OK, I’m back in the ARES Torrance office, and I’ll be flying back to Florida tonight. Some conference thoughts:
This was a little disappointing, relative to last year. It seemed much more like a traditional AIAA conference (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it had much less of a NewSpace flavor, for two reasons, I think. First, last year was sort of an anomaly, because it was up in San Jose on Ames’ turf, and it was really Pete Worden’s conference. He worked pretty hard to make it a NewSpace conference. Second, it was (let’s face it) a bad year for NewSpace. While there are some success stories (more on that in a minute), the explosion at Scaled put a damper on things somewhat, and RpK’s problems will haunt people raising money, though they had a somewhat unique situation. There was very little NewSpace presence, at least relative to last year.
On the other hand, Jeff Greason was on the first morning’s plenary panel, and was a refreshing new voice, in conjunction with the usual suspects from the Aerospace Industries Association and other usual suspects. As he noted himself, a few years ago, there wouldn’t have been even a slot on the panel for someone like him, let alone him personally. XCOR has come a long way, and seems to continue to do well.
He was also on a panel with Elon, in which “the Gap” was a topic of much discussion, and for some, consternation. This Wired article describes it (sort of). Why this is big news, I don’t know. There has been a “gap” ever since January 14th, 2004. It was intrinsic in the VSE announcement. All that’s changed is that it’s increased slightly, from four years to five. Stop the presses!
I hope that Elon can live up to his boast, and I suspect that Jeff does as well. I suspect that what he meant to say is that it won’t be closed with fully reusable vehicles in that timeframe (a statement with which I agree). I don’t think (as the article implies) that he was saying that Elon won’t be able to do it. Only the future will tell.
One other interesting (and concerning) bit of information. Though it wasn’t publicly announced there (because it’s not really an announcement), based on a reliable source, they still don’t know what caused the explosion in Mojave. The implications of that are troubling. I would think that it means that they can’t move forward on a nitrous hybrid system, and have confidence that this won’t happen again, until they know why it happened the first time. That implies that (assuming they don’t come up with an answer in which they have confidence) they will either have to change oxidizers (probably to LOX) or perhaps go to an all-liquid system (something I’ve long advocated, and speculated they might do).
This could be an opportunity for one of the engine companies (XCOR jumping first to mind), since it’s unlikely in the extreme (particularly considering what happened with the hybrid development) that Scaled would try to develop one on its own. That’s probably the only way to move forward fast enough for Virgin to start generating revenues in a reasonable amount of time.