Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.

Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.

It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.

Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.

It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.

Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.

…on your new job, Andrew. I think.

It’s certainly a key position right now, with the legislation continuing to hang fire. Be sure to let us know what we can do to help on an ongoing basis.

Sorry for the short notice–it slipped my mind. I’m going to be live on The Space Show with David Livingston in about an hour. On the air in the Seattle area, and there’s an internet feed here.

[Update afterward]

The interview went well, but I found out it wasn’t broadcast live (thought it was on the internet). It was taped for a later broadcast. I also want to remind people that Bill Simon (transterrestrial webmaster) and I will be on the show next Tuesday. It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, and we’ll be talking about that, and the sedar-like ceremony that we developed to commemorate it.

If you’re really into the significance of that date, it would be a good time to gather with family and friends, and have a dinner to help remember the first liberation of our species (and earthly life itself) from its homeworld, just as the Jews celebrate their liberation from Egypt at Passover.

Despite all the saturation coverage of space in the past year and a half, it would seem that we need such tools to educate ourselves about this new frontier, as Jay Manifold sadly points out today.

Mike Mealling over at RocketForge has added to his shwag offerings. In particular the Apollo LEM mug is cool, though the Skylab Mousepad is also quite geek-chic. I’m hoping he’ll add an RL-10 mug (hint).

I’m a big fan of the RL-10, since it’s as close to the realizing the ideal of evolvable design as any spaceflight gadget that I’m aware of, having been in use since 1963, with continuous upgrades and improvements since then. It’s also the engine that was used (in yet another variant) on the DC-X, which is enough to earn it a spot in space history even without the large number of variants. I suspect that there are Russian engines which come close to the RL-10 in realizing evolvable design, but none pop immediately to mind (a reflection of ignorance more than anything else).

I’d be interested to hear of other candidates for best realized evolvable design in space hardware. Bear in mind that by “realized evolvable design” I mean not just design that is capable of incremental improvement, but design which has actually undergone substantial incremental improvement, or which has spawned a large number of useful variants. Soyuz is one obvious candidate. I suspect that there are Russian spacesuit designs which also meet the criteria for realized evolvable design.

This post honestly started out as just a pointer to the new RocketForge mug, but obviously I’m in a bit of a rambling frame of mind. For more on why you too should be a fan of the RL-10, check out the relevant collection of archived Usenet posts on Yarchive.

That’s the date that, with a little luck, the insurance company loses their money. And the date after which it starts to get easier to raise money.

Apparently SpaceShipOne’s problems have been resolved. Burt says that he’s ready for the X-Prize flight attempts (though there’s not yet been a formal announcement). Alan Boyle has the story as well.

Here’s an interesting article, on a couple of levels.

With demand waning for its traditional service – clearing Arctic shipping lanes – the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operates the world’s only fleet of atomic icebreakers, has started offering tourists a chance to chill out at the top of the world for $20,000 per head.

The business has outraged environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth Norway, which is urging would-be ticket buyers to consider the damage a nuclear accident can do to the pristine region’s fragile ecosystem…

… The green group has found an unexpected ally in the Russian Audit Chamber. Parliament’s budgetary watchdog, after investigating partially state-owned Murmansk Shipping’s finances earlier this year, urged the government to revoke the company’s license to operate the fully state-owned icebreakers because it had “improperly used $79 million worth of state property and cheated the state out of $7.3 million in revenues,” auditor Yury Tsvetkov said June 29.

The superficial (i.e., obvious) one is the issue of whether or not we’ll let environmental groups object to tourism on grounds either real or spurious (and in particular, the notion that it shouldn’t be allowed because it’s a nuclear-powered ship is extremely spurious, and one that we should expect to confront in the future as we start to use nuclear reactors in space).

But the other one is that the Russian government itself is opposed to such tourism. That indicates to me that some there are starting to figure out what things actually cost, and that the tourist dollars don’t actually cover the operating costs.

While popular legend has it that Dennis Tito paid twenty millions bucks for his ride into space, reality is that such things are extremely negotiable, and that he actually paid much less (perhaps a little over half) of that amount. The Russian space program has survived largely on the basis of its prestige (one of the few things that Russia can surpass the US at, at least by some criteria). If they discover that tourist flights (and NASA payments) aren’t covering the true costs, will that continue?