The latest edition of NewSpaceNews is out, with a roundup of alt-space activities from around the web.

Thomas James (who reads this stuff so you don’t have to, though it’s entertaining even if you do) has the latest roundup, including a certain NASA scientist who’s been in the news recently.

If numbers get repeated often enough, like in this gallery of commercial space opportunities, they start to be believed. Business 2.0 as part of a big spread on space investment opportunities in their March cover story retells some whoppers.

Space Hotels: $5B/year by 2015

This is inconsistent with Futron and world launch capabilities and expense. First let’s see if someone wins the America’s Space Prize. Expensive travel means very little revenue. By 2025, very possible if space access costs drop. $2M/month would get a lot of takers if we can get 600kg worth of people, spaceship and consumables to orbit at $3000/kg including payload. A Progress at 2000-3000kg of payload lasts 2-3 months with three eaters.

Mars: $400B in exploration by 2030

If you just put NASA spending in line with US GDP growth and put 12 years of it to “Mars” you get about $400B.

Orbital labs: $10B/year by 2015

NASA can’t even come up with a business case to finish ISS. So far the only demand has come from Greg Olsen so he could take a tax writeoff on his vacation. Hmm, maybe it will be a conference destination.

Solar sats: $100B/year by 2020.

You have to beat the marginal cost of hydrocarbons to make money on this. Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resouce 2 indicates heavily against this. Methane hydrates, coal and uranium would have to be taxed to a standstill (which is not impossible) for this to be this big. Space elevators flip it.

Space elevator: $2B/year by 2021

If it works much bigger. It will probably be bigger than solar sats or asteroid mining. Without competition, almost all profits from solar sats and asteroid mining will accrue to the elevator owner.

Asteroid mining: $10B/year by 2030

The space access and demand curve math does not really work except for local consumption in space. But it would be a great place to colonize along with the Moon and Mars.

Moon: $104B in exploration by 2018, $250B in helium mining by 2050

The exploration comes from extrapolating the NASA budget: good bet; the He3 requires us to run out of uranium or patience for it. Not likely.

Microsats: $1.5B/year by 2018

Likely an underestimate as miniaturization, space access costs and dedicated launchers for microsats come into their own

Space Tourism: $1B/year by 2023

This will be bigger than hotels, which is not to say that it will be more than twice Futron’s prediction repeated here. (The factor of 2 selfishly comes from games. The transport to and from the hotel is more expensive than the hotel stay.)

…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

…don’t know when I’ll be back again, but my return reservation is for Friday night. I’m off to Califor Nye A early tomorrow morning, and may be too busy to blog, as there are a lot of deliverables due this week, on top of the CEV proposal work. But I’ll try to check in tomorrow.

It doesn’t sound like a smart design to me, though:

The first stage is configured as a winged body system, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. After burnout, the vehicle will re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and will be made to land horizontally on a runway, like an aircraft.

In the second stage, after delivering the payload, the vehicle will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in sea or land.

No description of the first-stage propulsion, but if Clark Lindsay (from whom I got the link) is right, and it’s a scramjet, that’s a huge mistake. And an ocean recovery with airbags? Please.

Of course, what do you expect from a government? And at least they haven’t bought into the current nonsensical conventional wisdom that “Shuttle proved that reusable vehicles don’t work.”

I’m too busy to blog much, but the Chairforce Engineer has a follow-up to the previous discussion (see here, too) on lunar transportation architectures and L1.

Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on space system design goals, and some advice for Elon Musk:

Take a look at the EELV program, and even SpaceX. EELV’s goal was to reduce the cost of launching satellites for the military from absolutely obscene to merely ridiculous (ie a 50% drop in price IIRC). So, they tried to make some incremental changes to how they build and operate their vehicles. In some areas they’ve gotten a lot better, but the reality is that they didn’t even acheive the modest goals they set out for themselves. It isn’t that they’re dumb, or malicious, or incompetent. It’s just that they set themselves too easy of a goal, so they didn’t actually have to think outside the same high-cost artillery box that they’ve put themselves in over the years.

It should be pointed out that one of the reason that they haven’t achieved the cost reduction goal is the collapse of flight rate. As I pointed out in my New Atlantis piece, flight rate, even for expendables, is a much higher contributor to launch cost than design is.

He also writes something that a younger Jon Goff would have found heresy:

…if they go for the BFR instead of trying to radically change the Earth-to-Orbit transportation market by going fully reusable…They’re probably going to get their lunch eaten. I mean, they could possibly acquire one of the companies that actually develops a fully reusable, high-flight-rate orbital space transport. But the reality is going to be that if they don’t keep pushing more and more reusability into their Falcon line, it’s going to go obsolete.

That’s sort of an inside joke to long-time readers of sci.space.*, but once upon a time, Jon was a, hmmmm…shall we say, vociferous proponent of expendable launchers. It would be interesting (and possibly educational to others) sometime to hear a description of how his thinking has evolved.

Now, we just have to work on his politics…

Ken Murphy has a useful tutorial on the use of Earth-Moon L1 as a staging point to and from the Moon, and to other destinations.