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There's an interesting post over on Clark Lindsay's RLV and Space Transport News, part of which I've pasted below:

http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid =894

* Florida Today points out that "In the past three years, Congress has given the [Shuttle] program $13 billion, and all that money has resulted in just two flights". Sword of Damocles: NASA must safely launch the space shuttles this year, or the program wont survive - Florida Today - Feb.5.06.

To put that into perspective:

* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn't said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.

* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.

* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.

* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.

There are lots of companies out there developing commerical launch systems. http://www.spacex.com/ http://www.kistleraerospace.com/ http://www.garvspace.com/ http://www.zigaero.com/

Kistler had a project underway to create a re-usable launch vehicle. I thought it had gone belly-up, but according to the Kistler Aerospace web site, they expect to begin commercial operations next year (2003). It looks like maybe they got an infusion of NASA money, which is itself drying up, so their schedule might take a hit.

I've been watching Kistler with some interest for years now, and I continue to wish them all the best. Unlike some of the cranks and profiteers, they seem to be serious about making money in space.

Half true. The shuttle is a huge political stone around NASA's neck, but there is still a strong desire in most of the agency to get launch costs down and reliability up.

The simple reality of the situation is that rocketry is hard. Here's a partial list of commercial enterprises trying to get in on it:

• Orbital Sciences
• Kistler Aerospace
• Andrews Space and Technology
• Rotary Rocket Co. (dead)
• EER (Conestoga) (dead)
• JP Aerospace
• Kelly Space and Technology

And of course the big boys like Boeing, Lock-Mart, and all the various non-Amurrican folks like Russia, China, Japan, and the EU.

Any of these enterprises would be, er, on top of the world if they could develop a low cost launch vehicle. It's much easier to grumble about how expensive access to space is than it is to actually do something about it. Whether NASA is going about it in a sensible way is a separate question, but it's not like all they're just sitting on their duffs waiting for the right incentive.

also
kistler
and
beal

and they actually have funding (although I'm sure they could use more )

The "space game" isn't heating up, just Slashdot's coverage of it is. I'd given up last year on submitting space stories to be ignored by "News for Computer Nerds", but the change of pace this summer is pretty nice. But frankly, with the progress of past years in mind, the current news is pretty depressing.

Rotary Rocket has been gutted of engineers and CEO, and their current progress is destined to be mothballed unless they find a magic money tree somewhere.

Ok, so they were a long shot. But Kistler was playing it relatively safe with their design (after ditching an initial wacky idea), didn't hit any big technical or political snags, but simply is in limbo now trying to raise the last third of their funding.

Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). The SAS seems to be the group most interested in low cost access to space, rather than in lobbying for a larger NASA budget. And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system, there are only two aerospace companies left who can afford that kind of investment, and they've both got good reason to love the status quo.

Oh, but what about government research? The X-33 is a joke. It was never designed as a simple, cheap launch vehicle, just as a way to be a "technology demonstrator" for as much flashy stuff as necessary to win a NASA contract. Of course, except for the aerospike engine, most of that flashy stuff is looking worse and worse. The lifting body shape may need control fins the size of wings, or ballast (yes, ballast on a spacecraft) to keep the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure. They've just about given up on a high-tech composite tank after discovering it damaged in tests, and will probably have to use plain old aluminum for their wacky, multilobed design.

And did I mention that they're running years behind schedule, over budget, and despite previous agreements that Lockheed-Martin would pay budget overruns, they may renegotiate or scrap the project anyway?

Sea Launch's success isn't even in the same class as these failures. They're trying to squeeze a few extra pounds onto the usual work-intensive expendable rocket, not to reduce the gross costs of space launch by an order of magnitude.

My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design, but because they've got a sugar daddy financer who can afford all the capital investment before they get up and running. And even if they get started with tried and true booster technologies, they'll be a profitable new space company with no vested interest in squeezing the largest launch prices out of the government as possible. And that might actually heat things up.

One problem for NASA is the current demand for it to launch satellites. It's rocket science, which makes it a difficult and expensive mission. Currently NASA's manned vehicle program includes the Space Shuttle. For interplanetary space travel, NASA needs a new vehicle. Unfortunately this just isn't included in the current budgets. The demand for NASA to assist in sattelite launches and other earth bound tasks with the Space Shuttle is big. This costs NASA money, movey that could be spent elsewhere.

Hopefully some of the other companies that have been mentioned(Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler) will help lift this burden. The other company mentioned, Kelly, is one that I think has the greatest chance for success. Their website demonstrates their towing concept. This has many great advantages over traditional launch methods. For one, the craft can carry a payload approximately 7 times greater than one carried in a rocket. The cost to get that same payload up in the air with the 747 isn't that expensive either. Kelly has realistic goals to be flying their first craft in a few years.(There are three crafts, each becoming progressivly larger.) I only glanced at the website, but I believe it fails to mention that this is a proven concept. They successfully modeled a test and then actually had several test flights. A C-141 towed an F-106. I was fortunate enough to see a video of this. It was pretty impressive.

Wigs
--Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?

I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.

If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"

It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.

It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.

On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.

On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.

And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.

Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler, and Kelly) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.

Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow, but there are others.

Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent, The Mars Society, and Artemis is strong evidence of this.

NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.

Or Pioneer Rocketplane, Kistler, Kelly, and others, for that matter. But the key word here is equal capabilities: AFAIK, none of the aforementioned projects envision 25 tons to LEO with 7 people aboard...

Not that I would mind missions to be redesigned to use a smaller payload/crew capacity, maybe with multiple launches.

Katz talks about the tragedy of technology. I'm not sure quite what he's getting at, but I think it IS tragic that Wall Street has found billions of dollars to pour into cyberspace, but can't seem to find the few millions needed to make viable some of the companies REALLY looking at revolutionizing space travel.

Space.com actually has pretty good news on some of the latest companies and technologies. I think the Rotary Rocket idea is the most interesting, though I suspect they may have run into some technical issues relating to angular momentum conservation... But there's also Kistler Aerospace and many others that promise to reduce costs to orbit by a factor of 10 or more. There are 17 entrants in the X-prize $10 million race to be the first single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. NASA has some nice new ideas too, but the bureaucracy makes that agency close to useless.

Anyway, even a single $1 billion internet entrepreneur involved in this business would be a huge boost. Most of the companies are scrounging for financing at the $10 million to $100 million level - some are getting it, some are not. But there's clearly not nearly enough money being put into it yet to take full advantage of the new materials and other revolutionary ideas that are just itching to be put into space vehicle design.

The NASA dream died when the argument went around that this has no relevance to solving our "real problems" - poverty, etc. etc. Well, I think the argument Arthur Clarke made about this recently should resonate with the techies here on /.: here on Earth we're on a single planet, with no redundancy. The Earth goes "down" for very long, and we're finished. Getting into space is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for the long-term survival of humanity. And that's pretty important in my book, anyway.

He got as far as building prototypes before NASA announced the advent of the Space Transportation System, aka the space shuttle. It would make space flight so cheap and easy that all other launchers would be obsolete, they claimed. They told the giants of aerospace to stop building rockets that wouldn't be needed. The space shuttle would take care of all our launch needs.

Garys investors pulled out. His contracts disappeared. He learned the folly of trying to compete with the U S Gov't. They have the money, they control the industry.

As it turned out, the space shuttle was a huge failure. Instead of costing $100 per pound to orbit, it cost $10,000 per pound. Far from being the least expensive launcher, it was the most expensive ever. Once again, the STS proved that bureaucracy and efficiency do not mix. How often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?

And, tragically, not the safest either. After Challenger, the shuttle was grounded, for a long, long time. The US launch industry was crippled. The Aerospace giants hurried to restart production of their more traditional launchers. The innovative start-ups had long since gone away.

Eventually, people started to think innovatively about cheap space flight again. Gary started a new company. Others, such as Mitchell Burnside Clapp and Walt Kistler did likewise. Lots of new companies started springing up, each determined to lower the cost of space launch; to make it cheaper, or safer, or both.

What would the world be like today if NASA hadn't crushed the entrepreneurs of yesteryear? Would one of them have succeeded? Might we have commercial launches at reasonable prices?

And now, NASA will do it again. Would you invest in a start-up company if you knew that it's competitor was subsidized by the government, or that it's closest competitor was a large government agency with a 10+ G$ budget?

I am not, as you see, a big believer in monopolies. Especially government monopolies. I believe that competition breeds innovation, and that people who work hard and take risks deserved the fruits of their labor.

I'm not knocking NASA. There are certain research areas that are so fundamental that they aren't commercializable in the near term. There are some areas too speculative for investor money. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to spend my tax dollars persuing these areas, and NASA and the NSF serve these roles. Heck, even the once-and-current ARPA does the same.

But it is not the government's place to compete with industry! Again, how often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?

Another story: A man named Rand Simberg also had a dream. If he couldn't bring spaceflight to the masses, well, he could simulate it for 30 seconds at a time. He bought a jet, outfitted it for zero-g flight, and started the only company in the US devoted to selling zero-g experiences. He called it Interglobal Space Lines, Inc.

When Ron Howard was making the film Apollo 13, Rand knew that this could be a big break. Howard wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, and planned to shoot many of the sequences in actual weightless conditions. This would be a big boost for Interglobal, since they were the only company poised to offer this service.

But before a deal was struck, NASA offered to let Howard use their KC-135 "Vomit Comet" gratis. Think about this a minute. Why? For what justification was my tax dollars (duly allocated for research by Congress) spent to subsidize Universal Pictures? Why was Simberg, who staked his whole life out trying to provide a unique service, shafted by his own government?

I'll tell you: because bureacracies like NASA are unthinking, inefficient and, well, bureaucratic! Far from fostering innovation, commercializing NASA will only serve to stifle it! Let NASA focus on research, on science, not on the operation of launch services.

I wonder if man will walk on the moon in my lifetime.

NASA does good, even great, as a research and exploration agency. NASA does horribly at operations, though. This is why they have turned over the day-to-day ops of Shuttle to USA (United Space Alliance- Boeing and Lockmart).
At every turn, NASA's Administrator, Dan Goldin, slams commercial space startups, like Rotary and Kistler. He, and by extension, NASA, have a serious beef with companys other than the Big Two having any piece of the launch market, or the exploration market.
NASA, in it's current, supposedly non-commercial guise, has killed many companys and efforts (Conestoga, almost Kistler, and Jim Davidson's "tourist to Mir" sweepstakes). If NASA became a competitor in an open market, it would wield an incredible and destructive influence, since it would still have huge contacts in other govt. agencies and the Big Two, it could effectively strangle any company that didn't fit 'the agenda'.
This might sound slighlty paranoid, until you reflect on how much damage NASA has done to commercial space efforts, even it's own commercialization efforts with Shuttle and Station, without being an actual competitor.

Be very afraid for the future of space exploration and utilization if NASA tries to go commercial.

J05H

Something does not smell right.

So: NASA spends millions of dollars on _another_ cheap to orbit test project. Was not the Space Shuttle, NASP, then the DC-X, then the X-33/X-34 supposed to do the same thing? (cheap launch to orbit)

But what happens, NASA spends the money, not just the money alloted by 5-10X more. What do we get? Either a) the project gets canceled after a couple years (NASP, DC-X) or b) the project "succeeds," in costing 100X as much as it should have. If you read what people were saying about the space shuttle in the 70's you see it was supposed to launch stuff into orbit for something on the order of $100/lb. In fact it costs well more than $10,000 a pound to launch something on the shuttle.

I love space, but I hate NASA. They went to the moon and made it boring. Dammit, I want to go to the moon. :-)

Now if they were encouraging private industry to develop launch vehicles that would be one thing, but in fact they are actively discouraging it. Dan Goldin, NASA's head, has been going around telling investors that private SSTO isn't going to happen.

But there are people who believe in the dream that low cost access to space will happen and will happen soon. Most prominent amoung them are Kistler Aerospace and The Rotary Rocket corporation.

Ad astra!