“[W]hat the world
All posts by Sam Dinkin
Space Space Glut?
Aviation Week has scooped Bigelow on his plans for next week. Bigelow predicts 800 people to orbit in the next ten years. That’s a bold prediction given that there haven’t been 800 people in orbit in the last 50. Where is the demand? What’s the price point? Where is the supply of transportation? If they are using K-1, they will likely get a good price on the order of $17 million/flight which I’m told is only ever quoted for very high frequency long launch program’s like Bigelow’s. I’m guessing K-1 can’t support 3 flights per month since it’s only one ship and 9-day turns seem unreasonable for orbital vehicles. If Bigelow has to cover transportation and the launch cost of his 6 or so heavy launches for all of his outposts, then he has to charge a pretty penny to the visitors.
Who can afford $6 million/month to be on station? Granted, $5 billion would be a bargain for 800 man months in space, but Bigelow still needs to get buyers to step forward who want to station people in space. A factor of five decrease in the price to orbit and a US option might generate 25 rich visitors per year instead of one. The other 55?
I don’t see China scrapping its own tech development path to use commercial. I don’t see India scrapping its own tech development path to use commercial. Western countries don’t seem too keen on astronautics. Maybe one from Poland, one from Hungary, one from Saudi and one from Singapore. Other up and coming countries that have the wealth to spend, but not enough to develop a full rocketry and space station program? Drug companies? If countries with $100 billion GDP don’t want the glory at that price, do the drug companies want the PR with turnover of $10 billion/year?
What Bigelow needs to get countries and companies to fund his vision is lobbyists in the national capitols of 40 countries to set up government astronaut corps and subsidies to national champion businesses to do glorified industrial research in space on the government dime. The case has not yet been made that there is any demand beyond national prestige demand and tourism demand.
The US space program is certainly spending a lot more on Space Station and Moon Mars than Bigelow is spending to achieve substantially more capabilities. It will take a major effort to get the battleship approach to Moon and Mars exploration cancelled in favor of Bigelow modules. If the major aerospace prime contractors figure out that Bigelow offers an alternative to Ares and the lunar habs and landers (and Mars equipment), they will lobby to keep the US government exploration on NASA developed equipment. NASA will abet this.
Bigelow is building a better mousetrap, but is that enough?
Turning Tide on Gambling
My press guy also runs a PAC that is trying to legalize Texas Hold ‘Em in Texas. Should be quite a show at the Texas Capitol tomorrow.
Space Marathon
An astronaut is going to run the Boston Marathon remotely. I think the astronauts should demand conjugal visits.
Winning Space Game Biz Model
Here is my Space Access presentation:
I asked Robin about her half-price contract with Constellation Services and she says it does not include a test flight, so perhaps if we are not first to buy that, we can have half as many players to get to the trip for two around the Moon.
Dawn of Modular Spaceflight Revolution
John Carmack’s announcement of a modular rocket that can reach suborbital space for $25,000 per module is revolutionary. Each module can independently reach suborbital space. Group the modules together and any size or shaped payload can reach suborbital space. The cost to get to space is $250 per module in fuel costs.
In a video that John said will be posted to his web site, he showed the modules being hooked together in a square arrays. These arrays can then be stacked for staging.
He predicts that he will produce the Armadillo orbital “Sputnik” which John also referred to as Mitchell Burnside-Clapp’s DYANN–Do You All Notice Now?
There are two revolutions here. The first is an open source garage revolution. With a small warehouse and a budget closer to Charlie Farmer’s in Farmer Astronaut than COTS winners RpK and SpaceX, Armadillo in a humble, matter-of-fact tone is brashly announcing an orbital program.
The second is the price of the revolution. At $25,000 per module, the capital cost per delta V is unprecedented and substantially lower than RpK or SpaceX.
This revolution was incrementally developed in plain sight and demonstrated in plain sight. No one thought Carmack’s Pixel and Texel were minimum concept proofs for a 64-module version. No one thought that by looking at the specifications they were seeing the ultimate cheap first stage and second stage and third stage.
Carmack thinks he can get the mass ratio down from 27 to 15 with some low cost evolutionary modifications. At 15-1, he can loft “Pixel 2” onto a suborbital trajectory with a 64-module first-stage lifter made up of 16 Pixels arrayed in a 4-4 grid or 8×8 single modules. Pixel 2 will be full of fuel and be the second stage. On top of Pixel will be a single module with a 25 lb. payload that will make it all the way to orbit. The cost for this delivery? The capital costs would be about $1.7 million if he can stay under $25,000 per module. If only the first stage is reusable, the cost per flight would be $150,000. If the first and second stage are reusable, the cost per flight would be $60,000. For a three stage system, that is a not very revolutionary price of $2400 per pound to orbit (albeit revolutionary vs. old space of $10,000+ per pound though.)
If they achieve a two-stage to orbit system where the second stage is also reusable, that would deliver a 100 lb payload to orbit for $35,000. That is roughly half fuel and oxidizer and half capital assuming a 100 flight lifetime. $350/lb is revolutionary. If this could be scaled up to Spacex Falcon IX payload size of 22,770 lbs., that’s $8 million or $22 million for a Falcon IX heavy sized payload of 62,500 lbs. An array of 100×100 modules supporting a second stage array of 25×25 modules boggles the mind and would cost $265 million in capital costs at $25,000 each. The flight rate assumptions would not be invalidated, however, because the vehicle could be broken up to support the suborbital tourism industry and smaller orbital payloads.
On the optimistic side, this price is before mass production. This mass ratio is before switching to methane (a 10% improvement in ISP over alcohol and a 50+% fuel price drop too). Google revolutionized servers by using modular white box CPUs. Now Carmack is making a bid to do the same thing. Nevertheless, Henry Vanderbilt cautions me that there is a long way to go from a view graph to orbit.
———Update 3/24/07 7:00 MST———
A wide plane requires a bunch of successively stronger connectors moving inward and results in very little additional payload delivered by the outside modules. This is especially true with a square grid which require more connections moving in from the corners than a hexagonal one. Other possibilities are more stages so connections are shorter and more vertical and larger, taller modules for lower stages.
Carbon LOX Stock and Barrel
Clean coal which was a $10 billion subsidy issue in the last election is developing. It involves capturing carbon dioxide by first burning it with liquid oxygen. Buy LOX stock. I like Air Liquide. There are two technologies: one rich: they inject steam, use heat to split off the oxygen to burn the coal and use the hydrogen to generate more electricity. The other lean: just use more LOX.
Both are idiotic from an economic standpoint. To add a hydrogen system and make the coal crazy hot enough to split water will use a lot of LOX at $1/gallon or so. Clean coal is an attempt to minimize the carbon output per electricity instead of the carbon output per money. Better than producing 1,000,000 barrels of CO2 via clean coal, would be to generate 3,000,000 barrels of carbon dioxide enriched air. Underground storage of air is a lot cheaper than buying hundreds-of-dollars-a-ton of LOX to burn $20/ton coal. We ought to be able to achieve sequestration for under $5/ton of CO2. And the plant modification is low-tech. Just direct the exhaust into a pipeline to inject it into the ground.
Checking Out
Time to fission. It’s me, Sam, saying I am signing off for good over here at Transterrestrial. Check out my new blog at Decisive Win.
Au revoir.
Anti-Krugman 2:
Single Horrible Payor
Paul Krugman today attempts to answer the question, “Why is the insurance industry growing rapidly, even as it covers fewer Americans?”
In 2005, the percent of uninsured was 15.9%. In 2000, it was 14.0%. In 2000, private insurers covered 72.4% of Americans or 204 million. In 2005, they covered 67.7% or 201 million.
Total number of covered individuals increased from 243 million to 249 million. From 2000-2005, the number employed rose from 137 million to 142 million. The number unemployed rose from 6 million to 8 million.
Could it be that we were experiencing a boom in 2001 and coverage peaked as a percent and that it will rise again if we have another boom with 4% unemployment? The percent of the population working has dropped from 67.1% to 66%.
Could it be that people are feeling secularly more healthy and feel like they can go without health insurance? Between 1999 and 2004, life expectancy at birth has risen from 76.7 years to 77.9 years. At least average health overall is improving by that indicator.
Could it be that the sector is over-regulated? CATO estimates that about 1/6 of daily uninsured would buy insurance if it was less heavily regulated. That would allow health care deregulation to take us from 15.9% to 13.3% uninsured and allow everyone else to save a total of $170 billion a year or $680 per covered individual per year or about 1.4% of GDP.
In short, insurers are covering more people. They are helping increase the average lifespan of all Americans. They are doing it despite a substantial burden of regulation.
Anti-Krugman 1
Paul Krugman brought some great analysis of economics, the dismal science, to the New York Times Op-Ed page, but has consistently beat the drum in recent years for being dismal about every Bush decision and inaction. I am going to start an anti-Krugman column to take apart each criticism. These antibodies might allow us to have a debate that would allow both less reactive talking points for Democrats and more constructive criticism for the Administration.
The Krugman column is behind the Times Select wall. The cheapest way to pierce this wall is to order home delivery of the Times and go on regular three-month vacations.
Today’s Krugman column has the title “King of Pain”.