Another bitter rant!

> > NASA has discussed the idea of an orbital propellant depot, though I
> > don't know that much has come of it.
> No plans for it in the current architecture. Rand Simberg has been
> talking about what a mistake that is.

True, but I think there's a fair amount of skepticism that any
commercial launch services would be willing to serve such an
architecture. NASA doesn't want any critical part of the mission to
depend on commercial services that may or may not materialize. And I
can understand that, from their point of view.

Fortunately, Constellation is very likely to slip considerably behind
schedule, leaving a nice big gap between Shuttle retirement and the
next time NASA's able to launch pretty much ANYTHING on its own. COTS
will step up to fill that gap, and after a few years of relying on
those providers for important tasks (like station resupply, and
probably even astronaut launch), it will seem much more sensible to
assume such services when making operational plans.

I think Rand's still right, though -- if NASA saw it as its mission to
reduce cost to orbit, there's almost nothing they could do that would
be more effective than to provide a regular, guaranteed market, such
as promising to buy a daily shipment of water. Imagine if this were
cast in stone (or at least, law):

"NOW OPEN: The NASA orbital water depot! NASA will buy one shipment
of water per day, paying no more than $10000/kg, for as much water as
you can deliver. Daily purchase guaranteed, no shipment is too large
-- if we don't have room for it, we'll buy it and dump it! In the
event of two or more deliveries on the same day, NASA will pay for the
one with the lowest cost per kg. So get those rockets ready -- our
check-writers are standing by!"

In such an environment, a whole lot more business cases would suddenly
close, because any technique of getting stuff into a controlled orbit,
slightly cheaper than the next guy, would work, even if it needed to
amortize development cost over hundreds of launches. It also wouldn't
require the extreme (and extremely expensive) caution now applied to
most rocket launches, because hey, it's only water. You would simply
expect to blow up a few as you refine your machinery and operations.
And once you succeeded, and were bringing in a nice check every day,
you couldn't get fat and lazy -- you'd have to be constantly looking
over your shoulder and improving your cost to orbit, or be overtaken
by some new upstart with an even cheaper method.

NASA, in turn, could either use that water (possibly split into
propellant) for its own missions, or just store it on orbit and resell
it on demand, probably at more than they paid for it (since for small
missions, satellite refueling, etc., it wouldn't make sense for
someone to set up their own rendezvous with a fuel launch; it'd be
much easier to just visit NASA's depot). Probably they'd still end up
losing money on the thing overall, but the result would be drastically
reduced launch costs, and isn't spending money to improve things for
us all what government is for?

Best,
- Joe