The Economist has a fairly good story on the future of manned space after Columbia. I take issue with a few points, though. First, a nit:

IT SHOULD have been a perfect day. An exhaust plume was cutting a neat trail across the pale morning sky. All over America, people were watching the remarkable spacecraft zip across the continent, to its final destination on the eastern side of the country. Of course, as we now know, it never landed. In only a few seconds, another emblem of American hopes had disintegrated.

Well, no. There was, or at least, should not have been an “exhaust plume.” Shuttle has no exhaust during descent, because it uses no propulsion (other than the occasional reaction control system firing, which wouldn’t leave a visible “exhaust plume”). The streak was more likely the plasma sheath that envelopes the vehicle at that altitude, and perhaps a very high-altitude contrail.

The problem, as even the most gung-ho space enthusiasts agree, is that reusable spacecraft do not yet make economic sense. A fully reusable craft is difficult to justify unless it can be flown more than 50 times a year. (The shuttle only manages five to six flights a year.) Over the next two decades, global demand for launches is expected to run at less than this, somewhere between 30-40 shuttle equivalents a year. But launch services for this market are already over-supplied.

That number of fifty is kind of arbitrary. No one knows the right number, but it’s certainly much higher than current traffic rates. But the third sentence is curious. Such projections of launch demand, performed by the Teal Group or the Department of Commerce, have built-in assumptions, which generally include no new markets, and continuation of business as usual in the launch industry. This ignores the potential for price-demand elasticity should a new, safe launch system come along.

It’s surprising that a publication called “The Economist” would miss the point like this.

Antonio Elias, vice-president of advanced programmes at Orbital Sciences Corporation, a commercial-satellite company based in Dulles, Virginia, said recently that the economic rate for reusable vehicles had not changed for decades. This is because the two fundamental parameters of rocketry?the efficiency of rocket engines and the properties of structural materials?have not changed. It is difficult to see how investing in any spacecraft that could take 25 years to pay back its development costs can be justified.

I’ve personally had this argument with Dr. Elias (the last time was a couple years ago, when I was back at OSC looking over the X-34, doing research on its potential as a suborbital tourist vehicle). He firmly believes that launch is expensive purely because of physics, and doesn’t seem to understand that most of the difference between aircraft ops and space ops are economies of scale. But then, he’s a physicist…

But the next couple bits are encouraging.

In the next few decades, the only reusable ?space? vehicles that are likely to make sense are those being designed and built by private industry to take tourists 100km (about ten times higher than an airliner) above the earth.

and

So why are we still there? The technology to do more than briefly visit the moon or Mars does not yet exist. Further ahead, mankind will have a place and a purpose in space, but until technology improves, manned spaceflight will be an expensive luxury. NASA could focus on getting the costs of spaceflight down, and on helping the private sector to get tourists on sub-orbital flights.

So they recognize that suborbital is a key stepping stone to cheap launch, which is amazing progress from Economist editorials of even a year or two ago.

Unfortunately, they remains stuck in the “space is exploration and science” paradigm, as evinced by the graf above, and the ending to the piece.

Any money saved could be used on the more pressing questions of space science: are we alone in the universe, is there life on Mars, could we live there, are there other earth-like planets, where did we come from? In the short term, robots and instruments should tackle these questions. There will be many spin-off benefits that arise from this research in the field of miniaturisation and robotics.

If, later this year, China launches its first astronauts into space, calls to beef up America’s manned-spaceflight programme are bound to increase. That would risk missing the real frontier in space over the next couple of decades. This other frontier is not a place, but rather a matter of knowledge. Robots could approach and extend it farther than people could?and at far lower cost, however you measure it.

Yup, Trix are for kids, and space is for robots.

We need to keep working on them, fellow bloggers.

All together now: Economist–We Want To Go!