There have been many comments over the years on many sites about cost plus being used when nobody has any idea of the costs of a project or how to bid it. This morning on Clark’s site spacetransportnews.com he linked to an article claiming that getting bids was so uncertain that contractors would bid 50% higher than it would run to do the same project cost plus to make sure they didn’t lose money. That is an interesting claim. Cost plus is noted for budget over runs while straight bids, honestly enforced, cannot over run as the contractor wouldn’t get paid.

Considering the Constellation mess, wouldn’t it possibly have been cheaper back in 2005 to put the project out for bid? With the current projection of $35B to complete Ares, 50% more would have been a $52.5B  bid. If there was that much money on a fixed price contract, how many companies would have been willing to bid on the expectation of making a large profit? How much would they have been willing to cut to get the bid? This is when someone usually points out that there are only one or two companies qualified to bid on such a system. That should be a red flag. If you are specing a system with too few qualified bidders, then you are overspecing more often than not.

Cost plus seems to have a fairly low percentage of profit or even a fixed profit in the contract and requires extensive oversight to keep the contractors honest. I question whether the mandated low percentage itself eliminates potential contractors. Who wants to do a contract with a limit on potential profits when there is other work with much higher margins except the one or the few companies that are set up to do the insane paperwork and deal with the oversight? I think the profit limits in the name of taxpayer cost control end up costing far more than letting companies make higher profits or take their losses. If there were a half dozen or so companies bidding on the Ares, don’t you think it possible that some of them would think they could do the job for far less than $52.5B, or even $35B?

There are companies that are just better at cost control than others just as some people are smarter than others. I don’t think it is out of line to suggest that some companies can execute a rocket project for half of the cost of a competitor. If one qualified company bids $10.00 on a widget and another bids $9.00, go with the lower bid, and don’t pay if they don’t produce. Then if the second company has costs half that of the first, then they spend $4.50 in costs while the first spends $9.00. The second company has profits of 50% of income while the first has 10%. The government attitude seems to be that since this is taxpayer money, excessive profits are harmful to the taxpayer. With this attitude, the more expensive company has the edge since they will make twice as much profit as the better managed one at the same percentage.

If government contracting would quit worrying so much about how much profit a company makes, and start worrying about what is being delivered for the dollar, more companies would try for the contracts. A possible contract with 25-50% profit potential will attract more players. As more players enter a field, some will have better people or ideas which translates to lower costs, which becomes lower bids. When faced with real competition, Lockheed and Boeing can both find cost saving options when it is in their best interest to do so and they can make higher profit margins doing it.

In the long run, competition will cut into the possible profit potential and the end result will be a percentage similar to that mandated in cost plus except on a far lower total price. Financial oversight can be vastly reduced for further savings.

One objection many make is about quality when a simple low bid is the criteria. They believe that low cost is low quality. This has been demonstrated to be false anytime there is a competent purchasing agent involved. If the product doesn’t perform, don’t pay.

Another thing brought up all the time is dishonest contractors when there is no oversight, with the assumption that most contractors will cheat when no one is looking. Thomas Matula says that this is why the government must have a ten page spec for an ashtray. From rotten food to weapons that don’t work to vehicles that don’t run, he suggests that every single one of those specs is required due to suppliers cheating at one time or another. I believe this is a  poorly thought out objection. Every single time one of those suppliers cheated, there was a government official not doing his job of confirming an acceptable delivery. It is a matter of historical record that much of the time the particular official was corrupt. You want honest delivery, write a simple spec and have one (1) official responsible for the proper delivery. Responsible includes prison for corruption, which he can share with this supplier.

Many of us have complained from time to time about the lack of true progress from NASA even while agreeing that there are a lot of very smart motivated people in the agency. It would be useful if some way could be found to use the capabilities of those skilled  people without the anchor of bureaucracy holding them back. It is even more difficult considering the role congress plays in controlling the outcome of funding for the different stakeholders.

I wonder if it could be made possible to provide incentives to the people that can produce, while simultaneously preventing the bureaucrats in the agency from interfering with the producers. I suggest a thought experiment for increasing agency performance in a politically acceptable manner, while reducing long term costs. This is just a first cut for the Halibut.

List a series of projects internal to the agency for employees to bid on. A condition of the bid is that successful completion of the project ahead of time and budget qualifies the participating employees for full retirement effective immediately after the demonstration of success. Incentive also is that 10% of the funds remaining from being under budget is split among the participating employees. Failure to complete on time and budget is immediate layoff from the agency.

Other NASA employees have no oversight role for these cheetah teams. If the team leader and his group are good though, they will get the support of many of the theoretically uninvolved to help accomplish the project, even though they will not be eligible for the retirement package.

A project might be a multipropellant depot in LEO. It must accept LOX and fuel from at least two vehicle types and dispense the propellants to a different vehicle type after storing it for at least two months. Time limit three years and bid cap at three billion including projected retirement payments.

 Whichever group gets the bid will increase spending in a congressional district through at least one election cycle and possibly two. With congressmen on the bid review board, it seems likely that they will be going for the infusion of near term pork and will worry about the following elections later. The bidding NASA teams will be aware of this and will dutifully spread the pork as far as they need to to get the congressmen on their side.

A bid might be a team leader and a couple of hundred other NASA employees bidding $2.6B and 32 months. If they succeed on time and for $2.1B, they split $50M two hundred ways by whatever formula they agreed to among themselves and retire early with full benefits. The depot is in orbit and operational and two hundred people with a performance track record are available to the private sector if they choose to keep working. Also $850M less than the original cap could be available for the follow on projects.

The retirement incentive is center to the strategy. After slamming a project through with little time for the agency drone workers, the project members will need to get out as too many toes will have been stepped on for them to be part of the clique again. The termination for failure is the stick to balance the carrots.

An F1 class kerosene engine might be another project with a functioning rotovator for a different group.

A suitably motivated group could have had Ares I flying by now, or if none would bid it would have been understood that it was a turkey five years ago. Either there would be working hardware, or the money wouldn’t get spent.

If there is a project that none would bid on, as seems possible for the Ares, then it is understood that the agency is not capable of that task. That would be a clear signal that the ‘experts’ in that field were not up to the job and would run the risk of losing whole departments that couldn’t get results in their field. The agency would need to get teams to produce with failure to do so carrying real penalties. Employees wouldn’t sign on to a project to be sacrificial goats to the bureaucrats and drones, so the bureaucrats and drones would need to support the teams in their own best interest.

With the truly productive getting projects and getting out, the agency drones would run out of workers to hide behind and could then be dismissed as excessive to the requirements of the agency. The congressmen gaining from the project pork would possibly support getting rid of people not getting them as much return in favor of the high profile projects they brought home. The high profile projects could get them more votes than the standing armies for this election, and the next one could be worried about later.

There is a fairly constant murmur that commercial space will not go beyond LEO and more mumbling that there must be a specific destination with a specific timeline.

The second mumbling assumes that there is some top down command structure that will make one thing happen regardless of obstacles or opportunities along the way. Goals for the short term are often good, but not so much for the uncertain future. It is roughly the difference between getting married or staying single. When you get married, it better be the right one, and all the other options better be off the table. A single goal and time frame assumes that no other goal is worthwhile, and that nothing will ever change the relative values.

The murmur about commercial not going beyond LEO is often from people that haven’t considered the implications of CATS. For this post, I suggest that CATS is $1K per kilogram to LEO and work out a few costs that apparently haven’t been considered openly enough. I also suggest that RLVs are giving launch on demand in order to hit that price point.

Say someone wants to send a small commercial robot probe to a NEO. Current state of the art might be a one ton spacecraft with a mass ratio of three to go from LEO to the object. At $10K per kilogram for launch costs, $30M. The way it is currently done, perhaps $50M for the vehicle itself and another few million for operations. So $85-90M for one data set. From program start to launch could easily be from three to five years, plus looking for funding and operating the vehicle almost as an afterthought. It would be easy to burn a decade on the program, and well over $100M considering the time value of money.

With CATS and launch on demand, other methods become attractive. If it is allowed to triple the mass of the probe and use less efficient engines, a three ton vehicle with nine tones of propellant becomes 12 tons IMLEO instead of 3 currently, though launch costs drop from $30M with a long lead time to $12M whenever you get ready to go. With relaxed mass constraints developing the probe becomes a construction project rather than research and development. Shield modern electronics with mass rather than use expensive antiques that are space rated. It seems possible that the three ton probe could drop to $1,000.00 per kilogram in construction costs, for a total of $3M in hardware costs. Lead time could drop to a few months with relaxed hardware mass restrictions. Engineers could spec a 7mm bolt from COTS suppliers rather than spend the time and money to determine that a 6.26mm bolt gives the exact safety margin required.

If CATS makes it possible to send a NEO probe within three months of decision for a total cost of  $15M, that is a time frame and cost that fits into a quarterly stockholders report. Pick your favorite reason to go, and it is quite possible that there is a millionaire out there that will agree with you. Minerals, volatiles, SPS materials, or just to see what is there become affordable to many thousands of interested people. At that price point, hundreds of probes per decade would certainly fly.

Many many people will point out that a three ton probe is way too much craft for early prospecting. Some people will certainly agree that 10 kg of fairly sophisticated instruments could be quite capable and not even be all that expensive if they didn’t have to support a decade program and could avoid a lot of that helpful oversight. 10 kg of instruments in a 40 kg vehicle with an IMLEO of 200 kg including propellant would drop the launch costs to $200k. Instruments and hardware by the right people might double that total cost. With a total of $400k per flight, commercial and private players would launch them by the thousands. I think it would be safe to suggest that known NEOs, the moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and most of the asteroid belt would be explored for a fraction of today’s government exploration budgets.

There are some that would try to do probes with a 1 kg cube sat, While I’m skeptical, CATS would make it possible for them to prove me wrong for around $10k.

I personally am more interested in the effects on human spaceflight. With $1,000.00kg for launch costs, a person’s direct mass cost to LEO would be around $100k. A reasonable overhead for life support and supplies would bring it to perhaps $500k for a several week visit. A true CATS launch on demand would let people go during a month vacation. Bigalow would have to get busy building stations and hotels to accommodate the customers that could and would  go at that price point.  There is a laundry list of experiments that companies and governments would do if their orbital workers could do a three month LEO  tour for under a million. An EVA worker cost would drop to a couple of thousand dollars an hour under these conditions.

What about beyond LEO? A five ton vehicle could certainly shuttle from LEO to LLO and back with four people. Flying the same vehicle repeatedly with four people and supplies would require about twelve tons of propellant and provisions per trip. Twelve tons of supplies is about $12M in launch costs and about $6,346.50 for the actual supplies. Circumnavigating the moon for under $4M per person including launch costs and LEO accommodations is considerably less than anything currently planned and should be proportionately more attractive to customers.

If the vehicle has entered LLO, then a modest craft can single stage from there to the surface and back. Propellant costs would bring the whole adventure to about $8M per person for the round trip from Earth’s surface to a moon base and back. Additional time on the surface is simply a matter of supplies. At $10k per kilogram on the Lunar surface, a person could stretch their stay by about three weeks per million dollars. It is a fairly safe bet that many people will go, and some of them will go for profit as they look for something they think valuable to some market. Anyone that can create more than 5 kg per day in resources from the local materials can stretch their stay almost indefinitely.

For some, it’s Mars or nothing. There is no reason they can’t get to Mars while everybody else exploits the nothing they disdain. Think of a ship of a thousand tons for their comfortable journey to Mars that takes ten thousand man hours of EVA to assemble and needs three thousand tons of propellant for the trip. What would that cost? At $1K per kg for the ship mass, $1B for construction. $4B for launch cost. $20M for EVA labor costs. Total costs for a thousand ton ship on Mars trajectory, $5.02B plus tax, tag, and title.

Quit yammering about commercial stopping in LEO. If commercial creates CATS, the rest follows.

What if games can be quite entertaining even if not practical. This particular one is what if Griffen had dictated an RS-68 for the Ares? It is existing and has considerably more thrust than the J2S, which would seem to imply a more capable second stage with considerably more payload to orbit.

Second glance is where the problems and fun start. A fifth segment was already required for the Ares I first stage even with the available thrust of the J2S, so the SRB would seem to be even more inadequate to support an RS-68 upper stage. Unless you parallel stage to get enough take off thrust, but then you are stuck with a clumsy layout and a sea level  nozzle on the upper stage. Serial stage seemed to be a requirement. Using a pair of stock SRBs would provide enough performance to lift a large upper stage compatible with an RS-68 fitted with a vacuum optimum expansion nozzle, but that would have been a different game altogether.

This what if idea comes from another direction. What if the gas generator cycle RS-68 pumped it’s propellants into the SRB to increase it’s thrust as much as adding another segment only without adding the mass and development of that segment? The gas generator cycle presumably can send propellants through a pipe without concern as to where they are actually used. So the plumbing for the upper stage has two flow paths for the propellant down stream of the pumps. One goes to the first stage  SRB to boost thrust and ISP, while the other path goes to the RS-68 thrust chamber as second stage propulsion.

With the hundred foot L* of the SRB and the rough and tumble combustion of the solid, it would seem that there would be no problem with mixing and burning even with minimal injector capability. A dozen or so ports of inches in diameter should be sufficient. The effective sea level Isp of the virtual RS-68 should even be higher than a stock version as found on the Delta IV because the expansion ratio would be less and the exhaust temperatures higher due to the much higher temperatures of the solid combustion products. The H2/O2 combustion would actually lower the temperature of the solid rocket exhaust though which would drop that effective Isp some. The net Isp effect would seem to be similar to a stock SRB parallel staged with a stock RS-68. The total thrust and Isp would seem to be a bit higher than the five segment SRB while being much lighter.

Testing could be by bolting an H2/O2 propellant supply to a stock SRB at ATK’s static test stand. It shouldn’t be more expensive or time consuming that the five segment development. It would also test a possible command throttle capability.

If this could be made to work, it would put a ~700,000 pound upper stage at roughly the same altitude and velocity as the Shuttle stack at SRB burnout. A very high expansion ratio RS-68 should get an Isp considerably higher than a stock engine, possibly approaching RL-10 performance. Various assumptions give a mass ratio of 4 to 5 for the rest of the way to orbit. If this different Ares I placed 140,000 to 175,000 pounds in LEO, then effective payload should be in the 30-40 ton class even with the extra tankage supporting the first stage burn.

Properly handled, this would seem to be a better, faster, cheaper way to get a strong medium lift. We all know better, which is why this is just a what if post for fun. Unless the concept itself is viable and can be applied to other vehicles later on.

The increasing tempo of VTVL development flights and the recent success of the Falcon 9 lead to possibilities for a different type of cooperative venture. Two companies have VTVLs testing  that are pretty much gas-n-go while SpaceX has vehicles that are quite difficult to get back. Using gas-n-go boosters to improve an expendable rocket payload might be a viable business.

Two VTVLs are built proportionate to the Falcon 9 and used as strap on boosters with propellant cross feed so that the Falcon 9 is fully fueled up when the VTVLs stage off and return to launch site for a pinpoint landing. What I propose that is different than what I have seen before is that the VTVLs separate at about a minute into the flight before transonic flight and maxQ is reached. By separating at high subsonic, the VTVL vehicles and the coop vehicle clusters never have to be designed for or subjected to the stresses of transonic and supersonic flight.

Subsonic flight is a far more forgiving and understood aerodynamic problem than the higher velocities and leads to considerably less problems, though also with less results. By staging at high altitude the Falcon’s engines are attaining near vacuum thrust and the vehicle could be considerably heavier than on a ground take off. A small tank stretch and a subsonic boost should get about 40-50% more payload to orbit. While the Falcon would be the main player, the supporting cast could improve the bottom line considerably with benefits for all.

The benefits for Falcon would be of the same order as the subsonic air launch scenarios that so many have studied. The VTVLs just do the airplane’s job. It is the emergence of the fast turnaround rocket vehicles that make it possible to virtually airlaunch in unlimited sizes.

The VTVL players would have a market for a fairly low velocity vehicle with a high dollar (compared to the suborbital field) market that doesn’t require high flight rates. It would give them early experience with a larger vehicle than would fit in their normal course of development, and a large launch assist platform in the bargain. Though the vehicles developed for Falcon assist would not go supersonic in their booster role, they would have plenty of size margin for modifications to allow them to carry relatively large VTVL upper stages to mach 3-4 and still do an RTLS maneuver for another flight or two that day.

SpaceX nailed the Falcon 9 on the first try. There is enough crow being eaten around the country now that somebody should put out a cookbook. My serving comes from the expressed belief that the opening of space will come through the incremental development with RLVs starting from suborbital through small orbital and so on, and not through all up test flights of ELVs. I could develop a taste for this brand of crow, so SpaceX, serve it up. Prove me wrong.

I haven’t changed my opinion of how space will be opened up in the long term, but this is an increasing sum game. I can cheer for my favorite teams without wishing ill on the others.

Ares is a different team in a different league playing a different decreasing sum game, so I can wish ill on that one. I think their players will be drifting away to more productive sports, and the events of Friday will accelerate that drift.

Recent events make it easier to describe one scenario for getting orbital costs down. This specific example almost certainly won’t happen and just stands in for the dozens of possible ways that orbit could become affordable.

Masten and XCOR have a joint venture for developing a methane lander. Consider the possibility of future cooperation. If in five years Masten and XCOR are operating profitable sub orbitals out of Mojave, it will be past time to start on orbital hardware. If both companies have 300+ kg payload capacities to above 100 km, then the Lynx  will have the capacity to lift one of the earlier Masten vehicles (Xombe 0.5?)to above 100 km. A fairly rapid partially retrograde development could have the small Masten vehicle capable of very long suborbital flights if properly assisted.  Say, Mojave to Kodiak, Oklahoma, or New Mexico. The Lynx lofts the Masten vehicle to mach 3-4 at high altitude and stages. The Masten test article finishes the boost for one of those spaceports while the Lynx returns to it’s runway.

The experience gained in test flights with almost existing equipment will go a long way toward convincing investors that orbit is well withing the reach of a conservative  three stage to orbit transport. (Pete suggested this as two stage over on Transterrestrial) The reentry problems can be explored for mach 10 to 15 including turnaround time and environmental impact. Reentry noise can be one of the largest hurdles for inland recovery of second stages. If, and only if, inland recovery can be done in an acceptable manner will this concept work. A tiny smallsat stage might be launched from the Xombe 0.5 if required to make the point.

For a second set of tests, Masten launches a three barrel vehicle with their full size suborbital craft. The two outers deliver the same assistance to the center vehicle as Lynx does to the smaller craft. The full size suborbital vehicle lands downrange at one of the available spaceports. Once this is explored, a 300 kg upper stage is used to place a useful smallsat in orbit. Some testing is done on recovering the upper stage.

If the above tests confirm that the technical concept is sound and acceptable to the uninvolved public at the recovery spaceport, then funding can be sought for a full orbital system. A much larger XCOR vehicle (Panther  for this post) is developed to launch the full size three barrel Masten (Xorbit for this post) assembly. This time the two outer vehicles cross feed propellant to the center vehicle and land at one of the downrange spaceports. The center vehicle goes on to deliver 300 kg of payload to orbit. This allows XCOR to focus on the much larger suborbital Panther while Masten focuses on improving existing vehicle performance and reentry. The Panther could also be the rent-a-booster as Clark suggests over on Space Transport News. The technical risk to orbit from that point would be comparable to funding XCOR and Masten to a full suborbital operation now.

A launch organization has four main costs. Development costs. New vehicle costs. Fixed operating costs. And marginal costs. Only marginal costs are mostly unaffected by flight rate. On a gas-n-go vehicle propellant is a major marginal cost.

On this three stage to orbit with each stage having a mass ratio of three, (total MR=27) there would be about 36,000 kg of propellant or about $18,000.00 per launch. Other marginal consumables would double this to $36,000.00 per launch or about $120.00 per kg in marginal costs.

Starting from a base of operating vehicles and recent development experience with an intact team, I speculate that the development cost would be about $250M. Expected interest on the money for this high risk field could easily be in the 25% range for a development cost of $65M per year to service the debt. If there is one flight every two weeks, $2.5M per flight to service the debt. At two flights per week, this drops to $625K. With multiple airframes flying twenty payloads per week, this drops to $63K per flight to service the debt.

New vehicle costs for the four airframes (Panther and 3 Xorbits) could be in the $20M range after the bugs are out. At a flight every two weeks, it would take $770K to pay off a set in a year. At two flights per week per airframe, it drops to $193K to pay off in a year. If some financing can be arranged, then costs can drop considerably more. (It could be much less in the reality as the Panther could lift 20+ times per week while the Xorbits could possibly do two each.)

 My first guess on fixed operating costs is $30M per year keeping two or more spaceports fully operating with all support staff, including transporting the Xorbit stages back to Mojave. These numbers are based on this guess. At a flight every two weeks, $1.154M per flight. At two per week, $289K per flight. At twenty flights per week, $58K per flight figuring that staff doubles at that flight rate.

flight frequency   debt    vehicles      fixed              marginal           total      

two weeks           $2.5M    $770K       $1.154M        $36K            $4.46M     

two per week    $625K      $193K         $289K          $36K            $1.143M    

twenty per week$63K      $193K         $58K              $36K              $350K     

If it worked out like this, then a flight rate of once every two weeks would break even at a little under $7K per pound, while twenty flights per week could get it down to around $530 per pound. A lower flight rate under every two weeks would make the plan unworkable while a higher flight rate than twenty per week would make it somewhat cheaper than $500.00 per pound. These numbers assume that interest only is paid on the development and that the vehicles must pay for themselves in one year.

This is very much a first generation space transport. Obvious places to get the cost down further are to reduce development costs while still getting an acceptable vehicle group. Getting a better interest rate. Improving propulsion and dry mass fraction to get the mass ratio down from 27 to 16 or so with less dry mass to lift in the first place. Getting it down to two stages to orbit to eliminate supporting downrange spaceports and the extra stages. Flying each airframe more than the twice a week I have here. Reducing the cost of new airframes and spreading the payback time over more than one year. Reducing the number of support personnel required per flight. And so on to get costs insanely low compared to the present day.

 Developing orbit into an economic driver is going to take a lot of work and intelligent handling. Orbital development to date with existing transportation is a mere shadow of the possibilities given transportation that is economical, reliable, and convenient. Everything changes when a decision can be made and executed reliably and affordable in a matter of weeks or possibly days. When was the last time you scheduled anything years in advance? How many times in your whole life do you schedule something years in advance and know that it might cato before it gets started? That is what the whole launch industry is forced to do at this time.

Basing on this cooperative venture creating a somewhat convenient transportation method to orbit, speculation on markets becomes possible. The first markets are somewhat limited in orbital inclination by the restrictions of the downrange spaceport requirement. The choices are a somewhat retrograde high inclination orbit, or a normal orbit with an inclination at  Mojave’s latitude. Anything to ISS is out due to inclination restrictions. Tourism is out due to the small vehicle size. What can you do?

While proving the vehicles, expensive payloads are out, so the focus must be on things that have low intrinsic value with only being in orbit making them valuable. Propellant is the first obvious choice. The first launch to each available inclination carries the largest propellant tank that it can as payload with subsequent launches filling it up. Or possibly one of the ELV companies leaves an upper stage in the right orbit that can serve as a depot. This is only good if there is a market for propellant from that particular orbit though. I dislike the concept of buying propellant, or water, or sand in orbit for the purpose of artificially creating a market.

The first stopgap depot would need to be in a normal orbit at Mojave’s latitude. When it has sufficient propellant delivered to make it worthwhile, one of the majors launches an un fueled GEO bird from the Cape to rendezvous with it. A 25 ton GEO bird unfueled could take on 50 tons of propellant before boosting to it’s final orbit. This would make for a very massive satellite compared with the current operational GEO sats. This would take about 170 launches of Panther/Xorbit. A contract for a million a launch would be profitable to both sides. The GEO provider would have the capability of a 75 ton launch vehicle for an extra $170M per GEO sat while only risking a 25 ton launcher. The Panther/Xorbit companies would need to get the launch rate above 3 per week to make a profit and pay off their debt. The 3 launches per week to reach profitability would take over a year to complete for each GEO bird that takes advantage of the capability. Assuming there are at least two of these monster satellites per year to refuel,  the launch rate is at nearly 7 per week. If deliveries could reach that flight rate, about 40% of each launch would be for profit or paying off the debt. Debt payoff would be under 3 years and would further reduce the launch costs by a factor of almost two, which would make the launches even more profitable at that price point.

Propellant is not the only possible cheap on the ground expensive in orbit payload though. Military surveillance would benefit from the ability to place fleets of cheap observation satellites in orbit. The gaps in coverage of the existing sats are most likely known to the people with something to hide. They probably time most of their sensitive moves to take place in these gaps. The military could easily spec an LEO surveillance sat that could be mass produced for under half a million. Though these birds would be far less capable than the high end machines they use now, a thousand of them would provide wall to wall coverage. At a million a launch and half that for the actual satellite, they would be looking at $1.5B for the whole program not including collecting and integrating the data. Allowing three years for placing the constellation, flight rates and costs match that of the propellant market only. Under three years to payout and higher profit thereafter.

Communications is frequently brought up as the target for early market. With cheap reliable launch as suggested here, less capable LEO satellites could be used in constellations with spares on orbit and on the ground ready to be launched in days if required. It is quite conceivable that these 300 kg comsats could be mass produced for a half million just as the surveillance satellites are. A billion and a half for a robust LEO comsat constellation of a thousand birds should be a business plan that would close. A three year launch schedule has the same numbers as the propellant or surveillance constellations. Under three year payoff and 40% profit after at a million a launch.

Astronomy and microgravity science and Earth observation satellites should be a market to match the last two.  Though the individual capabilities are less with the smaller satellites and cheaper construction, a cast of thousands could make up the difference. The ability to launch follow up or replacement experiments in a week or less would make commercial use of LEO much more user friendly. Over a hundred countries with thousands of universities and tens of thousands of private companies would be the market this time. With similar launch rates to the other users, the money works out the same.

If all four of these markets were to emerge though, a flight rate of 30 or so per week would drop costs still further. Costs of under $350K per flight would allow a charge of a half million per flight to make over 30% profit available for the debt payoff or investor ROI. It would also create even more incentive for the users of the service to make less expensive satellites for an even lower total cost. $4.5M per week profit would pay off the development debt in just over a year.

The assumption that these satellites would be inferior to the $Dirksen Galactica models launched by the current providers might not be true. The current birds are just too expensive and hard to replace to fail so every possible effort is spent making them reliable. This means literally gold plating some components and using only hardware that has been “space rated”. The time required to space rate components added to the long lead time on the current launch capability means that by the time any component reaches orbit, it is incredibly expensive, and it is obsolete by standards on the ground. The point has been made many times by many people that many of the current satellites, especially comsats,  are so expensive that the cost of launch is not all that important. With replacement launch on demand, satellite reliability becomes somewhat less important. It becomes possible to launch the latest electronic devices without “space rating” them at all. If they survive, they are space rated, if not, they are not. Henry Spenser has noted that the commercial stuff launched in the Canadian satellite that he worked with has lasted for years. How much capability is in $10K worth of May 2010 commercial electronic components components compared to $100M of “space rated” 1995 electronic components?

When failure is not an option, success can get expensive. We have all read that. How many have also noted that when failure is not an option, success also gets much  less capable?

With launches available on demand for half a million, many high risk or complicated capabilities can be tested and possibly implemented. A 300 kg tug could do considerable work in LEO. It is past time to deploy tethers for extensive testing. Debris cleanup vehicles can be tested and then employed. Fairly small service vehicles could do good work in GEO. National Geographic could afford a 300 kg Lunar, Mars, or NEO probe that was launched on one flight and fueled up by others.

It just gets better and the sky is not the limit.

A few weeks ago I did a post on possible fantasies related to suborbital spaceflight. Some of the feedback applies to orbital flight. Some feedback I was really looking for though did not show up. One commenter in previous threads really hammered on the human spaceflight being a fantasy  detrimental to the cause. Didn’t hear from him. Oh well, this one is about the transition from suborbital transports and the current ELVs moving into serious orbital transport operations.

I see many ways that the naysayers could be right about the current commercial plans for NASA cargo and human launch. While I don’t consider myself a negative person, I think SpaceX, Orbital, Lockmart, and Boeing would be well advised to focus on the short term gains from the new plan while protecting themselves against the long term consequences of abrupt termination of it for political reasons. I.e. don’t bet the company on uncontracted future NASA launch purchases. I think they would all be wise to operate in more or less the traditional (dinosaur) manner in regard to government contracts.

While I am somewhat pessimistic about commercial crew and cargo for NASA in the middle distance , I also don’t think that a shift in the political winds will “crater commercial launch for the foreseeable future” as so many think. Boeing and Lockmart will still have EELVs  for military launch, while SpaceX could still be in position to service Bigalow and commercial satellite customers. Orbital has other customers as well. These four will most likely continue to launch infrequent, relatively  expensive payloads whatever happens. This does not open orbit for the rest of us though.

The suborbital providers will have technical and market data in the next few years to prove or disprove their case. I expect three or more companies to be flying by 2015 with prices spiraling down and flight rate spiraling up. The suborbital companies are a major part of the foundation of space access in the future IMO and the survivors will be the ones to move forward  while the companies that don’t make it will inadvertently be supplying personnel training for the ones that do. The scaling problem is the next major stumbling block for these companies to face on the way to orbital operations.

Many that deride suborbital as “not real spaceflight” focus on the energy difference between the two types of flight with 50 times harder being a frequent number. Mach 25 is about 50 times the energy of mach 3.5 if you ignore such things as gravity and aerodynamic losses. Suborbital requires on the order of 2.5 km/s Vee when gravity and aerodynamic losses are included while orbital requires about 9km/s, which is a factor of 13 in real energy differences required for launch. Some negative comments even refer 100 or more difference in difficulty. There were a lot of good comments in the other post on the scaling problem, and I had to rethink how to write this post to incorporate them so I could take the credit away from Axel, David, Ed, and Pete. 

It has been mentioned many times that LEO is halfway to anywhere in terms of delta V. I think it will become clear in later decades that suborbital is halfway to orbit in terms of delta B, or Business. A suborbital company that delivers will have demonstrated the ability to build a company, build a team, raise funds, and only after that build a vehicle and the supporting technology. While the technical side is difficult, the business side is far more so. 90% of new restaurants go broke, and people have to eat or die. Business. It is more difficult to get one store going profitably than it is to get the second store operating. Business. It is far easier to open the tenth store than the second one . Business.

A successful suborbital company will have demonstrated the ability to operate a business. This has implications that are lost on many people. A successful business will have to have some track record for keeping employees functioning. It will have some record for integrity or else honest people will avoid dealing with them. It will have demonstrated staying power in the face of adversity……… And dead last, it will have demonstrated a profitable vehicle. When the suborbital companies look to orbital operations, their business reputation will make or break them. The reputation of Scaled Composites vs Rocketplane Kistler is a textbook example. If I were an investor, Rocketplane would have to have one very persuasive salesman to convince me to go with them instead of Burt. Whether the company in question is trying to raise funds for in house development or merge with a larger company, they must protect their reputation. Conservative engineering  strangely enough is part of protecting that rep. The Kevlar engine shields on XCOR engines are protecting  far more important assets than just one vehicle.

Given a good business reputation, how do the suborbital  companies move on to orbit? The choices are basically expansion or merger.

The expansion model could happen for some. Lynx with the mother in law pod. Xombe3 as launch assist platform. Possibly an Armadillo modular vehicle or a cargo Spaceship 2 carrying an upper stage. It is a bit early to say just which smallsat* launcher will do what and when. It is clear that these companies and more will be leveraging whatever assets they have to generate revenue. When one  of them is successful with smallsats, it is only natural that they think of scaling up to larger sizes. This is where the scaling starts getting interesting. They have already operated a suborbital vehicle for profit and have placed at least one payload in orbit, however small.(*smallsat, microsat, minisat, cubesat, or your own favorite term)

They will have some experience in staging with the smallsats and all other phases of orbital flight except perhaps pumps and reentry. Tanks, airframes, and engines will have to be larger and lighter, and the engines more efficient. This will be a very difficult technical problem. Technical problems have been solved before in this field with enough resources. A successful suborbital company should be able to acquire these resources.

XCOR would need to scale up their piston pump and already has a proprietary composite LOX tank capability. The next step up from the Lynx (Panther?), could be much larger suborbital vehicle that launches upper stages  from a mother in law pod in the same manner as the Lynx. If the piston pumps scale well, they just need to increase the dimensions as the cube root of the increased volume to be pumped. Eight times the engine requires a pump with twice the dimensions, but the same parts count. As conservative as a piston pump is technically, development could possibly be a case of scaling up the blueprints. Larger pumps are actually easier in some ways because the relative clearances are easier to achieve. With the Nonburnite composite tank technology, hitting the tank weight goals for a conservative Panther stage could also be a matter of scaling and building a test unit before the flight article. The airframe and engines are the only major scale problems I see for the company, and with focused resources and a subscale (Lynx) experience base these should be tractable problems. Even the engines shouldn’t be all that difficult on the relative scale, having already done a  dozen or so generations of them.

Armadillo is focused on a modular orbital system. If their plan works, they should be able to cluster however many modules together they need to deliver the payload to orbit. The only major scaling problem should be to get many modules to play nice together and John Carmack believes he has that covered. The upper modules will have to have reentry shields and gear and could be the sole major development item.

Masten has developed several generations of engine also with few reported problems. Their pintle based injectors seem to scale to any reasonable size on quite limited funds. Flometrics has been trying to sell their pistonless pumps for several years now so adding a pump should almost be a case of writing the check. They already outsource much of their tank construction so that doesn’t seem to be a show stopper either. Scaling the airframe would seem to be a straightforward task with the VTVL architecture. A reentry system would seem to be the major development hurdle for them.

These three companies can possibly start delivering orbital  payloads in the several hundred pound range with additional investments in the $100M to $250M range. Launch facilities  with eastern exposure could be their major problem. When development is done, additional airframes will probably be in the $10-20M range each. At $1,000.00 a pound, they could launch 500 pound satellites for a half million each. At that price point, with reliable and convenient launch availability, commercial companies can afford experimental payloads for material and medical research along with communications and small observatories. Even some universities could afford research launches. Airframes that are launching one to seven times per week  have investment pay back times measured in months. The first company to achieve this technical capability will prove or disprove the business case in a hurry.

Propellant is a market in a class of it’s own for these first true RLVs. A depot in LEO would allow a GEO bird twice as heavy as any in the current inventory to launch dry and be sent on with very fat propellant reserves. Same for launching a GEO tug to organize and move the dead bird traffic up there. A 25 ton GEO bound com-sat could tank 50 tons of propellant for some seriously enhanced maneuvering capabilities.

Scaled Composites just might be able to get an edge on those companies by the simple expedient of building Space Ship Two airframes optimized as lower stages. Unmodified White Knight Two could fly a few hundred miles up range and launch the SS2 for a depressed trajectory suborbital flight back to Mojave. SS2 could   launch the orbital stage during the flight.

There is a whole alphabet of other companies out there that might jump in from Airlaunch LLC to Unreasonable Rocket and back. I only expect one company to make it to this stage intact though, at most two. The one or two that make it might be the trendsetters for the next generation of larger orbital transports.

The tourism market is just beyond the reach of the first scale up to orbit as I see it. The second wave of orbital transports will be capable of handling humans. The companies that have survived to this point will be the ones that have already demonstrated the capability of building and operating a business in two risky markets, suborbital and orbital being very different animals for business purposes.

I think merger or acquisition is more likely than direct expansion. The large companies didn’t get where they are by being blind. If they see a profitable capability in the suborbital guys that they can acquire with a check, one of them will make an offer. Boeing, Lockmart, SpaceX, and Orbital are currently focused on getting there while the suborbital guys are more focused on getting there and back repeatedly and often. The getting back repeatedly and often will be purchased if possible. A Falcon first stage with an Armadillo modification  for RTLS is worth serious bucks. Even a heavy payload hit on the mass orbited might be acceptable if the recovered stage can gas-n-go tomorrow. An XCOR Lynx proof of concept for a Tiger next generation might have RD 180s and Lockmart tanks. Whichever of the suborbital guys survives will be in a strong position to leverage a unique capability in a merger with the big boys. When they do, you just might see 5 tons to orbit per airframe per day in ten years. When spaceflight participants can fly domestically on demand for a reasonable price, demand will rapidly appear.

For the people in orbit market, price and convenience will be critical. At $20M-$50M a seat and six months in Russia, demand seems to be just slightly above the supply of a seat or so per year. When someone can fly to the US for a week of training and a week on orbit for a million or less, demand will become obvious if it exists. The precondition is the ability to supply those seats and a destination with easy scheduling for customer convenience.

I’ll have to expand on this in another post as the subject is difficult to explore in a concise manner

I have not said much on the commercial take over of NASA orbital deliveries, so I thought I would lay out the timeline that I see happening.

Commercial space will start sending up astronauts to ISS in 2016 after $16B-$20B in development costs.

Commercial space will get a bit cocky by 2021 and mistakes will cause accidents that kill ten percent of the riders that year. The funding of $6B-$8B a year until that point will be increased for a few years to address the problems that caused the accidents while no commercial vehicles fly astronauts for a couple of years.

From 2021 to 2038, commercial space will continue to be overpriced and under performing to the point that the military redevelops it’s own launch capability in the national best interest. People with real commercial payloads find other providers, even foriegn ones.  Almost frantically NASA explores other means of getting commercial companies to perform with a different focus every two to four years with a couple of billion to each failed attempt in addition to the $6B-$8B a year sent to the ‘commercial’ launch providers.

In 2039 additional accidents will cost the lives of twenty percent of it’s riders that year. The government  finally realizes that the current crop of ‘commercial’ companies won’t get the job done and initiates a new program with new commercial companies to get the job done right and get back the capability before  had before it started down the commercial path.

The commercial companies continue to get $6B-$8B a year to launch even while they are being phased out in favor of the new new commercial companies. In 2045 the government learns that the new new crop of ‘commercial’ launch companies have screwed up even worse than the old new launch companies and decides to shut them down and eat the $18B that they collected for their paper studies with no real hardware to show.

During all this time the commercial companies have built up a lot of political power and the shut down attempt becomes a very long drawn out fight in congress and the press.

Substitute the word Shuttle for the word commercial in this post and back date everything 35 years with costs adjusted for inflation at 2% anually and you have the NASA human spaceflight operation for the last thirty years.

Many of the potential spaceflight markets have been labeled fantasies along with any market that involves government money. This labeling is usually in a negative light as in, “Space tourism is a fantasy market”. The implication is that fantasies are always bad and we need to wake up and smell the coffee.

Some major industries are fantasy based. Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Playboy are visible symbols of three separate industries that offer very little substance and a lot of fantasy. Gambling depends on large numbers of people to ignore the fact that you can’t build billion dollar casinos on losses thinking they are the exception. Hollywood does not portray reality except in a minute fraction of low budget “documentaries”. Playboy and the rest of it’s associated industry offers yet a third type of illusion. While all three of those industries would go broke if they depended on people like me, they are real industries with annual receipts that dwarf anything the space industry is likely to see in our lifetimes.

Financially successful fantasies have money that necessarily flows back into the larger community. Somebody must build and run those casinos, manufacture and use those cameras and theaters, and supply Pamela’s silicone. Billions of dollars a year go into product and energy businesses via the fantasies of millions of people. Space development can use such fantasies as available to move the visions along.

There are other kinds of fantasies that must be avoided. The fantasy that a product can be sold where no market exists is a major one. There is enough He3 in the atmosphere of Jupiter to run our world for millenia. As of now, getting it is a fantasy even though the He3 is certainly there. Trusting the UN to do the right thing when they do things like put Iran on the Commission for Women. There is ice on the moon, that’s nice. Who are you going to sell it to and what are they going to use it for. The driest nation on Earth almost certainly has more available water than the entire moon. If harvested, the Lunar ice must be used on the moon or in space. Until there is a market for water in a location off Earth, Lunar water is only a potential resource. In 2010, that ice is a data point. In 2030, it may or may not be the well spring of solar system development. For now though, it would be foolish to invest major funds in Lunar ice harvesting. Maybe.

There are many potential space markets that will be called fantasies by somebody. Tourism, point to point, communications, geo surveys, navigation, RLVs, He3, powersats, PGMs, and robotic exploration off the top of my head are things that might be a part of it that will be called fantasies by some. The thing is to set up businesses that that can work with them whether they are fantasies or not. To run a successful business, you must be responsive to customer desires, even if it is as dumb as a basketball bat. While I can’t make a case for multimillion dollar homes, I do work on them and try to give the customer their money’s worth, just as I do on an office building or a $10k remodel.

Suborbital spaceflight has been called a fantasy by some. There are at least four companies working on vehicles to send people, several more focusing on experimental payloads, and at least one  looking hard at military surveillance. These applications are all somewhat price dependant.

At the $200k starting price quoted by Virgin Galactic, I doubt there will be as many as 10,000 customers before the price starts dropping, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was under 1,000. Since that won’t pay off the investment, they will have to drop prices to fill the seats and generate revenue if they want to pay off their investment and make a profit. So IMO $200k is a fantasy market in the long term. So what. It is very unlikely that recurring costs are more than $50k per flight even with the two craft and clumsy hybrid. If they can on average put four people in a flight, then the recurring cost is paid off at $12,500 per participant with anything they can charge over this available for ROI and profit. With Zero gee flights at a few thousand, and supersonic aircraft rides in the $20k range plus a trip abroad, Virgin can look at a sustainable market for a very long time at a much lower price by offering a lot more altitude and float time for a few dollars more, unless the competition nails them.

I believe the Lynx will do much better. With the single craft and better engines, recurring cost  could be below $5k per flight. The gas-n-go vehicle is projected to be capable of four or more flights per day last I heard. If through competition, prices drop to $10k per flight later on, they could still be applying as much as $20k per day per vehicle toward ROI and profits if they hit their flight rates. This is down in the price range that can be handled by anyone with a job and the desire. Being well under the price of the supersonic Mig rides, and available domestically, the market can easily be expected to last until orbital spaceflight becomes affordable.

But what if suborbital spaceflight is a fantasy? Space Ship Two and the Lynx are going to be built. There are investors that buy into the concept enought to fund them both as well as possibilities from Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin. If the ships get built, and the naysayers are right, what then? It is almost certain that two or more vehicles will be developed and enter service within the next few years. If these vehicles enter service and the participant market dries up in a few months, what do they do? They will compete with Masten Aerospace and JP Aerospace for science payloads. Their vehicles are built and the development money is gone. They need revenue and they have vehicles to get it if the science markets are there. Then they work the surveillance market that TGV has been exploring. They do communications experiments and spaceflight equipment qualification testing. They will do any flight that will get their investment back and help the bank account.

When equipment is paid for, people will find ways to make money with it if at all possible. If the current guys go under and leave viable vehicles, somebody will buy those vehicles at bankruptcy prices and still use them to make money with far less ROI to worry about. Like Iridium. The only things that can kill suborbital spaceflight are government interference, a total lack of market for anything suborbital, or competition from an orbital provider at very low cost.

What if there is no market for anything suborbital? Then you have two or more companies that have demonstrated competence in building RLVs with fast turnaround and high reliability, the base requirements for entering suborbital service. If there is a desire for orbital spaceflight at the end of this cycle, who better to build a reliable orbital RLV? The PowerPoint Cowboys, or the people that just posted a hundred suborbital spaceflights from one tail number during one month in the process of proving their design and training the operational personnel? In the unlikely event that suborbital is a bust, it is still likely to have a serious effect on the future of orbital spaceflight.

The move to orbital operations is inevitable. It is a question of who, when, why, how, how often and at what price. If the current orbital demand is all there will be with only modest increases in flights over the decades, then no new vehicle provider is needed. The current vehicles serve the current market. If we are not expecting considerable increases in flight rate, then all these discussions are a waste of time. I have a base assumption that it will be worthwhile to go out there for some reason. That reason does not have to be the same for everyone though. That reason does not need to be distorted by massive subsidies in questionable programs. 

Assuming the suborbital market does produce profitable revenue, the companies that built the vehicles that generate it will have strong credibility with investors toward building orbital space transports. They should also have a bit of cash reserve and considerable preliminary work done on their favored solution.

They have to address one bad fantasy though. Many people have pointed out that orbital flight has fifty times the energy requirements of suborbital flight. They use that true statement to create the negative fantasy that orbital spaceflight is fifty times harder than suborbital. In any other transport realm this would be true. Not spaceflight. Orbital is about seven times the velocity requirement of suborbital which is forty nine times the energy due to the square function. A car that is traveling 210 mph is a vastly more difficult beast than one that is moving 30 mph. Fifty times the energy is probably a thousand times the difficulty. A plane that travels at 700 knots is vastly more difficult than one that is doing 100 knots. Again fifty times the energy is probably a thousand times the difficulty. A boat at 280 knots is a deathtrap while one at 40 knots is a common speedboat. A spacecraft at mach 25 though has identical requirements to one at mach 3.5. The propulsion to get it there and the thermal protection to get it home are obviously different though even the propulsion is similar.

                                                                     suborbital           orbital

mass ratio                                                   3-4                         9-20    

main engines                                                 1                             2-3                                                      

flight duration                                   15-30 min                  1.5-72 hours

thermal protection                             minimal                   critical

navigation                                               minimal                   moderate

control systems                                     16 thrusters            16 thrusters, more propellant

Mass ratio is 4-7 times as much for an orbital vehicle as suborbital. That means the first stage must be much larger, just not fifty times larger. Two to three larger engines instead of one for the suborbital with a somewhat higher performance requirement. For a shop with generations of engine development in it’s recent history, another generation of engines will probably take considerably less time than it took to reach their first generation of reliable flight weight engines. They will be larger, not necessarily more complicated. Flight duration is different of course and is fifty times longer at times. Is a seat going to be fifty times more difficult because someone is going to sit in it longer? Batteries and air tanks will be larger though also not more complicated. Thermal protection is the major biggie. After half a century of government spaceflight, what have they delivered to to commercial sector in this field? This one will have to be solved, and may well be fifty times harder. Navigation is harder though not fifty times, especially with all the GPS and software available now. Control systems will need larger tanks.

A company with a strong track record of suborbital rocket vehicle operations and development is halfway to orbit in business terms. The problems they face in technical development are mostly problems they have already dealt with on a smaller scale. The fantasy of orbital difficulty will have to be laid to rest, not by argument as I’m doing here, by operational demonstrations.

This post  is getting too long so I’m going to have to break it into pieces.