Tim Bendel is head of the company, based in Chugwater, Wyoming (they bought an old Atlas missile silo and set up shop in it, including housing).

They provide attitude control systems, engines, and test facilities to other startups. Describing their use of “state-space” controllers that solve a simultaneous set of differential equations, rather than classical ones, that allow a rapid seek/find of an optimal solution in real time. Had a demonstration at the X-Prize Cup last fall, using cold-gas thrusters, using it to balance a cone on end with air pulses. Showing a video of the demo. “Like balancing a broom on your finger.” They gave the kids nerf balls to try to knock it over, to demonstrate its ability to respond to unexpected disturbances. Supplying systems to Masten Space for their attitude control.

Other company is “Speedup” which is building a Lunar Lander Challenge vehicle, which is a prototype for what they call a “flying motorcycle.”

Also developing a 7500 lbf engine, and capabilities to design whole vehicles. In addition, they have engine test facilities. Sorry, I’m distracted by other things, but they do seem to have some interesting capabilities to other entrepreneurs. They seem to be one of the companies trying to make money by selling picks and pans to the miners.

Applying for spaceport license out of their facility, which has the support of the Wyoming Economic Development Council. It has a mile radius of empty space, so could provide a good test range for small vehicles that can’t exceed that distance.

John Carmack is showing a video describing all of the testing they’ve done, and how all the progress they’ve made is two days a week with an all-volunteer team. Describing the switch from peroxide to lox/methanol, and how they built the two vehicles capable of entering the Lunar Landing Challenge. Time constraints didn’t allow them the test time, so they had vehicles that “couldn’t land as well as they could fly.” Vehicles kicked up so much dust out in the desert, it “looked like a tornado approaching the landing pad.” Hard to capture all of the testimonials and desciptions of the flights from the various participants. Presumably this video will appear soon at the Armadillo web site. Showing a computer graphic of assembling a theoretical modular orbital vehicle (influenced by Otrag concepts). Video ends with an NVidia logo, thanking them for sponsoring attempt.

Spent three million dollars over six years. Half a million dollars a year, with most still in volunteer positions. Had to pay Neil, because getting permits doesn’t qualify as “fun” like the rest of the stuff. Thinks they’re on the right track to get them all the way to orbit, eventually. Have much more robust legs in the vehicles now, has improved guidance to eliminate drift, increased deadbands to waste less RCS. Have experimental permit to go up to Oklahoma Spaceport and do some testing next month. Think they’re ready to win, but know they have to wait until October. Vehicle “looks a little funny,” but has more capability and performance than either SpaceShipOne or DC-X.

Has a theory that roll-thruster deadband may have been too tight on the Falcon second stage, based on many similar experiences with their own vehicles. Flown half a dozen times since LLC, and they always launch in a “go to space” configuration, including fuel and burn duration, but keep it low. Overall the regulatory burden has been light, and they’re expecting to apply for a commercial launch license this year–doesn’t expect it to be that bad, though worse than permit.

By the end of this year, space-capable vehicle, with insurance already in hand, at least permits and probably launch licenses at that time. Thinks that if the technology is right, the business issues are solvable. They’ve learned a lot about manufacturing, and tradeoffs in solutions space for materials, and tank shapes, and they aren’t spending that much money, and are flying many more test flights than anyone else is doing. Doesn’t expect to go to space the first time. Expects to have many failures, some of them catastrophic. Their philosophy is not to make things perfect on first attempt by spending lots of money (NASA approach), but making things perfect over time with a lot of build and test.

It’s been nice to have a growth curve from tee-shirts, appearance fees, sponsorship. Not profitable yet, but can see it ahead. They were rushed last year, but think that this year they have plenty of time, and it will take “really bad luck” for them not to come away with something this year. Program is sustainable with his funding, “as long as the bottom doesn’t drop out of the videogame market.” Could cost-effectively get to perhaps twice their development rate, but can’t speed up much more by throwing lots of money at it. Happy with the rate they’re going, and “absolutely going to carry people into space.” Making steady progress toward that next year, but not promising. Believes that when the vehicles have been demonstrated, the business case will take care of itself. They expect to have spent five million in development, whereas Virgin will spend ten times that much. They will have much bigger windows and better view. Sees multiple market niches, with some people wanting to take off like and airplane, and some who want to ride a “real rocket ship.”

He thinks that a vehicle with “dozens of engine modules” can be reliable. Most look at this with skepticism, but he thinks it’s unjustified. May want to have a bigger base module when he gets to large vehicles (Falcon 5 class). Will be adding three-axis GPS, whose price has dropped to ten grand, which will allow recovery from tumbles. Thinks that he is ahead of his competitors because he accepts failure, whereas others still work too hard to get it right the first time. If he wins money, they’ll be flying straight up early next year, and think they will get close to a hundred kilometers if not all the way, but there are market opportunities even at a hundred fifty thousand feet. They’re getting better at building these vehicles, and they can get more productive at higher rates. Still believes that it’s possible to build something that can go all the way to orbit with something built in a garage, or at least a small section of a warehouse. And he thinks he may make back his investment in the next couple years.

Talking about how a year ago he propounded a strategic deal that we could and should cut with NASA–if NASA was going to invest in COTS and technology, and fund Centennial Challenges and buy suborbital rides, and reach out to New Space, then why not let them (instead of fighting with them) do Ares? Why fight about Orion, or capsules versus wings. If we could find a way to get enough money out of them over the next few years to do the things that we needed to get done, then go ahead and let them do what they were going to do to get to LEO, because we were going to beat them to the moon. He was not saying we should support Constellation, or Ares or Orion–he was simply saying, “Why fight it?”

He was wrong. Not that we should get into fights over designs, but he was wrong to think that NASA wouldn’t screw it up. But the way they seem to be going about it is internally logical and consistent, and predictable with the circumstances they face, but Orion and Ares are eating up many things in the agency, including the things we thought we hoped we’d get. So the truce is over.

Notes that it’s easily as much Congress’ fault. NASA had the original idea of letting a lot of people try a lot of things, but because Congress couldn’t figure out which district the money would get spent in, or when it would get spent, they didn’t understand, or have any interest in prizes. Their job is politics, and you pass bills based on getting 51%. Decisions are made on both substantive and political grounds, and when the appropriations committee doesn’t know who’s going to win the prize, they don’t know who’s going to come to the fund raiser. They don’t see the lobby. It’s hard to get federal funding for some set aside that someone might win or might not. He’s not a great fan of prizes as a cure-all, but they can be a useful mechanism. And NASA never explained to Congress that if the prizes work, there would be lots of jobs in lots of districts, and if NASA was seen to be responsible for this, it would make it easier for NASA to win support. And now NASA has stopped asking for money for them.

He’s concerned that NASA is more interested in cutting deals with foreign partners than nurturing commercial US industry, and they are setting themselves up for having station eat them alive because they won’t be able to afford to service it. They gave Marshall the easiest, low-tech rocket to design, and they gave JSC the easiest low-tech crew vehicle to design, and it’s going to take until 2015, and cost a lot of money. They have cut Advanced Capabilities, and don’t think they need it because they don’t seriously expect to do much research at ISS. But it also involved with coming up with better ways to do things in exploration. They are not designing any infrastructure to be commercially owned and operated.

NASA trying to rush Orion in order to get to ISS. The “gap” isn’t a national security gap, or a human spaceflight gap, or an American spaceflight gap. It’s simply a US government human spaceflight gap. Are we really so cynical about US capitalism and innovation that we don’t believe that private enterprise could do the job if given incentives? Griffin himself admitted there was no schedule pull for going back to the moon–the only schedule pull for political support was the gap. The notion was that Congress would care so much about space station that they would fund NASA to fill the gap. “If they wanted it so badly, why didn’t they just put out a few billion-dollar prizes to accomplish it”? Because they didn’t know where or when the money would be spent. Democracy is the worst form of all the others, but he’s not very happy with its results in space policy right now.

There are other bad ideas. Like United Launch Alliance. How could they let this past the anti-trust statutes? They’re adding additional oversight, and SETA contractors, and FFRDCs and other “powerpoint shops,” as though that would solve the problem.

Now that he has that out of his system, he feels better.

Now for the good news.

Dynamic leadership at the FAA that helped with the passage of the revolutionary legislation a couple years ago. AST is now a star in the FAA for the work they’re doing in nurturing this industry. There’s now ten million dollars in the airport improvement program this year that can be used to convert/expand airports to spaceports. Spaceport insfrastructure is now recognized as strategic and is funded by the federal government.

Operationally-responsive space is now getting attention from the Air Force, something we’ve been preaching for years. Transitioning from large, expensive infrequent satellites to small, cheaper, often satellites, with surge capability. And there’s a private industry that needs vehicles that can do this for their own needs (providing passenger transport). Even Congress has gotten on board, because they know that the war fighter in the field actually wants to have intelligence when he needs it, not months later. It could make sense to spend a few millions dollars on a Tascat/Falcon launch to get something into place that can make a difference in a battle, and the Chinese ASAT test woke them up, because these “gold plated satellites can’t be armor plated as well.” There’s now eighty million dollars for ORS, though the Air Force was fighting against having anything in their budget for it a few months ago. The relevant new chairman in the House recognizes the need to invest more in “PC” satellites and less in “mainframe” satellites. Cautions that we don’t know how successful this will be, but there are opportunities there.

Mike Griffin continues to fund COTS at half a billion, and he’s doing other things with other private entities, but Jim is afraid that it’s too little, and that Congress won’t continue to support it. Doesn’t know how things will turn out–not as good as he thought they would last year, but there are good things happening. This industry is encouraging, and despite his “downcast eye,” he is happy to see us, and happy to be with us and not in DC.

Ending on (what he thinks is) a positive note. One of the accomplishments that Mike Griffin has accomplished is that Shuttle will not fly much past 2010 or 2011. There are only tanks left for seventeenish more flights, and it costs four billion dollars a year. If they don’t end by then, they won’t get to the moon.

Jim Dunstan is giving a talk on acceptable levels of risk for various transportation modes. Case in point, we could reduce our forty-thousand traffic deaths but aren’t willing to pay the cost. We accepted significant loss of life for early aviation. It was recognized in developing the Warsaw Convention that we had to “do for law what the engineers were doing for machines,” which meant we needed a liability regime. Aviation has strict liability, with a cap per the convention. Space currently has an uncapped liability, driven by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 liability convention.

He thinks that he’s perhaps found a loophole in the liability convention for spaceflight participant, though it’s not clear whether “participant” means “crew” or “passengers” (or both). Unfortunately there’s enough wiggle room for plaintiff’s lawyers to have a field day.

He is still amazed that we won the battle a couple years ago in getting the FAA to keep hands off passenger safety regs for now, but the battle isn’t over. It established a “Informed Risk Regime” for spaceflight participants. Implication for this is that, since there is no federal tort law, it will be matter for state laws (at least in the states in which people operate, if not in all fifty, just to be safe). This is the “next frontier” for space lawyers. Gaol is to provide immunity for operators who have FAA licenses and have obtained “informed consent,” based on extreme sports, such as helicopter skiing.

Virginia has passed such a law, though it needs to have a governor’s amendment with help from the space lawyers, because original law was based on an agricultural tourism bill to protect farmers on historical farms. Tractors and spaceships aren’t quite the same thing, so they took the existing language and tied it back into the FAA regulations as much as possible. Virginia needed to do this early, because they have a spaceport at Wallops, and they also have a common law that says that citizens cannot waive right to sue in prospect. The law had to be amended to override this. It has been submitted to the governor, who accepted the amended language, and it’s hoped that it will be repassed in April. He is giving credit to Jack Kennedy to make this happen (in the face of opposition from the Trial Lawyers Association). Still problems with the bill–could be better from a clean sheet of paper, but it’s good enough for now.

Next targets–Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California (which might require a state constitutional amendment).

Another concern is if someone comes down with cancer after flying and attempts to blame it on the flight. Need to characterize environment of vehicles during testing to help fight this.

And somehow, it seems appropriate to point to this article that describes how lousy the human mind is at assessing risk. This may be one of the biggest problems with this industry.

[Update at 5 PM MST]

Jack Kennedy checks in in comments with a link to the latest version of the bill.

Jim Dunstan is giving a talk on acceptable levels of risk for various transportation modes. Case in point, we could reduce our forty-thousand traffic deaths but aren’t willing to pay the cost. We accepted significant loss of life for early aviation. It was recognized in developing the Warsaw Convention that we had to “do for law what the engineers were doing for machines,” which meant we needed a liability regime. Aviation has strict liability, with a cap per the convention. Space currently has an uncapped liability, driven by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 liability convention.

He thinks that he’s perhaps found a loophole in the liability convention for spaceflight participant, though it’s not clear whether “participant” means “crew” or “passengers” (or both). Unfortunately there’s enough wiggle room for plaintiff’s lawyers to have a field day.

He is still amazed that we won the battle a couple years ago in getting the FAA to keep hands off passenger safety regs for now, but the battle isn’t over. It established a “Informed Risk Regime” for spaceflight participants. Implication for this is that, since there is no federal tort law, it will be matter for state laws (at least in the states in which people operate, if not in all fifty, just to be safe). This is the “next frontier” for space lawyers. Gaol is to provide immunity for operators who have FAA licenses and have obtained “informed consent,” based on extreme sports, such as helicopter skiing.

Virginia has passed such a law, though it needs to have a governor’s amendment with help from the space lawyers, because original law was based on an agricultural tourism bill to protect farmers on historical farms. Tractors and spaceships aren’t quite the same thing, so they took the existing language and tied it back into the FAA regulations as much as possible. Virginia needed to do this early, because they have a spaceport at Wallops, and they also have a common law that says that citizens cannot waive right to sue in prospect. The law had to be amended to override this. It has been submitted to the governor, who accepted the amended language, and it’s hoped that it will be repassed in April. He is giving credit to Jack Kennedy to make this happen (in the face of opposition from the Trial Lawyers Association). Still problems with the bill–could be better from a clean sheet of paper, but it’s good enough for now.

Next targets–Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California (which might require a state constitutional amendment).

Another concern is if someone comes down with cancer after flying and attempts to blame it on the flight. Need to characterize environment of vehicles during testing to help fight this.

And somehow, it seems appropriate to point to this article that describes how lousy the human mind is at assessing risk. This may be one of the biggest problems with this industry.

[Update at 5 PM MST]

Jack Kennedy checks in in comments with a link to the latest version of the bill.

Jim Dunstan is giving a talk on acceptable levels of risk for various transportation modes. Case in point, we could reduce our forty-thousand traffic deaths but aren’t willing to pay the cost. We accepted significant loss of life for early aviation. It was recognized in developing the Warsaw Convention that we had to “do for law what the engineers were doing for machines,” which meant we needed a liability regime. Aviation has strict liability, with a cap per the convention. Space currently has an uncapped liability, driven by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 liability convention.

He thinks that he’s perhaps found a loophole in the liability convention for spaceflight participant, though it’s not clear whether “participant” means “crew” or “passengers” (or both). Unfortunately there’s enough wiggle room for plaintiff’s lawyers to have a field day.

He is still amazed that we won the battle a couple years ago in getting the FAA to keep hands off passenger safety regs for now, but the battle isn’t over. It established a “Informed Risk Regime” for spaceflight participants. Implication for this is that, since there is no federal tort law, it will be matter for state laws (at least in the states in which people operate, if not in all fifty, just to be safe). This is the “next frontier” for space lawyers. Gaol is to provide immunity for operators who have FAA licenses and have obtained “informed consent,” based on extreme sports, such as helicopter skiing.

Virginia has passed such a law, though it needs to have a governor’s amendment with help from the space lawyers, because original law was based on an agricultural tourism bill to protect farmers on historical farms. Tractors and spaceships aren’t quite the same thing, so they took the existing language and tied it back into the FAA regulations as much as possible. Virginia needed to do this early, because they have a spaceport at Wallops, and they also have a common law that says that citizens cannot waive right to sue in prospect. The law had to be amended to override this. It has been submitted to the governor, who accepted the amended language, and it’s hoped that it will be repassed in April. He is giving credit to Jack Kennedy to make this happen (in the face of opposition from the Trial Lawyers Association). Still problems with the bill–could be better from a clean sheet of paper, but it’s good enough for now.

Next targets–Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California (which might require a state constitutional amendment).

Another concern is if someone comes down with cancer after flying and attempts to blame it on the flight. Need to characterize environment of vehicles during testing to help fight this.

And somehow, it seems appropriate to point to this article that describes how lousy the human mind is at assessing risk. This may be one of the biggest problems with this industry.

[Update at 5 PM MST]

Jack Kennedy checks in in comments with a link to the latest version of the bill.

Henry Cate, who normally blogs about home schooling is also live blogging the conference. Just keep scrolling.

Michelle Murray of FAA-AST gave a presentation on what the office has been up to for the past year since the last Space Access meeting. In the process, she announced that Blue Origin had a successful test flight yesterday. She’s probably not at liberty to say much more than that, but perhaps they will have something at their site about it soon (they don’t yet). Then again, perhaps not.

Kerry Scarlott, an attorney who specializes in ITAR, will be talking on it. Following that, there will a panel on it, on which I’ll be sitting, so don’t expect me to blog it.

Introduction, saying it is what it is, rather than what we can do to change it. It is effective when talking about guns and bullets and missile technology, but it’s questionable whether it is with this community, and there is hope that it may change, but right now, it’s something we have to live with. Explaining some of the nuts and bolts of how it works, then put together the panel, where he can respond to issues that the rest of us bring up.