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Pentagon Sets Tone For Future Space Exploration
coondoggie writes "It obviously leans heavily on the military's concerns for outer space exploration, but the National Security Space Strategy (PDF) released yesterday by the Department of Defense outlines concerns like protection from space junk and system security that all space travelers in theory would want addressed. The NSSS document emphasizes the Obama administration's desire to protect US space assets and to further commercialize space but also to ensure that the US and international partners have unfettered access to outer space."
Sounds perfectly reasonable. A couple of high sounding, moral high ground arguments (space is for everyone), a few sops to Boeing, et. al (need for continued government support for x,y,z), a sop to NASA and the inevitable "don't mess too much with our playground, we're bigger than you".
Now. Where's the money?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Considering that the DoD's budget makes NASA's look like a rounding error, getting the military involved in the space program must be warming the hearts of space buffs everywhere. One thing's for sure, the DoD never lacks for funding.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
That will be an interesting thing for a faithful Muslim to have to work out if they go to some extra-terrestrial location. Frederick Pohl mentioned the concept in one of his Gateway books where some group of Muslims landed on another planet and had to locate the Sun (Sol.... the Earth's Sun) in order to orient themselves properly to Mecca.
There have been a couple of Muslim astronauts who have already been in space, so the idea isn't completely theoretical. I'm sure the idea was at least addressed, as at least a few astronauts have discussed their religious experiences in an extraterrestrial setting. I know that Catholic Mass was held on the Moon at one point (wine and wafer previously blessed by a priest), as was a Mormon sacrament service in the Space Shuttle. Why is some faithful Muslim considered weird in that respect?
Given that two things drive human civilization above all others -- war and sex -- I have concluded that a new space race and space hotels offering the possibility of sex in zero g may be our best hopes of getting off this planet. The only other thing I can think of that could provide the right motivation is religion, which is why I'm in the process of founding a new cosmic religion to inspire new generations of cosmic missionaries to reach for the stars. See thecosmist.blogspot.com for more information.
The Constellation Program was doomed from the beginning and deserved to be shut down and replaced with something else. In the words of the Augustine Commission, even if the spaceflight vehicles were ready to fly today, their first recommendation would be to cancel the program as too expensive and dangerous. On top of that, it was billions of dollars over budget and years behind in terms of getting anything done. The earliest that the Ares V would be ready is 2020 with a very optimistic timeline.
It is also a project that keeps coming back from the dead, but I'll leave that zombie where I can shoot it from time to time... like this thread.
As for shutting down the Shuttle program, that is something which was decided by the Bush administration following the destruction of the Columbia. Simply put, there aren't enough orbiters for a viable Shuttle program, and the loss of any future shuttle orbiter would be its termination anyway. Perhaps a "next generation" shuttle could have been made to continue the lessons learned, but the Shuttle program as has been flying for the past 30 years simply can't continue as it has been flying. The loss of two orbiters is bad enough, and some serious reconsideration for its design was desperately needed. The Constellation Program was not a shuttle replacement but rather a return to.... something else. I'm not even sure what. George W. Bush is the person to blame, not Obama.... not that Obama is helping out here either but that is besides the point.
As for radioisotopic generators (RTGs), the largest problem there is that the nuclear bomb factories have been mostly shut down as the number of warheads in the U.S. arsenal have been gradually reduced through attrition (getting old and having to be refurbished) and various treaties with several countries, including the SALT treaties and the START treaty negotiations with the former USSR. If you are going to blame a U.S. President, you can blame Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both are indirectly responsible for the current situation with regards to RTGs, unless you are also blaming the anti-nuclear activists who have kept domestic nuclear reactors from getting built. Breeder reactors in particular as a major solution to both RTGs and to reducing or eliminating nuclear waste. There is no need for Yucca Mountain, but for the fact that nuclear engineering is all but a dead discipline now in America.
While I'm not a fan of Barak Obama, his problem has been mainly one of apathy and benign neglect of NASA and U.S. space policy. It took him nearly a year to appoint Charles Bolden as NASA administrator, and Obama certainly hasn't been reining in people like Gabrielle Giffords (when she chaired the sub-committee with oversight of NASA and federal spaceflight policy.... yes the same lady who has been in the news more recently) nor has he really given Charles Bolden the political support necessary to make some of the really tough changes needed at NASA to put everything back on track either. He had the chance and blew it, but the problems remain. He had the chance to set American space policy for the next several decades, but instead has half-heartily reinstated George W. Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" by setting NASA into auto-pilot.
As demonstrated by this policy directive by the Department of Defense, if NASA doesn't "boldly go", the DoD will. About bloody time I might add. At least somebody is showing some leadership in the area. Such leadership certainly isn't coming from the White House. Obama has been transparent with regards to NASA.... he just isn't doing anything worth caring about and thus doesn't matter if it was published or not on Wikileaks or anywhere else for that matter.
States, at least in the US context, certainly are subject to different financial constraints than is the federal government. There are some other differences as well. At least for stuff that can be stamped "national security" the feds have greater leverage over private sector actors: It is perfectly legal for Yoyodyne LLC. to say "Dear Florida, give us the land to build a spaceport, some cushy tax breaks, and exemption from certain local zoning restrictions, or we will take our precious, precious jobs to New Mexico". That is, in fact, entirely standard practice for corporations siting facilities. On the other hand, were Slaughtertek industries to say "Well, if you don't like the price of our proposed air-defense missile package, perhaps China will be more cooperative...", they would likely find themselves in legal hot water.
This tends to create a countervailing pressure on state governments: As you say, even if they are willing to take the macroecomic consequences, they cannot print money and are generally limited in their ability to run debts. On the other hand, state governments are often much easier to play against one another in competition for the most generous public/private "partnerships". In non-defense industries, some of the same stuff happens nation to nation; but there are still barriers like language, tariffs, currencies, etc. that states either are powerless to erect(interstate commerce is federal, so state x can't impose a tariff on goods from state y) or that don't exist(all states use USD and have high concentrations of available native English speakers, say). Unfortunately, there is some evidence from empirical economic study that this countervailing pressure often ends up with state governments being made into what amounts to a corporate booty call. Governors just cannot resist the electoral value of cutting the ribbon at some new plant with some shiny new jobs for their constituents; but often end up paying out alarming sums in taxpayer money per job, and long-term retention(once the goodies run out) can be surprisingly low. Apparently, southern states have it particularly bad; but others are not immune(Municipalities that shell out to build stadiums for private sports teams are in a similar boat and that seems to be a universal vice...)
This isn't just a US phenomenon: Euro-zone nations, because of comparatively low borders, often face some of the same problems and national governments generally are not exempt, though they have somewhat stronger tools to work with.
There certainly are enough billionaires building mega yachts that have a price tag similar to a genuine spaceship, if put up by a private company like Bigelow Aerospace. It isn't nearly as unknown as you are saying and there are people who wouldn't mind grabbing some extra-terrestrial real estate for themselves in a provable way.
The trillion dollars was in reference to the whole tourism industry, not space tourism, but the point is still there that there is a market for people wanting to get into space, and the number of people willing to pay at least a million dollars for the opportunity is a bit higher than you would think.
The real advantage of space tourism is that it is one of the few areas of spaceflight where lower costs bring about a huge increase in revenue. Let me explain in perhaps another way:
Communications and weather satellites are pretty rare things, and generally not too many of them are needed at any given time. As a result, they are big but expensive things costing billions of dollars to make. Ditto for "spy satellites" and even probes to other planets. For most of the existing "proven" markets for spaceflight, the "customers" are willing to pay a premium for getting into space, but generally not too many flights are necessary to get everything up. That is one of the reasons why spaceflight is so expensive, and has been stuck at about $10,000/kg (give or take) for almost 50 years. Any "competition" getting into the market mostly shoots themselves in the foot (like SpaceX) by grabbing market share, but once they start to land the big projects and have a flight tested piece of equipment, they start raising launch prices to meet the market of seldom flying rockets to LEO. Other companies go out of business, but essentially the price stays the same. These companies and government agencies have a pretty fixed budget for launches into space, and as long as it is a fraction of the price of the vehicle they are sending up, the cost of the launch itself is meaningless.
Space tourism, on the other hand, responds very well with lower cost where a 50% drop in the price more than doubles the overall revenue received. That is the key thing here, and a missing ingredient in terms of spaceflight financial models. You might have a dozen potential astronauts at $20 million each going to LEO, but a thousand or more with a price of $2 million and hundreds of thousands of customers at $200,000 for the same trip (perhaps even more). Even at $200,000 each, the cost of paying for fuel and the crew is trivial compared to the costs of the vehicle itself. Fuel costs for spaceflight right now are so trivial that the cost of the press conference catering service is usually more on most launches. The ground crew is generally expensive because most of the time they are doing nothing but training.... not launching vehicle. If you change that equation, you can see the cost for access to orbit drop considerably and still make some serious money for those companies wanting to get involved. It can be done, but it takes rethinking the market.
If you take an historical analogy, it cost on average about $3,000-$10,000 in order to buy a Conestoga Wagon with a couple of pair of oxen, some sheep, chickens, food, ammunition, and other supplies in order to cross the western plains in order to get to Oregon or California. Considering that an average laborer earned about a dollar a day, that represented about 10-15 years worth of life savings in order to get that kind of money together, or about 5 years worth of savings for a skilled tradesman. If you start to think in that fashion, with a "skilled worker" today earning about $100k/year, a $200k ticket to space is quite comparable to a trip across the great plains of America from a century and a half ago in terms of effort needed to make the trip. Sure, no 3rd world citizen is going to make a trip like that, but it is in the realm of an ordinary person in a 1st world country. Give those folk