Smells Like Teen Spirit

I was refering primarily to NASA's budget. NASA has a 15 billion
dollar per year budget, of which only a small fraction goes into any
launch activity other than the shuttle (around $4 billion/year). While
all the activities you mention are great and certainly help, most are
either very small or are aimed at minor improvements in current
vehicles. What I would like to see is about half of NASA's budget
devoted to launch. I'd like to see it spent on:

- Propulsion and materials R&D
- Providing launch and test facilities to private industry
- Some sort of prize (like X-prize, but more money for orbital flight)
or purchase of initial flights (10-15) for reusable orbital vehicles.
- Other R&D of value to launch vehicles.

On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 12:13 PM, Arthur P. Smith wrote:

> Al Globus wrote:
>
>> The guts of this is right on -- building castles in the sky doesn't
>> work if you can't get to the sky. What we, and every other aspect of
>> space development, really need is cheap, safe, routine access to Low
>> Earth Orbit. That's where the vast majority of the money, time, and
>> effort needs to be and it isn't.
>>
>>
> It isn't? We have the space elevator people, the huge variety of
> X-prize
> people (is the Rocket Guy shooting for the X-prize?), the Elon Musk
> big-dumb-booster people, NASA's OSP and next-generation reusable
> (formerly space launch initiative), the EELV's from Boeing and
> LockMart,
> Orbital Science's various air-launched efforts, SeaLaunch, the Russian
> ICBM-based launch platforms, not to mention the Indian and Chinese
> manned and unmanned programs, and the new Ariane's. And we have the
> failed Beal Aerospace, Rotary rocket - and what happened to Kistler and
> the others? I find it hard to believe anyone thinks we need more
> volunteers to put time and effort into new projects in low-cost access
> to space right now. Somebody to maybe coordinate some of these
> different
> efforts and get them to cooperate a bit might be a good idea, which is
> perhaps what McKnight is proposing.
>
> Of the three things you think are needed, it's not time and effort, but
> money, and that means commercial markets for your services, that is the
> real sticking point right now - the X-prize contenders hope the
> sub-orbital tourism market will bring in sufficient funds; other people
> are looking at other markets. And that's what this proposal was really
> all about - creating a huge new market for space transportation and
> infrastructure, by establishing a legal basis for celestial property
> ownership, where law is currently very murky. It's not building castles
> in the sky - it's building markets in the sky to support people working
> here on Earth.
>
> And obviously space settlement requires transport - the space
> settlement
> initiative being discussed here (read the details at
> http://www.spacesettlement.org/) has regular transport to the site in
> question as a condition for making a claim.
>
> Arthur Smith
>
> Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions.
>
The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.