Neil Woodward of ESMD is chairing a panel on how commercial activities can fit into the Vision.

Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing gave a short presentation on the value of having propellant depots in cis-lunar space (he calls them "gasteroids" to the collective groan of the audience). They have the capability of increasing landed mass on the moon from 18 to 51 tons of cargo. They provide a market for commercial providers (300 tons of propellant per year). They also provide a means for international participation that doesn't put them on the critical path (international partners could provide both the propellant and the extra lunar cargo). And it's not in NASA's current plans.

Ken Davidian talked about the need to reduce or remove barriers of entry for commercial space companies.
-- Investor funding
-- Production of commercial space goods and services
-- Demand for commercial space goods and services
- Example of Multi-Phase procurements
-- prize competitors
-- funded space act
-- FAR 12 Contracts
- X PRIZE essentially led to COTS

[Note, above Davidian comments, which I was distracted during, gratefully stolen from Clark Lindsey]

Jim Dunstan: Describing relative difficulties between working with NASA and the Russians. Thinks NASA's biggest problem is hubris. "Get over yourselves."

NASA does not own space.
There is on inalienable right to explore space.
The public doesn't care that much about space.
Neither NASA or the current private space companies know much about business.

Wants to get rid of Space Act Agreements. No enforceability clauses, so any money spent is wasted. Doesn't like FARs and government contracting, but at least they're available. Have to kill "cancel for convenience." Without stiff penalties, hard to get investment. NASA needs to hire business people, not engineers or ex-military people. Same thing for engineers. Need good business help and good legal help.

Remember Dreamtime. A disaster between Hollywood media types and engineers at NASA who had no clue how to put a business together.

Jeff Greason: What does government do well? Railroads were big hit, but government running railroads less than successful. Government did a good job of creating aircraft industry in the US, after the disaster of attempting to have the government own/operate vehicles. No economic activity in Antarctica.

By government's nature, it's an unreliable customer and unreliable supplier, due to being a creature of politics. Private sector much more predictable. Whether or not greed is good, it's predictable. No government infrastructure to guarantee continuing supply of tennis shoes, but they're always available.

If the government has a mission to create a lunar infrastructure, it has to be with heavy commercial involvement to be affordable, but it seems to be the other way around. If the government is the only customer, hard to raise private money. Would have made sense to utilize transportation that other satellite customers also wanted to use.

Points out fragility of having a single government-developed vehicle, so if a commercial customer of a lunar base, you'll be out of luck if the system goes down. Agrees with Dallas that propellant depots make sense as a market. Also critical on lunar end regardless of location. Will eventually need to produce propellant on the moon, and will need places to store it. Architecture in mind doesn't look like one NASA is building. Unclear whether it's opportunity lost or deferred, because unclear whether or not this architecture will be completed.

The notion that you'll build something, then operate it for a while, then hope you can pawn it off on someone else is not a good plan. If a lunar base isn't pre-leased, there's something wrong with it, either in transportation infrastructure or base design or something else, but NASA won't feel the pain, unlike a private company.

NASA has a disease of no pain receptors.

NASA can't successfully run the railroad, or be a property developer, or be a landlord without even talking to the customers, but that's what's happening.

Wants the government to spend its money in such a way as to at least potentially be useful, but understands that this isn't a guarantee.

I liked Bienhoff before and I like him even better now. I hope "gastroids!" attracts additional publicity ^_^

Onto more serious matters:
"NASA has a disease of no pain receptors."
Wouldn't that be leprosy? Uh-oh...

Actually the government did a pretty good job of running the railroads in World War I and ran the Alaskan Railroad well for 60 years before the state of Alaska bought it to keep it from private ownership. In fact the equipment moderization and traffic control systems developed by the USRA became the standard for excellence for decades afterward. Only in the 1930's did Diesel-electrics start to replace the USRA design locomotives.

I suspect Jeff Gleason was referring to Amtrak, which has the curse of trying to provide a service no one wants in most of the U.S., intercity passenger trains, which should have been allowed to go extinct in the 1970's. Basically the railroads couldn't run it successfully in competition with airlines and automobiles so they dumped it on the government.

BTW that was my post above. I forget this site doesn't save names.

I can never get traction with my product names, even when I'm the primary designer.

Our company has a 3D inter active graphics toolkit for developing data visualization apps, which I wanted to name OGWiz (Oh Gee Whiz) for Open Graphics WIZard. I thought one of the clients was going to get sick on me.

On application built on top of this is called "RiteView" (our company is Rite-Solutions). We added a web-based collaboration capability. I want to call it "Collaborite." One of my fellow engineers said he couldn't even bring himself to type it.

RLVnews reported Bienhoff mentioning the possibility of developing gastroids in a COTS manner. I'm wondering if as a precursor one could break it down into smaller problems and goals and have LLC/CC-like competitions.

Mauldin: the OGWiz name was a very good one in my opinon.

I like the name, myself, although I think "gasteroids" rolls off the tongue a little better, with the extra syllable.

ION, I saw a report that Northrup wants to buy out Scaled. Thoughts?

Seems I need more e keys on my keyboard ^_^

It will be interesting to see the details on the Northrup Grumman Scaled Composites deal on monday but I can't say I'm worried. NG had a 40% stake in SC before the deal and it doesn't seem like SC/Burt Rutan had any pressing need to sell the controlling 60% unless they wanted to (I haven't looked up any ownership records but it would strike me as rather strange if it wasn't SC or Rutan himself who sat on those 60%).

Unless Rutan has decided he wants to start something new (could be fun) or retire (I hope not) I don't expect any big changes to SC.

Gasteroids are a very good idea, and Jon Goff's ideas about developing on-orbit propellant storage and transfer seem pretty much the same. Perhaps Boeing will develop and publish the specifications for the interfaces, like IBM did for their PC way back when.

And that should be gasteroids-plural, for sure. Having multiple places to refuel removes another bottleneck from the critical path, increases competition, increases the private sector involvement, and increases the range of possible missions.

Note that Bigelow stations would be very convenient places to locate gasteroids...

As shocking as it may seem to folks here the NG buyout of Scaled likely has nothing to do with SpaceshipTwo.

The USAF has been interested in a military version of the Proteus that Scaled Composites has been working on with Northrop-Grumman for a while. This merger would serve to strengthen Northrop-Grumman’s bid in that competition as well as future competitions for advanced UAVs. That is very likely the prime motive as Northrop-Grumman as UAVs are a key business and revenue center for it.

Alt.space folks forget that Scaled Composites was a defense contractor, and sub-contractor, long before they became an "new space" firm. That is their bread and butter business and where they learned the technology needed for craft like the White Knight and SpaceshipOne.

As for SpaceshipTwo, as long as VG keeps the money flowing SpaceshipTwo will move forward, just as was the case with Paul Allen and Spaceshipone. And that is how its suppose to work in a business.

I don't think the problem with Amtrak is that no one wants to ride it - there are plenty of people using those trains that they have. I think the problem with Amtrak is that it costs too much.

There is a market for trains -- some people don't like to fly, traditionally people who liked to drink preferred the train because there were not the same limits on what they could be served as on a plane, some people want to take in the scenery, a lot of people don't like to drive that much. The problem is that Amtrak cannot serve the market that they have without requiring large amounts of operating subsidy.

Many in the advocacy community argue that "all modes of transportation have government involvement and the Amtrak subsidy is small compared to highways and airlines." By many objective measures, however, the Amtrak subsidy is large, perhaps by a factor 10 or more, per unit of transportation provided -- if Amtrak were scaled to the size of the highway program, it would dwarf the defense budget.

Perhaps the government in the guise of Amtrak wastes money; perhaps trains are a labor-intensive and hence high-cost way of moving people in this age. You would think that a train would be cost saving over a bus because one operator (and I believe Amtrak is down to one crew member driving the train) can drive an entire train. But the bus driver is driver, ticket collector, baggage handler, passenger attendant all in one employee while passenger trains, either for historical/union contract considerations or perhaps for other reasons (like the rail advocacy community throwing a fit if diners and sleeping cars are removed from trains) have a lot of people to do the job of one person on a bus.

You would think that trains should be cheaper than airliners, but a passenger coach these days can cost as much as 3 million dollars (compared with low hundred-thousands for an intercity bus coach). When an airplane travels 10 times as fast, multiply the 3 million by 10 and you get 30 million dollars of rail equipment to have the productivity of a current generation regional jet. The maintenance on railroad equipment seems also to be expensive for something that can have much larger structural design margins than an airplane.

I suggested to a passenger rail advocate that NASA is "Amtrak in Space", because 1) they are both in the transportation business, 2) they both cost too much for the services they produce, 3) they both have an advocacy community (train nuts vs space nuts) that is critical of how their respective agency was run but realizes that the government is the only game in town at this time, and 4) the vast public out there is both rather indifferent to what Amtrak or NASA is going.

I got an earful about how there was no comparison because NASA got 30 times the money of Amtrak owing the Texas Congressman Tom DeLay and that Amtrak was all pork and no one cared about it. I tried reasoning that 1) NASA was nowhere near 30 times Amtrak: based on an engineering back-of-the-envelope cost accounting of Shuttle ops and the percentage the Shuttle accounted for all of NASA, it was more like 10 times, 2) even if NASA was at a larger scale and rail advocates would sacrifice some anatomy to ditch NASA and get that large amount of money into trains, NASA too had an advocacy community with a long list of talking points about why money spent on NASA served a public purpose.

Anyway, next time I saw that person, he gave me this "we were both wrong" non-apology, apology and said that the NASA budget was not 10 billion by my estimate or 30 billion by his but 15 billion. The 15 billion could have been out-year proposals for this VSE thing too, which we will believe when we see. I think that a lot of shrill political-advocate types are pains you-know-where. I couldn't care whether NASA was 10 times, 30 times, or 100 times Amtrak; the point is that Amtrak is one of a raft of relatively minor programs (compared to Defense or Social Security) kept going by a mix of pork barrel spending and advocacy group agitation.

So there you have it. NASA is Amtrak in Space. I am saying there are arguments that train travel as well as space travel offer some broad social benefits to justify government subsidy, but both NASA and Amtrak cost too much for the amount of transportation they provide.

Paul,

The point is Jeff Gleason's statement is false in that the government does have a good record of running railroads when its allowed to run them as a business. In World War I the USRA ran the railroads far better then they were being run at the time and most of the innovative operational procedures like CTC were kept afterward. Also rolling stock designs by USRA continued to be produced by industry for decades after the USRA released the railroads from its control after the war.

The Alaskan Railroad was always well run with costs comparable to private railroads, it just had a limited revenue base because not many folks lived in Alaska. But that was why it was built and run by the government after private industry failed to do the job.

And in 1970 Conrail took six private railroads that went bankrupt under private management and turned them into a very well run railroad that turned a profit, until its competitors, the Norfolk and Chessie systems, engineered its sale in 1987 to eliminate the competition it was giving them. The Winner, Norfolk, paid almost 2 billion for it and many still see that as a steal given its revenue streams and low cost structure.

Now, going back to Amtrak. Amtrak does very well in the Northeast where its run like a business. If it could limit its service to those routes it would make a nice profit

The problem comes with its "legacy" routes that its not allowed to cut or rationalize because the local Congress critters want to keep passenger service to their districts. In fact that was why its was created, because the traffic density did not justify the level of service demanded and private railroads wanted out.

And to complicate matters, Amtrak is not able to adopt cost saving measures because of union staffing rules for passenger trains which is another burden. Railroads developed some very innovatative low cost solutions to passenger trains in the 1950's and 1960's like RDCs that unions simply shut down. Which was why they were more then happy to dump the passenger trains on the government.

And railroad coaches cost so much for the same reasons rockets do, lack of economies of scale.