Fresh from a tour in the belly of the space beast, Laughing Wolf describes the sad state of NASA at the end of 2003, and offers hope for the future similar to mine.

Clark Lindsey has some good roundups as well.

[Update at 4 PM Central Time (I'm still in Columbia, MO)]

My New Years Fox column is up. As some may have guessed, it's a reprise of this post. I should issue a correction, since my editor is probably out partying by now and won't be fixing it any time soon (it's my fault, not hers--she ran it as submitted, instead of correct). I say that Lockheed is the only remaining provider of large commercial expendable launchers. That should have read, of course, the only domestic one. There are others, in Europe, China and Russia.

Hmmm, Boeing has Sea Launch with the Zenit rockets from Russia. They have a pretty respectable payload. Further, the Delta IV seems to be ready to launch even if Boeing has been saying otherwise.

I don't consider Sea Launch a domestic provider, because it's a joint venture with Russia. And I didn't say that Boeing wasn't going to fly Delta, just that they're no longer selling it commercially (or at least they're no longer devoting any marketing resources toward that end)--they view it as a vehicle for primarily government payloads.

Gee, all of this carping about how bad NASA is and yet, when they pull something off (Spirit), no one even takes the time to make mention.

No one?

I'll readily admit that that I haven't mentioned it, but I haven't mentioned anything for the past few days--I've been too busy to blog. Certainly Thomas has discussed it over at LA Mars Society.

But I'll also confess, since I'm not that interested in space science (no more than any other science), and it's rarely JPL that I criticize, I didn't see a need. Unmanned space isn't my beat. It would make just as much sense to criticize me for not mentioning some new aeronautics advance that Langley came up with.

In other words, now that you are posting again, you don't have anything positive to say about the mission?

I'm not posting again, Keith. (Note: still no new posts.) I'm replying to your comment. But if it makes you happy, congratulations on a job well done, JPL (a NASA center that I rarely discuss, let alone criticize).

As I said, I rarely post on planetary science issues or events. It's simply not of that much interest to me, and there are many other people both more interested and knowledgeable about it. Note that I said nothing about the apparent loss of Beagle, either, even when I was posting.

Happy new year, Rand.

You wrote that the fundamental flaw with the Shuttle was designating NASA "to build and operate a single vehicle type (of whatever design) to accomplish its paltry goal of sending a few government employees into space each year." I agree that the Shuttle ended up being an operational failure in part because of the way NASA was managing the vehicle. But in retrospect, the goals of the project seem, if anything, overly ambitious! Max Hunter & co. were saying STS would be capable of 60 flights per year and a fair number of them *would* have featured non-government passengers. In contrast, the much smaller and simpler X-15 never managed more than 30 suborbital flights annually. Many of the operational problems and limitations can be traced to technical issues such as high-performance propulsion and thermal protection. Certainly, the fully reusable Shuttle proposals would not exactly have reduced these performance requirements. Merely handing over the entire project to Rockwell International would not have solved this fundamental problem.

Elsewhere, you comment on the recent failure of the Japanese H-IIA rocket by saying a reusable "space transport" would be much better for launching satellites. Maybe so -- if one is willing to spend at least five times as much money on launch vehicle development and testing! The H-II and H-IIA cost a combined $3 billion. Now, the Japanese Rocket Society has produced a study for an equivalent ~10-tonne VTVL SSTO RLV dedicated mainly to space tourism. The price tag? $15-20 billion!! For example, you need to perform HUNDREDS of flights to orbit just to certify the vehicle for routine passenger travel. And the Japanese government really does not need the capability, as long as it is only launching a few commercial, scientific and military satellites per year. For all their faults, ELVs are clearly cheaper and easier to develop for such comparatively modest missions.

I think the Shuttle suffered from the same problem as virtually all orbital RLV plans. The development cost is comparatively high (=$20B, including inflation) and the existing, credible "customer base" isn't that big and not very committed to a risky new vehicle. So Max Hunter & co. needed to make all kinds of fancy assumptions regarding the importance of in-orbit servicing and retrieval of payloads etc. to make the Shuttle's business case close.

I agree with you that space tourism will have to work "from the bottom up" and start on a really small scale using suborbital vehicles. It is clearly impossible for private industry to justify spending billions on space tourism RLVs today. And they *WILL* cost billions... Heck -- Paul Allen has already invested $30 million in SpaceShipOne which doesn't even come close of what will be required for routine flights to orbit and back.

MARCU$

> Note that I said nothing about the apparent
> loss of Beagle, either, even when I was posting.

Only because Beagle II wasn't managed by CNES?

Re: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,107121,00.html

Good article and post. I was wondering what your thoughts are about the scalability of x-prize suborbital to orbital solutions? I'd read someplace (probably a link from your blog) that the energy requirements are about 25 times greater to achieve orbit; also that some people feel that the objectives and scalability of suborbital will not get us to reusable orbital vehicles (I don't necessarily share that view.)

Re: A Vision, Not A Destination

You said, "I agree that NASA needs a vision, but I think that the focus on destination is distracting us from developing one, if for no other reason than it's probably not going to be possible to get agreement on it."

I have to disagree with this Rand with regard to the question of agreement. I think the consensus I'm seeing (granted that perhaps my preferences influence my judgement) is that the destination is going to be Mars with the Moon being used to test hardware. Only a small minority are suggesting anyplace else.

Also, I have started a blog (but I am too embarrassed at the lack of quality to go public with it just yet... mostly it's a personal diary type blog, just to get used to the tool and break the ice.)

Anyway, thanks for all the effort you put into your blog and have a great new year. I always enjoy reading your posts.

"I'd read someplace that the energy requirements are about 25 times greater to achieve orbit"

An interesting thought experiment: work out how much launch prices scale with energy. We have factual data. LEO vs GEO launches. Knowing the energy multiplier and price multiplier for these two destinations, and dividing we get the slope of the energry/price graph. Lets assume the graph is linear all the way down to X-prize point and the slope is the same for both RLVs and ELVs.
Further assuming a 100k per X-prize flight, how much would an orbital flight cost, knowing the energy difference and the scaling factor ?

Its a constructed argument and probably very much irrelevant to reality, but the result might suprise one.

Happy New Year to you as well, Marcus.

Only because Beagle II wasn't managed by CNES?

No, because I don't care that much about Mars probes, successful or otherwise.

As for your other, longer point, it's the point of my long-standing sig--extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets (though I don't believe that the initial ones will require tens of billions to develop, despite the cost estimates). We will either have to develop those markets privately, or persuade the government that if they want cheap launch, they'll have to subsidize the market sufficiently to create it, instead of focusing on their own narrow needs (whose narrowness is largely driven by the high cost of launch...)