]

I Wish That Were The Only Problem...

Tankmodeler, a friend and regular here at Selenian Boondocks, mentioned something in a comment to Ken's last post that I think deserves some mention:

[T]he one absolutely key stumbling block is ownership of Lunar mineral rights. No-one is going anywhere unless they know, rock solid, that they will own what they find. If space advocates want to get us off this rock, the single best thing that they can do is lobby their local governments to recognize Lunar property ownership. Once that happens a lot of other things start to happen in very well-known ways.

Now, I'm not saying this to pick on Tankmodeler, but I think this is a common opinion. I also think it's wrong.

First off, while the state of extraterrestrial property rights isn't as solid as one would hope, they're probably good enough. Basically, while property rights aren't formally and intentionally recognized by international law, the law does informally create a regime that is close enough for practical purposes. You can't own a deed to lunar property. But anyone who wants can land hardware there, and do whatever research or resource extraction they want. Anyone who has hardware in space can seek legal redress if someone tries to interfere with their operations. Anyone who harvests materials on the moon still owns them when they land.

Heck, using the exclusion principle, you might even be able to structure a deal that smells rather strongly of real estate. While you couldn't say sell the right to the lunar land underneath a LOX extraction facility, you could sell the facility, and the right to exclude anyone from interfering with it...it ain't perfect, but life is about taking what's possible and running with it.

More importantly, while there is definite room for improvement when it comes to extraterrestrial property rights, there are no real obstacles that couldn't be overcome if there were a sufficiently compelling business case to be made. As Jim Dunstan pointed out a while ago, there used to be all sorts of legal restrictions about oil extraction in the Alaskan wilderness. But, once the technological and economical case for extraction was solidified, the legal restrictions were overcome in short order.

I'm pretty much with Jim. The reason why we don't see lunar mining ventures right now has little to do with legal ambiguities about property rights. It has a lot more to do with the immaturity, unaffordability, and to put it bluntly, non-existence of cislunar transportation systems. And our relatively limited knowledge of lunar resource concentrations, extraction techniques, and the lack of experience with technologies capable of long-term lunar surface operations. I may be biased, but I think it's the transportation architecture and infrastructure immaturity that is the real obstacle. Once you have affordable, reliable, and consistent access to the lunar surface, doing the exploration necessary to get a good handle on the location of useful resource concentrations becomes feasible. Doing the development work of making equipment, spacesuits, and structures that can handle the abusive lunar surface environment also becomes more feasible. Etc.

That isn't to say that we should just ignore space law, or that the situation is perfect. I'm sure there are several space law experts who can offer good suggestions for practical next steps, and things we can do to improve space property rights (Jim? Berin? Jesse?) What I am saying is that I think it's really easy to lull ourselves into thinking that the main thing standing between us and space profits is those meddling socialists in DC and Turtle Bay, as opposed to more mundane things like creating solid business models and building reliable and affordable technology.

Benefits of Orbital Propellant Transfer: Adaptability, Capability, Etc.

[Editor's note: A good friend of mine from Santa Clara, Henry Cate, is starting up a Carnival of Space. I'm usually not a huge fan of blog carnivals, but I think this is a creative idea, and wanted to support him on this, so this is my first "Carnival" post.]

Of the top ten technologies that I discussed previously as being critical for a spacefaring society, one of the technologies that I've repeatedly stressed has been orbital propellant transfer and storage. And for good reason. Other than lower cost launch (which I think has been discussed to death already), these two technologies are probably the ones that can have the largest impact on space exploration and development. I'd just like to summarize some of the key benefits I see of using orbital propellant transfer and storage in a space transportation architecture.

Adaptability: Propellant transfer and storage technologies (especially in the form of propellant depots) allow a space transportation system to take advantage of improvements in launch vehicles over time. By separating the launcher from the interorbital transfer stages, landers, and other in-space hardware, it makes it a lot easier to take advantage of upgrades over time.

In a way it's kind of like the computer I'm writing this post on. This computer started out as a machine I bought on eBay back before my mission (in '99 I think). Over time as new chips and better hard-drives came out, I was able to incrementally upgrade things without having to fork out all the money for a brand-new machine. By now, the only hardware I have on this computer that was on the original machine is the smaller of the two hard disks. The modularity of a PC architecture has allowed me to inexpensively upgrade things as I had the time and money available, instead of forcing me to buy a whole new system. Now, not everyone does it that way, but the option is there if you want to.

Reusability:Propellant transfer and storage makes it much easier to move towards a more reusable transportation infrastructure. In fact, without the ability to transfer propellants on orbit, there are some segments of a lunar or Martian transportation infrastructure that really can't be reused. With propellant transfer capabilities (eventually augmented by ISRU capabilities), there really aren't any parts of the transportation architecture that need to be expendable.

The economics of reusing in-space hardware may actually be even more compelling than reusing orbital launch vehicles (and the case for reusing orbital launch vehicles is pretty darned compelling). Unlike orbital launch vehicles, reuse of on-orbit vehicles doesn't involve adding much if any hardware that wouldn't be needed already for just performing the basic mission. Design for reusability does tend to drive you in different directions from design for expendable vehicles (such as pushing you to multi-engine landers with engine-out capability instead of rolling the dice every time you land with a single-engine lander), but in many cases those changes can actually make things less expensive in the end.

But all of that is moot if you can't refuel the vehicles except on planetary surfaces.

Capability: Orbital propellant transfer and storage can allow for much more capable missions than you could perform without them. Dallas Bienhoff (of Boeing) recently presented a paper at the recent STAIF 2007 conference discussing how much you could increase the lunar surface mass of the planned ESAS architecture if you used orbital propellant transfer and "dry-launch" techniques for the EDS and LSAM (Dry Launch is where you launch the transfer stage and lander empty, and top them up on orbit from a depot or from fuelers). I don't have the exact numbers handy, but the increase was substantial. It may have been over double the cargo to the lunar surface.

More interestingly to me, these technologies can allow you to get much more capability even if you don't develop new launch vehicles. Every component of the planner lunar stack is light enough to be launched dry on existing EELV equivalent vehicles. And if you then top them off in orbit, you can send a lot more in a given mission than could be done with a non-dry-launch architecture. You could probably send 6-8 person missions, or land entire Sundancer modules along with the 4-6 person crew. All without needing heavy lift launch vehicles.

Dependability: In a world of expendable launchers, where launcher reliability is still depressingly low, a propellant depot serves as a buffer or capacitor between a lunar or martian mission, and the launch vehicles that put the components up. A commercial propellant depot can buy from whoever can launch to it, and with the likely propellant demands for even modest lunar transportation architectures, it will be buying from lots of suppliers. If one launcher starts having problems, the show still goes on. Much like how many companies will put UPS systems between their computers and the main power grid, especially in areas where the power can be flakey or unreliable.

Incremental Developability: [Yes, I think I may have just created that word on the spot.] One of the main issues raised with propellant depots, is that they sound like big, very complex projects. When people hear propellant depot they often think of some ISS sized monstrosity and then extrapolate that only NASA could run something like that, and therefore it would cost as much, take as much time, and be as poorly run as ISS. The reality is that the first "propellant depot" probably isn't going to be some sprawling 100% custom designed facility that has all of the features, bells and whistles. More likely you'll see a gradual buildup of capability.

At first, you might see missions that don't even use a depot--but transfer propellants directly from tanker to tankee without any special infrastructure. Some of that may be in the form of hitchiker satellites that tap the surplus propellants from their launcher so they don't have to store propellants onboard during the flight (thus reducing the risk to the main, paying customer). Then, you might see someone moving into a first generation propellant depot. This will probably be nothing more than an upper stage possibly docked to a Sundancer module. It won't have zero-boiloff capabilities, probably won't have fancy sunshields or meteorite protection, it probably will only handle two propellants, and much of the propellant handling may involve manual connections and valves. Only once there starts to be serious money being made by depots will you start seeing them branching out, growing in size, adding bells and whistles, etc.

You'll also likely see a lot of the technologies needed for these depots being developed not by big expensive NASA or DoD demonstration satellites like DART or Orbital Express, but by companies like Lockheed piggybacking experiments on the postflight portion of Atlas V launches, and other such, low-budget partially IR&D funded experiments.

Feasibility: One of the best things about propellant depots is that there really is a lot of prior art and experience that demonstrates that we should be able to make this a reality. Every time a Centaur upper stage performs an in-flight relight, it is settling propellants, transferring them through a series of valves and pumps, and then sending them into another system (in this case an engine). Starting with Gemini and Russian programs at the same time, we've demonstrated the ability to do orbital rendezvous and docking. The Russians have been doing autonomous rendezvous and docking for decades, and now that we finally got around to it with Orbital Express, we're doing it too. The Russians for decades, the Shuttle, many other programs, and now Orbital Express have demonstrated the ability to make fluid couplings between spacecraft, both with and without manned intervention.

There are subtleties and tricky parts to tying everything together in the case of cryogenic propellants, but almost all of the toughest techniques and technologies needed for transferring propellants on orbit have been demonstrated already. Based on the plethora of past experience, one can have high confidence that this orbital capability can be refined and brought into practice in the near term. There is a lot of detail work to be done, and it'll probably take a lot of hands-on experience and several iterations before we start converging on the best ways of doing things, but the initial capability is relatively low-risk, and near-term.


Anyhow, that's a basic introduction to some of the benefits I see from orbital propellant transfer and storage. I've got lots of other articles on this blog detailing some of the technical challenges and some ideas for how to handle them. I'd strongly suggest doing some searches if you have the time and are interested.

Lunar Tourism

For a long time, I've felt that translunar tourism was an interesting potential market, especially for guys like me who have the solution of propellant depots that is definitely searching for a problem. I was quite interested a few years back when David Anderman of CSI announced their whole "Lunar Express" idea of using a Soyuz to send space tourists around the moon. I thought the idea was pretty darned clever (the CSI guys are pretty good at being clever), and apparently so did Space Adventures, because they also started trying to drum up interest for a similar flight. The only problem I had with the whole concept was the price tag.

At $100M per person, I figured that the price was so high that nobody would bite. There just really aren't that many people in the world who even have $100M, let alone enough more than $100M that they could actually afford a $100M vacation. So, my focus has always been on trying to find ways to lower the price point at least to the commonly accepted (though probably quite inaccurate) $20M price for a ticket on a Soyuz. But if what Clark reports about what Eric Anderson was saying on NPR today is accurate, I may need to find some recipes for crow.

Now, I'm not exactly firing up the grill yet--it's pretty clear from Eric's comment that while they have people who've expressed interest, they most definitely do not have the full $100M in hand at the moment. But if his statement isn't total marketing hype (and you have to remember--these are the guys who've arranged for several ISS trips so far, so there's a real chance it isn't just hype), and he's actually able to get even one paying customer at that price point, that will be truly impressive. And it will likely provide a fairly nice prod to people with business plans for orbital propellant depots to start moving faster.