The first thing I wanted to mention was that this was the first Space Access in three years that I actually came away from feeling recharged and excited. 2010 was a very difficult conference, with the strains that led to the second Masten reboot coming to a head, and some personal and petty disappointments on my part that at Masten we hadn’t even tried to give XCOR any real competition when it came to selling ULA on a partner for their RL-10 replacement engine project.

By 2011, I was running full-speed ahead with Altius, which was exciting, but the feeling I came away from Space Access with that year was frustration. Masten was making headway on its reboot, but hadn’t really caught its stride yet, Armadillo had had a depressing year, and XCOR was still struggling to raise the rest of the money it needed to really get into its Lynx work.  The industry had fought and lost the NASA 2010 Authorization battle, with its main win being that the much suckier House version hadn’t been passed. While that would’ve been disastrous, it was still pretty clear that the antibodies had won that round. I won’t belabor the point any further, but the last two Space Access conferences before this one hadn’t recharged me or excited me the way that previous conference had.

Fortunately, at least to me, the feeling I took away from this year was a lot more invigorating and optimistic, mostly due to progress at the three main sRLV companies that have been regulars at the conference: XCOR, Armadillo, and Masten. I’ll touch on each of them briefly:

XCOR
By far, XCOR impressed me as the company at the conference the closest to seeing its vehicle become a reality. With the funding round finally closed on Lynx, and the aerodynamics work winding down, they’re hot and heavy in the processes of parts detailing, manufacturing drawing development, quoting, working with suppliers to get parts made, and then integrating the pieces as they came in.  The design work they showed at the conference gave me a lot of confidence–I personally think that that HTHL vehicles like Lynx are actually more complex in many ways than VTVL vehicles–and XCOR’s presentation showed a design reaching the level of maturity, detail, and sophistication you would expect in a vehicle that is being built and readied for flight test.  While they’ve got a lot of integration to go, with all its opportunities for delays, rework, and development snags, if you’ve been at this point in a prototype vehicle development effort, it almost makes you giddy with excitement. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I think there’s a high probability that XCOR is going to be there in force at next year’s conference, showing pictures and videos from Lynx’s first few flight tests. There’s still a long way from there to a commercially operating Lynx Mk2, but I think that so long as they can keep a decent war-chest of extra cash available to work through the inevitable slides, it’ll be exciting to see the race between them and VG over the coming year or two. To be honest, I wish I had some XCOR stock about now.

Armadillo
Armadillo also gave reason to be excited. Simply put, they already flew a vehicle to 95km that actually probably could’ve been coaxed over the von Karman line with a little more patience in the engine characterization and such. While they are stepping up to a larger vehicle, and going back to a cold-gas RCS system (which worries me–I think you’re really going to want hot-gas RCS for a full 100km flight), I think they’ve got a good shot at being the first of the Space Access regulars to make it over the von Karman line. Now admittedly, this is with a vehicle that’s basically a liquid sounding rocket, but it’s a good first step. It’ll be interesting to see where AA goes as they try to transition the info learned from Stig-B back into their VTVL vehicle development.

Masten
The things that gave me the most hope about Masten were actually from a side conversation from Dave outside the conference itself. A lot of the technical issues that I had been sweating while still working there look like they’ve found a good rigorous approach to solving. While they still have a lot of execution between them and success, and while they’re by far the most undercapitalized of the three, it looks like they’re taking the steps and getting the outside help they’ll need to make a reliable VTVL rocket system. The Xeus work and the other contracting stuff is also cool, but to me I was able to walk away with the warm fuzzy that Masten’s on a good track for getting Xaero and eventually Xogdor flying.

My hope with all of this is that next year, each of the teams will have enough solid accomplishments under their belt that we’ll have many of them back in larger numbers to collect some hard-earned bragging rights. We’re still growing up as an industry, but I feel pretty excited about the near-term prospects of at least this corner of the industry.

While I was standing there looking at this pretty darned impressive hole in the ground, I started thinking about Larry Niven’s quip about how “Dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space program”. As I said on Twitter during the drive, I don’t think our space program would actually do us much good in stopping an extinction-level meteor strike, even if we had 5-10 years advanced notice (which we most likely wouldn’t have because we’re not doing the NEO search in the way that would actually give us much advanced warning).

I think a better way of thinking about this would be to say that “Dinosaurs went extinct because they weren’t spacefaring. Unfortunately, neither are we–yet.”

Speaking of spacefaring, I think that Paul Spudis’ article about the seafaring vs. aviation analogy for space was spot-on in illustrating this point. This is why I’m worried that the destination/mission focus of so much of the space debate is driving things in foolish directions. I actually side with Paul in thinking that cislunar space (including the surface of the Moon) is where it makes the most sense for us to develop ourselves into a spacefaring (and not just space-visiting) civilization. I just think a lot of the debate is on destinations versus whether we want to be forever stuck with one-off missions or whether we want to establish the kind of transportation infrastructure that enable something more like what Paul described (and ultimately what would be required if we want to be able to avoid repeating the fate of the Dinosaurs if it turns out some rock out there is addressed with our name on it).

It takes slightly crazy people to make big changes. These same people generally have tough lives. It’s a lifestyle choice.

–Iain McClatchie (who runs the  Ambivalent Engineer blog)

One of the things that really strikes you about all the conversations between NASA and Congress about NASA’s attempt to help you know, follow its charter and “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space” by funding commercial development of crew transport vehicles is the emphasis on safety. Shuttle ended up killing two crews out of 135 flights, which is actually about what you’d expect to get from flying crews on EELV-class vehicles without a launch escape system of any sort, yet in almost every Congressional hearing, you hear a ton of hand-wringing about whether these vehicles will be safe enough for NASA’s astronauts. And you can tell that NASA has taken these inputs very seriously, with all the requirements (and referenced requirements, and requirements referenced in referenced requirements, and requirements referenced in requirements referenced in referenced requirements), paperwork, overhead, and with their attempt to force things into a FAR-based mold closer to how NASA does major programs. It’s pretty clear that NASA and Congress both see safety as the top priority for commercial crew. I know this may be heretical, but I’m wondering if this is a misplaced priority.

Maybe I’m wrong, but here’s my concern:

1. NASA really wants at least two independent, self-sustaining, affordable ways of getting people to and from the ISS. Having this capability means that if anything happens to one system, you don’t get the standdowns like what you had with the Shuttle program.
2. Having at least two affordable and healthy competitors also means more price competition, and more incentive to innovation.
3. There’s no chance that Orion on SLS is going to be anything within spitting distance of “affordable” for routine crew rotations.
4. As NASA has been openly admitting for almost as long as this blog has been around, they know that they can’t afford to go beyond LEO if they can’t offload all of the ISS crew and cargo needs to commercial providers using firm, fixed-price contracts.
5. But NASA only wants to buy about 8 seats per year (two rotations of four crew each) from commercial providers, in order to meet their ISS obligations.
6. You’re only likely to get two affordable and healthy commercial crew providers if they have enough demand to spread their fixed costs out over (and if they can keep those fixed-costs within reason).
7. I can only see a few ways of doing that (though there may be others):
1. Have the commercial crew vehicles be affordable enough that they can enable significant non-NASA crew, cargo, and recoverable freeflyer (like DragonLab) services.
2. Having the commercial crew vehicle be similar enough to a commercial cargo vehicle that each provider can actually get a decent number of flights per year out of a mix of crew and cargo.
8. Only the first of those two options avoids the challenge of a NASA/commercial crew monopsony scenario, where the ISS is the only thing keeping the commercial crew providers afloat.
9. While there is a small, but non-zero, chance that you could get sufficient demand from what Bigelow calls “sovereign clients” to get non-NASA crew/cargo demand even at the old $20M/seat Soyuz price, the best analysis I have seen with the existing data (pgs 43-53 of this presentation) suggests that the price point commercial crew needs to get in order to reach a tipping point is $5M/seat max, and possibly as low as $1-2.5M/seat.
10. While it may be barely possible for NASA to eke out a minor victory by getting two independent  and semi-healthy commercial ISS crew providers who also do ISS cargo deliveries on unmanned versions of their rockets/delivery vehicles, even this minor victory is only possible if the fixed cost of the crew capability isn’t too excessive.
11. With only two flights per year worth of crew demand, there might not even be enough demand for one commercial provider unless they can find synergies with ISS cargo deliveries, or more preferably non-NASA customers.

I guess my big concern is that it doesn’t appear as though NASA or Congress are being realistic about how to properly prioritize safety. Ultimately you can always spend extra money on safety (one more test, one more certification, one more sign-off, one more review, etc)–the only way to have 0% chance of losing a crew on an ISS mission is to not do the mission. If you are actually going to fly, there’s a point where you have to accept some risk, and you have to say at some point that you’re only willing to spend a certain amount of money to potentially buy down tiny fractions of a decimal point safety-wise. If you have to make that decision anyway, then it makes sense to do it in the framework of the big picture of the mission risks and overarching goals.

This is something for instance that the Constellation program utterly failed to do–the core justification for Ares-I was that it’s launch ascent safety was supposedly going to be so darned good (a 1 in 2106.4823910293 chance of losing a crew on ascent, at a 50% confidence interval…), but in the light of a program that expected a 2% or greater chance of losing a crew on a given lunar mission, it’s pretty clear that spending money to go from a 1 in 1000 probability on existing LVs versus spending a decade and $10-20B on a new launcher to buy that risk down a bit was money very foolishly spent. The problem is I worry we’re going down the same path with commercial crew.

While I don’t personally have any really sage advice on how best to ensure safe operations while still keeping the overhead low enough to keep commercial crew provider costs low enough to give a realistic shot at enabling a new market to emerge, I am worried that the current balance is a well-intentioned disaster waiting to happen (see also Wayne Hale’s previous warning on this topic).  If NASA and Congress continue down the path they’re going with safety, there’s a very real chance that they’re going to make commercial crew commercially unviable. And that would be the ultimate Pyrrhic Victory–having one or two “commercial” crew providers that in the end that are flying, but are so expensive that only NASA can afford them.

Jeff made the point that you can look at space policy from a framework that has Goals at the top, with Strategies that help you achieve those Goals, Objectives that provide you measurable steps to gauge your progress at those Strategies, and then Tactics that determine what tools you use for meeting those Objectives. I really like this framework, and in fact it helped me clarify my thinking about Altius’ corporate goals and strategies (but that’s a blog post for another time, and probably over on the ASM blog).

After giving a few analogies (WWII military policy and the Space Race), Jeff then made the argument that “space settlement” was actually the policy of the United States. For me, my motivating goal for space development is a very closely related but slightly different focus–tapping the resources of space for the benefit of mankind here on earth. Now, there are challenges for both of these goals. As Jeff right pointed out, there are many who are afraid of openly proclaiming goals like these, because they are afraid that they might not actually be realistically achievable. In the case of settlement, there are questions of whether humans can actually reproduce outside of a 1g field, or if we can ever get to the point where we can economically support life indefinitely off planet. In the case of tapping space resources for humanity’s benefit, there’s the “minor technical detail” that most of these resources are extremely subeconomic right now.

I actually discussed the topic of subeconomic resources back in the early day of this blog, but I figure a revisiting of the topic is worthwhile. To recap, a subeconomic resource is one that you can’t profitably extract and sell under current conditions. Pretty much all space resources currently fall under this category. While you hear a lot of comments on space forums about the importance of better space property rights, the reality is that even if there was a clear way you could homestead a chunk of the Moon or a NEO or Mars, and sell anything you could harvest for it, I still don’t think you could actually close an honest business case around resource extraction today. With how much it would cost and how long it would take to go from where we are right now to the point where you could actually sell your first kg of lunar platinum or put the first drop of lunar derived LOX or LH2 into a customer’s tank in LEO, there’s no way you could actually make the ROI work for doing that privately, stand-alone. In fact, I’ve even got a certain coblogger who has made the argument that it’s impossible to ever mine a resource in space and send it back to earth for a net profit.

While I’m pessimistic on the current economics of space resource extraction, I think my friend is wrong. The point I made in my previous article on the topic and that I wanted to remake today is that resources that are currently subeconomic don’t have to stay that way. What got me thinking about this was actually reading a sign at the Hogle Zoo last week while on vacation. One of the donors for the zoo was the Kennecott Copper Mine, a major open-pit mine located in the mountains on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. While this mine is one of the most productive mines in the world, there was still a time in the not-to-distant past, where even if you knew exactly how much gold, silver, copper, and molybdenum there was in there, that it wouldn’t have been possible to economically exploit that. But as transportation systems became more mature, affordable, and reliable, commerce spread, and eventually mines like it or deep-sea oil rig operations also became feasible and even profitable.

Now don’t get me wrong, just because it’s possible for some subeconomic resources to become economic over time, that doesn’t guarantee that a specific resource will do so. Personally, I’d be really surprised if anyone ever harvests Helium-3 from the moon for use in fusion reactors, for instance. But I think there’s a reasonable case that a space program run with the goals I mentioned earlier (settlement and resource utilization), and with a suitably well-thought-out and implemented strategy, can enable at least some extraterrestrial resources to become economically extractable for mankind’s benefit.

Imagine for a second that the White House actually proposed such a goal, and a strategy like Jeff’s “planet hopping” strategy, and found a way to get Congress on-board with such a strategy, and NASA to competently execute it’s part of that strategy long enough to get us past our first two major objectives (depots in LEO and L1 and a working lunar ISRU operation capable of delivering respectable amounts of LOX/LH2 to L1). Also imagine that the idea of prepping these new capabilities for a handoff to commercial operations was built-in from the get-go instead of being an afterthought like it usually is. By that point, we would have already started some virtuous cycles. By providing an anchor tenancy need for propellant in LEO, you’ve now provided a large enough stable market to close the business cases for several lower-cost launch providers. You’ve also helped establish infrastructure and systems to allow sending large amounts of crew, cargo, and other materials to the lunar surface. You’ve also established the first market for propellant in L1 (servicing missions both to the Moon and also to NASA’s next steps in the “planet hopping” strategy). If the price point of propellant in L1 from lunar sources really is cheaper than shipping it from home, you’re also getting the start of a transportation system that has a made a lot of progress towards being able to extract and ship home Lunar PGMs at an economically useful price point. While you might not yet be all the way there, you’ve now lowered the amount of additional work that has to be covered by a lunar PGM extraction business plan substantially, and also removed a lot of content and time between fundraising and when that first bar of platinum can be sold on earth. Also, by providing steady demand for propellant in L1, NASA has also provided an economic incentive for people to improve the cost of delivering stuff to L1 (say by improving the reusability of lunar landers, building a small lunar mass driver, rotovator, launch loop, sling, or a lunar beanstalk). By providing an anchor tenant for LEO and L1 propellant, NASA has also made it easier for other people with business ideas to factor those into their company’s plans, or their country’s space program.

To summarize what has now become a much longer blog post than I intended, I think a properly done settlement/resource extraction goal with a “planet hopping” strategy could actually start making lunar resources economically extractable even before we’ve managed to put a human foot on Mars, even if such resources are currently nowhere near economically feasible today.

I think this is potentially a really positive move forward that might open the doors for commercialization of technologies that NASA is helping fund development for. Just thought I’d pass along the thoughts.

First off, I wanted to congratulate my friends at XCOR and ULA. This engine work that ULA and XCOR have been doing is something I’ve been watching from the sidelines for some time now, and it’s cool to see them making progress. As Jeff Greason pointed out during and after the Augustine Committee’s work, the US rocket industrial base is in bad shape, and getting new blood and new ideas injected into it is critical.

Second off, I’ve been an advocate of aluminum rocket engine fabrication for several years now. It’s worth noting that while I was still at Masten we ended up doing almost every one of our successful Xombie/Xoie flights using aluminum chambered engines (and I think we’re still the only company to ever fly a reusable rocket engine made of aluminum). Aluminum has a ton of advantages especially for cryogenic engines (ie Methane or LH2 fueled ones), but even for non-cryo ones as well. A quick list includes:

• Low density and high strength-to-weight allows you to get a very lightweight engine without having to push margins or analysis anywhere near as far as with more traditional materials.
• Low-cost and easy availability of many alloys with good mechanical and thermal properties. Once you’ve tried to source a high-strength copper alloy for a medium-ish sized rocket engine you’ll know why this matters.
• Easy, quick, and cheap to machine, even if you want to do tricksy things with the cooling groove geometries.
• There are a ton of manufacturing process options that are semi-unique to aluminum that give you a lot of tools for optimization of the design without excessive costs. Some of these knobs allow you to optimize either for maximum heat flux into the coolant (for expander cycle engines) or minimum heat flux into the coolant while still keeping the wall cool.
• High thermoconductivity (about 50-60% of pure copper’s thermal conductivity) allows you to keep walls cooler–which is kind of necessary with it’s low softening temperature.
• If you can keep it cool enough for long-duration operations (which you usually can for low-moderate pressure engines), thermal stresses can be much lower making it easier to make engines that can stand hundreds or even thousands of cycles

The list definitely goes on from there (like making feasible an alternative engine cycle that I was supposed to have blogged about months ago), but that gives you an idea. The manufacturability/availability issues were enough to get me an opportunity to try them out at Masten, and the work we did for the Xombie/Xoie engines vindicated the choice. For an upper stage engine, the benefits are even more compelling. One of the things I’ve always looked for are manufacturing technologies/choices that allow you to cheat on the cost vs. performance curve. With a small alt.space company, you’re not going to be able to spend the same amount of engine optimization as a bigger aerospace company, so any technologies that allow you to approach “big boy” performance while still being something that a 1-3 person propulsion team can do is worth pursuing.

I think this technology is especially relevant to RL-10 follow-on type efforts like what ULA and XCOR mention they are collaborating on in this announcement. Using the right combinations of manufacturing processes (and there are probably several ways of skinning the cat), you can increase heat flux into the coolant (which allows you to get more power out of the engine or higher chamber pressure), lower the weight of the engine assembly, substantially reduce the manufacturing/inspection/rework cost and complexity compared to a tube-wall nozzle, improve the reusability of the engine, and at the same time allow robust enough margins that a small team can have a realistic shot of delivering a world-class engine.

While I am very happy for XCOR and ULA, I do have to admit to being somewhat jealous that I haven’t had a chance to be involved in this aluminum nozzle technology effort. I spent a lot of time at Masten working on coming up with approaches for making scalable, low-cost, high-performance manufacturing approaches for aluminum nozzles, with just this sort of application in mind, but we were never able to get the sort of outside traction ($$$) it would take to actually validate our concepts (past what we did for the Xombie/Xoie/Xaero/Xogdor engines). Since leaving and starting Altius I’ve been trying to push the ideas even further. In fact, this past month I came up with a completely new approach that if it works (I’d give it about a 75-80% chance of working) could be amazing, not only for rocket engines but also for 3D printing, and many other applications as well. Imagine a process that would make a full-density part with lithium-aluminum strengths, where minimum hole size for internal channels was small enough that you could basically make metal foams, that would allow you to build-in electronic components and sensors, but without the size limitations of most other additive manufacturing processes, which could be scaled up for large thin structures (on the scale of an F-1 rocket engine or an Apollo CSM-sized transpiration-cooled heat-shield).

Anyhow, I hope that some day we’ll get to see some more details on what exactly XCOR/ULA doing for the manufacturing process, and I also hope that we’ll see an RL10-class engine flying some day with an aluminum nozzle (and maybe even chamber). Congrats guys!

That exchange was annoying, but utterly predictable. What really torqued my screws though was the HEFT presentation that was released yesterday. On pages 26-27, they list a bunch of key technologies needed for exploration, and which missions they were applicable to. The only technology that was included in the list that was shown to be not applicable to any of the missions was In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Transfer…

The dirty little secret most people don’t know is that the only HEFT study that was actually well within budget goals was the one based on the original FY11 proposal, which focused heavily on propellant depots and advanced technologies. I hope Chris Bergin doesn’t get too mad at me for posting a teaser from L2 of NASASpaceflight from back in September:

HEFT DRM 1 Budget Sandchart

As you can see, the only point at which it breaks the “budget bogey” is near the end of the commercial crew development, but for most of the exploration phase is well below the line.  Now admittedly, this DRM is not compliant with the now-signed NASA Authorization Act, however the HEFT team had abandoned this idea long before that Act was signed into law.  The only reason I could find for this was that this approach required “an excessive number of commercial launches”.  The next two DRMs (DRM 2A and 2B) also featured propellant depots, but combined with a “modest” HLV.  They ended up costing a lot more, but were still at least close to hitting budget targets.  Unfortunately, they also got rejected for requiring “too many commercial launches”.  The HLLV focused option (which dropped depots and any new technology) completely blew the budget guidance across the board, much like what NASA proposed in its report to Congress this week.

To give the latest HEFT report some credit, they did list depots as a potential commercial partnership with NASA.  If that meant something COTS-like where NASA helped fund some of the risk maturation on a FFP milestone basis, but basically let the commercial companies drive most of the technical decisions, that would be great.  I’m worried though that what NASA really means is the same “support” Griffin gave with his “we’ll buy propellant if you guys make it work on your own dime” comments.

But it’s really frustrating to see that it looks like depots were rejected for the same flawed reasons given in the ESAS report. Problems that industry is actively proposing good solutions to.  It’s also interesting that NASA’s NEA missions end up being so big and bloated.  I asked Josh Hopkins about this at his presentation last month, and he said part of the problem is that NASA decided that most potential NEOs were “too small” to be interesting, and therefore were focusing on the bigger, rarer, and harder to reach asteroids…and letting their whole architecture bet contorted by these initial assumptions.  Just like ESAS.

Ultimately, I think the whole HEFT process illustrates once again the danger of having secret teams at NASA doing conceptual architecture development in a vacuum, and without public transparency.  Instead of openly analyzing things, getting frequent feedback, or seeing if industry has ideas to deal with supposed show-stoppers, early decisions are made that drive things off the rails.  When those early assumptions drive the analysis in completely unaffordable directions, there isn’t a good mechanism to rein things back in.  Or at least, it’s hard to tell from the outside, because all the public gets to see is occasional summary reports released at the end, long after the flawed assumptions have been buried deep into the analysis in a way that will take years to pick out.

I guess the good news is that even though there are some elements in NASA that still don’t get it, there are a lot of other programs, particularly stuff in the Office of the Chief Technologist that give me some hope.  If Congress insists on setting NASA up for failure again by forcing them to build their Zip-Code Engineered Ares/Shuttle Zombie Rocket, at least some of the commercial work will be funded that will enable us to pick up the pieces when this all flies apart another 5 years and $10-15B down the road.  I’m hoping between the rendezvous and docking work we’re trying to do at Altius, depot work being done at ULA and Boeing, NEO exploration concept work at LM, inflatable station stuff being done at Bigelow, and all the commercial crew development projects, many of these excuses and wrongheaded assumptions will be impossible to make with a straight face next time NASA decides to do another internal, non-transparent, echo-chambered, insufficiently vetted paper-study project to figure out what they should do next now that the last Congressionally underfunded project goes flying off the cliff.