Jeez. I have to find out via Clark Lindsey that my latest take on NewSpace in The New Atlantis is now on line.

In yesterday’s post on bypassing the moon, a commenter writes:

As long as you’re going somewhere where there are no in-situ resources to produce fuel with, you’ve got no, repeat NO advantage in terms of the amount of mass you have to put into space to get something somewhere.

Orbital refueling is the same whether it takes place next to a space-station or in the middle of nowhere. You still have to launch all your fuel from Earth. Constructing a fuel-factory base on the moon, on the other hand, means that you only have to get the payload in an agreeable orbit for the booster rockets/tanks to be launched to it from the moon.

This isn’t necessarily the case. Not all payloads are created equal. It’s conceivable that propellants could be launched more cheaply than other things (for instance, with catapults, or relatively unreliable but cheap boosters). So fueling in LEO would make sense under those conditions. In addition, you might be able to deliver propellants to GEO or EML1 much more cheaply than other payloads (e.g., by sending them on a slow tanker with a high Isp, with trip times that wouldn’t be tolerable to humans, particularly through the Van Allen belts). So there is potentially a lot of benefit to orbital fueling even in the absence of ISRU.

[Early afternoon update]

I should note that it’s also not true that “you’ve got no, repeat NO advantage in terms of the amount of mass you have to put into space to get something somewhere.”

If you can deliver propellant to a staging point (like EML1) for your return more cheaply than conventional means, you can in fact reduce the total amount of propellant required for the mission, and that must thus be delivered to space. That’s because it takes propellant to move propellant. If you deliver your return propellant as part of the total lunar insertion payload, it costs just as much, in terms of injection propellant requirements, as a pound of anything else. But if you can get it out there using low-thrust systems or (as Jon Goff suggests in comments) by Weak Stability Boundary trajectories, you can get the propellant there with a lot less propellant. There are really huge payoffs to the ability to store and transfer propellants on orbit, regardless of the cost of launch from earth.

Here’s an article in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune about Frontier Astronautics, a company that has set up shop in an abandoned Atlas silo outside Chugwater, Wyoming.

This is an interesting concept, but I think that it would be a tough sell politically, partially because of the false lessons learned from ISS:

The notional mission design that Farquhar presented is based on what he calls the

Jon Goff explains why the ESAS windmill is worth a tilt:

How are we going to find investors willing risk the money to develop on-orbit propellant transfer when they’re being told that multi-launch architectures are too unreliable? That the best way to get back to the moon is building Ares I and Ares V, and that any EELV or light launcher based system would require too many launches to be practical?

Who’s going to fund a commercial lunar transportation system if we’ve abandoned the field to those who claim the only way you can do lunar transportation is using HLVs?

Ideas matter.

Honestly, as much as I would like to see NASA change to a more commercial aligned position, I don’t really think it is likely to happen. But if we can sway the conventional wisdom that these other, more commercial approaches really are not only technically feasible, but technically and economically superior, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, NASA will do what NASA will do, but if we can convince potential investors that there really are more cost effective ways of doing things, it will have been worth it.

But if we abandon the field of ideas, and stick to our knitting, we’re setting ourselves seriously up for failure.

It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the staggering amount of damage that has been done over the past decades to our prospects of opening space, by NASA-driven public perceptions about the difficulty of doing various things in space, in terms of decimating investment prospects. The false lessons from Apollo, the Shuttle and ISS continue to haunt us today, and this current irrational fear of orbital operations just continues that destructive legacy, in my opinion.

Ryan Zelnio has started a new space policy blog, that reviews space policy papers. He seems to be off to an interesting start.

The latest edition is up on the web.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.

I wonder what the center picture is on this web page? And what the “15” means? Years until it flies…?

[Update late morning]

As a commenter notes, it’s not Chinese, but Korean, which I should have known by the name of the publication.