SAS's View Of Things, As Of 2/15/06
What Do We Believe?
We believe radically cheaper space access (ten to a hundred times less
than current costs) would be a massive public good. It would enhance
existing space markets and open up potentially huge new ones, creating
new opportunities for research, exploration, commerce, and defense.
We believe such radically cheaper access is practical without radical
new technology.
Why Do We Believe This Is Possible?
Current US launch costs are dominated by large fixed development,
personnel, and facilities overheads amortized over a very small number
of launches, plus the direct and indirect costs of throwing away or
completely rebuilding the vehicle every flight. These are all legacies
of the way we originally got into space, hiring small armies to inspect-
in adequate quality to hastily-converted ballistic missiles. Fifty
years later, we've institutionalized these methods into massive self-
perpetuating bureaucracies rather than abandoning them as obsolete.
Somewhat counterintuitively, fuel costs are not a major obstacle to
radically cheaper space launch. Current US launch costs are on the
order of ten thousand dollars per pound delivered to low orbit. The
total propellant cost for a generic liquid-oxygen/kerosene launcher is
on the rough order of ten dollars per pound delivered to low orbit.
Airlines, flying reusable vehicles at high flight rates, typically
operate at overall costs of two to three times their fuel costs. There
is no law of physics that prevents reusable rockets from approaching
similar cost ratios. We pay the crippling current cost of US launch
largely because of fifty years of entrenched bureaucratic bad habits.
OK, How Do We Go About Fixing This?
We believe that radically cheaper access is possible in the near term
with current technology, by operating reusable rockets with sufficiently
lean organizations at sufficiently high flight rates. Rocketry has
become more medium-tech than high, as witness (among other things)
growing third-world missile proliferation. At the same time, modern
lightweight materials and electronics greatly ease combining the
necessary high performance, ability to abort intact in case of problems,
and fast-turnaround small-groundcrew reusability. This lets us break
away from the traditional expendable-missile "ammunition" design and
"standing army" operations mindsets, with potential huge benefits to
cost and reliability.
What's been lacking to date has been the proper combination of
reasonable goals (it's DC-3 time, not 747), sensible focussed
management, inspired engineering (KISS!), and funding. Much depends on
a leap of faith - faith in the studies that show large new markets
emerging at lower launch costs to support the necessary higher flight
rates - "if you build it, they will come".
Market studies do strongly indicate that somewhere around one-tenth of
current US launch costs, the market for space launch will reach a
tipping point where demand for launches starts expanding fast enough to
more than make up for reduced per-launch revenue. The overall launch
market will start growing rapidly at that point, as investment in
further launch cost reductions changes from a leap of faith to a sure
thing. Further cost reductions will drive further market expansion, to
the point where the space transport market will rapidly begin to
approach the air transport market in economic importance. (At least two
such new markets, tourism and post revolution-in-military-affairs
defense, are already growing steadily less speculative. The chief thing
we can predict about the other new markets that will appear as costs
drop is that they'll surprise us. Who would have predicted in 1952
that, say, fresh flowers would be profitably airfreighted across
oceans?)
Our Major Goal
Our major goal at Space Access Society is to help bootstrap space
transportation costs downward to the point where this virtuous circle
gets underway. We see this as the approach to humanity permanently
expanding off this planet with by far the best chance of success.
Government programs come and go, but if there's profit in a thing it's
here to stay.
(If you have to ask why humanity expanding off this planet in a
sustainable manner is a capital-G Good Thing, consider trends in
worldwide resource demand growth as billions of Third Worlders play
economic catchup, or in scientific understanding of the degree of
fragility of this planet and the lack of leverage we have over it while
planetbound.)
As for who might produce such lower-cost access anytime soon...
Very Unlikely NASA
In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have long ago dismantled the
NASA "human spaceflight" empire for being a massive inflexible
bureaucracy neither able nor willing to make any real changes in what
they do: Flying a half-dozen people on a handful of missions a year at
billions of dollars a mission. We'd have put money into low-cost access
demonstration projects and investment incentives, and once the results
started flying we'd have rebuilt NASA as a far smaller leading-edge
research and exploration agency flying dozens of times a year on other
people's rockets at less cost than it now (in a good year) flies a
handful of times on its own.
Alas, in this imperfect world NASA JSC/KSC/MSFC and their contractors
represent a volume of Federal white collar jobs funding just about
impossible to redirect with the limited political capital available.
The loss of Columbia and the CAIB report's damning revelations of
institutional dysfunction shook things up enough that the White House in
January 2004 called for major change at NASA: Finish Station and retire
Shuttle by 2010, then use the annual billions saved to transition to a
sustainable program of manned deep space exploration, beginning with a
return to the Moon to stay.
The first major hitch emerged last summer, when Discovery needed blind
luck to avoid destruction by essentially the same foam-shedding problem
that doomed Columbia, despite two years and billions of dollars spent
"fixing" things. Obviously the bureaucratic sclerosis identified in the
CAIB report hadn't been cured. No surprise - much of the "reform" so
far has been manager-shuffles and pious declarations of good intent.
NASA human spaceflight still awaits serious reform.
The latest problem is the new plan to implement the President's
orders, the Exploration Systems Architecture Study or ESAS. This plan
is crippled from the start in that it doesn't contemplate more than
trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army. It
calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary
Shuttle-derived launch vehicles, rather than working with existing and
future US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures
costs will stay far too high for the program to have any chance of doing
sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term. Possibly too
high to allow NASA to make it past even the first major hurdle,
simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the
oversized new "CEV" Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV
launcher to lift it.
Even if NASA can pull off winddown of Shuttle/Station in parallel with
development of CEV/CLV, we have grave doubts about any "minor" programs
aimed at our concerns surviving the funding crunch this will produce
over the rest of the decade. Even with the best will in the world at
NASA HQ, Congress will be looking hard for potential cuts - programs
already described as outside the main effort will have a hard time
surviving.
What Should NASA Do?
What do we think genuine reform at NASA would look like? We have three
broad guidelines for what the agency should do to fix itself:
- NASA should let go of controlling their own space transportation from
start to finish. They should make an exploration plan based on a
variety of commercially available boosters, then put the entire ground-
to-orbit leg of their new deep space missions out to commercial bid.
- NASA should lay off and/or BRAC large parts of their Shuttle/Station
establishment as Shuttle is shut down and Station completed, rather than
once again compulsively trying to "keep the team together". It's been a
long time since this team had a winning season, the payroll is
crippling, and the game has changed. Rebuild from the ground up.
- NASA should let go of numerous arbitrary and/or dated "this is best"
prejudices the organization has accumulated over the years. Old NASA
(as someone once said of a notoriously inbred european royal house)
forgets nothing, and it learns nothing.
How To Fix ESAS?
More narrowly, the core problem we see with NASA's current Exploration
plan is the way every part of it depends on every other - if one element
among CEV, CLV, SDHLV etc fails, the whole plan fails. Therefore, no
element can be allowed to fail, which is a recipe for spending years
shovelling good money after bad to solve the inevitable development
problems. We went down this road already with Shuttle/Station; we're
still paying through the nose for the deathgrip interdependence of all
elements of those programs.
We strongly recommend ESAS be altered as follows:
- Maintain an option to launch CEV on EELV, as a hedge against CLV
development or cost problems.
- Add a serious commercial orbital propellant delivery component to the
COTS program demonstrations, as a hedge against SDHLV development or
cost problems.
- Maintain and expand the COTS program overall while ensuring a level
playing field and support of multiple options, as a hedge against cost
or development problems with government space transportation elements in
general, and as a way to eventually get far more commercial bang for
NASA's exploration bucks. This would make it far more likely the nation
will get an enduring and productive deep-space exploration program for
its money in the long run.
Alas, given the systemic obstacles to real change at NASA, we're not
holding our breath for anything much beyond but business as usual under
a new name, absent ongoing pressure for reform from outside the agency.
One useful thing we would like to see from NASA (though we're still not
holding our breath) would be for them to publicly state that launch cost
reductions impractical in the context of their large and inflexible
organization, complex requirements, and miniscule flight rate may be
eminently practical elsewhere. NASA's repeated oversimplification of
"it's impossible for us" into "it's impossible" seriously muddys the
waters for commercial cheap-launch investment.
Probably Not DOD
The Defense Department is starting to get interested. Discussing
the military implications of near-term radically cheaper on-demand
launch hasn't been career suicide for years now, DARPA and AFRL are
funding some useful work, and the Air Force is putting some money into
fast-response space access. Unfortunately DOD's last reorganization
consolidated space under USAF, which over the medium term is allergic to
any serious development which might compete with F-22 and F-35 funding.
We don't expect DOD to produce radically cheaper access anytime soon.
Almost Certainly Not BoeNorLock
The existing major aerospace companies may or may not still be
organizationally capable of developing radically cheaper space
transportion - recent signs are not good - but this is a moot question,
since absent a deep-pockets government customer, none will try. They've
had that sort of risk-taking thoroughly squeezed out of them over the
last generation. It isn't going to happen.
The Startups
This leaves the entrepreneurial startups as our main hope for a cheap
space transportation revolution. Few of them yet look like much:
Several have serious funding, a few have test-flown hardware, but most
still tend to be a handful of engineers working on a shoestring with an
ambitious business plan and a partially refined design. But
historically, every time there's been a revolution in transportation
technology, new companies have taken over from the old established
leaders. The massively complex organizational structures that evolved
to squeeze marginally acceptable reliability out of modified artillery
rockets are more hindrance than help in dealing with the new high-
flight-rate reusable paradigm. The startups should be supported and
encouraged - individually they're long shots, but collectively they're
by far our best bet for a spacefaring future.
Practically speaking, this means we at SAS are supporting these
entrepreneurial startups, while encouraging the Federal commercial
launch regulators to strike a reasonable balance between public safety
and not strangling this new industry in its cradle. We have seen
significant progress in this regard, though there's still a ways to go.
We also encourage the parts of the federal government nominally charged
with advancing US space launch technology - NASA and DOD - to do the
right things, but especially in the former case, not with any great hope
of near-term major results.
So, What *Do* We Like?
A brief word about our idea of "the right things": We don't trust X-33
style all-in-one megaprojects. Since these tend to concentrate all
available R&D money in one place, they get zeroed-in on and captured by
the Usual Suspects. Since such a megaproject tends to be the only game
in town, it gets overburdened with conflicting agendas. Since nobody
knows how to build rockets that fulfill all those different agendas (and
the Usual Suspects seem to have a hard time building rockets at all
anymore), advanced space launch megaprojects in recent decades reliably
get sucked dry of money then abandoned with no useful result.
We do like flight demonstrators - "X projects", if you will - but
smaller more traditional ones that focus on taking one significant new
technology at a time and making it ready for prime time. We also like
incentive prizes, demonstrably a great way to leverage a lot of creative
talent for not so many bucks. In both cases, we lean toward splitting
up available funding enough different ways that the Usual Suspects can't
be bothered to hoover it all up, so fresh new ideas get a chance and
eager new development teams can build up their skills.
Fortunately, as we've said before, the nature of our revolution is that
it doesn't cost much. Getting just 1% of the overall government space
budget going to incentive prizes, flight demonstrators, and such, might
be enough. Between COTS, Centennial Challenges, and various DOD
efforts, this might now be in reach.
-end-