One of the biggest concerns about the commercial spaceflight industry is whether there will be sufficient demand to support multiple players. Technology Review has an article on the subject.
I would note that the limit on crew rotation to the ISS is somewhat arbitrary, and that the crew capacity is artificially limited by lifeboat capacity. I don’t think it would be that hard to increase the life support to handle a larger crew if they could solve this problem. I personally don’t think it’s really a problem — we don’t have “lifeboats” for McMurdo in winter, and I don’t understand why we really need one at ISS, but if we do, the solution is not to evacuate the entire station and bring everyone back to earth, which is really kind of stupid if you think much about it, but it’s been the default requirement since the eighties. As I’ve noted before, the Titanic’s lifeboats weren’t designed to get people back to Southampton — they were designed to provide a safe haven until their passengers could be rescued by another ship. A much better solution is to have a coorbiting habitat (e.g., a Bigelow facility) with a true lifeboat in the form of a crew tug (I’d make the tug large and inflatable as well, to maximize utilization of the docking port, and it could serve as a temporary safe haven itself). If NASA really wanted to goose the market, they’d buy at least one of each.
Rand,
[[[“lifeboats” for McMurdo in winter,]]]
The USAF often flies into McMurdo during the winter so there is a way to evacuate if needed. I think you are thinking of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station which is 800 miles further inland and is inaccessible during winter.
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123065970
[[[Winter flights to Antarctica wrap up]]]
The USAF often flies into McMurdo during the winter
And more often, they can’t. Anyway, use Amundsen if you want. The point stands.
Rand,
[[[And more often, they can’t.]]]
The press release notes only a single flight delayed by bad weather…
I think it’s a given there’ll be a boom, bust & shakeout. It’s a new industry. Remember when America had more than 2 1/2 car companies and more than one airplane manufacturer?
It’s normal and I know we’ve talked about it privately numerous times over the course of this decade. When a big ‘event’ happens, capital will flow into commercial space; investors will line up to throw money at it; it will grow rapidly and lots of things will be tried… then there will be a bust and the weak entries will be cleared out and only the Google’s, Amazon’s and Paypal’s will remain and commercial operations in space will just be ‘something we’ve always had’ as far as the generation growing up then is concerned.
Its just normal capitalism at work.
I don’t see the conditions for a “bubble” here. My view is that a bubble in a technical sense is some period of superexponential growth in the valuation of some asset (such as happened to many businesses during the dotcom boom) or a long period of higher than average growth of said asset (education) that leads to overvaluation of the asset by a considerable amount. Here, the problem is that there’s simply too much supply and not enough demand at the current price point, a different problem. I’d just call it “oversupply”.
I wouldn’t call NASA’s current spending a “bubble” unless it’s going away. If they consistently spend money and the expenditures track inflation or real needs fairly well, then I don’t see the bubble there.
Having said that, there might be a bubble in government-funded aerospace R&D. There’s an index called the NASA New Start Inflation Index, which alleges to track the costs of aerospace R&D. The problem with it though is that it apparently is also used to determine expenditures for current government funding in the area. So there’s this feedback effect as past jumps in the index become future jumps in spending (and in the index). End result is that it grows faster than traditional measures of inflation (for example, from 1980 to now, the GDP deflator index doubled while this index grew an additional third).
Just like with other methods of transportation when they first get commercialized.
It happened with the canals (overbuilding and a lot of marginal ones)
It happened with railroads (overbuilding & some marginal routes)
It happened with automobiles (Packard, Nash, Plymouth, Tucker, etc.)
It happened with airplanes (Wright, Curtis, Douglas, etc.)
It happened with airlines (Eastern, People Express, TWA, etc.)
It will happen with spacecraft. The best and/or the most nimble will survive.
The Titanic is probably a poor example to cite of successful rescue system design, since the lifeboats were mostly designed to satisfy outdated government regulations by owners who thought they’d never be needed.
On the other hand, the SS Trevessa’s boats were designed so they were capable of getting their passengers 1700 miles to Mauretius, and a good thing too.
The space tug/lifeboat idea is an interesting one. NASA could operate like the Coast Guard. It would be an enabler to the success of private industry.
You could argue that we were in a bubble for access to LEO and the bubble burst when Ares I was canceled.
If NASA really wanted to goose the market
Isn’t encouraging the private sector supposed to be part of their charter? The problem is nobody seems to be keeping their feet to the fire leaving them to police themselves. The only thing they seem to do very well is distribute the contracts to all the right voting districts.
To get beyond a burst bubble I’ve advocated a settlement beyond the moon. The current budget is fine for the purpose if they focus on the important things and quit wasting money in areas they have no business doing. Buying some habitats from a private company and putting them in orbit with others and putting a transfer tug in orbit as well is exactly right. They should do exactly one other thing… make a market for fuel to orbit.
Getting fuel to orbit is going to be the most expensive part of human space exploration, dwarfing all other expenses including access for other people and things.
Many people have been waiting for a space flight for a long time. I sometimes wonder for how long Virgin Galactic clients will keep waiting. If they never get to fly in Virgin Galactic, it may sour these people never to spend money on spaceflight again. This could delay the industry for another generation.
Not keeping SS1 flying before SS2 got ready = big mistake.
Not keeping SS1 flying before SS2 got ready = big mistake.
Why? No offense, but it looked like SS1 was very unsafe. Killing people is another way to sour people on space flight for a while. And SS2 seems well underway to achieving flight (they have been doing a lot of test flights with the carrier plane and a few with the SS2 prototype).
it looked like SS1 was very unsafe
Agreed. Even the footage from the promo video released yesterday showed SS1 slewing about as it climbed. Not that I take it as indicating an unsafe craft, just that it looked “less solid” than I expected.
People pay to fly on old military jets which are not exactly safe either. As long as people know what they are getting into I see no problem.
As it is there is presently no commercial space flight market outside the people doing the commercial Soyuz flights. So if there is a bubble, it is happening before the market even actually started. At least the dot-com bust people actually had websites which people used, even if they could not generate a profit.
New Space survived the X-Prize Bubble, it will survive this one…