Rocketforge

or “How a Democrat out-Republicaned George Bush on Space Policy

Two links that help with the background:

• A Space Program for the Rest of Us
• Towards a Conservative Space Policy

Just to get it out of the way early: I’m a conservative leaning libertarian with the street cred to prove it. I helped organize the first Tea Parties in Atlanta. I helped Harry Browne around Atlanta during his Libertarian Party campaign for president and was even one of his electors for Georgia. I left the Libertarian Party after 9/11. I’m not sure how involved in the GOP I want to be but that seems to be a general issue with all conservatives these days.

The point of all that is to say this:

President Obama’s new policy for NASA is the most fiscally conservative and downright capitalist policy to come along since the agency was founded.

What the President is proposing is that NASA follow with the Augustine Commission called “Flexible Path”. The commission made several observations that are key to understanding why what the President is doing is so important to NASA’s future:

1. We explore to reach goals, not destinations. It is in the definition of our goals that decision-making for human spaceflight should begin. With goals established, questions about destinations, exploration strategies and transportation architectures can follow in a logical order. While there are certainly some aspects of the transportation system that are common to all exploration missions (e.g. crew access and heavy lift to low-Earth orbit), there is a danger of choosing destinations and architectures first. This runs the risk of getting stuck at a destination without a clear understanding of why it was chosen, which in turn can lead to uncertainty about when it is time to move on.
    
2. After a list of things that space exploration returns such as spinoffs and science, the Committee had this to say, “… human exploration also should advance us as a civilization towards our ultimate goal: charting a path for human expansion into the solar system. It is too early to know how and when humans will first learn to live on another planet, but we should be guided by that long-term goal.”
    
3. Commercial involvement in exploration: NASA has considerable flexibility in its acquisition activities due to special provisions of the Space Act. NASA should exploit these provisions whenever appropriate, and in general encourage more engagement by commercial providers, allocating to them tasks and responsibilities that are consistent with their strengths.
    

Now, while the committee was instructed not to make recommendations, it was obvious from the meetings and the scoring that the Flexible Path option best matched the goals of what we would like our space program to accomplish.

What the rumors and leaks are suggesting is that President Obama has embraced the committee’s findings and is redirecting NASA to implement the Flexible Path option, including the use of commercial providers for manned launch to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

What is Flexible Path exactly and why is it preferable to NASA going back to the moon using its own rockets? The gist is that Flexible Path is about building up the capability to go anywhere and do it without going broke. Flexible Path is about going to Venus, Phobos, Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), Lagrange Points, and yes, even the Moon and Mars when you can figure out how to do it without killing yourself from radiation poisoning. So no, we’re not abandoning the Moon, we’re not abandoning manned spaceflight, and we’re not turning it over to the Chinese. Here’s one example of what a Phobos landing might look like.

Flexible Path Destinations

Here are some of the interesting features of Flexible Path:

• Multi-vendor
  This means that there is no one critical path vendor for launch and possibly on orbit assembly and fueling. One of the problems with Shuttle and even Russian launchers is that if there is a problem the entire line is shutdown while the problem is fixed. With multiple launch providers you can keep flying even if one is having problems.
   
• Multi-capable
  This means that you’re not stuck with one design that can only do a few things well. Shuttle does a few things well but it can’t stay on orbit very long and it is monstrously expensive to fly when all you want to do is deliver water.
   
• Multi-destinational
  This means your launch architecture is flexible enough that you use the same systems, people, and infrastructure to go to ISS, an NEA, or Phobos. Each new destination doesn’t need a custom designed one-off system (what in business we call a silo).
   

Even after this discussion many wonder if its a good idea to outsource the responsibility of America’s leadership in space to a bunch of untried Internet billionaires that haven’t put anything in orbit yet?

The easiest way to answer that is to compare what is being done commercially and what NASA has done lately. First lets take NASA. What many people don’t realize is that NASA hasn’t designed a rocket in over 30 years. The people who did that are long gone. NASA has built the International Space Station, though. That means it has a lot of current knowledge on how to do in space assembly of very complex hardware. The Constellation program which is NASA’s plan for building its own system of rockets is WAY over budget and behind schedule. This partly due to Congress limiting its budget but also due to NASA not designing the system to be operationally efficient. With rockets about 80% of your operational costs are fixed before you ever bend a single piece of metal. NASA simply has no incentive or desire to design something for operational efficiency.

Now lets look at the commercial side. There are numerous companies who have been or are about to fly new rockets:

• Boeing – Delta IV, including the Delta IV Heavy which can lift 28.5 metric tonnes to LEO – 11 flights to date
• Lockheed – Atlas V, 29.4 metric tonnes to LEO – 18 flights to date
• SpaceX – Falcon 9, 10.4 to 29.6 metric tonnes to LEO, designed to be human rated – still in development. First flight expected in March.
• Orbital Sciences – Taurus II, 5.5 metric tonnes to LEO, still in development
• Bigelow Aerospace – Sundancer, an inflatable space station habitat. Gensis I and II already on orbit

There are more out there such as Masten Space Systems (my company), Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Dreamchaser, etc. All building hardware and flying it on budgets that combined are smaller than one years budget for Ares I.

The final point of all this is to encourage all of my friends on the “right” to take this gift from Obama and run with it. We may not agree with the President on much but on this we can.

If you’re curious what you can do about this you can call your elected representatives about it. There are parochial interests out there that are looking to derail this effort because it threatens politically connected jobs in certain districts. Some of even Republicans who twist themselves into the most contorted kind of logic in order to justify spending billions of taxpayer money on a big government program. Yes, I’m talking about you Senator Shelby.

Thought experiment: Are their Near Earth Asteroids you can get to with what you can fit as a secondary payload in a PPOD?

I’m watching the House Committee on Science and Technology’s hearing on the Augustine Committee’s summary report. This committee hearing is a complete cluster fuck. Mr. Augustine has repeatedly said that Constellation would make a good program if it had the extra $3 billion. He even said that Ares I is safe. He is simply not defending his Committee’s own findings. Even our ally Dana Rohrabacher ripped the findings apart.

I’ll state it here now: if this continues then our national space program will never go anywhere ever again. I think we just lost our space program. The ONLY option left for an American lead expansion into space is for the private industry to route around this steaming pile of shit.

Last weekend I dragged the wife to see The Astronaut Farmer. Big mistake! The movie was unrealistic on several fronts but the one that struck me full in the face was the doe-eyed forgivenes of Audie Farmer (Virginia Madsen) and the complete lack of any financial/business sense in Charles Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton). Yes, you could rail on about the barn not burning down after two engine firings or the land-shark flight that seemed to defy gravity. But this is Hollywood so we should all expect the laws of physics to be ignored with extreme prejudice. But what I didn’t expect was the simplistic nature of the characters. You would think Hollywood would try and get that right.

First off, it seemed that Charlie Farmer was selectively intelligent. The man could run a 350 acre cattle ranch and rebuild an Atlas launcher and Mercury capsule, but he couldn’t figure out a way to pay his mortgage? That requires an unbelievable level of tunnel vision that would have washed him out of the astronaut corp simply because he couldn’t multitask. Did he have any plan for his second flight? Was he just going to find another rich relative that was about to die and squander their entire inheritance all at once?

Secondly, what woman (or bank) would have put up with 6 mortgages? The movie wasn’t clear, but one assumes that Audie Farmer met and married Charles Farmer while he was in astronaut training. So you can assume that she knew that her husband had some fairly significant ambitions for the 1960s and that she bought into them to a certain degree. But there are limits that any sane wife would have set. And what about her dreams and aspirations? I half expected to hear Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” at points. And its something I’ve seen in business in general and the space business specifically: we neglect our wives. Yes, there are a few ‘rocket’ couples out there (the Millirons come to mind) but by and large this business causes our significant others a good bit of stress. That willingness to assume someone else’s dreams and put up with the financial uncertainty just didn’t seem to match Audie’s apparent strength and drive. It just didn’t seem realistic to see those very different character elements in the same person.But in the end I did get a little misty eyed when he did get into space. I did enjoy the personal validation of seeing my own dreams and aspirations portrayed on the big screen. So yea, I enjoyed the movie. But it would have been 10 times better if the characters had been more completely fleshed out and reasonable.

One a slight different note, I had two specific comments to anyone reading this who isn’t from inside the industry:

1) The FAA/AST is NOT like the FAA portrayed in the movie! They are a very professional organization that is out there rooting for us as much as they can. Think about it: if we succeed it means they have job security! They live with and have to enforce a set of regulations. Do we wish some of the regulations were slightly different? Sure. But until we’re flying all the time the regulators only have the old way of doing things to go by.
2) The people who really are building rockets in their garages are much more normal than what’s portrayed in the movie. We try and treat our wives and families better than that, we do know how to do business and marketing before the fact instead of after it, and we do file our government required paperwork when asked to. We’re just like you. Except that we’re building rockets in our garages.