…private spaceflight doesn’t need any enemies. Here’s a proposal from the Prometheus Institute, a libertarian think tank in California. It’s got a lot of problems.

China, already having put a human into space, further demonstrated its celestial capabilities by recently shooting down an orbiting satellite. To Washington’s Sinophobic lobby already hopped-up about inflated currency and devious trade practices, the Chinaman’s aerospace belligerence seemed to be cause for grave apprehension.

But America should not be afraid – far from it. Instead, we should be celebrating the advancement. Just like air travel in its infancy, space travel is a technology now finding its way from rich world governments and militaries to civilians around the world. And just like air travel, market competition should lead the progress.

Yes, let us celebrate the ability of the Chinese to obliterate our satellites. And maybe I missed all the “civilians” in China who are not traveling into space.

NASA, America’s space program, currently enjoys a government-created-and-backed monopoly privilege and is, along with our military, the only American entity that legally ventures into space.

For all his appreciation of private enterprise, you’d think that this guy would know that all launches other than the Shuttle are private launches. And they’re all performed legally, as licensed by the FAA.

The first space-tourist, American millionaire Dennis Tito, doled out $20 million from his own coffers to the Russian authorities for the ability to go to space with their Cosmonauts. Tito chose Russia only because NASA first rejected his proposal to fly with them on the grounds that he was not a trained astronaut. Thus, in an embarrassing bit of irony, America’s refusal to fly Capitalism’s Neil Armstrong means that the only “commercial” space carrier currently available in the world is in the former Soviet Union. (And as is true of all government-sanctioned monopolies, especially Russian ones, they charge a hefty price.) But the tide of private competition is finally turning.

None other than Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson wants to be the first to offer sub-orbital flights to the general public. Currently, his White Knight Two and the Space Ship Two spacecrafts are scheduled to undergo a test flight program later this year and then finally launch commercial operations approximately a year later. Tickets start at $200,000, or 1% of the going Russian price. Now, if one competitor can reduce the cost of space travel this drastically, imagine the result when America’s entrepreneurial craft is truly unleashed.

He’s comparing apples to omelettes. Virgin is not going to reduce the cost of going to orbit by two orders of magnitude, as is implied here. The twenty million is for a trip to an orbital space station of several days. The two hundred kilobucks is for a few minutes in suborbit. So the fare is a lot less, yes, but so is the service. He even says himself that it is “sub-orbital.” I don’t know whether he’s being clueless, or deliberately misleading here, but either way, it severely undermines his thesis in a way that will be sure to be justifiably attacked by the NASA fanboyz.

But wait! It gets better! Or worse, depending on your point of view:

America should facilitate the progress toward private space travel. First, Congress should dissolve America’s space monopoly by transferring NASA from government to private ownership.

Sure. Just hand it over to private ownership. Why didn’t we think of that?

I wonder who he thinks would take it over? Does he have any idea how much you’d have to pay anyone sane to take NASA off the government’s hands? It not only has no market value–it has negative market value. The auction would be based on whoever was willing to take the least amount of ongoing taxpayer subsidy to keep the mess going.

Second, Congress should ensure efficient entry into the space travel market, levelling the competitive field for any investor or entrepreneur, thus ensuring that no one is granted privileges or exemptions that favor one over the other.

Here is the kind of simplistic proposal that was made for the phrase, “the devil’s in the details.”

He goes on:

The government should gradually auction off each project, to ensure an orderly transition to private control, and to also make sure they do not land into the hands of a few oligarchs at Abramovich, Khodorkovsky & Co. From the outset, this policy would provide for competition and a certain degree of specialization. Those NASA projects that truly fall under the umbrella of national security should be allocated to a branch of the U.S. military, which is where they originally belonged anyway.

As is the reality in every other industry, we should let the scientists, pioneers and entrepreneurs compete in the marketplace, instead of in the halls of Congress, and let the consumer decide to whom the share of the pie shall go. As recent experience has shown, competition in the marketplace lowers prices and increases consumer choice, and will continue to do so over time.

Where to start?

Most of the projects that are described here simply will not happen if the government doesn’t fund them. The market is either non-existent, or too diffuse, for them to get private funding, given their cost. If one wants to argue that they’re a poor use of federal dollars, that’s an interesting discussion, but to assume that they’ll simply go out and get funded in the private marketplace displays a naivety that could only be found in a libertarian “think” tank.

If this is the quality of “thinking” that goes on at Prometheus, if I were a donor, I’d demand my money back.

If you’re going to the Space Access conference (a little over three weeks from now), you may not be able to get a room after Thursday. Clark has all the details.

I ran across Parabolic Arc the other day, and added it to the blog roll. It’s run by Doug Marsh, and he seems to post quite a bit.

Unfortunately, though, the color scheme (gray letters on black background) hurts the eyes to read it. I hope he’ll change it.

Clark Lindsey, in response to NASA’s “rebuttal” of Ares criticism:

Still waiting for a sensible rebuttal to the rumor that the Ares I is a stupendously overpriced way to send people into space in the 21st Century.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Rocket Man” has some more thoughts:

“If we change the approach in architecture of Constellation…we simply won’t ever get off the ground,” King said. So instead of using either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, both of which are flying and building statistics, one of which is being man-rated commercially, King claims ARES involves less development risk (ahhhh, we think Atlas and Delta are already developed, Dave), would be about a fifth cheaper (ahhhh, buy Atlas and Delta in quantity and see what happens to the price, Dave), and twice as safe for the astronauts on board (ahhhh, paper is always safer than the real thing, Dave, you know that).

No, the reason for the dissension is not coming from the contractors who lost as the Emperor theorized and King echoed. The reason for the debate is that ARES is no longer heritage hardware being employed as designed and King’s own folks can’t see how to make it work. From the casings, to the fuel mix, to the addition of segments, to the control systems, ARES is brand new from the inside out. The upcoming ARES 1-x test flight is a hoax designed to generate momentum, not to test as-designed hardware. King’s premonition scare tactics (“If we continue to argue over how to accomplish this mission, we run the risk of losing the opportunity to do the work.”) will come to pass, not because of the arguments, but because no one stopped long enough to have the arguments in the first place.

Yup. If this program fails, it will be entirely on the heads of the people who chose this flawed architecture, not its critics.

Jeff Foust lays out the case, pro and con. As he points out, there is a lot of ignorance and misinterpretation in this area, on both sides. I don’t think that we’re in a race, and if and when we are, it will become clear long before it’s “too late,” in any sense. We will not be surprised by a Chinese lunar landing.

As noted previously, the real race is not between governments, but between plodding politicized bureaucracies and cash-starved private space enterprises.

And I found this bit amusing:

It is difficult, though, to get a handle on some information, such as exactly how much money China spends on its space program; estimates vary widely and even Chinese officials have said that their budgets are “very complicated…”

Does that distinguish them in any useful way from NASA’s?

Taylor Dinerman discusses potential new capsules under development. Orion is not involved.

Chair Force Engineer writes about it:

In a true competition for transporting astronauts to low earth orbit, NASA would be beaten hands-down by SpaceX at this stage in the game. SpaceX has a capsule with more astronauts (seven versus six,) a cheaper booster (Falcon 9 vs. Ares I,) and a faster schedule.

The only thing SpaceX doesn’t have is thousands of jobs, and access to billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

[Update about 5 PM EST]

Mark Whittington continues to live in a fantasyland on this subject:

My sense is that under the scenario, COTS will be cancelled and the manned space program will consist of astronauts going in circles around the Earth forever and ever.

At least until the Chinese land men on the Moon. Then there will be a rather rude awakening.

Like it or not, the only hope for near term commercial space flight in LEO is that NASA continues to explore beyond LEO.

COTS is helpful, but in no way essential for commercial human spaceflight.

SpaceX was developing the Falcon 1 and 9 before COTS, and it would continue to do so in the absence of COTS. OSC might not move forward without COTS, but Dragon development will continue, Falcon 9 development will continue, and Atlas V upgrades will continue. The real market is not COTS, which is a sideshow from a payload standpoint, but Bigelow’s private space facilities, which were also moving forward before COTS, and would continue to do so in its absence.

I simply don’t understand Mark’s blindness to these realities that intrude so rudely on his theories, and his continuing obtuse insistence that commercial space is doomed without COTS, other than some sort of faith-based belief that it is not possible to put people into space without government funding.

And the notion that China is going to land a man on the moon any time within the next twenty years, at their current pace of development (far slower than Apollo was) remains laughable. So is the notion that they would suddenly do so out of the blue and that it would be a “rude awakening.”

This isn’t the Sputnik era, in which one can slip a satellite on a missile, in a world in which there was no space-based surveillance. There will be no surprise. If the development pace of the Chinese program picks up, it will be quite obvious, given the need for either a very large Saturn-class vehicle or (if they’re smart) orbital infrastructure, long before it actually happens. We will have plenty of time to respond, from a policy perspective, should we decide to.

CFE has it right–the race is between NASA and the private sector, not between slow-paced, expensive and moribund government space programs.

Rob Coppinger has the story.

I wonder what that propulsion system is? I hope it’s not a hybrid. I also wonder what the lift capacity of White Knight Two is.