From Jon Goff (related to my previous post). I thought that this is a very key point, that demonstrates the absurdity of Mike’s (or at least, people like Mark Whittington’s) thinking:

There’s been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a “Lunar COTS”. Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won’t have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they’ll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space.

Yes, there’s a huge logical disconnect here. Either NASA will have developed technology that makes it easy for the commercial folks to access the moon (which they currently are not) or they are counting on the commercial folks to have done that on their own, in which case, that means that there’s already a thriving lunar market, of which NASA will be a trivial part, because otherwise, it won’t have happened commercially. NASA’s current high-cost, low-activity plans really do have the effect of ensuring the worst of all worlds for them, and us.

Over at Phil Plait’s place, where he’s hosting this week’s Carnival of Space.

One of the nice things about blogging is that, even for print journalists, it provides an outlet for information gathered that may be of interest, but for which there wasn’t room in the publication. Here’s a good example: interview notes from Rob Coppinger’s discussion with Phil Sumrall on Ares V performance issues.

As noted, the vehicle has come a long way from the originally advertised “Shuttle-derived” system that was supposed to save us so much money and time, and utilize the existing Shuttle infrastructure (though the latter was always a politically-induced pork-driven bug, not a feature, if one wanted to actually lower launch costs). It (like Ares I) is now essentially a new vehicle, including components, though if Ares I ever comes to fruition, Ares V will probably be at least in part derived from it.

Of course, this part is what really has me grinding my teeth (and it’s probably what I’ll be talking about on Jon Goff’s propellant depot panel at Space Access):

…once the EDS and Altair were in orbit there was a 95-day loiter in Earth orbit for the concept of operations. That was changed from 95-days when Griffin said it was not acceptable. Instead the new target date was four-days and this may also assume a launch of the Orion CEV prior to Ares V

Reasons for the four-day change are propellant boil off and electrical power requirements. For four-days fuel cells are sufficient and solar arrays not needed. Less than four-days and batteries could be used for EDS power. During Apollo they had 15% boil off over 3h so over several days Ares V would lose a lot of propellant. To stop boil off the choice is a passive system and “we have to eliminate heat leaks”. The solution to boil off is seen as multi-layered insulation as they want to reduce the boil off losses to 1-2%, but MLI is very expensive in terms of money, not payload margin.

So, they’re going to launch the Orion, with crew, on an Ares I, and hope that they can get a successful Ares V mission off within four days, because they can’t afford the duration. They build this mondo grosso launch vehicle to avoid having to do multiple launches, and yet, they not only have dual launch, but it’s one on a tight window. And if they can’t get the launch off on time, the lunar mission is scrubbed, and the crew comes back home from LEO, having wasted the cost of an Ares I launch (and an Orion, if they end up not making it reusable).

This is an affordable, resilient, sustainable infrastructure?

All of these issues go away if you use orbital infrastructure. The propellants are brought up over a period of time, with a number of different vehicles, and vehicle types. The propellants are stored on orbit with a combination of passive and active thermal control systems, eliminating boil off completely. If MLI is expensive, that’s OK, if you only have to manufacture/lift it once and then continually reuse it at the depot. If you have power at the depot, you don’t have to worry about battery life at the vehicle (note: the next Shuttle mission will set a record for duration, because it doesn’t have to rely on its fuel cells for power–it will draw power from the new solar arrays at the ISS while docked, allowing it to stay up for two weeks). And the same system will scale to a Mars mission (perhaps based in L1 instead), obviating the need to develop Ares XI.

Put the power/propellant/other-utilities infrastructure up once, and continually reuse it, instead of making each vehicle have to be a self-contained Winnebago, like the Shuttle. Even if the moon remains a wilderness, there is no longer any excuse for LEO to be so.

…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.