It would seem that my post yesterday (and my Fox column) were quite timely.

I’ve often discussed the chilling effect that regulatory uncertainty can have on investing in private space transportation efforts. Usually, I mean that in the sense that it makes investors hesitant, or reduces the potential pool of them. But you can’t get a more clear cut case than what happened yesterday, when Dennis Tito testified to a Congressional panel, with no ambiguity, that he’s ready to invest, and the only thing preventing him from doing so is fear of the FAA.

I hope that they’re listening.

[Update at 8:57 AM PDT]

The testimony is now on line.

Here’s Tito’s. Key graf:

Please understand me: I am not looking for government funding or technology. I don’t need an investment tax credit or a loan guarantee. I’m not even looking to escape the regulations under which other space transportation companies operate. But I would like to know which government agency, and which set of regulations, will oversee this new industry.

You see, I am willing to risk my money on a technical concept and a team of engineers. I am willing to risk my money on the customers actually showing up. And I am willing to risk my money competing against other companies in the marketplace. But I am not willing to risk my money on a regulatory question mark, on waiting for the government to decide who can give me permission to get into business, and what the regulatory standards for my business will be.

For an excellent tutorial on the history of aviation and launch regulation, and the differences between the two, I also encourage you to read the testimony of Jeff Greason, head of XCOR.

The key point is that the mature aviation industry’s goal is to protect passengers and cargo. At the state of development of launchers, we must be prepared to accept much higher risk to (informed) first and second parties, and focus regulations on protecting third (that is, otherwise uninvolved) parties on the ground, as required by the Outer Space Treaty and common sense.

Elon Musk (founder of Paypal, and now President and owner of SpaceX) also has some useful thoughts, with some specific recommendations for making government ranges more user friendly, and with an optimistic outlook for the industry based on his internet experience:

It is worth noting that the perspective I bring to the launch vehicle industry is drawn from a particularly Darwinian experience in the business world, having founded and helped build two successful Internet companies in Silicon Valley. Seldom have we seen a faster moving, more voraciously competitive business environment or one with more tombstones. However, for all the problems associated with that era, the rise and fall and perhaps rise again of the NASDAQ, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of the monumental work required to build what we know as the world wide web was done in less than a decade.

If you doubt that we can possibly see such progress in space access, please reflect for a moment that the Internet, originally a DARPA funded project, showed negligible growth for over two decades until private enterprise entered the picture. At that point, growth accelerated by more than a factor of ten. We saw Internet traffic grow by more in a few years than the sum of all growth in the prior two decades.

John Kutler’s testimony is worth reading as well, providing the perspective of the institutional investment community. Summary: they’re not ready to jump into this yet, so the startups will have to continue to rely on angels for a while.

Finally, read the testimony from Futron on their space tourism market research study.

As I said, I hope that Congress was listening carefully.

The Houston Chronicle has been running a very good series of articles this week on the mess that is our manned space program.

Too often, press accounts of the space program are either breathless and unquestioning regurgitations of overhyped NASA Public Affairs Office releases, or at the other extreme, dark exposes about activities of minions of the military-space industrial complex, plotting to enrich themselves at the expense of the downtrodden taxpayer and/or carry out secret space missions that will continue to make the rest of the world toiling slaves of the Amerikkkan Empire (TM).

Refreshingly, authors Tony Freemantle and Mike Tolson set just the right, sober tone, and considering that it’s the hometown newspaper for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, they, along with their paper, are to be commended for their willingness to tell stark truths, and to provide a history of the program untainted by local boosterism.

On Sunday, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the first moon landing, they provide the setting–NASA is at a crossroads in the wake of the Columbia loss.

I was encouraged by the fact, as reported here, that many are starting to realize that there is much wrong with the program, far beyond mere vehicle design. I’ve long been agitating for a serious national debate over the purposes of our civil policy, and if this article is correct, that may finally be happening:

“The Gehman report will mark the moment which will be noted in history as before and after,” predicted U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. “After the report comes out, everyone will be committed to charting a new direction for the program that will have discernible goals.”

Of course, that debate should be an informed one, and I would accordingly encourage everyone involved to read Monday’s installment, which provides a great summary history of the space shuttle. Tuesday’s installment describes similarly the history of the space station. Together, they give a good insight into how each program is dependent the other, not just technically, but in terms of institutional support–the shuttle was needed to provide a means of getting to space station and an excuse to build it, and the space station was needed to provide something for the shuttle to do.

A much better station could have been built, and much more quickly, had that been the goal, by developing a shuttle-derived heavy lifter. The costs of doing so would have been trivial in comparison to the cost savings. But to do so would have been to admit that the shuttle wasn’t all that great for building space stations, ostensibly one of it primary purposes. So we spent at least an additional decade in construction, and arguably two (we could have had a fully-capable shuttle-derived station in the late eighties, and the current one isn’t yet complete), to get a far inferior product.

But of course, building a space station wasn’t the goal–having a space station program, that employed lots of people, was. I hope that, in the weeks leading up to the release of the Gehman report a month from now, there will be many more articles like this in the broader press, and that we can establish the basis for a long-needed national debate on not just the means, but the purposes, of our manned space program. And according to this article, the people seem to agree.

I wrote three weeks ago about overburdensome regulations potentially shutting down the model rocket community.

The problem extends beyond hobbyists. While it’s important for our long-term future in space to continue to nurture budding space engineers, there is a more immediate problem. Here’s an interesting article that describes the confused situation with respect to regulation of suborbital space transports.

This is a hot subject in the news right now, with the growing excitement about the X-Prize and the fact that people are now investing in commercial suborbital passenger vehicles. And it’s a good article, but probably in the interest of brevity, it glosses over some of the history necessary to really understand the issue, and why Burt Rutan is still potentially gumming up the works, though he’s at least conceded that he needs a launch license from FAA-AST to fly his vehicle and win the prize.

From the article:

Permission to fly the proposed suborbital crafts in the United States rests at the Office of the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (AST), an arm of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Established in 1984 as the Office of Commercial Space Transportation in the Department of Transportation, AST was transferred to the FAA in November 1995.

That’s part of the problem. The enabling legislation for that office, the Commercial Space Transportation Act of 1984, didn’t require that it be under the FAA–that was a policy decision made (for reasons that remain obscure, at least to me) by the Clinton administration. That administration made a number of disastrous decisions with regard to space (e.g., the X-33 program, Russianizing the space station, putting NASA in charge of the development of reusable launch systems) and this was one of them.

Here’s the problem.

The aviation industry is a mature one. The regulations that regulate it evolved along with it, allowing it to develop over the past several decades. Very few of them existed at its infancy, back in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If they had, it’s likely that the industry would have been stillborn, because they would have been much too stringent for companies still trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

And in fact, some have argued, with some merit, that the regulatory regime in place for commercial aircraft has actually held back progress in aviation even today, because the regulations are aimed at conventionally-designed aircraft, which leaves little room for innovation. In fact, the experimental aircraft category, in which Burt Rutan swims like a fish in the ocean, has been the main force in allowing visionary engineers to try new things without either being shut down by the regulations or the litigation attorneys.

At this date, early in its development, no one knows how to properly regulate a (non-expendable) space transportation industry, because no one has any experience with doing so, either from the standpoint of the regulator or the regulatee.

As long as the regulating authority remains within the FAA (charged with regulating aviation), there will be an ongoing danger of overregulation. Those who wrote the language for the 1984 Commercial Space Transportation Act recognized this, and deliberately put the office that would regulate space transportation independently within the Department of Transportation, rather than the FAA (an agency also within that department).

There were two reasons for this.

First, because doing so would give it more preeminence and clout–it could report directly to the Secretary of Transportation, rather than having to get its viewpoints heard through an insulating layer of the head of the FAA.

Second, because (also as already described) the modern FAA, had it been in place during the golden age of aviation, would have preempted the modern aviation industry.

Now here’s the problem. While Burt seems to be at least now pretending to go along with the program, this part is disturbing:

Rutan said that their initial concern is that AST considers no distinction between research flight tests and certification for commercial operations.

“Until this is done, we believe there will not be a proper environment to allow proof-of-concept research, and may result in the real progress being made by foreign competition,” Rutan said.

“I want to be sure it is clear that we have no current disagreement with AST on what the requirements should be for certification of commercial space operations,” Rutan said. “As we have found with our many previous aircraft development programs, it is helpful to understand certification requirements in order to best structure an initial research test program.”

This, of course, is exactly the issue. Burt continues to consider this an extension of the current aviation model, in which spacecraft will be “certified” by the FAA.

Here’s the rub. FAA “certification” has a very specific, and expensive meaning. The gauntlet through which an aircraft has to go to attain this vaunted imprimatur is well understood in the aviation community. However, it is so expensive (it can increase development costs by at least an order of magnitude) that it is in fact a barrier to entry to new players in the business, which is one of the reason that it’s supported strongly by existing entities.

On the other hand, it is currently meaningless under the FAA-AST launch licensing procedures–there is no certification regime for spacecraft, passenger or cargo. So it’s not clear at all what Burt is saying here. It’s not currently possible to “structure an initial research test program” around certification requirements, because they don’t exist, and (if we’re lucky) won’t for a long time, until we have developed experience with this new flight regime via vehicles such as the one that Burt is developing.

Perhaps what Burt means is that they make no distinction between flight test and operations for licensing purposes, and this may in fact be the case, since their licensing procedures for reusable vehicles are still evolving.

Unfortunately, confusion such as this, and the potential danger of industry-killing overregulation, is likely to persist as long as the office that licenses launches remains within the FAA. A good first step toward clarifying the situation may very well be to reverse the mistake of the previous administration, and set it up once again as a separate office within the Department of Transportation, as Congress originally intended.

Let us hope that the administration has the wisdom to consider doing so, or that Congress might direct it in this year’s relevant legislation. With the money for the X-Prize finally raised after many years, it would be a tragedy and a travesty if it all ends up being for nought because of regulatory confusion.

Joshua Elder wants to see the Moon become a retirement community.

It’s possible, though I suspect that it might even become a desirable location for the working class as well, depending on how bad things get down here from a tax and freedom standpoint. There’s nothing in this piece that wasn’t true a decade ago, though, and he seems a little overenamored of particular technical solutions (e.g., single-stage-to-orbit).

As is often the case, it started off a round of comments arguing about the best way to build space transports, and how it’s expensive to get into space because of the “physics” (which reminds me–I found a nice page the other day that thoroughly debunks this notion, and provides a good FAQ as to why space access is currently expensive).

The real point is that we have to get private enterprise on the case to figure out the best way, rather than arguing about it on the internet, and once we do, it will become apparent what the best uses of our off-world locales and resources are as well.

On this Apollo anniversary, go check out The Speculist. There’s not much information about the proprieter, but the focus seems to be on space and the future.

Five hundred million years ago, the moon summoned life out of its first home, the sea, and led it onto the empty land. For as it drew the tides across the barren continents of primeval earth, their daily rhythm exposed to sun and air the creatures of the shallows. Most perished ? but some adapted to the new and hostile environment. The conquest of the land had begun.

We shall never know when this happened, on the shores of what vanished sea. There were no eyes or cameras present to record so obscure, so inconspicuous an event. Now, the moon calls again ? and this time life responds with a roar that shakes earth and sky.

When the Saturn V soars spaceward on nearly four thousand tons of thrust, it signifies more than a triumph of technology. It opens the next chapter of evolution.

No wonder that the drama of a launch engages our emotions so deeply. The rising rocket appeals to instincts older than reason; the gulf it bridges is not only that between world and world ? but the deeper chasm between heart and brain.

— Sir Arthur C. Clarke (L’Envoi)

Remember, and celebrate.

[Update at 3:05 PM PDT]

There’s more at Winds of Change, including Jews in space…

The competition to ride into space, as well as to provide rides, is heating up. According the linked article, Space Adventures had a little soire in London to show off potential services to well-heeled clients, and it does indeed look as though (assuming that NASA gets the Shuttle flying again), there will be a purely commercial space tourism mission coming up. And also according to the article, Richard Branson would like to lose his space Virginity.

There’s also a continued shift in perception underway:

…not everyone with an interest in British space exploration was excited about the prospect of the UK’s first space tourist. Professor Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist leading the Beagle 2 project to Mars, was among them.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Professor Pillinger. “I doubt very much whether Nasa will let people just drop into the International Space Station for a cup of tea.

This kind of snooty dismissal is not atypical of responses from space science types. But what’s different is the next quote from him, which shows that at last, he and his colleagues may be starting to get it. I should also note that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because in fact NASA has done just that, twice.

“The only possible benefit I can see from all this is that if more people are going into space, rockets will become cheaper for the rest of us.”

Exactly. That’s the point.

And that should be benefit enough for you, if not for those of us who want to go, so maybe you’ll at least stop poo-pooing it?

[Warning, long space policy post]

That seems to be NASA’s current attitude, and just one more reason that the Space Launch Initiative program should be hauled up to the top of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape and hurled off the roof.

They’re proposing (as was the case with X-33) that the new launch system be designed to be flown unpiloted, and have a separate, separable crew module when it has to carry people.

This notion of manned vs. unmanned launchers contains many myths. Even people who are supposedly expert often don’t quite understand the issues involved.

One of those myths goes back to the Challenger disaster. Prior to it, Shuttle had been taking up commercial satellite payloads, as part of NASA’s efforts to get the flight rate up, and thus reduce their per-flight costs. This had the incidental effect of severely damaging, and in fact almost destroying, the nascent commercial launch industry at the time, since the private developers were competing with a government-subsidized system.

After the Challenger disaster, an edict was laid down that Shuttle would no longer fly commercial payloads. As is usually the case when the government does the right thing (banning commercial payloads which were injuring the commercial launch industry), it was for entirely the wrong reason. The rationale was, instead, that “never again should our brave astronauts risk their lives doing things for which they’re not required” (launching satellites).

The thinking here is that since commercial satellites can be launched on unmanned launchers, they should be launched on unmanned launchers. Never mind the fact that Shuttle launches are rarely single purpose, or that the costs may be lower (though in fact they weren’t really–only the price was). At the heart of this thinking, of course, is the notion that spaceflight is dangerous, and intrinsically so. So since any human spaceflight is risky, we should restrict it to those purposes for which it is required that humans be aboard.

This would be a reasonable enough position, if it were true that a) spaceflight is inherently dangerous and that b) having humans aboard doesn’t increase the probability of a successful mission.

Now for Shuttle, both of those assumptions may be valid, though for assumption (b) there were a number of cases in which crew checkout of the satellites prior to deployment might have been the difference between success and failure, even more so if the mission were designed with this capability in mind.

But there’s no reason to think that it will be true for any future space transport.

Despite this, as always, the generals are fighting the last war, and NASA thinks that one of the problems with the Shuttle was that it was designed to fly crew on every flight, and are thus incorporating that “lesson” into the SLI program–by designing it to be capable of unmanned operation.

There is another factor that drives this decision. It’s called “man rating.” This is a concept that everyone who is familiar with space programs thinks they understand, and that very few, in fact, do. The myth here is that vehicles designed to carry people are intrinsically more expensive to design, build and operate, because they are “man rated.” Now in the case of the next-generation Shuttle envisioned by NASA, even without a crew, the vehicle will still have to be “man rated,” because it’s meant to carry passengers in a separate module in the payload bay, so they won’t get the cost savings that conventional thinking would indicate by not “man rating” it.

But the very notion that a space transport, even one that carries pilots and passengers must be “man rated”, or that it will cost more than one that doesn’t carry crew or passengers, is yet another myth.

To understand why, it’s necessary to understand what man rating really means, and why it’s therefore inapplicable to the new launch systems envisioned. And in fact, here’s a shocking bit of news, to people who don’t fully understand the concept–the Shuttle is not man rated.

A couple of years ago, I posted the following contribution (with some minor edits) to an FAQ over on sci.space.policy, which set off a rousing two-hundred-plus post thread/debate, but not one that ultimately changed my basic thesis.

Q: What is man rating, and what are its implications for the cost of designing, manufacturing, and operating a launch vehicle?

A: Man rating is a process by which design and operations of an expendable launch vehicle are analyzed and, if necessary, changed to reduce the chances of injuring or killing any person who might use it for transportation, relative to its design and operations prior to such analysis and modification.

It evolved as a practice in the 1960s, when, in our hurry to get to the Moon, we used existing ballistic missiles as the basis for our launch systems, rather than develop new space transportation systems from scratch (the Saturn was an exception to this).

The premise was that because these systems were designed to be used only once, and would be used en masse and redundantly (to lob warheads at folks to kill them and break their stuff), their individual reliability was sacrificed to a degree, in the interests of globally minimizing the overall cost. The reliability of the individual launch systems that resulted from this philosophy was deemed unsatisfactory for putting people on top of them (even for the early astronauts, who were test pilots at Muroc and Pax River, and riding on top of a tested guided missile was probably the safest thing that they’d ever done in their interesting careers).

Without getting into detail, it involved improving the reliability of the missile by using higher-quality components, adding in redundancy and testing in critical subsystems, getting lots of signatures, and ensuring that there were ways for the astronaut to semi-safely abort from a launch gone bad (in the words of Mitchell Burnside-Clapp, President of Pioneer Rocketplane–“attempted suicide to avoid certain death”).

What does it not mean? It does not mean having systems/subsystems that permit people to be carried on board, such as cockpits, and life support. A man-rated Titan remains man-rated without the Gemini capsule that goes on top of it.

It also does not mean federal certification of a vehicle to allow it to legally carry passengers, which is more about testing and paperwork than about vehicle design per se.

This tradition continued into the development of the Shuttle in terms of design philosophy, though because large portions of the system were reusable, it started to lose some of its meaning.

The Orbiter itself is fully reusable (albeit with high maintenance costs–some would characterize it as “rebuildable” rather than reusable). And in fact, I am going to surprise (some) people here and say something good about the Shuttle, or, at least about the Orbiter.

It is a damned reliable vehicle.

It has never had or caused a catastophic failure. It has rarely caused a mission failure, most of which are caused by failures of the payloads themselves. In fact, perhaps someone can correct me, but I cannot think of a single instance in which a mission failed because of an Orbiter system/subsystem (other than vague recollections of some being somewhat shortened due to fuel cell or APU or similar problems). The one case where we had an on-board propulsion problem was caused by a faulty sensor, and the vehicle still made orbit.

The single event where we lost an Orbiter was due not to the Orbiter, but to one of the semi-reusable ballistic missiles that we had attached to it. Thus, I don’t count it against Orbiter reliability.

In that spate of delays where the system was shut down in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s for hydrogen leaks, this was again a feature of the fact that we were crossfeeding from an expendable system–it had little or nothing to do with the Orbiter design per se.

Shuttle should thus give us great confidence that fully-reusable space transports can indeed be quite reliable. In fact, based on its performance to date, it should be clear that reliability is not the issue for a reusable launch system, as long as we have adequate performance margins. The only issue is cost of operations and turnaround, which cannot be addressed with the existing Orbiter–they will require a clean-sheet design.

For all this reliability, each Orbiter cost on the order of two billion dollars, and now would require several years of time to replace (with additional billions for reclimbing the learning curve and retooling). We only have four of them, and they are *all* needed to keep to scheduled plans.

Now for a thought experiment for those who are worried about “man rating” space transports. Ignoring the crew module (which as I said, is not relevant to whether or not the Shuttle is “man rated”), I challenge anyone to tell me how the Orbiter would be designed or manufactured differently, in terms of reliability or capability to deliver payloads, if it didn’t carry crew on board.

[End Usenet excerpt]

My point is that a reusable vehicle represents a significant asset in itself, and that it has to be reliable, regardless of whether it has a crew, and regardless of the value of its payload, even human payloads.

Now, as I said, this is a secondary issue in the case of the intended output of the SLI program, because it’s meant to be a Shuttle replacement, and must of necessity be capable of carrying people.

But I will argue that, for a space transport, a piloted vehicle will be lower cost, and more reliable, than an unpiloted one. Were it otherwise, Fedex would automate their aircraft and remove the crew.

There are a couple reasons for this. When things go bad, there are some situations in which having a pilot on board will allow the vehicle to be saved. It’s often argued that this could be done remotely, but there’s nothing like being on the scene, and feeling what’s happening, to control a vehicle. Also, a remotely-piloted vehicle is vulnerable to a communications loss in a way that a piloted vehicle is not.

But the most important reason is that the ability to get FAA approval for flights of such a vehicle will go much more smoothly if the flight testing, and flight operations, are performed in a regime with which the regulators are familiar–i.e., piloted aircraft.

There were two potential development paths for space transportation. One was to take existing aircraft, put rocket engines on them, and gradually expand their performance envelope to the point at which they were capable of routinely flying into space. This was, in fact the evolutionary path that we were on in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

However, in our rush to beat the Soviets to the Moon, we short circuited this path, and in fact, cut it off altogether with the end of the X-15 program. Instead, we put men on top of munitions, because they were available, we knew how to build them, and we could do it quickly. As a result, all government-funded launch vehicle development (including Shuttle), has been right down the groove worn originally by Apollo and the early military and NASA unmanned space programs, and we seem to have trouble getting out of it.

The next generation of launch vehicles will arise from the first evolutionary path, which is being picked up again by companies like XCOR, and Pioneer Rocketplane, and some of the X-Prize contenders. NASA and its conventional contractors are institutionally incapable of following such a path–there’s far too much bureaucratic inertia, and this bizarre notion of building an unpiloted reusable vehicle is just more evidence of that.