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.

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.

Let’s turn to the Augustine Report itself for some information. On pages 83 and 84 they discuss implementing the Program of Record on entirely unconstrained budgets–ie if we gave the program the full funding it needs to execute, and allot it to move at the full pace it can realistically move at, what do we get?

• A $145B pricetag over the 2010-2020 timeframe, which doesn’t even get us to the point of having Ares V and the LSAM ready for operations, much less a moonbase.  This would require almost $5B extra per year–ie a 25% increase in NASA’s topline budget.
• An international space station deorbited within 5 years of its completion, during which time the only method of access would be by paying the Russian government for flights.
• A crew launch vehicle that becomes available two years after its first destination is deorbited, and whose operational costs have to be carried for over half a decade until we have any of the tools that would be necessary to actually use it for anything.  But don’t worry, we can spend $2B+ per year to send even fewer astronauts flying in even more useless circles.
• A seven plus year manned orbital spaceflight gap in the US.
• Almost no investment in long-term technology development (not much more than the current SBIR budget, and entirely focused on short-term Constellation needs, not on making future missions safer, more affordable, and more valuable).
• No stimulation of commercial industry beyond the CRS contracts which wouldn’t be extended since the ISS would be gone by 2016.  No investment or early market for commercial crew delivery
• No money to actually develop hardware for actually doing anything on the Moon, since almost all of the money will go to figuring out how to go there while maximizing employment in Shelbyville.
• No more robotic orbiters or landers for years to follow-up on the work LCROSS did.

But hey, at least if we do it this way, sometime 15+ years from now, we’ll have the ability to send 8 people to the moon every year at the cost of an “exploration” program that costs almost as much per year as NASA’s entire current budget!

If you assume that there are parts of NASA outside of Huntsville that actually matter (ie that NASA != Northern Alabama Space Administration), the situation gets even worse.  In order to fund Constellation at full speed without splashing the space station almost as soon as it’s completed, you would need $159B over that timeframe, which constitutes a $7B per year increase for NASA.  That increase still:

• Gets you a space station you can’t access without the Russians for most of its operational lifetime (why does Congress trust Russian commercial space more than American commercial space, btw?).
• Gets you no real investment in long-term technologies, ensuring that the cost, safety, and efficiency of manned spaceflight will be stagnant for another couple decades.
• Gets you no real investment or encouragement of the commercial industry (in direct contravention of the laws of the land and NASA’s charter I might mention).
• Gets you no more robotic follow-ons for LRO and LCROSS for over 15 years.

Compare this with the Flexible Path option that Mark likes to mock so much.  For less than half as much of an increase per year, you get:

• Robust ISS utilization through 2020, with multiple methods of providing crew and cargo delivery that aren’t all dependent on Russia
• Investments in commercial space that can help keep the US in the forefront of space technology and utilization
• Robust investments in high-payoff medium-term technologies like propellant depots, space radiation, space nuclear power, aerocapture and other EDL techniques, ISRU, and other high-payoff technologies that can vastly lower the cost of future exploration missions, allowing us to accomplish more for less and at lower risk.
• A manned lunar landing program that at most is only 3-4 years behind the current PoR, but when it gets there, it provides a much more affordable, more commercially and internationally interesting program, and has much greater capabilities once you get there.
• A manned spaceflight program that is much more capable of exploring the whole inner solar system, and not just doing a few flags and footprints landing on the Moon.
• A manned spaceflight program that builds on and leverages our impressive achievements in robotic space exploration.
• A program that in spite of doing a lot more looking, also allows a lot more touching of new destinations like NEOs and Phobos/Deimos, all on about the same timeframe that the PoR would at best be going for its first lunar landings.

Where I come from, we tend to think that getting a heck of a lot less while paying a heck of a lot more is usually the sign of a sucker.  I just wish that a few space pundits and public figures didn’t keep enabling Senator Shelby and his ilk from hijacking NASA’s budget to enrich his campaign contributors at the rest of our expense.

[Note: As an aside, am I the only one who finds Shelby's latest childish tantrum accusing the Augustine Committee of being compromised by biased by evil commercial lobbyists to be richly and hilariously ironic?  When it comes to lecturing people about the evils of lobbyists corrupting the political process for their own personal gain, Senator Shelby has about as much moral standing as Tiger Woods does when it comes to lecturing people about marital fidelity.]

Anyhow, I probably would’ve figured it out a little quicker if I had been more interested in NEOs.  I’ve always been a planetary chauvanist, and a Moon Firster at that.  I always just waived away the much easier access to NEOs (which turns out not to have been as much easier as I thought) with the argument that while the transportation delta-V requirements were less, the trip times were a lot longer, and the difficulty of operating that far from home would likely drive the costs up a lot higher than just shear delta-V numbers alone would indicate.

So this misconception sat uninvestigated (and fortunately mostly harmless) for several years until earlier this week I was running some numbers regarding the so-called “Flexible Path” approach that was discussed by the Augustine Committee.  To my surprise when I actually looked up the numbers, the closest and easiest to reach NEOs all required delta-Vs from Low Earth Orbit of greater than 3.8km/s (which is approximately delta-V needed to reach Earth-Moon L-1 or one of the Earth-Sun L-points).  In fact some required over 10km/s of delta-V just for rendezvous!  After thinking it through, it actually made plenty of sense.  NEOs aren’t orbiting earth, they’re orbiting the Sun.  So it makes sense that you would need to do an earth escape maneuver first (3.2km/s right there) plus some more to change your orbit to intersect there, and a final burn to match their orbits and rendezvous.

So where the heck did the 60m/s number come from?  It turns out that the 60m/s number is the delta-V needed to depart the closest of earth-crossing NEOs in a trajectory that intersects with earth’s atmosphere.  If you actually wanted to bring the returning vessel into LEO, unless you have a really good aerobrake you’re talking about at least 3.2km/s just to decelerate from an escape trajectory, and honestly it’s probably the same amount of delta-V to return from an NEO into LEO as it is to depart LEO and rendezvous with the NEO–as it typically is in orbital mechanics.

What this means to me is that the round-trip delta-V’s needed for NEOs, especially for missions that don’t just go directly to reentry, are actually a lot more demanding than I had ever suspected.  Without extensive aerobraking, for a round-trip you’re looking at at least 7.6km/s of delta-V, ie nearly SSTO levels of delta-V.  Even with aerobraking and in-situ propellant production at the NEO, you’re still talking at ~4km/s of delta-V on the outbound leg–which means that with a LOX/LH2 system, only about 1/3 of your LEO mass will even reach the asteroid.  This also makes a propellant depot/transportation node at one of the Earth-Moon L-points look a lot more interesting for missions to NEOs.  The delta-V from L-2 to most of those locations is around 1-2km/s, which means that most of your mass that leaves L-2 will arrive at the destination (about 65-80% for a LOX/LH2 stage, depending on your target).

In summary, I still think that NEOs have their place, and I still think that they do have some transportation advantages compared to going down into the lunar gravity well.   But now that I’ve cleared up my misconception, it looks like actual near-term commercial exploitation of NEOs is not likely going to be any easier than commercial exploitation of the Moon.