Category Archives: Space

Subsidizing Space Transportation

Sam, what I don’t understand about your proposal is, well, how it would actually work. The devil is always in the details in these things. When you say:

It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted.

…what does that mean? What price will they get the service at? Who is purchasing from the launch providers?

My idea would be to have the government purchase some fixed (and large) quantity of various goods and space services (e.g., tickets to LEO, pounds to LEO, maybe even tickets and pounds to the lunar surface), use whatever there was a government need for, and auction the rest back on the market. If the market price turns out to be higher than the price paid by the government, then the program costs nothing at all (other than the cost of the services that the government needs). If it’s a lot more, presumably the providers would stop selling to the government (assuming they were allowed to opt out) and sell directly to the market. If the differential was low, then we’d have a subsidy, in which the cost of the program would be the difference in price between market and government cost of the service.

But in order to make this fly, the country (and its government) would have to decide that having large amounts of activities in space at reduced unit costs were sufficiently important to justify what would be considered a large expenditure in the context of current space activity (essentially doubling the NASA budget under your proposal, but I think you could do a lot of damage to the problem for a few billion a year). There’s been little sign of that so far.

Don’t Wait for Cheap Orbital Access

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

Don’t Wait for Cheap Orbital Access

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

Don’t Wait for Cheap Orbital Access

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

Give It a Break

John Schwartz of NYT has written “NASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle” published today. My cost benefit analysis is here.

The statistics can be simplified. What are the failure modes? What are their probabilities? How much do those probabilities overlap? What rate is it OK for the shuttle to fail? How much does it cost to mitigate the failure modes? Stack rank them according to the highest increase in safety for the lowest cost. Go to work.

So we have a failure mode of about 1% based on 100 trials. So far it has cost $2 billion to mitigate it. That implies that NASA is acting as if the value of the orbiter and crew on each flight is $7 billion or more to make the benefits of the fix outweigh the cost ($2 billlion to achieve a less than 1% reduction in the probability of a fail in 28 flights. $2 billion/(28 * 1%) = $7 billion). The families of the 9/11 victims each received $2.1 million. To compensate the families of astronauts who may die at the same level would cost $15 million. At commercial prices of $16 million for a Falcon V which delivers about 1/4 of a shuttle’s worth to the ISS, we could buy 443 flights for $7 billion not counting range and payload costs or over 100 shuttles flights’ worth. Even using the Ariane at $4,000/lb according to Futron’s 2002 price estimate we could buy 28 shuttle flights’ worth of Ariane payload for $5.6 billion. With viable outside commercial options that are less expensive to build and operate than the shuttle is to just operate, the sale price of the shuttle would be zero. We should not be treating it like a $7 billion asset. So perhaps the cost/benefit analysis is a little off at NASA.

Or maybe the following quote from AWST, 4/11/2005 (subscription required) will give you a better feel for what is really going on at NASA:

“We had one place in the backpack where, because of the confined space, the wire bend was tighter than the specified engineering limit was. And the EVA folks said it will cost us $100,000 to fix this,” [Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle program manager] said. “Well, in the space business, $100,000 is not a lot of money, so I said go fix this.”

This man should be relieved and someone put in place someone who can explain cost-benefit to the public.

No Big Deal

The president’s science advisor says that Mike Griffin will ride to the rescue, and save us from the dreaded gap.

Unlike Senator Hutchison, though, who unaccountably thinks gaps are a national security crisis, Dr. Marburger is more sanguine about them. Too much so, in fact, for my taste:

…more gaps in access were likely in the future of the U.S. space program. These gaps are to be viewed as a fact of life in space operations, he suggested.

“There will be future gaps from time to time. The thing to remember is that the president’s plan is a long-term, sustained commitment.” Gaps, he suggested, were simply a part of the continuing process of space exploration.

While I don’t in fact think that “gaps” are that big a deal, given the trivial things that we’re currently doing (and even planning) with our civil manned spaceflight program, I’m quite disturbed by the notion that they are an inevitable feature of space operations. Imagine if he’d said, “there will be future gaps from time to time in our ability to get into the air,” or “there will be future gaps from time to time in our ability to cross the oceans.”

Clearly, this isn’t an attitude that would be acceptable if we were actually doing anything important with humans in space. The fact that he can make such a statement is a window into his perception of the importance of being a space-faring nation, a goal at which the current plans for VSE still fall far short, for decades.

Stuck In The Past

Senator Hutchison is going to be a distinct downgrade from Sam Brownback, when it comes to space policy, though she’ll probably be good news for JSC. It also means that one of her nicknames should be “Senator from ISS.”

In an article in which Bill Readdy says that NASA plans to accelerate the development of the CEV (not intrinsically a bad thing, given that it’s going to be built at all, and certainly in line with the new administrator’s desires), note this:

Sen. Kay Hutchison (R-Texas), subcommittee chair, said that NASA must work to avoid being caught without the ability to launch its own human missions to the ISS and low-Earth orbit.

The Sin of Inaction

There is an interesting argument going on here about my article on Orion. I am cc’ing you the following:

I always thought the active-passive distinction in philosphy and law was a cop out. We are just as responsible for the millions who die from our inaction as we are for murder. If you are consciously not donating to a hunger fund with the understanding that the inevitable consequence is that an additional person will die of hunger, it is tantamount to first degree murder.

There is an active choice to be part of coal deaths. Every time we turn on a light switch, we actively increase the coal output that kills tens of thousands per year or more. So each flick is increasing the likelihood of death. It is therefore self-deception to suggest that moving in the direction of safety is a sinless course. It is just murder too common to prosecute.

So if we can all agree that we are a civilization of murderers, then we can get on to real questions like is it better to kill people with atmospheric nuclear explosions to colonize the solar system or kill each other through inaction.

Sticking with spending $15 billion/year on chemical rockets instead of half on nuclear rockets and half on defibrillators is killing hundreds of thousands.

I would give my life to colonize the planets. Our focus on saving every life is penny wise and pound foolish.

Do people avoid having children so that all their cells can die a natural death? Envision all humanity as cells of a greater organism, the global species. Envision that it is time to have a child species on another planet. Isn’t that worth the death of millions or hundreds of millions if new billions will spring into existence? I am asking for dozens possibly killed offset by savings thousands of others that would otherwise be killed.

I don’t expect to fundamentally change dinosaur thinking. “I will not kill anyone to save the species from the asteroid that has our species’ name on it.” But be aware of the systematic cost of the capricous risk aversion we impose in the name of morality.