X-Prize judge Rick Searfoss informs me via email that tonight’s episode of “The Apprentice” will have a very interesting prize for the winning team.

Mark Whittington describes an innovative concept for developing the moon and near-earth space. I hope it’s under serious consideration. I haven’t seen much evidence of it so far, other than keeping their options open by granting contracts to a couple of the unusual suspects.

Mark Whittington describes an innovative concept for developing the moon and near-earth space. I hope it’s under serious consideration. I haven’t seen much evidence of it so far, other than keeping their options open by granting contracts to a couple of the unusual suspects.

Mark Whittington describes an innovative concept for developing the moon and near-earth space. I hope it’s under serious consideration. I haven’t seen much evidence of it so far, other than keeping their options open by granting contracts to a couple of the unusual suspects.

Alan Boyle has an interesting report from Esther Dyson’s little space conference, on the state of the entrepreneurial space industry, and its invigorated prospects for investment.

Clark Lindsey has lots of interesting thoughts on NASA’s priorities:

It certainly seems strange that NASA is initiating the VSE by alienating virtually every natural constituency that it has. In addition to this hit on space education, the science community is becoming convinced that the VSE just means big cutbacks in its funding (At NASA, Clouds Are What You Zoom Through to Get to Mars – NY Times – Mar.21.05), the aviation community is now sure that NASA wants to eliminate all aeronautical research (Congress Quizzes NASA On Cuts in Aeronautics Spending – Space News – Mar.21.05), closing a research center or two will certainly reduce its circle of friends (NASA BRAC: a bad idea – The Space Review – Mar.21.05), and cancelling the Hubble repair mission angered every astronomy fan in the country.

It’s not as if NASA has a shortage of waste. It could clearly accomplish much more with its 16 billion dollar budget. Often it appears, however, that particular NASA programs are cut not because they are failing or because they lack cost-effectiveness, but because they are small and don’t have the political clout to fight back. Meanwhile, the huge Shuttle and ISS programs relentlessly suck up all funding in sight.

He also has an updated timeline for private space activities. He’s increasingly optimistic. Me too. But I’d expand on one point that he makes:

In the US, for example, it is quite possible that NASA’s new exploration initiative will fail to produce new systems that significantly lower the cost of access to space.

I would put it more strongly. It will almost certainly fail to do so, particularly since that doesn’t even seem to be a program goal.

Based on the results of the architecture studies so far, NASA seems to find it satisfactory to spend billions to send a handful of NASA astronauts to the moon once or twice a year fifteen years from now. Mike Griffin wants to develop a heavy-lift vehicle for that purpose. The traffic rate doesn’t justify one such a system, let alone the two that would be required to provide resiliency in the architecture.

The utter economic absurdity of our current approach to spaceflight (which seems largely a return to the glory days of Apollo) continues.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other comment on his new timeline:

2009-2010: …NASA cancels the CEV under development by one of the large aerospace consortiums and contracts with the America’s Space Prize winner for its launch needs.

I don’t know if they’ll cancel the CEV per se, because they still need an entry vehicle capable of returning astronauts from the moon, unless the plan changes to have them deorbit propulsively. This requires much more heat shielding than a simple entry vehicle from orbit, because the specific energy to be dissipated is twice as much.

What NASA will really have to do (and should be thinking about now) is how to design the CEV with the flexibility to “unbundle” its functions. Private access to orbit means that they don’t have to develop the CEVLV (which probably consists anyway of simply “human rating” an EELV like Delta 4 or Atlas V, whatever that quoted phrase turns out to mean), and they don’t have to deliver crew to orbit in the CEV command module. Cheap access to orbit, for both people and propellant, will require a radical rethinking of the requirements for a CEV from the current ones, including propellant depots at LEO (probably low inclination, not ISS orbit), as well as at L1 and on the lunar surface. With sufficient propellant available from the moon, propulsive circularization in LEO (perhaps with an aerobrake assist) from the lunar vicinity becomes a more reasonable proposition, and we can design systems that are more specialized for their environment, rather than one that, like Apollo, has to go all (or most) of the way to the moon from the earth’s surface, and return, which is the current CEV concept.

And part of that rethinking also has to be the possibility of private interest in developing regular commerce to and from the moon…

Reading them, that is.

This reporter Down Under seems to think that the CEV contractors will be selected on May 2nd. In fact, that’s the time that proposals are due (the RFP was released on March 1, with a two-month response time). There’s no way in the world that the source selection could occur that quickly. If you look at the program schedule from the Industry Day briefing a week and a half ago, you can see that the award will actually occur in August.

One of the big questions about the incoming NASA administrator is whether or not he’ll reinstate the Hubble mission. Keith Cowing has doubts:

…Mike Griffin will work for the very same White House which endorsed Sean O’Keefe’s decisions regarding Hubble – and adjusted the agency’s budget profiles accordingly – two fiscal years in a row. Such a reversal would be a change in Bush Administration policy – and we don’t really see a lot of that, now do we?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. For example, Dr. Griffin could have made such a policy change a condition of his accepting the job (I’m not saying that he did, just that he could have). As a sweetener, he might have offered other savings (such as his postulated plan to reduce Shuttle support to complete ISS from the planned two-dozen plus missions to just a few, with earlier phaseout). That would allow the mission to be accomplished with no increase in budget.

My sense, from knowing him, is that he has some big ideas about how to implement the president’s goals that aren’t necessarily completely in synch with current plans. Many consider him (not Dan Goldin) the true father of “faster, better, cheaper”–a legacy from when he left the agency in the early nineties that he probably considers to have been poorly implemented by Goldin.

I’ll bet that he’s coming up with what he thinks are “faster, better, cheaper” ways of getting back to the moon, and on to Mars, and he could very well include keeping the popular Hubble alive as part of the overall deal. And I doubt if the administration is all that wedded to the specifics of the plan laid out a year ago, as long as the goals are achieved. I also doubt that the administration has any innate desire to end the Hubble program–they just didn’t want to pay for it, so if Mike can come up with a way to do both, I doubt if they’d view it as a “policy reversal.”

I’m not claiming any special insight into what he will do, or wants to do, just what he could do. Hubble may yet live. The confirmation hearings will be very interesting.

One of the big questions about the incoming NASA administrator is whether or not he’ll reinstate the Hubble mission. Keith Cowing has doubts:

…Mike Griffin will work for the very same White House which endorsed Sean O’Keefe’s decisions regarding Hubble – and adjusted the agency’s budget profiles accordingly – two fiscal years in a row. Such a reversal would be a change in Bush Administration policy – and we don’t really see a lot of that, now do we?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. For example, Dr. Griffin could have made such a policy change a condition of his accepting the job (I’m not saying that he did, just that he could have). As a sweetener, he might have offered other savings (such as his postulated plan to reduce Shuttle support to complete ISS from the planned two-dozen plus missions to just a few, with earlier phaseout). That would allow the mission to be accomplished with no increase in budget.

My sense, from knowing him, is that he has some big ideas about how to implement the president’s goals that aren’t necessarily completely in synch with current plans. Many consider him (not Dan Goldin) the true father of “faster, better, cheaper”–a legacy from when he left the agency in the early nineties that he probably considers to have been poorly implemented by Goldin.

I’ll bet that he’s coming up with what he thinks are “faster, better, cheaper” ways of getting back to the moon, and on to Mars, and he could very well include keeping the popular Hubble alive as part of the overall deal. And I doubt if the administration is all that wedded to the specifics of the plan laid out a year ago, as long as the goals are achieved. I also doubt that the administration has any innate desire to end the Hubble program–they just didn’t want to pay for it, so if Mike can come up with a way to do both, I doubt if they’d view it as a “policy reversal.”

I’m not claiming any special insight into what he will do, or wants to do, just what he could do. Hubble may yet live. The confirmation hearings will be very interesting.

One of the big questions about the incoming NASA administrator is whether or not he’ll reinstate the Hubble mission. Keith Cowing has doubts:

…Mike Griffin will work for the very same White House which endorsed Sean O’Keefe’s decisions regarding Hubble – and adjusted the agency’s budget profiles accordingly – two fiscal years in a row. Such a reversal would be a change in Bush Administration policy – and we don’t really see a lot of that, now do we?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. For example, Dr. Griffin could have made such a policy change a condition of his accepting the job (I’m not saying that he did, just that he could have). As a sweetener, he might have offered other savings (such as his postulated plan to reduce Shuttle support to complete ISS from the planned two-dozen plus missions to just a few, with earlier phaseout). That would allow the mission to be accomplished with no increase in budget.

My sense, from knowing him, is that he has some big ideas about how to implement the president’s goals that aren’t necessarily completely in synch with current plans. Many consider him (not Dan Goldin) the true father of “faster, better, cheaper”–a legacy from when he left the agency in the early nineties that he probably considers to have been poorly implemented by Goldin.

I’ll bet that he’s coming up with what he thinks are “faster, better, cheaper” ways of getting back to the moon, and on to Mars, and he could very well include keeping the popular Hubble alive as part of the overall deal. And I doubt if the administration is all that wedded to the specifics of the plan laid out a year ago, as long as the goals are achieved. I also doubt that the administration has any innate desire to end the Hubble program–they just didn’t want to pay for it, so if Mike can come up with a way to do both, I doubt if they’d view it as a “policy reversal.”

I’m not claiming any special insight into what he will do, or wants to do, just what he could do. Hubble may yet live. The confirmation hearings will be very interesting.