Space Access Update #70 10/18/96 Copyright 1996 by Space Access Society _______________________________________________________________________ Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, it's been eleven weeks since the last Update, and yes, the SAS web page is still a sporadically maintained construction site, and yes, we're way behind on answering our mail. And no, there's been no dearth of news these last couple of months - quite the opposite in fact. But we've been trying a radical experiment in new operational styles here at SAS world HQ. We've been thinking. Which for us is a rather drawn-out process, because your humble servant the Update editor does not in fact make all this stuff up himself. Major SAS policies are generally a matter of consensus among members of our widely-scattered semi-formal mostly-anonymous SAS Advisory Board. (You would not believe the long-distance bills.) And reaching consensus among a bunch of prima donnas like us can take a lot of thrashing even when we _haven't_ just seen our old main rocket fall over and catch fire, and our new main rocket get downselected in a manner that left a lot of us muttering to ourselves "that's not what we meant, dammit!" And now we once again think we know what's going on, and we're once again ready to opine on what should be done about it. Though given the backlog that's built up, we're going to have to be a bit more terse than usual this issue. Read on... _______________________________________________________________________ X-33 If you haven't guessed, we're not wildly happy with the way the X-33 competition came out. In brief, no, it's not a matter of religious fervor for one vehicle configuration over another. We at SAS have consistantly favored whatever configuration lends itself to reliable fast turnaround ops with minimum ground crew out of austere sites - IE max potential for radical cost reduction at high flight rates. We don't care if what does this job is a vertical-lander, a horizontal-lander, or a Cavourite-fuelled Winnebago, as long as it works. Our problem with this spring's X-33 downselect is twofold: NASA is showing a distressing tendency to address NASA internal agendas rather than the national interest, and Lockheed-Martin is showing a distressing tendency to try to turn this into a monopoly on the current (rather limited) US space launch market, rather than treating it as a chance to be the Boeing of a vastly expanded 21st century spaceliner market. Shortsighted in both cases, to say the least. The details could fill a book (they have, see the next item) and we're in a hurry, so for now we'll just say that X-33 can still be a very good thing for the country, given two things: Continuing competition, and rigorous budget/schedule oversight. We have already begun working for both. SAS's X-33 policy is one of "constructive engagement". (A correction to a previous Update: We wrote that Lockheed-Martin's X-33 bid called for spending $2 billion in corporate cash on the hypothetical "commercial RLV" (Reusable Launch Vehicle) followon to X-33. We heard a rumor, we thought we'd found backup for it, we were wrong. L-M plans to put about $220 million into X-33 (about a sixth of the total cost) and about the same again into developing a "commercial" followon (about 5% of the estimated cost of developing and building three ships.)) _______________________________________________________________________ "Halfway To Anywhere" Hits The Bookstores. G.Harry Stine has written the best single account of the cheap space access movement we've seen so far. It's called "Halfway To Anywhere - The Age Of Commercial Space", it's from M.Evans & Company, ISBN 0 87131 805 9, hardback, $21.95, and it should be in bookstores now - if yours doesn't have it, ask them to order it for you. Harry's added a chapter on the X-33 downselect since we saw the galley proofs last spring, and we understand it's incendiary. Highly recommended. _______________________________________________________________________ DC-X Hits the Dirt Y'all likely know by now that DC-XA had a landing gear problem on its fourth flight (at the end of July, 12th flight for the DC-X overall), fell over post-landing, caught fire when the liquid oxygen tank split open, and was essentially destroyed. Another correction of a previous Update: DC-X's landing gear was pneumatically operated, not as we reported hydraulic. And the "repeated partial gear extensions" we thought we'd spotted on the tapes of the last flight were in fact a spring-hinged pad-umbilical hatch cover flapping in the breeze. Oh well. (You can check the tapes yourself now, see the next item.) It turns out the reason one gear leg didn't extend was that a pneumatic hose was disconnected during servicing then not reconnected. Nothing fancy, just a mechanic's error in a single-string no-backup system. Given how long the ground crew had been working ridiculous hours in desert heat on God's own reflector-oven of a lakebed, eight hundred miles from their homes and families, on a project with the axe poised over it, and we hear with major hiatuses in paychecks, we hereby offer to punch the lights out of anyone who faults them for this. X-vehicles inherently have a lot of single-string, no-backup subsystems. It's a tradeoff; build it cheap, dirty, and quick and try to collect the data you need before it breaks. Then you put multiple-backup landing gear actuator systems into the operational vehicle that comes after. The main lesson to be learned here is already known: Build two copies of your X-vehicle, since you almost certainly will break at least one - probably in a manner that in 20-20 hindsight seems pretty dumb. EG, the X-31 lost to air-data-sensor icing. Beyond that, we'd guess that not jerking your field test crew around for months on end with funding interruptions and threatened program terminations is also a good idea. NASA's Brand Commission is due to come out with its formal accident report sometime before the end of this month. If they say "build two copies, don't burn out the ground crew, don't use marginally-welded testing-damaged aluminum-lithium propellant tanks", we agree. If they recommend microscopically comprehensive written procedures and lab- coated clipboard-bearing hordes of overseers to enforce compliance, we will likely have one or two negative things to say about that opinion. _______________________________________________________________________ Revised Video Has All Twelve DC-X Flights Late but better than never department: We now have a revised 3.1 version of our DC-X/SSTO 3.0 tape, with about twenty minutes of footage of all four DC-XA flights copied onto the end, including two views of DC-XA's final flight and post-landing fire. Two hours total, includes animations of all three X-33 bids and considerable SSTO background material including aerospike engine test-stand footage. US standard VHS NTSC only. Same price as the 3.0 tape, $25 US, $20 for SAS members. $5 off if you've already bought the 3.0 tape - there's a lot of overlap. Add $8 for postage outside North America. Mail a check to SAS, 4855 E Warner Rd #24-150, Phoenix AZ 85044. _______________________________________________________________________ Space Access '97 Conference And earlier than ever before, we have a hotel signed up for next year's "Space Access '97" conference. It'll be the last weekend in April, evening of Friday the 25th through evening of Sunday the 27th, at the same hotel as last year, the Safari Resort in downtown Scottsdale, Arizona, fifteen minutes from the Phoenix airport. Room rates are $63 a night, up a whole dollar from last year, call 1-800-845-4356 for reservations and mention "Space Access" for the rate. This will be the fifth time we've done our annual conference on the technology, economics, and politics of radically cheaper space access. Ask anyone who's been to one already: everybody who's anybody is there, talking informally about the absolute latest developments in cheap access. Hear more new ideas in an hour than you'll catch all weekend anywhere else. SA'97 registration is $80 through December 31st, $100 through mid-April, $120 at the door, $10 off for SAS members. $50 student rate. We're holding the line at last year's prices; these things are not cheap to put on - but they're worth it! Mail us a check now and save. _______________________________________________________________________ Miscellaneous News $25m in FY'96 DOD reusable rocket finally cleared OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defence, where the financial comptroller seems to think he has a policy-making role) and got to where it's needed. Just as well, as FY'97 money was reduced to $10m in the last-second scramble to make an election year budget. Largely, we gather, due to the lack of a high- profile reusable rocket program in DOD, post DC-X. Stay tuned for more on this subject - FY'97 has barely begun. NASA's FY'97 RLV budget, meanwhile, passed essentially unchanged. Good news, in that theoretically this allows the X-33 project to get off to a running start. Now if only the Lockheed-Martin public affairs types would figure out that this is NOT a black project, that times have changed and they're supposed to spread info, not hide it. We might then have some idea what we're getting for this year's couple of hundred million of our money. Meanwhile, in the commercial world... Kistler Aerospace's engine contractor has taken delivery of the first three shipsets of Russian NK-33 engines for Kistler's planned commercial reusable medium-lift two-stage-to-orbit cargo ship. Kelly Space & Technology has taken delivery of two surplus F-106's (a fifties-vintage delta winged long range interceptor with a 15' by 3' internal missile bay) they plan to use for proof-of-concept demos of their proposed "Eclipse" winged air-launched (towed by a 747) reusable medium-lift cargo ship. Motorola announced they're buying options on ten Eclipse satellite launches for 1999-2000, valued at $8.9 million. This can't hurt in Kelly obtaining development financing. No word on how much Motorola has paid for the options. The Boeing-Zenit Sea Launch project (Boeing will fly Ukranian SL-16 Zenit boosters off a mobile ocean platform) is moving forward briskly, as are McDonnell-Douglas's Delta 3 and Lockheed-Martin's Atlas 2AR. All of these are essentially commercially financed expendable booster projects, intended to compete for commercial launches. Not yet cheap access, but the fact that commercial funding is available for well over a billion dollars of new launch projects is extremely encouraging. Between these (and several new/surplus-military small boosters coming soon) and the various medium-launch reusable companies starting to get financing, we see the beginnings of a major commercial space expansion that will be financing, building, and flying low-cost commercial reusable ships a whole lot sooner than most people expect. We like it. -----------------------(SAS Policy Boilerplate)------------------------ Space Access Update is Space Access Society's when-there's-news publication. Space Access Society's goal is to promote affordable access to space for all, period. We believe in concentrating our resources at whatever point looks like yielding maximum progress toward this goal. Right now, we think this means working our tails off trying to get the government to build and fly high-speed reusable rocket demonstrators, "X-rockets", in the next three years, in order to quickly build up both experience with and confidence in reusable Single-Stage To Orbit (SSTO) technology. The idea is to reduce SSTO technical uncertainty (and thus development risk and cost) while at the same time increasing investor confidence, to the point where SSTO will make sense as a private commercial investment. We have reason to believe we're getting close. With luck and hard work, we should see fully-reusable rocket testbeds flying into space well before the end of this decade, with practical radically cheaper orbital transports following right after. Space Access Society won't accept donations from government launch contractors - it would limit our freedom to do what's needed. We survive on member dues and contributions, plus what we make selling tapes and running our annual conference. Join us, and help us make it happen. Henry Vanderbilt, Executive Director, Space Access Society To join Space Access Society or buy the SSTO/DC-X V 3.1 video we have for sale (Two hours, includes all twelve DC-X/XA flights, X-33 animations, X-33, DC-X and SSTO backgrounders, aerospike engine test- stand footage, plus White Sands Missile Range DC-X ops site footage) mail a check to: SAS, 4855 E Warner Rd #24-150, Phoenix AZ 85044. SAS membership with direct email of Space Access Updates is $30 US per year; the SSTO V 3.0 video is $25, $5 off for SAS members, $5 off for previous version 3.0 purchasers, $8 extra for shipping outside North America, US standard VHS NTSC only. SA'97 conference registration (April 25-27 1997, at the Safari Resort in Scottsdale Arizona) is $80 through December 31st, $10 off for SAS members. $50 SA'97 student rate. __________________________________________________________________________ Space Access Society "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere 4855 E Warner Rd #24-150 in the Solar System." Phoenix AZ 85044 - Robert A. Heinlein 602 431-9283 voice/fax www.space-access.org "You can't get there from here." space.access@space-access.org - Anonymous - Permission granted to redistribute the full and unaltered text of this - - piece, including the copyright and this notice. All other rights - - reserved. 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