Keith Cowing also wonders why NASA would want a missile defense analyst on a space exploration advisory committee. My reading of the VSE and the Aldridge Report is that the new vision should support several goals, one of which is defense, both national and planetary. It would in fact be quite useful to have someone from the space defense community involved in the planning, to keep an eye out for opportunities for synergism, and to bring a different perspective in the development of systems that could both help in that defense goals, and perhaps complicate them if done without consideration of those other strategic needs.

While it’s not obvious to me exactly how they would fit (other than for the planetary defense role), concern about how LEO activity will coexist with potential LEO missile defense systems is worth worrying about, and it’s not a bad idea to have someone on board who does think about such things for a living.

Keith Cowing wonders why NASA is procuring hardware for military tanks.

Well, without discounting the possibility (even likelihood) that there is something bureaucratically suspect going on here, there is a plausible justification, in that the technology for an oil-free turbine would be very handy for space applications (e.g., power conversion for nuclear systems), reducing maintenance and helping with reliability. Since the funding is from Glenn (NASA’s propulsion center), it makes sense that it would develop this potential dual-use technology. It may even have other civilian terrestrial spinoff applications.

It is strange that the applications cited are so military specific, though. Equally strange is that the application (a diesel environment) is so specific so as to make it look suspect as a pure technology development. We’re a long way off from space diesels.

Dale Amon has some interesting, and plausible, speculation about Richard Branson’s business plans for space transportation.

There are a variety of ways to subsidize space transportation. Rand’s idea to implement my proposal is a good one. I chose the $15 billion number not because I thought it was the minimum necessary to kick start the industry, but to beg the question about what we are getting from NASA for the same amount of money. I do not propose to use new spending.

Instead of an auction for launch services, followed by a delivery of cash on completion of the launch there are several other ways to implement a subsidy:

• Have a box on the launcher’s corporate tax return that says payload to orbit
• Have a box on the customer’s corporate tax return that says payload to orbit
• An application like student aid or a federal housing loan with a fixed subsidy level that is adjusted periodically based on the rate of takeup

Rand’s auction is simple and would set the price in advance of flying which would be good.

As for popularity, it will take someone like Eisenhower or Kelly to make this happen. If someone can make the case for California stem cells, the case for space access ought to be possible.

Sam, what I don’t understand about your proposal is, well, how it would actually work. The devil is always in the details in these things. When you say:

It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted.

…what does that mean? What price will they get the service at? Who is purchasing from the launch providers?

My idea would be to have the government purchase some fixed (and large) quantity of various goods and space services (e.g., tickets to LEO, pounds to LEO, maybe even tickets and pounds to the lunar surface), use whatever there was a government need for, and auction the rest back on the market. If the market price turns out to be higher than the price paid by the government, then the program costs nothing at all (other than the cost of the services that the government needs). If it’s a lot more, presumably the providers would stop selling to the government (assuming they were allowed to opt out) and sell directly to the market. If the differential was low, then we’d have a subsidy, in which the cost of the program would be the difference in price between market and government cost of the service.

But in order to make this fly, the country (and its government) would have to decide that having large amounts of activities in space at reduced unit costs were sufficiently important to justify what would be considered a large expenditure in the context of current space activity (essentially doubling the NASA budget under your proposal, but I think you could do a lot of damage to the problem for a few billion a year). There’s been little sign of that so far.

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

See my proposal for a decentralized approach to developing space in this week’s The Space Review here. What people don’t seem to understand about my subsidy proposal that I first put forward last year (See recommendations 10 and 14) is that NASA and DoD would no longer be directing the space programs. It would be private industry and individual citizens who could book whatever missions they wanted. That would lead to the following benefits:

1) Freedom and liberty
2) Capitalism instead of central planning allocating capacity
3) Private development instead of government development

Government would be the primary beneficiary of cost savings since they are the primary space user. They would have more responsibility since all of space would become open for business.

Private industry and citizens would have new services that would be less valuable at first, but would be more price elastic than the government demand.

Thomas James expresses a fear about government lunar bases, and NASA, that I share. We’ve got to break out of Apollo mode. I hope that the new administrator understands this, but so far, I see little sign of it.

John Schwartz of NYT has written “NASA Is Said to Loosen Risk Standards for Shuttle” published today. My cost benefit analysis is here.

The statistics can be simplified. What are the failure modes? What are their probabilities? How much do those probabilities overlap? What rate is it OK for the shuttle to fail? How much does it cost to mitigate the failure modes? Stack rank them according to the highest increase in safety for the lowest cost. Go to work.

So we have a failure mode of about 1% based on 100 trials. So far it has cost $2 billion to mitigate it. That implies that NASA is acting as if the value of the orbiter and crew on each flight is $7 billion or more to make the benefits of the fix outweigh the cost ($2 billlion to achieve a less than 1% reduction in the probability of a fail in 28 flights. $2 billion/(28 * 1%) = $7 billion). The families of the 9/11 victims each received $2.1 million. To compensate the families of astronauts who may die at the same level would cost $15 million. At commercial prices of $16 million for a Falcon V which delivers about 1/4 of a shuttle’s worth to the ISS, we could buy 443 flights for $7 billion not counting range and payload costs or over 100 shuttles flights’ worth. Even using the Ariane at $4,000/lb according to Futron’s 2002 price estimate we could buy 28 shuttle flights’ worth of Ariane payload for $5.6 billion. With viable outside commercial options that are less expensive to build and operate than the shuttle is to just operate, the sale price of the shuttle would be zero. We should not be treating it like a $7 billion asset. So perhaps the cost/benefit analysis is a little off at NASA.

Or maybe the following quote from AWST, 4/11/2005 (subscription required) will give you a better feel for what is really going on at NASA:

“We had one place in the backpack where, because of the confined space, the wire bend was tighter than the specified engineering limit was. And the EVA folks said it will cost us $100,000 to fix this,” [Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle program manager] said. “Well, in the space business, $100,000 is not a lot of money, so I said go fix this.”

This man should be relieved and someone put in place someone who can explain cost-benefit to the public.