Category Archives: Space

Business, Space

SpaceX Press Conference

37 Comments

Elon — half a billion dollars, biggest commercial launch deal in history. Reinforces fact that Falcon 9 is vehicle of choice not just for NASA but also for commercial sector. Also a lot of international customers. Good thing for US in particular because vehicles are built 100% in the US. US hasn’t been cost competitive in launch market, but are now.

2015-2017 for launch. Expect a couple dozen launches before then.

Bobby Block: What does mean in terms of what you’ll be looking for from the government to accelerate both crew and cargo?

Elon: Won’t make much difference, but does validate the NASA’s approach. Over the long term the cost to NASA and the taxpayer will be less because fixed costs will be divided by larger number of launches. Dragon is currently long pole, and this deal doesn’t affect that.

Block: People talking about Shuttle extension and more flights. If Shuttle is extended will it affect COTS?

Elon: Doesn’t see it affecting things. Assume that everyone knows that extending/restarting not a viable option. An extra Shuttle flight will cost a lot of money, more than SpaceX is getting for the entire NASA constract.

Claire Moskowitz: When launching out of Vandenberg?

Elon: Two years from now, roughly. Using SLC-4, former Titan IV facility (just like at the Cape). So they have a good understanding of what it takes to convert, 12-18 months.

Moskowitz: How about Taiwan launch on Falcon 1e?

Elon: Been in discussion for a couple years. Planning to do a number of Falcon 1e launches. Over forty launches manifested by the end of the year.

Alan Boyle: How many launches is the contract? About ten? One more provider to receive lion’s share?

Elon: No insight into other provider. SpaceX is primary provider, so other will be a backup or secondary. Can’t comment on exact number of launches, depends on final satellite configuration.

Elon: Most of the money goes to satellite production, the half billion is just the launch piece. Part of the cost is dispenser development, so it’s not all launch costs.

MSNBC: When is next launch, and what is cash situation (talking about Pasztor’s billion-dollar number).

Elon: Pasztor’s article rife with errors. In good financial shape but may take on debt for working capital. May also take in strategic investor. Next launch toward end of summer. Falcon 9 carrying operational version of Dragon.

Todd Halvorson: What is total backlog of Falcon 1/9 launches?

Elon: Low thirties in terms of backlog. Will be over forty by the end of the year.

Halvorson: Assuming that Iridium are polar, will any be equatorial?

Elon: Some chance of equatorial, but all current plans high inclination.

Irene Klotz: Location of Falcon 1e with Taiwan satellite?

Elon: Kwaj.

Klotz: How much to convert SLC-4 for Falcon 9?

Elon: $40-$50M.

Klotz: Who was competition for Iridium?

Elon: Everyone. French satellite, so no restrictions on American content issue. Global competition.

Klotz: How is data analysis from flight going?

Elon: Not a lot to report. It went great. Slight roll anomaly isolated to probably the roll-control actuator, but still not positive, still seeking internal consensus. A little too concerned that it went too good. Will be looking for “near misses” to prepare for next flight.

Space News: Is contract for all seventy two birds, or just a piece of the Constellation?

Elon: Doesn’t want to discuss that, ask Iridium.

ALan Boyle: Any better sense of how long the Dragon test article will stay in orbit? Is there another client for the mission, perhaps classified? Can you say anything?

Elon: Laughs, can neither confirm or deny. Dragon will stay up for a year or two, and burn up on entry.

Halvorson: Comment on how SpaceX operates versus legacy companies in terms of costs?

Elon: Doesn’t like to give sound bites — oversimplifies. Needs to write a paper on it. Like asking why Southwest is cheaper. Not just because they use 737s. SpaceX operates on a Silicon Valley OS and DNA. Sort of like an Intel or Apple or Google of space transport. Vertical integration helps also, once problems are solved. Too much outsourcing in traditional aerospace. They cut out middlemen. Using legacy components means inheriting legacy cost structure. Tightly integrated team, with factory on the same floor as engineering. Everyone in a cube, including him. Also, very simple, with same propellants in both stages. Upper stage simply a short version of first stage. Same engine on both stages, so lots of economies of scale from Merlin.

Klotz: Launch escape in house, or contract?

Elon: Building liquid escape engines into sidewall of Dragon, which will be safety improvement over solid. Won’t have to eject a tower. Having something that you have to eject every flight seems like a crazy idea. Will have escape capability all the way to orbit.

International Business: Is this part of the two and a half billion in contracts?

Elon: Yes, it’s about $2.7B, including this, through 2017, but bulk over the next five years.

Are Chinese competition?

Yes, when international customer.

How much financial margin? Can you avoid the Sea Launch problem?

Elon: Cash flow not significantly affected even in stand down. Sea Launch suffered from single-point failure of launch platform. Tough to recover from. SpaceX has site flexibility of Vandenberg, Cape and Kwaj.

Space News: Might want to check out if Chinese were eligible to bid for Iridium work.

Elon: Not sure they were, just thought they were because of French satellite. You may know more than me, but didn’t think there was an ITAR issue.

Conference over.

[Update a few minutes later]

The one question that I didn’t capture was mine. I asked him if they knew yet why the first stage didn’t survive entry, or if they would have to wait for another flight to get better data (because they didn’t get the microwave imaging data they wanted). He said that they still didn’t know, and might not figure it out until they try again. I followed up, asking if he could conceive of a time that they might just give up on it, and pull the recovery systems out to give them more payload. I was surprised at the vehemence of his answer (paraphrasing): “We will never give up! Never! Reusability is one of the most important goals. If we become the biggest launch company in the world, making money hand over fist, but we’re still not reusable, I will consider us to have failed.” I told him that I was very gratified to hear that, because I like reusability.

[Early afternoon update]

Here’s Bobby Block’s report on the presser.

Political Commentary, Space

How Risky Are The Russians?

17 Comments

Some thoughts from Jim Oberg.

This slow-motion policy train wreck has been going on for years. Decades, in fact. We knew back in 1986 that we needed a more robust transportation architecture, but we trusted NASA to fix it when it just wasn’t up to the job, and never will be. Jobs have always been more important than space, and that will remain the case until space becomes important again, as it was briefly in the early sixties. The only way out is to promote competition and market development in the private sector, which is finally starting to happen with the new policy, if Congress doesn’t screw it up (again). What is so frustrating is that if we’d had sensible plans for the VSE five years ago, and Bush hadn’t allowed Mike Griffin to copulate with the chihuahua for this past half decade, we’d be very close to not having a gap at all.

[Update a while later]

In that two-year-old PJM piece that I linked last night, I just noticed this bit of prescience:

In hindsight, if the goal of Apollo had been to open up the space frontier, rather than a crash program to send half a dozen astronauts to the lunar surface, it would have been better to state as a goal that we would establish an affordable and sustainable transportation infrastructure to and from the moon. As it happens, that was in fact what George W. Bush proposed four and a half years ago in the Vision for Space Exploration, but NASA apparently missed the memo. But that never was the goal of Apollo. The goal of Apollo was to simply prove that a democratic socialist state enterprise was technologically superior to a totalitarian one. Once we had beaten the Soviets to the moon, it was mission accomplished, and no need to go back. The remaining missions after Apollo XI were simply programmatic inertia, using up the hardware after the production was shut down in 1967, when it became clear that we were going to win.

The problem was that, as already noted, Apollo cost a lot of money. So much so that after landing only six crews, we flew the last mission thirty-six years ago, and shelved the technology that enabled us to achieve it, because it wasn’t providing an economic return commensurate with the cost to the taxpayer. In fact, it spurred a new use of the phrase among frustrated space enthusiasts. Since 1972, they’ve been able to ask “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we send a man to the moon?” The answer is that we couldn’t afford to continue to do so, at least not the way we’d been doing it (which is a reason why NASA’s plan to redo Apollo, pretty much the same way, will likely not be sustainable, either). To use Apollo as a model for the provision of our most vital commodity — energy — would be economically ruinous.

Emphasis mine. Did I call it, or what?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Sorry, It’s Not The Manhattan Project

32 Comments

…or Apollo. I suffered through the president’s speech so you don’t have to.

The most egregious part of it was when he compared energy independence to Apollo. Here’s my response from the campaign:

He’s never met a problem that, in his mind, the “full power of the government” can’t solve.

It’s an understandable appeal, but it betrays a certain lack of understanding of the problem to think that we will solve it with a crash federal program, at least if it’s one modelled on Apollo.

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones. And the former is not necessarily even a desirable goal, if by that one means only getting energy from domestic sources. Energy is, and should remain, part of the global economy and trade system if we want to continue to keep prices as low as possible and continue to provide economic growth.

Nothing has changed. My commentary remains true today.

[Wednesday morning update]

If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we stop the leak, Mr. President? That’s a much better Apollo analogy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Clueless In London

12 Comments

Giles Whittell had a misanalysis of the US space program at the Times of London yesterday (registration required):

President Obama is nothing if not rational. He came to office facing the collapse of the US economy and has since ordered a freeze on discretionary non-security spending. He has ring-fenced his education budget, committed the Treasury to paying $1 trillion (£690 billion) over ten years on health insurance subsidies, and still has two wars to fund. In the circumstances, Nasa’s quixotic lunge toward Mars with a “new generation” of distinctly old-fashioned rockets looked vulnerable at best. If Mr Obama has his way, it will be doomed.

I would dispute the assessment of the president’s rationality, but NASA (why can’t the Brits learn to capitalize acronyms?) wasn’t making a “lunge toward Mars,” quixotically or otherwise. It wasn’t even making a “lunge” toward the moon. It was more of a slow crawl, unlikely to ever get there. And it was a smart decision, regardless of the economic environment. No matter how wealthy we are as a nation, it would be foolish to spend tens of billions on so little capability as Constellation offered when we could have much more for much less, and much sooner.

The last graf doesn’t make much sense, either:

There are stronger strategic arguments for maintaining America’s lead beyond Earth’s orbit. If it steps back, China will become the world’s dominant space-faring nation and its goals there remain unclear. Mr Obama understands this. He also knows that the idea of journeying to the next frontier retains a powerful hold on the American psyche, which is why he claims that his plan to outsource research and development for new propulsion technologies will lead eventually to Mars. Yet the frail US economy leaves his hands tied. For at least ten years American astronauts will fly to space in Russian capsules, or not at all — because American consumers borrowed too much for their houses.

It’s not clear who would be the dominant space-faring nation if we were to truly “step back,” (in reality, by any sensible understanding of the phrase, there are no space-faring nations on this planet, and there never have been). China is certainly in no hurry to go anywhere, at their current pace, and the Russians remain far ahead of them. But as I noted in a comment over there, the notion that it will take ten years to put a capsule on a Delta or Atlas, or to get Dragon ready for crew, is a ludicrous one. And it was going to be at least seven years before Ares/Orion would be ready (for a cost of at least a billion dollars a launch, a point that the defenders repeatedly ignore).

Anyway, as a result of the shoddy reporting, Daffyd Ab Hugh (is that a pseudonym?) has an uninformed Anti-Obama rant over at Hot Air:

…it’s hardly a surprise that Barack H. Obama is in the process of killing the Constellation program proposed by (of course) President George W. Bush to return human beings, Americans, to the Moon, this time to stay; to explore lunar science and geology, investigate the origins of our solar system, and exploit the vast mineralogical, energy, and environmental resources found on our nearest neighboring planet.

No, it’s not a surprise to anyone who read the Augustine Report (and particularly to those who read between the lines) — the program was a disaster. But it wasn’t proposed by George Bush, and that’s not why it’s being cancelled. Bush proposed the Vision for Space Exploration, which survives in much better shape than it did under Constellation (with the exception of an explicit goal of moon first). Constellation was Mike Griffin’s deformed brain child.

And in quoting Congressman Bishop, he fails to note that he is the Congressman from ATK, whose oxen is most severely gored by the Constellation cancellation — the SRBs are built in his district.

I actually agree with the criticism of the president’s indifference to (and ignorance, perhaps even loathing of) American exceptionalism, but there are many better pieces of evidence for it than finally fixing a screwed- up space policy. I might email Ed Morrissey to see if I can get space for a rebuttal.

Space

The Missing Piece

13 Comments

John Strickland has some suggestions for in-LEO transportation:

One of the features of the original space station and shuttle concept was a space tug. The concept was called the S.T.S: (Space Transportation System), which would have allowed access to other locations in LEO (in the same or similar orbital plane) from the station. Such a tug would be able to capture large payloads, either modules or large cargo containers, and deliver them safely back to the station. The tug was originally in the post-Apollo plans, but by the mid-1970’s, like many critical components of the current Station, such as the Large Centrifuge Facility, it got chopped by budget cuts and budget overruns of other parts of the shuttle program, leaving just the Shuttle. Thus this component was lost long before the 1984 Reagan Space Station proposal. We still only have two components of what was intended to be a three-component system.

There were a few half-hearted attempts over the years to restore it (e.g., the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle, which Marshall screwed the pooch on with, among other things, stupid requirements), but this hasn’t really been a serious discussion at NASA in decades. Yet it’s a key piece of the architecture for both LEO and BEO ops (a BEO version could be similar to the LEO one, except with larger tank or propulsion kits). And it’s all enabled by gas stations, of course. And these are all issues that Constellation, with its “let’s do Apollo again” mindset, completely ignored.

Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Space

Negligent Parents?

52 Comments

I don’t have a problem with the sailing attempt — I think that today’s children are far too coddled and infantilized (all the way to age 26, thanks to ObamaCare). I don’t see anything particularly magic about eighteen, either. Different people mature at different rates. There are many people who would never be able to do this at any age (most people, I’d say). What I’m looking forward to is the youngest (or even first) person to sail around the moon.

Economics, Political Commentary, Space

What Is Old

41 Comments

…is new again. In doing some research, I was reading the old Agnew Space Task Group report, and I came across this paragraph:

The Space Task Group is convinced that a decision to phase out manned space flight operations, although painful, is the only way to achieve significant reductions in NASA budgets over the long term. At any level of mission activity, a continuing program of manned space flight, following use of launch vehicles and spacecraft purchased as part of Apollo, would require continued production of hardware, continued operation of extensive test, launch support and mission control facilities, and the maintenance of highly skilled teams of engineers, technicians, managers, and support personnel. Stretch-out of mission or production schedules, which can initially reduce total annual costs, would result in higher unit costs. More importantly, very low-level operations are highly wasteful of the skilled manpower required to carry out these operations and would risk deterioration of safety and reliability throughout the manned program. At some low level of activity, the viability at [sic] the program is in question. It is our belief that the interests of this Nation would not be served by a manned space flight program conducted at such levels.

Hello? Shuttle extenders?

They’re talking to you.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

My Sidebar For Popular Mechanics

19 Comments

…didn’t run, so I’ll run it here.

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Pasztor reported that SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, has claimed that it will cost a billion dollars to develop the launch escape system for the Dragon capsule needed to allow it to carry crew. This would be twice the amount that it has cost to develop both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets, and the Dragon itself, from scratch, and seemed quite improbable to many who have read it.

Mr. Musk notes in an email:

“I definitely didn’t tell Pasztor that our LES would cost $1B. He is off by a factor of ten! All I told him is that there is no way it would cost us more than $1B to demonstrate crew transport. That includes development, testing and certification to the most stringent NASA standards of everything needed for a seven-crew vehicle. I’ve also said that our price per person would be $20M, assuming the seven-person configuration and minimum of four flights per year. This compares to $30B for Ares I/Orion and a per person cost of ~$250M.”

In a follow up, he noted that the billion (if it goes that high) will include two abort flight tests (one on the pad, one high altitude) and a demonstration flight to and from ISS. Sounds like a bargain to me.