Space Access Update #114 2/20/06
Copyright 2006 by Space Access Society
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Contents This Issue:
- Space Access '06 Hotel Info & Conference Info
- Some Thoughts On The Revolution
- Industry Roundup
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Space Access '06 April 20-22 in Phoenix Arizona
Preliminary Conference Info
Space Access '06 is our upcoming annual conference on the technology,
business, and politics of radically cheaper space transportation,
featuring a cross-section of leading players in the field. Our
fourteenth annual conference will once again be an intensive informal
snapshot of where the burgeoning low-cost space access industry is this
spring of 2006. Space Access conferences are specifically set up to
maximize opportunities for exchanging information and doing business.
No rubber-chicken banquets, just an intensive single-track schedule in a
setting with plenty of comfortable places to go off and talk during the
breaks, not least of these our world-famous Hospitality suite.
Our location this year is the Grace Inn, 10831 S 51st St, Phoenix
Arizona, a clean modern resort hotel seven freeway miles from the
Phoenix Airport, with a free airport shuttle. Our special conference
room rate, taxes and full buffet breakfast included, is $99 a night
single or double, $119 for a suite. Call 1 800 843-6010 for room
reservations, mention "space access". Space Access '06 times are
Thursday April 20th 2 pm through ~10 pm, Friday the 21st and and
Saturday the 22nd 9 am to ~10 pm. (We will post a more detailed agenda
as the conference approaches and we pin down our speakers' travel
schedules.)
Confirmed speakers so far: Armadillo Aerospace, FAA AST, Len
Cormier/PanAero, Mike Kelly/ Personal Spaceflight Federation, Jim
Muncy/Polispace, Jerry Pournelle, Rocketplane LLC, Henry Spencer, TGV
Rockets, XCOR Aerospace. Watch for additional speakers as they confirm
plus other conference info at:
http://www.space-access.org/updates/sa06info.html. (We are very
conservative about listing speakers as confirmed; expect this list to
grow fast as we catch up with a bunch of interesting people who've
indicated they'd like to talk over the last year.)
Space Access '06 registration is $100 in advance, $120 at the door.
Student rate is $30. (Day rates available at the door.) Mail checks
to: Space Access Society, 5515 N 7th St #5-348, Phoenix AZ 85014. Be
sure to include your name, address, affiliation info for your badge (if
desired), and an email address (for Updates) with your Space Access '06
advance registration.
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Some Thoughts On The Revolution
We are going to take a look once again at what Space Access Society is
trying to accomplish, and why, and how we think it's going lately.
(Bear with us, old hands, we actually have a few new points to make.)
US space launch prices currently run on the rough order of ten thousand
dollars per pound delivered to low orbit, the first essential step into
the solar system. We're here because we think it's possible, by
applying sensible management and inspired engineering to existing rocket
technology, to bring this cost down by one to two orders of magnitude.
(See http://www.space-access.org/updates/saspolcy.html for the detailed
arguments behind this assertion.)
What interests us here today though is that the core of our position,
the possibility of as much as a hundredfold lower launch costs without
waiting for radically new technologies to arrive, has spent a long time
as a matter of faith among a small minority, a point argued mainly by
analysis, a point absent proof not widely accepted.
For a while we thought we had our proof in DC-X, built and flown and
flown again by SDIO for a fraction of traditional government aerospace
costs. But the limited nature of the DC-X project and the massive botch
NASA made of the X-33 followon combined to hopelessly muddy the waters.
We had additional evidence, but persuasive proof remained lacking.
Then in fall 2004 Paul Allen, Burt Rutan, and company won the X-Prize,
and in the process beat the old X-15 piloted suborbital altitude record,
for just over one percent of what the X-15 program cost. We had a new
proof, one hard to ignore, one that quickly started catalyzing multiple
funded followup projects. Hallelujah, the revolution was at hand!
We have more proofs in the pipeline this year - SpaceX will soon take
their next shot at demonstrating they can match Russian expendable space
launch costs (several times lower than traditional US Big Aerospace)
even while paying US wage, materials, and overhead rates. We expect
them to succeed, if not this time (first launches of new boosters are
historically a 50-50 thing) then the next, or the next. And in the
coming months, Bigelow Aerospace will orbit their first subscale demo of
a commercial inflatable orbital habitat. Both the means to get there
and a place to go to, already at near an order of magnitude below
traditional Big Aerospace costs, are on the verge of changing from sci-
fi wishful thinking to demonstrated fact.
So. The revolution is unstoppable now, right? And the winners are
established and can start coining money? The rest of us should all go
home now - right?
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It's been another good year - a great year -
but there's still a long hard road ahead.
We've seen the revolution arrive unstoppably before, twice now in just
over a decade, with the flights of DC-X and then with the prospect of
skies dark with low-orbit telecomms satellites. Far too much might yet
go wrong with this "unstoppable revolution" too.
As for the winners being established, everyone else can go home now...
We can forgive such sentiments, between well-earned euphoria and
understandable preemptive marketing hype (this is America, after all)
but the history of previous transportation revolutions tells us that the
first often don't dominate in the long run. Else we'd all be riding in
Curtiss-Wright airliners... We think there's room for a bunch of
competitive new entrants, and may the best ships win. But the only
halfway safe bet right now is that the Boeing and Airbus of the mid-21st
century won't be called "Boeing" and "Airbus".
Keep in mind too that there are large engineering hurdles still ahead.
Those taking the reusable suborbital development path need to keep in
mind that winning the X-Prize took handling perhaps a tenth of the
energy involved in getting to orbit. Even going long distances point-
to-point on Earth will require two-thirds to three-quarters of orbital
energy; there's no obvious small easy next step there. Meanwhile, those
going for orbit now and reusability later also have some major hurdles
ahead. We advocate reusability, but we don't pretend it's easy in a
vehicle that has to make it to orbit and back - it will take some
inspired engineering and a lot of hard work.
Getting to orbit and back reliably, repeatably, and radically cheaper is
going to take additional generations of reusable rocketship development.
The good news is, we're seeing ever more proof that a generation of
spacecraft development done right (outside the sclerotic existing
government-aerospace bureaucracy) can happen in just a few years, not
decades. Multiple generations of development per decade are possible -
it's been done before. It's starting to happen again now, in the new
private space sector.
But then there are the legal aspects - government regulations, plus the
closely intertwined issues of liability and insurance costs. We've seen
progress on these fronts, and we're cautiously optimistic, but there's
still a lot of work ahead here too.
And let's not forget the purely political angle - we have three more
years of a relatively supportive Administration to get as much done as
possible. After that we could see anything from continued support
through indifference to outright ideological hostility from DC. Make
hay while the sun shines, guys...
But we can't complain. These are great times. We're not there yet -
but we are getting there.
Viva la revolucion!
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Industry Roundup
This is not intended to be a comprehensive look at the state of the new
low-cost spaceflight industry. (For that, you're better off monitoring
on an ongoing basis the websites that do daily coverage - not to slight
anyone else, but www.spacetransportnews.com is one good place to start
following links and building up bookmarks.) Rather, we're going to skip
around to various items that made an impression on us in recent months,
with an occasional interjection of our views on one thing or another.
We are seeing signs that this industry is growing up fast. One trend is
specialization - rocketship builders are starting to differentiate from
rocketship operators, something that happened to the air transport
industry too around the time it was getting serious.
Another is that rocketship builders are beginning to access a novel
method of finance for this industry: Paying customers, both government
agencies wanting a mix of tech development and delivered payloads, and
commercial operators wanting actual ships to fly.
And while most company finance in this industry is still via some
variant of "angel investors", aka wealthy individuals, there have been a
number of signs that the venture capital industry may not be that far
behind. First there's all the positive press buzz of the last year, of
course. Never underestimate the herd factor in investment trends.
There are also signs of a fundamental VC investment requirement firming
up: The exit strategy. One time-honored way to cash out investment in
an innovative startup is by selling out to an established player that
wants a foot in the new door. Arianespace showed up at the X-Prize
Cup's Personal Spaceflight Symposium last fall "looking for possible
connections" in this new industry. We've seen indications the US launch
majors too are keeping a close eye on developments among the startups.
Looking to eventually buy what they can't foster internally? It
wouldn't be unprecedented.
On the regulatory front, things keep moving forward. FAA AST's Notice
of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on commercial human spaceflight is open
for comment through February 27th - text of the NPRM is at:
http://ast.faa.gov/files/pdf/Human_Space_Flight_NPRM.pdf. This is AST's
proposed implementation of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act
passed just over a year ago, now well on its way to becoming detailed
regulations.
And there's a "Space Weather Week" gettogether in Boulder April 25-28 -
see http://www.sec.noaa.gov/sww/. Some of the people involved will be
at Space Access '06 the week before, holding private discussions with
interested industry parties, AKA potential customers for timely space
weather information.
The X-Prize Cup
Probably the single place that brought together more interesting trends
in this industry (at least until Space Access '06 this April) was the X-
Prize Cup series of events in New Mexico last fall. On the downside,
events were scattered over four days and a quarter of the state, and
there was a certain amount of first-time disorganization and slack time.
On the upside, a lot of good and interesting things happened. We
already mentioned Arianespace checking out the new industry. Virgin
Galactic's Alex Tai emphasized to the same Personal Spaceflight
Symposium audience that Virgin will primarily be an operator, not a
developer, saying more or less "if you have a better spaceship, then we
want to operate it" - making clear that Virgin's deal with Scaled
Composites for SpaceShip 2 suborbital tourist ships is non-exclusive.
Armadillo and XCOR both flew - for pay - reusable rockets, XCOR twice
the same afternoon, wowing the (large, paying) crowd at the day-long
"Prelude To The X-Prize Cup" rocket festival at Las Cruces Airport.
Much of the rest of the industry showed up with static displays, booths
and mockups, some threatening to be back next year with flyable ships
themselves . XCOR CEO Jeff Greason, by the way, mentioned at the
Symposium that XCOR's marginal cost per flight of their EZ-Rocket
demonstrator was about $900, stunningly low by Big Aerospace standards
of recent decades. And Peter Diamandis, wearing his Zero-G Corp
(weightless parabolic-arc airplane rides) hat, mentioned that their
operation has achieved a spacesickness rate among passengers of under
4%, as opposed to the NASA "Vomit Comet" record of 25-50%. Being
customer-driven can make a difference, apparently. (Though to be fair,
one skeptic points out to us that NASA typically flies several times as
many parabolic arcs as he experienced on his Zero-G flight.)
Commercial Spaceports
Another, less obvious good thing that happened at the XP Cup events was
that a lot of New Mexico movers and shakers showed up to see whether
they should take this new industry seriously. New Mexico got burned in
the late nineties putting tens of millions into a spaceport aimed at X-
33, and the memory lingers. Apparently they were reassured by what they
saw this time. The New Mexico legislature just approved the first
hundred million in funding (of $225 million total expected) for the new
Southwest Regional Spaceport to be built on state land west of the White
Sands Missile Range, with Virgin Galactic as an anchor tenant.
Commercial spaceport development has become a hot topic in general.
Over at Mojave Spaceport, Burt Rutan has said that he expects that among
four or five different potential SpaceShipTwo operators, at least two
would fly out of the already-licensed California facility, home base to
Rutan's scaled Composites, XCOR, and a number of other outfits.
Virgin made clear that New Mexico's greater willingness to provide
incentives for siting there was a factor in their decision. There is a
Futron estimate that by 2020 the new spaceport could return some 5,800
new jobs and $752 million new economic activity to the state. New
Mexico expects to obtain their FAA spaceport license by the end of 2006.
In the meantime, UP Aerospace will break in the site with a series of
sounding rocket flights starting in late March under FAA waivers.
Oklahoma meanwhile quietly completed environmental assessments for their
own commercial spaceport at Burns Flats early this year and is expecting
FAA approval in the spring. Oklahoma is already home to Rocketplane LLC
and TGV Rockets.
At the same time, Florida is one of a number of states vigorously
debating making a significant commercial spaceport investment and
looking at possible sites
The Suborbital Contenders
Getting down to actual rocketship builders and operators, now, first
we'll take a look at some of the suborbital contenders. There is a LOT
of action in this field.
We'll start with a look at a sub-suborbital contender... The new Rocket
Racing League (RRL) announced by X-Prize's Peter Diamandis and Grainger
Whitelaw (a partner in several Indy 500 racing teams) plans to hold a
series of rocket powered airplane races around the country, culminating
in a yearly fly-off at the October X-Prize Cup event in New Mexico.
(We say "sub-sub-orbital" because the RRL plan is to fly a closed course
at low altitude in front of spectators. We confess to a prejudice in
favor of what rockets do best, flying high straight and fast - Mojave to
Vegas time trials, anyone? - but the RRL approach probably does make for
a better show, and will certainly advance operability of the ships
quickly, as reliability and turnaround time in refuelling pit-stops will
be key competitive elements. We'll watch this sport.)
The rocket racers are inspired by XCOR's "EZ-Rocket" operations-testbed
conversion of a Long-EZ light sportplane, and will be based on a higher
performance airframe manufactured by Velocity Aircraft of Florida,
powered by an XCOR 1800-pound thrust LOX-kerosene rocket engine. The
first Rocket Racer is expected to fly demos at next October's XP Cup,
with racing to commence the following year.
On to the suborbital spaceflight companies... Armadillo Aerospace plans
to approach 100 kilometers altitude with its latest computer controlled
bipropellant engine Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTVL) rocket this
year. They plan to fly it at next fall's XP Cup event. We expect it's
no coincidence that our back-of-the-envelope performance calculation for
this vehicle matches closely the requirements of a NASA Centennial
Challenges prize contest to be run for the first time at the XP Cup.
The Lunar Lander Analog Challenge has a $2 million prize for the first
vehicle that demonstrates powered vertical takeoff and landing plus
enough velocity change capability to go from Lunar surface to Low Lunar
orbit and back. Detailed rules for this contest are expected out in the
next few days.
The ever mysterious Blue Origin (funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com)
continues its secretive ways. We've seen information recently primarily
due to legal requirements as they establish facilities. Test flights of
their VTVL suborbital ship from West Texas may come later this year.
The company has purchased a headquarters in Kent, Washington that
includes a rocket test stand and various shop and assembly areas.
Speaking of mysterious, TGV Rockets, the granddaddy of all reusable
suborbital ventures, continues to pursue government rather than
commercial markets, and is looking for a few good engineers. For
anything more than that you'll have to come to Space Access '06 and try
to pry it out of TGV yourself. Good luck!
Rocketplane plans to roll out their prototype Rocketplane XP by the end
of this year, commence test flights early next year, and hopes to start
commercial service late next year. The prototype will be powered by a
Rocketdyne RS-88 50,000 pound thrust engine borrowed from NASA and
derated to the XP's 30,000 pound thrust requirement. (We expect it's
significant the engine is coming from NASA and not Rocketdyne; the
company reputedly is tough to deal with even for large government
customers.) Rocketplane has announced agreements to market seats on the
XP with Incredible Adventures, Inc and with a UK company, Pure Vacations
The latter's marketing division for the flights is called Pure Galactic.
Masten Space Systems is testing and refining its 500 pound thrust engine
and assembling parts for the XA-0.1 VTVL testbed, which through several
iterations is planned to lead to the XA-1.0, 100 kg payload to 100
kilometers system. We understand that they are developing market data
and have started looking for their first round of external investment.
Brian Feeney of the Canadian da Vinci project tells us that development
is continuing on the original three seat, balloon-launched suborbital
ship, but the earliest flight attempt would be in the 1st or 2nd quarter
of 2007. In reaction to others' progress toward commercial suborbital
flight, they have also begun proof of concept work on the Tiger, which
would be a winged nine seat suborbital ship dispensing with the balloon.
UK-based Starchaser twice fired their Churchill II engine at the XP Cup
rocket festival last fall, the second try resulting in a Hollywood-style
billowing fireball. They didn't seem surprised, saying that particular
engine was nearing the end of its expected life. We speculate they may
have decided there was little downside to accidentally doing something
so crowd-pleasing. They have scaled back for the moment their plans for
a 3 person suborbital capsule/reusable rocket, in favor of building and
marketing a smaller unmanned sounding rocket. They have an office in
Las Cruces NM, and are seeking a site for a rocket-assembly facility in
the area.
Planetspace has a lot on their plate, working toward first manned launch
of their Canadian Arrow V-2 derived ship in 2008, announcing the long-
term goal of developing their Silver Dart orbital spacecraft (based on
an old USAF lifting body concept called FDL-7 and powered by a booster
using up to ten of the Canadian Arrow's 70,000 pound class engines) and
working on a NASA COTS proposal based on the Silver Dart.
And in this week's big surprise, Space Adventures in partnership with
the Ansari family's Prodea investment firm announced a deal with a
consortium of Russian aerospace companies via the Russian Federal Space
Agency to build the five-seat "Explorer" suborbital tourist ship, a
larger version of the Myasichev "Cosmopolis 21" air-launched solid-
rocket powered spaceplane that was being promoted a while back. The
deal includes operations from multiple spaceports worldwide, possibly in
the US and Australia, and definitely in the United Arab Emirates and
Singapore. Plans are to be flying as soon as late next year.
Savability
Now, before we move on to some of the low-cost orbital ventures, we want
to briefly climb onto a hobby-horse of ours, "savability". It's an
awkward word, but we haven't come up with a better name for the concept
in nearly twenty years of trying, and it's a vital concept.
Savability is what Max Hunter called the vehicle design characteristic
of being able to, at any point in a flight, decide that things aren't
going well, stop, and land the ship safely. Savability is what makes
modern air travel so safe - modern airliners by design can survive the
vast majority of things that might go wrong, and either turn back and
land or even shrug and continue to the destination.
More subtly, savability is what allows modern aircraft to be flight-
tested incrementally to work out all the bugs before entering service -
from low-speed taxi tests through the first short hop on to exploring
the far corners of the flight envelope, every step of the way if
something goes wrong the test pilots can abort the mission, land the
plane, and try again tomorrow.
Now, savability is never absolute. If an airplane's main wing spar
breaks, it's toast. But savability over the vast majority of possible
failures is what makes modern air travel as safe and cheap as it is.
Traditional "disintegrating totem pole" expendable rockets are totally
unsavable. You cannot incrementally flight-test them - each time you
push the button to fly, it's all or nothing, orbit or a smoking hole in
the ground. This is why these rockets require such painstaking pre-
flight procedures, months of component testing then hours or days of
traditional countdown, as every last system on the rocket is checked and
rechecked. This is also why even the best of such rockets still fail
catastrophically one or two percent of the time - because in a big
complex system like an airplane or a space rocket, some problems simply
won't become visible till the whole system is flying.
Reusability brings the potential of savability to rockets. This, just
as much as not throwing the hardware away, is why we think reusability
is essential to radical cost reductions in the long run. Because until
rockets are engineered to be savable under most possible failures,
neither their safety nor their operability will reach acceptable levels
for routine commercial transportation. They'll take way too much pre-
flight prep, and they'll still crash too often.
Note we said reusability brings the potential of savability, not the
assurance of it. Reusability implies the ability to land the ship again
safely at the end of the flight, but there are all sorts of design
choices that can deny that ability at various intermediate points in a
flight. NASA calls these "black zones", segments of a flight profile
where trying to abort and land means destruction of the ship. A few
common examples: Shuttle launches while the SRBs are burning - there's
no safe way to stop the solids running before they're out of fuel. Any
vehicle while it's still loaded with more weight (propellant or payload)
than it can safely land with, or loaded outside its safe landing center-
of-gravity limits. Any vehicle at a point in its launch profile where
reaching a safe landing requires more maneuverability than it's got, or
requires exceeding aerodynamic or thermal or structural limits.
Savability is something that has to be kept in mind every step of the
way in designing a truly safe operable rocketship. It will be, we
predict, a major factor in separating the successes from the also-rans
in this new industry. Perfect savability is an unachievable ideal, but
adequate savability, most of the time under most circumstances, is key.
The Low-Cost Expendables
SpaceX right now is nearing the end of a long, painful process every
traditional booster maker has had to go through: Working out that last
1% of pre-launch procedure that can't be predicted ahead of time,
dealing with the obscure interactions that don't show up until the
actual vehicle is on an actual launch pad being prepared for an actual
launch. Compounding the difficulties, they're doing this from a launch
site 6000 miles from their home base. We counsel patience, both to them
and to everyone waiting to see how they do on their first attempt to put
Falcon 1 into orbit. We also remind everyone that first launches of
expendable boosters are historically a coin-flip, for reasons alluded to
in the previous section. There's just too much that can go wrong when
the first flight test of a complex system has to get all the way to
orbit. All that said, may the champagne be cold, ready, and earned,
soon!
AirLaunch LLC has been working on the two stage Quickreach rocket to
carry small satellites to orbit at under $5 million per flight with 24
hour response time, as part of the DARPA FALCON program. In the $11
million Phase 2A Airlaunch dropped a dummy booster out the back of a C-
17, proving their concept for bringing the rocket to vertical boost
position so that wings (such as those on the Orbital Sciences Pegasus)
are not needed. In November, Airlaunch got $17.5 million more for Phase
2B, and by January they had successfully ground demonstrated pneumatic
separation of a dry dummy first stage from the second stage nozzle.
AirLaunch is also a partner with T/Space in their NASA COTS program bid,
which proposes a much larger version of this booster (Quickreach 2) to
launch a manned capsule. That booster would also be air dropped, from
external carriage under a large new Scaled Composites carrier aircraft.
A subscale drop test succeeded using the existing Scaled Composites
Proteus carrier aircraft. (It's noteworthy that the dollars for this
flight demonstration came from preliminary COTS study funds that NASA
had assumed would be only adequate for paperwork.)
That's not close to all that's going on in this new industry, but it's
all we have time for now. See you all at SA'06!
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Space Access Society
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"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein