It's Time to Take the Training Wheels Off and Fly

I learned to ride a bike with training wheels. They kept me from falling over. They also slowed me down. After a month or two, I took the training wheels off and really started to ride. For decades, American companies have flown people into space under the strict government supervision, training wheels that got us started and, most of the time, kept us safe.

It's time to take the training wheels off and fly. This means NASA's top human space flight priority should be the Commercial Crew Program. This program is helping American companies develop privately owned space taxis to take people from Earth into Low Earth Orbit, especially the International Space Station (ISS). The primary alternative is the Space Launch System (SLS), a program to pay private companies to develop a much larger 100% government owned vehicle with strict government oversight -- training wheels. It should be noted that right now, American astronauts travel to the ISS on Russian vehicles.

With today's massive federal debt and deficit, choices must be made. In the case of human space flight, I believe that the Commercial Crew Program should be fully funded first because:

1. Commercial Crew is far, far cheaper than the SLS. Total cost is around $6 billion for the largest Commercial Crew proposal vs. the $35 billion estimated for the SLS. Furthermore, Commercial Crew uses fixed price contracts and the SLS will be traditional cost-plus accounting, an approach that rewards cost over runs. The lower cost is fundamental, Commercial Crew takes advantage of market forces.

2. Commercial Crew vehicles are expected to fly humans many years sooner than the SLS. Thus, less money will be paid to the Russians.

3. The SLS is too large for efficient transportation of people to the ISS. This also increases cost.

4. Commercial Crew is intended to develop multiple space taxis by multiple companies. No longer will America depend on a single launch vehicle for human access to space. In the shuttle era, each accident was followed by years of cancelled flights. Multiple vendors will reduce this risk substantially.

5. Commercial Crew is intended develop space taxis that can sell rides to others. For example, Bigelow Aerospace has put two small space stations in orbit and once a space taxi is available is prepared to fly a full sized space station to host astronauts. The Commercial Crew vehicles are perfect for space tourism, a market that is currently a Russian monopoly. Space tourism has the potential to vastly increase the number of people in space.

If Commercial Crew is fully funded and Congress wants to fund the SLS or other human launch alternative, I support that. But, only when the best alternative, Commercial Crew, is fully funded.

For fifty years American companies have built and operated human launch vehicles under strict government ownership and supervision. It's time to take off the training wheels and let private enterprise fly.

NOTE: While the SLS is a much larger vehicle than those proposed for Commercial Crew, at least one private company is prepared to build similarly large vehicles at much lower cost. Specifically, SpaceX believes the can build a vehicle with a greater payload than the SLS for approximately $2.5 billion in five years (link).

Space Launch System

The much anticipated plans for the Space Launch System (SLS) were unveiled today. It will cost (at least) $18 billion to get to the first unmanned test launch in 2017 of a 70 ton payload version and, according to Space News, the launch rate will be one every two years. If the system lasts for 20 years, that means a total of 10 launches. If the system cost nothing after the first test launch, the SLS would cost $1.8 billion per launch -- more than the space shuttle.

Now suppose we spent that money on private launch services. Right now SpaceX is advertising $125 million per launch for the Falcon Heavy, which will lift 53 tons. That means we could buy 144 Falcon Heavy launches with the money needed for a single test launch of the SLS.

Furthermore, in a letter to 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." The SLS is eventually supposed to lift 130 tons, so for 1/7th of the money and a year's less time SpaceX thinks they could do the job.

But perhaps SpaceX can't! What is the record? SpaceX has developed two vehicles in the last few years, Falcon I and Falcon 9, both of which have flown successfully. In the last 20 years NASA has tried to develop four vehicles, the aerospace plane, X33, Ares I and Ares V. None have made it into space.

Of course, the SLS is intended to be human rated, however, the Falcon series is designed to be human rated too.

The short story? From the point of view of space development, the SLS is fiscally insane and there is no reason to believe it is technically superior.

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!