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  My copy of Return to the Moon just arrived. I'll read it tonight and post a review when I'm done.

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I have created a new blog called “COTSWatch.org” specifically for tracking articles and news about NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) announcements. I'm looking for authoritative submissions so if you're interested in writing for it please let me know.

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For my day job I get an in depth view into what the entrepreneurial space industry looks like. And I see gaps that need to be filled. If you or anyone you know is qualified to do or is already doing the following, please let me know:

• **Space Education K-12 Fundraiser** There are large numbers of space related educational opportunities out there as well as a large number of sources for educational funds. Sadly finding funds to match a project is an extremely manual process that is often left to the educator.
• **Space Media Channel Consultancy** There are growing numbers of media products that have a specific space theme. But figuring out who to market it to, how and in what package is difficult.Especially if you’re targeting non-traditional venues such as science centers, IMAX theatres, art houses, etc. Having someone who understands the various market segments (educational, scientific, scifi, etc) and how they’re changing would help all of us.

I'll post more as I can identify specific tasks that someone can wrap a business around. If you have any ideas or suggestions please forward them and I'll add it to the list.

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NASA's Commercial Crew/Cargo Project Office has released the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Demonstrations (247k Word Document) announcement and is holding an industry biefing on it this Thursday and Friday (your's truly will be there). The list of interested companies is interesting due to its mixture of traditional and “New Space” companies.

Past attempts at “alternate access to station” started just as optimistic but were deep sixed due to lobbying, politics, and budgets. As with all NASA contracts, this one also includes the ability for NASA to cancel the contract at any moment. The difference here is that NASA will be bound to pay up to the next milestone if it does cancel. The key will be to ensure that clauses like that stay in throughout this process. Anyone interested in the progress of commercial space should pay very close attention to this process. Let's keep NASA's feet to the fire on this one.

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I spend about an hour each morning checking everyone's blogs and other space related punditry. Every few weeks the combination of several unrelated articles twigs something in my own mind. This week it was a combination of Jon Goff's Stopped Clock Alert and A Modest Proposal, Rand Simberg's The Innovator's Dilemma, and Rick Tumlinson's Do We Go to Play? Or Do We Go to Stay?.

If you read anything in the Innovator's Dilemma series one of the points Clayton makes (and backs up with considerable evidence) is that it is extremely rare for an organization to change itself to take advantage of disruptive technology/business models. Either the enterprise fails completely and goes out of business or, in the case of very large organizations such as IBM, the company can survive but that particular line of business fails. Those organizations that do take advantage of it usually do so by creating physically seperate organizations that intentionally cannibalize the original enterprise.

The point of all that background is this: while I agree with Rick and Jon that NASA and Congress could do a lot better, the odds of being able to convince the existing organizations to change is so slim that its hard to justify spending your time attempting to change it. The political reality is that the various Shuttle derived systems exist because no other plan pays the political bribe that gives NASA the budgets it needs to do other things. Any suggestion that causes the standing army to stand down is dead on arrival. It sucks but its just the nature of our system of politics. Its the nature of any large organization.

Does that mean you give up and start cheerleading for the Architecture as the only show in town? No. Did Jobs and Wozniak become cheerleaders for mainframe computing? No. They simply ignored the current way of doing things. While their products did eventually disrupt the computing industry rather radically, they didn't set out with that goal. They did it by finding new markets and routing around adoption barriers.

I'm not suggesting we completely ignore NASA and the Federal Government either. Just don't focus on trying to change the fundamental laws of political physics. Use the bits that are useful and route around the rest. If your business plan can take advantage of NASA's need to supply ISS cost effectively then do so. If it can take advantage of a Centennial Challenge, then do that. But we should all also be looking beyond NASA. Orbital Recovery has had great success working with European companies. The stem cell research community accomplished a great deal by routing around the Federal Government and going directly to the state legislatures. There is enough going on in other places that you could effectively build an alternate space program out of those scattered pieces. Yes, NASA will be building various bits of the CEV and other shuttle derived hardware at the same time but so what? In the end did it really matter that there were business units at IBM that were still attempting to sell mainframes during the microcomputer revolution?

Yes, it sucks that politics is illogical and that it dictates that NASA will end up deploying a flawed system. But our system of government is simply incapable of the kind of radical change that doing the right thing would require. Congress will never vote to disturb the standing army. It will disappear only when everyone has retired or been hired off by other concerns. When you're presented with a brick wall like that don't beat your head against it attempting to knock it down. Figure out a way to climb over it or go around it.

UPDATE: I should be clear here that I'm talking mostly about the Architecture, not all of NASA or the Federal Government. Over the past few months of market analysis I've been doing for my day job I have been learning how large NASA is. There are some bits of it that are useful such as Centennial Challenges, Sounding Rockets Program Office, and even COTS. And outside NASA there is AFRL, and Dod's Space Test Program.

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Between Mike Griffin's recent speech to the AAS and his recent comments on design and operations I think that he probably means what he says and is probably as good as we're going to get on space commercialization. The questions still left outstanding for me are the following:

1) Mike has said several times that “as commercial service stand up, NASA will stand down”. But a move from government to commercial services isn't a binary operation. There is a transition period during which equity markets need a very firm committment that NASA will actually either purchase the service or will discontinue its own service. The current Administrator may have a personal committment to do so and has said as much with regard to commecial crew and cargo to ISS. But the Architecture as currently instantiated creates an expectation on the part of several congressional districts that their pork is secure. How will an Administrator tell the congressperson from Utah that the ATK contract is being cancelled in favor of a commercial service? Is there a way to make the stand down a legal requirement that gives a commercial provider legal recourse?

2) What happens after Mike is gone? As I've discussed before, one of my largest concerns is that the hardware and lunar return portions of the ESAS architecture have overshadowed, and in some sense “swallowed”, the other non-NASA parts of the Vision. If we end up with a Democratic President in 2008 that gets rid of Griffin along with all of the other Bush appointees, will the Architecture, and thus the commercialization aspects of it, be swept out with him? The Architecture is already seen as Griffin's personal intepretation of the VSE. If he is gone in a little over 2 years are we back to square one? Or even square zero?

I think my solution to both of those problems would be legislative. Something written into law that sets a particular test that a private company must accomplish. Once they've passed that test then NASA is required by law to use that service within two years of the company passing the test. One of the biggest issues would be who gets to write the test criteria since “fly an exact replica of the CEV as NASA designed it using the same number of employees and processes” wouldn't accomplish anything.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher recently submitted HR 1021: The Space and Aeronautics Prize Act which outlines several prizes run outside of NASA itself. I think that bill could easily be tweaked to provide for the requirement that NASA make significant use of the systems/products of whoever won the prize. Or possibly that within 4 years after a prize is won NASA must be purchasing 100% of anything in that category from commercial providers.

I also think its important to note that while I whole heartedly support HR 1021, that doesn't mean I think that the Centennial Challenges budget should have been cut. I can understand the budgetary reasons for why they were cut but I think they should be restored somehow once the NASA Authorization bill passes later this month.

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Alan J. Lindenmoyer was named as project manager for the new Commercial Crew/Cargo Project office. You can see Alan in this webcast that ESMD gave least week. This is the presentation that Alan is speaking to in that video. All of this was from the Industry Day from last week.

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Frontier Files Online is back! It was around earlier last year as a blog/portal run by Al Differ and others for the Space Frontier Foundation. It has found a new host and all of the old articles have been reloaded. Its nice to see such a useful resource back among the living. Welcome back!

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cur·mudg·eon (kr-mjn)

n.

An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.

scha·den·freu·de (shadn-froid)

n.

Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

One can be curmudgeonly without engaging in or hoping for the rather shameful emotion of schadenfreude. There is a difference between saying you think someone is wrong and seeming to openly hope for and possibly work toward their failure.

In the native German the term schadenfreude has two connotations. Private or secret schadenfreude is an understandable human emotion that we know we have but keep to ourselves along with those other emotions that keep us from turning into emotional animals. Open or public schadenfreude is when you verbalize or take action to express or bring about your internal schadenfreude. The first is a base human emotion we learn to live with. The second is shameful, wrong and a character flaw to be corrected.

Or, stated in a more pop culture accessible way: Oscar the Grouch is a curmudgeon. But we all still love him. But if Big Bird's nest burned down you wouldn't find Oscar standing in the burned out ruins singing “Nyea, Nyea You suck!” That's the difference between being a curmudgeon and engaging in public schadenfreude.

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Read and enjoy! Not a whole heck of a lot of meat there but enough for people to see progress and act accordingly.

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