The View From 2015: Integrated Space Plan's 100-Year Plan

garyebickford writes: Wired Magazine has posted an article about the new 2015 version of the Integrated Space Plan, updated 14 years after the last version and descended directly from the original 1989 version. The original one was printed in the thousands, distributed by Rockwell, and appeared on walls throughout the space industry. One even hung behind the NASA administrator's desk. The new one is prettier, great for dorm room walls and classrooms, and Integrated Space Analytics, the company behind it, promises to expand their website into an up-to-date, live interactive tool. This is a great new beginning after over 30 years.

Comments

science fiction

[Iamthecheese]

Until NASA's real, actual use-this-money budget comes in 20 year cycles it's just science fiction. Here is a chart of NASA's budget. I'm not going to say whether it's too much or too little in this comment, that's not the point. The big problem is NASA has no idea whether sequestration and budget games, the presidential fad this decade, or party politics is going to increase, eliminate, or do weird things with their budget. Maybe they'll have money for Orion or maybe the President will do away with it with the sweep of a pen. Maybe we can send up ten shuttles a month at a low cost per shuttle. Or maybe we'll have to cut that way, way back until the cost is hard to justify. From Mars to space stations to earth science the fad of the day dictates what NASA is building this year -- and worse, where it's building it.

There have been noises in the direction of stabilizing things and NASA is a fairly popular, if misunderstood, organization. But it's not enough. We need a NASA funding omnibus bill that sets NASA funds, be they generous or miserly, and NASA plans in stone.

Re:science fiction

[DanielRavenNest]

I was one of the contributors to this plan, and one of the big misconceptions is that NASA is the only player in space. In reality, worldwide space industry was $323 billion in 2014, and NASA's $17.6 billion only represented 5.45%. Most of the 1250 active satellites in Earth orbit are commercial ones, and a lot of innovation is happening in that arena. For example, ion thrusters for boosting to synchronous orbit are standard procedure these days, using solar arrays 2.5 times as efficient as the ones powering the Space Station. SpaceX is working on recovering their first stage so it can be used again, while NASA is going backwards on the SLS solid boosters. In the Shuttle era the boosters were 2/3 re-used, on SLS they will be thrown away.

Re:science fiction

[garyebickford]

To Dani's comment, I'll just add that, the day that an asteroid assay is done and proves that the thing is actually more than 1% platinum, or any other of the many proposed ways to make space economically interesting proves out, the land rush will be on. Private investment by institutions today is difficult because many of the business models are speculative, the terrain is unknown, the payout time frame of 10-20 years is way too long for VCs, who want to get paid in five or less. As soon as somebody shows that their business is more than a pipe dream, things will happen fast. But already the angel investors are working about a dozen deals per year in space-related startups. Many of these are for small companies that are already profitable or cash flow positive but don't have the cash to go to the next step. I look forward to when the majority of launches to LEO and beyond are for private commercial purposes.

Re:science fiction

[garyebickford]

I haven't looked into this recently. This is a good example why it's difficult to get traditional investment entities like VCs to invest in these highly speculative ventures - nobody really knows what's out there. Platinum is fun to talk about, but IMHO the markets for in-space re-fueling, satellite maintenance, possibly space tourism, a robotic lunar research facility (prototype self-constructing system), and similar more mundane aspects have higher near-term probabilities.

OTOH, platinum on Earth is extremely problematical. It's a horrible environmental mess, it's a horrible human mess with workers one step above slaves, direct mining takes huge amounts of ore to make a few grams of platinum. (I think more is produced as a by-product of copper smelting.) A high grade platinum source may be less than 0.5 ppm. 2010 production was 245 tonnes. Potential global demand at $10 per ounce may well be more than 1000 times that.

Part of the theoretical justification for platinum in asteroids is that, as a very dense metal, nearly all of it on Earth has sunk into the core. But many asteroids appear to be the remnants of proto-planets (proto-dwarf-planets?) that partially differentiated concentrating the heaviest elements toward their core, similarly to Earth, then were broken apart in collisions. We know that many asteroids are mostly nickel-iron (which in the long run will also be quite valuable as raw material for space manufacturing), and as such _should_ have platinum in veins, in solution with the iron, and/or in chunks from the deepest part of those cores.

One argument against asteroid platinum mining is the purported cost. However the negative cost estimates I've seen assume a full Earth->asteroid->Earth travel cycle, which is incorrect. If I were building a system, it would be launched once, then operated and maintained in space for 15 years at least. I would try to do as much refining at the asteroid as feasible, and return the concentrate or pure material to LEO (possibly via multiple intermediate steps), where it could be brought back piggy-backed on another return vehicle. Returning need not take anything like as much resources - fuel or anything - as launching. (A Falcon 9 launch involves about $300K of fuel but $10 million for the first stage hardware, used once.)

Some of the numbers and discussion here.