Rocketforge

Just FYI: the #arocket channel on freenode.net is getting a small, regular crowd now. So if you want to talk to people about things like JP Aerospace or upcoming space conferences, drop by!

CP Technologies Propellant Class Enrollment
February 17, 2004
Web posted at: 2:04 PM EST

(ROL Newswire) — CP Technologies has opened enrollment for their next solid rocket motor design class. It runs three days and starts on April 16, 2004.

The class costs $195 and includes the “How To Make Amateur Rockets” 2nd Edition bookset, all motor/propellant materials and lunches. A $30 discount is given to students who already own the 2nd Edition bookset. Students do not have to be US citizens and do not have to be members of any rocketry organization.

After students learned how to design a composite solid rocket motor, the class instructor assigns each student a maximum peak chamber pressure and pressure-time curve goal. The students design a rocket motor to meet that goal and then mixed and cast the propellant as well as make the motor parts. The motors are static fired on the last day of the class at Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion Company facilities. In the previous classes, no student has had a motor failure or failed to come close to the design goal.

People interested in the class should sign up as soon as possible as class size is restricted to seven students. More information on the class can be found here

Source: ROL Newswire Service

[ posted by iz ]

The International Assocation of Space Entrepreneurs just sent out this quarter’s newsletter. You can sign up on their front page. The newsletter includes information about this years list of speakers and events as well as columns from entrepreneurs, investors, and service professionals. The March event blurb:

Please join us for the kick-off of IASE’s 2004 Speaker Series with two very special guests: Eric Anderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Space Adventures, and CNN Anchor/Correspondent Miles O’Brien.

During a unique “live onstage interview” by Miles, Eric will talk about the entrepreneurial challenges of “Building a New Company While Building a New Industry.” He will share his lessons learned from years in the space tourism industry and apply them to other markets, such as bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

The newsletter is worth it. Go sign up. Now.

The President’s Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond held its first public meeting yesterday. While there are no transcripts, the video archive is available. Here is some other coverage: Space.com, HobbySpace, Florida Today, Voice of America, etc.

I can usually tell what I’m going to write about when I find myself talking back to the TV. Three seemingly unrelated topics got me going: ‘political sustainability’, ‘inspiring education as a goal’, and the almost dismissive nature of the commercialization question during the press conference. The recurring theme of the meeting was how to ensure the vision is sustained through almost 10 election cycles. I’ll quote the VOA article since it’s the most succinct:

Mr. Tyson says history shows that huge national expenditures, whether for pyramids or cathedrals, Columbus’ voyage to the Americas, or development of nuclear weapons, are sustained only if linked to economic return, defense, or praise of royalty or deity. He notes that the promise of scientific exploration has never driven major national programs and doubts that it would sustain interest in Mr. Bush’s new space policy.

“While we need to make sure science and exploration are part of any discussion, in the end, learning from history, the public will have to be convinced of the truth of the space program in our lives, and that is the actual role it plays in driving our economic strength,” he said.

But a witness before the president’s moon-Mars commission disagrees. “If all we do is talk about our own industrial base and how great this is for jobs, I don’t think this mission gets furthered in any way,” he said.

Mark Bitterman is with the U.S. business promotion group the Chamber of Commerce. He believes the public is interested in space exploration for itself and cites the wide attention to the Mars rovers and the Hubble Space Telescope.

“There is a lot of excitement out there,” he said. “I think once the possibility of these new discoveries begins to become clear and they are discussed in the schools, kids get excited about it, that’s what I think will really matter.”

Wrong. (Click the Read More link below to see why)
Dr. Tyson is correct that large projects funded by national expenditures happen only because of greed, fear, king or god. But that assumes that our goal should be building cathedrals. Bazaars are much more sustainable. Of the four motivators Dr. Tyson cites, only the first builds sustainable economies and industries that can outlast presidents and congressmen. Fear only works while there is an enemy. King or god isn’t relevant anymore and if it were it would only relevant to priests (sounds like NASA to me!).

And this is where Mr. Bitterman makes his mistake. It was typical of what happened during the Dot Com bubble. He mistakes hits/eyeballs with purchases. As companies like CMGI found, the typical Internet user is a a fickle thing. Sure, the Mars rovers are getting lots of hits. But so did Janet Jacksons bare chest. At least she has a prayer of monetizing that in the form of record sales. There is novelty with the current rovers. But what happens when there are twenty rovers and they’re all returning the same pictures? Its the same thing that happened with Apollo: when the pictures started to look the same it became routine. Boring. That didn’t mean it actually was boring or routine. Just that the viewer perceived it that way. It’s the same reason men who are married to super models still have affairs.

So sustainability justified through web site hit rates is a dead end. Case in point: CMGI is currently trading at 2.74.

This brings me to the goal of inspiring kids to go into science, math and engineering fields. Here in Georgia there is a recurring question of how to move the state up in the ranks of high tech ‘corridors’ (the valley, northern Virginia, etc). This always generates platitudes like “we need a first rate education system!”, “we need mentoring!”, “we need technology showcases!”, etc. None of these works. They are symptoms of an underlying cause: the availability of equity, the ability to get silly rich while you’re still young enough to enjoy it.

People emulate what they see as success. If you see someone in Atlanta driving a hot sports car or wearing really expensive clothes, the odds are that he/she is either a professional sports star or a rap musician. So when kids see that they learn early on that the easiest way to get the wheels or the threads is to do what they see. If you see a hot sports car in the valley the driver is most likely to be a technology entrepreneur. As a result, the number of students in math, science, engineering and business is much higher. The point is this: if you want to bring kids into math and science oriented fields you have to figure out how they can get rich doing it.

Lets put it another way. A friend teaches in an MBA program and as a result is often visited by dignitaries from other countries that are attempting to learn why America is so successful. In this particular case they were trying to understand their brain drain. Their best and brightest were going to school in America but they weren’t bringing that education back home. My friend told them the basic solution was to make sure these students had the resources back home to make them and their families very rich, that the only motivator worth mentioning was wealth. One of the visiting dignitaries became incensed at this. He asserted that these students should come back home for the glory of the motherland and sacrifice themselves by teaching others for a government stipend. One of the other dignitaries then apologized to the MBA professor for the fact that his friend was stuck in the Napoleonic era.

Are we going to base the future education of our children and the viability of our economy on Napoleonic concepts of motivation? Our system, indeed, the American Dream itself, is based on the basic motivation of improving ones life through economic freedom.

If you want children to be motivated to go into high tech careers such as engineering and aerospace then you need to figure out how to get large numbers of current engineers into sports cars. Figure out how to make the aerospace industry look like the computer and Internet industries and we’ll have large populations living on Mars in our lifetimes.

And that brings me to the last item. I realize that commercialization wasn’t on this meetings agenda so I may be overly critical. But the fact that even one meeting went by without commercialization being the core agenda item means that we are still stuck in the Napoleonic era. Every meeting should have that at its core. When asked specifically about commercialization, Aldridge dismissed it as for a future meeting. Dr. Tyson elaborated by reiterating his point about the role of guaranteed mail delivery for early passenger aviation. But then he went on to say that the long term sustainability of the program shouldn’t be dependent on an unproven and currently non-existent private, commercial space sector.

Given history, psychology and the system that we’ve built here in the United States that has made us the most powerful economic force in the world, I assert that the only way to ensure long term sustainability of the goal is through commercialization at the very core of this undertaking. To do anything else is Napoleonic and will continue to cause our space industry to be the economic equivalent of a third world country.

or “How I stopped worrying and learned to love the end-to-end model”

Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, have put together a 10-part guide that details the end-to-end model from an economic/networking/socio/political viewpoint as an attempt to educate those that want to turn the Internet into either television or an FM radio.

This concept is tired directly to Metcafle’s Law and the idea of disintermediation and is the direct cause behind things like Amazon and Ebay.

The question for us is to find a way to apply these methods to getting our asses into space while we all get rich in the process. With CNC processes becoming cheaper is it possible to remotely ‘print’ rocket parts? I.e. moving the fabrication of aerospace hardware to the edges? What components of the resources we need for launch can we commoditize and make ’stupid’?

Robert Roy Britt (Space.com) has an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Its mostly harmless. I particularly like how he downplays the lack of a modern day Carl Sagan. I loved Cosmos as a kid. As a kid. Its to bad he, like many scientists, ignored economics. But the part that stood out was this:

Tyson: I like to take a broader view. Early pilot-engineers, who invented or designed their own airplanes, were supported by the government in the form of a guaranteed load of airmail. That enabled these people to be more and more innovative, to be more competitive to try and get the government contract. What emerged from this were airplanes that no longer required the government support because they could then fly paying passengers.

In developing all the technology necessary to go to Mars, stuff is going to get invented. Look at the government investment in the Global Positioning System (GPS). It was initially a military utility, but now there are commercial GPS receivers in cars and even in wristwatches.

These are whole industries that have been spawned and given unto private enterprise to then make money and create jobs.

If it means we can one day get into space so cheaply that you can set up a hotel, fine, let it be so. If it’s a hotel with a zero-g theme park, fine. Business will go wherever it thinks it can make a buck. Right now space is kind of expensive, so only governments can do it.

The emphasis is mine. If governments keep doing it then it will always be expensive. I have a bottle of champagne ready for when Burt Rutan, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Dennis Laurie, Kistler Aerospace, and Walt Anderson prove him wrong.

You all might be interested in my review at the Huntsville Times. The editor added a lot of paragraph breaks, but I guess that’s what editors are for. Follow the link, or read some of the text below. Aside from all the negative history, the positive point of the book is to help figure out what purpose NASA should serve in a future of mostly private space enterprise (particularly relating to human spaceflight). I certainly hope the new presidential commission takes some of this into account.
[...]

Klerkx doesn’t entirely agree with the NASA-bashers he portrays, pointing out in the chapter “The Belly of the Beast” that there is “no ‘NASA’; or rather, there are multiple ‘NASAs’,” over which even the administrator has little control.

[...] The most sympathetic portrait in the book is probably of Pascal Lee, Klerkx’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute colleague, who has worked tirelessly with NASA staff and the Mars Society on Devon Island. For most of the rest of the space advocates, entrepreneurs, organizations and bureaucrats described here, one feels like shouting, “can’t we all just get along?”

But there are legitimate grievances that trace one way or another to NASA as a self-protecting entity: the demise of Mir, the Industrial Space Facility, DC-X, the waste that was the SLI and X-33, the rise and fall (and rise again now?) of the Alternate Access to Space Station program, the treatment of Dennis Tito.

[...]

Most damning are Klerkx’ details on the incestuous relationship between NASA and the two major contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Current arrangements seem almost guaranteed to suppress innovation, rather than foster it.

Ideally Klerkx sees innovation coming through growth of large numbers of smaller companies, but he also sees a vital role here for NASA as endorser, encourager and provider of technology support. NASA needs to accept a lesser role than the full control of human space flight it has had; the lack of progress described in Klerkx’s text leaves one almost depressed for the future.

The X-prize competitors, Kistler and Elon Musk’s venture, SpaceHab, and many other small space companies are featured, along with Russian privatization efforts.
[...]

Given the near comprehensive coverage, I was a little surprised Klerkx left out two private organizations that are actually launching hardware: the Planetary Society’s Cosmos-1 solar sail and TransOrbital’s private lunar mission. Perhaps no single person can be familiar with the entire worldwide range of government, commercial and nonprofit space activities at this start of the 21st century. And things change fast enough that what we thought we knew may no longer apply. The gaps in Klerkx’s book are perhaps less significant than the fact that, although Klerkx covers Columbia’s loss and the accident report, the book was finished well before the January 2004 presidential vision statement.

Refocusing NASA should address Klerkx’s criticism, particularly if it helps change relationships with the private sector. But those working on changing NASA need to review this book if they want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

NASA Contract Could Jumpstart Rocket Start Up:

WASHINGTON — Eager to find new ways to ferry cargo to and from the international space station, NASA plans to pay a U.S. company $227.4 million for the demonstration of a reusable rocket that has been in development since the satellite boom of the 1990s.

NASA announced Feb. 2 that it intends to exercise a 2001 contract with Kirkland, Wash.-based Kistler Aerospace Corp. to buy pre- and post-flight data from demonstrations of the company’s K-1 reusable launch vehicle. The award, according to NASA, is not for actual launch services to the station, but for the data from a series of flight demonstrations meant to show that a recoverable launcher can reliably approach an orbiting platform such as the space station and safely attach to it.

Hot damn!