Clark Lindsey has a good rundown of yesterday’s meeting in Washington on space policy.

A couple of strong impressions came through. Firstly, the end of the Shuttle in 2010 is now taken for granted by everyone. Weldon wants NASA to assign a manager full-time to monitor the transition so that the community disruptions as happened after the end of the Apollo program don’t hit the KSC area again.

I also noticed a widespread awareness of the existence of an entrepreneurial space industry and that it is becoming a force to reckon with.

That’s the title of my piece over at TechCentralStation today on big changes at NASA per its new administrator.

Taylor Dinerman says that the administration has to start getting serious about space weapons. I agree.

[Update late afternoon]

There are several good critiques of the piece in comments, that I don’t necessarily disagree with. My only point was that I agree with his bottom line.

Lots of good stuff over at Clark Lindsey’s site yesterday, including a tribute to the failed space entrepreneurs of the past that laid so much of the groundwork for today’s burgeoning industry. He also has some parting thoughts on last weekend’s Space Access Conference, with a link-rich summary of many of the talks.

Over at The Space Review, Jeff Foust takes my “hangover” metaphor and runs with it in describing the state of the industry as represented by the conference (first of two parts–presumably the second will be next Monday).

In response to my previous post citing Orson Scott Card’s Star Trek critique, Tobias Buckell takes issue with my comment (and Jim Oberg’s concurrence) about Trekkers’ interest in space:

Boy, I’d have to quibble with that. I recall ST folk being excited enough to beg NASA to rename the first shuttle Enterprise. That hardly smacks of ‘not being interested in space activities.’

This little episode, dating back to the late 1970s, actually makes my point, not his. OV-101, the test article for the Approach and Landing Tests (ALT), was originally supposed to be called the Constitution, but the Star Trek fans were mobilized to rename it the Enterprise, despite the fact that it would never actually fly in space. Many (including me) attempted to make them aware of this, but they didn’t seem to care, and pressed on regardless.

It was kind of a drive-by interest, and whether or not the vehicle they were attempting to rename would actually be a space vehicle seemed to be of much less importance to them than that it be named after the Enterprise. If they thought that they could have pulled it off, they’d have probably signed a petition and sent in letters demanding that the astronaut uniforms be bell bottoms with boots, a la STTOS. If Mr. Buckell has any other data to indicate interest by Trekkers in space, or reality, I’d be interested to hear it, because this sure isn’t it.

Here’s more description of last weekend’s Space Access Conference with pictures (albeit insufficiently lit ones). There doesn’t seem to be very good navigation to previous posts, but if you’re checking this out in the future, check the later April and early May archives.

The most interesting talk at Space Access was a fill-in that was not blogged by Rand, but was by Clark Lindsey:

a CEV concept [was presented] that Boeing is investigating that involves commercial delivery of fuel to orbiting depots. This so-called “dry launch” approach would mean that vehicles for in-space and lunar transport could be launched without fuel and so, being lighter, they would not need new heavy lifters. This would open a great opportunity for the new launch companies to provide fuel to the depots.

It involves an alternative concept (see page 32) from Boeing. The idea is to launch the lunar transfer vehicle dry and provide commercial propellant delivery. This could result in thousands of metric tons of fuel needing to be delivered to LEO. This might bootstrap the commercial launch industry. There are also opportunities for “the last mile” because some launcher companies will not want to have to figure out how to dock with a fuel depot.

1000 metric tons of fuel would be a cool $3 billion unless someone can undercut Elon Musk. 9000 metric tons through 2030 would be $27 billion at current prices, but would likely spur a tech drive and a bidding war to compete prices down to $1000/kg or less.

I just got an interesting note from Popular Mechanics:

At 12:01 a.m. EST, Popular Mechanics will unveil on its Web site an early look at Lockheed Martin’s proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle — one of two major proposals submitted today to NASA to replace the Space Shuttle and eventually carry us to Mars. We’ll be including images and specs. A larger piece will run in our June issue.

I don’t know if I’ll stay up for it (I’m still recovering from the Space Access Conference sleep deprivation), but comments here are open for anyone who does. I’ll take a look in the morning. I am curious to see what Lockmart will propose, particularly now that the competition has gotten more heated with the apparent decision to only award a single contract.

[Tuesday morning update]

Here’s the story.

The biggest obvious difference between it and the Boeing concept (at least the Boeing concept that has been on display in the exploration studies–I can’t speak to what was actually proposed) is that it’s got wings. Or at least a body with a lot more lift than a capsule, with supersonic drogues. Despite that, it still lands with chutes and bags, so it’s not clear why they want such a high L/D, except for more cross range and landing site flexibility, and reduced entry gees. What NASA has been calling a Service Module they seem to be calling a Propulsion Stage. It’s not clear whether it also contains life support consumables (as the Apollo Service Module did), though it does mention that the crew module itself has a LOX supply and fuel cells.

It definitely looks more sexy than Boeing’s design–they may be hoping that will help them as it did in X-33, but having that much L/D is a problem for the launch vehicle, because it will impart bending loads (for which it’s not designed) on it from the side force of the lift. It will be interesting to see how they explain this.

I had a long travel day yesterday. My scheduled return flight was supposed to leave Phoenix at 3:30 in the afternoon and arrive in Fort Lauderdale (via DFW) after midnight. I went to the aircraft in the morning, assuming that I could get an earlier flight to Dallas, and thus get home earlier, on standby.

Wrong.

I ended up spending all the time at Skyharbor not getting on to three separate flights, and ended up taking my original flight anyway. Next time I’ll do more than verify that the flights exist–who would have thought that so many others would be so desperate to get out of Phoenix yesterday?

Michael Mealing has a summary of the results of the panel discussion that ended the conference Saturday night. Thanks again to Henry Vanderbilt (and particularly for getting a hotel with wireless everywhere) for putting on another good get-together for this growing community.

[Update at 10:30 AM EDT]

Clark Lindsey has some good further coverage of the sessions that I didn’t get to, or write about.

I’m listening to John Carmack describe future plans for X-Prize Cup and future vehicles and flight tests, but I’m getting sore wrists from blogging in my lap, so I want to conserve keystrokes for Jim Muncy, who is scheduled to speak shortly. I should mention that as a result of switching from peroxide to LOX/methanol as propellants, John says that Armadillo has about fifty thousand dollars worth of good peroxide equipment that he’ll let go cheap. His next vehicle should be a space vehicle, and he expects to crash it a few times in the process of perfecting the design.

3:06 MST: Jim Muncy is coming up to the lectern to speak now. His job as a political consultant is to help space entrepreneurs at the intersection between their endeavors and the political sphere. Talking here primarily about t/Space (among his many other clients). First part of t/Space consortium is AirLaunch (a company of Gary Hudson’s) that has one of the Falcon contracts. The goal is “operationally responsive spacelift.” Joint project between DARPA, Air Force and NASA.

Title of his talk: AirLaunch, t/Space and a Fast Prototyping Path to Prompt Global Strike, Orbital Tourism and Maybe Even the Moon.

Thanking everyone here for getting the regulatory legislation passed last year, for which this conference was a key event.

NASA has decided that working with these crazy people like Scaled Composites and the entrepreneurial space community is a good idea. Goal is to responsively replenish, replace satellites and respond to space threats, a capability which the nation currently doesn’t have. Also able to get several thousand miles in a couple hours and deliver a payload. Key part of program is developing Small Launch Vehicle (hopefully more than one) for smallsats into LEO or hypersonic test vehicles, at less than five million dollars per launch. Trying to return to the launch vehicle paradigm operating in the DC-X program.

Upper stage for launch vehicle isa two-stage self-pressurizing LOX/propane system. Goal is 24-hour response time. It’s launched from a C-17 transport (aircraft can carry two). No aircraft modification required. Benefits of air launch aren’t performance, but safety in ability to abort, and security, provided by the ability to hide launch location until the last minute. Vehicle is deployed by gravity (about a 750-foot drop prior to ignition, with a large right bank by the aircraft to prevent collision).

t/Space has people from both entrepreneurial community and aerospace establishment: David Gump, Gary Hudson, Jim Muncy, Brett Alexander (White House space policy), Jim Voss (veteran NASA astronaut–will run vehicle development). Two key contractors are AirLaunch LLC and Scaled Composites.

A frontier means new resources and opportunities, not just new knowledge. Create the frontier through government leadership, not government ownership. Inviting private sector to party means more affordable and more sustainable.

They promote commercial delivery of crew, cargo and propellant to LEO. Don’t use CEV as a means of getting crew to orbit–turn that over to the private sector, and use CEV in space. Don’t base the hard part of going to the moon on the system that gets people into orbit. Their CEV would be space based, and return to LEO via aerocapture. Transportation between earth and LEO would be done privately. The proposal is a split-level architecture: ETO and LEO to Moon. Goal of architecture is to get to lunar-produced propellant as soon as possible. They send a convoy of two vehicles to the moon for redundancy and safety.

They propose air launching their crew transfer vehicle on a “stilt” 747 carrier aircraft. It has longer gear to allow the vehicle to be slung underneath to carry peoploe into LEO. It uses LOX/Hydrogen. A second air launch concept is a new airplane by Burt (that he wants to build for other reasons), which is a “White Knight on steroids.”

Goal is to help NASA go faster. Hopeful that new program direction of single CEV contractor will free up funds to allow NASA to have “non-traditional” approach in parallel.

Concerned that Air Force will only have enough money for a single Falcon concept to go forward. Would like us to lobby the Hill to get them to make sure there is sufficient funding for two concepts, to keep the competition going, and keep more companies developing low-cost launch vehicles. Talking about ARES (Affordable REsponsive Spacelift). Not encouraged about it, because it’s being managed by traditional missile guys at the Air Force. Wants to get Congress to encourage the Air Force to work with non-traditional players, and get new management in place. If we can’t get an award to go to the small guys, we should at least get the big guys to get the small guys as suppliers for subsystems.

He’s announcing a new activity that could provide the seed of a new NACA for spaceflight, by developing synergism between the Air Force Research Lab and the entrepreneurial community, called ORSTEP (ORS Technology Enterprise Partnership–where ORS is Operational Responsive Spacelift). Hoping for five million in FY 2006 to get it started.