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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To The Editor,

I’m a small business owner in Boulder County, building robotic systems for use in space and here on earth. While I’m a libertarian-leaning independent, I want to defend Newt Gingrich’s recent space policy statements, which I feel have been given undeserved flack.

While NASA’s budget is only a measly 0.5% of federal expenditures, that is still a large amount of money, and I agree with Mr. Gingrich that even within its existing budget, NASA is capable of delivering much more to our nation. Specifically, I agree with Newt that NASA can accomplish significantly more within its current budget in three ways:

First, NASA needs a bold vision that is clearly not achievable by doing “business as usual”. Newt’s proposal of fielding a moon base by 2020 fits that description. Such a goal is definitely not feasible within NASA’s budget without drastic changes to how NASA does business. One such change would be to utilize orbital “gas stations” such as those being developed by Boulder-based Ball Aerospace in conjunction with existing commercial launch vehicles, instead of relying on NASA-operated heavy lift launchers like SLS. This would also provide more near-term use for Lockheed Martin’s Orion Spacecraft, currently being developed here in Denver.
Second, NASA needs to be allowed to take more risks. As former Administrator Michael Griffin once asked “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar [unmanned] mission?” For instance, Denver-based United Launch Alliance flies rockets that by this standard should be safe enough today to launch US astronauts, at a risk no greater than a space shuttle mission.  Today, not five years from now.

Third, NASA needs to be allowed to continue to tap the potential of the commercial space industry through expanded prize authority and through continuing to act as a customer for NASA-needed services that the commercial companies such as Colorado-based Sierra Nevada are starting to offer with their proposed Dreamchaser vehicle. Prizes are a great motivator for private investment and risk-taking, and by acting as an initial customer for new commercial services, NASA can help entrepreneurs bring more investment money into the growing entrepreneurial space industry.

While I don’t agree with Mr. Gingrich on much, I do agree that his space policy is good for our nation, and good for the state of Colorado.

–Jonathan Goff

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.

“While it is true that prudent investments in science and technology will almost certainly yield future economic gains and will allow our knowledge economy to grow, it is also true that these gains can be thwarted by poor decision-making,” Chairman Hall said. “Americans expect and deserve better. With our unemployment hovering at over 9 percent, they expect us to reduce or eliminate those programs that are duplicative and wasteful and examine ways to advance real job creation and economic growth, not just spend their hard-earned money on what the government assumes is best for them.”

Hmmm…I can think of a few examples of massive projects that fit those descriptions. Like say SLS?

• Duplicative: In the near term, without any plan for BEO exploration hardware, SLS will be duplicating the function of commercial crew launchers–sending astronauts to the station (on MPCV), but at far higher costs.  If at some point an upper stage and actual exploration hardware do get funded (10-15 years from now), SLS will mostly be launching propellant–something private rockets are also capable of doing.  So, duplicative? Check.
• Wasteful: The development cost to the government of both the EELV programs and the two COTS programs are less than half one year’s worth of SLS funding, even at the lower projected rate that Obama proposed in his FY’12 budget, and even including the $300M increase in COTS funding. Those programs are giving NASA and the DoD four launchers, with at least some capabilities on both coasts, as well as two ISS cargo vehicles.  Even if you include the total government and private investment in developing those rockets, the total cost is far less than SLS alone will spend over the next 3 years, let alone to completion. Even if you insist on building an HLV, and even if NASA is the only customer (likely), these programs demonstrate that the expected $10B+ development cost for SLS is disturbingly high compared to the cost of developing vehicles for launching critical national security assets.  Wasteful? Check.
• Job Creation? Economic Growth? SLS is a NASA-specific products with no real outside commercial benefit, that will reuse obsolete technology in an effort to maintain as many existing jobs as possible. It is really just a zero-sum wealth transfer from the productive part of economy to politically-connected contractors. Actual economic growth and job creation come from creating new goods and services that provide for peoples wants and needs at increasingly affordable prices.  Innovation, both technical and entrepreneurial are what drive job creation and economic growth–not running government-directed design bureaus to produce products that are irrelevant outside of NASA’s needs.  Contrast this with EELVs, the COTS vehicles, Commercial Crew, and many of the technology programs NASA wants to fund, that serve multiple public and private needs, create wealth, and provide jobs that are backed by eventually self-perpetuating wealth-creating enterprises. So, Job Creation, Economic Growth? Not so much.
• Spending Tax Money on What Government Thinks is Best for Them? The big push for SLS development from the Senate (which has won it the nickname “the Senator Launch System”) and the even bigger push from the House, were led primarily by Congressmen from states that directly benefit from continued spending in this area. The ironic thing is that it’s pretty clear that even NASA doesn’t entirely want SLS, but you have Congressmen trying to legislate the design of a launch vehicle. To the point of Utah reps bragging about how language they put into the bill supposedly can only be met by using hardware procured in a non-competitive manner from bloated contractors in their districts (which I’m sure didn’t make any campaign contributions to help grease the palms of their Congressional enablers). There are few clearer examples of Congress forcing the government to build something that is more in the personal interests of certain Congressmembers than is actually beneficial for tax-paying public. Check.

Not trying to pick on Representative Hall.  I actually have a bit of a soft-spot for the guy, since he came out and spoke at the NGLLC awards ceremony.  Just pointing out that he has good advice, and it would be great if he consistently followed it.

This point was driven home to me talking with an India-born aerospace engineering student at the University of Michigan last week.  I was out there giving a talk on space entrepreneurship, and afterward this gal comes up to me to ask for help on what to do about work after graduation. She loves being in America, and doesn’t want to leave. She loves aerospace, and it has been her passion.  But wunderkinden in DC think that somehow preventing her from using her hard-won education to benefit our country is somehow protecting national security or protecting our borders. Conversations like this just make me sick inside. Here’s a talented young lady who wants to contribute to our society.  But because of a combination of stupid laws, that politicians aren’t willing to change for fear of looking “soft on defense” or “weak on immigration”, I bet there are thousands or tens of thousands of foreign-born engineering students facing similarly crappy choices.

I just think about my coworker Ian. Here’s an enormously talented GN&C engineer, who did amazing things at Masten, and is making a huge contribution at Altius. The only reason why he wasn’t screwed by ITAR and Immigration laws was because he was from Cuba, and due to Florida politics, Cubans have a much easier time getting a green card and eventual citizenship.  Had he been born on a different island in the Caribbean, it would’ve been official US policy to tell him to go take a flying leap and work for some other country.

I have to agree with @joestump’s tweet: “If Obama was serious about us out-innovating and out-building, we should be granting every law abiding immigrant w/ a degree legal status.”

In the end I was able to give this young lady a suggestion on how to proceed. I suggested that she find a job outside of aerospace (and outside of ITAR-covered technologies) that required similar skills to the job she wants to do inside aerospace. That way she could work for a few years until she could get green-card status, and then she could move back to aerospace. In her case it worked, but I wonder how often our shortsighted policies mean that we’re training engineers for foreign countries who would rather stay here and be Americans.

Something needs to change.

What was the general response to these claims? Most in industry other than the fanboys treated their claims with healthy skepticism.

Eight years later, even after that company successfully nails a picture-perfect launch and reentry, people are still skeptical that in the end their prices are going to end up much cheaper than anyone else. Heck, even I’m still wondering if they’ll be able to keep the prices they’ve been claiming once they’re really into routine and reliable operations–and I’m about as close as you can get to a koolaid drinkin fanboy without having spittle in the corner of my mouth.

Then there’s this other rocket group. Like the first one, they haven’t actually demonstrated the ability to successfully design and build new rocket vehicles. At least not within my lifetime. They also start making claims about how by implementing some key industry suggestions (this time those found on “Page 38″ of last month’s HEFT report) they can deliver a new vehicle for far less than past experience dictates. Unlike the first team though, this team does have a track record. But it is a track record of 30 years of consistently overrunning budgets and getting major projects canceled.

“But it will be different this time” they say. “If we use the suggestions on ‘Page 38′, we can dramatically improve on the affordability of developing new rocket vehicles.”

Now, it’s not that the suggestions on Page 38 are bad. They’re not. They’re actually pretty good. Just like “using the best practices from Silicon Valley” sounds good too. I’ll admit that I’m kind of curious how on a $20B project they’re going to “Model, test and fly early and often” or “Use small lean projects with highly competent empowered personnel”, or how a project that is more or less designed by Congressional committee is somehow going to “Push decision authority to the lowest level. Trust them to implement and don’t second guess (over-manage)” [Aside: if Congress really intended to allow NASA to do that last one, they wouldn't be specifying the size of the rocket, what hardware it can use, and which contractors they have to maintain contracts for]. I’m also somewhat curious of how many of the items on that list CxP managers would claim they were already doing…

…but leaving all of those specific details aside, I just don’t get why this second group of people gets all offended when the net result from industry is once again healthy skepticism. Especially given their past track record. When you’re trying to get people to entrust you with a multi-billion dollar project that all past experience and your management claim is unlikely to fit within budget or timeline, is it really that offensive when people have a hard time swallowing that somehow one powerpoint slide is going to change everything?

I mean, it is totally possible that like SpaceX, this new team is going to surprise us, and totally knock this SLS project out of the park. Heck, maybe they’ll even come in far enough under budget that Shelby, out of the kindness of his generous soul, will decide to put the savings into commercial crew or propellant depot development. It’s totally possible.

But is it really rude to be skeptical about this outcome?

A commenter named Robert B. has a great answer:

Congress doesn’t trust NASA’s administrators to follow the will of Congress. The admins have proven that they will use the letter of the law to circumvent the intent of Congress. So Congress feels they need to be very specific about what they want done, to the point of being too specific. I don’t blame Congress, but it’s less than optimal I agree.

I think we need new NASA administrators once Congress has passed this budget. The current admins were picked in order to dismantle Constellation and move Obamaspace forward. Now that’s over with, we need administrators who are skilled in executing a space exploration program, and that Congress can trust.

This is all amusing, because the only reason Bolden was picked was because Congress thought he was going to be a shuttle-hugging lapdog for Congressional interests. That because he had been an astronaut, and had flown Nelson on the Shuttle that somehow he’d be easy to control to keep the pork flowing to their district. There were several other potential people for administrator who were probably more qualified, who “had skill in executing space exploration programs” (like say Steve Isakowitz), who were passed over explicitly because Congress didn’t want someone who knew what they were doing.

The problem is Congress (and most NASA fanboys) still don’t want an administrator who is actually innovative and knows what they’re doing. Because a NASA admin who knew what they were doing would do an even better job of pointing out how stupid it is to design an HLV *right now* when you don’t even know what the mission for it is, won’t have any hardware to use it, and will be stuck paying for it for decades to come. They want the status quo to continue so they can keep using NASA as a way to funnel benefits to their constituents at the nation’s expense.

I find it amusing that so many of the opponents of Obama’s proposed space plan are so happy with this, when it doesn’t actually resolve most of the things they said were wrong with his policy. To whit:

1. There are no details, plans, or near-term destinations.  Just an unfocused non-plan to build an HLV without really having a plan on how it will be used or when.  So unfocused spending and lack of a plan or near-term destination wasn’t the issue?
2. Even the Moon isn’t outright dismissed, it’s pretty clear the plan is a modified version of flexible path.  Ie this isn’t going to give people that moonbase they craved so soon.  So actually going back to the Moon anytime in the forseeable future wasn’t the issue?
3. Without the shuttle extended, and with commercial crew being delayed (let’s get real folks, moving most of the funding to the out years is a cheap way of defunding a project without actually having to have the huevos to do it honestly), it is now guaranteed that the ISS is going to be accessible only via Russia for most of the rest of this decade.  There will be no way of launching those critical spares that were the reason Jeff Bingham was always giving for a shuttle extension.  So apparently the gap isn’t an issue?
4. The KSC portion of the Shuttle team is going to get decimated next year still, this time with no commercial crew projects ramping up to help soften the blow.  So apparently workforce retention wasn’t really an issue?

As far as I can tell, the only issue Congress really cared about was protecting jobs in Huntsville and Houston and making sure we get a big HLV as soon as possible, even though we won’t have anything to do with it once we get it.

The good news is that the “dot-product” of NASA’s direction and sanity is a fair deal of money, and it grew quite a bit compared to last year.  At least some elements of useful things survived.  Instead of being 99% orthogonal to the actual development of space, it’s now only 95% orthogonal.  It’s just so frustrating and disgusting when we actually had a chance for something so much better.

Here’s to hoping that now that JSC and MSFC got their rattle back, the creative and useful parts of NASA can be moved to locales better-matched to small development programs.  Even the pittance they’re being given compared to feeding the HLV albatross can go a long way if managed by the right group.

[Note (7/1/11): I realized that at least some of what I said was pretty offensive, so I edited out the most mean-spirited part.]