Ferris Valyn has the latest edition of his space diary up, with a lot of links, and discussion of the conference. Also, yesterday, I failed to mention the latest edition of the Carnival of Space over at Music of the Spheres.

I look at using chemical vapor deposition (and welding) to build a mono-crystalline, mono-molecular carbon space elevator over at The Space Review. Surprisingly, it will cost about what Brad Edwards budgeted for single-walled carbon nanutube (CNT) manufacturing.

If space elevators cost $25,000/kg and space delivery after the elevator’s up cost $10-$800/kg, then the second space elevator probably should be built out of less expensive, less exotic materials. If Kevlar is only 2% as strong as carbon nanotubes, you can still afford 50 kg of Kevlar for the price of 1 kg of diamonds at delivery costs and purchase prices less than $500 if elevator-quality CNT cost at least as much as bulk purchases of pure synthetic diamonds wholesale. One wouldn’t use Kevlar further down the elevator because then there would be a multiplier because we would need more Kevlar to hold the Kevlar and it would go up by a factor of e⁵⁰ or so. But that doesn’t apply right at the base–it’s pretty much linear there.

Another issue I may explore is that if a Mars elevator can be 6 tons or less, it might weigh less than the fuel needed to take off from Mars or even the fuel and aerobrake to get from Mars geosynchronous orbit to the surface. Mars exploration economics change a lot if return oxygen can be carted up from the surface by elevator. Note that one would not necessarily need laser or microwave power to power a climber on Mars. Solar power for a climber would have it climb slower, but it would still climb.

A great place to work the kinks out of space elevator technology is the Moon. A Lunar space elevator going from a little ways Earthward of Earth-Moon L-1, would not need materials as strong as a space elevator for the Earth’s surface. If successful, it would allow much more mass to go down to the surface and much more return mass than the 46 metric tons of LSAM ascender and descender. A 7-ton Lunar elevator and some climbers powered from Earth would provide as much cargo capacity as Edwards’s starter elevator on Earth. Since Lunar exploration doesn’t really begin in earnest until late next decade according to the current (perhaps overly optimistic) vision, it might be worth doing some thought experiments about saving mass on the very first sortie to the Moon by using a Lunar space elevator. Pearson advocated this using M5 fiber to make a 7,000 kg Lunar elevator with 200 kg capacity a few years back. Forget thought experiments, launch the @$%#! elevator.

At the NewSpace 2007 luncheon on Thursday, the speaker was Ed Morris, the head of the Office of Commercial Space at the Department of Commerce. In response to a question from Dave Huntsman, he indicated that there might be a possibility of alleviating the situation. Jeff Foust reported on it at the time, and Dave has an interesting comment there, with which I agree. I also agree that while new legislation would help, it’s not necessary to fix some of the things, despite what Morris said.

As I noted on a panel at the Space Access Conference in March, I would like to see the burden of proof shifted for whether or not an item should be on the munitions list. The current standard is guilty until proven innocent. I think that it should be the other way around. And it is encouraging to see some recognition at the Pentagon that the cure is worse than the disease. It has alway been a much more realistic position to “mend it, not end it,” than to simply demand that there be no export controls, and the argument that, in its current implementation, it’s actually damaging our security will be a useful one with its most staunch defenders, such as Duncan Hunter.

I was going to post some thoughts on the acquisition (which was really just an increase in equity from a minority to a hundred percent), but before I had an opportunity to do so, Jon Goff must have channeled me. A “skunkworks for NG” was exactly what I thought when I heard the news.

There will probably be more tomorrow. Dennis Poulos was the only NG person at the conference, and he was only there on Thursday (and he’s probably not a spokesman for the company on the issue). Alex Tai had little to say about it (with regard to implications for SpaceShipTwo) yesterday, other than that he thought it was a good (even great) thing, and that it was “Northrop’s story, not his,” to tell.

But I think that this points out that the nature of this business is much more complex than many would like to make it, and it’s not simply the “Big Bad, Small Good” template that many like to think, and that the line between New Space and Old Space has never been as sharp as many thought, and it’s becoming progressively blurrier. As Jon says, the Boeings and Northrop Grummans, and Lockheed Martins are recognizing that the new century brings new business realities, and it’s particularly worth considering, in light of the Apollo anniversary last week, that the old space age is over, and the new effectively begun, despite Mike Griffin’s attempt to resurrect Apollo, which seems likely to fail.

I have always swum in both seas, and have often had former colleagues at Boeing (now fairly high in management) tell me that they’re interested in this new business, but it’s not obvious how to break in, other than watch, and observe, and when something succeeds, to acquire it. And of course, they didn’t need to tell me that, because it’s obvious, from a business sense. They’re simply too risk averse, by the nature of their being large publicly-held corporations, and their existing business relationships, to do things like this from scratch on their own, and that’s not a criticism, just a statement of fact. They have to be so, because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, many of whom are pensioners, to not take big gambles with the company’s money, on new but uncertain markets and business lines.

The fact that such acquisitions are now occurring is to me a sign of the transition of the old age to the new. When we really know that it’s real will be when one of them buys one of the new companies, born in this age, such as XCOR.

[Update a while later]

I should make one other point. This acquisition really has very little to do with space. SpaceShipTwo may be one of Scaled’s most well-known current projects, but they’re first and foremost an aircraft company, and that’s the bulk of their activities. I think that NG saw this as an aviation, or aerospace acquisition. To the degree that it helped them on the space side at all, that would just be gravy.

Wireless is still problematic, but I want to at least mention that at lunch today, Jim Muncy gave (a very surprised) Clark Lindsey a well-deserved award for his years of devotion to Hobbyspace web site, and his seemingly tireless efforts to broadening the appeal of space to many people on a number of fronts.

I’ll be leaving for the airport in a couple hours, and socializing before then, so probably no more posting until tomorrow.

Neil Woodward of ESMD is chairing a panel on how commercial activities can fit into the Vision.

Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing gave a short presentation on the value of having propellant depots in cis-lunar space (he calls them “gasteroids” to the collective groan of the audience). They have the capability of increasing landed mass on the moon from 18 to 51 tons of cargo. They provide a market for commercial providers (300 tons of propellant per year). They also provide a means for international participation that doesn’t put them on the critical path (international partners could provide both the propellant and the extra lunar cargo). And it’s not in NASA’s current plans.

Ken Davidian talked about the need to reduce or remove barriers of entry for commercial space companies.
— Investor funding
— Production of commercial space goods and services
— Demand for commercial space goods and services
– Example of Multi-Phase procurements
— prize competitors
— funded space act
— FAR 12 Contracts
– X PRIZE essentially led to COTS

[Note, above Davidian comments, which I was distracted during, gratefully stolen from Clark Lindsey]

Jim Dunstan: Describing relative difficulties between working with NASA and the Russians. Thinks NASA’s biggest problem is hubris. “Get over yourselves.”

NASA does not own space.
There is on inalienable right to explore space.
The public doesn’t care that much about space.
Neither NASA or the current private space companies know much about business.

Wants to get rid of Space Act Agreements. No enforceability clauses, so any money spent is wasted. Doesn’t like FARs and government contracting, but at least they’re available. Have to kill “cancel for convenience.” Without stiff penalties, hard to get investment. NASA needs to hire business people, not engineers or ex-military people. Same thing for engineers. Need good business help and good legal help.

Remember Dreamtime. A disaster between Hollywood media types and engineers at NASA who had no clue how to put a business together.

Jeff Greason: What does government do well? Railroads were big hit, but government running railroads less than successful. Government did a good job of creating aircraft industry in the US, after the disaster of attempting to have the government own/operate vehicles. No economic activity in Antarctica.

By government’s nature, it’s an unreliable customer and unreliable supplier, due to being a creature of politics. Private sector much more predictable. Whether or not greed is good, it’s predictable. No government infrastructure to guarantee continuing supply of tennis shoes, but they’re always available.

If the government has a mission to create a lunar infrastructure, it has to be with heavy commercial involvement to be affordable, but it seems to be the other way around. If the government is the only customer, hard to raise private money. Would have made sense to utilize transportation that other satellite customers also wanted to use.

Points out fragility of having a single government-developed vehicle, so if a commercial customer of a lunar base, you’ll be out of luck if the system goes down. Agrees with Dallas that propellant depots make sense as a market. Also critical on lunar end regardless of location. Will eventually need to produce propellant on the moon, and will need places to store it. Architecture in mind doesn’t look like one NASA is building. Unclear whether it’s opportunity lost or deferred, because unclear whether or not this architecture will be completed.

The notion that you’ll build something, then operate it for a while, then hope you can pawn it off on someone else is not a good plan. If a lunar base isn’t pre-leased, there’s something wrong with it, either in transportation infrastructure or base design or something else, but NASA won’t feel the pain, unlike a private company.

NASA has a disease of no pain receptors.

NASA can’t successfully run the railroad, or be a property developer, or be a landlord without even talking to the customers, but that’s what’s happening.

Wants the government to spend its money in such a way as to at least potentially be useful, but understands that this isn’t a guarantee.

Jim Muncy leading a forum on presidential space politics, consisting of himself, Alan Ladwig, Lori Garver and Courtney Stadd. It’s a bi-partisan panel, since Alan and Lori are Democrats, and Jim and Courtney are Republicans.

Jim: We are already seven months into the longest, hardest-fought and expensive presidential campaign in history. People in this room can have more effect on our prospects for space than anyone in the Oval Office. We tend to look to presidents to set the direction and lead, but it doesn’t have to be just about what they do. Yes, we should wish that we can have an impact on what they do on space, and in a perfect world, we’d have a debate in 2008 debating the merits, successes and failures of the G W Bush administration, and missed opportunities, and new opportunities and what their agenda would be. This is about as likely as Kurds, Shia and Sunnis in Iraq singing Kumbaya with Harry Reid.

What is the art of the possible? What could she say or he do to take up the good things that were accomplished over the past eight years and move them forward, or identify things that should be fixed? He asks Courtney for a report card on Bush space policy.

Courtney: Mixed record at best. Columbia afforded an opportunity to make some major changes, VSE addressed anxiety about presidential space leadership. We can argue about destinations, but we can be happy that there is one for now. New administration will inherit transportation problems. Current NASA leadership has put in high-quality people that would allow next administration to make some advances. Now he’s in the private sector, thinks that Bigelow is a dream come true, and told them that he’s willing to help as long as they don’t make NASA a key part of the business plan.

Lori: Agrees with Courtney about Columbia environment setting new policy to move beyond LEO, and a highlight of the past six years. COTS has increased commercial space transportation pool by order of magnitude over Alt Access. But need more participants (two not enough). Also have issue of no broad base of support for the program. Overall grade: C-

Alan: Space science uber alles is a symptom of the fact that the space science people have always had a long-term vision and agenda that didn’t need a president to support them, but the human space flight community has been less visionary, and was waiting for the president to stand up. The president stood up, but hasn’t said much since. Cuts to aeronautics are almost criminal. COTS is a good new model for how to get things done. Good things have happened over the past eight years, but it’s not much because of what the government has done. Agrees with Lori’s C- grade.

Jim: Going to be generous and give them an Incomplete. In human spaceflight and space operations, NASA was not doing a very good job early in the decade, and could have embraced alternatives to space station access more aggressively, but thankfully the Russians bailed us out. Gerstenmaier doing a good job of getting station built and Shuttle retired. Gives them a B or an A- on that. On the science side, they initially threw a lot of money at science because they didn’t know what they wanted to do, and got people too excited, so that later “cuts” appeared much worse than they really were, because they were really small increases. Gives the administration (not the president) a D grade. The architecture, by Mike Griffin’s own definition, will have to be implemented by a future administration, and Griffin has as much as said that the decision to actually go to the moon will have to be determined by a future congress. Vision itself A- (could have been more commercially oriented), but implementation has been flawed, and thinks it unfortunate that whether or not we’re really going back to the moon remains uncertain, and poorly argued. Needs a more forthright statement that we are going back to the moon, and need more embrace of commercialization, and there is too much focus on the gap. The only gap will be of American-government-flagged spaceships going into space.

Lori: Wants to defend Mike Griffin. Has said great things in the Washington Post and other places about the importance of space and colonization, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever get a stronger advocate in that regard. Jim agrees on that score.

Courtney: Officially not aligned with either party. He sees a fundamental problem with the country, and sees a fundamental dysfunction of organization of the government, regardless of party. We have a 1950’s style government in the twenty-first century. Have good vigorous people on the Hill, but no one with the necessary science and technology knowledge. Lots of policy wonks and political science types, but not people who understand the accelerating technologies. People will look back in a few decades and wonder how people we were condescending to recently are beating us. His fear as an American citizen is the fact that NASA is a symptom of a much larger problem with how the government is organized. We are sitting in “six and a half square miles, surrounded by reality.” Space policy is a parlor game populated by a very small group, and he hopes that next president will broaden that base.

Alan: Hopes that we can get people to think about space in a broader context than NASA (group NASA and DOD together, rather than just with NSF).

Courtney: NASA was stovepiped in the Bush administration.

Lori: Under the Kerry campaign, space was grouped under science and technology, and she would have preferred it as part of national competitiveness.

Jim: Space has wide impact: environment, energy, etc. Space fits in everything, and we want a space person on all the transition teams.

Alan: Nothing magic about how teams are set up, but we might be able to get some people in. Unfortunately, support for the campaign is a more important criterion for choice of who is in transition than subject knowledge.

Courtney: Signal-noise ratio of campaign very high, and hard to penetrate it with policy analysis, particularly if it doesn’t seem to help politically. Campaigns are crisis driven, and it’s hard for space geeks to get much attention. We have an infrastructure crisis, and we’re not grappling with it. If we can get space into that conversation, we might be able to get some traction with it, but it takes a long time to get national consensus. We have responsibility to grab the political apparatus and politicians by the lapels, and tell them that we have a serious problem.

Jim: If you’re running the transition team for the new president, what are the top three things related to space?

Alan: More support for longer-range R&D (quotes Goldin that NASA should be doing things that the private sector won’t do). Need better collaboration between NASA and DOD. Better, but still too much stovepiping going on. Third, NASA has to be more commercially oriented. If they can’t outsource parabolic flight, why should COTS contestants think they’ll do it with ISS delivery?

[Simberg note: I was making this latter argument over ten years ago, when there was this fantasy, on which I did some consulting to USA, about privatizing the Shuttle. I had been fighting to get NASA to buy parabolic services from my own company, and noted how fiercely they defended their turf. My recollection of a conversation that I had with him at the Space Foundation meeting in Colorado Springs at the time, when Alan was at NASA, is that he was defending them, claiming that they had to have control over the training aircraft for the astronaut candidates. So I find it amusing that, having gone to Zero-G after leaving NASA, we’re now on the same page. The only difference, of course, is that they have FAA certification, but that shouldn’t have been necessary to perform services for NASA anyway. Another example of how one can become sensible once one is out of range of the mind-control stupidity-inducing beams that seem to permeate the agency facilities.]

Courtney: Wants a suspension of all commissions for a period of time. Would tell the new president that we have real problems, and are going out of business as a bureaucracy and a country. Overdue for reinventing NASA and government overall. Will be six to nine months before new administration recognizes NASA and picks a new administrator, because it’s too low a priority. Then there will be a scramble to get someone in. Would hope and pray that the next group running a transition will set it up up front. Whether true or not, there’s a perception that this administration is bad on science, and this should and could be a high priority for any next administration.

Jim: Describing an article he wrote fifteen years ago called “Never trust a space agency over thirty.” Next year it will be the fiftieth anniversary of the agency. We’re not very good in this country at reinventing our institutions. Only thing that tends to work is to shrink them (often randomly). Doesn’t know if that’s possible.

Alan: There’s a precedent when NACA became NASA. Maybe because the mission has changed, it shouldn’t be contained all in one agency.

Lori: They may create a department of the environment, pull Goddard out. Jim suggests moving it to NOAA. Refers to the next president as she to the fright and amusement of the audience.

Alan: We should plan to hammer out some policy suggestions for the next administration at the next year’s conference, but also get other sectors involved, such as the environmentalists, and military space plane people.

In response to a question as to whether or not Shuttle should be extended to close the “gap,” Jim says “Hell, no.” Points out that entitlement programs are going to be increasing pressure on the budget in the future. Courtney mentions that one day of Iraq is a useful science program. Don’t ever underestimate the tremendous inertia that these programs have.

[Monday morning update]

Jeff Foust has a report on this session, and presidential space politics in general, over at this morning’s issue of The Space Review.

Tom Pickens, head of Spacehab, gave the lunchtime speech, in which he proclaimed that the time is right for this industry. Unfortunately, he didn’t provide much support for the thesis, and much of his speech seemed to argue that it was still too early, at least in the sense that there’s a paucity of fundable business plans. He is also much more enthusiastic about the prospects for the International Space Station and its ability to support microgravity research than I am. But then, that’s the business he’s in.

I’m blogging from the space finance session at the conference (we finally got power in the room, so I don’t have to worry about my battery dying).

Thirty-eight years ago, the first men walked on the moon. In December, it will have been thirty-five years since the last footsteps occurred there. The conference I’m attending is about figuring out ways to keep it from being that long before it happens again.

James Lileks has additional thoughts, as does Alan K. Henderson, and there’s still time to celebrate it with a commemorative dinner tonight.

Also, blogging will probably continue to be light. The wireless connection here is sporadic and iffy. However, Clark Lindsey is diligently blogging the conference. Just keep scrolling.

Their continuing to push for the US to sign and ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty. As I’ve pointed out previously, this would set a dangerous precedent, in that it will weaken the arguments against our signing on to the Moon Treaty.