Space Access Update #89 8/25/99 Copyright 1999 by Space Access Society ________________________________________________________________________ Stories This Issue: - Sixth Anniversary of DC-X First Flight - Congress On Break Till September - Space Funding Bills Status - Miscellany - Rotary Rocket Reprieve, Kistler Gets Funding & Moves Forward, NASA STAS Process Underway Again, Daimler-Chrysler and Boeing Reveal Reusable Launch Plans, GAO Report On X-33 Overruns ________________________________________________________________________ Editorial: Sixth Anniversary of DC-X's One Small Hop On August 18th, 1993, a forty-foot boilerplate traffic-cone of a rocket rose a hundred-fifty feet above the New Mexico desert, translated three hundred feet sideways, then came down to a precision-controlled landing. Not much of a flight - it was described at the time as a "bunny-hop" - but this was still a revolutionary milestone, for a couple of reasons: One, it was a reusable rocket, designed to be flown and flown again in days rather than months, by a ground crew of dozens rather than thousands, from a site set up from a few tractor-trailers rather than a huge industrial complex - all key factors in getting space launch costs down from their traditional astronomical levels. Two, this had been accomplished in less than three years from go- ahead on less than sixty million dollars to first flight - radically faster and cheaper than the aerospace establishment had come to consider possible for such projects. If the original DC-X/DC-Y plan had not already grounded hard on the shoals of politics (SDIO imprudently added to DC-Y a (grossly premature) 25,000 lb payload requirement, leading the Congress to truncate the program at DC-X), we would likely by now have seen flight test of an aimed-at-orbital "X" DC-Y, one with no payload but test gear (and test pilots?) and no purpose but exploring what affordable reusable rocket spaceflight takes. We would by now very likely be a year or two into development of practical low-cost reusable space transports, rather than a year short of, fingers crossed that nothing breaks, demonstrating high- cost single-stage-to-Utah reusable rocket flight. Oh well, it's water over the dam now. We are still better off than we were before DC-X. It changed perceptions radically - reusable rockets are now widely seen as practical, with the debate moved on to who pays and what flavor(s) to build. Low-cost rapid-paced experimental aerospace projects are once again accepted as doable, though the funding balance between a handful of these and the contractor-in-every-district megaprojects is still not what we'd like to see - NASA still hasn't figured out that sponsoring one "winner" in each market segment now is a way to pay monopoly prices later. We think it's obvious that a policy of more DC-X class, X-34 class RLV concept demonstrators, from a variety of vendors large and small, would pay off big in reduced launch costs down the line. It may have been three steps forward, two steps back since DC-X first flew, but that beats the heck out of no progress at all. So spare a thought this summer day for the little rocket that could - and help us get more such projects funded. Which brings us to... ________________________________________________________________________ Congress On Break Till September - Space Funding Bills Status As of Friday August 6th, Congress went into recess and out of DC until after Labor Day. Here's the current status of the various funding bills we're interested in this year. - The House passed its NASA Authorization a while ago, with some very good language on our proposed Future-X "X-Ops" program plus $30 million new money authorized for it. (An authorization bill is an officially approved shopping list; money isn't actually provided to a program until it's "appropriated".) The Senate, meanwhile, almost certainly won't pass a NASA Authorization this year. - The Defense Authorization conference took place just before the recess; Space Maneuver Vehicle was authorized at up to $35 million. - The House and Senate have both passed their Defense Appropriations, the House with nothing for Space Maneuver Vehicle (SMV), the Senate with $25 million. We'll be pushing for the Senate number when the House-Senate conference comes. (SMV is either a second NASA X-37 or a first USAF X-40B, depending on who you ask - the AF people apparently need enough internal differences from the X-37 that a separate designator might make sense, but both would be built by the X-37 contractor with pretty much the same basic airframe. Either way, it's a very useful reusable upper stage with non-toxic storable fuels, with considerable potential for extended operations in orbit before reentry, landing, and reuse.) - The House Appropriations Committee marked up their NASA (HUD/VA/Independent Agencies) Appropriations bill with a $900 million dollar cut (down from a $1.3 billion cut in subcommittee), the majority of it from space sciences, causing a considerable stir. Advanced space launch work had already come down $150 million this year from last, largely a reflection of X-33 being past its funding peak, and was not further reduced. Future-X stayed level at $30 million. Given the massive cuts elsewhere in this version of the funding bill, no new reductions in advanced space launch is a victory of sorts - it's harder for them to further cut areas where there's active pressure for an increase. Thanks, y'all. We must emphasize that this House NASA appropriation with its large cuts is an interim result, a side-effect of the tax-cut/budget-caps fight between Congress and the White House. Chances are that fight will be settled in some sort of compromise in the next month or so, with a significant part of the NASA cuts restored and with some room for minor increases in high priority areas. We are working hard to see that Future-X X-Ops is treated as such a priority - this year. - The Senate still hasn't started the process on their NASA (HUD/VA) Appropriation; the sequence would be markup by the Senate Appropriations Committee's HUD/VA subcommittee, then markup by the full Committee, then a Senate floor vote. The Senate seems to be holding off to see how things shake out in the budget-caps/tax-cut fight with the White House. Our guess is that, if a compromise is reached in the budget fight, the NASA budget fixes will happen in the Senate HUD/VA Appropriation and the House will then accede to them in conference. (You self-starters out there, work Senate HUD/VA appropriators to add $50 million for NASA Future-X X-Ops.) Once Congress gets back in session, things will start happening fast - stand by for political action alerts on the Senate HUD/VA markups, on the Defense Appropriations conference, and on the HUD/VA Appropriations conference. Meanwhile, a good summer to all of you! ________________________________________________________________________ Miscellany - Rotary Rocket Reprieve Gary Hudson confirmed the other day that Rotary Rocket has gotten financial backing from an undisclosed source (space.com implies it's Tom Clancy) at least through completion of the ATV "Aerial Test Vehicle" flight test program. We also think we've put two and two together regarding Rotary's plans for engining the space test version of their Roton reusable launcher with a derivative of NASA's "Fastrac" cheap-but-too-heavy engine - Space America, of Huntsville Alabama, recently won a NASA contract for just under a million dollars to develop a propellant-cooled nozzle for Fastrac, much lighter than the initial low-cost ablatively cooled nozzle. - Kistler Gets Funding & Moves Forward George Mueller in an interview with Aviation Week Online last month said that Kistler had obtained funding from Saudi Arabian sources that would see the company through flight test of their two-stage reusable K-1 launcher. We've seen no official confirmation of this since, but if it's true, it would also set into motion previously- negotiated conditional backing from structures subcontractor Northrop Grumman and from a Taiwanese-led investor consortium. Indications are that Kistler's plans to conduct test flights out of Australia and commercial operations out of Nevada are moving forward. - NASA STAS Process Underway Again The week before last, NASA held a short-notice meeting in Washington DC. The subject was continuation of the Space Transportation Architecture Study (STAS) process, the effort to define just what NASA should do next in light of an aging and expensive Shuttle fleet. Another round of STAS meetings is taking place this week in the Los Angeles area. So far, we've seen some hopeful signs - the various RLV startups were recruited strongly to attend the DC meeting, one of the draft papers NASA passed around was "Crew/Cargo Transfer Vehicle Preliminary Requirements" indicating one of the more sensible options is still alive, and trial balloons were floated about steering some funding to the RLV startups. It's possible that the ankle-biting we've been doing these last few months is having some effect. More when we know more. - Daimler-Chrysler and Boeing Reveal Reusable Launch Plans This is relatively old news, weeks in the case of Boeing and a couple months in the case of Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace (DASA), but we think there's an interesting trend here. Both companies have expressed official interest in doing next-generation reusable launchers on a commercial basis in the coming decade, and both are looking at incremental approaches to technically conservative two- stage reusable designs. While neither aerospace giant has made a major commitment yet, it looks like reduced-cost reusable launch is beginning to get commercially respectable. - GAO Reports X-33 Cost Overruns The government's General Accounting Office has been looking into X-33 for a while now, and apparently their report is now in. We hear, in addition to the obvious - X-33 is behind schedule and has technical problems - that GAO thinks that actual NASA cost for X-33 has grown to almost one and a quarter billion dollars, 30% higher than the nominal NASA cost-share of $941 million. So much for putting all your eggs into one big basket - we said at the time and we'll say again that multiple awards for smaller less all- encompassing projects would have been a far better use of the funds available. X-33 is what we've got, and it should be finished and flown (with NO more additional public money) but in future NASA should heed this lesson: Award monopoly projects and you'll get monopoly results. Fostering multiple competitors is far better in the long run - cheaper for NASA as competition drives down launch costs, and better for the country as a whole as space industry growth rates climb. ________________________________________________________________________ Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety. ________________________________________________________________________ Space Access Society http://www.space-access.org space.access@space-access.org "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System" - Robert A. Heinlein