The day that Columbia was lost, I noted, among other things, that the Orbital Space Plane would be a step backwards for the nation as a Shuttle replacement. Some in the comments section asked why I believed this.

Here’s an all-too-credulous article from Saturday’s Baltimore Sun about the OSP and NASA’s plans. It’s unfortunate that reporters are usually unacquainted with economics, or even basic accounting–they often simply accept whatever government agencies say at face value.

In the wake of the Columbia disaster, NASA officials say they’re accelerating plans to develop a $12 billion Orbital Space Plane that would ferry astronauts to the International Space Station by 2012 at a lower cost than the space shuttle can.

OK, we have an assertion in the very first paragraph that something that costs twelve billion dollars to develop (and presumably purchase a small fleet of) will be lower cost than something that we already have. Let’s see if the claim stands up to financial reality, and if it’s worth the money.

Designed to function more like a minibus than the truck-like shuttle does, the lightweight space plane would carry mostly human cargo and rely on rockets and other technology that NASA has developed.

The space plane might not look like a traditional plane at all, but more like an earlier generation of capsulelike craft that were launched by expendable booster rockets in the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs.

Ahhhhh…back to the future!

Smith said the space plane would be no more than half the size of a shuttle, which has roughly the same dimensions as a DC-9 jetliner.

What does that mean? The Shuttle is a launch vehicle, one that grosses millions of pounds as it launches. Perhaps he means that it will be half the size of an orbiter. But what does that mean? Wingspan? Weight? Length? How large will the payload bay be?

What!? You mean it doesn’t have one?!!

The latter is an important question, as I’ll get to in a minute.

It also would cost far less to operate than the shuttle’s $500 million per flight. NASA hopes the space plane would shave the cost of ferrying passengers to the station to $100 million per flight or less.

Smith said he expects a flying version of the space plane by 2010 and regular service two years later.

Here is the nub of the issue. The implication would be that we will save four hundred million dollars per flight by using the OSP rather than the Shuttle. Let us examine it.

First, let’s figure out where the hundred million figure comes from. If the OSP is to be launched on something like, say, a Delta IV, then we have to figure on the cost of the launch system. Though the Boeing description doesn’t have prices, digging around a little, I found this page, which says that Boeing will be paid $1.38B for twenty two launches, which comes out to about sixty million a flight. So that leaves forty million for everything else (and of course, it assumes that no further investment will be needed in the new Delta to “man rate” it).

Let’s indulge in a little political fantasy for a moment, and assume that the Congressfolks from Florida and Texas and Alabama, actually allow a significant cutback in the annual budget for fixed costs at the Cape, and Houston and Huntsville, that’s currently allocated to Shuttle (over three billion) to, say, a third of that–a billion dollars. Since crew rotate every three months at station, there’s no need for more than four flights a year, so we get a quarter of a billion per flight for amortization of fixed costs alone. In order to get it down to forty million, they’d have to reduce the annual Shuttle budget to five percent of what it is currently–a hundred and sixty million dollars per year.

I suspect the reality is that their hundred megabuck estimate doesn’t actually include the fixed costs–they’re quoting marginal cost for the OSP, and then comparing it to average cost for the Shuttle. If so, I call foul. You’ve got to compare like fruit to like fruit–the marginal cost for the Shuttle (the cost of flying the next one, given that you’re already flying that year) is more like a hundred fifty million.

But OK, let’s continue to be generous, and assume that they really are referring to average annual cost per flight. Now we’re down to a hundred million per flight, as they claim.

Or are we? Aren’t we forgetting something? When the Shuttle launches, it doesn’t just deliver people to and from space. It also delivers (and sometimes retrieves) tens of thousands of pounds of payload. NASA is proposing to “unbundle” the cargo delivery and return service from the passenger service. Fine, but now they have to account for getting the cargo up some other way. That means that you can’t replace a Shuttle launch with an OSP launch. You have to replace it with an OSP launch plus a cargo launch. Whoops, you just added another sixty million dollars per flight (again, generously assuming that the number above for Delta IV flights is correct).

And what if we were going to retrieve something? We just lost that capability entirely. Not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to understand the program implications of it–remember, the ISS was built partially as a way to justify the Shuttle program, and its design and operations are centered on the assumption of servicing, construction and operation via the Shuttle.

But let’s forget about that one as well. Here’s the real kicker.

NASA wants to spend twelve billion dollars up front to build a fleet of OSPs.

Where are they accounting for that cost in their estimates? If you’re going to justify the OSP based on savings over the Shuttle, then you have to include that up-front cost in the calculation. After all, though Shuttle is expensive, it doesn’t require any major capital outlay up front–it will simply continue to absorb its annual budget as long as we continue to operate it.

So what is the internal rate of return on this investment? I’m working on a spreadsheet for a more sophisticated analysis, but if we assume that it flies four flights per year for ten years, and no discounting (i.e., a dollar in the year 2020 has as much value as a dollar next year, another generous assumption) that twelve billion has to be amortized over forty flights. That means add another three hundred million dollars per flight. Considering the time value of money makes the situation much worse, since the development costs are in fact paid for in much more expensive dollars than the out-year operations costs.

But now, even with all of these generous assumptions, we’re up from the claimed hundred million per flight to almost half a billion ($160M + $300M). Whoops, that’s getting close to what the Shuttle costs, with much less capability. The reality (particularly annual fixed costs, and the cost of man-rating the Delta, and the actual launch price of the Delta) is probably much worse.

At best, NASA sees the Orbital Space Plane as an interim solution for supplying crews to the space station while it develops a more advanced ship that would be launched more like an ordinary plane and would be able to draw oxygen from the atmosphere instead of using heavy tanks of liquid oxygen.

Thus, they propose to spend twelve billion dollars over the rest of the decade, for an “interim solution” that won’t fly until the next decade, at which point, they presumably plan to spend many billions more on a true “shuttle replacement”–an airbreather.

Smith said yesterday that the Columbia disaster “validated” plans NASA announced in November to produce the passenger craft.

I can’t imagine any sequence of events that wouldn’t “validate” NASA’s plans in the mind of Dennis Smith.

There is a little hope, though.

Critics called the program shortsighted.

And they didn’t even ask me.

“It lacks vision. It’s a stopgap measure for NASA so it can fulfil short- term goals of supplying a space station, which has a limited life of its own,” said Rick N. Tumlinson, president of the Nyack, N.Y.-based Space Frontier Foundation.

Tumlinson said the space plane would supplement a shuttle program that he called basically an “expensive government trucking service” that could be handled by the private sector.

NASA should focus instead on exploring the planets, he said.

“The space plane is part of an extension of a shuttle program that’s been heading in the wrong direction,” he said. “The goal should be to make space travel more routine, less costly and safer.”

Of course, this then causes a rise to NASA’s defense by its primary beneficiaries.

Bruce Mahone, director of space policy for the Washington-based Aerospace Industries Association, an industry lobbying group, defended NASA’s plans.

He said that although the shuttle fleet is aging, the three remaining craft are constantly being upgraded and have years of service left.

None of them has flown the 100 missions envisioned for each when the shuttle program began in the 1970s, he said.

The space plane “will be much smaller than the shuttles, newer and more inexpensive if designed properly,” he said. “It’s a lifeboat for the space station.”

This is utterly incoherent. Smaller may be good, or it may be bad. Hard to know, because we don’t know what the requirements are. It will certainly be newer, but that’s not an intrinsic virtue, either. I’ve already demonstrated that it won’t be more inexpensive, and of course, we have that nasty little word “if.”

Based on history, how much faith should we put in that?

Utter insanity.

NASA has to be taken out of the space transportation business, ASAP. Step one of that, of course, is deciding what we want to accomplish in space. This entire episode simply point out the absurdity of our current manned space program. Until we want to have serious accomplishments in space, we need no new vehicles. We don’t even need the ones we have.