It’s finally time, long past time, really, to abandon it, if we want to make any serious progress in space. This was a major theme of my piece in The New Atlantis last summer.
Category Archives: Space
The Geopolitical Problems
…of asteroid avoidance.
This, much more than the technology, is something that we have to think about very hard — how to deal with the international legal liability.
Space Tourism Issues
It’s a little on the pricy side, but this new book on space tourism regulation
Is Ares I Dead?
If this report is correct, it is.
I’ve thought for a long time that it was a dead rocket walking. It simply cost too much, and made too little sense (though, of course, that’s never stopped NASA before). But we won’t know for sure until next year, and in the meantime, NASA will continue to waste money on things like this, because to stop work would be a tip off of the new policy. And of course, the article isn’t very specific about what the new heavy lifter will look like. It’s a shame that Augustine didn’t put a stake through the heart of heavy lift, but at least we got rid of the Corn Dog.
The Race Is On
I noted in my Popular Mechanics piece last week that Jeff Greason was “cautiously optimistic” that XCOR would have the funds in the next few months to complete Lynx.
Well, they have a press release out today that reveals what he was optimistic about:
The Yecheon Astro Space Center announced today that it has selected XCOR Aerospace as its preferred supplier of suborbital space launch services. Operating under a wet lease model, XCOR intends to supply services to the Center using the Lynx Mark II suborbital vehicle, pending United States government approvals to station the vehicle in the Republic of Korea.
…Working closely with its partners, Yecheon Astro Space Center has formed a broad coalition of regional and national entities to fund the approximately $30 Million project to bring the Lynx to Yecheon for space tourism, educational, scientific and environmental monitoring missions, making it the early leader in commercial manned space flight in Asia. Under the envisioned arrangement, Yecheon will be the exclusive Lynx operational site in Korea.
“As part of our long term strategic plan, we have performed an extensive review of the suborbital vehicle suppliers over the past 18 months, and found XCOR’s Lynx to be the best mix of safe design, reliable clean propulsion, skilled team members, full reusability, ease of operation, turn around time, upfront cost and long term cost to operate,” said Mr Jo Jae-Seong, Founder and Chief Executive Director of Yecheon Astro Space Center. “We look forward to a long term relationship with XCOR and Lynx!”
Note that the plan is to use a Lynx Mark II. In other words, while Virgin Galactic’s Will Whitehorn has run down the Lynx in the past, claiming that it didn’t really go into space, because it didn’t make it to a hundred klicks, the Mark II will, and the new plan is for there to be a single Mark I prototype/test-vehicle, with follow-on vehicles all being spacefaring Mark IIs. Jeff said that his schedule was funding constrained, but it looks now as though, as long as they hit their milestones, that constraint has gone away. That could mean Lynx flights in a little over a year, which means that they’ll be going head to head with Virgin, schedule wise, with much lower operational costs.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that only one company will emerge. They’re different approaches, with different markets, and the markets are large and diverse enough for both.
Of course, they may run into other schedule problems in the interim, perhaps not technical — I’m sure they had to already grease the ITAR skids to do this deal, but I can still imagine potential for it to throw some sand in the gears.
Anyway, this is really great news, on the 106th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. I wonder if they chose the date of the announcement deliberately, or if it was just coincidence? There’s no mention of it in the release. Of course, the release has a date of 17th/18th, because it’s already tomorrow in Korea (as it often is in California), and Jeff is reportedly over there now.
For subscribers (and if you aren’t you ought to be) Charles Lurio has a lot more info at The Lurio Report.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s worth pointing out that XCOR plans to spend an order-of-magnitude less money in development than Virgin does (thirty million versus at least two hundred million and probably more). This means that they’ll not only have lower operations costs, but also less development cost to amortize per flight. This shouldn’t necessarily be surprising, as Virgin has a much more ambitious project, carrying more passengers, with two vehicle types, plus spaceport investments. XCOR is more of a shoestring operation, with a single-passenger vehicle. And of course, both of them make the EADS estimate of a billion dollars to develop a European suborbital rocket plane look ridiculous.
[Late afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey summarizes some of the info from Charles’ newsletter. Also, go hit his tip jar, so that he can go keep doing what he’s been doing.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, so it looks like the next couple of years are going to be very exciting in the suborbital reusable rocket world. We now have at least five serious players, with hardware being built and scheduled test flights coming up. We have two horizontal/horizontal (VG and XCOR, with the former two stage and the latter single stage) and three vertical/vertical (Armadillo, Masten and Blue Origin). Even with XCOR’s new deal, VG ang Blue remain the ones with the deepest pockets, and the least likely to fail due to capital constraints. Armadillo comes in next, though I suspect that John is starting to think seriously about looking for other peoples’ money, because while he’s wealthy, he’s no Bezos or Branson. It’s hard to know what Blue’s schedule is because they’re so secretive, but their recent agreement to fly payloads indicates that they plan to have a lot of air under the nozzle soon. Of the three vertical contenders, they’re probably furthest along in having a space-faring vehicle, because I don’t think that Armadillo or Masten have put serious resources into aeroshells yet, which will be a key development for them to leave the atmosphere.
Blue, Armadillo and Masten are closer in technical approach than any of them are to the others, or XCOR and VG to each other, though I’m sure that there are not-insignificant differences in propellant type, propulsion design, structure, etc. The really great thing is that we’re finally going to start to try lots of different things, and let the winners be sorted out by the market, instead of multi-million cost-plus simulations and trade studies. If NASA is smart, it will be buying lots of rides on all of them, just so that it can see how well the different approaches work, and to encourage innovation and diversity. But then, if wishes were horses…
Zubrin’s Path
An amusing political cartoon, but pretty much inside baseball for space enthusiasts.
In Which I Agree With Nancy Pelosi
“If you are asking me personally, I have not been a big fan of manned expeditions to outer space in terms of safety and cost. But people could make the case – technology is always changing … and that could change depending on the technology,” she said today in a press conference with regional reporters.
I don’t think that safety is that big an issue, though apparently the body politic insists that it is (which is why we make so little progress in opening the frontier). But she’s dead on. The current plan makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, but with a change in technology (e.g., orbital infrastructure), it could be improved dramatically. Of course, it would also involve not just a change in technology, but more importantly, a change in philosophy, from a government command-and-control space program to one much more attuned to market incentives and private initiative. Somehow, I suspect that Nancy will be much less interested in that…
Anyway, it’s a shame that the Augustine panel couldn’t put a stake through the heart of the money-sucking heavy-lift myth. But I’d be happy to attempt to persuade Madam Speaker (assuming that she’s sincere…OK…OK……..OK…………OK, you can stop laughing now) that there are better ways to go.
No Lunar Landings For The Indians
At least no time soon, or affordably:
Theo Pirard, who attended the conference, discovered the projected plan of the Indian manned Mission on the Moon, which is the result of recent feasibility studies made by ISRO. This plan offers some similarities with the US Constellation programme for the return to the Moon but no date could be announced, because of lack of money.
Yes, the main similarity is that they think that in order to go to the moon, you have to replicate Apollo. We’ll see how these long-term plans evolve in the years to come when the reusables start flying, and Bigelow is doing lunar excursion using depots.
How Technology Will Change Our Lives
…in the next decade. Prognostications from Ray Kurzweil. This is the part I like:
We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy – and young – for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.
For those of us interested in space, we’re going to need it, because one thing that doesn’t seem to be improving over time is government space policy.
Why Not Just Fund The Program Of Record?
Chris Kraft weighs in with a “common sense approach”:
NASA should essentially stay the course that has been pursued for the past several years. It makes good common sense to preserve and continue the use of the present NASA assets. Specifically, NASA should:
* Continue to operate the space shuttle until a suitable replacement is available, and initiate a study to consider a modernization program aimed primarily at reducing the operating costs.
* Operate and maintain the international space station until it ceases to be economically reasonable and scientifically productive.
* Continue to push forward with orderly haste to accomplish the goals set forth by the Constellation program.
* Initiate an aggressive research and development program aimed at the technology required to make space exploration to Mars and other deep-space objectives rational and affordable.
* Estimate a realistic set of budget requirements for the total NASA program based on the above goals and the other elements and goals of the agency.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain how much this would cost (it would cost billions to get the lines started again to keep Shuttle flying alone, even ignoring the orbiter-aging issues), or where the money would come from. Without doing any analysis, I’m guessing that it would require a doubling of the current HSF budget, or on the order of an additional ten billion dollars per year, for a system that will continue to cost billions per mission.
Jon Goff, on the other hand, explains why Kraft’s proposal is a non-starter, and fiscally insane:
Where I come from, we tend to think that getting a heck of a lot less while paying a heck of a lot more is usually the sign of a sucker. I just wish that a few space pundits and public figures didn’t keep enabling Senator Shelby and his ilk from hijacking NASA’s budget to enrich his campaign contributors at the rest of our expense.
Unfortunately, it’s more than a few. He also has a good question for Chris Kraft and other America bashers:
Why does Congress trust Russian commercial space more than American commercial space, btw?
Obviously, Russians are much better than American entrepreneurs and businesses. The latter can’t be entrusted with the vital duty of spending billions of dollars per flight on unsafe vehicles to protect jobs in key states and congressional districts.