China's Space Program

This was written in response to an article in Space News.

In the March 26 issue, Dean Cheng complains that the Obama administration regards China's expanded space activities as a potential threat while advocating cooperation with the Chinese space program. Mr. Cheng sees this as inconsistent and confused. Perhaps Mr. Cheng has not considering the fact that the Soviet Union's thousands of nuclear tipped ICBMs and stated goals represented an imminent mortal threat to America, but a series of U.S.-Soviet/Russian cooperative space programs has played an important role in reducing that threat significantly. President Obama's Chinese space strategy is not confused, as Mr. Cheng asserts, it is intelligent. It recognizes that short of the mutual suicide of nuclear war we cannot destroy the Chinese space program, or even slow it down much. We can forge cooperative links with this program, as we have with the Russian program, to our mutual benefit while simultaneously reducing the threat to America.

SpaceX, Heavy Lift, Fixed Price!

In a letter the Space News editor on February 7 SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said: "we .. develop a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a 150 metric ton to orbit capability ... We can do so for no more than $2.5 billion, within five years, on a firm, fixed price basis with payment made only on achieving hardware milestones."

Contrast this with the 2012 budget proposal for NASA's new, traditional, cost-plus contract heavy lift booster: $1.8 billion for ONE YEAR of a five year development plan! Don't for get that these cost-plus contracts almost always go over budget.

Bottom line: Congress should change the heavy lift development program to a fixed price program similar to the very successful COTS program which helped develop the SpaceX Falcon 9 (on which the heavy lift vehicle would be based) and an Orbital Science vehicle. It would b a lot cheaper.

Bigalow's National Customers Revealed!

"The company [Bigalow Aerospace] plans to lease space aboard the stations to foreign nations, research organizations and businesses (Aerospace DAILY, May 6, 2010). Seven clients in The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, Australia, United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirate of Dubai have signed memorandums of understanding." From Bigelow Floats Plan For Florida Space Coast Aviation Week, Feb 4, 2011. This is the first time I've seen a list of potential Bigalow customers. Very interesting!

If you are not familiar with Bigalow Aerospace, they are building inflatable space stations. They have two sub-sized, pressurized stations in orbit right now. Their target market is national space programs for countries that can't afford to build everything themselves -- they can lease a Bigalow station. I think this is a pretty good way to get started on orbital hotels.

Bigalow's plans will not work without some kind of private, commercial human launch capacity, the kind that President Obama is trying to create. See Obama's Brilliant Space Policy for details.

2010 SSI Conference

The 2010 Space Studies Institute conference just ended. I had a great time. The best part was hanging out with 100+ folk who love to talk about space settlement, many of which have done a lot to bring that dream a little closer to reality.

My favorite presentations were by Joe Carroll, Tether Applications, on tethers; which he has successfully flown four times in orbit. While he described a number of extremely interesting, and just plain fun, concepts; the most important, to my mind, was a rotating electro-dynamic tether to retrieve intact spent upper stages and abandoned satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). It turns out there are thousands of these in LEO with a combined total of thousands of tons of aerospace-grade aluminum -- a very large, easily-accessible extra-terrestrial resource! This is far, far easier to exploit than either the Moon or Asteroids. The electro-dynamic tether provides no-reaction-mass propulsion by interacting with the Earth's magnetic field; passively to reduce altitude and actively (firing electrons) to increase altitude. As an added extra bonus, each one of these that is secured is no longer a potential source of hundreds of thousands of smaller but deadly pieces of space debris should there be a collision (which has happened once already).

One of the most important developments presented was by Greg Baiden, Laurentian University and Penguin Automated Systems. He and his company have played a major role in automating mining to the point that a few major mines are now teleoperated from the surface. Furthermore, some of these operations take place with a few seconds delay -- analogous to lunar mining teleoperated from Earth! This isn't talk, this isn't studies, this isn't laboratory demonstration, this is profitable working mines operating right now. Greg also described a study of lunar mining which suggested we need just five machines to do pretty much any rock mining required.

While tooting my own horn isn't the best, I really think that my own paper, "Towards and Early ProfitablePowerSat" is a major contribution because it shows, for the first time, a way to make the first operational step towards space solar power: a PowerSat that can deliver about 5MW to the grid with a single launch for perhaps a few hundred million dollars (for the first one) based on solar energy collection demonstrated in orbit and power beaming to the ground partially demonstrated on Earth. This system can generate a substantial revenue stream within some small number of years and, for certain niche markets, could conceivably be profitable, or nearly so. Such a first baby step has been sorely missing from the SSP (Space Solar Power) literature; which is dominated by schemes requiring tens or hundreds of billions of dollars and decades before producing a penny in revenue.

Other tid-bits I heard on from the podium and in the hall included: a major network is backing a documentary about space settlement, XCOR is very close to flying sub-orbital tourists at very low operational cost, there is a good design for food, air, and water production/recycling for space habitats, there's a lot of water on the Moon, the former president of India is pushing space solar power hard, and international space law will require, not permit, require, that the parent country help future space settlements become politically independent!