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Launch Limits Lifted
TOTKChief writes: "Apparently, Uncle Sam now doesn't want to keep an artificial advantage in commercial spaceflight launches. I personally think this is great -- allowing commercial booster companies unfettered access to space will allow for market action to take place, which should eventually drive down launch costs and allow for R&D efforts to further lower launch costs. " What's going on is that Russian rockets don't have sales caps here - or at least they're expiring, and aren't being renewed. This means more launches with Russian rockets, which means more stuff, hopefully, going into space.
LEO orbital velocity is about 18,000 miles/hour. The orbital velocity gets smaller as the distance from Earth increases.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here's something I wrote over 10 years ago about this ridiculous situation:
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 89 10:46:54 PDTo m!jim@angband.s1.gov (Jim Bowery)
- -------------------------
From: mordor!lll-tis!oodis01!riacs!rutgers!pnet01.cts.c
To: ucsd!nosc!crash!space@angband.s1.gov
Subject: re: Private launch costs
John Roberts writes:
> Another problem: the USSR has just one "company" to supply all its launch
> needs. If the US has 10 private launch companies, will it have to have 10
> times the USSR's launch volume for all the companies to have good economy
> of scale?
The Soviet government's effectiveness in space activities can, in general,
be attributed to the fact that while our private sector is more effective
than the Soviet public sector, our public sector is LESS effective than
the Soviet public sector. Why this is so becomes obvious when you
consider that the Soviet public sector has no private sector to tax --
any costs are born by itself, directly, whereas in the US (and other
relatively free market economies) the governments have the luxury of
becoming fat and lazy at the expense of the private sector.
It is a simple matter of accountability, the US private sector is
most accountable for its costs, the Soviet system is next most
accountable for its costs and the US government is least accountable
for its costs.
-------------------------------------------------
Jim Bowery Phone: 619/295-8868
PO Box 1981 Join the Mark Hopkins Society!
La Jolla, CA 92038 (A member of the Mark Hopkins family of organizations.)
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Seastead this.
Agreed! The Russians were doing it the American way long before the Americans were....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
There is more to it than "protecting an American monopoly". The production of launch vehicles is a strategic industry. For national security, the USA must have a viable, domestic launch capability. Some payloads are too sensitive to be launched on foreign launch vehicles. The Russians and French may not always be willing to launch American satellites. It is in the USA's interest to keep both the Russian and American industries healthy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I mean, commercial jets are bad enough. Maybe we need to put the restriction back as an environmental law. Maybe we need to make strict emission quota laws for the booster rockets and suchlike that will be used.
Maybe through competition and public outrage combined, the private companies will develop not-as-bad methods of propulsion (slingshots!).
Probably not.
*sn
U is a Burmese apellation equivalent to Mister.
Nix is latin for snow.
UNIX means Mister Snow.
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.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I forgot, does More_Stuff_In_Space == GOOD?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Actually, what we truly need is finding better ways to get the space junks out of the sky.
Putting useful stuffs up there may be wonderful, but till now, no one, - not Uncle Sam, and not the Ruskies either, - has come up a economically viable way to get the junks - stuffs that are NO LONGER NEEDED - down from the sky.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The concept of limiting US access to Russian space hardware really irks me. What the earlier restriction basically did was blackmail Russia into accepting the US terms. Russia needs Western capital to support their space program, and this law used that need to protect an American monopoly. This is no different from Microsoft tactics, using an organizations weight to manipulate the internal affairs of another country. Forcing Russian companies to make costs no more than 7.5% less than Western prices under the threat of losing that critical business seems, at least on the surface to be nuts. It hurts Russia, meaning we have to continue to pour money into their economy through non-job-creating means such as foreign aid and IMF loans, and it hurts American companies who need cheaper access to space.
Thank heavens that the Clinton administration... (wait, that's not right! The Senate has to legally ratify such treaties... that means that this was a bipartisan effort. Sorry, Bill, but you ain't gonna find a legacy here.) got something right. These restrictive and punitive protectionist measures only hurt our economy as well as foreign ones. This is certainly A Good Thing(tm) for both the US and Russia.
I've heard the story, too bad it isn't true. Please stop spreading this myth.
Paul Fisher invested several million dollars of his own money to develop and patent the space pen. See this page.
By the way, pencils are a bad idea. They generate airborne graphite particles that contaminate the crew compartment.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Spider Robinson writes a column, Past Imperfect, Future Tense, for the Toronto Globe and Mail. A few months ago (last year?), his column was titled "Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle". In it, Spider relates a conversation he had with Buzz Aldrin at a science fiction convention where they were co-Guests Of Honour. Buzz Aldrin related a fairly hushed up incident in the Apollo 11 mission.
The lunar landing module was very tight for space. The story is that, at the end of the exploration phase of the mission, as our heroes get ready to return to Earth, they need to remove their backpacks (dead weight) and switch back to the LEM air supply. In removing his backpack in the tight constraints of the LEM, Neil Armstrong breaks the ignition switch for the ascent engine. They are stranded on the moon with no tools to fix the problem and a finite reserve of air.
As Spider puts it:
``It dawns on Armstrong and Aldrin that they are now dead men walking, a long way from home.
``And then, God be thanked, Armstrong remembers what Senator Jocksfire called the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle. That egregious taxpayer-ripoff frippery: his zero-gravity pen. He retrieves it, roots around in the ruins of the switch...and becomes the first man ever to hot-wire a vehicle on another planet."
In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.
The space pen had a bigger side effect than having any notes written by American astronauts more easily preserved for posterity. The failure of Apollo 11 could have crippled the American space program and provided the Russians with breathing room for their moon landing efforts. Kennedy's goal, after all, was ``to land a man on the moon and return him safely"
Jerry Pournelle argues the point that the fall of the Soviet Union is in large part due to the fact that the Russians bankrupted themselves trying to match the American SDI ("Star Wars") effort. Their belief that the Americans might succeed at Star Wars was, Pournelle believes, founded in the USA's success on seemingly impossible projects like Apollo. Would we still be living with the Cold War had we not had the space pen?
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
While this will be good for the satellite business, I don't think it will help drive down costs that much, beyond satellite technology. Beyond that you basically move up to space stations or planetary exploration.
Neither of these are particularly profitable, and even if they were, the investment needed would be far too high to outweigh the risk. I'm not sure what money could be made off a space station. Tourism is a possibility, but the market for it is too small, even if you could make a lot of money per person. Medical research is a possibility, but again I don't think there is much of a safe investment there either.
Planetary exploration stands to make no profit, until you have ships big and fast enough that could fly out and start mining the asteroid belt. Current technology levels for exploring mars or other planets is far better suited for scientific discovery than for a corporations bottom line.
So the conclusion is this: while privitization is sometimes good, it's not a blanket solution. The government still needs to pump money into it's own programs (space station, mars programs) until there is enough technology that can be transfered to private corporations that will allow for profitability. Most emerging markets followed a similar path, with most of the modern tech industry being a good example, after military technology was transfered to private corporations.
... with the US aerospace and launch industry, let me just say that you're fooling yourself if this is going to in anyway increase competition and/or inspire Darwinism. The American aerospace industry (at least on the top level) is a far cry from anything remotely resembling that. This move will do nothing to assist the aerospace industry at the level where true competition exists at. Of course, I also believe that it would do the aerospace industry a great boon if we took to heart Russian pragmaticism. The Russians don't have the greatest safety record, but their frontiersman attitude of improvising and practicality is something NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, JPL, etc. should take note of. To give an example, the US spent on upwards of a million dollars researching, designing, and then fabricating a writing tool that could write in space, upside down, under water, etc. Know how much the Russians spent? $0.99 They used pencils.
Folks, I want to see cheap access to space as much as the next guy, but those limits placed on the Russian boosters were justified.
During the "bad old days" of communism, constructed items did not have a cost as western markets understand it -- they were constructed with parts and labour lovingly grafted from the collective (i.e. They were FREE). So, when the iron curtain fell and everything went up for sale, the prices the Russians put on their boosters were arbitrary. They did not reflect market reality and would heavily distort the launch market (which, at the time the limits were implemented, was dominated by _European_ boosters, not the Big Bad 'ol United States) and damage the global industry if they were to be sold at the quantities and prices desired at the time.
Today, Russia still has the same old boosters with the same old infrastructure but now they're charging western rates for the goods. Sure, they could go back to the $10 million per launch cost they claimed to be able to do before, but now, since they actually PAY their people in money, it wouldn't be a viable business and would collapse if they charged that rate.
This price equilization would have occurred sooner or later without the imposition of limits. However, limits minimized the damage to the rest of the world's space sector while giving Russia time to get their act together.
If Russia wants, they can still charge bargain prices for their "superior" launch technology. Nothing is stopping them from running themselves out of business if they want to.
>Anyway think about this. The Russian proton
>launcher if it was man rated (it isn't); it could
>launch people for around $350,000 per person. If
>there is competition in this market; this price
>can fall by 4 or more, easily. 10x is harder. But
>there are credible designs that reduce it by a
>100x.
...and operate at a slightly reduced margin of risk? Is one spacecraft lost in 100 a good margin for you? Would you take that kind of risk at an airport?
So, it costs $350,000 to launch a person to orbit on your dream ship...
Plan on bringing any food? Clothing? Air? A habitat? I'll bet you could find a Western launcher able to hoist your naked body aloft for $350,000, too.
Looks like you're spending too much time waving your arms (wishing Reeeeeeeeeeeeally hard) and not enough time being an engineer.
There is already a scary glut of launch vehicles today. The manufacturers had been forcasting a lot of demand, based on the expected success of Iridium. Iridium is a constellation system, which requires lots and lots of launches, as compared with single-launch satellites like the ones the Sea Launch puts up.
So... When Iridium went bankrupt, we saw an immediate evaporation of interest in constellation systems. Very simply, investors don't want to take the risk. Sometimes the systems have been reformed as non-constellation systems, or lumped onto other satellites, and other times they're simply cancelled. In any case, the net result is the same: The projected large market for launches is vanishing rapidly.
I think all of us know that the way to get low per-widget costs is to make a lot of them. Henry Ford proved this out with his affordable mass produced cars. And we all know that when you write a piece of software, the more customers you can sell to, the wider you can spread your development costs, and the lower a price you can charge and still make profit. Competition is a great way to drive costs down, but doing it in volume is an even better way.
So I don't know, maybe there will be a "clearance sale" or some such, but I *think* the result ain't going to be what we'd like. Having more launchers is fine, but what we *really* need are a lot more launches. Nothing else is really going to drive costs down to where we need them, IMHO.
Are rockets really what commercial space ventures should be using? Chemical rockets ,that is. They're big, heavy, expensive, and dirty (there's more to it than 2H2 + O2 => 2H20. Lots of hydrazine and who knows what else).
If chemical rockets were hard to come by, but there were still a big market for getting stuff up into space, wouldn't it just accelerate the development of more efficient launch systems? This will only provide less of an incentive to improve.
Due to the recent complete failure of our "nuke defense system" (aka Star WARS), one has to ponder that maybe the US is confident that if we aren't able to properly fly things into space to shoot things out of the atmosphere, then Russia won't be able to either. Call it an inferiority complex, but I think the US wanted to strut their stuff and failed miserably. Star WARS was a product of the seventies, and so was the cold war -- I thought our "global community" had moved past those days.
"I try to live a lifestyle that Chairman Mao would not find amusing. Have fun." -The Plaid Jedi
The deal was dodgy anyway. The size of the space market seems to be partly set by the price- the idea is that reducing the cost of a rocket would just reduce the profit in space. I don't completely understand that, but it makes a certain sense in the short term; if you assume the industries make a fixed percentage of the price, and if the amount launched doesn't depend on the price. Neither is true in detail, or probably general. Probably reducing the price will raise the total value of yearly launches, in the long run.
Anyway it looks like the cartel has broken up. Probably the Ruskies think that they have better rockets based on their long cost-sensitive development history (and they have a point). And they have cheap labour costs.
Maybe the Merkins think that they have more money and can come up with a better design themselves. Maybe, but the cost of rockets seems to increase with greater sophistication rather than decrease.
Personally I'd bet on the Ruskies, but the Merkins might win.
Basically every time the space shuttle launches for the same cost the Russians could have launched about 6 times. That's nutty but true.
Everyone's probably heard the story about the space pen- the Americans needed something that can write in zero-g. They spent a million dollars developing a pen that can write upside down, underwater and even in zero-g. The russians used pencils. That sums up the difference in principle between the two approaches.
Anyway think about this. The Russian proton launcher if it was man rated (it isn't); it could launch people for around $350,000 per person. If there is competition in this market; this price can fall by 4 or more, easily. 10x is harder. But there are credible designs that reduce it by a 100x.
Would you pay $3500 for a trip to space? I would...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"