Keith Cowing also wonders why NASA would want a missile defense analyst on a space exploration advisory committee. My reading of the VSE and the Aldridge Report is that the new vision should support several goals, one of which is defense, both national and planetary. It would in fact be quite useful to have someone from the space defense community involved in the planning, to keep an eye out for opportunities for synergism, and to bring a different perspective in the development of systems that could both help in that defense goals, and perhaps complicate them if done without consideration of those other strategic needs.

While it’s not obvious to me exactly how they would fit (other than for the planetary defense role), concern about how LEO activity will coexist with potential LEO missile defense systems is worth worrying about, and it’s not a bad idea to have someone on board who does think about such things for a living.

Keith Cowing wonders why NASA is procuring hardware for military tanks.

Well, without discounting the possibility (even likelihood) that there is something bureaucratically suspect going on here, there is a plausible justification, in that the technology for an oil-free turbine would be very handy for space applications (e.g., power conversion for nuclear systems), reducing maintenance and helping with reliability. Since the funding is from Glenn (NASA’s propulsion center), it makes sense that it would develop this potential dual-use technology. It may even have other civilian terrestrial spinoff applications.

It is strange that the applications cited are so military specific, though. Equally strange is that the application (a diesel environment) is so specific so as to make it look suspect as a pure technology development. We’re a long way off from space diesels.

Dale Amon has some interesting, and plausible, speculation about Richard Branson’s business plans for space transportation.

Sam, what I don’t understand about your proposal is, well, how it would actually work. The devil is always in the details in these things. When you say:

It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted.

…what does that mean? What price will they get the service at? Who is purchasing from the launch providers?

My idea would be to have the government purchase some fixed (and large) quantity of various goods and space services (e.g., tickets to LEO, pounds to LEO, maybe even tickets and pounds to the lunar surface), use whatever there was a government need for, and auction the rest back on the market. If the market price turns out to be higher than the price paid by the government, then the program costs nothing at all (other than the cost of the services that the government needs). If it’s a lot more, presumably the providers would stop selling to the government (assuming they were allowed to opt out) and sell directly to the market. If the differential was low, then we’d have a subsidy, in which the cost of the program would be the difference in price between market and government cost of the service.

But in order to make this fly, the country (and its government) would have to decide that having large amounts of activities in space at reduced unit costs were sufficiently important to justify what would be considered a large expenditure in the context of current space activity (essentially doubling the NASA budget under your proposal, but I think you could do a lot of damage to the problem for a few billion a year). There’s been little sign of that so far.

Thomas James expresses a fear about government lunar bases, and NASA, that I share. We’ve got to break out of Apollo mode. I hope that the new administrator understands this, but so far, I see little sign of it.