Thomas B. Pickens III gave the luncheon speech at the Space Investment Summit yesterday. He thinks that SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler are the "Toyota trucks" of the space infrastructure and that Space Hab will make a good business of packing science payloads to send to the Space Station. He is interested in ISS racks but can do free floating experiments and also work with Bigelow. I asked him afterwards if doing his "due diligence" as a board member before taking over as CEO he talked to the customers. He said that every customer said that they were interested if it were cheaper, more reliable and standardized.

I think that this market may not be as big as Bigelow and Space Hab are hoping. It remains to see if a business can be made. The Bull I prefer is Space Tourism. Space Hab did say they could do logistics missions too. Glad to have you as part of the industry, Thomas B. Pickens. Best of luck.

Sam, I think the best proof that you're right is that the only real way people on Earth in inhospitable places -- tropical jungles, arctic wastes, lonely islands -- make money is by tourism. Without tourism, there's no big reason not to sell Hawaii to the Japanese.

Furthermore, death being what it is, the stream of potential new customers is inexhaustible. You can't say the same thing about technical customers. It may be useful to grow crystals for crystallography in micro-g, but if it's profitable (= expensive) then competition and innovation on Earth will eventually make it less so, perhaps to the point where orbital facilities can't compete.

In Antarctica, they make money by science. But it's not a lot. Even there they get 13,000 tourists a year.

One thing to remember about orbital manufacturing is that getting down is cheap - so costs will probably invert in a few decades. Consider: energy is free, and eventually so are most materials; "land" is free (though buildings are not); freedom from EPA etc.

It would not surprise me if in 40 years light manufacturing was in orbit, and within 60 years heavy manufacturing folowed.

It may be useful to grow crystals for crystallography in micro-g, but if it's profitable (= expensive) then competition and innovation on Earth will eventually make it less so,

If gravity-induced convection were really such a central problem in protein crystal growth, then it could be substantially reduced on Earth by growing the crystal in a strong magnetic field with a large gradient. Water and protein molecules will have nonzero induced magnetic moments (water and typical proteins are diamagnetic, IIRC) and if you tune the field you can get the effective density-driven forces to disappear, at least over a small volume.

> I think the best proof that you're right is that the only real way people
> on Earth in inhospitable places -- tropical jungles, arctic wastes, lonely
> islands -- make money is by tourism.

That would be news to oil workers on the Alaskan North Slope or in the North sea.

> It may be useful to grow crystals for crystallography in micro-g,
> but if it's profitable (= expensive) then competition and innovation
> on Earth will eventually make it less so

That's the big problem at present. Scientists can do a thousand experiments on Earth for every one in space, so terrestrial science has a big edge in innovation.

That will remain true until both cost and turnaround time are drastically reduced.

> One thing to remember about orbital manufacturing is that getting
> down is cheap - so costs will probably invert in a few decades.

It's cheap in terms of energy (propellant), but propellant is not the driving factor in launch costs. Even if getting down required zero propellant, it would still require hardware.

Hardware either has to be launched from Earth or built in space using stuff that has to be launched from Earth (and maintained by people launched from Earth). TANSTAAFL.

That's a problem the Moonies miss. Most of analyses I've seen assume that extracting lunar materials like LOX will have zero (or at least negligable) cost. They miss the dependency of lunar industries on the Earth-LEO-Moon supply chain. If they understood that, they would not argue that we should do nothing to reduce launch costs until after we have created demand by building huge industries on the Moon -- the classic cart before the horse.

That would be news to oil workers on the Alaskan North Slope or in the North sea.

A good point, Edward. Now if only we weren't talking about a vacuum, for God's sake. The very definition of an utter absence of natural resources. (Except for the sunshine to which Sam refers skeptically, which rains down on the Earth's surface nearly as copiously. If we were Venusians an orbital solar-power industry would be a more credible proposition.)

Scientists can do a thousand experiments on Earth for every one in space, so terrestrial science has a big edge in innovation.

Well, and not only that, but what we're after with experiments is, typically, a technique or technology that will work on Earth, i.e. under 9.8 m/s^2 gravity and at the bottom of a lake of O2. If I wanted a better way to grow corn in Iowa, you wouldn't suggest doing crop experiments in pressurized bubbles under the Gulf of Mexico, would you? Similarly, experiments in orbit may be useful for basic research, and invaluable for developing orbital technology, but I can't see them being of any great use in developing Earthbound technology.

That's why I've always thought the "practical" near-term arguments for space access do more harm than good, once people figure out they're mostly bullshit. I think the best arguments for space access are military advantage, national pride (which, despite the cynics, is valuable stuff, just ask the British lately), manifest destiny, and the sheer wonder of it, a/k/a tourism. Why folks concluded in the 70s that making better ball bearings (or whatever) was a better public motivator than the possibility of having your mind blown in wonder is beyond me. Maybe it's Jimmy Carter's fault.

Why folks concluded in the 70s that making better ball bearings (or whatever)

Indeed, 'whatever'. Turns out that ball bearings was an early von Braun idea that was rapidly deflated when he had NASA people talk to the metallurgists at MIT about the idea. It seems a drop of steel solidified in microgravity would acquire the 'morphology of a porcupine'. Ouch.

For some reason, this undead meme went on to eat the brains of credulous space fans.

Why folks concluded in the 70s that making better ball bearings (or whatever)

Indeed, 'whatever'. Turns out that ball bearings was an early von Braun idea that was rapidly deflated when he had NASA people talk to the metallurgists at MIT about the idea. It seems a drop of steel solidified in microgravity would acquire the 'morphology of a porcupine'. Ouch.

For some reason, this undead meme went on to eat the brains of credulous space fans.

I agree that there is great potential for Lunar and orbital manufacture. It just has to have demand that is willing to pay the freight. Until Ed's "horse", a workhorse transportation system comes along, the cost to weight ratio for any profitable exo-Earth manufacture is rivaled by few Earth products. If there is a Lunar city, it will create demand for local manufacture. But how many would go to stay if there is nothing they can buy at first? Total demand for natural materials from space is measured in grams and thousands of dollars. We need something measured in billions of dollars to support pharmaceutical- or chip-style research. We also need it to be lighter than drugs and wafers.

One of the things Pickens is talking about are some of the results of experiments recovered from STS-107. There were some really nice PCG crystals that have given the pharm guys a real breakthrough in treating a certain disease.

The value of PCG research is not for space manufacturing per se, but the evaluation of perfect crystal structures that are very difficult to obtain on the Earth (no matter what is said here). The processes on the Earth can then be improved to obtain the same results. However, you have to know what you want before you do the manufacturing scale production and this is the data that the microgee experiments provide.

As for the porcupine steel ball comment, I would like to see that data as the data that I have seen does indicate that the balls would be perfectly round. There is a whole research thrust related to how surface tension in a microgravity melt of any liquid gives uniform density and a very nice surface structure. The problem is the cost of manufacture to get the hardware up and the product down.

Which is where Ed was going and in this instance I agree with him.

Wishing demand to occur seems to be the modus operandi for ISS, Space Hab and Bigelow. Virgin Galactic says they have $20 million in sales. Space Adventures $20 million/year. I want to see some sales numbers to these excited industrial "prime" customers that are going to do space research. Out of $219 billion in annual private R&D, the space share is? 0%?

CBO sees 20 to 10 launches of US commercial demand a year through 2020. Bigelow gets 12-14? Spacehab pack them all? ISS gets? So are we going to double commercial demand? Why?

CBO sees 20 to 10 launches of US commercial demand a year through 2020. Bigelow gets 12-14? Spacehab pack them all? ISS gets? So are we going to double commercial demand? Why?

You may be out-smarting yourself by dissing a doubling of 'commercial demand'. Bigelow's initial markets, he believes, will be countries and national agencies. Then business-on-business (e.g, maybe Big Pharma - once regular transportation is really there, which he has been told by Pharma was the killer to even trying in the past). Then maybe tourism.
And that's just for LEO.

Sam, you remind me of Southwest Airlines in the late 60s/early 70s. They were simply laughed at and ignored by The Big Guys because they (the Big Guys) felt that the only market that could exist...was the market which then existed. The creation of frequent, cheap flights - often to destinations the majors refused even to serve to begin with...changed everything. In the mid-70s working at JSC I visited my girlfriend in Harlingen twice a month, $15, 350 miles, & 50 minutes each way. They created whole new markets which The Big Guys didn't even acknowledge could exist.

Whole nations can have dreams of being Big Guys; and people like Bigelow offer them the possibility of joining the Big Guys a whole lot sooner, for a whole lot cheaper, than they ever dreamed. (In Bigelow's case, by offering destinations and services).

Each time I listen to Bigelow I'm more impressed; and his talks at Colorado Springs last week were the most impressive yet.

Would a Sam Dinkins of 3 or four decades ago... besides not believing in a Southwest Airlines-type concept.....also not have believed in the Budget Suites concept for Vegas as well?

Dave Huntsman

Dave: Is $7 million for a small, $35 million for a medium and $78 million for a large launch the 'Southwest Airlines' price point? Maybe for tourism. Maybe for science. What I see is that science does not have the political support to fund the marginal cost of doing science on the ISS. I see that there is a very limited sounding rocket market. If you cut the price in half, you may be able to double demand or maybe even triple it. That is not enough for these guys to turn a profit. I don't begrudge them their bets. I want them to succeed and I want the bigger successes more. But that requires finding the leap of faith that requires the least faith per meter leaped.