G. Scott Hubbard says that entrepreneurial space is becoming very real:

Building a new space industry requires three things: demand, access to space and a platform. In the Stanford study, where we deliberately limited the investor horizon to 5-8 years, the only truly new business case that clearly closes for profitability is suborbital tourism. In this arena, the technology has proven itself available, private funding is adequate to build the vehicles, and more than enough wealthy individuals are willing to pay $100,000 or more for a short excursion to the edge of space. Space tourism is coming.

“So what,” some say. They point out that even with generous assumptions about flight rate, the business generated by suborbital companies would still be at best a tiny blip in the estimated $180-billion global space market dominated communications satellites and traditional government missions. So why do we care? The answer lies in the huge future potential for space-based goods and services.

As Boeing’s Shaw, a former astronaut, pointed out, human space travel is such a powerful personal experience that, “the more people who go, the more will want to go.” Once space becomes accessible to tourists on a regular basis, practical industries will certainly follow. If early aviation is any guide, we can say for sure that the demand is as woefully underestimated as the development costs. Still, clever advertising companies and marketers already are exploiting space connections to capture attention, and their strategies appear to be working.

I think that he’s mistaken here, though, continuing to buy into the ongoing myth of weightless research:

My own speculation about the location of space’s version of “Sutter’s gold,” as Walker called it, is with biological experimentation in microgravity. Every living organism that we know of evolved in 1g. Science never has been able to fully examine gravity as a variable. From experiments of a few days to a few weeks in space, there are tantalizing hints of radically different gene expression, unusual lignin (a compound vital to connective tissue) growth in plants, and changed rates of disease infectivity. If one assumes extraordinary new breakthrough discoveries will occur, then advanced biotechnologies and future products will arise. It’s very sad that given our current set of U.S. space priorities, only the European and Japanese programs will be able to exploit the full potential of the ISS. However, for the right entrepreneur, setting up a biology lab on the ISS

Well, everyone is talking about the New Years treat. Blue Origin finally lifts the curtain on its vehicle developments, with comments and pics from the Amazonmeister himself (note: probably not a permalink). John Carmack thinks that the vehicle is too big. Alan Boyle has more, having interviewed some of the Blue Origin folks.

I wonder where he’s getting his high-test peroxide? Is he manufacturing it in Van Horn?

There’s an interesting comment in Alan’s post, with which I don’t necessarily agree:

“In response to my inquiry about that, Hicks said, ‘I just want to remind you that we said previously we didn’t plan to comment one way or another about tests, whether they are scheduled, were scheduled, happened, didn’t happen, etc.’”

How nice. I can only think that a philosophy like that makes it sooo simple to avoid telling the (potential ticket-buying) public about any screw-ups or failures of system unless forced to by public enquiry via legal means. What kind of public relations philosophy is that for a company that wants to throw and eager public into space and bring them back for mega bucks? Methinks I will not be trusting anyone with the Madison Avenue mentality trying to sell me rides into space. Even NASA kills people in the business of trying to expand our world and species into the universe. It’s inherent in the technological challenges. The public has every right to know everything before stepping aboard Wobbly Flight 106 to nowhere in particular.

It’s not clear what the best strategy is, from a marketing standpoint. Certainly Blue Origin has been the most secretive of all of the serious players in the business, at least to date. Whether this is for competitive reasons, or because of a fear of revealing failure to customers, isn’t clear. It’s also unclear why they decided to show their stuff now, after six years of circumspection (the most prevalent theory being that the secrecy was hampering their ability to get good employees, but I’m not sure that makes sense–secret government programs manage just fine).

Does Boeing invite the public to test flights of its airliners? Did the excitement of the “corkscrewing” of SS1 increase, or decrease the confidence of potential passengers? On the one hand, it was an unexpected (and no doubt would have been unpleasant for passengers, given how upset Melvill was about it) maneuver. On the other, he recovered, so it could serve as a demonstration of the safety and robustness of the system.

I think that it’s less important to show every single flight test, than it is to demonstrate a long track record of public successful flights. The first passengers to fly on these vehicles will be less risk averse. As confidence builds with a series of safe flights, more will be confident enough to take their ride. I don’t think that early prototype test flights will really be relevant, successful or otherwise.

Of course, the great thing is that, like technical approaches, it’s not clear what the right marketing or flight test approaches are either. Now that we have a variety of entities working the problem, instead of a monolithic government agency, we’ll find out what works best the way we always do ultimately–via the market.

One of the key trades made in the Apollo program was the decision of where to do a rendezvous in preparation for the lunar surface mission. Many credit the decision to do it in earth orbit as a key contributor toward achieving the goal of doing it by the end of the decade. But the quickest way to get the job done wasn’t necessarily the best. It looks like NASA is now considering one of the other options originally considered–a lunar orbit rendezvous. And it may be that the Ares IV vehicle described will eliminate the need for the Ares V. This is a step in the right direction, but still much more expensive than it need be, and offering much too little for the money.

[Update in the afternoon]

D’oh!

As is pointed out in comments, in fact lunar orbit rendezvous was the method chosen in Apollo. I was thinking of the reconfiguration in LEO prior to lunar injection, but that didn’t involve rendezvous.

I wrote about a lunar Zion several years ago. I guess I was just ahead of my time:

Daniel Yaron, CEO of Crazyshop, the company which markets moon property in Israel, explained to Ynet why Israelis are interested in purchasing land on the moon: “People decide to buy land on the moon for two reasons: One is the gimmick of giving a gift

The Space Review is back after a holiday hiatus, and Jeff Foust writes about young peoples’ attitude toward NASA:

The article cites a study published last fall by Dittmar Associates that found relatively low levels of interest among Americans 18-25 years old, part of a cohort of the population often called

Clark Lindsey writes about NASA’s great leap backwards.

So I was reading this latest post over at Selenian Boondocks on lunar base economics, and in comments, someone put forth the hypothetical prize of fifty billion for a private lunar base.

I think that’s too much money, for too nebulous a goal, to be politically practicable. The real problem with all these prizes is that the government can’t be counted on to not renege. But what if there were a way to assure the winner that he’d get the money if he accomplished the goal? I think that I’ve mentioned this before, and it was actually originally suggested by someone in sci.space.policy who is generally an idiot, but perhaps a savant one, because he came up with this brilliant idea.

Drop a billion dollars worth of bullion on the lunar surface. Whoever can get up there, and bring it back, gets it. There’d be no way to pull the prize money off the table with such a scheme.

The question is, how much would it cost to implement it?

The problem is the weight.

Well, at the current price of gold, it turns out that a billion dollars is about a hundred thousand pounds. In fact, the cost of the gold that the Shuttle could launch would be roughly the cost of a Shuttle launch (about half a billion dollars). (This sort of calculation is the source of the oft-noted critique of space manufacturing: that if you had some way of alchemically converting lead to gold in LEO, it still wouldn’t be worth the money). And of course, that only gets it to LEO–it would take more pounds of stage and propellant to get it to the moon.

Would it have to be soft landed? If not, then the job’s a lot easier. You could do a grazing lithobraking maneuver with it that would save a lot of propellant, though it would leave a long and (to purists) ugly gash in the regolith that would hang around for a very long time before it was cratered over. If you just dropped it in vertically, it would just make a new (big) crater, but it would also probably make excavating for it a challenge.

But for a soft landing, let’s say (without doing any calculations) that it takes five pounds in LEO to get a pound on the surface (or subsurface). That means a half a million pounds of launch requirement. Say ten Atlas launches (again, roughly). Or about a billion bucks. So it would cost two billion dollars for the prize (ignoring development costs for the lunar descent system)–a billion for the payload and prize itself, and a billion or so to deliver it to the moon.

Clearly, we need something that has a higher dollar density than gold.

Well, there’s cold hard cash.

Of course, if it’s going to be cash, it would have to be unmarked, unserialized bills (otherwise the government could retroactively come up with a way to make them worthless). That could be done easily enough (well, not trivially, but it’s certainly doable). How much would it weigh?

According to the mint, a currency note weighs about a gram. That’s a little less than five hundred to a pound. If we use Benjamins, that means that a billion bucks would be about twenty-two thousand pounds. And unfortunately, that’s the largest note that’s made today.

There’s another problem with currency. It’s not that durable, if there’s a landing accident on the moon. Metals are better.

What are the other possibilities?

Well, there are other precious metals. For instance, the gold/platinum ratio is currently 0.55, so we could roughly halve the mission costs by using that metal instead. Rhodium would be even better. The rhodium/gold ratio is about eight right now (rhodium is just north of $5000 an ounce on the New York spot market right now), so we could reduce the lunar payload down to about ten thousand pounds with that. Of course, is there even a billion dollars worth of it available for the purpose? And how stable would its price be?

But are there things that have even higher dollar densities? Yes. Some drugs, microchips, etc. The problem is coming up with one that will hold its value. Shipping off a bunch of the latest fastest dual-core Intel processors, or eight gigabyte memory chips, would be sinking a lot of money in the project that would be almost worthless by the time someone got to them, given Moore’s inevitable Law.

Well, I’ve wasted enough time on this little trade study. Anyone have any other ideas?

FAA-AST has finalized their rule making for private crew and spaceflight participants. Happy reading.

Apparently, Canada is reassessing its future in space:

The federal government has turned down a request by Canada’s space industry to support a contract that would have allowed the companies to build the European Space Agency’s Mars surface rover, CBC News has learned.

The decision stunned the companies and has left the ESA scrambling to find a new partner, as no European firm is adequately prepared to match the technical abilities of Canadian firms to build its ExoMars rover.

This points out once again that government space programs are first and foremost jobs programs. If having the best robotics (which at least in theory might translate into the best science) were really important to the Europeans, they’d simply send CSA the money, and hire them as a contractor. But space development funds are not allowed to cross borders. ESA insists that each government get an amount of work on its projects in proportion to each member nation’s contributions. Now they’ll have to spend a lot of money for one of the European partners to get up to speed, and it will result in schedule delays, cost overruns, and risk of failure, all because (at least) when it comes to space, they don’t believe in comparative advantage.

We will make much more progress on the high frontier when it starts to pay for itself, and management decisions can be made independently of politics.

I haven’t talked much about this, but apparently, as things stand now, NASA is not going to get the funding increase it anticipated for 2007, because the federal government is apparently going to be funded on a continuing resolution.

This could mean a new bloodletting to continue to fund the Constellation-related programs. Under those circumstances, I won’t be shocked to see COTS put on the block. Millennium Challenges are probably at risk as well.