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.

The best way to describe things in one sentence is that Altius Space Machines is a rapid prototyping company developing and commercializing technologies needed for reusable orbital launch vehicles, and enabling markets for such vehicles.

Rapid Prototyping
Altius will be focused on building and demonstrating prototype flight hardware both for our own internal projects, and for external clients. In the process of developing our own product lines, Altius will be building up a team with significant expertise in rapid prototyping, and flight vehicle testing which will be able to serve the needs of other customers.  The fact that Altius is not trying to be an operations company also makes it a bit easier for it to work with many players in the suborbital and orbital launch world.

This model is similar to what Scaled and Aurora Flight Sciences have done in the UAV world.

Enabling Technology Product Lines
In addition to contract prototype work for commercial and government clients, we have identified several areas where Altius can develop stand-alone products that mature technologies required for enabling reusable orbital transportation.  We have looked at a wide range of potential product lines, including launcher-related products like nanosat launchers with reusable first stages and reusable upper stages for suborbital RLVs, as well as non-launcher ideas like reusable micro reentry vehicles and a variant on the boom rendezvous and docking concept.  We also have several other ideas we’re looking at, including more subsystem-type technologies such as an extremely lightweight aluminum combustion chamber fabrication concept, an advanced pump-feed concept we’re investigating with Retro Aerospace (blog post on that one soon), and a few others.

Here’s some more details on a few of those product lines:

Reusable First-Stage NanoSat Launcher
This is a topic area I’ve been working on for quite some time now, but particularly over the past year or so. There are many competitors in this market area, especially with the announcement of the NanoSat Launcher Centennial Challenge, but most of them are looking at expendable systems based on solids or other components. While it is true that doing so reduces risk in the eyes of investors, it ties in a higher operations cost, typically makes the vehicles more complicated (three or more stages), and lowers the potential for high-tempo operations like some customers (such as the Army Nanosat program) want. I don’t think the reusable element in such a system has to cost much more to develop than a comparable suborbital RLV like Masten’s Xogdor or Armadillo’s SuperMod.

I won’t go into all the details here, but the concept we’ve been looking at is based on the air-launch glideforward concept I discussed on this blog several years ago (using John Hare’s realization that you don’t necessarily have to have a winged first stage with such a system), but with an expendable upper stage.

There seems to be a decent amount of demand for a system like this, it paves the way for future fully-reusable vehicles, and is a small-enough project to be completable within a 4-5 year time-frame with adequate funding.

Reusable Micro Reentry Vehicles
One of the prime examples of technologies that can be developed independently, but which is critical for orbital RLVs is reusable, low-maintenance Thermal Protection Systems. There are a ton of ideas out there for how to solve this problem, ranging from stronger ceramic tiles, to transpiration cooling, to metallic heat shields. A good deal of ground work has been done on these ideas, but very few of them have been flight tested, and none of them have really gone into an operational product. By focusing on a micro-scale reentry vehicle (imagine something big enough to bring something like a NanoRacks CubeLab back from LEO), a lot of experience from the nanosat and suborbital communities can be brought to bear on the problem, and the scale is small enough that rideshare opportunities are available to keep the flight demonstration costs reasonably low. Such a system could target markets including rapid sample return from ISS researchers as well as providing a free-flyer platform similar to DragonLab, but without having to aggregate your payload with dozens of other systems. But at the same time it would be demonstrating a key subsystem technology needed for orbital RLVs.

Once you’ve developed the ability to reusably return a vehicle from LEO, most of the other pieces for a small RLV are ones that have already been demonstrated in the suborbital world, and from doing a semi-reusable nanosat launcher.

Advanced Boom Rendezvous
Current rendezvous and docking systems are not a good match for high flight-rate RLVs. The complicated hardware necessary for such prox-ops ties up too much of the capacity of a small RLV, and they are not really suited for high-tempo operations. The limitations of current prox-ops solutions are also part of why groups like ESAS and HEFT were able to so readily dismiss propellant-depots for exploration missions. If there were a solution that required minimal hardware on the delivery vehicle side, minimize risks of failed docking or accidental collisions, and generally made rendezvous and docking an almost non-event, it would go a long way towards making propellant depots and orbital RLVs a reality.

Kirk Sorensen, one of my cobloggers here on Selenian Boondocks, invented the Boom Rendezvous concept, which I see as an important part of the solution to this problem. Boom rendezvous, by moving the initial contact away from either vehicle greatly reduces the odds of accidental collisions, simplifies and speeds up the rendezvous process, and greatly reduces the mass penalties for rendezvous and docking systems on the delivery vehicle. And we figured out a way to take that great idea and make it even better, making it so the boom system can readily (and non-destructively) grip target surfaces that aren’t designed for mechanical capture…but how we intend to do that is a blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, if we can make this technology work, it would enable easy capturing of space debris, nanosat-scale space tugs, simpler rendezvous and docking for personnel, cargo, and propellant deliveries, much easier orbital servicing missions, etc.

Anyhow, there are a lot of other details about Altius Space Machines, more details on what we want to do, why we’re interested in Colorado, and how we intend to run our business, but I think this is enough to help people understand what it is we are trying to do with this new company.

As our marketing guy would say at this point: Machine Up!

Imagine a future where transportation to and from orbit has become so common that there are dozens of vehicles going to and from orbit every day, from countries all over the globe.

Imagine a future where orbital research facilities can get new parts or materials quickly enough that they can keep pace with terrestrial research labs. And where the transportation costs are low enough that some high end materials are even manufactured in space for use on earth.

Imagine a future where orbital rendezvous and docking has become so simple and reliable that dozens of such events occur on a daily basis, with some facilities handling multiple events at the same time.

Imagine a future where every cellphone on the planet uses LEO satellite platforms for “roaming” when outside of cities, where such systems are competitive enough with terrestrial cell towers, that rural cell tower have been dismantled because they aren’t cost-competitive.

Imagine a future where you can get custom facilities constructed for you on-orbit, with lead-times measured in single-digit years, not decades.

Imagine a future where there are daily flights departing from earth to the Moon.

Imagine a future where transportation costs to the lunar surface are low enough that lunar tourism is the new playground of the rich. And where transportation costs from the lunar surface back to earth are getting low enough that mining companies are beginning to mount prospecting expeditions, in the hopes of returning PGMs to the earth.

Imagine a future where beyond earth orbit spaceflight is affordable enough that space exploration enthusiasts stop arguing over people vs. robots.

Imagine a future where orbital debris is a concern that sounds as anachronistic as worries about the Soviets coming through the Fulda Gap.

Imagine a future where due to remediation efforts for the van Allen belts, radiation levels have dropped to the point that COTS electronics can be used all the way out to GEO, without any concern about radiation hardening.

Imagine a future where more people reside in space than in Antarctica at any given moment.

Imagine a future where microgravity science is a common major at most universities.

Imagine a future where orbital propellant transfer is so common that all spacecraft are designed from the start for refueling.

Imagine a future where in-space search, rescue, and repair is common enough that travel to the lunar surface is no more dangerous than traveling to orbit today.

Imagine.

Here’s the link.

As I said, very well worth the read, since it’s only 3pgs.  I think he may be working on a more detailed paper as part of a Master’s Thesis or PhD dissertation, though I could be misremembering.

And now back to continued light blogging.

May 25th, 2010, Mojave, CA, USA: XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, two of the leaders in the New Space sector, have announced a strategic business and technology relationship to pursue jointly the anticipated NASA sponsored unmanned lander projects. These automated lander programs are expected to serve as robotic test beds on Earth, on the lunar surface, Mars, near Earth objects and other interplanetary locales, helping NASA push the boundaries of technology and opening the solar system for future human exploration.

Masten’s award winning automated vertical take off, vertical landing (VTVL) flight vehicles combined with XCOR’s strong experience in liquid oxygen (LOX) / methane powered propulsion systems and nonflammable cryogenically compatible composite tanks, brings to NASA a powerful and competitive combination of innovative talent with a proven record of producing exceptional results quickly and affordably.

Last October, Masten won the $1 million first prize for Level II of NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge, beating out a host of New Space rivals, and demonstrating they are the leading VTVL development group in the country. In 2007 XCOR Aerospace’s LOX/methane engine, developed for NASA, was named by Time Magazine as one of the “Inventions of the Year”, recognizing XCOR’s successive advancement in the state of the art of both pump and pressure fed reusable, throttle-able rocket propulsion systems. XCOR and Masten have also demonstrated the ability to rapidly take from concept to live fire, new propulsion and control system designs using innovative rapid prototyping techniques that surpass client requirements in much shorter periods of time than traditional aerospace methods.

Dave Masten, founder and President of Masten Space Systems commented “Masten Space and XCOR are next door neighbors here in Mojave. We’ve worked together on many tactical problems over the years and our corporate cultures mesh well. Working together on something like this simply made too much sense. We can’t wait to start working with Jeff, Dan, and the XCOR team to help NASA build affordable and responsive landing platforms.”

“Our company work ethic and styles are very compatible, and with XCOR propulsion and Masten VTVL technology, we can solve problems of national interest, and I am excited about the possibilities,” said Jeff Greason, CEO and Founder of XCOR.
Andrew Nelson, Chief Operating Officer of XCOR added, “It’s a no brainer, Dave’s team is the absolute best New Space company when it comes to VTVL and autopilot unmanned operations – they demonstrated that in October by winning NASA’s lander challenge. And we feel our LOX/methane engines are unsurpassed in the trade space today by anyone. We should bring this tandem set of best in class capabilities to NASA, it just makes sense for them and for us.”

XCOR and Masten will be jointly marketing their skill sets and services to the NASA community as prime contractors, and as joint teaming partners for larger systems integrators and prime contractors servicing the NASA community.

# # # # #

Masten Space Systems is a Mojave, CA based aerospace company developing fully reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) launch vehicles, rocket-related products, and engineering services. The company’s 6000 square foot production facility and 200,000 square foot testing facility is located on the Mojave Air and Space Port. The company designs and builds aerospace solutions that focus on durability, long operational lifetimes, and minimal per-flight maintenance. For more information on the company see http://masten-space.com

XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation located in Mojave, California. The company is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket powered vehicles, propulsion systems, advanced non-flammable composites and other enabling technologies for responsive private space flight, scientific missions, upper atmospheric research, and small satellite launch to low earth orbit. The Lynx is a piloted, two seat, fully reusable, liquid rocket powered vehicle that takes off and lands horizontally. The Lynx production models (designated Lynx Mark II) are designed to be robust, multi-commercial mission vehicles capable of flying to 100+ km in altitude up to four times per day. XCOR’s web address is: www.xcor.com.

Contact:
Michael Mealling
Masten Space Systems
Phone: +1-888-488-8455 x102
Email: mmealling@masten-space.com

Mike Massee
XCOR Aerospace
Phone +1-661-824-4714 x127
Email: press@xcor.com

I can’t speak for the company, but personally I’m really glad we were able to find a way to make this partnership work. I’ve got nothing but respect for the XCOR team, and have been trying to find a way to work with them for years. As Jeff said at Space Access, it’s deals like this that show that the industry is starting to grow up.