Category Archives: eSpace

Commercial Crew Launch funding issues cause concerns

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Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | NASA decision increases risk in commercial crew program.

Congress short funded the commercial ISS crew/cargo program (by 1/2!!!!) the only good result being the continued use of cooperative agreement funding tools rather than the (potentially) more controlling fixed price contracts. Some concerns about delays and risks are very appropriate but it’s possible this not all bad. One of the comments pointed out that the senatorial launch system got funded as well and suggests a great solution, take some of the SLS money for CCL and then offer the big launcher requirement up to the eSpace competitors for solution on a commercial basis.

AWST – NASA, SpaceX Set First Dragon Launch To ISS

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20111210-132329.jpg

NASA and SpaceX announce a February launch for Dragon to the ISS.

Later in the article is this, first articulation of something that should have been policy from the start:

Philip McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA headquarters, told the conference he expects regular commercial cargo deliveries to the ISS to begin next year, followed in about five years by commercial crew flights. Although it is currently funded only through 2020, McAlister says he expects the station to continue to operate “as long as it is safe and productive,” serving as an anchor destination for a growing space economy in orbit.

Space Junk to Resource

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I saw this picture elsewhere and lost it, its cool and a bit worrying, thought of course the scale is so out of kilter it’s almost sublime, but if you figure this only the big stuff and that it’s all in motion all the time and new stuff is going up there, then the worry is not so out-of-place.

The real cloud up there
Junk, very expensive Junk, maybe reusable Junk
All sorts of solutions for removing this stuff has been proposed, from robo tugs to catchers mitts, and evaporating them with lasers.  That last has been under study since the 1990’s and you don’t have to blow them to ‘microns’ you just have to slow them down enough so they did into the outer atmosphere and come crashing to the ground.
 
Basic equeipment and geometry to deorbit debris

A very high tech broom (click through to Wired article)

And in the end I think the laser broom will be used, to deorbit bolts, dropped tools, smashed up debris etc, not worth recovering.

 
But a lot, even most of the material up there probably can be reused.  If we could cheaply catch the small stuff, maybe my using the Laser Broom to guide it into a catch basket, there is plenty of solar power and vacuüm to smelt the metals and create new things. 
 
Using spare material, sunlight, natural vacuüm and microgravity environment it seems reasonable that we could design and build a large-scale Additive Fabrication Machine in orbit that could build space craft parts from scrap.  In the long run we then start getting the materials from asteroids or the moon and off we go into the solar system.
 

Space the lost frontier? Losing other things…

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There was a flurry of space interest coinsidering with the shutdown of the Shuttle and the announcement of the Senatorial Launch System, then some good traffic on visiting asteroids etc. Now it seems to have fallen of the face of the earth.  It’s this kind of thing that drives me nuts, we live in such a press release driven world that there tends to be these booms and busts of interest and its all about as artificial as much of the rest of the so-called news.  I know that I can in fact keep up on what’s going on via various web sites and blogs, but I find it disturbing that the there is no concerted effort to keep space front and center in the american people’s attention. 

And no I am not saying NASA should be flogging its programs, but the rest of the space world should be, not only US but the world, there is interesting stuff going on around the world, from the first Chinese docking, to the flyby of the big rock tomorrow etc, etc, that there is never a paucity of things that could be used to keep people’s interest tickled.

I am a bit afraid that the likely coming downturn (recrash…zombie cat bounce…) is going to crush eSpace, maybe not, most are probably fairly well isolated but maybe not if things really go bust.

On another topic…….

Talking about busts I have a feeling that the administration and others may have absolutely no idea the devastation they are looking at if the military downturn turns into a bust due to one force or another.  A huge amount of the US industrial base depends on defense spending for some of its more profitable work.  Maybe (hopefully) not its base, but the stuff that really makes the books sing every once in a while.  I know the vendors who do work for the company I work for, while they may curse us quite frequently, also love us for the ‘quality’ of the work with contract out as well.  Us and dozens of other defense related companies. 

Generally the economic multiplier effect of a defense dollar is over ten, in space or aviation it can be nearly twenty, things like green tech are probably decent but sub ten, automotive is in the same range, but get to more basic stuff and its a few turns at best.  And if you start subtracting a lot of those 10 to 20 X multiplied dollars and either don’t spend them or spend them on more basic products, you are going to see a much more massive downturn than expected.

Hopefully the grownups all realize this and are planning for it…….Oh, yeah, there are no grown ups….there is only us.          Maybe we’re in trouble.

SpaceX costs , and some remote observations…

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Elon Musk in this update post is very publicly making the point that while his wealth enabled him to ‘launch’ SpaceX the prices they are charging are ‘real’ and sustainable over the long run not subsidized.  Seems that he is proving that when you are talking about certain classes of product America is still the leader, you just can’t carry old infrastructure, including old thinking, along for the ride. 

Had a look at Blue Origin’s website and their factory, the thing that strikes me about all of the eSpace companies is that they are quite modest in size, set up for clean, smooth, flexible manufacturing and have a modest work force. I assume that they have developed a significant network of supporting suppliers, small and large and do only key operations in house.   

They are using modern tools and techniques, informed by a huge legacy of knowledge and the tools that the legacy has created.  This is the sort of thing that America is very good at, it requires motivated people working in trust based teams, with accountability, bull headedness, hard headedness, willingness to fail and a refusal to let the risk of, or even the actuality of failure, to get in the way of progress.  Small entrepreneurial companies are infinitely better at this that big ones. Especially big ones with any ties to the gov’t/mil world and its utter aversion to risk or failure.