Rocketforge

At next month’s Return To The Moon VI I will be running a panel that will be slightly different than most. The idea is to show participants that lunar specific, for profit product and service providers exist and that many are in various stages of being ‘real’. Its also an opportunity for a short sales pitch and some aggresive networking.

What I’ll be doing is giving each company 5 minutes to give a short sales pitch and take one or two questions from the audience. In networking events I’ve been to in the past some use the opportunity to ask the audience and other companies for things. For example, in my day job I often ask the crowd for leads for customers needing RFID educational seminars.

I will be using my own personal “reality detector” to determine if your company/product is real. That doesn’t mean it has to already be built, but that you have a company and its doing the things it takes to become real (customer channels, market analysis, financial analysis, bending some metal, etc). And it doesn’t necessarily have to be directly targeted at lunar markets at this point. For example, Masten Space Systems’ VTOL propulsion system could easily be retooled for lunar operations and is a long term development goal for the company.

So if you have something, please drop me a note at michael@rocketforge.org with the particulars of your business and when you plan on being at RTTM. The schedule is still being developed so your answers may impact on when we do this panel.

I’ve posted Masten Space System’s June status update. No pictures yet but I expect those sometime soon and will add them to that article when they arrive.

If you liked ISDC last month then you can’t miss Return to the Moon VI. NASA will be using this venue to make some very significant announcements so you should be there. Here are some new details released last nigh by Jeff Krukint:

Return to the Moon VI is approaching quickly and many developments have occurred in the last few weeks. Make your travel plans for RTM VI now as the agenda is filling up with some very exciting items. Register now at https://www.space-frontier.org/Events/RTM6/

Hotel Deadline Approaching
Discount hotel rates ($70/$70/$105 for Wed –Fri nights) will expire on 6/25/05!!!

Confirmed NASA Speakers
A number of high-level NASA speakers have confirmed their presentation topics:

· Chris Shank – NASA’s plans to restructure exploration/Crew Exploration Vehicle efforts in line with Administrator Griffin’s new direction

· Michael Foale – Long-term vision and integrating shuttle and exploration operations in the future

· Brant Sponberg – New Non-Traditional Approaches office and Centennial Challenge prizes to support exploration

· NASA Legal – A NASA speaker on hand to talk about Other Transactions Authority (OTA)

· NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate – Several speakers will be on hand from NASA ESMD to discuss various exploration projects

(Look for the release of a complete speaker list in the next week)

Banquet Awards Ceremony

Two distinct Heroes of the Moon awards will be given this year. The Foundation is proud to announce that one of these awards will be given to President Bush for his vision of returning NASA and this country to the Moon and pushing further into the solar system, and for his continued support of that vision.

The Foundation will also be awarding a Heroes of the Moon award to a hero from the past; an individual who contributed to the effort that got this nation to the Moon in the first place. Look for the announcement of this award in the next week.

RTM VI General Information

2005 has been a very big year for the space sector. All of the new developments in the entrepreneurial space community, combined with the maturing of a new Presidential mandate to return to the Moon under the new Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) presents one of the most exciting years yet for advocates of the true development of space.

At this critical juncture in this new endeavor, the Space Frontier Foundation presents the sixth annual lunar development conference; Return To the Moon VI July 21-23 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Entitled RTM VI: “Reality Check,” this year’s conference will focus on exploring what is really happening in lunar development.

The event is envisioned to be a focal point of the lunar development process; the point where the entrepreneurial space community and NASA’s exploration agenda intersect. All discussions will be focused on what we are doing now and what we can do on the Moon within the next decade, rather than longer-term, idealized concepts. We are bringing new entrepreneurial and legacy companies both within and outside the aerospace sector to one venue to explore the opportunity that the development of the Moon and cis-lunar space has to offer.

Attendees will have the opportunity to meet the people in NASA, politics, the private space sector, and the space advocacy community who are doing the hard work of opening space. In addition to our sponsors (such as t/Space, Space Age Publishing, PoliSpace, and the National Aerospace Development Center), a wide array of scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and visionaries will appear at the conference. Conference panels include:

How do we get to the Moon? – A discussion of the technologies and systems that will allow real lunar development to begin.
* What will we do on the Mmoon? – An analysis of the techniques, technologies, and approaches that will enable long- term lunar habitation.
* What will we do on the Moon? – A detailed analysis of the scientific as well as commercial applications that will make lunar development both productive and profitable.
* Legal/Regulatory/Policy – An exploration of the legal, regulatory, and policy roadblocks and leveraging tools that will both encourage and hamper lunar development in the near term.
* Enabling Technologies – a panel discussion of those critical technologies which may fit outside of the traditional visions for lunar development, but which nonetheless will be critical to the success of any development efforts.
* International Partners – A panel made up of representatives of some of our nation’s most important allies and partners to discuss how we can all benefit from our return to the Moon.
* Lunar and In-Space Business Development Models – A discussion of the unique business requirements and models required to set up successful lunar businesses.
* Space Property Rights – Sooner rather than later the question of who owns and who can own extra-terrestrial property will have to be answered. There is no shortage of opinions on this topic. This panel will explore some of them.

A detailed list of panel chairs and a keynote speaker will be announced at the end of next week, so keep a close eye on the conference website and on your email.

In addition to providing unique discussions, speakers, and panels, the Return to The Moon conference features a unique backdrop to the conference: Las Vegas; a city built on nontraditional business models. So, after an entire day focused on humanity’s return to the Moon, all of the excitement and relaxation of the Las Vegas strip is available right outside the door.

RTM VI: Reality Check will be unlike any other conference; this is where the public and private sectors will meet to seize the opportunities involved in returning to the Moon. Seize this opportunity and join us at the Space Frontier Foundation’s sixth annual Return to The Moon conference.

The basic agenda for the conference is currently available at: http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/Moon/rtm2005.html

Early registration is strongly recommended and currently available at:https://www.space-frontier.org/Events/RTM6/

Thank you for your kind attention.

Keith has posted the 2nd part of his article on Mike Griffin’s STA breakfast talk. This part is a transcript of the resulting Q&A session and it has the real nuggets. Bits such as the fact that they are negotiable on what is capable, especially on things such as “last mile” delivery, how the mass is divided among launches, etc. What was clear was that a lot of the hard questions haven’t been answered yet. But it does sound like the right direction.

His comments on the Aldridge Commission, other sources of “recommendations” and some his tone didn’t leave much of a warm fuzzy. But I can get over the lack of warm fuzzies. Business requires that. What bothers me is that Mike appears to have sole discretion over how things are done. That might be ‘ok’ while he’s on your side, but what happens after he is gone and there is no policy infrastructure in place to ensure continuity? The reason the Aldridge Commission suggested reinstatement of the Presidential level space commission was to ensure that our space policy would survive different administrators.

About the only thing that suggests there is some check on our space policy becoming “Mike’s Space Vision” is the fact that many of his AA appointments are dictated by the Whitehouse. Could that be our “space commission”? But even then that “commission” won’t survive a party change in the Whitehouse.

What happens to all of Mike’s commercialization efforts if Hillary Clinton wins the Whitehouse?

At a Space Transportation Association breakfast yesterday Mike Griffin laid out out his plans for commercialization. Keith Cowing of NASAWatch had to do the transcript himself and has the entire thing here. Overall I like what he’s saying, I still have a few issues though:

What I would like to do is be able to buy those services from industry – and in fact I’d like to be able to buy those services from the industry represented in this group: the Space Transportation Association.

I can’t tell if this is a throw away line considering his audience or if he’s really saying that he prefers one set of potential providers over others. I think he does since he essentially lays out the satellite model of procurement: pick a big satellite vendor early on and then marry them financially until the product is out there and profitable. Its almost like a prime contractor but with fix priced contracts. If they do follow that model I can’t see how he’s going to create the competition he wants.

I think he thinks he’s going to pick a winner early and then help others along with study money:

and [you should] look for us to pick a “leader” with whom we will get started – and also to fund a couple of “followers” at the study level in case the leader falls off the track.

which again, does little to help create competition. But its still better than nothing. Unless something amazing happens I suspect the “leader” will be a BoLock derivative where they use the winning CEV design to compete against itself. I could see where t/Space might get some of that study money and that might help but expecting the capital markets to just wake up and say “whee, let’s give t/Space butt loads of money with no customer contract in hand” isn’t going to fly. Along with that study money is going to have to be some kind of agreement that says if you meet milestones X,Y and Z we will use your service.

IMHO, Mike isn’t taking an entreprenurial view. Instead he’s attempting to use a mature economic model that evolved within a particular industry verticle that may not be the right one in a few years (think what the satellite business would look like using Falcon V class launches of swarms of nanosats). Its very much a top down view. I don’t know why I was expecting something else but I guess this is what we get. For one thing I expect the memebershp of the STA to grow considerably over the next few weeks.

A Giant Leap Forward – or a Giant Step Backward?
By Rick Tumlinson
(Space News/062005)

It wasn’t too long ago that it was announced Mike Griffin would be the new NASA administrator. Many of us in the pro-Frontier movement were pleased to see that someone who could actually spell “space” and understood terms like “return on investment” was taking the helm of an agency that had been woefully adrift for many years. With his diverse background, which included real commercial experience, and bringing with him a circle of friends and associates including many of the most ardent supporters of human expansion into the frontier, we thought we at last had found someone we could work with.

Two months later, some are grumbling that he is doing some very important things wrong – exactly and diametrically wrong. Or is he? I for one am still hopeful, if a bit concerned.

Understand that from a frontier perspective the president’s mandate – in the context of our national heritage (and as refined by the Aldridge Commission) is based on three points:
1. We are to explore and expand beyond the Earth.
2. This exploration and expansion is to be affordable and sustainable (ie – permanent).
3. The only way to assure expanding permanence is the development of an economic infrastructure as part of that exploration.

Thus, permanence is the goal. And to be Permanent, this expansion not only has to pay for itself, but create new value for our society economically and strategically as well as scientifically. And the way we do this in America is through the real private sector working in partnership with the government.

There are a lot of small firms and even a few giant non-space companies out there who want to get involved, from providing the space transportation to building and supporting the facilities, firms who believe they can leverage off of the effort to grow profitable enterprises – the ultimate marker of success on the frontier. But there is a lack of knowledge regarding how best to make the transition to this model, as well as great mistrust on both sides of the public/private line.

However, since a strong private-sector infrastructure is central to permanence, one of the most important things the government must do is catalyze and enable the growth of a strong and broad in-space industry that goes well beyond traditional contractors, which are basically an extension of the government.

This means opening up to new ideas and players, enabling the growth of small firms into major players, financially anchoring operational infrastructure rather than owning it and embracing the pay-for-performance culture that powers the rest of the nation outside of NASA’s gates. It also means being consistent, predictable and always pushing out whatever knowledge and industrial wealth it creates beyond the stultifying hallways of government and into the creative wealth generator of the marketplace.

Yet, in his first few weeks on the job, according to some, Mr. Griffin has done much that appears the opposite. He has canceled and threatened to cancel innovative contracts that would seem to be critical to the early development of exactly the sort of private-sector infrastructure needed to lower costs and assure the sustainability of the effort. He also has begun a drive to bring knowledge in house and empower NASA centers and groups that are legendary for their lack of success, vision and innovation.

If one looks back at the endless flow of taxpayer dollars into the endless series of failures and dead ends in human spaceflight we have witnessed since the beginning of our national space program, it is clear that Mr. Griffin must make major changes. If he is to succeed in his mandate to get us back to the Moon and on to Mars he must make tough choices, and there are no easy answers.

In such a situation it is tempting to harken back to the “good ol’ days” of Apollo, when a focused and NASA in-house-dominated team carried out an incredible program and put us on the Moon in under 10 years. This seems to be the model Griffin is adopting. Unfortunately, for all its virtues, this is a deeply and fatally flawed model. Yes, it got us to the Moon. But it could not keep us there. Whatever societal and political blame you wish to make, centralizing and institutionalizing our national space agenda set it up to be unsustainable once it reached its stated goal.

Imitating Apollo will result in the same end — if it even gets that far — for the costs of today’s program far exceeds the available funding. According to some sources, even if NASA shuts down all the nonrelevant field centers it now operates, fires all the employees at those centers, kills all the research we are ostensibly going to do on the way out, tosses the space station into the trash, retires its private jets and makes its managers fly coach, the money just isn’t there.

Thus, I am hopeful that the signs we see on the outside are not really where Griffin is going. Call me naïve, after all I have only been in this game for 20 years or so, but I am hopeful that what appears to be going backwards is actually not.

One reason lies in some thoughts he shared with me a few weeks back. (I compliment him for talking with one such as myself, for his candor, and for allowing me to share some of his words.) In our dialogue he said two very telling things, that if true, make his current actions more understandable, if not offering a glimmer of hope as to what is to come.

Responding to my Frontier paradigm, his basic tone was that as a public servant working for the president, he has to do whatever it takes to achieve the explicit goals given to him. (ie – return to flight, building a Crew Exploration Vehicle and getting us back to the Moon and on to Mars). In his own words: “I have to execute a government program with public money that does not depend for its success on whether industry can do what they promise, or not.”

This statement, when combined with other recent statements and memos circulating in NASA indicate a drive to consolidate a space-knowledge base within the agency, rather than in private companies, which “come and go” in his words.

I have to believe (for now) that he understands collapsing the corporate aerospace duopoly into a closely controlled arm of a NASA Space Design Bureau will not work. Rather, I choose to think he is actually just trying to make NASA more technically competent and a better customer.

In the same written conversation with me, he appeared to be speaking of that catalyzing function for the real private sector (beyond the contractors) when he stated: “How can I use public money to make a space market available to purely commercial enterprises – pay for performance, period – without having a government program that sits on the sidelines waiting for private industry to deliver?” Perhaps he does get it and is merely consolidating and taking control over his core, and he intends, once this is done, to begin bringing in the private sector in a strong and meaningful way. Right now it just isn’t clear.

Whatever he feels he must do in the near term, I urge Griffin and his team to not lose sight of the goal of permanence and the only formula that can work to support it – free enterprise – the same one that powers the nation that pays their salaries.

The worst possible choice here is to end competition and catalyzation, and to euthanize the early precursors of what can become a vibrant and self-funding space industry with the capability to dramatically lower costs. They must not ignore the New Space revolution going on just outside the agency’s gates in the form of companies like SpaceX, Bigelow, t/Space, XCor, CSI, SpaceDev, Rocketplane, Scaled Composites and the others being born as we watch.

My hope resides in part on his closing words. He ended his note by stating his belief in the private sector and with: “Yet, one of the grades on my report card,” when I am done, should be, “what kind of commercial space industry have you left behind you?”

School is in session.

Rick Tumlinson is a space consultant and co-Founder of the Space Frontier Foundation.

NASA announced the formation of the Office of Program Analysis & Evaluation today. From the ESAS project description:

The Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) is a 90-day study examining many of the larger questions associated with the Vision for Space Exploration. Some of the topics the ESAS is reviewing include the requirements for returning to the Moon and extending human exploration to Mars, as well as possibilities for accelerating the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). The ESAS is being led by Dr. Douglas Stanley.

It sounds as though a lot of what the Aldridge Commission did in terms of strategy is being redone by this new office. Which probably means that while the Aldridge Commission was mandated by federal law to hold public meetings, I doubt if this office will be doing that within its 90 day time limit. So much for transparency…

After contributing here and at Masten (the launch company we both work for), Jonathan Goff has finally bit the bullet and created his own blog: Selenian Boondocks. Welcome Jonathan to the blogosphere and wish him well….

I’ve re-enabled comments but Anonymous posting is gone completely. Sorry ’bout that. If you don’t like it then find a spammer and beat them up…

Depending on what minute you catch Congress it looks as though NASA’s aeronautical budget is going to be restored. The problem is that it isn’t clear what the demand is. Some suggest that the workers will be paid to dust unused wind tunnels. If there is money but no work then it might make sense to see if they can be used by industry somehow.

My suggestion is a type of externship. This has been suggested elsewhere but often it required the company to deal with the onerous overhead of dealing with NASA regulations. For many companies that overhead would be a severe distraction from the business of building products.

The prefered system would be to flip the point of view around: make NASA apply to the companies. Create a system whereby companies can easily advertise positions and/or research that needed to be done and have NASA’s budget pay for the time needed to implement it. The same could go for resources: a NASA wind tunnel staff could make proposals to “alt.space” companies such as “instead of doing all that CFD analysis, just come down to our wind tunnel and we can do it for you”. The proposal could even include monetary or resource allocations that the company would provide. I.e. “NASA Ames wind tunnel #7 plus two engineers would like to help you do supersonic tests of your airframe, NASA will kick in 80% of the employee costs and 100% of the wind tunnel costs. We believe that our resources can save you X percentage in your vehicle development costs.” The NASA employee technically works for the company as an independent contractor. They follow company policies and procedures. But their salary and benefits are paid by NASA.

This puts the onus on the NASA staff to find something interesting to do. And it sets a bar such that the company only gets motivated staffers that apply. It really is a classical externship. And once the employee rotates back into NASA they now have a different perspective on how things can be done.