I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.
As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.
[Late Friday update]
I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.
But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.
And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.
[Bumped]
I’m a bit concerned that government might do with real estate what they’ve done with radio spectrum, assume ownership and auction off use rights. We already know governments have no respect for free enterprise or private ownership.
@ ken anthony
I’m a bit concerned that government might do with real estate what they’ve done with radio spectrum, assume ownership and auction off use rights. We already know governments have no respect for free enterprise or private ownership.
An issue nicely captured by the competing “natural law” versus “gift of the sovereign” theories for the origin of property.
Note that both a UN Treaty system and a “US claims the Moon and doles out land grants” system fall in the “gift of the sovereign” category.
A private company that claimed lunar land under current treaties and somehow through diplomacy kept Russia, China, India, EU, US and Japan all happy could bootstrap an extraterrestrial “common law” approach NOT dependent on prior legislative action by Terran governments.
@ken anthony – 2
bw: Short term, there aren’t any markets in tangible property really worth fighting over.
ka: Which may only be because nobody now sees a way to fight effectively over a claim. But there may be a way.
Thought experiment: Lets assume all legal issues are resolved — what out there can you import here at a profit?
I will concede ISRU lunar LOX sold in LEO as a possibility — but you can do that now using roving regolith gatherers that extract the LOX and then move on.
Even PGM — find a nice nugget and its yours.
“Rick, it’s on my blog, as I mentioned, and is a little too extensive to reproduce here.”
Mark’s commentary seems to be something akin to a Rush Limbaugh rant. It sounds good until one does some analysis. The historical analogies are faulty, the logic contradictory, the criticisms ill-founded and overly broad, and the alternatives vague, unworkable, or nonexistent. It offered all of the clichés one hears from an uninformed member of the Internet Rocketeers’ Club, but without good grammar or spelling.
Prop depots do provide a tantalizing market, and I’ve slowly been won over. It’s harder (though not impossible) to politicize the asset especially if it is unmanned – unlike the ISS, where NASA can pull the plug on any COTS competitor by fiat by saying they don’t meet arbitrary approach/docking safety criteria. It’s also a lot harder to over-specify a simple chemical substance… you can turn the dial on purity but that is about it. Standardizing structural, data, electrical, and fluids interfaces – albeit in government regulation-kluge form – in and of itself would be worth billions, and it would be at least as valuable for commercial operators as for government operators. It would also improve the currently marginal business case for on-orbit servicing.
I was at first concerned that propellant depots were marketless, but I think Doug Jones hit it on the head. As long as the thing appears to be politically stable enough to not be Mir’d after 5 years, GSO launchers can at least triple or quadruple the functional size of satellites; or launch payloads on smaller rockets; or make a business case for smallsats in MEO and GSO. In other words, it’s not really “if you build it they will come,” it’s “If you build it, they’re already there, and as long as you make it cheaper overall than launching 4-8 times the weight they’ll use it because they have a profit motive.” On the other hand, most telecom satellites are only 3-5% launch cost, the rest being ground ops and design-build, so at most you’re giving them 2-3% extra profit. Whether or not that is enough to make them change their design and operations, involve another relatively high-risk procedure, and change long-standing relationships with heavy launch providers is a valid question. On the whole, current GSO activities are notoriously inelastic to launch costs, but quite elastic to payload size.
To those looking to Rand to support other similar ideas, I think it is useful to frame this debate a little. Most “profitable” space business concepts are really only “profitable” if the government finances development & construction and sells the results at pennies on the dollar. Even most papers that assume investor financing and show profitability in a reasonable horizon also assume risk-free rates of return. Suborbital services is the only business plan that currently comes close to closing at market cost of capital, and even then only for speculators.
So the real question is one of scarcity: of all the pie in the sky schemes out there that don’t fly without free money, which scheme gives the most impact on space in general and on NASA’s exploration mandate? I think the argument of propellant depot people is:
1. We seem to have about 1/2 to 1% of the federal budget each year.
2. Prop depots are simple and scalable, so they seem relatively likely to be finished and operable within forecast budgets in a reasonable timeframe (as opposed to a permanent moon base or Mars mission or shuttle-derived launcher). In other words, they don’t seem to require the political equivalent of unobtanium like Apollo did.
3. They address the hardest technical part of the agency’s beyond-LEO mandate (the rocket equation).
4. They address the demand side of commercial space industry, but for NASA this is essentially just a side effect.
5. At the same time, they are extremely flexible. They can be re-supplied by industry, or if that doesn’t materialize they can still be re-supplied by government rockets at little or no marginal cost. In fact, since they lack the prestige value of manned flight, they can even be contracted to India like everything else we do these days without much political rancor.
response to other Bob
How does the existance of propellant depots (note the plural) lock us into a particular propellant combination? Propellants with a market will continue to be delivered and those that don’t, won’t. If there is enough activity for depots to work, then there is enough activity for better competators to improve on. The gas stations become tire stores, mechanic shops, and coffee houses here when they become unprofitable in the orriginal role. Why will space be different?
“Waiting until materials deplete” will probably never work since we can recycle and substitute one material for another quite often.
There are many fine uses for space. I believe had space ever been militarized, as happened with aviation in the early years, we would be better off by now. The military could certainly use it. If you remember aviation in WWI they started with reconnaissance, moving to fighter planes to shoot down enemy reconnaissance, then moving to bombers. Space vehicles have been stuck in reconnaissance for over 40 years. Sure there were projects like Polyus, which would constitute a space fighter vehicle, but they were never deployed. Space bombers would make a lot of sense, since you can just drop meteors on your opponents to have the same effect of a nuclear bomb without the radioactive fallout, but the politicians were afraid of an expensive arms race (many people argue Energia helped bankrupt the Soviet Union).
Thought experiment: Lets assume all legal issues are resolved — what out there can you import here at a profit?
Accepting the challenge implicit in your thought experiment and further assume I have no minerals of any particular value. Is trade (and profit) still possible? Of course it is.
I’m not yet self sufficient, so I may purchase some things from Earth or other sources. So there’s one side of the trade picture.
What about my own profits? Do they depend on me selling minerals? No, we set that as a condition. Well how does anybody profit? Either by selling products or services. That doesn’t change just because I live in space.
I once traveled to Vegas with a friend from SD for a nine ball tournament (billiards are big in the Dakotas.) He didn’t see any farms going through Nevada and asked, how do these people make a living without farms?
Your question might be, how do they make a profit if they don’t sell minerals?
Each and everyone in their own particular way.
As a software programmer I worked remotely for many years. Give me an internet connection on the moon and my income would be the same there as anywhere else. If food and oxygen were produced locally I might even have been able to afford living there on my pitiful pay.
someone will need to follow the advice given by Rousseau . . .
Rousseau is just about the last person I would take advice from. He and his ideas are responsible for the brutal deaths and living misery of hundreds of millions of people over the past two centuries.
Thought experiment: Lets assume all legal issues are resolved — what out there can you import here at a profit?
Accepting the challenge implicit in your thought experiment and further assume I have no minerals of any particular value. Is trade (and profit) still possible? Of course it is.
I’m not yet self sufficient, so I may purchase some things from Earth or other sources. So there’s one side of the trade picture.
What about my own profits? Do they depend on me selling minerals? No, we set that as a condition. Well how does anybody profit? Either by selling products or services. That doesn’t change just because I live in space.
I once traveled to Vegas with a friend from SD for a nine ball tournament (billiards are big in the Dakotas.) He didn’t see any farms going through Nevada and asked, how do these people make a living without farms?
Your question might be, how do they make a profit if they don’t sell minerals?
Each and everyone in their own particular way.
As a software programmer I worked remotely for many years. Give me an internet connection on the moon and my income would be the same there as anywhere else. If food and oxygen were produced locally I might even have been able to afford living there on my pitiful pay.
(…and Cricket as an ISP stinks in Phoenix especially when work let’s out. I’ve been trying for half an hour to post this one comment.)
Rousseau is just about the last person I would take advice from. He and his ideas are responsible for the brutal deaths and living misery of hundreds of millions of people over the past two centuries.
Rand, Rousseau merely pointed out, in this case, what was already the standard policy for such issues. One needs only to remember European colonization efforts to know this. The default was to get territory by occupying it, treaties usually just reaffirmed the status quo.
He is not the only person to have pointed it out. It’s not necessary to cite him in particular.
Mark Whittington, you claim that there is no substance to Rand’s article, and then fail to provide any convincing facts from your side. Can you explicitly lay out where Rand failed to provide analysis, and your counter analysis on the real situation?
Brad
Thought experiment: Lets assume all legal issues are resolved — what out there can you import here at a profit?
Nothing, given current transportation costs. That’s what many of us have tried to tell you.
That doesn’t mean there will never be anything, however. It simply means that transportation costs must be reduced. Nor do we have to wait until Marshall Space Flight Center builds “Selenopolis” before we do that.
Excellent article!
One small nitpick:
SpaceX has a rocket sitting on the launch pad in Florida, expected to have its first flight this year
The first Falcon 9 was raised on the launch pad in January, but as of the June 16 SpaceX update it was in pieces for qualification tests in Texas. Has it since been re-integrated and moved back to Florida?
Woohoo! Congrats! As a long time Transterrestrialite I have seen much of this subject matter already displayed in the abstract. You pieced the Tetris puzzle together very nicely and neatly. Bonus points to you my good sir.
Freedom is an ideal of limitless potential and boundless possibilities. Fortunately, there is plenty of room in space for the imaginations of Man to explore unseen end runs around constructs we so haplessly erected to hold ourselves back.
Hi Rand,
The article was great, but it really didn’t answer the question it started out with: why the nation should go into space. Unfortunately, absent a consensus on that, I think the Augustine report is going to end up like all the rest, largely ignored. It will take a substantial amount of political muscle to dethrone the NASA bureaucracy and finally get them to take on the technology development role that the article identifies as a key to opening up the space frontier. Without a consensus on NASA’s role as more than a high-tech jobs program, BAU will continue.
A side note: since it has proven consistently unable to open up any real estate outside of Earth orbit over the last 40 years, NASA seems now to be getting into the real estate business here on Earth. They have announced plans for a huge development next to NASA Ames on federal land, in conjunction with a couple of local Bay Area universities. This seems like some kind of twisted metaphor for the country as a whole: from the spirit of exploration and discovery that surrounded Apollo (despite its unsustainable nature) 40 years ago to the subprime crisis today.
Excellent article and worthy of the hype. It’s interesting that we have little of the usual disagreement here. I think this is a rare opportunity that we should support and use.
A side comment on Robert’s post:
I did my doctoral dissertation on lunar transfer vehicles and developed a concept that followed the rule of no new launch vehicles. It can be done with no modifications to today’s launch fleet (except a possible modification to the shroud of the Delta IV or Atlas V), but it required using a shuttle launch and approximately 14 Delta IV/Atlas V Heavy launches for a two-person crew rotation with a reusable lunar lander refueled in lunar orbit. (Includes launches for all of the associated tankers for refueling at L1 and lunar orbit.) EELVs are too underpowered for human lunar transit. There are a few cargo applications you can use them for, but a Saturn class vehicle is necessary for any singificant space operation. Whether it’s a Saturn V, a Direct, a Shuttle-C, a super cluster of EELV-derived hardware, etc. is a point worth debating, but EELVs as they exist today are pickup trucks trying to do the job of an 18-wheeler when you try to go to the Moon on them.
At a glance, it appears to me that you don’t need anything like that level of infrastructure to get started. For example, I gather the Apollo mission complete with the three modules (command, service, and lunar) could be run with 3-4 Delta IV Heavy launches. There’s a lot of excess capacity in three Delta IVs (the command module is pretty light), enough to get the fully fueled modules into orbit. The only remaining question is how much more propellant is needed to duplicate the boost from the air start of the third stage of the Saturn V, which pushed the original Apollo missions into lunar transfer orbit (LTO).
Anyway, where I’m going with this is that one approach to getting heavy lift vehicles is merely to support existing commercial launch vehicles and thereby encouraging them to develop larger launch vehicles, much as they have for the past few decades. By using existing vehicles in a somewhat limited program, we’d encourage private industry to build future vehicles with greater capabilities.
Sure heavy lift vehicles can be handy, but not at the sacrifice of the program.
John Hare asks me: How does the existance of propellant depots (note the plural) lock us into a particular propellant combination? Propellants with a market will continue to be delivered and those that don’t, won’t. If there is enough activity for depots to work, then there is enough activity for better competators to improve on. The gas stations become tire stores, mechanic shops, and coffee houses here when they become unprofitable in the orriginal role. Why will space be different?
John, When I first heard about propellent depots, I had just finished reading a Bob Forward vision of laser driven light sails zipping around cis-lunar space (with the lasers and the power stations in Earth orbit). And then I thought about other propellentless methods of in-space travel such as rotovators and other forms of tether propulsion. As you know, there are many other non-chemical propulsion options, including the relatively new electric sail… (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_sail) I hope you can see what I’m getting at: gas stations might become tire stores, but would propellent depots have anything to offer for someone who wants to use a very different kind of propulsion?
To save you time: I asked about this here once before and your co-blogger Jon Goff kindly answered me by acknowledging that there is a risk that alternative propulsion options could make propellent depots outdated, but he discounted the risk by suggesting that chemical propulsion has a long future ahead of it, and even if beamed propulsion or elevators were available, chemical propulsion would still be useful in many circumstances.
Jv, I agree with Godzilla – we won’t run out of minerals here on Earth. Godzilla mentions recycling and changing tech, but I would add that just more extreme mining here on Earth might be more fruitful and profitable than mining the sky. You make a great point (I hope) about adding value via zero-g manufacturing.
Excellent article, and I suspect it will not fall on deaf ears, the public is more ready than it has been.
It would have been nice to elaborate more on the economic vision of the future of space, but I am not sure how to do this without stepping into the realm of science fiction – which I doubt would sell well to the masses.
Exporting goods (beyond science, reconnaissance, communications and tourism) back to Earth does not seem a near term possibility. The primary market for space settlement will for the first few generations be space settlement. Immigration and expansion alone can finance a high rate of growth, if the future looks better there.
Five generations hence I expect most of the prosperity and growth will likely be in space, not on Earth – space is where the money will be. Reason being the far greater availability of resources, energy, and room to expand. It will also become the forefront of technological development – it will select for it.
One can build and move around far larger structures in space and automation can happen at a far larger scale. CNC machines, and the products they produce, could be truly enormous, and cheap. Space has a fundamental competitive advantage over Earth in growing people, and this will eventually translate into greater prosperity for those who live there. Earth will become the poor cousin.
Maybe sell space as the promised land.
Excellent article, very well written and convincing. I look forward to the version with footnotes, but the aloof professional tone set by TNA’s style guide lends a certain something — I wouldn’t be too eager to see the “more fun to read” version, this version is plenty satisfying as is.
Fantastic article! I hope that many will read it.
One suggestion for future articles of this type is to point out that the energy required to get to LEO from the Moon is far less than the energy required to get to LEO from the Earth.
I second Pete, I think NASA’s purpose should be to help us reach the critical mass required for the space based economy to sustain itself by fueling its own growth.
The fact that we have a space program implies a general belief that someday we will be living out there. Much of NASA research is into learning to live in space, yet none of our congressmen, presidents or NASA administrators will say that colonization is the goal. Why the disconnect between what is obviously our long term destiny and current efforts that should be towards making that destiny a reality? Why the giggle factor? Why must colonization always remain 100+ years away to avoid ridicule?
It can happen soon and will happen much sooner if those in power can overcome the giggle factor and actually publicly state colonization as the purpose of our space program.
“You want lots of tankers to come up from Earth to get the launch costs down, but if the best way travel past Earth orbit is found (by the market) to not use chemical propulsion, the whole system falls apart. Perhaps the market locks the infrastructure in place until we can get to Earth orbit without using conventional chemical propulsion (eg laser launch or space elevators), but it is a shame to lock-in one particular solution.”
I agree to some extent, but the depot system can also provide pure reaction mass for nuclear thermal propulsion and some kinds of electric rockets…
I don’t have the same faith in the practicality and usefulness (though I do accept the technical possibility) of space elevators that some do. They aren’t that helpful for reaching *low* orbits (step off one at, say, the 200 mile point and you *still* need to get yourself a lot of horizontal velocity, quickly…indeed, the structure is a potential collision hazard for objects in lower [or higher, few though they are] orbits). Only at the center of mass at geostationary orbital altitude can you get off the structure and be ‘in orbit.’
But even taking the path of least resistance on this, one would still want to use it to bring fuel/reaction mass to GEO, for ships going elsewhere from there…
I liked you peace in the new Atlantic. Generally agree with it. As to the nits and questions.
>= Because of the payload requirement and the lack of funding, the shuttle uses an external fuel tank ==
I was wondering about that. I mean I talked to a guy on the team that came up with the current config. to quote: “A guy came in Thursday afternoon and said we had until Monday morning to have a new design on Nixon’s desk that will cost half as much to deliver, and retain the lift capacity and on orbit capacities of the orbiter.”
Ok, delete a day to build and paint the model, print out the report, and courier it to DC, you got 2 long days and some change. So obviously trade studies get “streamlined”. But how much would it actually have cost to integrate in some of the tanks? Orbital refuel and restart would be really usefull. Not having a throw away tank would really help.
course that shuts down the plant outside New Orleans, and you might need to drop the SSME for a LOx Kero design (which might have involved canceling let SSME contracts to politically important areas) but really how much would it have cost?
I really wish the centers could have been converted to FFRDCs, but the stregth of changing the civil servents to contract labor would politically doom it. At that point, whats the political point of having the centers at all?
> == The Bush administration determined that what NASA needed was a new destination. ==
To be fair everyone was saying NASA needed a new mission, and Bush wanted to make sure NASA could relearn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. (Seems not.) Then promise to think of a big Mars or other mission if they did well.
>== Because, at current launch costs, it is very expensive to deliver the propellants
> needed to reuse the lander—more expensive than the cost of the hardware.
This gets sticky. The costs are about all fixed costs. So adding a extra Aries-V tanker launch wouldn’t really cost anything as long as it means more flights per the same number of years. For example it takes $300 million a year to keep the factory outside New Orleans open and making tanks or something – but for shuttle 1 tank or 6 costs the same. You can go to 12 a year and only push it to $315M a year.
Now given the fuel is about all the weight of the fueled lander, it doesn’t make much difference, and you want to build more landers to put more pork in the lander builders district – but this is a bit different from what you said.
>== developing the capability to do s[ Lunar lox production and transport ]
> will cost money, but it would surely cost less than the tens of billions of
> dollars that NASA’s heavy-lift vehicle will cost.
??
You need the HLLV anyway to lift and boost the stuff to the moon in the first place?
And even Aries V isn’t expected to cost tens of billions.
What are reasonable costs for a ISRU LOx miner/refiner and associated transport facilities?
> With a production infrastructure in place, propellant made on the Moon
> could become cheaper in space than propellant made on Earth and shipped
> to space, since it would not have to be freed from Earth’s gravity well. ==
That’s a DAMN big leep.
>== Later, propellant might be made from resources found on asteroids
> or comets (which, because they hold water, could provide the resources
> needed for both fuel and oxidizer), ==
Comets also hold a lot of oil and Methane, so breaking down the water seems overkill – and the water can be used in solar high temp steam rockets which could give higher ISP then LOx/LH, and certainly would be easier to handel
>== as the Constellation architecture implicitly does; it doesn’t even
> call for an airlock on the new crew capsule for the crew to conduct
> extravehicular activities
Its not designed to support EVAs. No apace or resources are allocated to carry EVA suits. Pretty much its just you in a orange flight suit and a 20 foot hose.
>== NASA == should have been explicitly forbidden from developing a new launch system.
Disagree here. One of the few things I can think of that NASA SHOULD do is commission and develope new launchers. BUT they should be next generation craft. I.E. NASA as a DARPA and/or anchor tenant for advanced launchers that help open up space.
Obviously Apollo on steroids is more of a close the door kind of design, but still.
Also obviously the real question is what is the space program for?
You need the HLLV anyway to lift and boost the stuff to the moon in the first place?
No, you don’t.
And even Aries V isn’t expected to cost tens of billions.
Yes, it is.
Not quite related to this discussion (I’m sticking it here because the article and comments were pretty good and he does not blog about space very often) was charles Stross’s piece about the uses of space:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/what_have_the_romans_done_for.html
Rand Simberg Says:
>> You need the HLLV anyway to lift and boost the stuff to the moon in the first place?
> No, you don’t.
If you need a HLV to launch the fuel for the reusable lander (which granted you don’t if you use multiple flights) you’ld need it to launch the fully fuel replacement lander. Eiather way you need the same infastructure to have something to refuel, as to send the fuel – so the lack of said infastructure can’t be a reason for ISRU.
>> And even Aries V isn’t expected to cost tens of billions.
> Yes, it is.
No, Aries 1 is expected to cost tens of billions, Aries V is expected to cost $15B. (A reasonable person might ask then why not launch Orion on Aries-V’s with ballast – but Griffen is not such a person.)
If you need a HLV to launch the fuel for the reusable lander
You don’t. A reusable lander comes after depots and low-thrust transfer techniques are in place.
Regarding space elevators, Frank said But even taking the path of least resistance on this, one would still want to use it to bring fuel/reaction mass to GEO, for ships going elsewhere from there…
From a practical standpoint, that might be true, if another elevator wasn’t your destination, and you weren’t traveling there using a light sail, or another propellentless method.
I don’t want to focus on elevators specifically, as it is quite possible that non-chemical mostly-propellentless methods could be practical long before elevators are built. But don’t forget that elevators can be used as a propellentless way to leave GEO for more distant locales. If the elevator extends outward away from GEO, and if you can arrange to travel along the elevator without much friction, the elevator will catapult you away with no propellent required.
In general, I wonder if there is a space infrastructure that uses no (or almost no) chemical propellent and uses no expendible launches which would be cheaper than one using ELVs and propellent depots.
An elevator extending beyond GEO can be used to fling payloads away, even if the payload is stationary with respect to the elevator before being released. There is no need for the payload to be accelerated along the elevator with a low friction contact.
Lets assume all legal issues are resolved — what out there can you import here at a profit?
Nothing, given current transportation costs.
This responds is not entirely correct. Information is a commodity that easily overcomes gravity wells. If we establish local independent economies in space there will be profitable trade.
What will drive transportation costs down? A growing independent market (a colony) will do that. Nothing else will come close to providing that type of motivation.
People fixated on trade with Earth need some perspective. Internal trade far surpasses foreign trade and going off world doesn’t change that (other than the short term which everyone fixates on.)
On depots becoming obsolete: I see the most strategically important goal of depots as channelling as much money as possible as soon as possible into commercial launch services. Market forces are the best hope we have for getting the cost of getting into orbit down. Who cares if depots become obsolete 20 years from now? They will have served their purpose by enabling exploration without HLV and more importantly by establishing a thriving launch sector.
A reusable lander comes after depots and low-thrust transfer techniques are in place.
If the reusable lander comes before low-thrust transfer you can concentrate money on the launch sector where it will do more good than just paying LM $500M to $1B to build a brand new lander. It will require more propellant, so NASA wouldn’t be saving any money, but it wouldn’t be more expensive either. Given the choice I say they should do what maximises benefit to the launch sector, which is more propellant flights.
Think net present value, the more money is spent on launches and the earlier it is spent, the bigger boost to the launch sector and commercial space in general. Once we have LEO in commercial hands, we have everything else, because then ISRU will make economic sense. We wouldn’t have to depend on bureaucrats doing the right thing.
Maximising propellant launch volume and getting a commercial market going as soon as possible are two of the most important things right now. Another one is redundant commercial manned access to space. Nothing else matters at this point. In particular not ISRU.
Economic growth often involves perceiving a need and meeting it. Imagine you’re a martian colonist. You will have enormous potential for economic growth because the needs will be so obvious. There will be a need to manufacture every item locally that is currently imported. That’s the gold rush that will bring settlers to Mars.
Once a threshold of colonists exist (perhaps five or ten thousand) people will sell everything they own to move to Mars to start new businesses because the margin of profit verses imports will provide the profit incentive.
Depots will only become obsolete when rockets stop using reaction mass. Which is to say, never.
Can you imagine people selling bottle water for profit on Earth?
Think net present value, the more money is spent on launches and the earlier it is spent, the bigger boost to the launch sector and commercial space in general.
This is absolutely, completely, totally false. You can spend 100 billion dollars on breeding unicorns and you will not have advanced to cause of increasing unicorn populations one iota. Alternatively, more germane to the current discussion, you can give a government agency 100 billion dollars and a mandate to breed horses, and have them pay armies of biologists on tangential projects, produce one horse at the end of it all, and call it a success. Money does not equal success when government is involved
Roga, I believe you’re missing my point. The idea is to buy propellant on orbit from commercial sources or at least to buy commercial launch services to launch the propellant to a depot. In other words it is about getting the government out of the launch business and to start acting as a customer. This only works if there is a true, competitive market, not if it’s done with NASA launchers.
$4B a year to the commercial launch industry for a decade or two should be enough to lead to RLVs. If that doesn’t do the trick, we might as well give up.
Why does everyone keep saying that the Shuttle was a failure? It worked perfectly–if you were the NRO. It wasn’t much use for other customers; but then, other customers didn’t pay for it.
The shuttle was a failure because it failed to achieve the goals that were the stated purpose of the program. Costs were not reduced, launch to orbit was not made more routine. And, no, the NRO didn’t pay for it.
Paul: D’oh! I don’t know I was imagining accelerating from the elevator midpoint at GEO– much easier to just hop off the far end. Thank you.
Ken: Rockets use reaction mass, but there are alternatives to rockets. I mentioned electric sails because I thought think they are a clever idea – much easier to deploy than a light sail or even a magnetic sail. You can read more about the concept at wikipedia, and here’s an article on space testing and utilization chock full of links to follow up on: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1842
>>If you need a HLV to launch the fuel for the reusable lander
> You don’t. A reusable lander comes after depots and low-thrust transfer techniques are in place.
Then how do you get the lander to the moon? Low thrust transfer doesn’t get you to LEO, or down to the moon even if you use non fueled propulsion (which I assume was what you ment by “low-thrust transfer techniques”).
>.. Regarding space elevators ..
I wouldn’t hold much hope for them. In order to get the costs down to $500 a pound to orbit, Liftport had to assume they could make nanofiber composites (when anyone ever learns how to make it) for 1/50th to 1/100th the cost of kevlar or carbon fiber, and assume 2000 tons per year (the max capacity for the elevator.).
Given we’ve only lifted about 3000 tons in the last 50 years so far, adn SpaceX was saying they could beat those prices if they could get a few hundred tons of cargo a year – this was very underwelming cost reduction.
Ken says: “Economic growth often involves perceiving a need and meeting it….”
Excellent point, the services industry is usually where the “gold” really is. Me, I want to open the first Lunar gambling hall to be the first to separate our erstwhile lunar miner from his hard earned cash. …of course the craps table will have to be a little deeper, the dice bouncing six times higher and all. 😉
>..What will drive transportation costs down? A growing independent market (a colony) will do that…
And what is the economic basis for the Colony? Its cost of operation would dwarf the depot.
Then how do you get the lander to the moon?
Using propellant accumulated at a LEO depot.
Kelly: “…what is the economic basis for the Colony?”
To sound a little too philosophical, history shows over and over that once the human seed is planted, the economic basis usually follows. Yes, there were some failures, but there were a lot of successes as well. The original Virginia Company never paid off, but once the colony reached critical mass, innovation and profit eventually took over (I don’t want to start a flame war here, I know this is GREATLY simplified history.)
On the Moon, a few things come immediately to mind. The regolith to fuel idea is a potential player. Destination tourism is certainly another. Education and R&D could be viable. (Lunar U anybody?) As I tongue in cheek allude to above, the services to support these will spawn whole new industries. All of this implies, of course, that the free market is allowed to function as normally or as soon as possible. A country that wants to establish a colony may want to provide would be colonists a stipend to get things started, there’s plenty of precedence for that. My distant relative came to America as an indentured servant (won his freedom and some land in West Virginia in the war).
OK, I’ve proven I’ve read way too much Sci Fi as a kid, but darn it, we were supposed to have been there by now!
I think it was an excellent article, overall Rand. I do starkly disagree with some of your assumptions that lead you to your preferred solutions.
I think Joe pretty much nailed it with regard to the depot argument.
Metaphors and analogies as you have pointed out in other contexts are dangerous.
The wagon train analogy is particularly apt and contradicts your own argument.
If the only way frontiersmen could get food and water for their horses and oxen was to go to fixed bases and limited oases in the West, the West would never have been settled. If the only way to jumpstart providing those fixed bases was the union army setting up or using depots, again, the west would not only never have been settled but neither would California.
The wagon trains were able to feed themselves off the land around them, literally for free in the area around them. There is no comparison with anything or any planetary body in the solar system. There is always a delta-v cost with chemical rockets that fully or almost fully exceeds the benefits of resources available, never mind the inefficiencies with mining in space.
I’ve always thought a more appropriate pre-industrial analogy to spaceflight than wagon trains would be if all ships had to go upriver for hundreds of miles before they would reach any destinations at all. Colonization of the new world becomes unthinkable in that context.
Mass fraction, as painful as the fact is, matters when it comes to scale and costs.
The fact is if you actually do the math for chemical rockets, no matter how favorable the economic scaling laws you assume, you end up with answers that leave a required demand at least two orders of magnitude above the actual demand, or approaching from the other side, a supply available at a price at least two orders of magnitude above the market-supporting price. This is why government agencies and conglomerates dominate the launch market to the degree they do.
Two orders of magnitude is not something that can be overcome by a doubling or even a tripling of existing government program budgets, or even a complete realignment of government priorities.
A technological solution is actually, as painful to accept as it is for those of us who think the human race desperately needs to be spacefaring yesterday, the only possible solution.
That means higher Isp with low T:W and higher payload fractions.
Breakeven is the goal, and sadly, breakeven occurs at ISPs above 1000s with sufficient T:W to reach orbit.
>>Then how do you get the lander to the moon?
> Using propellant accumulated at a LEO depot.
My mistake, I thought you were talking about Lunar RLVs using Lunar resources. I should be more carefull posting durring packing.
😉
>> Kelly: “…what is the economic basis for the Colony?”
> Steve A Says: To sound a little too philosophical, history shows over
> and over that once the human seed is planted, the economic basis usually follows. ==
There are a lot of ghost towns and ghost colonies on Earth saying the opposite. Also no one will invest in starting unless there is a strong argument and plan for payback. Given the huge upfrount costs, you need to convince pretty conservative folks.
And to make it worse, both moon and Mars don’t have enough gravity for long term health. And no technilogical culture on Earth is having enough kids to even maintain their population – much less grow a colony.
Unless you can show some way to payback investment, adn make a profit by trade, you’re not going to sell the colony.
> On the Moon, a few things come immediately to mind. The regolith to fuel idea is a potential player.
You mean LOx? You’ld have to show how its cheaper to get it from themoon then from Earth – which looks unlikely, especially as launch vehicle tech gets better and the launch market increases.
> Destination tourism is certainly another. Education and R&D could be viable.
Could be, but these don’t sound like something to sustain a colony? More like a large base with high turnover.
My mistake, I thought you were talking about Lunar RLVs using Lunar resources.
I was.
But not initially. We don’t even know if there are practical lunar resources. We have to get to the moon with earth resources first to determine that. But we don’t need heavy lift to do so.