Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo Or Spirit of Solyndra? 157
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:3, Interesting)
If SpaceX gets humans back on the moon, then more power to them. Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.
I'm starting to think we haven't gone to the moon since 1972 because we forgot how.
Re:SpaceX rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
The space shuttle cost between a billion, and half a billion dollars per launch.
Of that, well under a percent was the fuel.
A Falcon 9 launch retails at $50m, and of that perhaps .4% is fuel. (300 tons of propellant at $1/Kg, which is a high estimate)
There are plans to make portions of the falcon reusable.
There is _CONSIDERABLE_ room for launch cost reduction, if they suceed.
Re:Considering the source... (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider this.
SpaceX designed and built Falcon 9 for under 20% of what it would have cost NASA.
The proposed new launcher from NASA would cost 30 billion over the next decade, and provide 2 launches, totalling around a hundred tons.
If the money was spent purchasing Falcon 9 launches, you would get 7500 tons in LEO.
With the development of Falcon heavy, that rises to 20000 tons.
If you can't bootstrap a decent space industry with what in an earlier age would be a respectable mass for an aircraft carrier - you're doing it wrong.
And this assumes SpaceX fails in their goal of making the rockets partially reusable, which will significantly lower costs.
The fuel is under a percent of the costs.
Re:SpaceX rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Space Shuttle could have been considerably more efficient, had the budget for it not been slashed many times over. Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go. Had there been a more enlightened attitude on both sides of the curtain, we'd have colonies on Saturn's moons by now, never mind Mars. Ion drives make extended-mission space probes a real possibility, but the lack of isotopes to make nuclear energy cells (due to a total lack of decent nuclear facilities in the US) means that the probes will still have propellant long after the batteries are dead.
Ok, launch systems. ARLA is a real possibility for low-mass satellites. TAR is a real possibility for larger systems. NASA is experimenting with ski-jump assisted launchers but I doubt that will go anywhere - Congress keeps slashing the budget. Blended-Wing Body aircraft could have been released by NASA by 2010, but Congress - guess what! - slashed the budget and the program was killed off.
NASA could do a hell of a lot better, but it can't do it for free. The current rocket program is a mistake - NASA is an R&D facility, a discovery facility, not a mass production facility. Multiply NASA's budget by 10 or 20, build it a dedicated reactor for producing the necessary isotopes for batteries, devolve it as a quango so it has less political interference, and you'll see what it is capable of. All without breaking a single law of physics.
Re:SpaceX rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you to a point. SpaceX has been able to prove they can get stuff "up there" in one piece, and that they can nail orbital parameters that they set out to achieve.
This next year (2012) is going to be the big year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Either they are going to have several successful launches or they are going to have several spectacular failures including their collapse as a company. Assuming they get the NASA COTS demos completed, they will certainly have a proven track record including to paying customers.
There are several commercial customers that are taking a "wait and see" attitude toward SpaceX, and presuming these flights are successful there are more flights that will go onto their backlog of flights [spacex.com]. It is also worth telling that SpaceX has already sold more flights this past year to new customers than all other spaceflight companies in the world, including the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and ESA combined. That should say something which should be worthy of notice, and also tell a sad tale of the incredibly small market that there currently is for commercial spaceflight. It isn't a completely dead market, but it is still incredibly small... and I'm talking about people willing to pay for telecom satellites and other proven commercial markets for spaceflight.
Re:I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Interesting)
It all depends on what you want to accomplish. I would dare say that the "problem" of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO, aka what the Space Shuttle did and what most other spacefaring countries are currently doing) is a "solved problem" and really something that needs to be handed over to private companies completely. Back in the 1950's, there still was doubt it could be done at all or at least reliably done. That isn't even a remote issue any more. LEO is hardly even a frontier any more and there are some serious traffic issues in terms of dealing with what is up there because so much stuff [wikipedia.org] is up there at the moment.
Turning over actual launches to private companies seems like a very wise use of tax dollars, and try to set up the means for private individuals (or companies) to be able to launch their own payloads on the same vehicles.... just like is done currently with commercial aviation. The U.S. government often does buy flights on commercial carriers or even individual seats on regular commercial routes. Why can't that same business model be applied to spaceflight if you can get similar economies of scale?
As for going to the Moon, the notion that you have a disintegrating pyramid that absolutely must start on the ground here on the Earth is the first idea that needs to be killed. Once you give up that notion, it becomes much, much easier to design a vehicle and system which can go from LEO to the Moon and back. We certainly don't need a multi-billion (with a giant "B") dollar boondoggle [wikipedia.org] that is only really designed to keep rocket engineers busy in key congressional districts that does more of the same and even duplicating services being done by private companies.
It isn't really so much we forgot how to go to the Moon, but that the cost of doing so with this massive disintegrating pyramid is so huge that designing a unique vehicle to accomplish that one task is cost prohibitive. The circumstances which created the original Apollo program won't be duplicated and currently don't exist either. We (as a country or even as a species) aren't in a particular hurry to get to the Moon either.
Re:Why have Americans become nancies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Going to space is, however, more like some of the early flights that were done in aviation. Many of those early aircraft were incredibly flimsy and there were thousands of (non-military combat) related deaths each year in the early years. If anything it is the risk aversion that is to me something that is repugnant, other than the fact that nobody wants to be responsible for the death of somebody else.
In terms of some of those deaths on spaceflight, all 14 of the Shuttle-related deaths could have been prevented had NASA simply followed their own safety guidelines. Apollo 1 was also an unfortunate accident, and something which should have been preventable.... also something which didn't even happen during the course of the actual flight but during a ground test that could have even been inside of a factory. On top of that, the number 17, while technically accurate by figures that NASA claims, is only Americans and not deaths by other people who have attempted spaceflight or deaths by Russian Cosmonauts. It also doesn't include other astronauts who died "on the job" through other means, nor does it include deaths of ground personnel in many countries that can also be related to spaceflight.
Yes, it is dangerous, but so is simply living as a person. You take risks, but you also take measures to try and avoid the most serious injuries and hopefully take safety measures seriously. The trick is to learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others so you don't repeat them... particularly the most dangerous mistakes.
BTW, in terms of spaceflight, most vehicles have built into them the knowledge and experience of the previous generations of astronauts where those mistakes... especially fatal mistakes... are not likely to be repeated. That is true for anybody trying to push the boundaries of human experience. I certainly would assert that anybody going into space today on board any modern spacecraft is going to be far safer than their predecessors by an order of magnitude or better, and I expect that to improve over time. It certainly isn't a reason to fear going into space.
By far the largest problem in terms of going into space is simply the cost. That is, of course, what the whole point of commercializing spaceflight is all about. There is certainly room to make the trip to space much cheaper.
Re:SpaceX rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.
For myself, I think the DIRECT [wikipedia.org] approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.
Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.
Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.
Re:Considering the source... (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX seems pretty pragmatic about their funding. They are going after as much of the existing satellite launch business as they can get, take what they can from NASA for ISS support or other government launches and use the money to build both cheaper small launchers for LEO and cheaper big launchers that would enable deep space missions.
Not sure if SpaceX cares about Moon missions or asteroids, Elon seems pretty focused on Mars as his real deep space goal. I imagine he is hoping that if he has off the shelf launchers that make Mars viable the missions will come (i.e. some government(s) will see the possibilities and fund actual missions). This is as opposed to now where no one has anything that will makes Mars feasible so it never gets off the drawing board. If you are waiting for NASA to build a heavy launcher you will be waiting forever it would appear. All that buearacracy cares about is keeping the jobs program going in the home states of Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hutchinson and Hatch.
Its kind of out there but opening a whole new planet to habitation would seem to offer future economic incentives. Also as we exhaust our mineral reserves moving mineral rich asteroids in to earth orbit and mining them also would have huge economic payoffs. Someone in China wrote a paper on this recently. One asteroid could yield trillions of dollars in returns... though it could also crash the price of the commodities involved if, for example, someone found an asteroid laden with gold.