Tory Bruno and Gwynne Shotwell have very different space-business philosophies. I think that Gwynne is right, but the good news is that for now, the two companies are more complementary than competitive. And the Air Force will want to continue to maintain two providers.
7 thoughts on “Yesterday’s Launch Panel At NSS”
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I would complain about the substantive problems with Bruno’s statement, but I can’t get past the nit-pick that kerosene is emphatically not a high explosive.
Tempted to ask Tory what he’s doing going around each day in vehicles that are carrying highly volatile fuel (gas) on roads. But there is a lot more propellant on rockets.
The bottom line is, will we have the opportunity to explore how to drive the risks down to “commodify” space launch. That is what SpaceX & Blue are doing, and XS-1 may help too. So (unsurprisingly) I agree with Gwynne – you gotta try (…and try…and try…)
The other part of Tory’s argument, about “large payloads” is based in the ULA “(near) bespoke” launch model. Well, just as there were SuperGuppies and still the An-125, there may be special cases. But with reliable launch and a good, reasonably priced space assembly infrastructure, you fit the parts to the launch systems and put the items together in orbit as needed.
Bruno is not wrong in saying that a typical EELV class payload cost far more than the rocket. And ‘costs’ really just means ‘takes much more manhours’. So unless somehow a lot of payloads suddenly require a lot less manhours to design and build, he is correct.
These payloads might come in form of serial-produced spacecraft, bulk commodities, people or who knows what, but none of these payload categories are available today.
Oh, I agree re the payloads – today.
BTW someone pointed out to me that to keep the income coming for now ULA has to keep feeding from traditional sources that won’t see space launch as commodity. For that matter, so does SpaceX, but they’re already expected by the market to be seeking the commodity model, eventually, whereas ULA comes from a different starting point. Sure, they may be envisioning creative use of ACES stages but that’s irrelevant to their customers at the moment.
So the real question is, where is an order of magnitude cost reduction for ~EELV class payloads going to come from ? And how soon ?
One can see it happening on the small sat side where Cubesats have made big strides in commodification of parts and kits. And there is a little ecosystem of companies that do builds, launches and operations of these almost as a service now.
Space and launch are two different issues. Different engineering and different economics.
The space economy will eventually drive the launch economy, but without a permanent presence (the ISS doesn’t count for much) there is no significant space economy.
Ironically, space is the easier engineering requirement of the two and progress could be magnitudes faster if we focused on it.
We need long term solutions for radiation protection. Everything else is just incremental improvement of what we already know.
I see mars as an anchor tenant for space development; others don’t of course. So let’s get BA330s in orbit, on the moon and other places. Traffic and freight between these points will be the space economy that drives down costs by increasing frequency and volume.
Arguing that launch costs must come down is mom and apple pie. Nobody is arguing otherwise (although the article points out that some refuse to see the historical precedents.) Private companies in real competition will continue to work on it without help from the peanut gallery. We need to focus on the space economy which is being neglected and much more impactful.
It’s harder to see the benefits, but that’s because we’ve built no infrastructure to work with. We need general purpose refuelable ships in orbit now. They can act as depots. Once several are in place the lightbulbs for there uses will go off like strobes and the space economy will finally get started.
We don’t have to over engineer the general purpose ships either. They need cost no more than launch costs… a $100m launch puts a $100m BA330 class ship in orbit. We could afford lots of them and incrementally upgrade them over time.