I got a response to last week’s Fox column from Congressman Weldon’s office, specifically from his staffer Brendan Curry, who’s one of the good guys, if you’re interested in getting into space. But it shows how even the folks who sincerely want to make things happen can often get into mind sets that continue to constrain us.

Rand–

I must take exception to a portion of your Terrestrial [sic] Musings column of August 1st, 2002. To characterize Dave Weldon?s action as pork protection is not only simplistic but also wrong. I am also afraid your characterization of next generation vehicles and their operations are overly simplistic.

You are absolutely correct in pointing out the severe problems we have at KSC regarding the infrastructure, but you take a leap of faith that says for next generation RLVs, current concerns about KSC will not matter much because the new vehicle will be or should essentially be Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO). The U.S. government has already gone down that path in an attempt with SSTO under the ill-fated X-33 program. As you are well aware this was to be a vehicle that would lead to a commercially operated RLV with expedited operations from anywhere in the U.S.

Well, actually, I’m not aware of that–I’m only aware that that was the stated intent by the contractor, but their actions belied it from program start to finish.

Absolutely no one in the space policymaking process is even suggesting that the 2nd generation RLVs will be SSTO. The plan is that these RLVs (most likely Two Stage to Orbit) will have fully returnable/reusable stages.

Well, I’m not sure that there really is a “plan,” but I agree that it is unlikely that there will be any single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicles in the near future, because the technology needed for them is probably insufficiently mature (though the failure of the X-33 was neither necessary, or sufficient, to draw such a conclusion. It failed for reasons of flawed management–not for any technical reasons relating to SSTO per se).

Fortunately, SSTO is also neither necessary, or sufficient, to provide low-cost space access. My column was not referring to SSTO when it said that the next generation of space transports would not be “shedding parts down range,” though I can see how Brendan may have misinterpreted it to infer that. I simply meant that we wouldn’t be dropping stages on peoples’ heads, not that there would be no staging.

Furthermore, there is no other facility in the world like KSC that has twenty years of RLV experience and therefore is ready to handle any new class of RLV.

I assume that Brendan is referring to Shuttle here.

It’s just barely a reusable vehicle. “Rebuildable” would be a more accurate description of a vehicle that has to be torn apart and inspected after every flight, and only flies once or twice a year.

And much of what we know about building space transports (I really dislike the term “reusable launch vehicle”) comes from the Shuttle in the negative sense–it’s taught us how not to do things, so it’s not clear that using Shuttle facilities is in any way a virtue. As we say in the software biz, that’s not a feature–it’s a bug.

Congressman Weldon?s action is not a case where a Congressman is blindly lashing out because of fears of job losses at the expense of improved efficiency. Rep. Weldon has repeatedly been on the record as supportive of all efforts to improve efficiency within the space program. This bill language is a case where arbitrary decisions were made that could hamper efforts currently underway to improve next generation launch vehicle operations at America?s premier launch facility.

I never said, or intended to imply, that the Congressman was doing anything “blindly.” As I said, I’m sure that he’s quite sincere in his desire to see a more successful and vibrant space program. However, the fact that his actions protected jobs in his home district is indisputable. That it was also the correct policy decision (in the narrow sense that sending money to Wallops was probably foolish) was simply an additional virtue.

Rand, there is no vehicle on the drawing boards anywhere that has a chance of flying anytime soon that will not need the facilities and capabilities that reside at either Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral Air Force Station or the capabilities of our existing West Coast launch facilities. Third generation vehicles may indeed possess the capability of airline-like operations, but for the foreseeable future we are wed to more traditional launch vehicle technology.

Brendan Curry
Legislative Assistant.
Office of U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, M.D.

I doubt if Brendan has access to all drawing boards everywhere, and he might want to reconsider this statement. I suspect that what he means is that NASA has no plans to build one. There are a couple of implicit (and in my opinion, mistaken) assumptions in Brendan’s letter that shape our current space policy, and not for the better.

One is that NASA (as an agency–not the individuals within it) knows how to reduce launch costs, and that their judgment in such matters is of any utility to decision makers who sincerely want to achieve that goal. Other, that is, in a negative sense, just as, in the absence of any other information, I occasionally base my vote in elections on the exact opposite of whatever the New York Times and LA Times editorial boards recommend.

The other (which is a result of the first, and NASA’s advice) is that the primary barrier to low-cost launch is a lack of technology (as stated in the last paragraph of Brendan’s letter). This is an article of faith among those who support programs like the Space Launch Initiative, in which the purpose is for NASA to develop “technology” which will then somehow become incorporated into new vehicles by industry. Since NASA is a technology agency, it’s natural for them to want billions of dollars to pursue technology, but policy types should know better.

The real barrier to low-cost launch is lack of funding applied toward that purpose, which can be attributed, more fundamentally, to lack of market. While we’ve spent billions of government dollars on the launch problem for the past couple decades, it’s almost all gone toward “trade studies” and “technology development,” and very little of it has gone toward understanding the real problem. Thus, it’s not surprising that launch costs, years and gigabucks later, remain high.

When I worked on one of those many trade studies in the mid-1980s (this one was called the Space Transportation Architecture Study), I saw something very interesting in the data, but it was a story that never made it into the official policy discussions that resulted from it.

It turned out that, for a given set of mission requirements, there were minor differences in cost from one vehicle design to another, or from one technology choice to another. But there were huge differences in cost when you went from a small market size to a large one.

The simple lesson was that, no matter what you built, it would reduce costs tremendously if you flew it a lot. Even the Shuttle could be flown much more cheaply (on a per-flight basis), if you invested in the facilities and vehicles necessary to fly it hundreds of times per year instead of a few.

Conversely, no matter how spiffy the design, if you only flew the official “mission model,” which was simply an extrapolation of the minimal things that we were planning to do in space (based on the assumption of high launch costs in perpetuity), you couldn’t reduce costs significantly.

Markets–not technology, are the key to low-cost access. Provide the technologists with a market, and the technology will happen, for the most part, automatically as needed to build the vehicles to satisfy it. Because the dirty little secret is that most of the technology necessary to build low-cost space transports, at least a lot lower cost than anything currently flying, is already available off the shelf.

What NASA is doing with SLI may be useful, if it isn’t allowed to turn into another disaster like the X-33 program, in which all the eggs are placed in one fragile basket, and then we run down a rocky hill with that basket in pursuit of a single Shuttle replacement based on hyper-advanced technology.

But to the degree that SLI proves useful, it will be in the development of what technologists call enhancing technology–not enabling technology. That means that the technology that we have in hand is already sufficient to dramatically lower launch costs–enhancing technologies will just allow things to become cheaper still down the road, and the continued promotion of the notion that we can’t do anything with technology in hand is simply a recipe for delay and discouragement of investment.

What’s currently lacking is not the technology, but the will to employ it, and to utilize it on a large scale. Fortunately, private enterprise is starting to recognize this, and those companies that tap the unfulfilled desires of millions of people to go to space themselves, and raise the money to do so, will leave the government launch efforts (including government launch facilities) in the dust.

If the government itself were serious about lowering launch costs, rather than simply giving NASA more money for more technology studies, they’d be creating markets, rather than technology. They’d simply put the billions of dollars in escrow as a prize, to purchase thousands of launches from the private sector. It would use as many of them as it needed for its own purposes, and then auction the rest back on to the market, providing an industry-creating incentive akin to the airmail of the 1930s.

And it wouldn’t care where they were launched from, as long as the price was right.