One of the huge advantages of processing ore on the Moon is that you don't have to worry quite so much about oxidation of the minerals during the refining process. All you really need is a big mirror that collects energy from the Sun and if you really want to be efficient, some method of collecting the oxygen from the refining process (mainly to have the oxygen for other purposes, not to use it in the refining process). One of the larges problems with refining metals on the Earth is trying to get the metal into an environment where it doesn't oxidize before you can turn it into something useful.
In fact, I would dare say that many of the smelters would likely first be used for oxygen production well before the metal is going to be used, with the metal being treated as a "waste product" at least at the beginning of resource consumption and production on the surface of the Moon. At that point, all you really need is a good lathe and other basic machining tools, and almost anything else you would want to have built on the Moon could be made right there from materials found on the Moon.
The critical element isn't necessarily metals (Iron works out rather well, in fact), but rather volatile elements like Hydrogen and Nitrogen. With the basic elements of life, CHON, you have the basics for establishing life on the Moon. The rest is trying to find an economic reason to justify the cost of shipping all of the infrastructure into place, and how impatient those who are putting the equipment and personnel on the Moon want to wait before they get a return on their investment.
I envision that labor shortages are going to be the most significant problem on the Moon, which is what will ultimately be driving the automation of the equipment up there, not really that we can't get people up there to get things done. There will also be a use for skill technicians, particularly machinists and "skilled trades" of almost every kind (except perhaps carpentry).
The reason why JSC is in Houston is strictly because of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the USA, former Senator from Texas, VP for John F. Kennedy, and the Senate Majority Leader during most of the initial appropriations moves for NASA in the 1950's. He ran the U.S. Senate in a manner that is nearly legendary.
One lasting legacy of his tenure in the Senate is that the constitution for the State of Texas was modifed just for him.... so that if he were to fail in his bid for the Presidency that he could keep his seat in the Senate. Most other states in the USA require that you can only run for one office at a time, but not in Texas. This is sometimes called the "Johnson ammendment" and is still on the books.
I don't know of any politician in recent memory who was able to wield this kind of political power and have nearly absolute control over the legislative process... with perhaps the exception of Nancy Pelosi (and that is debateable with Johnson looking much better).
BTW, if you want some American territory that is closer to the Equator, I would suggest American Samoa or perhaps even Puerto Rico. Both could have had some rocket launch infrastructure, and it should be pointed out that Kwajalein Atoll was the site for several rockets as well (still in use) and was built when the territory was administered by the USA even though now it is in the Marshall Islands. Kwajalein is practically right on the Equator or close enough to not matter in terms of rocket launches and is ideal for launching satellites to Geo-synchronous orbits.
The ISS inclination was selected primarily for Russian purposes, as it is the easiest orbit to achieve from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. That is one of many compromises made for its development that might have been different in terms of an overall infrastructure had it remained as simply Space Station Freedom. An inclination of about 28 degrees is more appropriate from KSC (maximum payload to orbit), and as you point out would also make a fairly decent depot for trans-lunar injection flights too.
It will be interesting to see what Bigelow Aerospace is going to be up to.... presuming that anybody can actually get to the Bigelow space stations in the first place. If there will be in-orbit construction going on including spaceships to the Moon, I would expect it to happen with some Bigelow equipment at least in the short term. At a price of about $400 million, it seems like a bargain to purchase one of the BA-330 modules for some long-term duration flights that might include beyond low-earth orbit flight experience.
The role of building the ISS, from the American viewpoint, was to keep Russian rocket scientists and engineers employed so they would stay away from other countries (like Iran, North Korea, etc.) that would pose a major threat to American interests. This part of the program has been quite successful.
BTW, the American contribution to the ISS has been about $100 billion so far, including the cost of shuttle launches, modules, astronaut training time for all ISS-related missions, and operations budgets for ground controllers at JSC and elsewhere who are involved with the ISS. I'm not sure if that includes subsidies to the Russian Federation paying for some of the components and resupply flights, but I do know that more than a few billion has gone to Moscow with congressional approval. Certainly several flights of NASA astronauts has been done on Soyuz vehicles already that have been explicitly paid for by American taxpayers. And that is even while the Shuttle program is still technically in service. This is expected to ramp up over the next couple of years after the Shuttle retirement.
Show me what the equivalent of public mass transit in space is going to be and I'll try to give you a reasonable answer on this one. I don't think you can make that comparison.
Yes, I'll admit that the Constellation program could very likely be cheaper than flying on private spacecraft like the Falcon 9 flying a Dragon capsule.... assuming that they could get the flight rates for the spacecraft on the order of about 50-70 flights per year. That is what the army of workers at the cape and putting everything together for Constellation is all about and what they are expecting. Unfortunately, Congress is only going to be authorizing about 5-6 flights per year... at an optimistic pace even for that many. That is about $1 billion per flight if you cover the annual costs for the infrastructure and the standing army that will get it done.
Which is more efficient in terms of cutting out the BS and actually getting something flying? Private enterprise.
The purpose of a business is to maximize profits. They are going to be cost conscious and will avoid activities that cost extra money. Safety will not be one of those things which they will cut, because killing off customers is not only bad for public relations (hence lower revenue and reduced profits) but also because the "next of kin" tends to get rather upset when you kill off family members too and ends up with litigation that also impacts the bottom line.
Which would you rather see: Competitive airlines like exists currently in America, or to see Obama "nationalize" the airline industry and turn all commercial pilots into government employees?
Having NASA run spaceflight is like having a nationalized airline industry. It will get people from point "A" to point "B", but be incredibly costly and certainly customer service will go out the window even worse than what most people already complain about.
I think SpaceX is doing a fair bit better than what NASA was doing 50 years ago. The Dragon capsule is certainly going to be at least as good if not better than the Apollo capsule, and competitive with the Orion capsule on a whole bunch of levels.
More importantly, it isn't going to cost a billion dollars to launch the Dragon + Falcon 9 in order to get into orbit with cargo and/or people. And in comparison.... what has NASA been doing over the past 40 years since the famous Moon landing to get anywhere beyond low Earth orbit? If you are trying to suggest that the Ares V was going to get us back to the Moon, I'd like to see the actual congressional authorization to get that vehicle built in the first place. There is no "bent metal" on that one either, and I certainly am not holding my breath to see it built... even assuming that the current "Constellation" program is ever restored or preserved in current and future budget cycles.
NASA is still going to be going in circles around the Earth stuck in low-Earth orbit for the next several decades.... unless private Americans somehow get out of that rut. It will be a sad day when the return of NASA astronauts to the Moon will be covered live on CNN.... by reporters who got there first to film the NASA spacecraft landing there.
Weaponizing space really does little good even if there is somebody who tries. BTW, it was the Soviet Union who first put weapons into space... as a machine gun found on one of the Salyut space stations. Yes, that was technically in violation of treaty, but who cares? There really is no enforcement provision on any such provision.
BTW, a little lesson on orbital mechanics: If you fire a bullet in space, there is a tendency that the bullet ends up back at roughly where you are at when you fired the thing.... after making an orbit around the Earth. In other words, most weapons that are used on the Earth right now tend to create "space debris" if they are actually used.... which tends to make life miserable for the person firing the weapon in the first place. Essentially, if you use weapons, it is a space-equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. Generally it is a bad idea.
As for the "waste of resources" and diverting it to space, that isn't going to happen unless there is something which is a draw to encourage us to get "out there" in the first place. Other than the petroleum reserves of Titan (hint, this is a joke), there is little reason at the moment to exploit resources off the Earth. I think that will change over time, but that time hasn't happened yet.
Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
One thing that can be said about things like telecommunications satellites (including TV broadcasting sats but much more), remote sensing ("weather sats"... but also monitoring remote weather stations on the Earth too), and reconnaissance sats (including the classic "spy sats" by various military agencies.... but also things like Google Earth) is that they are proven applications of space technology where clearly a commercial entity can make some money and convince investors to dump in billions of dollars for infrastructure necessary to get it going. A good example of this is with the Iridium Satellite Constellation. BTW, Iridium is going to be expanding in the next couple of years with a new generation of their technology... with increased bandwidth and capabilities.
I'll also note that with these applications, while the "wealthy" do get served with this technology, it also helps those who are at the bottom of the heap in the social order of things too. This very technology has saved more lives due to advanced warnings for things like tsunamis, hurricanes and cyclones, and other severe weather problems than almost any other human activity other than urban sewage distribution and treatment systems. Very ordinary and indeed poor individuals also have access to the telecommunications systems, and navigation systems like GPS and Magellan have helped to make the transportation of goods around the world much, much cheaper due to increasing efficiency of navigation and shipping transportation.
The real trick is trying to figure out how to make money doing something else in space. Where there is going to be something new happening is with space tourism (yes.... those who have money "throwing it away" for a few moments of micro-gravity) and with space-based manufacturing. There certainly are processes and products that can only be made in space, and until very recently there was no basic infrastructure in place to even permit this kind of activity to take place. It really hasn't happened yet except on some very experimental processes that generated more hype than actual products. You will very soon be using products that have been manufactured in space and not simply just made for space manufacturing companies.
As for going to the Moon or Mars, the problem is that there is no infrastructure in place to be able to get to those places in the first place. Apollo was not about establishing infrastructure... other than building up Kennedy Space Center. Anything related to the Apollo program has long ago been gutted and sent to museums, and really didn't involve setting up a general system of allowing anybody other than government bureaucrats and employees to get there.
Getting to a Western USA model, when trying to exploit frontier areas there is a need to establish various bases of operation that can be used for both military and civilian uses. There is this thing call "logistics" that is necessary to really get somewhere and spend some significant periods of time away from your home. It doesn't matter if the location is in Antarctica, the bottom of an ocean, or on Mars. If you don't have that infrastructure in place to support that exploration, you can't have a sustained presence there. We don't have that infrastructure in place, and it is a fallacy that Constellation was ever going to get that infrastructure put into place there either.
We don't have an equivalent of McMurdo on the Moon, and until that happens you can kiss any chance for people doing projects on the Moon goodbye. Once something like that is built on the Moon, opportunities will expand and there will be
It looks like the U.S. will never get back to the space. I just wonder why they waste so much money on projects they abort soon.
Contrary to the prevailing public relations blitz that is being put on by ATK and certain entrenched interests within the D.C. beltway, The United States of America is not ceeding leadership in space to other countries. Instead, the paradigm is changing from that of a central government bureaucracy that is responsible for the financing, acquisition, and planning of such an endeavor to something that is more de-centralized, mostly privately led, and allowing freedom to ordinary individuals to try and get into space.
For commercial spaceflight companies, America simply dominates the rest of the world combined. When I hear of things happening in spaceflight and can compare stuff that is happening elsewhere, there are about two to three times as many companies formed and activities like the creation of a new spaceport than anything happening in the rest of the world. No, I'm not saying that private companies aren't being set up elsewhere and there certainly is something afoot in the European Union too in terms of private efforts for getting into space, but if you want to get into the action and see where the hot activity is taking place, it is currently in America. South-western USA to be exact if you want to know where the bulk of these companies are working at.
Never get into space? I suppose that this flight was a figment of my imagination. This is hardly the only company going into space, and I don't see vehicle production lines necessarily getting shut down.... except in Utah. I call that simply ATK having a singular problem trying to figure out how to make a profit in the current market rather than a national crisis. Sometimes dinosaurs go extinct too.
Yes, I'll admit that may have been a concern, but it wasn't really all that much longer of a free fall time than what Maston did. It is hard to say "what if the chute had never been there in the first place" as it was there, but as I said.... it was a part of the overall flight profile.
Other reasons to include a parachute include safety, saving some reaction mass (aka propellant) during the descent phase of the profile on much higher flights, and as has been stated to also help with attitude control when the engines are off. It also helps to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tank after significant free-fall time.... something that wasn't an issue at all for this particular test.
It is the overall flight profile that is the interesting part, and the fact that Armadillo is even using a parachute at all. They certainly could (and indeed did show) that they can recover from huge instability in their flight characteristics. The 3 or so seconds that the vehicles was falling was hardly enough time to get a nose down attitude and from watching the video it appears as though the parachute actually increased the instability of the vehicle by adding torque and an oscillation factor that needs to be reviewed with a better parachute.
That can be fixed and there are other things for Armadillo to be worrying about, so the real point of the test is to simply show that a parachute can be deployed at all and what a more complex launch profile might involve for much, much longer flights. They aren't going to be following the flight profiles of their Lunar Landing Challenge flights as they are dealing with trying to get out of the Earth's gravity, not the Moon's.
If you think you have a really good idea here, you might want to talk to Richard Gariott.... seriously! He has the money and is looking for an enterprise that can get himself back in orbit, but this time he can only justify the cost if he can turn a profit on the whole thing.
I'd agree that aerogels sound like an amazing investment opportunity, and is one of the few ideas I've heard that really makes sense for commercial spaceflight in the short term. There are some really interesting ideas but I would imagine that this is one that would... comparatively speaking... take a minimum of capital to get going and to be a good startup enterprise using space-based assets that could justify a commercial launch that isn't in an already established commercial space sector (such as telecom or remote sensing equipment).
I would imagine that this would also have some in-orbit value as well... something else to consider instead of throwing this stuff back down the the ground. Aerogels do a wonderful job at absorbing minor impacts quite well and in fact have been used by NASA for some micrometeorite studies and to gather samples from comets. Having the customers buy the stuff in-orbit and then process it for use in deep space could be an interesting market all by itself.
I'm not really worried about the Chinese for the moment, at least until they can figure out how to do an in-orbit rendezvous first. That seems like a trivial thing, but it really is one of the more complicated accomplishments just after simply getting into orbit in the first place from a technical point of view. They are taking their time at getting things done, although supposedly there is a Chinese "space station" that is going into orbit next year. I would image that is something akin to the Salyut space station that the Soviet Union flew back before the modular design that became MIR flew.
The problem with a patent pool (see the MPEGLA for details on a current one) is the buy-in and cost to participate. These by their nature tend to be very monopolistic in nature and are also often rigged to drive out competition and certainly to set the barriers of entry for new start-ups from getting involved.
It is a real trick, too, in terms of trying to "divide the capital fairly". Organizations like ASCAP have been collecting money for years on behalf of individual song writers but almost without exception have never actually paid those royalties to anybody but the very largest organizations involved. In the end, it is the occasional and part-time innovator that gets screwed completely.
Of the three major "intellectual property law" branches, patents, copyright, and trademarks, I'd say patents are by far and away the most onerous in terms of the complications they provide to genuine market competition and the complete lack of protection "of the little guy" when somebody new to the system shows up. I've said repeatedly that patents are nothing more than a legal scam that screws over the private inventor and is just a way to part a fool from his money.... the fool in this case is the one who thinks that patents actually offer some sort of protection to their invention.
Repeatedly, as was mentioned with the aircraft industry and I should add the patent fight that Philo Farnsworth also had to go through in regards to the development of electronic television (he eventually won... but it literally took him a lifetime to collect and fight for credit that still is not properly given) there is very little productive that happens in regards to patents. If, as was done by both Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, you create your own factory and make your invention by putting some skin in the game.... there might be some value in terms of a defensive application of patents to keep competitors temporarily from completely copying your ideas. You will never make millions by coming up with a unique product, patenting the thing, and then trying to "sell" the invention to somebody else.
In this particular case, I don't think the drogue parachute was really necessary for vehicle control before re-light, but it might be something more critical if Armadillo goes for a much higher altitude attempt. What they were testing was the overall flight profile, which for higher altitude flights will certainly involve a parachute of some kind for multiple reasons.
If anything, the drogue chute in this case actually added instability to the vehicle and to me proved the test all that more in terms of the ability to recover from an unstable situation and bring it back on course to a clean landing. In some ways, I was more impressed with the Armadillo test than the Masten one, but they were both quite impressive.
It is also kind of fun to see two companies like this compete with each other for what are aviation firsts too!
There are products like some kinds of aerogels, some metal alloy mixing, and certain biological processes (read pharmaceutical industries) where not only is it useful but actually necessary for those processes to take place in space or at least in micro-gravity conditions. In other cases you can also improve the quality of some of these products substantially... again due to the environment. Even at low-earth orbit the vacuum which is present is actually superior to anything which can be obtained in even the best laboratories on the Earth's surface (and that is even technically within the exosphere portion of the Earth's atmosphere).
Would these products be worth the cost? Absolutely! They would also be very sensitive to the cost of spaceflight, where even a very modest drop in the price of getting into space... say even a 5% drop in the cost of a launch... would make a huge difference in terms of how profitable such a manufacturing enterprise would be and how often they would want to go back up for another launch with new supplies or even personnel to operate the equipment. Not all of it can be or even ought to be 100% automated.
While SpaceX has done some remarkable things for getting into space, I think it is going to be companies like Armadillo and Masten that will be making the real game changer spacecraft. Both companies have stated that their eventual long-term goal is to get into orbit themselves, even if the prospect of doing that is a long way out at the moment.
What Armadillo has done in particular is to demonstrate that they are now capable of successfully achieving the basic goals of the original Ansari X-Prize (even if it is a decade too late). I also happen to believe that the Armadillo technology is also going to be much easier to scale up to orbital velocities, or at the very least longer sub-orbital flights that SpaceShip Two simply can't achieve.
That is but one kind of aerogel and hardly the most ubiquitous kind either. BTW, the re-entry temperature you are quoting here is also the temperature for a blunt body re-entry like is found for a standard ballistic capsule return that is highly dense and mostly a solid hunk of metal wrapped with some protective heat shields. The raw density of aerogels is substantially less and has some very different aerodynamic characteristics involved with it that simply tossing it into the atmosphere would not necessarily require the intense heat for re-entry that you have quoted.
Then again, with the density of the materials approaching that of air at sea level, it may be difficult to get the materials to land where you want them if you are tossing them into the atmosphere and then letting them blow around with the various air currents... something that a traditional ballistic capsule doesn't have to contend with all that much.
You are fighting an anonymous coward.... likely somebody who is writing just to stir up the pot and really doesn't believe what they are writing in the first place. You've made some good points and obviously touched on a raw nerve. Just smile with it!
The largest problem right now for orbital factories is the fact that nobody has a facility capable of "housing" such factories at the moment. There is, I suppose, the ISS.... but that monster of a fiscal black hole is something that no corporate entity would ever want to get stuck with in terms of trying to justify costs and would be worth staying clear of just for the bureaucratic red tape alone. With SpaceX and Orbital Sciences trying to simply provide raw cargo logistical capabilities to the ISS alone they've had to endure incredible scrutiny and meeting ungodly regulations just for the ability to simply dock to the ISS at all.
BTW, the resupply cargo vessels also have to be man-rated as people are going to be inside of those vehicles to extract the cargo. The only thing they will be lacking is the man-rated capacity for launch.
The Dragon capsule... with the Dragon Lab configuration might be perhaps one of the first real orbital factories that private industry could access. The first flight is scheduled (looking up the SpaceX manifest) some time in 2012. In other words, if there is a company wanting to put up a package into orbit (the mission is expected to last about six months before returning to the Earth), they can start work today and put some cash on the table without having to deal with NASA at all. SpaceX is planning on at least annual flights of the Dragon Lab, and eventually docking with a Bigelow BA-330 module too. Fabrication of items in space is one of the stated purposes for both SpaceX and Bigelow to making their equipment.
For a good reason, Robert Bigelow is desperately trying to "second source" a vehicle to his space station, which is one of the reasons why he is working with Boeing to build an alternate spacecraft that will fly on a Delta IV. That is expected to take a few years before it is completed, but it is something that has some bent metal already and is taking shape.
So the answer to your question.... how long before a corporation launches a factory into orbit? Within this decade.
As for how delivery can be made for returning the cargo back to the Earth..... there certainly will be many different options. Your suggestion of using an aerogel for delivery sounds incredibly promising for a whole bunch of stuff including perhaps even simply delivery of bulk cargo from orbit in general.
This is where genuine commercial spaceflight might really start to make a difference, and it is possible that orbital fabrication might be even larger than space tourism in terms of dollars spent for commercial spaceflight.
The problem with the NASA specs is that they have been written in such a way that only the "selected contractors" can actually meet those specs. That is unfortunately something incredibly common in government procurement circles, where often the contractors themselves write their own procurement contracts (I know.... I've helped to write some of them!) If you write the regulations or specifications in such a way that there can only possibly be one bidder on the contract, you can hardly call it a competitive bid. BTW, I've written spec contracts for government agencies for both small purchases... in once case for a single desktop PC... and for multi-million dollar capital purchases.
I'm not saying that all spaceflight specs are bad, but there certainly are some asinine regulations that do more harm than good and are mostly there to justify the salaries of the regulators and inspectors involved... and sometimes those regulations are there to scratch the back of a close personal friend and not necessarily to "protect the public". When those who wrote those regulations leave, sometimes it is incredibly hard to figure out even why some regulations were created in the first place. If they are created for political reasons, often there will be absolutely no commentary at all or "paper trail" to try and find out why they exist and are hard to cull out too.
This is also a problem in private industry to a smaller degree (for petty corruption among middle managers) but government agencies tend to take it to a much higher level.
It didn't look like they even really tried to get back on the exact spot either... just to simply get the rocket onto the pad so it wouldn't sink into the mud was good enough. Still, you are correct that it landed within just a couple of feet of the original take off point.
It will be very interesting to see what is going to happen when they try for high altitude flights. The next series is supposedly going to take them to about 100k feet, which is where the real fun is going to start. That still isn't in space, but it is getting close and will be in preparation for real sub-orbital flight.
I don't think it is so much a lack of regulations, but rather a lack of trust in democratic concepts and institutions. If anything, an open and free market is based upon the assumption that ordinary folks, when left to make their own choices and given freedom to innovate and come up with solutions to problems that they face, will tend on the whole to make the best choices possible to fill those needs, wants, and desires.
The issue isn't one of regulation vs. deregulation, but rather freedom vs. tyranny. Every time a regulation is written, the question ought to be asked "does this allow ultimately for more or less freedom... and is it worth the price for this kind of restriction if we lose some precious freedom?"
From a long view of human history, the pattern has usually been that tyrants have come into political power in some form or another to take the freedoms from others... sometimes for "the public good" and sometimes just for raw acquisition of power. Often it is hard to determine which is which. If you don't have a government that is actively trying to squash that tyrannical behavior, it becomes more a part of the problem than the solution.
Regulations can exist within democratic institutions... indeed they are necessary for a well-organized society. The American Constitution in fact was written under such a philosophy... one of limited government but acknowledged that a government of some kind still had to exist. Business regulations was one of the first orders of business in the First American Congress (just after passage of the Bill of Rights), and the fight to ignore those regulations created the first real test of the power of the U.S. Federal Government (with the Whiskey Rebellion). Having George Washington put on his general's uniform again and personally lead the U.S. Army into battle sort of helped to kill the opposition (the only time a U.S. President has ever lead a field army into battle).
Regulations do make some sense, but they really ought to be simple to comprehend and certainly shouldn't require a full time accountant, lawyer, or a whole team of them to be able to simply comply with those regulations. When congressmen who pass legislation that significantly alters the regulatory landscape have not even read the legislation they are making into law much less even tried to comprehend the long term consequences to that legislation, is it a wonder that the rest of us trying to actually follow those laws start to complain?
What's the problem with a gambit? It usually simplifies the battlefield in ways both contenders find adequate.
It keeps the legal profession employed and not much more. While most larger companies are able to afford full-time attorneys and perhaps even specialists such as patent and other "intellectual property" lawyers on staff, that is something which is much more difficult to do for smaller companies or even private individuals to do even on an occasional basis.
For the private innovator who is tinkering in their garage and trying to come up with something new, I argue that patents do absolutely nothing to protect that kind of "inventor" and in fact the whole patent system turns into a giant scam that takes millions of dollars out of the pockets of these would-be entrepreneurs and instead transfers that wealth into the hands of some of the least productive people on the planet.
Even the supposed benefit of patents to record "for posterity" what has been invented is largely a joke now. There is certainly zero benefit to actually reading a patent even for somebody "in the industry" (even expired patents), and indeed there may be some strong and compelling reasons to explicitly make company policies that forbid engineers and others in R&D settings from reading patents of competitors.
Back when patents required a working model of the device (perhaps in miniature) to be filed with the patent office there was some historical benefit to the practice. At least there was something to look at for historical research to find out what, exactly, was the patent all about. It also provided a threshold to keep the frivolous cruft out of the patent office... even if the patent office couldn't figure out what to do with the models when they were done with them (one of the reasons why the model submissions were halted). For example, I'd love to see a working model of an inter-stellar hyperdrive engine... even though the USPTO granted a patent on that crazy idea.
A start-up is the first to market because they are in the position to take the most risks. It is sort of implied by being new, as there is little to lose and much to gain by trying new things out. That sort of is in the definition of a "start-up".
The purpose of most for-profit companies is to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". By trying to be first to market, that is counter-productive to meeting this corporate charter for established companies as there are also a whole bunch of wrong guesses for what might be that hot new product idea. Being second, third, or in the second "wave" of a promising technology is certainly very useful for companies.
Apple was first to market with the Newton..... how did that work out for the company? On the other hand, when the technology matured and people like Rio established the legal precedence for portable music players, they came out with the iPod and made a fortune. That is an excellent example of why established companies usually don't make the first move on something like that. Also look at the Lisa.... something that almost sank Apple as a company too. If it wasn't for their Apple II product line at the time, they wouldn't even be around right now.
General Motors tried to be "first to market" with the EV-1.... and where did that get them? A bunch of heartache and grief, including documentaries about how GM screwed up and tons of negative publicity. Again, it generally is a very bad idea for an established company to try and be the first to market even when they try.
What is interesting is when I hit Republican candidates for office on private commercial spaceflight.... they are all for it until the word "Constellation" comes up and then try to defend that program as if ATK has completely financed the entire development for that project out of their own pocket.
Sometimes I don't really know what is going on, and it seems as though politicians will simply bend in the wind if you start to blow back. We'll see, I guess.
Support for the Constellation program won't survive the light of day when people really start to realize what it is and what it is doing to NASA. Once it is built, if it is ever built, the first act of the next President of the USA will be to cancel it. Right now we just have to see if Obama has the backbone to get it canceled for good before another dozen billion dollars are spent on that black hole.
Montana Power is a really sad case of a public utility horribly mis-managed. Unfortunately, it is another utility, formerly Utah Power & Light. Later "purchased" by PacificCorp and then Scottish Power (the current "holding company"). It is a monster international conglomerate that has been buying up various power utilities all over the western USA.... which quite possibly owns what is left of Montana Power as well. At least it wouldn't surprise me.
Some manager from that company actually threatened to essentially stop all maintenance upgrades in the entire state due to a failed bid with the state public utility commission to raise rates, and the state then started proceedings to dis-incorporate the utility at that point. You know it is a monster when they start flipping off state regulators and acting as if governments on that level don't matter any more.
At least at that level some cooler heads prevailed, and the main governing board/CEO (I don't know who actually stepped in) realized acting like a jackass to a state government could have some very bad consequences that would not be good for the corporate charter... aka "to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". The disincorporation would have happened with the state-level corporation, which still exists on paper even if it has since been gobbled up and management "streamlined".
One philosophy that I think should be applied to almost any endeavor involving tax money:
No matter how bad off some "deserving" person may be for tax money, there is always somebody far worse off that is being taxed to help pay for that service or endowment.
I personally don't mind having tax dollars that are for a general community benefit, such as a military organization or something like a fire department. Those generally benefit almost everybody in the community, including those at the bottom of the heap in the social order of things. The problem comes when "winners" or "losers" are picked and subsidies are done for some group that somehow got some extra political pull in some manner or another to get ahead of the rest of us.
I would also have to generally agree with infrastructure projects, and for the most part I don't mind locally owned public utilities. I emphasize locally owned as a mere individual or at least a smallish group of individuals can fight back against such a utility merely by going to the utility board... and if they are non-responsive they can simply replace that utility board at the next election cycle. Living in the Rocky Mountains, I resent the fact that my electrical utility is owned by a board of directors who live in Scotland and likely have never even heard of the town where I live, much less care one little bit if their policies adversely impact the businesses or residents of this community.
This also gets back to the issue you mentioned above with the idea that smallish community without border controls also provide mini political laboratories where people can come and go based on the decisions (good or ill) that the leaders of that community have made over the years. American states were envisioned as similar kinds of laboratories of political ideas, where something could be tried and if it proved to be successful that other states would adopt the idea. As bad as the Arizona "immigration law" might seem, it is but one of fifty states where the rest of the country can check out to see if it is a good or bad idea in the long run. Surprisingly, several other states are indeed looking at enacting similar kinds of legislation, which should survive or die based on its merits and success or failure rather than via some stupid lawsuit that will end up being decided upon by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are many other more successful ideas that can be compared that have been adopted in a similar kind of fashion, including some laws that are now common to all 50 U.S. states.
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One of the huge advantages of processing ore on the Moon is that you don't have to worry quite so much about oxidation of the minerals during the refining process. All you really need is a big mirror that collects energy from the Sun and if you really want to be efficient, some method of collecting the oxygen from the refining process (mainly to have the oxygen for other purposes, not to use it in the refining process). One of the larges problems with refining metals on the Earth is trying to get the metal into an environment where it doesn't oxidize before you can turn it into something useful.
In fact, I would dare say that many of the smelters would likely first be used for oxygen production well before the metal is going to be used, with the metal being treated as a "waste product" at least at the beginning of resource consumption and production on the surface of the Moon. At that point, all you really need is a good lathe and other basic machining tools, and almost anything else you would want to have built on the Moon could be made right there from materials found on the Moon.
The critical element isn't necessarily metals (Iron works out rather well, in fact), but rather volatile elements like Hydrogen and Nitrogen. With the basic elements of life, CHON, you have the basics for establishing life on the Moon. The rest is trying to find an economic reason to justify the cost of shipping all of the infrastructure into place, and how impatient those who are putting the equipment and personnel on the Moon want to wait before they get a return on their investment.
I envision that labor shortages are going to be the most significant problem on the Moon, which is what will ultimately be driving the automation of the equipment up there, not really that we can't get people up there to get things done. There will also be a use for skill technicians, particularly machinists and "skilled trades" of almost every kind (except perhaps carpentry).
The reason why JSC is in Houston is strictly because of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the USA, former Senator from Texas, VP for John F. Kennedy, and the Senate Majority Leader during most of the initial appropriations moves for NASA in the 1950's. He ran the U.S. Senate in a manner that is nearly legendary.
One lasting legacy of his tenure in the Senate is that the constitution for the State of Texas was modifed just for him.... so that if he were to fail in his bid for the Presidency that he could keep his seat in the Senate. Most other states in the USA require that you can only run for one office at a time, but not in Texas. This is sometimes called the "Johnson ammendment" and is still on the books.
I don't know of any politician in recent memory who was able to wield this kind of political power and have nearly absolute control over the legislative process... with perhaps the exception of Nancy Pelosi (and that is debateable with Johnson looking much better).
BTW, if you want some American territory that is closer to the Equator, I would suggest American Samoa or perhaps even Puerto Rico. Both could have had some rocket launch infrastructure, and it should be pointed out that Kwajalein Atoll was the site for several rockets as well (still in use) and was built when the territory was administered by the USA even though now it is in the Marshall Islands. Kwajalein is practically right on the Equator or close enough to not matter in terms of rocket launches and is ideal for launching satellites to Geo-synchronous orbits.
The ISS inclination was selected primarily for Russian purposes, as it is the easiest orbit to achieve from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. That is one of many compromises made for its development that might have been different in terms of an overall infrastructure had it remained as simply Space Station Freedom. An inclination of about 28 degrees is more appropriate from KSC (maximum payload to orbit), and as you point out would also make a fairly decent depot for trans-lunar injection flights too.
It will be interesting to see what Bigelow Aerospace is going to be up to.... presuming that anybody can actually get to the Bigelow space stations in the first place. If there will be in-orbit construction going on including spaceships to the Moon, I would expect it to happen with some Bigelow equipment at least in the short term. At a price of about $400 million, it seems like a bargain to purchase one of the BA-330 modules for some long-term duration flights that might include beyond low-earth orbit flight experience.
The role of building the ISS, from the American viewpoint, was to keep Russian rocket scientists and engineers employed so they would stay away from other countries (like Iran, North Korea, etc.) that would pose a major threat to American interests. This part of the program has been quite successful.
BTW, the American contribution to the ISS has been about $100 billion so far, including the cost of shuttle launches, modules, astronaut training time for all ISS-related missions, and operations budgets for ground controllers at JSC and elsewhere who are involved with the ISS. I'm not sure if that includes subsidies to the Russian Federation paying for some of the components and resupply flights, but I do know that more than a few billion has gone to Moscow with congressional approval. Certainly several flights of NASA astronauts has been done on Soyuz vehicles already that have been explicitly paid for by American taxpayers. And that is even while the Shuttle program is still technically in service. This is expected to ramp up over the next couple of years after the Shuttle retirement.
Show me what the equivalent of public mass transit in space is going to be and I'll try to give you a reasonable answer on this one. I don't think you can make that comparison.
Yes, I'll admit that the Constellation program could very likely be cheaper than flying on private spacecraft like the Falcon 9 flying a Dragon capsule.... assuming that they could get the flight rates for the spacecraft on the order of about 50-70 flights per year. That is what the army of workers at the cape and putting everything together for Constellation is all about and what they are expecting. Unfortunately, Congress is only going to be authorizing about 5-6 flights per year... at an optimistic pace even for that many. That is about $1 billion per flight if you cover the annual costs for the infrastructure and the standing army that will get it done.
Which is more efficient in terms of cutting out the BS and actually getting something flying? Private enterprise.
The purpose of a business is to maximize profits. They are going to be cost conscious and will avoid activities that cost extra money. Safety will not be one of those things which they will cut, because killing off customers is not only bad for public relations (hence lower revenue and reduced profits) but also because the "next of kin" tends to get rather upset when you kill off family members too and ends up with litigation that also impacts the bottom line.
Which would you rather see: Competitive airlines like exists currently in America, or to see Obama "nationalize" the airline industry and turn all commercial pilots into government employees?
Having NASA run spaceflight is like having a nationalized airline industry. It will get people from point "A" to point "B", but be incredibly costly and certainly customer service will go out the window even worse than what most people already complain about.
I think SpaceX is doing a fair bit better than what NASA was doing 50 years ago. The Dragon capsule is certainly going to be at least as good if not better than the Apollo capsule, and competitive with the Orion capsule on a whole bunch of levels.
More importantly, it isn't going to cost a billion dollars to launch the Dragon + Falcon 9 in order to get into orbit with cargo and/or people. And in comparison.... what has NASA been doing over the past 40 years since the famous Moon landing to get anywhere beyond low Earth orbit? If you are trying to suggest that the Ares V was going to get us back to the Moon, I'd like to see the actual congressional authorization to get that vehicle built in the first place. There is no "bent metal" on that one either, and I certainly am not holding my breath to see it built... even assuming that the current "Constellation" program is ever restored or preserved in current and future budget cycles.
NASA is still going to be going in circles around the Earth stuck in low-Earth orbit for the next several decades.... unless private Americans somehow get out of that rut. It will be a sad day when the return of NASA astronauts to the Moon will be covered live on CNN.... by reporters who got there first to film the NASA spacecraft landing there.
Weaponizing space really does little good even if there is somebody who tries. BTW, it was the Soviet Union who first put weapons into space... as a machine gun found on one of the Salyut space stations. Yes, that was technically in violation of treaty, but who cares? There really is no enforcement provision on any such provision.
BTW, a little lesson on orbital mechanics: If you fire a bullet in space, there is a tendency that the bullet ends up back at roughly where you are at when you fired the thing.... after making an orbit around the Earth. In other words, most weapons that are used on the Earth right now tend to create "space debris" if they are actually used.... which tends to make life miserable for the person firing the weapon in the first place. Essentially, if you use weapons, it is a space-equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. Generally it is a bad idea.
As for the "waste of resources" and diverting it to space, that isn't going to happen unless there is something which is a draw to encourage us to get "out there" in the first place. Other than the petroleum reserves of Titan (hint, this is a joke), there is little reason at the moment to exploit resources off the Earth. I think that will change over time, but that time hasn't happened yet.
Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
One thing that can be said about things like telecommunications satellites (including TV broadcasting sats but much more), remote sensing ("weather sats"... but also monitoring remote weather stations on the Earth too), and reconnaissance sats (including the classic "spy sats" by various military agencies.... but also things like Google Earth) is that they are proven applications of space technology where clearly a commercial entity can make some money and convince investors to dump in billions of dollars for infrastructure necessary to get it going. A good example of this is with the Iridium Satellite Constellation. BTW, Iridium is going to be expanding in the next couple of years with a new generation of their technology... with increased bandwidth and capabilities.
I'll also note that with these applications, while the "wealthy" do get served with this technology, it also helps those who are at the bottom of the heap in the social order of things too. This very technology has saved more lives due to advanced warnings for things like tsunamis, hurricanes and cyclones, and other severe weather problems than almost any other human activity other than urban sewage distribution and treatment systems. Very ordinary and indeed poor individuals also have access to the telecommunications systems, and navigation systems like GPS and Magellan have helped to make the transportation of goods around the world much, much cheaper due to increasing efficiency of navigation and shipping transportation.
The real trick is trying to figure out how to make money doing something else in space. Where there is going to be something new happening is with space tourism (yes.... those who have money "throwing it away" for a few moments of micro-gravity) and with space-based manufacturing. There certainly are processes and products that can only be made in space, and until very recently there was no basic infrastructure in place to even permit this kind of activity to take place. It really hasn't happened yet except on some very experimental processes that generated more hype than actual products. You will very soon be using products that have been manufactured in space and not simply just made for space manufacturing companies.
As for going to the Moon or Mars, the problem is that there is no infrastructure in place to be able to get to those places in the first place. Apollo was not about establishing infrastructure... other than building up Kennedy Space Center. Anything related to the Apollo program has long ago been gutted and sent to museums, and really didn't involve setting up a general system of allowing anybody other than government bureaucrats and employees to get there.
Getting to a Western USA model, when trying to exploit frontier areas there is a need to establish various bases of operation that can be used for both military and civilian uses. There is this thing call "logistics" that is necessary to really get somewhere and spend some significant periods of time away from your home. It doesn't matter if the location is in Antarctica, the bottom of an ocean, or on Mars. If you don't have that infrastructure in place to support that exploration, you can't have a sustained presence there. We don't have that infrastructure in place, and it is a fallacy that Constellation was ever going to get that infrastructure put into place there either.
We don't have an equivalent of McMurdo on the Moon, and until that happens you can kiss any chance for people doing projects on the Moon goodbye. Once something like that is built on the Moon, opportunities will expand and there will be
It looks like the U.S. will never get back to the space. I just wonder why they waste so much money on projects they abort soon.
Contrary to the prevailing public relations blitz that is being put on by ATK and certain entrenched interests within the D.C. beltway, The United States of America is not ceeding leadership in space to other countries. Instead, the paradigm is changing from that of a central government bureaucracy that is responsible for the financing, acquisition, and planning of such an endeavor to something that is more de-centralized, mostly privately led, and allowing freedom to ordinary individuals to try and get into space.
For commercial spaceflight companies, America simply dominates the rest of the world combined. When I hear of things happening in spaceflight and can compare stuff that is happening elsewhere, there are about two to three times as many companies formed and activities like the creation of a new spaceport than anything happening in the rest of the world. No, I'm not saying that private companies aren't being set up elsewhere and there certainly is something afoot in the European Union too in terms of private efforts for getting into space, but if you want to get into the action and see where the hot activity is taking place, it is currently in America. South-western USA to be exact if you want to know where the bulk of these companies are working at.
Never get into space? I suppose that this flight was a figment of my imagination. This is hardly the only company going into space, and I don't see vehicle production lines necessarily getting shut down.... except in Utah. I call that simply ATK having a singular problem trying to figure out how to make a profit in the current market rather than a national crisis. Sometimes dinosaurs go extinct too.
Yes, I'll admit that may have been a concern, but it wasn't really all that much longer of a free fall time than what Maston did. It is hard to say "what if the chute had never been there in the first place" as it was there, but as I said.... it was a part of the overall flight profile.
Other reasons to include a parachute include safety, saving some reaction mass (aka propellant) during the descent phase of the profile on much higher flights, and as has been stated to also help with attitude control when the engines are off. It also helps to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tank after significant free-fall time.... something that wasn't an issue at all for this particular test.
It is the overall flight profile that is the interesting part, and the fact that Armadillo is even using a parachute at all. They certainly could (and indeed did show) that they can recover from huge instability in their flight characteristics. The 3 or so seconds that the vehicles was falling was hardly enough time to get a nose down attitude and from watching the video it appears as though the parachute actually increased the instability of the vehicle by adding torque and an oscillation factor that needs to be reviewed with a better parachute.
That can be fixed and there are other things for Armadillo to be worrying about, so the real point of the test is to simply show that a parachute can be deployed at all and what a more complex launch profile might involve for much, much longer flights. They aren't going to be following the flight profiles of their Lunar Landing Challenge flights as they are dealing with trying to get out of the Earth's gravity, not the Moon's.
If you think you have a really good idea here, you might want to talk to Richard Gariott.... seriously! He has the money and is looking for an enterprise that can get himself back in orbit, but this time he can only justify the cost if he can turn a profit on the whole thing.
I'd agree that aerogels sound like an amazing investment opportunity, and is one of the few ideas I've heard that really makes sense for commercial spaceflight in the short term. There are some really interesting ideas but I would imagine that this is one that would... comparatively speaking... take a minimum of capital to get going and to be a good startup enterprise using space-based assets that could justify a commercial launch that isn't in an already established commercial space sector (such as telecom or remote sensing equipment).
I would imagine that this would also have some in-orbit value as well... something else to consider instead of throwing this stuff back down the the ground. Aerogels do a wonderful job at absorbing minor impacts quite well and in fact have been used by NASA for some micrometeorite studies and to gather samples from comets. Having the customers buy the stuff in-orbit and then process it for use in deep space could be an interesting market all by itself.
I'm not really worried about the Chinese for the moment, at least until they can figure out how to do an in-orbit rendezvous first. That seems like a trivial thing, but it really is one of the more complicated accomplishments just after simply getting into orbit in the first place from a technical point of view. They are taking their time at getting things done, although supposedly there is a Chinese "space station" that is going into orbit next year. I would image that is something akin to the Salyut space station that the Soviet Union flew back before the modular design that became MIR flew.
The problem with a patent pool (see the MPEGLA for details on a current one) is the buy-in and cost to participate. These by their nature tend to be very monopolistic in nature and are also often rigged to drive out competition and certainly to set the barriers of entry for new start-ups from getting involved.
It is a real trick, too, in terms of trying to "divide the capital fairly". Organizations like ASCAP have been collecting money for years on behalf of individual song writers but almost without exception have never actually paid those royalties to anybody but the very largest organizations involved. In the end, it is the occasional and part-time innovator that gets screwed completely.
Of the three major "intellectual property law" branches, patents, copyright, and trademarks, I'd say patents are by far and away the most onerous in terms of the complications they provide to genuine market competition and the complete lack of protection "of the little guy" when somebody new to the system shows up. I've said repeatedly that patents are nothing more than a legal scam that screws over the private inventor and is just a way to part a fool from his money.... the fool in this case is the one who thinks that patents actually offer some sort of protection to their invention.
Repeatedly, as was mentioned with the aircraft industry and I should add the patent fight that Philo Farnsworth also had to go through in regards to the development of electronic television (he eventually won... but it literally took him a lifetime to collect and fight for credit that still is not properly given) there is very little productive that happens in regards to patents. If, as was done by both Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, you create your own factory and make your invention by putting some skin in the game.... there might be some value in terms of a defensive application of patents to keep competitors temporarily from completely copying your ideas. You will never make millions by coming up with a unique product, patenting the thing, and then trying to "sell" the invention to somebody else.
In this particular case, I don't think the drogue parachute was really necessary for vehicle control before re-light, but it might be something more critical if Armadillo goes for a much higher altitude attempt. What they were testing was the overall flight profile, which for higher altitude flights will certainly involve a parachute of some kind for multiple reasons.
If anything, the drogue chute in this case actually added instability to the vehicle and to me proved the test all that more in terms of the ability to recover from an unstable situation and bring it back on course to a clean landing. In some ways, I was more impressed with the Armadillo test than the Masten one, but they were both quite impressive.
It is also kind of fun to see two companies like this compete with each other for what are aviation firsts too!
There are products like some kinds of aerogels, some metal alloy mixing, and certain biological processes (read pharmaceutical industries) where not only is it useful but actually necessary for those processes to take place in space or at least in micro-gravity conditions. In other cases you can also improve the quality of some of these products substantially... again due to the environment. Even at low-earth orbit the vacuum which is present is actually superior to anything which can be obtained in even the best laboratories on the Earth's surface (and that is even technically within the exosphere portion of the Earth's atmosphere).
Would these products be worth the cost? Absolutely! They would also be very sensitive to the cost of spaceflight, where even a very modest drop in the price of getting into space... say even a 5% drop in the cost of a launch... would make a huge difference in terms of how profitable such a manufacturing enterprise would be and how often they would want to go back up for another launch with new supplies or even personnel to operate the equipment. Not all of it can be or even ought to be 100% automated.
While SpaceX has done some remarkable things for getting into space, I think it is going to be companies like Armadillo and Masten that will be making the real game changer spacecraft. Both companies have stated that their eventual long-term goal is to get into orbit themselves, even if the prospect of doing that is a long way out at the moment.
What Armadillo has done in particular is to demonstrate that they are now capable of successfully achieving the basic goals of the original Ansari X-Prize (even if it is a decade too late). I also happen to believe that the Armadillo technology is also going to be much easier to scale up to orbital velocities, or at the very least longer sub-orbital flights that SpaceShip Two simply can't achieve.
That is but one kind of aerogel and hardly the most ubiquitous kind either. BTW, the re-entry temperature you are quoting here is also the temperature for a blunt body re-entry like is found for a standard ballistic capsule return that is highly dense and mostly a solid hunk of metal wrapped with some protective heat shields. The raw density of aerogels is substantially less and has some very different aerodynamic characteristics involved with it that simply tossing it into the atmosphere would not necessarily require the intense heat for re-entry that you have quoted.
Then again, with the density of the materials approaching that of air at sea level, it may be difficult to get the materials to land where you want them if you are tossing them into the atmosphere and then letting them blow around with the various air currents... something that a traditional ballistic capsule doesn't have to contend with all that much.
You are fighting an anonymous coward.... likely somebody who is writing just to stir up the pot and really doesn't believe what they are writing in the first place. You've made some good points and obviously touched on a raw nerve. Just smile with it!
The largest problem right now for orbital factories is the fact that nobody has a facility capable of "housing" such factories at the moment. There is, I suppose, the ISS.... but that monster of a fiscal black hole is something that no corporate entity would ever want to get stuck with in terms of trying to justify costs and would be worth staying clear of just for the bureaucratic red tape alone. With SpaceX and Orbital Sciences trying to simply provide raw cargo logistical capabilities to the ISS alone they've had to endure incredible scrutiny and meeting ungodly regulations just for the ability to simply dock to the ISS at all.
BTW, the resupply cargo vessels also have to be man-rated as people are going to be inside of those vehicles to extract the cargo. The only thing they will be lacking is the man-rated capacity for launch.
The Dragon capsule... with the Dragon Lab configuration might be perhaps one of the first real orbital factories that private industry could access. The first flight is scheduled (looking up the SpaceX manifest) some time in 2012. In other words, if there is a company wanting to put up a package into orbit (the mission is expected to last about six months before returning to the Earth), they can start work today and put some cash on the table without having to deal with NASA at all. SpaceX is planning on at least annual flights of the Dragon Lab, and eventually docking with a Bigelow BA-330 module too. Fabrication of items in space is one of the stated purposes for both SpaceX and Bigelow to making their equipment.
For a good reason, Robert Bigelow is desperately trying to "second source" a vehicle to his space station, which is one of the reasons why he is working with Boeing to build an alternate spacecraft that will fly on a Delta IV. That is expected to take a few years before it is completed, but it is something that has some bent metal already and is taking shape.
So the answer to your question.... how long before a corporation launches a factory into orbit? Within this decade.
As for how delivery can be made for returning the cargo back to the Earth..... there certainly will be many different options. Your suggestion of using an aerogel for delivery sounds incredibly promising for a whole bunch of stuff including perhaps even simply delivery of bulk cargo from orbit in general.
This is where genuine commercial spaceflight might really start to make a difference, and it is possible that orbital fabrication might be even larger than space tourism in terms of dollars spent for commercial spaceflight.
The problem with the NASA specs is that they have been written in such a way that only the "selected contractors" can actually meet those specs. That is unfortunately something incredibly common in government procurement circles, where often the contractors themselves write their own procurement contracts (I know.... I've helped to write some of them!) If you write the regulations or specifications in such a way that there can only possibly be one bidder on the contract, you can hardly call it a competitive bid. BTW, I've written spec contracts for government agencies for both small purchases... in once case for a single desktop PC... and for multi-million dollar capital purchases.
I'm not saying that all spaceflight specs are bad, but there certainly are some asinine regulations that do more harm than good and are mostly there to justify the salaries of the regulators and inspectors involved... and sometimes those regulations are there to scratch the back of a close personal friend and not necessarily to "protect the public". When those who wrote those regulations leave, sometimes it is incredibly hard to figure out even why some regulations were created in the first place. If they are created for political reasons, often there will be absolutely no commentary at all or "paper trail" to try and find out why they exist and are hard to cull out too.
This is also a problem in private industry to a smaller degree (for petty corruption among middle managers) but government agencies tend to take it to a much higher level.
It didn't look like they even really tried to get back on the exact spot either... just to simply get the rocket onto the pad so it wouldn't sink into the mud was good enough. Still, you are correct that it landed within just a couple of feet of the original take off point.
It will be very interesting to see what is going to happen when they try for high altitude flights. The next series is supposedly going to take them to about 100k feet, which is where the real fun is going to start. That still isn't in space, but it is getting close and will be in preparation for real sub-orbital flight.
I don't think it is so much a lack of regulations, but rather a lack of trust in democratic concepts and institutions. If anything, an open and free market is based upon the assumption that ordinary folks, when left to make their own choices and given freedom to innovate and come up with solutions to problems that they face, will tend on the whole to make the best choices possible to fill those needs, wants, and desires.
The issue isn't one of regulation vs. deregulation, but rather freedom vs. tyranny. Every time a regulation is written, the question ought to be asked "does this allow ultimately for more or less freedom... and is it worth the price for this kind of restriction if we lose some precious freedom?"
From a long view of human history, the pattern has usually been that tyrants have come into political power in some form or another to take the freedoms from others... sometimes for "the public good" and sometimes just for raw acquisition of power. Often it is hard to determine which is which. If you don't have a government that is actively trying to squash that tyrannical behavior, it becomes more a part of the problem than the solution.
Regulations can exist within democratic institutions... indeed they are necessary for a well-organized society. The American Constitution in fact was written under such a philosophy... one of limited government but acknowledged that a government of some kind still had to exist. Business regulations was one of the first orders of business in the First American Congress (just after passage of the Bill of Rights), and the fight to ignore those regulations created the first real test of the power of the U.S. Federal Government (with the Whiskey Rebellion). Having George Washington put on his general's uniform again and personally lead the U.S. Army into battle sort of helped to kill the opposition (the only time a U.S. President has ever lead a field army into battle).
Regulations do make some sense, but they really ought to be simple to comprehend and certainly shouldn't require a full time accountant, lawyer, or a whole team of them to be able to simply comply with those regulations. When congressmen who pass legislation that significantly alters the regulatory landscape have not even read the legislation they are making into law much less even tried to comprehend the long term consequences to that legislation, is it a wonder that the rest of us trying to actually follow those laws start to complain?
What's the problem with a gambit? It usually simplifies the battlefield in ways both contenders find adequate.
It keeps the legal profession employed and not much more. While most larger companies are able to afford full-time attorneys and perhaps even specialists such as patent and other "intellectual property" lawyers on staff, that is something which is much more difficult to do for smaller companies or even private individuals to do even on an occasional basis.
For the private innovator who is tinkering in their garage and trying to come up with something new, I argue that patents do absolutely nothing to protect that kind of "inventor" and in fact the whole patent system turns into a giant scam that takes millions of dollars out of the pockets of these would-be entrepreneurs and instead transfers that wealth into the hands of some of the least productive people on the planet.
Even the supposed benefit of patents to record "for posterity" what has been invented is largely a joke now. There is certainly zero benefit to actually reading a patent even for somebody "in the industry" (even expired patents), and indeed there may be some strong and compelling reasons to explicitly make company policies that forbid engineers and others in R&D settings from reading patents of competitors.
Back when patents required a working model of the device (perhaps in miniature) to be filed with the patent office there was some historical benefit to the practice. At least there was something to look at for historical research to find out what, exactly, was the patent all about. It also provided a threshold to keep the frivolous cruft out of the patent office... even if the patent office couldn't figure out what to do with the models when they were done with them (one of the reasons why the model submissions were halted). For example, I'd love to see a working model of an inter-stellar hyperdrive engine... even though the USPTO granted a patent on that crazy idea.
A start-up is the first to market because they are in the position to take the most risks. It is sort of implied by being new, as there is little to lose and much to gain by trying new things out. That sort of is in the definition of a "start-up".
The purpose of most for-profit companies is to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". By trying to be first to market, that is counter-productive to meeting this corporate charter for established companies as there are also a whole bunch of wrong guesses for what might be that hot new product idea. Being second, third, or in the second "wave" of a promising technology is certainly very useful for companies.
Apple was first to market with the Newton..... how did that work out for the company? On the other hand, when the technology matured and people like Rio established the legal precedence for portable music players, they came out with the iPod and made a fortune. That is an excellent example of why established companies usually don't make the first move on something like that. Also look at the Lisa.... something that almost sank Apple as a company too. If it wasn't for their Apple II product line at the time, they wouldn't even be around right now.
General Motors tried to be "first to market" with the EV-1.... and where did that get them? A bunch of heartache and grief, including documentaries about how GM screwed up and tons of negative publicity. Again, it generally is a very bad idea for an established company to try and be the first to market even when they try.
What is interesting is when I hit Republican candidates for office on private commercial spaceflight.... they are all for it until the word "Constellation" comes up and then try to defend that program as if ATK has completely financed the entire development for that project out of their own pocket.
Sometimes I don't really know what is going on, and it seems as though politicians will simply bend in the wind if you start to blow back. We'll see, I guess.
Support for the Constellation program won't survive the light of day when people really start to realize what it is and what it is doing to NASA. Once it is built, if it is ever built, the first act of the next President of the USA will be to cancel it. Right now we just have to see if Obama has the backbone to get it canceled for good before another dozen billion dollars are spent on that black hole.
Montana Power is a really sad case of a public utility horribly mis-managed. Unfortunately, it is another utility, formerly Utah Power & Light. Later "purchased" by PacificCorp and then Scottish Power (the current "holding company"). It is a monster international conglomerate that has been buying up various power utilities all over the western USA.... which quite possibly owns what is left of Montana Power as well. At least it wouldn't surprise me.
Some manager from that company actually threatened to essentially stop all maintenance upgrades in the entire state due to a failed bid with the state public utility commission to raise rates, and the state then started proceedings to dis-incorporate the utility at that point. You know it is a monster when they start flipping off state regulators and acting as if governments on that level don't matter any more.
At least at that level some cooler heads prevailed, and the main governing board/CEO (I don't know who actually stepped in) realized acting like a jackass to a state government could have some very bad consequences that would not be good for the corporate charter... aka "to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". The disincorporation would have happened with the state-level corporation, which still exists on paper even if it has since been gobbled up and management "streamlined".
One philosophy that I think should be applied to almost any endeavor involving tax money:
No matter how bad off some "deserving" person may be for tax money, there is always somebody far worse off that is being taxed to help pay for that service or endowment.
I personally don't mind having tax dollars that are for a general community benefit, such as a military organization or something like a fire department. Those generally benefit almost everybody in the community, including those at the bottom of the heap in the social order of things. The problem comes when "winners" or "losers" are picked and subsidies are done for some group that somehow got some extra political pull in some manner or another to get ahead of the rest of us.
I would also have to generally agree with infrastructure projects, and for the most part I don't mind locally owned public utilities. I emphasize locally owned as a mere individual or at least a smallish group of individuals can fight back against such a utility merely by going to the utility board... and if they are non-responsive they can simply replace that utility board at the next election cycle. Living in the Rocky Mountains, I resent the fact that my electrical utility is owned by a board of directors who live in Scotland and likely have never even heard of the town where I live, much less care one little bit if their policies adversely impact the businesses or residents of this community.
This also gets back to the issue you mentioned above with the idea that smallish community without border controls also provide mini political laboratories where people can come and go based on the decisions (good or ill) that the leaders of that community have made over the years. American states were envisioned as similar kinds of laboratories of political ideas, where something could be tried and if it proved to be successful that other states would adopt the idea. As bad as the Arizona "immigration law" might seem, it is but one of fifty states where the rest of the country can check out to see if it is a good or bad idea in the long run. Surprisingly, several other states are indeed looking at enacting similar kinds of legislation, which should survive or die based on its merits and success or failure rather than via some stupid lawsuit that will end up being decided upon by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are many other more successful ideas that can be compared that have been adopted in a similar kind of fashion, including some laws that are now common to all 50 U.S. states.