Thomas James notes that:

Michael Griffin spoke at JSC today, and is reported to have said that the Chinese are “five or six years closer to the Moon than we are.”

Depends on what he means by “we.” This statement needs elaboration, and a description of how he thinks that, at their current snail’s pace, the Chinese are going to get to the Moon at all, let alone before “us.” If he means Americans, I’ve no worries at all–the government-copycat Chinese space program is not going to beat private enterprise.

On the other hand, if he means NASA, I suspect he’s right. Of course, the way NASA goes about things, I don’t expect them to get to the Moon before 2040 or so…

Thomas James notes that:

Michael Griffin spoke at JSC today, and is reported to have said that the Chinese are “five or six years closer to the Moon than we are.”

Depends on what he means by “we.” This statement needs elaboration, and a description of how he thinks that, at their current snail’s pace, the Chinese are going to get to the Moon at all, let alone before “us.” If he means Americans, I’ve no worries at all–the government-copycat Chinese space program is not going to beat private enterprise.

On the other hand, if he means NASA, I suspect he’s right. Of course, the way NASA goes about things, I don’t expect them to get to the Moon before 2040 or so…

Ken Silber says that space settlers may be living in caves.

Thomas James thinks that Elon Musk is trying to get Boeing and Lockmart to pay the development costs for the Falcon series.

The Guardian is talking seriously about property rights on the Moon.

The Chair Force Engineer has a lot of good stuff over the past few days, including commentary on the SpaceX lawsuit against BoLockMart, NASA’s architecture plans, and many pictures of the recent X-Prize Cup exhibition in New Mexico.

Jeff Foust has a good wrapup of the current state of play in the space activist community over the proposed exploration architecture, from this past weekend’s Space Frontier Conference, over at today’s The Space Review. Bottom line, to quote Bob Zubrin, is that it “sucks.” Those in the community who (unlike Space Frontier and Space Access) aren’t saying so officially are doing so only to be polite, and operating on the principle that if you haven’t anything good to say about it, say nothing at all.

Unfortunately, as Jeff points out at Space Politics, the sophistication of the debate on space policy in Washington is less than informed or reasoned. It’s very easy to confuse criticism of NASA’s chosen means of executing the vision with the vision itself. Nonetheless, if NASA has chosen a hopeless path for our goals (which in fact they have) we must state that. There’s little point in supporting a program that will once again end in tears, after many more billions of taxpayer dollars and more wasted years just because it is ostensibly a “space” program.

And speaking of debate style, Jeff was overtactful in characterizing Bob Zubrin’s as “contentious,” in which he repeatedly interrupted anyone who disagreed with him, shouting “stop, stop,” “it’s impossible!” “stop.”

This heavy-lift issue is one that needs a vigorous, informed (and civil) public debate, since it’s not at all clear that it ever received one in the workings of the exploration team at NASA. Cyberspace, and the blogosphere, would be a good place for it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey points out an Aviation Week article that indicates that many are in agreement that the “all eggs in one basket” approach is potentially disastrous (and does little to advance our abilities as a spacefaring nation), and asks:

What is going to happen to the lunar program when (1) there is the inevitable long delay in the development of the HLLV and (2) when a HLLV fails and destroys a really big collection of lunar exploration hardware, and (3) the HLLV is then grounded for a long period?

Hey, Clark, didn’t you get the memo? We’re not supposed to ask those kinds of questions.

[Update at 7:40 AM PDT]

Clark has further thoughts:

…NASA’s plan is already under considerable stress due to budget restraints.

This further emphasizes the need for NASA to focus on lowering space transportation costs significantly rather than on getting to the Moon by a fixed date with a straight-forward but very costly and impractical system. With cheaper space transport, NASA can still reach the Moon within a budget that probably won’t grow and may even shrink.

Michael Mealing is chairing a session on various brief presentations of potentially interesting technical concepts.

First up is fellow Transterrestrial blogger Sam Dinkin, who is talking about Spaceshot, his new company that is making a skill game that will offer a prize of a ride on Rocketplane. The game will be a non-dexterity skill game. Tickets will be less than five dollars, the flights will start in 2007, and they will also provide money to pay taxes for the flight. Not a game of chance (poker, lottery drawing). Examples of skill games are tennis or chess. Idea is to increase demand, and offer space travel to the less well heeled (nine billion dollars spent on Halloween each year–wants to tap that kind of money).

Someone from Frontier Astronautics (didn’t get the name) is up now. He recently quit Lockheed Martin to form his own company with three or four other people. They’re selling attitude control systems and rocket engines. Their first customer is Masten, to whom they’re selling attitude control. Still looking for a first customer for their rocket engine, 7500 pounds of thrust, liquid oxygen and kerosene.

Alex Bucolari (sp?) is a student at Dartmouth, and is working on beamed propulsion systems. Planning to beam vehicles to orbit from the ground, either with thermal rocket or pulsed ablation (they’re working on the former). High specific impulse , about 800 seconds (Nerva class) and hydrogen propellant. Using a 1 kW System with cylindrical resonance chamber. Working with Kevin Parkin at JPL/Caltech. Plans to build clustered array for orbital system.

Berin Szoka has developed a public policy think tank to reduce regulatory roadblocks to space, and will be dedicated to do this in Washington. He’s a lawyer with a background in the DC policy world. He thinks that this community needs a professional organization, like Cato, to deal specifically with these issues. Still looking for funding to get it going, and wants feedback on our priorities. Focus now is on ITAR but will work other issues. Will not lobby, but will provide intellectual ammunition for the foot soldiers on the Hill and in the administration.

Phil Chapman points out three recent developments in SPS development: methane hydrates (enough to meet all the world’s energy needs for at least a thousand years) which will put a ceiling on the price of electricity (SPS will have to beat $.04/kW-hr); artificial thin-films of diamond are turning out to be easy to make as thermionic conversion devices, which may make for cheap and light SPS; they have a design for an SPS that is isoinertial, allowing easy pointing at the sun as it goes around the earth.

Steve Harrington of Flometrics is talking about his pistonless pumps, which will reduce cost, weight of engines, and increase reliability. He has a demo in the exhibit area, and he used one to pump a low-concentration alchohol-based rocket fuel (also known as margaritas) at the Space Access conference. He’s going to do it again tonight. I will attend the demonstration.

James Schulz of Space Resources, Inc. is talking about his company, which is looking at building large-scale platforms in LEO for commercial uses. They are looking at a three-phase approach: customers first, then transportation, then construction. Expecting it to be customer-driven concept that will lead to large amounts of in-space construction, because best way to stimulate business in orbit is large-scale habitable platforms and labs. Need to start now to be ready when vehicles are ready. Looking for people who share the vision. He doesn’t see himself as in competition with Bigelow–sees his timeframe as farther out. Expects developing customer base will take three years, and transportation will take several years beyond that. Market is envisioned to be corporate users. Analogy is building a shopping center, and they’re indifferent to what business occupy it.

Alliance for Commercial Enterprise In Space (ACES) by Bruce Pittman. Addressing demand (in biotech area). Biotech needs throughput, and they don’t like dealing with NASA. Looking for mechanisms in public-private partnerships that can help show how NASA can work (started with Ames, but also working with other NASA centers, including manned spaceflight centers) Four pillars that ACES supports: supply, demand, capital, and public policy.

Manny Pimente has a company called “Lunar Explorer” completing the development phase of a virtual reality simulation of the moon. Looking for high fidelity. Want to shrink the moon so that it fits into a computer at home. Allows people to “walk” along the surface. Modeling Apollo and other landing sites. Trying to extract more value from data gathered in the past by programs like Clementine, particularly for kids. They’ve raised $300K to date and are looking for more money.

Alan Crider working with Tom Taylor and Lunar Outpost will provide labs on the moon, for NASA and private enterprise (Lunar Base Systems). Uses both inflatable technology and retrofitting existing technology, to land bases anywhere on the moon. No data on weight of the base (guessing about a hundred tons).

Steve Knight (sp?) is looking at non-traditional corporate approaches to avoid middle management. Started thinking about it after Challenger, in which a pyramid of information flow restricted knowledge at the top and made for bad decisions. Started using internal contracting and decision markets a year or so ago as a new way of building high-tech knowledge infrastructure to build high-tech companies. Will have more case histories to show us next year. Casting a wider net to find people interested. Says to keep an eye on trac.t7a.org for updates in the coming weeks.

Joe Caroll, of tether fame, had developed a new interest, and thinks that most of the people buying seats will be tourists. Has new passenger vehicle designs, but doesn’t want to be a big company, so is offering his ideas (patentable) to people who want to see a tourism-oriented practical vehicle happen.

Derek Shannon, finishing up masters at USC, and working on urban transit program (very spacy) and a renewable energy project–an alternative to the DoE Tokamak program. Not cold fusion, but an interesting new approach.

Day’s sessions are almost over, and I need to take a break.

This panel consists of Jim Muncy of Polispace, Jim Dunstan (lawyer for t/Space), Randall Clague of XCOR and George Nield of the FAA. These are some of the people largely responsible for developing the current regulatory regime as it has evolved in the past couple years. Dunstan is the chair.

Format is short presentations, with a follow-on roundtable discussion.

Dunstan describing the underlying precepts of launch regulation. Question is how do we get from SpaceShipOne, with a well-informed test pilot, to a cruise ship on which one can take one’s family to space. Issues: amount of risk that society will allow individuals to accept, and the overall legal regime. We currently treat space differently from other activities in terms of allowable casualty rates. We’ve lost a million people on highways in the past quarter century, and a thousand a year in aviation. We’ve killed 0.56 passengers per year in space over that period. Autos and aviation have been trending downward, while space has long periods of no accidents with a couple blips of seven deaths at a time.

We could build cars that are ten times as safe, but they would get four miles to the gallon and cost a quarter of a million dollars a piece, so we make the tradeoff. In 1918, airplane reliability was 90%, yet we allowed people to fly them and delivered airmail on them. In 1929 we adopted the Warsaw convention, limiting airlilne liability, when we had a passenger fatality rate of 45 people per million miles flown. We apparently decided to allow a lot of risk in this field, because we decided that air travel was important. Currently, we don’t seem to think that space flight is important enough to accept a similar level of risk.

Several different models for spreading risk: no-fault model, to encourage activity; “negligence” regime, another auto model, and used in domestic aviation; strict liability, with damage cap via international conventions (international aviation); strict liability with insurance (current domestic launch business); strict liability, period (international space flight regime, due to 1967 Outer Space Treaty and 1972 Liability Convention). The latter treaties make governments responsible for anything launched from their jurisdiction. That’s the end of the brief overview.

George Nield follows up to point out that the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 (and amendments since, including last year’s) was passed specifically to address the treaty obligations, and the FAA license is the instrumentality that implements the act. Reiterates from morning talk that they have to maintain a balancing act between safety and a viable industry.

Jim Muncy notes that a year ago, this conference was on the Queen Mary, and at that time they were in the middle of negotiations with Congress on last year’s launch amendments act. Says that there have to be two different kinds of risk regimes: one for uninvolved parties, for whose safety the federal government is accountable. The other one is involved persons (passengers, and crew) assuming a known level of risk for a benefit from the activity, in which a negligence regime applies rather than a strict liability one. A year ago some in Congress wanted to make it clear that while there would be some differential between these two regimes, they also wanted to protect the people in the vehicles, and couldn’t accept that you had to let people learn how to build the vehicles before they could be regulated as aircraft are today. Shuttle has only flown a little over a hundred times, and each event was very expensive, and it still isn’t safe after many billions of dollars and many years. We can’t know what’s safe until we go through a “barnstorming” era, though one more safety conscious than the earlier aviation one.

We have to fly to learn, and we can’t regulate people out of being able to fly and make money, which is a necessary activity to learning how to fly safely (just as we did over decades with aviation). Our position last year was that we would rather have no legislation than legislation that required in principle that we had to ensure safety of passengers. The legislation passed last year allows, but does not require, the FAA to start to pass passenger-related regulations after a period of time, to allow lessons learned to be incorporated, while still allowing companies and people to fly. He thinks that the FAA is doing a good job so far.

Jim Dunstan asks George Nield to walk us through what the process has been and will be on the new rules to come out.

He says that from his perpsective, there were four outcomes: put administration and Congress on record of supporting private human spaceflight as a good thing; established an informed-consent regime as the one in which we will initially fly passengers, distinct from the uninvolved public; introduced experimental launch permit, to make it easier to allow launches without the issuance of a full launch license, which is much more onerous, allowing easier research and development activities in a manner analogous to an airworthiness certificate; and finally, AST had to go off and implement regulations for the experimental certificates and passenger flight for revenue. Initially, they’re guidelines, which will be followed by a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in December and regulations in June of 2006. The current guidelines are available at the the AST web site. They’ll be taking public input on these guidelines now and on the proposed rules after December when the NPRM comes out. Comments are encouraged, and can be provided electronically. They’ve had little feedback so far, and they think and hope that this is because the current guidelines are pretty good.

Question for XCOR–do they expect life insurance companies to have exclusions for flight as passengers? Answer is that they probably already do, since the activity would be in the same class as general aviation that already is excluded in general.

Muncy points out with regard to lawsuits by passengers or families that cross waivers should be required as part of indemnification (the current legal regime for satellite launches), but the current legislation didn’t retain that feature for passenger flight. But the government is not guaranteeing the safety of passengers, and it’s hoped that this will be a strong enough message to discourage notions that passengers weren’t flying at their own risk.

Break now.

Chaired by Berin Szoka, head of the new Institute for Space Law and Policy. Other panelists are Kerry Scarlott, of Posternak, Blankenstein and Lund LLP (a Boston law firm), Dennis Wingo of Orbital Recovery and Skycorp, and Randall Clague , government liaison of XCOR Aerospace.

Scarlott talks about how ITAR works, and how it serves as an impediment to what we’re trying to do. Three export control paradigms in US. Export Control Act (munitions items on the munitions list), Export Administration Act (dual-use goods), and other ad hoc presidential orders.

In 1999 all controls from Administration Act were moved to Export Control Act, which had profound effects on how it affects our industry (there’s a lot of history behind this, but he doesn’t discuss it, and I don’t have time to go into it right now while I’m trying to transcribe). It’s administered by the State Department, Director of Trade and Controls. They have a stringent attitude on how ITAR is applied. Small set of regs (forty pages of text). US Munitions List is the heart of it. Has twenty-one categories. Space technologies are covered by Category 15. Includes some basic catch-alls–anything that can be designed, used by a space vehicle or satellite (including technical data and defense services). It serves to pretty much capture everything we do. The “Deemed Export Rule” provides that you can be subject to licensing requirements of ITAR even if you don’t actually export–sharing of tech data with a foreign national within the US is sufficient (e.g, plant tour, meeting, etc.) which has become an onerous licensing requirement. Under ITAR, and export subject to ITAR requires an export license, including the “Deemed Exports” described above. These are granted through applications submitted to the State Department, and can take from weeks to months to a year, with no certain outcome. It’s a very anal bureaucratic process (paraphrasing here). It applies even to data that’s in the public domain–that’s been excepted out of Category 15, making it more onerous than any other category. He doesn’t understand why this category is subject to higher control, but this is a key point to make in lobbying. There is a Canadian exception, but few others. Most allies are treated almost exactly like North Korea.

After this intro, Randall Clague talks about the prospect of XCOR being an “arms dealer.” It costs them a lot of money to remain compliant and out of jail, and they view it as a protection racket. Propellants are on the list as well as hardware, and liquid oxygen, and kerosene cannot be exported. Candle was is on the list, technical data about them cannot be put on a web site where a foreign national can read it. You can buy Sutton, the canonical rocket book, in Syria, but you can’t put excerpts on your web site, where foreigners might read it.

Dennis Wingo follows. Founded Orbital Recovery to extend life of geostationary satellites. Company morphed from an American one to a European one because that was where the money and market was. They wanted to choose Dutch Space as a prime contractor, and contract with Arianespace for launch, and use German robotics. They had to find a law firm with an ex State Department guy on their staff to make things go smoother. He has technical assistance agreements to talk about people within his own company, and to talk to European suppliers, and to overseas customers. He has trouble talking to many companies because they don’t want to have to deal with signing the various agreements that the State Department requires.

He describes what would happen if Intel had to deal with this (ITAR Inside). For EACH processor sold to Lenovo (a Chinese company), they’d have to hire lawyers for the paperwork, instruct each customer, etc. Each meatting would only be able to take customer requirements, and answer direct questions associated with that requirement. (“Does it have an L2 Cache?” “I can’t tell you that.”)

They wouldn’t be able to include Windows (that would require a separate agreement). They’d also have to have another agreement to include Office.

The American computer industry wouldn’t be what it is today had such regulations been applied to them.

European industry has a stated policy of becoming ITAR free. Hundreds of millions of Euros are being spent to implement this. Sensors, actuators, antennae and software development underway, costing us huge European markets.

A brand new 21 Gigaflop process and computer running advanced mathematic software can be built and sold in Hong Kong for a few thousand. An antique actuator requires a technical agreement from the State Department to export one.

Need to go back to Reagan-era policy–Rohrabacher’s “Free Trade With Free People’s” approach. Deny advanced technology to our declared adversaries (sell them the old stuff). Free trade with everyone else.

This would vastly improve export sales in the US, and render moot the money that ESA and the EU is spending on ITAR remediation. He also points out that we have no appreciation of just what an irritation this is to Europe.

Point in discussion that has to be made over and over. This is not about space. It’s about national security, and the current regime is making us less, not more safe, and is resulting in a loss of our technological edge.

The major space companies don’t mind it that much, because they view it as a cost of doing business, and it presents a barrier to entry for newcomers, so they won’t lobby against it.

Clague notes that he’s not opposed to true useful export controls. What he opposes is the artificial and arbitrary definition of what they’re doing as export of advanced technology, when it is not.