Category Archives: Space

Business, Space

An Interesting Team

7 Comments

Masten and XCOR have announced a strategic partnership:

Masten’s award winning automated vertical take off, vertical landing (VTVL) flight vehicles combined with XCOR’s strong experience in liquid oxygen (LOX) / methane powered propulsion systems and nonflammable cryogenically compatible composite tanks, brings to NASA a powerful and competitive combination of innovative talent with a proven record of producing exceptional results quickly and affordably.

So does this mean that Masten is going to focus on the vehicles, and let XCOR provide propulsion systems? And is this just for the NASA lunar lander work? Guess I’ll have to talk to Dave and Jeff to find out.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Commercial Human Spaceflight Prospects

4 Comments

Jeff Foust has a good roundup of the current state of play in industry/congressional skepticism about the ability of the new players to do the job.

And Tom Frieling describes an appallingly bad book on space history. This kind of thing is really inexcusable, and may feed ignorance for years. When I do my pieces for The New Atlantis, I circulate drafts among a lot of knowledgeable people, to make sure that I get it right. If I write a book, I’ll do the same thing. But I guess that kind of thing isn’t very important to some authors and publishers.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Uncertainty

16 Comments

If you want to know why more people don’t invest their own money in manned space hardware, look no further than this article:

After announcing in February that Orion and the rest of the Constellation program would be canceled in favor of outsourcing routine crew transportation to commercial operators, the White House decided in April to have NASA fund completion of a stripped-down Orion capsule that would launch to the international space station unmanned to serve as an escape craft.

Lockheed Martin, which beat Boeing and its teammate Northrop Grumman in 2006 for an Orion prime contract worth an initial $3.9 billion, welcomed the news as a partial reprieve for the project. But to Boeing, continued NASA funding of an Orion capsule that would need only a launch abort system to start launching crews would add substantial risk to a business case Schnaars said will be a struggle to close.

And why was Orion kept alive? Not because NASA really needed a lifeboat. It was to try to maintain political support for the administration in the purple state of Colorado. But this political decision could have bad consequences for the stated desire to have competition in commercial crew. And the general problem is that one of the many ways that NASA is such a bad customer is in its unpredictability. And it will always be thus with a government space program.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Find The Missing Point

7 Comments

Sigh:

Success would be a win for commercial backers, but wouldn’t answer serious questions surrounding the approach.

And while failure would provide opponents with ammunition, it’s common for new rockets to have trouble on maiden flights and become highly reliable mainstays.

Those factors point to why the White House and Congress should select a dual-track strategy that would OK commercial companies to move forward while also allowing NASA to continue testing a system involving the Ares 1 rocket.

Note that there is zero discussion of cost in this editorial. Note also the fallacy of the excluded middle.

Mike Griffin sort of made this argument as well, saying that he was hoping for commercial to succeed but needed to do Ares/Orion as an “insurance policy” against their failure. But this is insane. On my planet, you spend most of your money on what you consider most likely, and pay a much smaller amount for an insurance policy (provided by, you know, an actual insurer who writes lots of policies and is betting that your main strategy will work so he doesn’t have to pay out). This “dual-track” strategy is exactly the opposite. They are spending six billion on the primary option, and plan to spend forty billion on the “insurance.” That’s just crazy.

But OK, let’s play along. If you really want a “dual-track strategy,” how about making commercial (in this case, SpaceX) one track and give a cost-plus contract to ULA for the other? Because they’ve already said that they can get there within the six billion. Of course, that’s not fair to SpaceX (at least theoretically) because they would then have to compete with a government-subsidized competitor (though I’ll bet they could still beat their price). But regardless, it doesn’t justify continuing wasting money on Ares.

Oh, and then there’s this:

…experts say it could take a decade before the companies have rockets and spacecraft that are safe and capable enough to fly astronauts.

You can find “experts” who will say lots of things. This wording implies that there are no experts who would disagree with that statement. Or at least its implications. Sure it could take a decade. It could take two decades. It could also take only three years or so. What’s magic about a decade? Nothing, of course, except it gives them an excuse to say that we have to have a “dual-track” (read, pork for Florida) strategy.

Political Commentary, Space

If Not Now, When?

42 Comments

A worker on the program says that now is no time to retire Shuttle.

It’s very appealing to imagine continuing the program, but it’s just not realistic. The decision was really made on February 1st, 2003, when the fleet size went (once again) from four to three, and this time there were no structural spares from which to build a replacement, as we did after the Challenger loss. As former Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale has explained, it is simply not practical to continue to fly. And since he wrote that, almost two years ago, it has gotten progressively more difficult to resurrect the program, with the ongoing shutdowns of second- and third-tier suppliers, who are no longer in business. The time to argue against this was six years ago, after the VSE was announced, because the decision was part and parcel of it, and while some politicians have made noise about trying to keep the program alive, nothing has ever happened to allow it. The Gap always existed, and a responsible NASA administrator would have done everything in his power to minimize it, and things could have been done to do so (for instance, allowing the original CEV flyoff scheduled for 2006 to go forward, and pick one to fly on an Atlas). Instead, Mike Griffin wasted billions on a flawed program that has expanded it, almost a year per year.

When you keep heading in a direction, eventually you get where you are going, and here we are. Space policy has, in general, been a slow-motion train wreck for decades, and now we’re watching the locomotive start to head over the cliff. It is the result of a lot of flawed policy decisions made over the years, almost all of whose consequences were perfectly predictable, and the piper has finally come to receive his wages for the clumsy dancing. Because space policy, at least human spaceflight policy, isn’t important, and hasn’t been since the early sixties. All that has ever mattered is the jobs, and now, even many of those will be gone. It’s time to grow up, and understand that you are never going to get good policy from a democracy on matters like this. Those who want to see us go into space are going to have to accept that the only route is one that provides a real return, that people are willing to pay for. Flawed and problematic as the new direction is, it at least offers some small amount of hope that we will be able to transition to such an environment. But the days of monolithic NASA monopoly programs for humans in space are over.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Do Both?

53 Comments

Sorry, but we can’t afford to do both. I disagree with this OC Register Op-Ed by Peter Navarro, Stu Witt, and Greg Autry:

At least to date, the private space sector has demonstrated very limited capability to move either cargo or crews into orbit or to dock with anything. Moreover, none is human-rated for orbital space flight while there are very difficult challenges requiring large infrastructure and access to larger investment.

Really? Atlas and Delta have “very limited capability to move cargo into orbit”? I think that the military satellite community will be wondering where all those satellite went, if not into orbit. As for docking, SpaceX plans to demonstrate that this year. It’s not like it’s just a twinkle in their eye. Crew will be along shortly after that, with the development of launch abort systems, and long before Ares I is projected to be complete.

We believe all these limitations can be overcome if the private space industry is encouraged along the lines of Mr. Obama’s plan. However, pressing matters of national security also call for a continued U.S. government presence in space. That’s why we believe Mr. Obama was dead wrong in cancelling the Constellation program, the successor to the shuttle program developed after the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.

While we have been winding down our space program, other countries – China, in particular – have been working on (and, with China, even testing) capabilities to weaponize space and seize a strategic position on the moon. To prevent this, we must present a credible deterrent with ongoing robust and responsive manned and unmanned space programs. That’s why Constellation remains important, both as a concrete program now and as a bridge to a cooperative public-private space partnership.

Obviously, there are national security implications for a US government presence in space. But not for a manned presence. There have been no national security implications for that in forty years. And if it’s a national security issue to put humans in space, then the Pentagon should be responsible for and paying for it, not NASA, which is a civilian program. And how having a launcher that costs a couple billion per flight and can only fly a few times a year contributes to national security remains unexplained, even if one really believes that the Chinese are “working on seizing a strategic position on the moon” (what does that mean?).

They go on with the standard flawed and failed spinoff argument. And then this:

What we do not need is what President Obama is leaving us with: Showing up at the doors of countries like Russia and China, begging for a lift up to our space station. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan: “Weakness invites aggression.”

Hey, I’m not a big fan of relying on the Russians either, but you know when the time was to complain about that? First, six years ago, when Bush baked it into the policy cake for at least three years, and then four years ago, when Mike Griffin increased the gap with his disastrous decision to build a whole new horrifically expensive and unnecessary launch system, instead of finishing Steidle’s plan for a CEV flyoff that would have resulted in something (and possibly two somethings) that could have flown on existing vehicles. The one person whose fault it isn’t is Barack Obama’s, and going back to the Program of Record doesn’t fix that problem.

I’m disappointed.

There’s a lot of discussion about this over at Space Politics, where I found the link.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Big Thumb On The Scale

28 Comments

It’s three on one at a House hearing today:

Witnesses:

* Mr. Charles F. Bolden, Jr., Administrator, NASA
* Mr. Neil A. Armstrong, Commander, Apollo 11
* Capt. Eugene A. Cernan, United States Navy (Ret.), Commander, Apollo 17
* Mr. A. Thomas Young, Executive Vice President (Ret.), Lockheed Martin Corporation

I don’t expect Bolden to acquit himself well. I wish I were testifying instead. It’s a shame that Gordon couldn’t get Sally Ride, or Leroy Chiao, or some other astronaut who actually understand the problem for balance (not to mention Augustine versus Young, who has no manned space experience). As Clark notes, it’s too bad that the media doesn’t point out how stacked the deck often is in these show hearings. It does reduce confidence (never high to begin with) in the honesty and integrity of congressional deliberations in general.