10-Year Plan

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Ian Woollard wrote:

> > apsmith wrote:
> >[...] What's wrong with
> >space advocates that they can't advocate for space spending?
> >
> NASA is not the same as 'space spending'.
> NASA is a tiny fraction of space, and getting smaller all the time.

So are you advocating for commercial spending - are you spending
any of your own money on space right now?

Anyway, NASA's fraction got substantially larger last year as
the general "space" market was shattered by the collapse of the telcos. And
it never was anywhere near "tiny". Go ask any of the launch companies
how much business they're doing right now.

But communications satellites, which is pretty much all
"commercial space" amounts to right now (ok, there's a bit of remote
sensing) is a big dead end for space settlement. Commercial tourism?
The only launches that have taken humans into space so far are
the government-funded NASA and Russian programs. Given that the X-prize
is still a far cry from getting people into orbit, and that
it seems to be taking years for any commercial entity to even get
that far, I don't see any hope for that (without government support)
in the next decade.

It makes absolutely no difference to the market for commercial
space settlement that there is $50 billion in commercial satellite
activity, since there seems to be $0 crossover.

> The question isn't what you spend. It's what you launch. I've seen
> figures that suggest that the true cost of launching a man, even with
> low tech expendables can be as low as $100,000 per person. And that's
> low tech. NASA might theoretically achieve 40x this with the space
> shuttle, which is 'high tech'.

Currently the minimum cost for a launch to orbit appears to be about
$20 million. You can pay less if you piggyback on another launch,
but that's about the best price you can get on the commercial market
for an entire launch right now. And the competition recently between
Ariane, SeaLaunch, the Russians, Ukrainians, Atlas, Delta, etc. has
been very intense. If you think you can launch for $100,000 per person,
that's 200 people you're blasting off with in one of these current
systems. Sounds a bit beyond anything realistic within the next 10 years...

Now launch costs do improve with time; probably we can expect
somewhere around 20% per year. Some of the "rocket-plane" concepts
like XCOR or Armadillo Aero may be able to dramatically cut costs
and improve reliability a few years down the road - but right now
those guys aren't even close to X-prize contention, so that's
pure speculation what it's really going to cost.

> >Ok, here's a test, to see who's truly committed to commercial space
> >development. You can't do $100,000/year, I understand that. Can you do a
> >one-time $16.95 contribution? That's all TransOrbital (the first truly
> >commercial deep space mission) is asking:
> >
> >https://www.transorbital.net/catalog/index.html
> >
> >and you get your message included in a lunar time capsule as well. So,
> >how many of you have purchased one of these? I happened to get the
> >deluxe package...
> >
> >Anybody who hasn't done at least this is, de facto, an advocate for
> >letting the government do all the spending on space.
> >
> The world is not either-or.

Let's see, there's $50 billion in commercial space activity devoted
to communications satellites. There's $14 billion at NASA, and a few
billion from other space agencies, devoted to scientific and
human activities in space. And there's ONE private firm that so far
is doing ANYTHING (and it's not the dead-end of communications)
beyond low earth orbit. And you can contribute to its efforts for
far less than any other space effort would cost you. We've heard all
the mouthing off - where's the money?

> [...]
> > however; all that's needed are a
> >few well-regulated monopolies...
> >
> No that must not occur. Monopolies are nearly always inefficient.
>

Yes, but they are also effective. Which may be more important right now.
There's a reason we have patents and copyrights; why we recognize
property rights. Those are government "monopoly" grants. The only
comparable thing in space is ITU grants of spectrum and geosynchronous
orbit slots. Which has led, as you point out, to a lot of commercial
activity. We need something similar to promote space settlement.

Arthur