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.

Personally, I think this is mostly a terrible idea. While offering fixed-price services, and moving to FAA regs is nice, I really don’t see how this fits with the spirit of CCDEV.  After all, USA is talking about taking over an existing government asset, and flying it temporarily through 2017, not providing a long-term commercial crew capability for ISS in the post 2016 timeframe.  And the budget ($9B over the next six years), is way outside the $6B NASA was going to give to commercial crew, or the $3B that the anonymous Senate staffer last week thought would be the real number.

But shuttle huggers, don’t despair.  If something like this goes forward, they could probably do this by taking money from the SLS and MPCV budgets.  After all, this would be offsetting some of the carrying costs that NASA would have to pay for keeping the Shuttle infrastructure in place.  By doing this, there also wouldn’t be any rush to finish Orion or the 70-100 ton version of SLS, because you could just keep flying the shuttle “commercially” for another year or two if commercial crew faces delays.  In fact, this would allow NASA to go straight for their beloved 130mT SLS and deep-space rated MPCV, because there would be no need for the intermediate vehicle.  They can take as much time as they want.

The only even remotely legitimate purpose for trying to rush SLS/MPCV was the worry that possibly all of the commercial crew providers would be running late.  It’s possible I guess, especially if they try and put all their money on just one or two providers.  But, under the current Senate-designed plan, if commercial crew does work, SLS/MPCV would be a giant budget-sucking white elephant for several years while actual mission hardware (EDS stages, landers, and/or habs) was developed.

But with this plan, you can just go straight to “exploration class” HLVs and mission hardware, without having to worry about the fate of ISS.  Something like this would allow you to keep your HLV infrastructure alive until you actually need an HLV without killing commercial crew.

And anyway, SLS and MPCV have big enough budgets that this would only be cutting out maybe 1/3 of the money they’d be getting over that time frame.  If the DIRECT fanboys are right, there may even be a straightforward way for NASA to still deliver on something like that within the budgets they’ve been given, even with keeping the Shuttles flying.

And if there are budget cuts, hey you have the shuttle still flying, you can just stretch out the SLS development even further.

If NASA tries to go this route, they should do so under the SLS budget, not the Commercial Crew one.

I’ll start with my positive impressions first. Most importantly, I like the idea of using reusable in-space vehicles. One of the points I had intended to make with the MHD aerobraking series was that such technologies might lead to the day where directly returning to earth from the moon interplanetary space via a capsule is considered an anachronism. So, I’m a firm supporter of space architectures where the earth-to-LEO segment is totally separate from the in-space segment, and where the in-space segment favors reuse.

I’m also a fan of many of the technologies that the MMSEV was talking about, such as artificial gravity, actually dealing with radiation issues, etc.

But on net, my overall impression was that while interesting, this will never happen. At least not with the NASA we have today, and not on the budget they’re claiming. Unless I’m totally misunderstanding what all falls under “DCT&I”, $3.7B to develop that vehicle over five years sounds wishful thinking when you realize that Orion has spent more than that over a similar amount of time to get to PDR. Realistically, in a world where Orion and SLS are expected to cost over $20B more and take at least another 6 years to get to service, I really have a hard time believing that a vehicle that much more complicated, done by the same groups, is somehow going to be available that much sooner and for that much less.

I’m not trying to badmouth the guys who put their hearts and souls into this concept. I think it is visionary, and has many elements in the right direction. I just think that compared to where we are today, the budget and timeline numbers they’re claiming are overoptimistic, and that we’re not really anywhere close to being able to do something like what they’re talking about. More to the point, we’re not even to a point where we need something like what they’re talking about. While I’m a fan of NEOs and Phobos, reality dictates that most human spaceflight over the next few decades is likely to be focused in cislunar space. We may do occasional ventures beyond, but they’ll likely be riskier, smaller, and cheaper missions.

I hope we get there (to a point where we’re ready to build something like Nautilus-X) someday while I’m still young enough to appreciate it, but I think there are bunch of steps between here and there that need to be taken first if we’re going to be serious about not just exploring space, but making space part of “humanity’s natural environment”.

All that aside, this post is related to Joe Carroll’s last topic–reduced gravity research facilities. His talk reminded me that I needed to dig-up and finish this blog post I had started back in May about the importance of such reduced gravity research facilities, and a clever approach I had seen to providing them.

Reduced Gravity Effects on the Human Body
I first made this point almost five years ago, but it bears repeating: while we have a lot of data on human health at 1g and at 0g, we have almost no data in the middle. I say almost, because we did have a dozen people live on the moon for at least 24 hours each…but that’s pretty much the only data we have on reduced gravity health effects, which is far too little to draw any really useful conclusions.

Most readers of this blog know that the data from microgravity impacts on the human body don’t look too promising–even with lots of exercise, there are apparently biophysical mechanisms that can have large negative health impacts (osteoporosis, neurological and pulmonary issues, etc) that begin to show themselves very quickly. However, as I pointed out in that earlier post, we have no idea which of the curves below really represents human health impacts of reduced gravity:

Does just a little bit of gravity go a long way (my personal guess I explain in the other post)? Or do you need almost full earth gravity? Or is there actually some gravity level less than 1g that’s actually better than earth gravity? While natural selection for humans has obviously been focused on a 1g environment, that doesn’t mean that humans are so hyperoptimized to 1g that nothing else will do. It’s unfortunately possible, but right now we don’t know. Without getting some “center points”, any guess at the shape of the response curve is just that–a guess.

Why This Matters
The reason why this knowledge void matters is that it greatly impacts the future expanse of humanity into space, as well as near-term human exploration. For instance, we don’t know if someone who goes to live on the Moon or Mars can ever really come back to earth, or if they have kids, if their kids can return.

If however it turns out that lunar gravity is already enough to counteract the worst of the effects of microgravity, it might be that the best way to do initial lunar human exploration is something like a One-Way To Stay (for a while) approach. If you knew that you could send someone for long durations while still being able to bring them back later if needed, it would open up some big possibilities. The return portion of a human lunar mission is one of the big performance drivers that make human missions so much more expensive than robotic ones. Even if you couldn’t close the life-support loop, just not having to return the initial explorers right away could allow you really enhance robotic exploration of the Moon by having people there on the spot to help troubleshoot, fix, upgrade, iterate, etc on your robotic systems. I know a lot of people think we can just send robots and have them make a turn-key base. It’s possible, but I expect you’re going to break a lot of robots along the way, and you could avoid that by having people in the loop. But its ethically hard to do a mission like that before you have some data on what long-duration exposure to 1/6g is going to do to your explorers.

Returning to the Joe’s talk, he suggested looking at .06g as well as lunar and martian gravity, as a possible minimal gravity level that people could intuitively adapt to without lots of training. If travelers can get by without large negative health hazards by .06g worth of gravity, that would really simplify the concept of providing artificial gravity for long-duration deep-space trips (like to Mars or NEOs). If there’s a “knee in the curve” above which you can avoid the worst of microgravity effects, that can make it a lot easier to provide artificial gravity for trips like that. If you have to provide a full 1g, and can’t go with high RPMs (which Joe suggested that the terrestrial centrifuge data might be suspect due to the presence of a 1g downward gravity vector), that implies very large structures, which become a much bigger engineering challenge.

xGRF
The question becomes, what’s the best way to get this data? Most of these effects take timescales on the order of hours, days, or weeks to express themselves. And there’s no way on earth to adequately simulate hypogravity. The only real way of testing this, short of going there and finding out the hard way, is to build some sort of orbital research facility. The ISS was originally going to have a Centrifuge Accommodations Module, but that project got defunded, and the hardware is no longer flightworthy from what I hear. I had suggested the idea of doing a “CAM in a Can” before, but even that would be limited to studying small animals–there’s no way you could fit a human in there. To get the data quickly, you really want some sort of artificial gravity facility that is human-sized. In his presentation, Joe Carroll talked about building a large rotating space station with facilities on different lever arms from the CG of the facility. While this is interesting, and would allow you to have your gravity decoupled from your spin rate, I think that Kirk Sorensen’s xGRF “Variable Gravity Research Facility” concept makes more near-term sense (Joe and I disagree on this point BTW).

I’m not sure if Kirk reads this blog very much anymore (he’s pretty busy at his new job as Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown), but I have to toot his horn a bit. While not all of his ideas are ones I’m sold on, he’s had more than his fair share of clever ideas. The idea behind xGRF is very simple. You have a small facility–something on the scale of a Sundancer or Nautilus module from Bigelow, and you attach it via a long tether to a large counterweight (such as the upper stage that delivered the module to orbit in the first place). In LEO the gravity gradient can be used to force such a system to adapt an orientation with the long axis pointing through the center of the earth. In such a situation, the CG will be somewhere between the two end pieces, and the module will be going slightly slower than the orbital velocity of other components at its altitude, and the counterweight will be going slightly faster. This provides a tiny bit of settling force on each end (acting like a tiny bit of gravity with a vector pointed outward from the center of the system).

Ok, you may be thinking, that’s nice. But where do you get the “Variable” Gravity from? That’s where Kirk’s idea gets really clever.

Basically, something in a gravity gradient orientation is still actually spinning–it just completes one complete rotation per orbit around the earth…What happens if you take a spinning object like this, and decrease it’s moment of inertia by, oh say winching in the tether? By conservation of angular momentum, the object has to start spinning faster!

You can winch the habitat and the counterweight together until you reach the desired level of artificial gravity. Depending on the design details, you can pick any gravity level you want between say microgravity and 1g. How do you dock, say to transfer crews or deliver supplies? Well, it turns out you can despin the system by just reeling out the tether:

Pretty clever. By doing this, not only can you pick any gravity level you want, but you can also do your rendezvous and docking in a simple, non-spinning environment, you can eliminate the need for having rotating and nonrotating parts of the station, or of long elevators or connecting tunnels. I really like this concept, because the system ends up being pretty simple, with everything being able to be launched on a single EELV flight. You don’t have to assemble a huge space facility and then spin it up. This can be a small project that might actually get built. I think the big station Joe might have more capabilities, but I’m worried that detractors would paint it as a second ISS, and it would never get funded. Something on this scale though is within the realm of feasibility.

Flagship Technology Demonstrators, Expansion Options, Future Uses, and other Parting Shots
One particularly interesting way to get something like this funded (and what I was originally writing this blog post back in May as a response to) is as a replacement for the “Inflatable Technology” Flagship Technology Demonstrator. Back in Galveston late last spring, NASA rolled out several proposed FTD missions to flesh out plans suggested in Obama’s FY11 budget proposal. One of the missions was to build an inflatable module and attach it to ISS. To be honest, this seemed a little duplicative–it looked for all intents and purposes as though NASA was going to spend $500M-1B duplicating what Bigelow was doing on his own dime. I think a much better way of both flight demonstrating inflatables while killing multiple birds with one stone would be to build something like xGRF as a Flagship Technology Demonstrator. Leverage either a Bigelow Sundancer module or compete it out and have ILC Dover also bid on it. For the same amount of money, you get a much more useful lab, that doesn’t endanger the ISS, and which allows you to do reduced gravity research that compliments ISS’s microgravity focus.

As Joe pointed out, even after the initial experiments (say at lunar gravity first, then Martian, then at the .06g level), a facility like this would have lots of follow-on utility. You can answer initial questions relatively quickly–ie even a few months at each level would tell you a lot compared to what we know right now, but getting longer-duration data could be very useful for future space settlement efforts. I’ll have to dig up my notes on all the reasons, but there’s a lot of long-term potential for a station like this.

Which means you might also want to upgrade it down the road. If you overbuild the tether, and the docking facilities, you could probably attach additional modules to a station like this pretty readily. To add to the counterweight, you could say have facilities on the original upper stage that could allow it to be outfitted as a depot…but that’s getting a little too crazy for now.

But I think the time for something like this is now. FTDs are getting money, even if it’s greatly reduced from what Obama wanted. The budget for exploration technology development, including flagship missions is currently authorized at over $1.1B over the next three years. At that rate, you could fund most of the work on both the depot approach that was proposed by the joint industry/NASA group I participated in last year, as well as xGRF, and still have money left over for starting another FTD like say an aerobraking or aerocapture one. Even if funding gets further reduced in appropriations, there’s enough money to pursue something like xGRF and depots in parallel.

I think this is an idea whose time has come.

First off, Jim’s goal here was to ask people questions that really delve into how likely they actually would be to do something like one-way Mars colonization, especially if the situation isn’t exactly a paradise.  He wanted someone to do a scientific poll, and while I’d like that too, I don’t have the money to do so myself.  But I think if we do this right, we can at least get some relevant data, even without doing truly random sampling.  But more on that after the questions.

Here are the questions:

1. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant leaving behind wife and children?
2. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week? 12 hours? 8 hours?
3. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the annual mortality rate was 50%? 25%? 10%?
4. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the level of privacy were equivalent to a subway car? A submarine? Antarctic research station?
5. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it was just yourself? 10 other people? 100 other people?
6. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant eating food indefinitely equivalent to combat rations? TV dinners? School cafeteria?
7. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if there were significantly more people of your own gender than the other? Vice versa?

And here are some “control” questions:

1. What is the longest period of time you have ever been by yourself? Separated from wife and children? Away from civilization?
2. What are the longest hours you’ve ever worked? How long did you work these hours? How long would you have been willing to work these hours?
3. What’s the most dangerous work you’ve ever done? What’s the most dangerous activity you normally engage in?
4. What’s the lowest level of privacy you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
5. What’s the most bland diet you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
6. Have you ever had to work for/with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?
7. Have you ever had to live with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?

Anyhow, here are the rules.  All comments *must* include an answer to these questions, with the number of the questions (both the original questions and control questions).  You can suggest additional questions, or make other comments as well, but you have to answer the questions first.  Use anonymity if you don’t feel comfortable answering under your own name.  You also should mention where you heard about this poll from.  Any comments that break these rules are likely to get deleted outright.

Also, to make this more valid, the wider this can be passed around, the better.  So, if you think this is a good poll, tell friends about it.  Especially friends/blogs outside the traditional alt.space crowd.  I’d be interested in seeing it linked to both by technology blogs as well as right-wing, left-wing, and/or libertarian sites as well.  The more answers we get, the more likely this poll will actually be even remotely useful.  It’s also important to remember that it’s ok if most of the answers are variations on “heck no!”  That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it would be interesting to get a wide enough sample to start seeing something closer to at least the opinion of tech-savvy people in general.

If this works out, I’ll do a poll like this on lunar colonization next.

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.

Our current situation is akin to being on a dead end road. Instead of being on a path toward the goal we all seek, i.e. to regain our leadership position in human space exploration, we must recognize that we are (and have been) on a path to nowhere. We are confronted with arguments to ignore the clear signs of this sad situation and even encouraged to accelerate along this futile path.

The alternative to this is support for the President’s proposed plan. It recognizes and eliminates the waste of precious resources in the current program and heads us in a productive direction toward our desired destination. In other words, when you recognize you are on a dead end road, stop, turn around, and head in a direction more useful to your goal.

Are we, in fact, on a dead end road? In answering this critical question you should not overvalue either my opinion or the opinions of my fellow astronauts, but rather focus on the considered and thoughtful, and even hard-nosed, analysis of the panel of experts who dealt explicitly with this, the Augustine Committee on our Human Spaceflight Program.

…

Is this risky? Of course it’s risky. All space activity is risky. But wisely accepting and managing this risk will ultimately lead to a new and exciting US business capability which will be the envy of the world. The alternative is for NASA to continue to divert its precious human and economic capital to a challenging but very well understood transportation service rather than toward pioneering new and more advanced technology.

While admittedly I still am still more personally interested in the Moon than in NEOs and Mars, Rusty made some good arguments. In particular, I really appreciated Rusty’s comments about risk. Anyone who thinks CxP wasn’t risky has their head in the sand. Congressional supporters wouldn’t be needing to slip spending restrictions into emergency military funding bills that have nothing to do with NASA if CxP were a low-risk, well-performing program. The reality is that there are always risks, including the risk that we’ll overspend on what is at best a mediocre program like CxP where success is defined as spending over $100B and 20 years to have what is at best still a joke of a lunar exploration program. Since we really have to take risks any way you slice it, I’d rather make sure we were taking the risks that would actually allow us to start becoming a spacefaring society.

As far as implementing this idea, the technology isn’t the hard part. Technologically, this is something that could’ve been done in the 70s. Modern technology and modern launch services make it a whole lot easier and more feasible, but the technology isn’t the key obstacle. Money is and always has been the biggest obstacle. But I think I have an idea, and it’s just crazy enough that I want to share it.

Any business plan whose first step is “first we convince a billionaire to give us lots of money” usually deserves to be laughed off the stage. But this isn’t a business plan competition entry, or some pitch before VCs that I’m demanding to be taken seriously, so I’m going to suggest just that. Even with a wealthy philantrocapitalist, I think you’d still want a concept that both gives you a reasonable chance of making the money back if things go well as well as minimizing your losses if it doesn’t work out.

Anyhow, this is a bit of a long-shot, and definitely not fully-baked, but here’s what I have so far. The business case revolves around a few core concepts:

• A privately developed simple lander and an ITAR approved method for launching it on both US and domestic launchers.
• Using barter with various space agencies with domestic medium-lift vehicles to provide both the startup launches and the sustaining launches
• Making revenue off of selling remaining space to corporations, research institutions, and smaller countries that are interested in lunar experiments, but lack indigenous launch capabilities
• Possibly offsetting initial lander development by selling rover delivery services to NASA or other large space agencies.

Some of these sound a bit crazy, so why don’t I explain them in turn.

Private Landers
The key technology piece in the project is obviously the lander. As discussed before, I’m thinking of something in the 10-20klb IMLEO range, with a payload in the 4-6klb range. The propellant combination for the lander doesn’t hugely matter. It could use storables like Martijn likes, it could use space storables like LOX/Methane or LOX/Propane. Heck, it could even use LOX/LH2. While the state of the VTVL industry isn’t quite mature enough where you could just order one of these custom and have it delivered to your launch pad 6 months ARO, a lander in these capability ranges isn’t a huge stretch for the commercial space industry, especially if they can partner wisely with some of the more traditional space companies or work with NASA via Space Acts. DC-X was actually a much bigger, probably more complicated system, and was done by a traditional aerospace company for around $100M in current dollars. A bare-bones lander, developed leveraging the emerging capabilities in the entrepreneurial community could probably be fielded for less than that. Possibly in the $50M range. You don’t need to push too hard on mass fractions or engine performance (you need to push a bit, but it isn’t as weight critical as some of the Apollo LM systems), and the technology is a lot more mature than it was in the 60s.

An important part of this process is not just developing the lander, but also working from the start with ITAR to make sure a process is in place that will allow you to launch on as many international launch vehicles as is feasible. This may not be fun, but is probably doable with appropriate precautions.

International Horse-Trading
Most space agencies prefer to spend money within their own borders, and interact with other agencies on a barter basis as much as possible. While this can sometimes lead to suboptimal solutions, it might just work in this situation. On the launch side, the barter would go something like this–the private entity would provide a lander, all lander ops, and physical launch integration work, and the space agency (NASA, ESA, RSA, JAXA, ISRO, or CNSA) would provide the lifter and upper stage for the mission. The launching country would get a certain share of the lander’s cargo space for their own experiments, a certain portion would be reserved for consumables and spare parts, and the remainder would be owned by the private entity to resell to other countries without launch capabilities (say a 40/40/20 split). In addition to transportation of the space hardware, the launching country would also get a share of the astronaut’s time on the surface. So basically you’re providing them with transportation and manned experimentation on the lunar surface in exchange for them providing a launch done by their own people. If one of the countries is willing to take some additional risks, they could even “buy” one of the two initial astronaut slots, in exchange say for a commitment to a certain higher share of the logistics launches per year. In exchange they’d get both the prestige of having one of the initial lunar crew, as well as a higher share in the available time. Over time, as the risk decreases, the initial crew could also be expanded (once again on barter terms that would have the agency in question shouldering a larger share of the required launches).

It should be mentioned how crazy of a bargain this really is for them in comparison to the typical lunar mission approach. Look at Constellation. It will be a lot more capable, but ultimately, somewhere around $10B/yr (and about $150B up-front), you get 4-person years/yr (2x 4-man crew rotations) and about 75klb of cargo (2x 17mT landings) on the moon once you have a base setup. Calling it a 60/40 split on costs (for manned vs cargo flights), that comes out to $1.5B per person-year, and about $53k/lb on the lunar surface–ignoring development costs. With a program like this, say you gave a country 1/4 of a man-year per launch, and about 1800lb, at a cost to them of call it a $200M launcher plus extra upper stage for the transfer. Splitting that $200M the same way (60/40), that gives you $480M per person year, and about $45k/lb on the surface. You don’t save a huge amount per pound of cargo on the surface, but your cost per person hour is about 1/4 as much (which is once again not too surprising–you’re not rotating crews, and not having to carry enough propellant to get them home–which takes about 4x as much mass per mission compared to a one-way manned landing). And you don’t have to spend tens of billions up-front, and you can buy your lunar program “by-the-slice”. Paying for an extra launch every year (and some lunar systems costs) is well within the budget capabilities of many of these agencies. While they might not be willing to take the risk of flying their own astronauts, or of “owning” the program, they are a lot more likely to be interested in a program like this, where someone else is shouldering the key risks, and they’re just getting a cheap deal. Even if they have their own lunar ambitions down the road, using a service like this would allow them to drastically reduce their technological risk moving forward, and might allow them to get a lot more benefit out of their investment when they eventually get that capability themselves.

“Sovereign Customers”
One of the key markets Bigelow is looking at for his inflatable space habitats is providing smaller countries with a way to participate in space for much cheaper than trying to do everything in-house themselves. By lowering the cost to participate, it makes it a lot more feasible for smaller countries, and even some corporations or research institutions to participate. This may be a country like South Korea wanting to send a rover that can get maintained by the astronauts over time. It may be a country wanting to do its own sample return mission–with the ability to have a human on the ground helping to presort/preprocess samples to maximize the bang for the buck. It could be a company like Catepillar that wants to get involved in lunar surface systems for future exploration programs sending a bunch of bearing concepts to test exposed to the lunar environment. It could be some small startup that has a crazy idea for lunar dust mitigation that it wants to try selling to future government programs, but needs testing and debugging first. There are many possibilities. The key here is that since the launch is already paid for, the private entity running all this can price the payloads however makes the most sense. You do need to cover lander costs, ground-ops costs, and the time of the scientists, but it might be possible to offer these slots at a price that is lower than they could buy commercially to try and stimulate demand, or if there is enough demand already you could price it high enough to make a decent profit. If there’s enough demand, you might even be able to justify paying for an additional “purely commercial” flight or two per year. You would want to save up some of the money to cover contingencies–like if something breaks down and you have to fly an emergency resupply flight on short notice, or if you decide for one reason or another to throw-in-the-towel after a few years, you can send enough propellant to get the settlers home. But depending on the interest level, this could easily be a business that has revenues in the low hundreds of millions per year.

Minimizing the Initial Risk
One additional market for the lander, and one that could allow the initial investment to be recovered a lot faster, would be to see if you could sell it to one of the space agencies for landing a rover or some other scientific package. The key here is that the lander is getting developed, on the philantrocapitalist’s own dime regardless of if he can presell any lander slots. This makes it easier to sell it as a commercially available service instead of a government funded development program. Using a light Atlas vehicle for instance (maybe with one or two strapons) you could probably short-load the vehicle enough to put a couple hundred pounds of useable payload onto the lunar surface. For a bundled price of say $200-250M for the launcher and lander, it would still be a steal transportation-wise for your customer, but could possibly pay off the initial costs of the project in one shot, even before the initial landings. The good news is that while its great if you can presell the landers for other applications, it isn’t the end of the world if you can’t.

One other way of minimizing the downside may be to see if you can prearrange the initial several launches. If you can line up enough international partners, it may be possible to get the initial setup done without having to actually buy any of the launches yourself. You’d still have to pay for the landers, but this way your total capital at risk for the startup is only the cost of 3-4 landers.

Anyhow, comments? thoughts? attempts to send nice young men in their clean white jackets to cart a certain space blogger away?

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.]

ISS Centrifuge Accomodations Module (Credit: NASA and Wikipedia)

As I’ve discussed before on this blog, our knowledge of the impact of gravity levels other than microgravity and 1 gee are almost virtually nonexistant.  We have billions of data points at 1 gee, and we have hundreds of data points in microgravity, but we have a few tantalizing hints from the six Apollo lunar landings–nowhere near enough data to make responsible projections.  It may turn out that only a little bit of gravity can go a long way (if the negative effects are driven by fluid distribution in the body like I think it is), or it could turn out that even Martian gravity isn’t enough.

This is the kind of information we really need to learn if we’re ever going to be a spacefaring society, and CAM would have provided that data.  Unfortunately, in 2005, the partially completed module was canceled, due to budget overruns and issues with trying to schedule a launch before the Shuttle was to be retired.  The module has been sitting outside at a space center in Japan ever since.

At the time, that may have sounded like a reasonable decision, but now that it is looking like ISS won’t be splashed in 2015/2016, and with the new emphasis on manned deep space exploration, it would be nice if that decision could be undone.  The Augustine Committee mentioned research on the impacts and mitigation of reduced gravity effects on the human body as one of the reasons for extending the ISS’s operations to 2020.

Unfortunately at this point the team has been disbanded for long enough, and the hardware exposed to the elements long enough that resuscitating the CAM is probably not in the cards.  More importantly, like most other ISS modules, CAM was designed to be launched on the Space Shuttle.  While it is possible to develop an adapter for EELVs that could allow ISS modules to be launched on them, such a system has yet to be funded.  So for now, it looks like restarting the CAM project as originally formulated is probably a dead end.

So here’s my crazy idea.  What about modifying a Dragon capsule to house the centrifuge experiment and its supporting equipment racks?

Dragon Berthed at ISS (Courtesy NASA and SpaceX)

Most of the volume in the CAM design was actually storage rack–10 of the 14 ISPRs in the module were set aside for storage, and only 4 were planned for science.   The actual centrifuge itself was about 2.5m in diameter, but not very thick.  Looking at the Dragonlab datasheet, I wonder if it would be possible to make another copy of the centrifuge assembly itself and fly it as a payload on a DragonLab flight to ISS.  Looking at the available volume, it looks like you could fit the centrifuge and possibly as many as 1-3 of the 4 payload racks that were originally slated for the science mission.  I’d need to do a quick CAD model to see if the ISPRs would fit as-is, or if you’d need to go with some other science rack configuration.  And such a setup wouldn’t have all the capabilities that the original CAM had, but it would give you some of the most important functionality.  Also, being part of a reenterable spacecraft, there would be the benefit that you could bring the setup back to earth to repair, modify, and upgrade it from time to time.

Looking at the sizing, this might require a dedicated Dragon airframe for the project.  The centrifuge assembly itself is too big to fit in the door in one piece!  It might actually be necessary to build the capsule around the centrifuge.  But there’s enough experimentation that would need to be done over the years, that it would probably make sense to do it that way.  The duration of DragonLab missions are listed as up to 2 years.  At that rate, you could do long-duration experiments, but still have the thing back down for maintenance, upgrades, and refitting frequently enough that it might allow you to make some design simplifications.  Also, basing the CAM inside a Dragon capsule would mean that the team designing the science hardware could focus just on the experimental apparatus, instead of having to design a full spacecraft like the original CAM.  That might save a lot of time and money compared to trying to complete the original CAM. Lastly, the Dragon capsule can be either docked to the station, or can serve as a freefloater, whichever makes more sense scientifically.

[Note: It might also, just barely fit with the Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft.  I don't have internal dimensions for that, but judging from the external dimensions, there's a chance.  If someone who has data on what the layout of the usable volume for Cygnus is, that would be helpful.]

By offloading all of the work other than the apparatus itself, and by using a relatively inexpensive launcher, this could be a way for international partners to contribute.  Either Japan could provide the apparatus, or if they’re not interested, this could be a way to involve India or China in the ISS program.  It would also be something well within the capabilities of Canada or the UK as well.

In fact, it might even be possible to do this entirely as a commercial venture or as a privately funded not-for-profit venture.  A commercial venture would be risky, since you would need some sort of guarantee that someone would actually pay for the data.    A not-for-profit with a wealthy benefactor who would be willing to subsidize the experiment, (much as has been done for many university science labs, telescopes, and other not-for-profit scientific facilities) might make more sense.  Imagine the Stanford or Caltech or MIT Orbital Centrifuge Lab, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Orbital Centrifuge…

As far as a spacefaring society is concerned, CAM would’ve been one of the most useful experimental hardware on the ISS.  It may be too late to restart the CAM module as originally conceived, but Dragon–if successful–may provide another chance at making the ISS truly relevant.