Space Access Update #99 12/13/02
Copyright 2002 by Space Access Society
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Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We are still around, watching developments and thinking about what
comes next. We did spend much of the last six months otherwise
engaged - we prefer to avoid sleeping on park benches. (Our apologies
to everyone whose mail we haven't answered over that stretch. We'll
be working through the backlog RSN.)
But then, not coming close to making a living off this space stuff can
be a blessing as well as a curse, in that we are not obliged to
constantly make a public fuss whether we have something to say or not.
We do, now, have a number of things to say.
For starters, this: One of the more useful things we do is putting on
our annual conference, bringing players in the cheap access game
together in one place to focus intensively on access issues. (For
those of you who like what we do but worry whether we'll keep doing
it, we'll stop either when cheap access is an accomplished fact, or
when they pry our cold dead fingers off our last hotel contract.)
Last spring's Space Access '02 conference went well, with attendance
up and considerable useful work done. Our take on the theme of the
event: "Building a Place to Stand" - what a number of startup low-cost
launch companies have spent the recent investment downturn doing.
Here are a couple of reports from the conference:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/marericks_020510.html
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/RLV/SAS-2002-Review.html
Meanwhile, preparations for next spring's Space Access '03 conference
are underway. We have a hotel contract for our traditional last-
weekend-in-April date at an old favorite site - SA'03 is set for
Thursday evening April 24th through Saturday night April 26th, 2003,
at the Old Town Hotel and Conference Center, in downtown Scottsdale
Arizona. This is the same hotel we were at two years ago, the former
Holiday Inn Old Town, with new owners and name but otherwise largely
unchanged, in the heart of Scottsdale's restaurant and shopping
district, a fifteen minute cab ride from the Phoenix airport. For
SA'03 room reservations, call 800 695-6995 or 480 994-9203 and ask for
our "space access" rate of $74 a night. (Our rate is available for
three days before and after the conference dates.)
As for our current view of things, here, briefly, it is:
- Radically cheaper space access (ten to a hundred times less than
current costs) would be a massive public good, enhancing existing
space markets and opening up potentially huge new ones, creating new
opportunities for research, exploration, commerce, and defense.
- Such access is possible in the near term with current technology,
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 high performance with intact
reusability, allowing breakout from the traditional expendable-missile
ammunition design mindset, with potential huge benefits to low-cost
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, good engineering (KISS), and funding. Much depends on a
leap of faith that large new markets will emerge to support the
necessary higher flight rates - "if you build it, they will come". At
least one such new market, tourism, is growing steadily less
speculative.
As for who might produce such access anytime soon...
- Certainly Not NASA
In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have long ago dismantled the
NASA "human spaceflight" empire for being a massively inflexible
bureaucracy neither capable of making nor willing to make any
significant changes in what they do: Flying a half-dozen people on a
half-dozen missions a year at over a billion dollars a mission. We'd
have put money into low-cost access X-projects and investment
incentives, and once the results started flying we'd have rebuilt NASA
as a genuine leading-edge research and exploration agency flying
hundreds of times a year on other people's rockets at less cost than
it now flies a half-dozen times a year on its own.
Alas, in this imperfect world NASA JSC/KSC/MSFC represents a volume of
Federal funding impossible to radically redirect with the available
political capital. The current White House still has only thin
Congressional majorities, and obviously has higher priorities than
radical reform of NASA - for now at least. Administrator O'Keefe's
immediate brief at NASA seems to be to stop the bleeding - to impose
actual accounting of where the money goes, and to steer the agency
back toward meeting existing obligations without busting future
budgets.
In this context, we see the new "Orbital Space Plane" (OSP) project as
being the best ("least bad", if you will) use of the existing SLI
funding wedge practical under current political constraints. It is a
huge improvement on SLI's previous direction, a budget-busting all-up
Shuttle replacement designed primarily to drop painlessly into the
current Shuttle operations bureaucracy, yet also touted as meeting US
commercial launch needs - seriously muddying the waters for genuine
commercial space transportation investment.
OSP has the virtue of assuring NASA's minimum manned launch needs
(whatever one may think of the current agency, we do now have
international obligations to meet) without the slightest chance of
anyone plausibly pretending it addresses commercial markets too.
We still would like to see NASA formally declare itself out of the
business of developing commercial space transportation. Further, we
would like NASA to make explicit 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.
- Probably Not DOD
The Defense Department is starting to get interested - discussing the
military implications of near-term radically cheaper on-demand launch
is no longer career suicide for officers, and DARPA is funding some
useful work as part of their RASCAL project - but DOD's latest
reorganization consolidated space under USAF, whose space people are
currently wrapped up in bringing EELV online, and which over the
medium term isn't interested in anything which might interfere with
F-22 funding. DOD in general has other more pressing budget
priorities for the forseeable future. We don't expect DOD to produce
radically cheaper access anytime soon.
- Almost Certainly Not BoeMacLockMart
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 of
them will try. They've had that sort of risk-taking thoroughly
squeezed out of them over the last generation. It ain't gonna happen.
- The Startups
This leaves the entrepreneurial startups as our main hope for a cheap
space transportation revolution. None of them yet look like much - a
few of them have test-flown hardware, but on average they tend to be a
handful of engineers with shoestring funding, 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.
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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.
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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