Slashdot Mirror

That's because the average slashdotter is a sci-fi fan who hasn't the faintest clue how incredibly expensive it is to explore space, and how little potential for profit there is. (the only money in space flight is in launching commercial satellites, and that is best (cheapest) handled with big dumb rockets, not with new unproven technology that is years from getting an inch off the earth.)

Yeah, yeah... mine the moon/asteroids ... blah blah blah ... I've read the fiction too and it was way cool, but does not constitute a legitimate business plan.

If private funding is such a panacea, why haven't the privately funded efforts gotten past slick graphics of cool spacecraft and "flight tests" of scaled down vehicles cruising well beneath the commercial aircraft?

If you want to see what happens to privately funded space fantasies, go here and then look here. [hint: It isn't there any more]

Anyone know what's happened to the Rotary Rocket Company? The website is unavailable. Have they folded? I hope not, as it was one of the coolest SSTO vehicles I've seen.

The big problem was that the new engine concept didn't work out, and using off the shelf engines doomed the thing to suborbital flight, for which there is no commercial market.

Some people have solutions that give you VTVL without needing to balance on the point of a needle. Unfortunately, they seem to be out of money.

Kinda sad, really.

The abbreviated Laws of Thermodynamics:
1)You can't win.
2)You can't break even.

SSTO designs hit this problem in a big way. They're all exercises in extreme weight reduction. I've met the founder of Rotary Rocket, a commercial SSTO. They got quite far along, but weight growth made their vehicle suborbital, at which point investors lost interest.

Exactly. The same thing happened to Rotary Rocket. The original plan was to build a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, but after problems with the "rotary engine" concept, it was downgraded to a suborbital technology demonstrator.

Single stage to orbit rockets powered by chemical fuels are inherently marginal. Well over 90% of the vehicle weight at launch has to be fuel, so there are terribly restrictive weight constraints on the vehicle. (By comparison, a commercial airliner at takeoff is typically less than half fuel by weight.) This is the basic reason space travel is just barely possible.

In some ways, that's the problem. If chemical fuels with twice the energy density were available, space travel would be straightforward. If the best fuels had half the energy density, chemical rockets would be hopeless, and atomic-powered space travel (which is quite feasable, provided you launch from somewhere isolated enough for atmospheric nuclear testing) would have been tried by now. But because it's just barely possible to do it with chemical fuels, we're stuck with a marginal technology.

Ok, you got me on that. *grin* Which is why I threw in the pointer to Rotary Rocket. Best of both worlds, DC-X failsafe reliablity and wings. :-)

I'm not certain why you insist on spacecraft having wings. Even a well-designed lifting-body has the flight characteristics of a well-aimed brick. As far as "no Air Force man would accept ...", last I checked, helicopters don't have wings and there are plenty of them in the Air Force. If landing on rocket power bothers you, the Roton from Rotary Rocket is an interesting twist on the DC-X vehicle design.

Now, I know originally the X-33 was supposed to be unmanned, but we all know that that was going to change sooner or later, no? Selling to the military (incl. NASA) means catering to the people that will fly/operate your technology, not just its niftiness.

I'm not certain what your point is. Yes, X-33 was suppose to be unmanned. Yes, that may have changed in any follow-on vehicle. Naively I assumed that safety, reliablilty and cost were more important to the military and NASA than "niftiness". And arguably, it was VentureStar's "niftiness" that sold NASA's management on Lockmart's proposal instead of Rockwell's or MacDouglas'.

Also, you're forgetting who the competitors were: a near-bankrupt McDonnel Douglas (soon to be picked up by Boeing), a down-and-out Rockwell (ditto) and Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, the Air Force's own private development lab. Who do you think the military would trust more?

Again I'm not sure of your point. The original DC-X was developed by McDouglas under a DOD contract. And I've heard nothing about the military "suggesting" to NASA who should receive the X-33 contract. NASA is more than capable of screwing things up on their own.

And if the DC-X was so cheap, how come hasn't Boeing picked it up and used it for their own commercial purposed instead of SeaLaunch?

Same reason Lockmart won't pickup the VentureStar on their own dime, and Rockwell didn't develop their proposal on their own. Realistically we're about 2 generations from commercial profitability on any of those designs.

I am no LM apologist, and I am genuinely sorry that all this money was wasted, but technology, tests and experience are never lost and will be used again (witness, e.g. the Boeing 747). Besides, I always thought Rockwell's proposal made the most sense...

That is a stupid comment... if they don't want the money, send it to me... if they want the money to go to NASA, mail NASA a check, I'm sure they will put it to good use! Maybe they should send their check to one of these start ups that are trying to win the X-Prize... or maybe my personal favorite, Rotary Rocket

But then, all manned flights are on the Shuttle nowadays, aren't they...?

I guess I'll just have to wait for the Roton... but by that time I'll be 40, fat and ugly :(

I understand water can keep you alive on Mars - but why would you want to be there in the first place? I haven't heard one useful reason to go to Mars. The cost of extracting ore from the crust is prohibitive. There are no useful materials to extract beyond ore. Even if you just wanted to go so you said it could be done, the cost is so high that making more than one trip isn't realistic.

I'm glad that the Spanish didn't take the same idea with the Americas. I mean it takes three months to get there and get back, there's nothing really useful there at all except for gold and silver ore, and it costs a lot to send those gallons across the sea for all that time, they can be put to much better use fighting the English or hauling spices from the Turkish coast. We should just avoid the New World at all costs. It's really just not worth the effort to go at all.

But you see that the possible profit drove them to the New World and the profit will drive people into space. You say that all that's there is ore, well everything around you is just ore. Nothing more. It is what can be done with it that matters. Prohibitive costs in research and development are not going to stop SSTO ships, no more than the prohibitive research costs have stopped cars or airplanes. As long as there is any profit to be made at anything it will be done. It is worth being done. Lowering costs by complete reusing of a spacecraft will cocur. It might not be nasa, esa or the russians. It could be Roton Rockets. Quite simply the current needs of space are not being met. It takes too long to set up a launch, it costs too much per pound, and repair is impossible (try replacing a broken motherboard is space, really can't be done so a $50 million dollar satilite has to be splashed for a $1,000 part.) The shuttle cannot do all these things, Soyez is just a orbital taxi, and the Protons, Arians, and Deltas of the world are too few to go around. There is money to be made in space, and we are going to go there, whether you agree with it or not. Developments costs can be divided over time, and there is no testing like putting it to work now.

Well, it sad to see Iridium go. I've followed is progress over the last several years and thought the concept really had a chance. Unfortunately, market tides and marketing foulups shifted under Iridum's feet, and they fell on their face. Let me tackle a few of the questions here.

The time hasn't come yet.

The time came five years ago even more than now. Iridium could have been used to bootstrap phone networks up in developing countries until regular cellular towers were available. One of the concepts was also a form of "village phone" that was basicly a phone booth with a sat antenna on top.

Expensive bulky phones that didn't work indoors?

The phones did have problems indoors. They really needed a line of site in order to connect up to the sats. It would have worked fine for a roof mounted antenna on a truck, ship, or plane. For some reason, the marketing brain power at Iridium decided to target mobile executives rather than commercial industry. Instead of trying to get a Fortune 500 CEO to carry one in a briefcase, they could have targeted trucking companies who do cross country runs, shipping that is in the middle of the ocean, and airlines who could use a cost effective replacement for those "Airphones" they try and charge $3/minute for. Iridium failed to target the tech to the market is was sufficient for.

Why not just auction the suckers?

Won't work. First, there is a lot of ground support involved. I believe the cost is at somewhere around $1M/day to operate the sats. Next, you have to send up replacements too often. This is not a geosync sat that just hangs out. This is five dozen plus sats in low orbit experiencing constant drag. Within a few years, the first generation sats will start coming home on their own. With a controlled deorbit, you can at least make sure they all end up in the ocean instead of having chunks of metal land in New York and Tokyo.

Iridium completely missed the boat on data service. The system is designed around voice and low-bandwidth pager data. This was a major design flaw with the move to an information society over the last few years. If Teledesic gets off the ground, maybe my faith in these sat clusters will be renewed, but it will take a lot.

The failure of these first generation sat clusters has hurt more than just the sat companies themselves. Several companies were developing new low cost launching technologies intended to support this market. You can write off Rotary Rocket and serverl other companies because they saw their potential customer go away before they were even out the door.

Such is life...

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.

This won't markedly increase the "stuff going into space" anytime soon. For that you need a market, and right now, that market is pretty stable. From 1990 to present, there have been around 150 satellites a year launched on an average of about 70 rockets. Even the big build-up of satellite constellations in the late 90s (along with the entry of new spacefaring nations like Brazil and India) didn't change this much, although for a time, it resulted in much rocketry investment and several startups in the cheap-access-to-space field.

But make no mistake: with Iridium failing to sell at a penny on the dollar (that's right, 1% of the investment so far, and the buyer walked away), its strongest competitor Globalstar perilously close to bankruptcy, ICO just emerging from Chapter 11, Orbcomm losing money despite orders, and so on, the LEO constellation market is pretty much over and done with.

[See Lloyd's Satellite Constellations for more info.]

With the end of speculation in the LEO constellation business [as well as a tanking tech stock sector], Rotary Rocket failed to get further investment despite an operational vehicle. This pretty much put the kibosh on anyone like Kistler or Beal or energizing the Cheap Access to Space market by dramatically reducing launch costs, at least anytime soon.

It may seem counterintuitive, but there actually are only a limited number of things you can do in space. Communications satellites in GEO are one; scientific satellites in LEO are another. And there are already plenty of commercial devices selling the data they collect.

What the launch limitations did was two things. First, they were political cover for an administration burned by Loral malfeasance in assisting China with a launch. Second, they were a simple protectionist measure aimed at giving homegrown companies (Rotary, Beal, Kistler) a window in which to develop vehicles and compete for business against the established American leaders, Boeing and Lockmart.

The irony is that most post-Soviet space vendors (Khrunichev, Energiya, Ukraine's Sea Launch) have partnered with one or more of the leading American vendors, who are now able to steer customers to a "preferred" international partner, in effect recapturing lost business. There has been no new American vendor to reach maturity. Whether these quasi-monopolies constitute improved American competition for the global satellite business, which pretty much remains a zero-sum game, is an exercise for the reader.
----

People who knew anything about the company had high hopes to be watching manned commercial space launches and landings at the Mojave Airport.

The company is currently looking for enough investment money to build and fly the space flight version of Roton, which was esitmated to run $1000/lb on a 7000lb payload capacity to low-Earth orbit. The Space Access Newsletter that this Slashdot article refers to mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...

I hadn't really considered the 'vested interests' argument before; but it makes sense. If the price per kilo is to come down, it'll happen because of competition from a new source; most likely private enterprise.
Already we see China, Japan and Brazil expanding their space activities, with India planning a mission to the moon. More and more companies, too, are getting in on the act; I believe the Roton was mentioned here before.
The more countries and/or companies there are involved, the more incentive there is to lower the prices to something reasonable.

Of course, if we had a space elevator, it'd be far, far cheaper. And faster. And better.

First, chemical fueled rockets aren't impractical. Its a little known fact that the most thermodynamically efficient engine ever built is the rocket engine- its about 60%. This is because they run at very high temperature.

If reusable rockets can be built, the actual cost per passenger is little more than the cost of a Concorde ticket, assuming designs like the Roton can be made to work, space travel becomes a heck of a lot more airline like.

That's where the costs go. Not in fuel (fuel costs are insignificant percentage-wise), but in the rockets that get currently thrown away after each flight. But that isn't why they are so expensive- its simpler than that, its because so few rockets are made. Costs for low numbers - its often cheaper to build one than 20; but even cheaper to build 1000.

You mention nuclear. Nuclear is fantastic for interplanetary drives. But launching from the earth is different story. Nobody has even successfully made a nuclear aeroplane. Weight is even more critical achieving orbit, and nuclear reactors need heavy shielding. And the devastation if it crashes would be Chernobyl like.

Actually the situation is improving. For one thing there are a lot more launchers out there now. The price is coming down due to competition; people are asking how can we get some of that 30 billion a year cake that makes up space?

I give it 30 years and then we'll see thousands of people living in space. The reasons it will take that long are economic. Somebody with a couple of billion to spare could make it happen much sooner though.

Excellent. Hopefully they'll hurry up with the manned missions, bring back some Helium-3 and scare the living fsck out of our lazy, "shoot-as-low-as-possible" space program.

Please don't flame me about this, I know they've done some fantastic things, including landing many spacecraft on the moon, but come on:
1)The Shuttle sucks. It's worthless. We can do better and cheaper with non-reusables. How messed up is that? Hopefully VentureStar will be a great replacement (or, maybe, Rotary Rocket's Roton).
2)We haven't GONE anywhere since the mid-70's. We're getting lax.
Just my 2c....

Unfortunately, due to incorrect assumptions at design time, the Shuttle now has costs very similar to the Saturn V, but boosts less cargo.

The Saturn V derivatives, such as the Saturn V-D could have carried 326,500 kg to orbit! And some of the Nova series boosters could have boosted over a million lbs into orbit in one shot!

Unfortunately, Congress decided to shut down the Saturn line. To avoid any conflict, they ordered the tooling and dies used the create these incredible vehicles destroyed and sold as scrap. Scrap metal!

Now, we have an expensive white elephant (in a distinctly non-elephant like Delta configuration) in the form of the space shuttle. It costs over $500 million to launch, and carries about half of what the original expected payload capacity was supposed to be. It requires extensive refitting between missions, too. The motors need to be pulled and rebuilt each time, and the re-usable solid boosters get so contaminated by salt water, they need to be extensive refurbished before re-use, and that gets rid of almost any benefit from re-usabillity.

The future is Rotary Rocket with their SSTO manned vehicle (small payload, smaller price) or the Energia w/ their succesful Proton heavy lift launcher and their new Fregat stages and Zenit.

I hope that one day nanotechnology realizes the potential we all think it has. If so, maybe hobbyists will use nanosites to construct a new generation of Saturn V boosters from reconstructed blueprints (a set still exists in the Library of Congress) and launch them from the beaches of America.

I hope I live to see that day, so I can see that huge booster my grandparents helped design lift off the pad like my parents and the rest of the generation before me did, and then, maybe, I'll know that our day in space is truly here.

The VentureStar (the scheduled replacement for the Shuttle) is at least a decade away. The X-33 is just the small-scale prototype of it. The X-33 will undergo at least 3 years of testing before work even starts on the VentureStar. I honestly believe that a private company will end up making a replacement before NASA gets around to it. One to look into is Rotary Rockets. They are scheduled to make their first orbital flight later this year or early next year. (This would be the first time that a private venture, as opposed to a government, has sent a human in space.)

It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.

You are absolutely correct. Much of the rank and file of NASA is highly competent, particularly the folks at JPL and others behind the unmanned exploration probes. But the middle and upper management do things for truly bizzare reasons.
My favorite example: Back before they got bought, Macdonald-Douglas put together a small team who did an absolutely crack job on the DC-X program. It was fast, it was cheap, and it did what it was designed to do and built hardware that worked. So when it came time to select the contactor for the next phase of the program, NASA in its infinite wisdom ignored the proposal from the MacDonald-Douglas team (which would have built on the things they had learned and done already) and selected the X-33/VentureStar program proposed by Lockheed. Why? Because the Lockheed proposal provided the greatest technical challenge and involved developing the most new technology.
Last time I checked, the X-33 was grossly overweight (including 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose, to balance out the engines, which were too heavy), has had its speed envelope reduced by nearly half, was way behind schedule and over budget (of course), and was having a host of fabrication problems (primarily with their "revolutionary" new tank technology).

Sigh. It's things like this that have convinced me that NASA is not the place to look for cheap space access, or much of anything else except the occasional really cool spaceprobe.

As an aside: if your interested in cheap space access, check out the Rotary Rocket Company to see how it might of happened (if they hadn't run out of cash). And then check out X-Cor Aerospace, which is all that's left of Rotary Rocket that's actually doing anything.

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.

A quarter of a billion dollars? Why is this guy trying to recreate NASA? You don't need Saturn-V-class vehicles to get the majority of payloads to orbit. What's more, it looks like his vehicle is disposible, which is an unnecessary waste. And that launch site looks ridiculously impractical; how are you going to get what might be an extremely delicate, sensitive payload to that island?

Check out the Rotary Rocket Company. They have a working prototype, the Roton, undergoing tests in California's Mojave desert.

Maximum payload capacity: 7000 lbs.
Estimated cost per launch: $7M
Price per pound: $1000
NASA's price per pound: ~$5000

Most payloads, especially telecomm satellites, are under 7000 pounds. Unlike Beal's proposed vehicle, the Roton is reusable and manned. It takes off and lands on its tail, like God and Robert Heinlein intended :-). And not only can they deliver your payload to orbit but, unlike Beal, they can bring it back! Never throw away another satellite!

Right now, all they need is investment capital. For half of what Beal has spent to date ($120M), they can complete the Roton and start delivering payloads to orbit. Unfortunately, Rotary Rocket has had difficulty securing investment capital. Unlike most .coms -- which typically get twice what Rotary Rocket needs -- they have an actual working prototype, and they will make money.

Schwab

It's late and I have to work tomorrow, so I'm going to confine myself to addressing the most relevant issue that you raised: the cost of launch.

You are correct: Getting into space IS prohibitively expensive. The going rate is around $5000/pound to Low Earth Orbit on the cheapest (Russian) ride available. If you want to fly the Shuttle, you're looking at more like $10000+/pound. And you are also correct in your assumption that we cannot do anything that makes sense in space until we get the cost to orbit down.

BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!! Your belief that space access is inherently expensive is a common misperception, which has been propagated and supported at every opportunity by NASA and the companies that feed off their largess.
The technical problems are hard, do not misunderstand me, but the primary challenges and limitations are organizational, political, and operational in nature, not technical.
NASA is a hidebound bureaucracy; they have no motivation to be cheap and efficient.
The shuttle requires ground support by tens of thousands of people between every launch. No wonder it is expensive.
Since the end of Apollo, NASA has repeatedly and consistently selected the launch system development programs that are least likely to produce results.

For a good summary of why we must go to space, and how NASA has worked to make that impossible, go to the latest report from the Space Access Society.

As long as I am getting up on this soapbox, let me establish my credentials: I have worked for NASA (at JPL) and I have worked on a launch vehicle development program. A privately funded launch vehicle development program. The company in question, the Rotary Rocket Company, is now effectively out of business for lack of funding. But in two years we built and tested four new rocket engine designs, while spending less than $2,000,000. Compare that to any program run by NASA, and you will understand why they have consistently failed to produce a reasonable launch vehicle.
We can develop the technology RIGHT NOW that would put us in orbit for 1/10 what NASA has to spend. And once space began to be commercialized in a big way, that cost would drop by another order of magnitude in less than a decade. All we need is the development money, and not very bloody much of it at that.
Come on, all you dotcom millionaires who grew up loving Star Trek. Do you want to live the dream? Then let's make it happen!

I welcome replies posted here, or to brent@lorax.org.

http://www.rotaryrocket.com/

I would put in a little money to this venture and so would a lot of other people but the way they talk about investment in their website makes it clear. The little guy need not apply.

DB

This is because the space shuttle does not have a "safe abort" in the early part of it's envelope: there is a significantly large part in the early flight where, if the engines fail, you die.

The vertical takeoff, vertical landing SSTO (single stage to orbit) craft that have been proposed by many people do have this option. (Go read G. Harry Stine's "Halfway to anywhere" for the history of this).

NASA prefers to "inspect in" the quality, which is expensive and supports a vast number of technical people. This is called "the missile mentality", and it stems from the early days of "get to the moon at any cost" and other political reasons.

So, it's important to support people like Rotary rocket, because, basicaly, NASA is the Microsoft of space travel.

Joking aside. If you want something to happen, there are two things you can do:
help make it happen.
hope someone else does it.

You seem to be a member of the second group. As you can tell... I want to be part of the first.

And yes if I had the $ I'd be donating cash to NASA or buying stock in a company trying to get into the space business.

Just because your buck rogers fantasy didn't come true, you seem to believe that a revolution in space travel won't be happening anytime soon. But it's comming. Why? Private industry. I doubt Uncle Sam will get us anywhere any time soon, but I think private industry will. Companies are going after the x prize (for the first commerically produced re-usable lauch vehicle) worth $10 Million. The rotary rocket is now in test flight.

Things are happening. And momentum will grow.

But of course, being young and impatient, I of course wish it would happen faster!

There is no technical reason that we could not establish permanent bases on the moon, Mars, or on an asteroid. The fact that we could send manned missions to the moon with less than 10 years lead time (from the idea being first proposed) suggests that we can develop the technology.

It is unlikely that NASA would be able to execute such a mission. Unfortunately, the space agency is no longer the can do group it was in the 1960's. Instead, it has grown into another Bureaucratic monster, more concerned with maintaining its funding that searching out new, expansive goals.

We can expect privately funded space launch services such as Rotary Rocket or Cerulean Freight Forwarding Company within the next five years. With these and other companies providing access to low earth orbit, there will be a ten fold decrease in the cost off access to space. This will allow more activity in space, which in turn will encourage more launchers to provide access. It is quite likely that Space Vacations will be available for the affluent inside the next ten years, with costs as low as $100,000 per person for a two week stay in a space.

There are groups who want to move permanently into space. Eventually, we will be going to the moon, Mars, the Asteroids, and elsewhere. If you are interested in promoting space, I recommend that you join one or more of these organizations.

According to this Expendable Launch Vehicle Cost Comparison, Soyuz is actually one of the cheapest ways to orbit at US$18M a pop. (It's those 27 years to depreciate base manufacturing costs that helps.) And each flight could presumably carry one cosmonaut and two passengers. I'm not sure anyone has a good way to estimate Energia's numbers, though: Russia's financial situation is such that cold hard American cash is worth far more than its paper conversion value, and they've probably run flights at a worse loss basis for the Russian government. Besides, this will help subsidize a running production line (more vehicles == cheaper costs), as well as advertise their satellite launch services.

I wonder what makes space travel so expensive? Is it the fuel (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen I believe), the cost of the vehicle itself (the various booster stages and so on) or the maintenance costs(engineers, repairs and general upkeep).

Fuels differ. LOX/LH is what the shuttle rockets use, but Soyuz uses a LOX/Kerosene fuel in all 3 stages. Figure 30 cents/kg for the combination, and you'll need something like 270,000 kg., but that's less than $100,000. The Soyuz crew vehicle is theoretically reusable, but they tend to land hard and space-rating afterward would be tricky. In practice Energia probably salvages what they can and sticks it back in the assembly line. What you're looking at are the overall costs of running the infrastructure. The shuttle has basically the same problem: if you look at pure materials and other "just this time" costs, you can come up with ridiculously low numbers (say, $60-100 million); but when you have 5 launches in a year and pay $5 billion for the privilege, you know there's more to it than that.

Soyuz launch vehicles (the type that go to Mir).

Why haven't we developed cool spacecrafts like they had in Star Wars:TPM that can go straight into the atmosphere? [you mean out of?] It would seem to be more an economic issue as opposed to a technological issue. I guess they can't develop quite enough thrust to escape the Earth's gravity without using those huge rockets.

SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) vehicles have been on the drawing board since the earliest days of NASA, but none has ever been built. The closest prototypes from recent years have suffered from the existence of the shuttle and other working launch systems. The DC-X was a promising vehicle, but it was damaged during a hard landing. The VentureStar project is billed as a next-generation shuttle, but since STS will be around for at least another 15-20 years it's not imminent. The X-33 is a prototype of some of its technology, but it's been delayed by problems of its own. The X-38 is a similarly-shaped (flying wing) vehicle, that would be a lifeboat for an ISS crew of up to 7; but it's an orbit-to-ground vehicle only.

Meanwhile, the non-governmental "space launches for profit" crowd has a number of possibilities close to reality. Kistler Aerospace has a two-stage reusable design, and Rotary Rocket uses an innovative rotor design to land a cone-shaped vehicle straight up (just like those 50s sci-fi flicks). The main obstacle remains a robust launching industry, with competition keeping the prices of expendable rockets low. Boeing and LockMart pretty much have this market sewn up; in fact there are more launches than can be accomodated at American facilities. A company called SeaLaunch partners with Boeing and Ukraine to orbit satellites from a floating oil-derrick-platform that lives in Hawaii. Launch facilities are being worked on in Canada and Alaska (to serve the polar orbit market), while India and China beef up their launch facilities. Indonesia and the Phillipines are proposing launch sites. It's really a wide-open market, as long as you're not talking about people yet. Give some of these systems a couple of years to mature and lower costs, and you'll have $1000/pound to earth orbit. That's when launching people will become easy.

http://www.space.com/business/launching/new_rock ets_wg.html
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With all the delays that Discovery and the rest of the shuttles have been experiencing, I think it may be time to retire the shuttles in favor of a newer design.

That's pretty disingenuous. What "newer design" is flight-ready? None.

While I'm no fan of the money-sucking, delay-prone, self-perpetuating shuttle program (I'd rather see that money spent on science missions, unless they're going to do something worthwhile like go to Mars), the shuttle is it for now. They're presently testing future shuttle technologies, e.g. X-33 and X-34 testbeds, X-38 flying wing station escape pod (CRV), and the big flying wing project from LockMart called VentureStar (we made it, it's really expensive, please buy it to make us rich). These are steps in the right direction, but they're baby steps. We're nowhere near designing the real next-generation shuttle. In fact, given the fact that shuttle's main apparent problems are not in fact problems -- that is, the people running the show care not about launch costs nor about delays, since the shuttle has so little to do nowadays -- it's hard to argue that it needs replacement.

There is a slate of possible shuttle upgrades, but again, they tend to solve problems we don't actually have (i.e. nobody cares about): making launches cheaper, or faster, or more capable. These would be nice to have, but there is no mission that requires them.

Meanwhile, the commercial launch business is sprinting toward next-generation vehicles like Rotary Rocket that have a good shot at reducing launch costs dramatically, which will change the equation for putting satellites in orbit -- and maybe just turn NASA into an agency buying a transport-to-orbit service from the market.
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That sounds a little extreme just because of some launch delays (which have *always* been the norm with the space program). But if you want to look at a commercial reusable launch platform, take a look at this site.

Pity none with equal capabilities is available right now or even in sight... Even without a requirement for cutting launch costs!

What about Rotary Rocket ?

They're trying, not enough investment money yet. Checkout:

Rotary Rocket
Kistler Reusable Rocketships
Kelly Space and Technology

to name a few. Unfortunately the big companies that afford to self-fund a project like this are severely risk-adverse and the small companies can't get enough investment capital. Maybe someone can figure out how to cross an internet IPO with Rotary Rocket.

In my crazier moments, I imagine Bill Gates wanting to diversify his investments by dropping a few hundred million on two or three of the more promising small companies (LOL).

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.

Now maybe Gilmore will have the bucks that Hudson needs to get his rotary rocket into space. B-)

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.

The reason this is all coming about is that commercial rocket companies, such as The Rotory Rocket Company successfully lobbied to have an amendment to the Federal Commercial Space Act, as mentioned in this Forbes article, which removed the restriction that only NASA could land space vehicles on US territory. So now NASA, big bloated behemoth that it is, is running scared. Not that it's doing anything to reduce the price of putting payloads in space to compete, but I would say it has an unfair advantage, given it's resources (your tax dollars at work!).

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

The Hilton space hotel proposal is unworkable with the current state NASA is in. They want to take space shuttle external tanks (which currently burn up on reentry right after launch) and give them an extra boost to orbit and then assemble the tanks into a space station. Problem is, shuttle tanks are not designed to, and will not, last in space for an extended period of time. People have been pointing out how NASA is resisting change, and this proposal will require NASA to radically change the way the tanks are built. The new tanks will most likely cost more and be heavier, which will mean the Shuttle will have its payload capacity reduced. Besides, the folks who originally proposed this idea had a statement up on their website for a while that said something to the effect of "We really don't know what we're talking about."

What we really should be doing is funding the innovative, low-cost launch vehicles being proposed by companies like , Bristol Spaceplanes, and Pioneer Rocketplane, among others. Many of these companies have workable designs if not actual prototypes and their designs are superior to existing launch vehicles. Bristol's "Spacebus" design launches an orbiter from a high-altitude supersonic aircraft, carrying 5 tons payload to space for $125,000. Sure beats a Shuttle per-mission cost of $500 million!

Expect delays. Unless NASA cuts off the funding, don't lose hope that they'll get X-33 off the ground eventually and learn something from it. But also don't forget there are other reusable launcher developments in the industry...

• Rotary Rocket Company
• Kelly Space & Technology
• Kistler Aerospace
• Pioneer Rocketplane

• CATS (Cheap Access to Space) Prize
• Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society (Silicon Valley)
• JP Aerospace (Sacramento)

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!

M200:
It would be nice to see some of the results of the '150' flights of the M200. Was this with a different engine than the Freedom Rotary? The technical information is really a bit lax.

Horizontal: What about landing horizontally? Surely this would save fuel, and be useful when flying into a normal air strip. If they are conforming to anything near the FARs for helicopters, then the landing gear should be strong enough.

Low Speed: The website doesn't give any decent information about the low speed characteristics (stall anyone?) or transition stability.

But then.. maybe they don't have the budget to put all of this information online.

Joshua Lamorie
Aerospace Electronics IV
Carleton University

• Launch costs drop radically (yeah Roton!)
• It becomes profitably in some way.

The doomsayers have it wrong. First, costs to orbit are set to drop quite a bit in just a couple of years (see the Rotary Rocket homepage). Second, if Hilton is going to spend US$6e9 on a hotel made of Space Scuttle external tanks, it would be easy to throw some money at NASA to have NASA re-design the ET to be easier to recycle. If it's too heavy, add a couple of RL-10 engines to the ET (a la Buran) to push the extra weight into orbit and a bit more fuel to feed them. The RL-10's are restartable, which would allow the ET to be maneuvered after separation from the Shuttle.

There are a thousand possibilities here.

Insanity at it's finest.