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One of the themes at Space Access was an attempt to tone down some of the intramural name calling that pops up from time to time. And apparently its not just a Space Access thing either. I recently discovered Dan Schrimpsher's __ Space Pragmatism__ blog which has this quote in his byline: “I am tired of all the infighting I see in the space community. RLV's versus EELV versus Saturn V clones. Who cares!? Just get me up there…”

While I definitely agree with the sentiment, I'd like to bring a little bit of perspective to this perception that all we do is fight about things. First of all, every industry does this. For all the talk about the egalitarian cooperation that formed the Internet, some of the worst screaming and gnashing of teeth have been at IETF and W3C meetings. The space industry in its various forms has nothing on those people. And the same thing has happened in the steel industry, telephony, medical, etc. In those industries they play hardball with issues like pricefixing, fraud, IP theft, wholesale stacking of standards processes to define competition out of their industry, etc.

The key difference is that its not the CEOs doing the nasty stuff. As you “grow up” you have the luxury of the CEO sitting back looking distinguished and “nice” while the minions in their flying monkey suits go off and do the bad stuff behind closed doors. So it at least has the appearance of being nice to people on the outside. Case in point, the IETF back about 5 years ago instituted the policy of requiring journalists to have a special badge so that regular participants could be sure to not fight in front of them. It helped. Although with blogs the distinction is becoming useless.

So I guess my point is that we're a young industry. Our CEOs are still active engineers. And engineers get wrapped around the axel about engineering minutia and really get torqued when they perceive someone is criticising their work. As this changes the gnashing of teeth will calm down a little. But it will still be there. The secret is figuring out how to hide it. That's why no one ever thinks that engineers from Sun or Microsoft bad mouthing each other at an IETF meeting is a bad thing. Its expected. Its when Scott McNeally and Bill Gates do it that it gets noticed and is considered a bad thing (and the fact that both men started out as engineers suggests the pattern holds).

I think it will fix itself. Somewhere in the process conferences like Space Access will need to decide if they're an engineering conference or a business/public relations conference. And even then you will probably need press badges and conversations about what is or is not “on the record”. And even policies about bloggers identifying themselves as such (this conversation is already happening).

So I wouldn't be to concerned about the infighting. It will solve itself. Just focus on execution and everything else becomes an irrelevant side issue.

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While waiting at the airport at 6:00 a.m. yesterday I was chatting with another Space Access participant about funding. He asked an interesting question: “Assume you cash out and get $20 million, what do you do with it?” I hmm-ed on that a little and came up with various answers that I'll get into later. But the question was an intriguing one that prompted some fairly strategic thinking on my part. Its enough to be able to change some things but its not enough to go out and buy your own program the way Musk, Bezos, Allen, etc are doing.

The major assumption is that, while you have the $20 million, you also don't have a job. So you have to figure out how to make sure that $20 million generates income so you can live in the lifestyle you have become accustomed. So just blowing it all on an ISS ride wouldn't be a good idea unless you could move back in with your parents afterward because your wife threw you out of the house.

So, what would you do with it?

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*Update: * I have turned this list into a wiki page: SpacePolicyActionItems

The last session of the conference was a policy discussion around what we, the industry, could do next after our success with the regulatory issues last year. This is the rough list:

Jim Muncy - Since parts of aeronautics at NASA are “shutting down”, could we

task those employees with something thus turning into something like NACA.

George Whitesides - Pricing?

Henry Vanderbilt - 1) an adhoc unit to stop bad things when they come up

2) as far as the one thing to do that we all agree on, we should pick

something with a high degree of success so we have to successes instead

of overreaching on our 2nd attempt.

Rand - ITAR, procurement reform, propellant to orbit, educating NASA about

affordability and sustainability

Kevin Green - Kill cost plus

Michael Mealling - organize communications, use new media between ourselves

and to the rest of the world.

room:

space property rights

raising money for politicians we like

ammend NASA's charter

Jeff Greason - trade assocation. none worthwhile. Needs a leader, needs

to be able to get rid of members who misbehave, uses consensus.

Stay involved with the NPRM process

Association needs industry to be ready for it

Modest stimuli - prize leveraged

drafting NASA experts who are underemployed

mandate NASA program for making aero facilities cheaper to industry, vouchers?

NSF model? turn them over to the NSF.

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David Masten on Masten Space System's VTVL vehicle and progress with their igniter and engine flow tests.

Disclosure: I work for MSS on business development and marketing.

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(Rand can type faster than I can)

Rick is giving an update on changes at NASA given his view from the roadmapping committee and other interactions. “We have good friends on the inside”. Now there's a new Administrator and some of the people he's bringing in are of the O'Neillean point of view. (Personally I find the O'Niel, Sagan, von Braun distinction insufficient due to O'Niel never getting into economics.)

Lots of people at NASA are satisfied just being part of space. Some of the new people are interested in opening it up.

Rick says, “I know things look like they're going backward. Being centralized and going all '60s' on everything. But that's just for the mandated items. Just the CEV. ” But he thinks that Griffin is going to create a “non-traditional programs office” for everything that's not part of the short term mandates.

Rick sent Griffin (among other conversations) the SFF's Frontier Enabling Test. Griffin's response (and quoting) “I don't disagree at all with your FET goal. ”(Ed: sorry, I couldn't type that fast). The gist of it was “I have to deliver a government program using government money. To do otherwise is malfeasance. The key is what kind of commercial sector is left behind once he's delivered on what he must deliver. Rick thinks one of those things might be orbital fuel depots.

But Rick still says, "Dont' trust and verify”.

His other comment: Pay your taxes! (refernece to the Walt Anderson issue)

Re: the margarita pump. It had a very good ISP….

Other points he tries to make: evangelize, but don't oversell and use facts. And stop the trash talking about others ideas/capabilities. Let's work on building each other up and work together where we can.

And we have to kill ITAR… (thunderous applause)

Rick is personally working on talking to politicos about “port authority” ways of thinking about ISS and lunar resources at the very beginning… Also the idea of prize based contracts where the prize is a lunar lease that can be sub-leased. “Catalytic contingency contracts”…

And lastly: build and fly! And make sure everyone knows about it.

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Flowmetric's piston pump being used to pump margaritas for the crowd at Space Access. Fun with green lasers illuminating the green margarita mix soon followed. Who says rocket scientists don't know how to party!

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Jim Muncy (t/space and polispace) is giving us an update on various policy issues. He has a handout concerning some policy issues that readers may be interested in helping out with. Here is an HTML version of it.

Right now he's doing an ad for t/space: Airlaunch, t/Space, & a Fast Prototyping Path to Prompt Global Strike, Orbital Tourism and Maybe Even the Moon

or

Jim Muncy is working with Gary Hudson, NASA, Burt Rutan, & DARPA t odo WHAT?!

Airlaunch is a Falcon participant that does a drop from a back of a C-5 and does an air start under parachute.

t/space was setup directly in response to the President's Vision for Space Exploration. Currently includes David Gump, Bret Alexander, Jim Muncy, Gary Hudson, James Voss.

t/space Goal: create a true lunar frontier. Commercial delivery of crew, cargo and fuel to LEO. CEVs launch on non-human rated vehicles. boosted without crew on EELV or new commercial vehicle) You turn over the job of getting to LEO to hte private sector.

t/space's CEV is an upscaled airlaunch vehicle that uses either a 747 on stilts or Burt's WhiteNight on steriods that would also be used for Virgin Galactic.

Now talking about NASA:

NASA publicly discussing ETO “non-traditional approach”. Means Rapid Prototyping, Hardware milestones, Fixed-price contracts.

NASA wants safe, reliable and responsive delivery of people to orbit at less than $20 million per flight

Near-term milestones tha timplement and sustain Vision

Eliminates the gap in US human spacefilight.

Avoids human rating a new vehicle, and Reduces risk to NASA.

It seems that Griffin is accelerates things to get rid of the gap by spinning stuff back in and not doing competitive multi-vendor bids. Jim doesn't think its a bad thing but has no special knowledge to back that up.

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Fleming, Olson, Pestritto on the funding process. Nothing really new here if you're the least bit familiar with funding technology companies.

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Brooke Owens just gave an update on the XPrize Cup. Nothing new except that Peter Diamandis is so busy that he couldn't be here. Brooke definitely turned heads….

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Chuck Lauer, Jeff Greason, John Powell, John Carmack on what rocket companies are looking for from the rulemakings:

There's a slight disagreement between Jeff and John on whether or not the law that was passed was a good thing. John also says they've scaled back their license oriented work since they're not trying for the XPrize anymore. Sees no huge roadblocks except for lack of a civilian vertical launch site.

John Powerll is in a quandry with AST for the first time: he actually likes them. The main reason is that its full of “shoulds” not “shalls” which the experimental airplane regulations have. He asks everyone to be careful to watch out for the inevitible creap of “shalls” back in.

Chuck Lauer: the right person for writing the medical stuff is there so that's a good thing.

Jeff Greason: XCOR has not gotten back to AST on their comments on the medical stuff. Jeff's biggest bone to pick is that they looked beyond suborbital to orbital when that's not what anyone is after right now and that there's no information about what's needed either and that there is no middleground between suborbital to orbital given the rather arbitrary measurements used to define them.

Question: do you agree or disagree with Burt's point about certification. They all agree that certification of some type eventually is a good thing but there is no way to write that certification now.

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