Can Commercial Space Tech Get Off the Ground?

coondoggie writes "While NASA's commercial partners such as SpaceX and Orbital have made steady progress in developing space cargo transportation technology, they have recently fallen behind their development schedules. Combine that with the fact that the most critical steps lie ahead, including successfully launching new vehicles and completing integration with the space station, and you have a hole that will be tough to climb out of. Those were the two main conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report (PDF) on the status of the commercial space world this week. The GAO went on to say that after the planned retirement of the space shuttle in 2010, NASA will face a cargo resupply shortfall for the International Space Station of approximately 40 metric tons between 2010 and 2015." Speaking of SpaceX, reader Matt_dk sends along an update on the company's Falcon 9 flight efforts. "Six of the nine first stage flight engines have completed acceptance testing and all nine flight engines are on schedule to complete acceptance testing by mid-July."

The problems...

[Darkness404]

The main problems are that NASA because of "security reasons" can't give out a lot of the taxpayer funded research that would help these companies get off the ground. So, what took NASA many years to do doesn't have to be reinvented by a private company. Really, the fact that any private craft could get into space would have been a remarkable feat just thirty or forty years ago.

Re:Here we go again

[LWATCDR]

Helium 3.
If it actually works well as a fuel for fusion then it would be valuable and light enough to be worth mining on the moon.
Un less the Polywell Fusor works then we will just use Boron.

Re:Isn't space like really exspensive ?

[hardburn]

The take home is that space is, and always will be, very $ relative to ground; therefore there has to be some compelling reason to go to space. Sadly, there are few compelling reasons.

Next time you want to get a weather report, try doing it without relying on a source that bases it on satellite imagery. Next time you watch TV, do it on a channel that doesn't link to a satellite somewhere along the way. At least as far as unmanned space projects go, the economic debate was over a long time ago.

Manned space flight is a different matter. Manned space flight is about the advancement of the species rather than any strictly economic viewpoint.

Re:The problems...

[GodfatherofSoul]

So, what you're saying is private industry can't work without government assistance. Forget the ideological orgasms over these projects. The fact is they're riding on some long coat tails to get into space, and we all know how exponentially difficult it is to progress to the next steps in their grand plans. I'm waiting for the day the US "licenses" the Space Shuttle to a private company, gives them subsidies as large as our Space Shuttle budget, then having to listen to the "I drink your milkshake" ranting of free marketers about how private industry knows how to do it better and more efficiently.

Re:The problems...

[MightyYar]

So, what you're saying is private industry can't work without government assistance.

That's not what he said... I only saw him imply that we are entitled to the knowledge that NASA spends our money to acquire.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's all I get out of his comment.

Re:Here we go again

[Yvanhoe]

Space based solar power is, in my opinion, the valuable resource that is up there. Always on, no weather problems, no geopolitical troubles.

Scaled Composites

[secondhand_Buddah]

In this TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html [ted.com] , Burt Rutan makes a very compelling argument for the Commercialised space industry.

Re:Here we go again

[hardburn]

There are metals that are very rare in the Earth's crust, but are extremely useful, like Platinum and Palladium. Any realistic plan for a hydrogen economy is going to need a lot of at least one of those metals, and those two are useful as catalysts in a lot of other chemical reactions, too.

Say the hydrogen economy is a pipe dream and we should be making better Lithium batteries instead? Well, you've only just moved the problem around. Lithium production is unlikely to meet future demands for electric vehicles [meridian-int-res.com], even though it has an atomic number of 3 and is therefore fairly abundant in the universe at large.

Further, mining of any kind has a lot of hidden costs in terms of human lives and environmental damage.

But you can strip mine an asteroid without damaging a fragile ecosystem, and with sufficient advances in automation, you can eliminate nearly all costs in human lives. Further, strip mining is relatively easy to automate (pick up chunk of rock, move it to processing station).

If you want to limit economic feasibility to what only shows up on a corporate balance sheet, then asteroid mining makes a lot more sense in terms of building out other space infrastructure, e.g. O'Neill Cylinders, nuclear pulse rockets built in space, Martian colonies, etc.