Co-blogger Sam finishes up his tour of SpaceX. The discussion is less about rockets than about corporate cultures and marketing messages. There certainly seems to be a lot of momentum finally building in the media and the business community for the new space age.

Thomas James writes about libertarian versus statist approaches to space colonization. A different way of framing it might be a dynamist versus a stasist approach. Unfortunately, for the most part (at least in terms of planned expenditures, the small effort toward prizes and COTS notwithstanding), Mike Griffin’s NASA seems pretty firmly in the latter camp.

Thomas also has a new pillory of the space luddites up (his previous one spurred the post about libertarianism in space).

…from SpaceX. Clark Lindsey does have a little interesting news from India, though. It sounds like they may be getting smarter:

The stages appear to be powered by conventional rockets using “semi-cryogenic ” engines, e.g. LOX/kerosene. Previous Indian RLV designs that I have seen usually involved some sort of scramjet first stage.

That’s it for now–still busy demolishing the kitchen. I hope that I can finish that today, so that I can get to the rebuilding part, which I find much more enjoyable.

[Sunday evening update]

Alan Boyle has info in comments, and at his site.

SpaceX apparently had a successful static test firing at Kwajalein today. I assume that this means they’re go for launch sometime in the next few days.

[Update at 5 PM EST]

D’oh!

As a commenter points out, this is old news. I should have double checked it first.

Jon Goff writes:

If space transportation was as free and healthy of a market as most other markets, I don’t think anyone would care about robots vs humans. It would be so obvious that the answer is “depends on what you want to do” that nobody would even ask the question. The saddest thing about the mainstream robots vs humans debate is that it isn’t really a robots vs humans debate at all, but merely people arguing over who gets the pork.

Yes. Unfortunately, we continue to fail to ask that fundamental question: what do we want to do in space?

Rand points out that you can carry a lot to orbit without a space elevator for some number of billions of dollars. You can also carry a lot of people in a ferry for the cost of a bridge. But once traffic gets high enough, you get economies of scale. There are actually several confounded questions about the cheapest way to GEO and beyond here.

First, it is very cheap to go from GEO to the planets with an elevator since you are on the downhill side of GEO and you slide out to the planets without any lasers or propellant.

Second, optimal energy to obtain orbit might be better to be hauled along. Maybe a climber could generate enough electric power to climb itself by burning LOX and kerosene in an internal combustion engine. No energy lost to air resistance. No energy lost to following an imperfect trajectory.

Third, optimal propulsion system might be a rocket engine. A rocket designed to go up an elevator would be a lot more capable than one that goes in free space.

Fourth, staging can be used with elevators cars to increase payload fraction in elevator cars. Stage 1 could just slide back down the elevator. Stage 2 could hit the brake and do a full systems checkout before moving up. The occupants could even get out and manually disengage the stages or something.

Fifth, the thing could even be refueled at 50,000 ft by some kind of a hovering balloon or vto refuelling craft. The balloon could even make it so that the last 50,000 feet of elevator at the bottom wouldn’t weigh down the thing. This is analogous to air launch or balloon launch.

Finally, there is the economics question. Will there be sufficient demand to justify a high capacity lifter of any sort? The marginal cost of ELVs is high. But the average cost may be lower for low mass to orbit (and beyond). This gets back to the bridge vs. ferry question. If it can be shown that the bridge is more profitable than the ferry, it is worth the billions that terrestrial bridges cost. Or it might be justified anyway via tremendous national prestige and driving down marginal costs even if it is a money loser (like, say, the Chunnel which cost $15 billion or so). I think demand is surely a matter of when rather than if. Demand for orbital space tourism will grow as the number of centimillionaires grows even if nothing else does.

The business case for elevators has not been scrutinized nearly as much as the one for rockets. For example, why not leave the spool for the second strand at the bottom of the elevator and send a climber up unreeling from the bottom as you go and send another “zipper” unit up after? What about suborbital jaunts for folks that don’t want to go all the way to orbit? It might even be cost competitive with airplanes for skydiving. As long as you are sending a newspaper roller up, you might as well print something in ink that will evaporate before too long. How much to print a 100,000 kilometer long love letter? Point-to-point hypersonic drop ships.

It is not necessarily true that space cannot warrant two pork infrastructure projects: a cheap RLV and an elevator. If you put it in the highway bill, you only have to compete against the dubious last $500 billion of infrastructure where trillions have already been invested. Bridge to nowhere indeed. The GEO elevator stop could even be called “the Middle of Nowhere”.

A space elevator also can be thought of as a national work of art. A modern pyramid. The longest film strip. The longest playing highest fidelity 8,000 track tape. So Bill, would you like to say to Paul, “Keep your laughing gas and rubber, mine’s made of diamond.”? How many carats in dozens of twenty ton strands? Work it right and get the ends of the nanotubes to join up and the whole thing can start as a single molecule, a single CNT lightyears long.

The promise if we can get orbit and deorbit down to a small multiple of the fuel cost whether via awesome RLV or awesome elevator is substantial. The cheapest way to get there will be a matter for competition to solve. Whether it is competition for Government projects or commercial service will hopefully be decided in favor of the market by capitalizing both projects in the st0ck market and proceeding to get them built.

Some of the reporters over at Florida Today have started a new group space blog, called The Flame Trench. The name seems appropriate, because they seem to have gotten into a little pissing contest with Keith Cowing (via whom I learned of its existence). Though, as I mentioned in a comment there (unpublished as of yet), I wish that people would learn the difference between “infer” and “imply.”

Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood, guys (and gals, if there are any).

[Update at 1 PM EST]

I just got an explanatory email from John Kelly:

Sorry it took a pissing contest for some folks to find us. But we’re always glad if people are reading and visiting.

There’s three guys, one lady, writing for the Flame Trench. Our space team is veteran aerospace reporter Todd Halvorson, space, science and tech writer Christine Kridler, our Washington correspondent Larry Wheeler, and myself, the humble space editor. The blog is an add-on to our existing space news site.

Now, if they could just fix their commenting software so that it will capitalize my first and last name…

Of the first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket.

From Henry Spencer, over at sci.space.policy:

…as Jordin Kare noted a while back, the elevator people say they could give us launch cost of a few hundred a kilogram for a ten-billion investment… but there are plenty of rocket people who think they could match or beat that launch-cost number with a lot less up-front money. “They aren’t Boeing, but neither are you.”

And the nanotube materials that the elevator people need will do wonders for rocket structure, well before they’re good enough for elevators.

This post made me wonder–since so many people seem to prefer aisle seats, do they even care if window seats, or windows, exist? I’d be very uncomfortable sitting in a windowless aluminum tube going hundreds of miles per hour through the air, but I notice that many people in airplanes don’t look out the window at all.

I wouldn’t fly in an aircraft in which I couldn’t see out a window, at least somewhere (even if I had to walk forward in a cargo plane to find one). How many people out there are indifferent?

And on the subject of space, one of the costs of designing a passenger spacecraft is exactly this–the need to put in windows, which increase structural weight. This isn’t just because the view is a large part of the experience–I suspect that many space passengers would be just as psychologically uncomfortable in a windowless space transport as they would in a windowless aircraft.

Oh, one more thing. It’s very hard to get me into a glass elevator–there, I insist on not knowing what’s outside. The difference is that one is a vehicle, and the other is part of a structure (I’m acrophobic).

[Update on Wednesday evening]

Just to clarify, I’m not asking which seat people prefer. I’m asking how important it is that the airplane has windows, regardless of whether or not you sit next to them.